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Even if you didn’t know Chris Burden’s name, you’ve likely seen photos of what has become his most famous work: 202 vintage streetlamps arranged with a military-like precision in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Like many of Burden’s pieces, Urban Light is infrastructurally inspired and technologically impressive. It has also managed…
Companies love to put Albert Einstein in their ads. We’ve seen Einstein peddle Nikon cameras, Apple computers, and even Mentos. But Einstein never approved for his image to be used in any product endorsements while he was alive. In fact, he called these deals the “corruption of our time.” Einstein was offered tens of thousands…
Even though Silicon Valley primarily follows (and mocks) a small startup, the show has always been stellar at satirizing the tech establishment. This week’s episode uses a wearable robotic monkey hand to make a point about how the big companies can be the biggest (and sometimes most literal) shitshows of them all. Hooli head honcho…
In the early 1970s, two Boeing engineers used a sandwich press to put a slice of foam between two pieces of airtight fabric and invented the self-inflating sleeping pad for campers. Therm-A-Rest still uses that basic principle today, just the sandwich machine has given way to an entire factory in Seattle. This is that production…
Owen Wilson basically plays the same guy in every single movie he’s in. If you’ve seen his shtick you know all his go to moves. Here is a video compilation of one of his favorites, saying wow at things. He either goes with breathless stunned wow or with an inflection that turns it into an…
A Subway franchise in Knoxville, Tenn. is the first US business to arm itself with “intruder spray,” which tags would-be robbers with a product called SelectaDNA. According to the manufacturer, the solution contains “a unique DNA code which can be used to uniquely mark and trace both items of property and criminals.” SelectaDNA’s US distributor,…
All serious Star Wars fans know the work of Tibor Helényi. The Hungarian painter, who sadly passed away last year, created some of the most-hated and beloved posters for the original Star Wars trilogy. And now, more than one year after his death, the original oil paintings are going to be auctioned off on May…
Emmet Brickowoski was repeatedly mocked for his double-decker couch idea in The Lego Movie, but in real-life it’s an absolutely brilliant creation that the folks at Super-Fan Builds have finally turned into an actual piece of furniture. Having to look through the legs of everyone sitting on the upper-section is a small price to pay…
I mean, after all, it’s a movie about normal people turning into tiny little people punching the everloving crap out of each other. Why not make tiny, cutesy toys out of them? If anything, Funko hasn’t gone far enough in miniaturising Scott Lang and Darren Cross. Just as the Sun rises and sets, Funko have…
How often have you had a great photo-op ruined by there being a window in-between you and your subject resulting in reflections in your shot? So far there’s just no easy way to fix that in post-production, but researchers at MIT, led by YiChang Shih, have developed an algorithm that can extract and automatically remove…
From toddlers to truly deranged adults, the White House has seen its share of intruders this year. Now, the Secret Service and the Parks Service are upgrading the fence that so many crazies have scrambled over. And they’re using millennia-old defense techniques. After several embarrassing breaches this year, the Secret Service began looking for ways…
Maybe it’s because they look like cheese puffs? I don’t know. But seeing this visual simulation of 1.3 million orange cheese puffy-ish particles get thrown into a bowl and the cascading physics that results because of that thought experiment basically stole my eyeballs for much longer than it should have. I just want to pour…
Even after more than a decade of studying sex in animals, my own attempts to teach my children about the “birds and the bees” were fraught with embarrassment, mostly for them. I wish I’d been as clever as medical educator Danielle Teller. In a recent article on Quartz, she describes a sugar-fueled game that got…
The first big trend in online campaigning is emerging for the 2016 presidential race, and it’s domain trolling, or buying up the domain names of your political foes. Go to TedCruz.com and you’ll get redirected to a webpage praising Obama. Go to CarlyFiorina.org and you’ll see 30,000 sad-face emoticons representing all the people she laid…
Giphy’s great new Chrome extension builds an animated image search engine right into your editor. I’m freaking out. Every party invitation email needs a GIF, and who wants to go to the trouble of doing a Google image search to find the perfect one. Ugh. The Labor. It’s pretty simple: After installing the extension, you’ll…
Google has temporarily shut down its Map Maker program while it figures out how to stop people from inserting pranks into its maps, like the image of an Android robot taking a big pee on an Apple logo that prompted an apology last month. Map Editor team member Pavithra Kanakarajan wrote a blog post explaining…
You probably didn’t think about it sitting in the theater, but all the screens and interfaces in Avengers: Age of Ultron were designed by someone in the real world—from Stark’s Iron Man schematics to Cho’s medical scans. Who are the designers that built this world? MeetTerritory Studio. At one point in the film, Stark says…
If you thought rotary tools like the Dremel were all work and no play, Make has a fun tutorial you’ll definitely want to try. You’ll need access to a 3D printer to create this flying toy disc affectionately called the Dremel Devil, and a rotary tool that you can power outside where it’s safest to…
Fracking can’t catch a break from bad press recently: Some think it’s triggering earthquakes in Texas, a state usually lacking in seismic activity. The U.S. Geological Survey says that the Dallas area (a fracking hub) has experienced 40 mini-temblors this year, with a 2.7 quake detected just this weekend. In January, nearby Irving was hit…
Everything is hackable — you can jailbreak your phone to get better apps, but you can also mod your own eyeballs to have night vision. Where do we go from there? Your libido, of course. Programmable vibrators are the new frontier in customizable gadgets, and we got a taste of what they’re like. Two very…
