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Chinese spies have breached the personal email accounts of many top Obama Administration officials and have been reading their emails since 2010, according to a report from NBC. This has got to be bad for Hillary Clinton, whose use of personal email address as Secretary of State during that time is now under FBI investigation.…
When you ride a bike at night, staying visible is essential—and this illuminated helmet not only adds lumens to your ride, but gives you some added functionality compared to your average clip-on lights. It’s called Lumos. It’s a bike helmet that packs in more than 60 LEDs, which are bigger, higher, and brighter than traditional…
Here’s another great reason to lock your doors, hide under some sheets, and never leave your home again. Samy Kamkar, already well known for cracking Master combination locks, has built a $32 wireless device that can intercept and steal the wireless codes used to open keyless car doors and garages. At DefCon in Las Vegas,…
Every day, you hear about security flaws, viruses, and evil hacker gangs that could leave you destitute — or, worse, bring your country to its knees. But what’s the truth about these digital dangers? We asked computer security experts to separate the myths from the facts. Here’s what they said. 1. Having a strong password…
Welcome to this week’s Reading List, where Gizmodo collects the best science and technology articles on the Internet in one shiny place, just for you. This week, we’ll explore the epidemiology of airplane toilets, the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, and the grim future of our planet’s oceans. Researchers are scouring the contents of sewers…
A fisherman on a San Diego pier hooked a drone yesterday, and the drone got the whole thing on video for your enjoyment. Even the drone’s operator had to admit that it was an impressive cast, even if it was a mean-spirited and probably illegal action which could have damaged a very expensive piece of…
A Los Angeles County child is recovering from the plague, and public health agencies are searching the wilderness for the source of the infection. It’s the third case of plague this year in the U.S. The first two both happened in Colorado, and both were fatal. Earlier this week, an adult in Pueblo County, Colorado,…
Lego superfans Jarren Harkema and Calvin Hartley studied Star Wars: Episode IV religiously, and spent hundreds of hours planning, designing and creating a Lego Technic replica of the Sandcrawler. It’s an impressive 3-foot long, 28-pound, 10,000-brick behemoth. Here’s what their Lego lair looks like: Harkema and Hartley met at a Lego robotics club and have…
The website GodBricks is a repository for Lego MOCs with religious themes. Some of the builds are pretty amazing and some are pretty simple. But, what I find most fascinating on the site is the theological musings regarding God and Lego. The Milan Cathedral by Joe Perez In the essay “WWJB (What Would Jesus Build)?”…
The Moon may be Earth’s kid brother, but Saturn’s moons seem more gnats on an elephant in this incredible image captured by the Cassini probe. Pictured here are Saturn’s moons Mimas (right) and Dione (left) staring up at their behemoth of a planet, with the unilluminated side of the rings angled about one degree from…
Somewhere deep in the cobweb-filled recesses of your brain, you might remember a time when checking your email meant booting up Internet Explorer. But as this infographic shows, it wasn’t long ago that the world was filled with Internet Explorers. Then, a couple years back, nearly every country switched to Chrome. The visualization below, which…
If you still own a Fisher Price cassette player, it’s probably buried deep in some ‘80s nostalgia-filled corner of your closet. But where most of us see a beloved electronic fossil, Matt Gruskin saw a retro-styled Bluetooth speaker. Turning his Fisher Price cassette player into a Bluetooth-enabled device took a clever combination of electronic and…
Wastewater from the Colorado mine spill that turned the Animas River orange this week has made its way to northern New Mexico, the Associated Press reports. Officials in the cities of Aztec and Farmington have temporarily shut down the river’s access to water treatment plants. Meanwhile, containment crews are building makeshift ponds to catch and…
On Thursday, a breach during an acid mine cleanup effort sent a million gallons of wastewater seeping down the Animas River. Overnight, the popular waterway was abandoned as its color quickly changed from blue to an acrid, neon orange. It’s not the first time we’ve managed to turn a large body of water an eerie…
The tallest mountain on Ceres is a split-toned creature that would be at home in Alaska. Explore it, and the still-mysterious white spots in Occator Crater in the latest flyover animation of the dwarf planet. Ceres is the largest object — dwarf planet, asteroid, or other — lingering in the main asteroid belt between Mars…
Your dog isn’t the only one who likes drinking from the toilet. Clever elephants at the Elephant Sand Lodge campsite in Botswana have also wised up to the most refreshing water source around. According to Laughing Squid, the elephants are so accustomed to their human visitors they’ve got no qualms throwing their trunks over the…
In the energy world, carbon capture technology is often seen as the Holy Grail: Imagine if we could just suck all pesky climate-changing CO2 out of the atmosphere. Scientists at the DOE are hot on the problem. They’ve just identified a new material that not only captures CO2, it helps convert the greenhouse gas into…
If you’re interested in data design, you’ll probably be very jealous of the developers and scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Visualization Lab. The Lab is charged with taking the government’s vast trove of data about the Earth and building public-facing tools that communicate that information visually. The latest, which the NOAA announced…
You can claim your retweets aren’t endorsements, but if you’re retweeting known terrorists on a regular basis, the feds may just use that as evidence to arrest you. A detailed report by the Huffington Post describes the myriad ways in which the FBI is ramping up its monitoring of social media, including, yes, busting people…
Facial recognition software is cropping up everywhere, so it was only a matter of time before anti facial recognition tech started to catch up. Naturally, Japan is leading the way. That’s right: Japan’s National Institute of Informatics is now developing ‘privacy glasses’ that make human faces unreadable to machines. An earlier (and way amazingly dorkier)…
