Tech News

Build Your Own BTTF Hoverboard Replica For Less Than $50

Remember how elated you were when Mattel announced it would be releasing a replica of the hoverboard from Back to the Future 2? And then how sad you were when it was priced at $120? Now you can just build one yourself with this handy tutorial and about $50 worth of random supplies. The only…

China Is Turning Beijing Into a Megacity Six Times The Size of NYC

China is already home to some of the most quickly growing megacities in the world. Now there’s a plan to officially merge several megacities around Beijing into one super-megacity that will house the equivalent of a third of the US population in an area that’s the geographical size of Kansas. The New York Times accessed…

Consequences and Regrets in This Week’s Masters of Sex

At the end of the last episode, Bill Masters added up Virginia’s moodiness, thickening waistline, and tasteful vomiting and deduced that she was pregnant. This week picks up right where we left off, as Virginia confirms the diagnosis. Masters is stunned and upset. And although he says he’s concerned about how it’s going to affect…

How to Turn Empty Pepsi Cans Into a Back to the Future DeLorean

There’s always some added level of satisfaction when you build something yourself. So instead of spending money on a model of the BTTF DeLorean assembled in an overseas factory, here’s a simple tutorial—courtesy of Dave Hax—that will show you how to build one from scratch using a couple of empty Pepsi cans and other household…

Driving Australia’s Most Challenging Off-Road Trail

For most of Cape York, the remote peninsula north of Cairns that runs parallel to the Great Barrier Reef, the nearest major city isn’t even in Australia, it’s in Papua New Guinea. You know, where head-hunting was a thing up until a couple of decades ago. We just drove through it on the most challenging…

Fake Doctor Arrested For Prescribing Bags of Dirt as Cancer Treatment

Vincent Gammill, a 69-year-old “doctor,” has been arrested in California for allegedly prescribing bullshit cancer treatments and practicing medicine without a license. One of his cancer-fighting drugs was little more than a “baggie of dirt.” Authorities were tipped off by a woman with late stage cancer in Thousand Oaks, California who sought treatment from Gammill…

Carbon Fiber Tour de France Bikes Are Surprisingly Easy to Counterfeit

The rise of carbon fiber technology brought lighter bikes, faster speeds, and innovative aerodynamics to the world of cycling. But an unexpected side effect is starting to frustrate the world’s top bike builders. Chinese factories are counterfeiting their products and selling them for a fraction of the price. It’s dangerous, too. As part of this…

Hot Toys Is Making a Sixth-Scale Millennium Falcon That’s 18-Feet Long

If you thought the sixth-scale Millennium Falcon cockpit diorama that Hot Toys showed off at Comic-Con was impressive, the company is apparently planning to reveal an 18-feet long, 12-feet wide model of the entire ship at the upcoming Ani-Com and Games convention in Hong Kong. Revealed on Hot Toys’ Facebook page, it’s not entirely clear…

The Massive, 1/6th-Scale Millennium Falcon Is the Prettiest Hunk of Junk

Alongside their ridiculously pretty Star Wars figures, at Comic-Con Hot Toys unveiled a new line of 1/6th scale dioramas to go with them—starting off with a gigantic, beautiful recreation of the Millennium Falcon’s cockpit. Now the company are teasing the possibility of attaching the rest of the damn ship to that. https://gizmodo.com/more-photos-of-that-millennium-falcon-cockpit-replica-t-1716800404 A full 1/6th-scale…

Video: The doomed story of the mighty king crab

This short film, The King Crab by Oscar Hudson, uses Rudyard Kipling’s story, The Crab That Played with the Sea, as an inspiration to show how though a king crab can look fearsome and monstrous, it is hardly as intimidating as it looks. Especially when the mighty king crab is doomed for the kitchen. SPLOID…

Use the Grammarly Extension to Avoid Dumb Mistakes When Writing Online

Chances are you do a lot of writing on the web, and the Grammarly extension for Chrome or Firefox can help you keep your spelling and grammar as accurate as it needs to be. The extension promises to detect hundreds of errors that the likes of Microsoft Word would just wave straight through. Once the…

Ford’s New Headlights Spot and Turn to Illuminate Hazards at Night

Self-driving smart cars might still be years away, but the technology that makes them so smart is already benefitting drivers. Ford is currently perfecting a headlight system that uses infra-red cameras to illuminate unexpected curves and hazards on the road ahead that might be invisible to drivers otherwise. Developed at the company’s Research and Innovation…

Why Chuck Jones, the creator of Looney Tunes, was such a great artist

Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting does his always wonderful deep dive thing on Chuck Jones, the creator of Looney Tunes, and examines how evolved as an artist. It goes beyond his technical skill and his jokes and his characters his discipline and tells how Jones used the real world to inspire his work…

A Simple Magnetic Adapter Gives Your Charging Cables MagSafe Powers

A magnetic power connector didn’t seem that revolutionary when first revealed, but over the years the Apple MacBook’s MagSafe connector has proven itself to be an invaluable feature. And as the Znaps magnetic adapter shows, it would be just as useful for your mobile devices too. Using a pair of simple adapters—one that plugs into…

Spotify’s New “Discover Weekly” Playlist Knows You So Well It’s Creepy

Spotify’s got a new feature called “Discover Weekly,” an automatically generated playlist of music that’s tailored specifically for you. For something made by a computer this playlist is pretty damn good! The new playlists updates every Monday, and it’s generated using the music you’ve been listening to as a foundation. It also takes into account…

Bursting Balloons in a Sand Box Reveals the Origin of Mysterious Craters

When we think of craters, asteroid collisions are often what come to mind. But now, thanks to scientists who exploded balloons in a sand box, we have a better idea of other ways craters can be formed, like underground methane explosions, for instance. Felipe Pacheco-Vázquez, a scientist at Mexico’s Autonomous University of Puebla, led the…

This Stop-Motion Video Is the Amazing Geology Lesson You Never Had

What happens when you take 60 rocks from 15 different countries all around the world, capture 8,500 photographs of them and string them together into a three-minute stop motion video? The geology lesson you always wanted is what. Created by Christophe Thockler, the video (below) shows off rocks ranging from Madagascan Actinolite from Madagascar to…

Why Aren’t Human Fingers All the Same Length?

The human hand is remarkably different from that of other primates, with shorter fingers, a smaller palm and a significantly stronger thumb; of course, the most notable feature of our hands is the ability of the thumb to perfectly and comfortably oppose (come into square contact at the tips) each finger of the same hand.…

Just because nobody uses your public key doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea . It just means your friends don’t really care about security. [XKCD]