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Fifty years ago today, the Mariner 4 mission sent home the first images of Mars. Today, the New Horizons probe sent home gloriously detailed photos of Pluto. Despite the intervening decades, the vibrant excitement of the mission scientists staying up all night to see that first image is exactly the same. Colour-by-numbers chart for the…
Thanks to an (assumed) technical glitch that will almost certainly get someone fired in the morning, Best Buy’s website is currently offering a $200 gift card for $15. Even if your order will almost certainly be cancelled, it’s probably worth a try. Update: And it seems to be gone, but still working for some people!…
Talk to a future-technology brand evangelist (sadly a real thing), and they’ll probably tell you that the Internet of Things is the next up-and-coming trend. But for the last 40 years, a very different kind of network of interconnected stuff has been quietly revolutionizing the global economy. Shipping containers, being at heart a 8x8x20 steel…
Uber has settled a lawsuit with the family of a 6-year-old killed by an UberX driver. Sofia Liu was hit on a San Francisco cross-walk on New Year’s Eve 2013; the driver had the Uber app running on his phone at the time. The terms of the settlement are under wraps, but given Uber’s billion-dollar…
Back in 2013, Apple enthusiastically announced iBeacons, Bluetooth-powered beacons that would interact with your iDevice. They were enthusiastically forgotten about by everyone but Apple Stores and the Toronto Maple Leafs; but thanks to Google’s rival project, Bluetooth beacons might not be dead yet. Bluetooth beacons are tiny transmitters, which constantly beam out a signal to…
In addition to definitively exposing Hacking Team as a spyware-shilling immoral bunch of crap, the recent dump of Hacking Team emails also revealed a bunch of zero-day exploits in Flash, Internet Explorer, and Java. If for some unfathomable reason you’re still using those programs, you should probably download today’s patches. https://gizmodo.com/hack-exposes-what-an-utter-piece-of-shit-this-spyware-c-1716075907 Adobe released a new…
Early this morning, NASA’s New Horizons probe made its closest approach to the Pluto-Charon system. Now after a full day of science and a long, long wait for the signal to reach Earth, we’ve received word that our daring (and darling!) probe is still alive. After its close approach to Pluto this morning, the inconsiderate…
Early this morning, NASA rolled out the highest-resolution image of Pluto to date, taken 16 hours before today’s historic flyby. Tomorrow, we’ll receive a new set of images at a resolution ten times higher. And Pluto Christmas is just getting started, because it’s going to take NASA 16 full months to download all the data…
Can the world’s tallest building be built in 90 days? It’s been two years since we asked that question, and as a report from a local Chinese paper illustrates today, the answer is an unequivocal no—at least not when the government thinks the plan is dangerous. Back in 2013, a company called Broad Group announced…
Are you a heterosexual woman? University of Liverpool psychologists Minna Lyons and Jessica Green would love you to help them figure out how a woman’s personality affects how she chooses a partner. The anonymous survey takes about 10 to 20 minutes to complete. Contact the author at [email protected].
Minion Yellow is a customized shade issued by Pantone with the express purpose of promoting the current installment of a certain film franchise which opened last weekend in theaters nationwide. It’s supposed to make people feel happy. But it makes me feel worried. Pantone is a system for identifying colors. It is a great tool…
Today we watched the Pluto flyby with New Horizons mission control via accurate-to-the-second visualizations and infographics. The results were glorious on the American Museum of Natural History’s IMAX screen. The New Horizons spacecraft is moving very, very fast: She is a beauty—compact yet complex, with named parts: What we’re looking at, via io9: New Horizons…
Welcome to the excellently weird world of informal naming systems: here’s how we’re naming all the newly-discovered places on Pluto after Cthulhu, Balrog, Meng-p’o, and other dwellers from the underworld. When exploring a whole new world, it’s important to come up with a shared vocabulary for naming the new geography. As mission scientist and (“wow^wow”…
One of the first-ever fitness wearables was so dangerous it was banned by the US government for causing miscarriages and hernias. The line between “convenient exercise device” and “ornate torture tool” was thinner back in the 1950s. Before it was outed as medically horrifying, the Relax-A-Cizor was marketed as an easy way to get thin…
The summer lull continues, but Godzilla waits for NO SEASON. While the big gaming releases die down , that just means there’s plenty of time to play catch up or return to old favorites. What have you been playing this week? Come tell us in this week’s Tuesday Game Room! What have you been playing…
This is a great video that shows the entire trip of the Mars Opportunity Rover on one side while tracking the trip on the red planet on the other. It’s cool to know where Curiosity has gone and what it has seen but perhaps the craziest thing of the video is hearing the noise of…
No crime here, except for the one that (thankfully) didn’t happen, and some unnecessary badmouthing. Blues musician B.B. King, who had Alzheimer’s disease, was found to have died of natural causes, refuting murder accusations made against King’s manager and personal assistant. As the BBC reports, two of the 89-year-old musical legend’s daughters (he had 15…
New Horizons is past its closest approach and we’re awaiting its first call home. While we wait, NASA hosted a question-and-answer on what new data is being collected, when it will arrive at Earth, expected image resolutions, and initial impressions on what we’ve seen so far. Top image: Mission scientists, press, and Pluto enthusiasts celebrate…
Life was basically impossible without Photoshop. The process and tools it took to get images and type set just the way you wanted took an eternity. There were no shortcuts! You needed a rapidograph pens, T-squares, rubber cement, exacto knifes and so much more just to do things Photoshop now does in one or two…
