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It’s a totally unfair fight since this Yaskawa Bushido industrial robot arm basically stole all of master swordsman Isao Machii’s moves and is not human, so it can be programmed and won’t get tired, but it’s really fun to see man vs machine swinging swords to see who can slice things best with diagonal cuts,…
Last month, a vehicle rear-ended one of Google’s self-driving cars at a Mountain View intersection. No one was hurt, but Google didn’t exactly broadcast the news to the public. Now, anyone will be able to download monthly reports about where the cars are and what they’re doing, thanks to a new transparency initiative from Google.…
What does it look like when one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets falls back to Earth? Here’s the view of our gorgeous planet captured during the uncontrolled tumble to reentry. The coolest thing about the Falcon 9R rockets is hidden in the name — that R stands for “reusable,” an ambitious if not-quite-yet-proven attempt to…
I have heard people use every kind of wording – from offhand quip to nine-part rococo longread – to say “we’ve all given up our privacy and nobody cares.” It’s the worst kind of knee-jerk cynicism, especially because it’s probably untrue. Yesterday in the New York Times, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote about how much…
Most movies, especially big blockbuster action movies, look embarrassingly awkward when you strip away the CGI and special effects and expose it in real life. It’s because so much is fake these days! Not Mad Max: Fury Road though. That movie’s action sequences still look so bad ass in real life. Check it out. Be…
Last month, Microsoft confirmed that Windows Media Center would not be included in Windows 10. It was not a surprise, because almost no one uses Windows Media Center (it was only available as a paid add-on in Windows 8). But it is a shame, because Windows Media Center might be the best DVR software out…
Welcome to Apps of the Week, where we take a look at the latest smartphone software that makes us oh-so-glad to be living in the 21st century. We’ve got apps to challenge your email allegiances, bring smarts to your photo library, and a new voice assistant that looks to challenge the Siris and Cortanas of…
There’s no shortage of nit-picking gamers who feel they could easily make better video games than what’s being released every week. And thanks to a new iPad app called Toy Engine, they can put their money where their mouths are and design their own side-scrolling video game, even if they’ve never written a single line…
What clothes, gadgets, and backpack does a photographer and writer for an adventure travel site rely on when he’s going to Asia and traveling light? This is my pared down adventure-storytelling kit, and how it performed. I spent nearly eight months adventuring around the globe. The second half of my trip took place in Nepal…
You melt down the aluminum alloy ingots, pour it into a funny shaped die, shave it and sand it down, sand blast it, get shot with plasma flame melting powder, mix up dozens of chemicals and thousands of diamond particles for the coating shower, get applied with the final non stick layer and get baked…
Every variation of chicken and rice is great so even though this space version of tumeric chicken and whole red rice looks like the least chicken and rice-y dish ever (for obvious utilitarian reasons), I would totally give it a bite or five. The key to cooking in space (if this can be considered cooking)…
Los Angeles is slowly but surely working its way towards being one of the most bike-friendly cities in then country by laying down a comprehensive network of bike lanes throughout the city. And this cute pint-sized street sweeper employed by the city makes sure they’re kept free of debris. Awwwwww. The mini street sweeper makes…
The DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals kick off today in Pomona, California, with 24 teams from around the world competing for $3.5 million in prizes. We’re here at the event to bring you the latest robotic thrills and spills, but mostly to keep a lookout for any signs of a robot uprising. Update June 6: Team…
Robot and prop-builder extraordinaire James Burton from XRobots.co.uk has just posted the final episode of an exhaustive four-part tutorial series detailing how he designed and built his own remote control self-balancing replica of Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ BB-8 droid. We’ve already seen home-made versions of BB-8 popping up online, but James is the first…
French scientists have created the first synthetic polymers that can store information as bits of 0s and 1s. You might think of it as a highly simplified version of DNA, another molecule that is very, very good at storing information. These new polymers could one day replace DNA in the burgeoning field of molecular barcoding.…
Want to know whether a given area has a higher number of racists than average? It turns out that Google searches can provide you with a pretty good answer, at least according to two recent studies. A few years ago, data analyst Seth Stephens-Davidowitz set out to study whether “racial animus,” or racism, could affect…
Previously, Kurzgesagt attempted to explain where all the aliens are by touching on The Fermi Paradox. This time around, the video explainer comes up with some possible reasons for why we haven’t found any aliens yet. We might be communicating with them wrong. They might be extinct. Maybe our technology isn’t there yet. And so…
In September the Pope will be visiting Philadelphia for the World Meeting of Families Congress and to mark the occasion the US will be doing what it does best: churn out tons of merchandise including an adorable plush version of Pope Francis himself. There will actually be over 200 official products released to celebrate the…
This week saw the announcement of Fallout 4 — and just in time was the announcement that Funko are continuing to somehow get their hands on every brand around, with new toys based on the franchise. Stop gathering your bottlecaps, because these little guys will be the new way we barter in the nuclear apocalypse.…
Every June, the PC industry descends on Taipei to show off its latest wares. The Computex trade show is a great place to see some awesome new gadgets and spot computing trends. So, what kind of promising new computers did they build on the eve of Windows 10? Let’s take a peek. Asus Transformer Book…
