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In 1972, Paris approved a hulking 690-foot skyscraper that dwarfed the rest of the city and looked like it was designed by Darth Vader on the back of a cocktail napkin. It’s no wonder it’s taken the city 42 years to give tall buildings another shot. In fact, the city ended up banning tall buildings…
What happened? By all accounts, Apple Music is a totally serviceable streaming music service. But it’s 2015. Give me more than the same old service everybody’s been offering for years. Apple Music does everything it’s supposed to: It plays music on demand for $10 per month. The app is fun to use, as Gizmodo’s Kelsey…
Beta Pictoris is a violently exciting extrasolar system and now we have fresh new models investigating just what is happening in the collisions and chaos. The model of debris, disk, warps, waves, and rings tracks the evolution of the system over millions of years, and is downright gorgeous. Three-dimensional model of dust distribution in the…
Today there’s a new trailer for the other other other Steve Jobs movie, the one starring Michael Fassbender. But this trailer gives us the first real look at Seth Rogen as Woz… and damned if I’m not going to see this movie just to watch him. Don’t get me wrong, Fassbender as Jobs is an…
Hasbro’s Titan Hero series take action figures back to their humbler roots when size was more important than articulation. But that also means the 12-inch figures are perfect for younger kids who play rough with their toys, and don’t mind that the new Titan Hero Hulkbuster is almost as big as they are. At 18-inches…
The handful of themes offered by Gmail have let you make your inbox look less like a faceless, nameless sprawl of email and more like something you actually enjoy gazing at. And now, Google has added hundreds of photos and new theme options that are going to make it look much better. You’ve been able…
This visualization by drwtsn breaks down the nuclear arms race starting from the 1940s until now. The countries shown are the countries who have historically had the most nuclear weapons: the US, Russia, the UK, France and China (a few other countries have nukes too but are not represented). You can see the arms race…
Compared to a password that’s either too simple to be effective, or too hard to remember, a fingerprint is a great security tool. But they’re not infallible, in fact, they can be easily replicated with just a photo. So researchers are taking fingerprint security one step further and scanning them in three dimensions. The idea…
We asked for your nightmare tales of startup employment. Did you ever deliver—sending narratives of woe, scams, drugs, psychotic managers, drinking at your desk and more hookers than a venture capitalist could handle. The One With All the Drugs and Douches K writes: I moved to Silicon Valley as a youthful, totally oblivious woman. I’d…
Excellent poster-makers and awesome vinyl distributors Mondo have slowly been getting into the action figure market recently—and while their recent “Original Turtle” figure was pretty damn amazing, this latest figure takes it to a whole new level. Announced as part of Mondo’s exclusives range at San Diego Comic-Con next week, the 11 inch tall, 1/6…
As part of its new Varia line of smart cycling devices, Garmin just introduced a couple of lightning options that promise to make it safer for cyclists riding at night. And not only when it comes to visibility but also because they help riders keep their eyes glued on the road. When connected to one…
This robot that can spin together 3D-printed furniture could really get your creative juices flowing. And maybe eventually inspire the world to nix sectional couches once and for all. Meet Galatéa, the honking, seafoam-colored robot arm that looks like road construction equipment. “She” was invented by engineer Sylvain Charpiot, founder of French startup Drawn. Galatéa…
The infrared eye of the Suomi NPP satellite captured this amazingly atmospheric light show created by the southern lights—aka aurora australis—over Antarctica before dawn on the 24th of June 2015. The view was captured by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) “day-night band” (DNB) aboard the satellite, which detects dim light signals such as…
Your friends that use iOS and OS X have been babbling about Apple Music and Beats 1, but you use an Android phone and are feeling left out. Well, now there’s a “very unofficial” way to listen along. While the official Apple Music app won’t arrive on Android until the fall, Twitter user Benji R…
Doctors have long observed odd, circular cells in semen. They resemble undeveloped sperm, but scientists have been unable to work out how or why they appear—until now. Whenever a sperm sample is checked, healthy swimmers are counted along with the mysterious round cells. They’re often assumed to be underdeveloped sperm, but sometimes classified as white…
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg ran a Q&A on Facebook, answering questions about the future of the social network, its technology and the Internet more generally. Here are some of the choice cuts. We’ve already covered his first public statements on real names and LGBT users. But elsewhere in the Q&A his discussed some of the less…
Squads of Chinese hackers aren’t the only threat to internet infrastructure in the US, it would seem: the FBI is reportedly investigating “at least 11” physical attacks on high-capacity internet cables in the Bay Area dating back a year. According to a report in USA Today, agents have confirmed that they are looking into a…
This evening, the State Department released another trove of Hillary Clinton’s emails from her time as secretary of state. Among the gems being uncovered is this terse exchange, a wonderful insight into trying to use a fax machine in the modern age. Anyone who’s tech-supported their parents over email can definitely relate. The full email…
Early this morning, Sprint announced a new ‘All-In’ wireless plan with unlimited data, throttled to 600kbps for anyone trying to stream videos. The internet’s resounding ‘hell no’ showed Sprint the error of its ways, and it has now changed that explicit throttling policy to a more vaguely-worded (but no less shady) one. Sprint’s All-In plan…
Here’s a really cool visualization from astronomer Scott Manley that shows what our sky might look like if we could actually see all the asteroids. Asteroids aren’t visible to the naked eye because they’re too small to register but Manley was able to reveal the known asteroids and speed them up to exaggerate how they…
