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Looking through the dome’s small porthole, the only view was of a barren field of red rocks. The astronauts ate freeze-dried food and shared cramped quarters for eight months to further space exploration, only venturing out to the alien landscape wearing spacesuits. At the end of the claustrophobic mission, they were greeted with a “Back…
For an incredibly simple concept — keeping you dry — rain jackets have evolved into awfully complicated products. Air flow rates, water pressure resistance, durable water repellent coatings, hard shells, soft shells…the list of technical terms goes on. Here’s what they all mean and how you can use them to find the best jacket for…
I have spent many waking hours trying to rank the best sandwiches. But there are so many sandwiches! Here’s a good place for me to start: this poster shows all types of sandwiches deconstructed in delicious drawings. But there are still so many sammiches I haven’t eaten! There are nearly 90 different types of sandwiches…
The story of Israel using a sophisticated cyberweapon to spy on the United States and others attending nuclear talks is getting weirder. According to Kaspersky, the attackers not only used a Stuxnet-like weapon—they also used a stolen security certificate from Foxconn to sign the malware. This is both crazy and curious. The new attack also…
Diagnosis is hard. Especially when it comes to joint injuries. Doctors can make educated guesses based on your symptoms, to be really sure, they’ve got to look inside. While MRI is the most popular option, it’s expensive, time-consuming, and not particularly accurate. That’s why this new, miniaturized camera that can be stuck inside your joint…
If you’re headed off on vacation, you’re probably flying somewhere warm. If it’s business travel, you might not be so lucky. So the Arland airport in Stockholm, Sweden, has installed three climate-controlled rooms that let travelers experience the weather of the city they’re heading to. Sure, it’s a publicity stunt by the airport to help…
Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. lived for 60 years, and spent most of them pretending to be someone else. Or someones else, really; the man who came to be known as “the Great Imposter” adopted at least 10 identities, including a year-long stint as a (self-taught!) trauma surgeon during the Korean War. In an obituary published…
On Friday, California passed its deepest water cuts yet, the state’s latest attempt to conserve a dwindling resource in a region crippled by drought. Yet there remains a small group of people in states throughout the West who continue to flagrantly waste water. Yes, on purpose. And it’s not just the wealthy. The announcement that…
Is nothing sacred? LastPass, the service charged with keeping track of all our disparate online security measures with just one master password, was hacked last Friday—as detailed by the company’s own blog post published today. That is not good news. But it could be worse. It’s not exactly that a bunch of thieves are in…
Roboticists have started work on a Transformer-style humanoid robot that morphs into a car that can drive nearly 40 mph. Not a toy—a human-sized transforming machine. Kinda pie-in-the-sky idea, but a Japanese company is throwing a heap of money into building this thing. Last Friday, Brave Robotics and Asratec Corporation announced they’ve started building an…
Earlier this month, an FDA advisory committee voted to recommend the approval of flibanserin, Sprout Pharmaceutical’s drug for women with persistently low sexual desire. The drug has a number of vocal critics, who believe that its side effects, relative to its modest effect, could be harmful for women. Although many news stories about flibanserin have…
The Blackburn Cult, also known by the far more mystically delicious moniker “Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven,” was dreamed up by a mother-daughter duo who got into the religion business in 1924, after having visions of angels … and visions of dollar signs. For awhile, business was booming. Sixty-year-old May…
Facebook just released an app called Moments that’s designed to help you share photos from particular events with the people who were there with you. It’s a great idea—so why can’t it just be part of Facebook? When you fire up Moments, it shows you events batched together by event as determined by the time-specific…
Well, this looks fun! The cage stands at about 40 foot tall and is the biggest of its kind in the world and yet the crazy car inside just drives in a vertical loop over and over again like it’s on a normal road that doesn’t go freaking upside down. It’s got to get a…
When we made the jump from the last generation of home consoles to the current generation, there was one thing missing: backwards compatibility. For Xbox One owners, that’s about to change—Microsoft just announced that Xbox 360 games will be playable on the new console this holiday season. https://gizmodo.com/xbox-one-review-absolutely-amazing-when-it-works-1467466379 Microsoft’s Mark Ybarra announced the feature during…
Is it any surprise that those cheap plastic dinosaur toys are far from being scientifically accurate? Not at all. But it’s still fun to watch a dinosaur expert like University of Columbia professor Paul Olsen point out their appalling inaccuracies. But in the end, even anatomically inaccurate dinosaurs are still awesome. And if they get…
Why doesn’t the United States have a base on the Moon? Because getting to the Moon was a matter of national security. Setting up a permanent base there? Not so much. Through the fog of history it’s really, really easy for Americans to forget why we went to the Moon in the first place. It…
The one thing that makes summer so awesome is also its biggest drawback: the heat. So to avoid completing scalding the bottom of your feet on hot sand, this inflatable floating volleyball court takes the action to the water where it’s easy to cool off. You can forget about inflating this monstrosity using just your…
Elon Musk and his company Space X are hosting a year-long design competition for Hyperloop pods that will culminate in a run-off on a Hyperloop test in July 2016. Deadline to sign up for the competition is Septmeber 15, 2015. Since first hinting about his plans for a nearly frictionless high-speed transit solution called Hyperloop…
In a Wired report this morning, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, let slip that Project Morpheus, Sony’s entry in the great VR race of 2015/2016, would go on sale for “several hundred dollars” in the first half of 2016. That is a frustratingly vague and dependent on the loose definition of what “several”…
