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Jay-Z’s TIDAL made big, messy waves the other month when it launched a $20-a-month streaming service. The accepted monthly rate for this kind of streaming service has normalized around $10 — which is why Rdio’s is hoping to undercut the competition with a new $4 tier. http://gawker.com/tidal-atry-my-tortuous-trial-with-jay-zs-overpriced-sp-1697023467 For that paltry amount of money, Rdio Select…
While Russia might have fleets of tanks and fighter jets to call its own, there’s one important product it still relies on the western world for: computer chips. But thanks to the launch of the Elbrus-4C, the 2006 Intel Pentium chip finally has a competitior. The top-of-the-line (in Russia) chip uses a proprietary architecture called…
My eyes mislead me. Even though this photo looks so perfect that it must be CGI’d or digitally manipulated, it’s not, it’s completely real. Artists Lernert and Sander took raw food—you can see meat and seafood and fruits and vegetables—and cut them into perfectly identical cubes and laid them out to form a perfect grid.…
Lovers of grainy portrait-orientation livestreams, rejoice! The Meerkat for Android app is out of beta and downloadable on the Google Play Store. That means Meerkat has beaten Periscope out of the Apple walled garden, although Windows Phone and Blackberry users might still be left in the cold for quite some time. Contact the author at…
This is great. Ben Morfitt cleverly and hilariously recorded a video of himself playing every instrument of a 70-person orchestra at the same time. It looks like he’s conducting an entire orchestra of musicians but it’s really an expertly edited cut of 70 versions of himself playing all at once. It was all filmed in…
Perhaps you’re familiar with the strangeness of supercooled water: It stays liquid well below water’s freezing point until you give it a whack, and bam, it suddenly turns into solid ice. You’re probably less familiar diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP) derivatives, which has similar but also odder properties. In a new study, scientists introduce DPP8, one particular derivative…
While most celebs are making headlines in California’s drought for their unnaturally green and fragrant lawns, a few public figures have stepped up to offer real solutions for the state. William Shatner explained his enthusiastic if somewhat unrealistic plot to siphon water from Seattle. Now Moby’s issued his own idea to save California. A Courage…
It’s a robot nerd lovefest at RoboUniverse 2015, and it’s great to be surrounded by other folks decidedly pro-robot. But some naysayers are less keen on sharing space with soulless gizmos. Know this: Misconceptions about robotic companions are aplenty. Brian Benoit, Senior Product Manager at manufacturer Rethink Robotics, gave a presentation at RoboUniverse called “Making…
If you try to describe 3D printing to someone, you can’t help but channel a little science fiction. “You put designs in this machine, which then just like…makes it.” I’m convinced that its the great-great-great-grandfather to the oft-referenced Star Trek replicator. Luckily, I already like my tea Earl Grey and hot. But almost every new…
System errors and software glitches appear without warning to mess with our workflows. If you work in tech, it’s often on you to fix ‘em. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen? Our EIC Annalee Newitz shared a story of a friend whose library software randomly decided to order 10,000 books in Russian. The friend was…
As key provisions of the Patriot Act are about to expire in June, Congress is in a big hurry to figure out how to reform surveillance. The House just overwhelmingly voted in favor of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that’ll limit the NSA’s bulk data collection. Unfortunately, it may not be able to fix…
Yeesh. Project Senium took a tour of an abandoned asylum and seeing the decay and emptiness and mess is quite unsettling. And then imagining the stories the walls could tell and then thinking about the people who walked through the halls and then having to convince yourself that ghosts aren’t real sure makes your spine…
Your next surgery may be performed by a robot. It will be controlled by a doctor in the room, or perhaps by one across the country. What’s truly extraordinary, though, is where these surgery robots came from. Their origin stories stretch back to the radioactive labs of the atomic age. Image via Atomic Robo by…
Last September, I traveled to British Columbia with Aether Apparel for a 1,200-mile adventure motorcycle ride through its remote fjords and mountains. Now, there’s beautiful video we shot along the way. Read about the trip here. IndefinitelyWild is a new publication about adventure travel in the outdoors, the vehicles and gear that get us there…
If you’re going to put a bottle of wine in a time capsule, maybe don’t bother with a cheap rosé. Yesterday afternoon, curious onlookers gathered at the Napa County Courthouse in California to glimpse the contents of a time capsule from 1979. And they learned that the time-capsulers of the 1970s included a bottle of…
Except when treating employees like garbage, Walmart isn’t much of a trendsetter. Now, the mega huge big box store may be continuing its “me too” tradition according to a new report from The Information and the Associated Press, saying Walmart is working on a shipping service to rival Amazon Prime for $50 per year. The…
Watches are awesome, ancient technology. They’re simple, often beautiful, completely functional tiny clocks we strap to our arms and wear out into the world. I love watches, but I think making them “smart” makes them worse. Instead, we should be making smart bands for the dumb, beautiful watches that already exist. The smartwatch notion of…
Bee colonies are still dying, and food may get more expensive as a result. Beekeepers in the U.S. lost 42.1 percent of their bee colonies between April 2014 and April 2015, according to a recent annual survey. Those losses continue a trend of die offs among bee colonies, which beekeepers say could drastically affect our…
After security firm CrowdStrike discovered a virtual machine security flaw that could (in theory) put millions of data centers at risk for malware attack this week, the comparisons came on hot, sticky, and thick. It was Heartbleed, all over again…..but this time, even WORSE. Various tech outlets called it “bigger than Heartbleed” and “much worse…
The earthquake in Nepal was so violent it moved mountains. Satellite imagery shows that the parts of the Himalayas sank three feet—and the area around it as much as five feet—as tectonic plates snapped under extreme pressure. But the mountains will regain their height, slowly but surely, thanks to the geologic forces at work. The…
