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In the interests of not being a jackass, you should probably be nice to your doctors. But if common courtesy isn’t a good enough reason, a recent paper suggests you’ll get worse medical treatment if you’re worse. The experiment put 24 different medical teams (1 doctor, two nurses) in charge of a newborn baby with…
There’s casual Pirate Bay piracy, and then there’s private torrent trackers: members-only clubs that share the best movie and TV rips among themselves. As you’d expect, they tend to be pretty hardcore about privacy, enough so that some groups are banning members from using Windows 10. As TorrentFreak reports, groups like iTS and FSC have…
Welcome to Reading List, Gizmodo’s weekly gathering of the best science and technology stories on the internet. This week, we’ll search for buried infrastructure, tour the electronics factories of Shenzen, delve into the future of science fiction for the Anthropocene Epoch, and look back at Nintendo’s famous virtual reality flop. Miles of buried cables and…
The gentle red glow of aurora and the richness of a star-filled sky make a picture-perfect backdrop the International Space Station. The remote-controlled Canadarm was cocked in preparation to catch and pull in the JAXA space cargo tug HTV5 launched on Wednesday and due to arrive at the station on Monday. After unloading fresh supplies…
At a lonely research station at the end of the world, a group of hardy men and women have spent the last four months in total darkness. The temperature outside hovers around -90ºF (-67.8ºC). But the team received a well-earned bonus recently, when a gorgeous aurora australis rippled across the southern sky. The European Space…
We usually use words like “immensely powerful” and “destructive” to describe Earth’s tectonic forces. But to artist Ken Goldberg of the University of California, Berkeley, even the most violent agents on Earth have an inner beauty. Bloom, a series of artworks that depict minute movements around the Hayward Fault Zone in California, is Goldberg’s latest…
Internal documents released late Friday show that managers at the Environmental Protection Agency were aware of the potential for a catastrophic “blowout” at Gold King Mine, The Associated Press reports. Earlier this month, workers contracted by the EPA to clean up an abandoned mine accidentally unleashed three million gallons of toxic, heavy metal-laced water into…
It seems like cruel fate that some folks are naturally thin, while others have to work tirelessly to control their weight. But in the future, we may be able to level the playing field, because scientists have just discovered a ‘metabolic master switch’ that determines whether fat-producing adipocytes store or burn energy. “Obesity has traditionally…
We’re pretty terrible at coming up with good passwords, but if you thought we were better when it comes to Android lock patterns, you’d be wrong. New research shows that the tic-tac-toe style patterns people devise to unlock their phones often follow dismally predictable rules. ALPs can contain a minimum of four nodes and a…
Converting a busy street in Times Square into vibrant pedestrian plazas is one of the most celebrated ideas in New York City’s history—a bold urban move which has been mimicked around the world. Now New York’s mayor and police commissioner want to remove the plazas and restore Times Square back to its original car-congested glory.…
Unless you were an audio engineer in the ‘60s, you’ve probably forgotten about the Mellotron, an archaic sampler that played back sounds stored on magnetic tape when you pressed a key on a keyboard. But in the fine tradition of hacking old hardware to make electronic music, somebody’s now gone and reinvented the Mellotron, using…
The news that an explosion at high-tech federal science lab last month might have been caused by meth production quickly precipitated a string of Breaking Bad jokes. But as became clear at a U.S. District Court in Greenbelt on Friday, this particularly meth lab was nowhere near as sophisticated as Walter White’s. It was small,…
A small number of the iPhone 6 Plus phones sold between September 2014 and January 2015 have a manufacturing defect in the iSight camera. It may be the reason your photos are always blurry! Apple is aware of the issue and says says it’ll replace the camera (not the entire device) for free, if you’re…
Hydrophobic sand aka magic fairy dust isn’t something new. But seeing the effects of in action is always impressive. Just watch it go from sand into this metallic goo once it sinks into a cup of water. And even cooler, watch it transform back from goo into grains of sand once it exits the water.…
Air pollution is decreasing over parts of the Middle East. But researchers say that for most Middle Eastern cities, the clearer air is actually a symptom of conflict, not a sign of progress. A team of atmospheric scientists led by Jos Lelieveld discovered that in most of the Middle East, nitrogen oxide emissions had been…
The stock market is tanking, North and South Korea are on the brink of war, and a cartoon character from a dystopian future is the most popular candidate for US President at the moment. But don’t despair. While most things are garbage, there are some things in the world that aren’t. Like this adorable kid…
The hackers who stole countless gigabytes of Ashley Madison user data finally spoke up. In an interview with Motherboard, the Impact Team said that “Nobody was watching” when they broke into Ashley Madison’s servers repeatedly over the past few years. “[We] got in and found nothing to bypass,” said one of the hackers. This is…
It’s a site called Open Puppies. Gawk at your own risk please!
10 years ago, Alan Yiu watched as clients of his family’s Vancouver garment factory sent their business to China. So, he launched his own outerwear brand — Westcomb. This is how he did it and what he learned along the way. Unless you’re a serious outdoor athlete, you probably haven’t heard of Westcomb. I hadn’t,…
It’s ON, Gizmodo. The weekend approacheth. Currently on As The Internet Churns, our most popular stories are about the bugs at Burning Man, what would happen if a massive solar storm hit Earth, how deep space cryonic sleep might work, and our misadventures with Google’s Project Fi. My favorite news this week was writing up…
