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Update: It looks like Amazon pulled the listing last night. Hopefully it will still honor any pre-orders it accepted last night. Back in June it was leaked that Lego was officially putting Angus MacLane’sWALL•E Lego Ideas model into production. And if you’ve been patiently waiting for the day when you can finally buy it, that…
Here we are folks: California’s in the midst of one of the worst droughts on record, and unsurprisingly, some Californians see the struggle as a great opportunity to get rich. The already filthy rich Apple CEO Tim Cook is one of them! Along with members of the Google dynasty, Cook is investing in Nebia, a…
Redditor noveltysin wore her Fitbit while she had sex, and shared the resulting graph of her heart rate with the world. Check out how well her graph matches the heart rates in Figure 1 of the classic 1956 paper Physiological Responses During Coitus. She doesn’t include foreplay, so start your comparison at “period B” in…
What if “life in prison” could mean 100 or 200 or 400 years? Does that change the way that sentences are doled out? What happens when a person gets out of prison? For all of you who’ve written in asking me to do an episode about longevity, this episode is for you. But instead of…
It’s that time of year when students start to prepare for their annual migrations back to their respective institutes of learning. And as you start to amass all of your school supplies, consider these ingenius Beetle Tip 3-way highlighter pens from Kokuyo. So why would you go to the trouble of having a highlighter imported…
Malaysia says it’ll be sending a team to the Maldives to inspect debris that could be related to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Late last month, the discovery of a flaperon on Réunion Island reignited the hunt for the aircraft’s remains. Malaysia claims the Réunion Island debris is definitely from MH370, but French officials say…
It’s easy to get creeped out by the bugs of summer, until you realize how incredibly beautiful and varied they all are. Here are the entries from this week’s bug Shooting Challenge. Winner: Katydid Portraiture We just recently moved to AZ, and holy moly the bugs. So many bugs, everyfreakinwhere. It’s like Armageddon around my…
Nothing feels quite as long as those morning hours at work leading up to lunch. And if you need more motivation to power through all those emails and voicemails, just remember that lunch time means you get to break into this Game Boy bento box full of power-ups and maybe even a mushroom or two.…
Last month, security researchers showed the world that a car can be hijacked from thousands of miles away using its internet-connected entertainment system. As if that wasn’t disturbing enough, there may be an even simpler way to take remote control of somebody else’s car: By hacking into small, internet-enabled device people plug directly into the…
If you dived in the Windows 10 deep end, you might not have a smooth and seamless experience. Nowadays every piece of software seems to be a work-in-progress, and Microsoft’s newest operating system is no different. That’s not to say Windows 10 has been a total disaster—plenty of people have upgraded with no problems at…
Oracle’s security chief Mary Ann Davidson published a rambling screed today against the security research industry, bug bounties, and reverse engineering on the company’s corporate blog. Oracle took it down, but the rant is one of the most impressively incoherent jeremiads to come out of Silicon Valley. And that’s saying something. Security researchers regularly reverse…
There’s avideo floating around the internet this week that shows an impossibly tall ladder of explosions climbing impossibly high into the sky. It’s not photoshop or a hoax—it’s the work of one of the mostcelebratedandcontroversial contemporary artists working today. You’ve probably already seen the work of Chinese-born, New York-based artist Cai Guo-Qiang. He’s had multiple…
As Silicon Valley struggles to understand the news about Google’s new parent company Alphabet, one thing has become clear. Alphabet is all about highlighting Google’s futuristic and downright nutbar projects. It’s as if Larry Page and Sergey Brin wish they were running Tesla. After all, Elon Musk’s company gets to do all the cool things…
The Devil in the White City is finally coming to the big screen. According to Deadline, Erik Larson’s 2003 book about a real life serial killer at the 1893 World’s Fair is one step closer to reality, with Martin Scorsese slated to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio to star. Paramount outbid four other studios to snag…
We know less about the deep ocean than we do about the surface of Mars. But if we want to really understand how humans are impacting the Earth, we need to start looking down deep into the muck. That’s why scientists created the first digital map of the seafloor’s geologic composition. Other seafloor maps have…
Adding lasers to photos of cats is a time-honored internet tradition, right up there with Rickrolling and looking at explicit pornography. But this is 2015. Cats are passé. And dinosaurs may be extinct, but they’re breathing new life into an old meme. Paleoart is best known for its scientifically accurate depictions of extinct animals, but…
If you’ve ever watched a pair of dogs have sex, you’ve probably noticed something odd happen partway through the act. At first, the male grips the female’s back and humps away–nothing unusual about it. But then he dismounts and turns to face away from his mate, with his penis still stuck inside her. It’s called…
The ESA put together this rendered flyover video of Mars (from images taken from the Mars Express) and we can see the craters and cliffs and canyons that pockmark the red planet as if we we were actually flying by and poking our head out the window. It’s all the same drab and dusty color…
I’m going to put this as gently as possible: 3D printing entire buildings, right down to the fixtures, doesn’t make a ton of sense yet. It’s an exciting vision of the future, of course, but it’s also a myopic one—we’re forcing an emerging technology to fit into the mold of our existing world. While plenty…
Rite Aid, one of handful of stores that decided to back the MCX created CurrentC platform for mobile payments, is pulling a 180 and will begin accepting Apple Pay in 4,600 stores starting Aug. 15. Rite Aid follows Best Buy who did a similar about face back in April. Looks like corporate greed is losing…
