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An Android 5.1 update is rolling out to the 2014 Moto X. It adds a new gesture that turns the the flashlight on and off. To do it, simply “chop twice.” That sounds weird, but makes more sense when you look at this GIF: Motorola’s software gestures are probably the coolest features on one of…
You already know that vibrators are great for erotic release. It turns out they can do something similar for plants. In an article at Wired, Gwen Pearson discusses how vibrators found a home on the farm by mimicking the intense thrum of bumblebees. From the article: Tomatoes grown in greenhouses are walled off from their…
There’s been no shortage of street art trying to make a point about the inequality of cities. But here’s a clever idea that not only illustrates some horrifying facts, it also gives some real-world context that’s impossible to ignore: These infographics have been wheatpasted onto actual urban infrastructure right out on the streets. Street Graphs…
Drones—like sharks and William Shatner—are often misunderstood by the public. Many associate the autonomous fliers with warfare and creepy government spies. But drones can be heroic, dropping life-saving supplies to civilians in combat zones. That’s what U.S. Air Force member/Stanford PhD student Mark Jacobsen wants to do with his crowdfunding effort, the Syria Airlift Project.…
This is crazy. An eight-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast was being smuggled into Spain while being hidden inside a suitcase. Apparently, the boy’s father had paid a 19-year-old girl to carry the boy in the luggage from Morocco to neighboring Ceuta, a Spanish city in Africa. This was a bad plan that could have…
At this point, there are tons of apps that let us know when our trains are running late. But apps aren’t nearly as pretty as an LED light strip set up to blink when something’s wrong with your commute. London-based developer James Singleton used a Raspberry Pi B+ and the London Underground’s API to turn…
This Dodge Caravan snapped in Orlando this morning certainly looks like one of Apple’s supposedly pre-autonomous minivansthat are currently swarming the country. Have you seen one of these things? Help us figure out what’s happening here. According to Gizmodo reader R. Holt, this van was parked in front of an East Orlando Publix grocery store…
If you can’t destroy your opponents with sarcasm or a deftly-executed line of code, you can at least stun them with a million volts of electricity from your cell phone, or stab them with the pen in your pocket. That’s what these actual, real-life products from True Swords promise. Here are the product details on…
After many years, Mattel no longer has the rights to make Ghostbusters toys. Diamond Select are picking up where they left off with a new line of toys, but before the era of Mattel is over, there’s one parting gift: and perfectly, it’s the dearly missed Harold Ramis. The 6” figure has been dubbed the…
It’s refreshing when justice is served. About as refreshing as the water that Starbucks will now have to source elsewhere to fill the plastic bottles of its “humanitarian” brand. Yesterday, they announced they will no longer bottle water from California’s cracked soil. After a blistering report by Mother Jones last week, Starbucks finally realized the…
The Dissolve put together this neat animation that briefly looks at the history of the PG-13 rating, a rating that was invented after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins was released. And in discussion of the rating, it reveals how backwards the MPAA can be when it comes to violence vs sex,…
When you hire a firm to take care of your cybersecurity, you’re hiring a team of experts whom you assume you can trust. But one such firm allegedly used the trust of its clients to straight-up extort them with made-up “data breaches.” CNN Money gives us a rundown on Tiversa, a still-operating cybersecurity company that…
As Elon Musk revealed in an earnings call earlier this week, people preordered a shit-ton of Tesla’s new batteries: Over 50,000 Powerwall units were reserved. Now some interesting math, courtesy of Bloomberg: The five million square-foot Gigafactory planned outside of Reno probably isn’t big enough to make them all. Take a look at the numbers,…
People often think about internet spying as relatively new. But the internet was used for spying before we even called it the internet—and when we look back at news articles from the era, we can’t say we weren’t warned. As just one more in a long list of examples, take a December 1975 article by…
In the Terminator franchise, Skynet is an evil military computer system that launches war on humanity. And at some point, someone in the National Security Agency sat down and thought, “Damn, that’s a sick thing to name a secret system!” Malevolent undertones of aspirations to unchecked aggression be damned, I guess, because Skynet is real.…
In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the goal is to treat survivors and distribute medicine, food, and tents. But what happens when the aftermath is over? The long, slow process of finding permanent shelter is often a difficult challenge all its own. Image: Laprak village in Gorkha district in Nepal. SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty Images. Japanese…
Imagine what would happen if every cell phone tower in the country spontaneously combusted. We’d be in big trouble, which is why the Pentagon is exploring other ways to communicate in the event of an emergency. Chief among them is the idea toconnect every cell phone in America with mesh networking technology. Actually, the technology…
The final Oculus Rift is coming next year. But why wait? If you’ve got a shiny new Galaxy S6, you can get a glimpse of the virtual reality future today. I’m talking about the new Gear VR headset, which turns your phone into a far clearer VR viewer than any you could buy to date.…
Lady Gaga’s steak gown and the Bjork-in-a-swan outfit feel as plain as a white t-shirt compared to these MIT-designed threads. They’re 3D-printed, look like human innards, and could tote around live, glowing bacteria. Designer Neri Oxman, who works at the MIT Media Lab, describes the look as a “wearable microbial factory” in an interview with…
This video of a crazy guy running and jumping and doing that parkour thing across a building ledge only lasts 15 seconds but I’m pretty sure I’ve thrown up 15 times, cried enough tears for 15 years, broke my knees in 15 different places from trembling too hard and destroyed my ability to process emotion…
