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A group of Japanese researchers have managed to improve the design of a transparent lithium-ion battery so that it’s now able to recharge itself when exposed to sunlight without the need for a separate solar cell. The transparent battery was first developed by the researchers, led by Kogakuin University president and professor Mitsunobu Sato, back…
Driving with a trailer in tow leaves with you a gigantic blind spot directly behind your vehicle. So to make it easier to keep an eye on traffic following you, Land Rover has come up with a way to make trailers appear to be transparent using strategically placed cameras. The system augments a Land Rover’s…
Joffrey is such a despicable character on Game of Thrones with such a punchable face and hateful personality that it’s pretty much impossible to make him look good. And yet! This video by Blood Blitz Comedy tries its hardest to re-edit the show to make Joffrey look like the true hero he could have been…
Whether you’ve upgraded to Windows 10 on your laptop or bought a brand new machine, you’re going to want to eke out as much battery juice as you can while you’re on the go. Microsoft’s shiny new OS includes a new native battery saver feature — and there are a few other tricks you can…
For the first time on any subscription video service, Amazon Prime subscribers will now be able to download movies and TV shows from the company’s huge catalog. Roll over Netflix. The new service is a huge deal. It means precisely what it sounds like: If you’re a Prime subscriber, you’ll be able to download that…
Whether you embrace it with open arms or toss it in the trash as soon as it arrives, the Ikea catalog is one of the most widely distributed publications on earth. But to help reduce the environmental impact of all that paper, the company is now recycling old copies into cushion stuffing. If you happen…
It’s been quite the four-year journey for Nest Labs, launching two big smart home gadgets and eventually drawing the eye of Google in January of 2014—and it all started with the Nest Learning Thermostat. Today, Nest Labs, now under the Alphabet umbrella, is announcing the 3rd generation of the thermostat that started it all. Technology…
As a species, humans are pretty awful for the rest of the things living on this planet. But as it turns out, you can take one less creature off the extinction list: Allonautilus scrobiculatus isn’t all gone, just quite hard to find. Lovingly known as the ‘fuzzy nautilus’ by the scientist who discovered it, Peter…
Viewers of Silicon Valley will appreciate the earth-shattering importance of compression algorithms. To most everyone else, it’s a geeky bit of math that’s of no particular interest. But when Google promises an algorithm that can cut the bandwidth needed to stream a video in half, things get a little more interesting. In an interview with…
According to a report on Variety, citing the usual collection of anonymous sources, Apple is considering a move into producing its own TV and movies. This rumor is as new as the rumors about Apple producing a TV, or a touchscreen iMac, or (insert consumer tech product here). But could this year be THE YEAR?…
Back to the Future is the best movie series ever. That’s obvious. And this 1.21 minute summary of the trilogy by Burger Fiction is the best movie summary ever done in 1.21 minutes too. Just watch it. It’ll make you want to pop on the movie and see Marty and Doc galavant in different points…
There sure has been a lot of discussion about flags lately. Flags that are appropriate to fly. Flags that need to be changed due to geopolitical shifts. Flags that represent pride. But most flags are actually horrible, from a design perspective. Specifically: Most city flags are essentially barf on fabric. Radio host Roman Mars is…
When the New Horizons spacecraft raced past Pluto this summer, it constantly snapped photographs both coming and going. This is exactly what it saw while zooming past the frozen dwarf planet. Whoa. We’ve seen fan-art of what the probe might have seen in a simulation interpolated from public image releases. But now NASA is providing…
Taking the train is my favorite form of transportation because unlike a car, I don’t have to drive or get stuck in traffic and unlike an airplane, I don’t have to go through security and be crammed in impossibly tiny spaces. But I only like it when I’m inside the train. This kid, who’s completely…
Earlier today, I reported that Ashley Madison’s source code reveals a concerted effort to create an army of thousands of female bots called “engagers” to coax men into paying more for the site’s services. Now we have a chart from the company’s leaked emails that shows how much money they made from the bots. This…
Now that many laptops and smartphones can be charged with the same USB Type-C cable, it makes sense to have those fancy new ports everywhere. And with Nomad’s new Roadtrip, any vehicle with a 12-volt car socket can be modernized with a USB Type-C power source of its own. The car charger hasn’t forgotten about…
Over the past month, this video of traffic at a busy intersection has gone viral. People are sharing it as a demonstration of self-driving cars on the road. And while there’s some truth to the general idea that cars will be able to caravan and avoid each other much better in the future, that’s not…
The same company that made Jeopardy!-conquering Watson will use similar tech to help fight air pollution in Beijing. In the future, that artificial intelligence could lead to cleaner air for the long haul, everywhere. According to MIT Technology Review, IBM’s rolling out a plan that predicts when and where Beijing’s pollution levels will be the…
In a wearable preamble to the gadget onslaught that will flood Berlin this week, Samsung’s just outed its latest attempt to win over your wrist-puter heart. It’s the Gear S2, an update to last year’s Galaxy Gear S, which was just too weird to love. Almost nothing is visually similar between the two watches—the Gear…
We always hear that dolphins are smart but how smart are they actually? Lori Marino explains for Ted-Ed in this cute animation and it’s almost stunning how intelligent they are. Their encephalization quotient (brain size to body size) is second only to us dumb humans and goes into detail how they can pass down knowledge…
