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Photographer Sam Cornwell captured this awesome meteor streaking across the sky and discovered that it left a gnarly smoke trail in the shape of a Z before it disappeared. You can see the photos he took of the fireball of a meteor here. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
It seems that Google Glass is down, but not out: Italian eyewear maker Luxottica — better known as the company behind Oakley and Ray-Ban — has confirmed that it’s working with Google to make version 2.0 of the company’s faceputer. As the WSJ reports, Luxottica’s CEO told a general meeting in Milan that it is…
You know about the potentially world-ending Supervolcano hiding under Yellowstone, right? Well, scientists just discovered a second magma chamber containing an additional 46,000 cubic kilometers of molten rock. Did we mention it’s “overdue” for eruption? Apparently not everyone is aware of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. That’s crazy because it a) has the potential to wipe out…
In an effort to fix our broke-ass password system, manufacturers are looking to the world of biometrics, sticking fingerprint scanners into everything from photocopiers to, um, school buses. Now, a team of Yahoo researchers might’ve come up with a way to extend biometric recognition to anything with a touchscreen. https://gizmodo.com/the-tech-that-will-kill-passwords-dead-1660746026 To identify the ridges and…
Man of Steel was mostly fine but one huge problem with the movie was that it was just too dark. It embarrassingly cribbed its visual style off of Nolan’s Batman trilogy and that dark tone just doesn’t match up well with Superman. Visual Lab decided to restore the color in the film and it looks…
Being a successful burglar requires stealth and finesse, and also the ability to resist the temptation to snack and nap while on the job. A prowling thief broke all of these rules yesterday in Petaluma, Calif., and is now chilling behind bars, presumably wondering if it was worth it to inhale all those tater tots.…
It’s assumed that once CDs killed off audio cassette tapes, the medium became extinct. But believe it or not, magnetic tape is still alive and well when it comes to data storage, mostly because it’s so cheap. And now that IBM has found a way to squeeze 220 terabytes onto a single cartridge, hard drives…
Every six months or so, mobile processing giant Qualcomm announces its latest and greatest Snapdragon processor, a piece of silicon that will find its way into the newest Android handset, making your life faster and better and so much higher-resolution than the old, crummy Snapdragon. Only, in the case of Snapdragon 810, that’s not true.…
Earlier this week, the ongoing FBI forensics scandal — in which it was determined that hundreds of convictions were handed down based on flawed hair analysis — made headlines. But this sort of thing is nothing new, as evidenced by a case that gripped Australia in 1921. https://gizmodo.com/fbi-admits-flawed-forensics-may-have-led-to-wrongful-co-1699057802 The crime, known as “The Gun Alley…
Buckminster Fuller was either a brilliant inventor or a nutcase charlatan, depending on who you ask. And perhaps no single invention of Bucky’s encapsulates that divide quite like his Dymaxion car. Was it a death trap or a feat of engineering genius? The Wall Street Journal recently tested out a functioning replica and decided it…
On the first day of Apple Watch pre-orders, I put on a $15k wristputer and tried to figure out what was so special about it. There was the solid gold casing, which was impressive in a blunt way, sure. I was curious about the digital crown, a new UI idea, too. But the only moment…
Hurray for the internet, the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal is dead. Right? We dodged a megacorporation-sized bullet, but the internet is just as broken today as it was yesterday. The death of the deal is being rightly heralded as a good thing for consumers. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler puts it succinctly: Comcast and…
Hey, we’ve all got ideas to save California from its cataclysmic drought. Stop fracking! Stop showering! Stop eating! But none of us is William Shatner: Enterprise captain, Priceline spokesperson, Twitter watchdog, and probably, definitely, most certainly not a water expert. This is not preventing him from proposing a $30 billion solution, including a crowdsourcing website…
There has been an awakening. Have you felt it? The Star Wars fan base has plenty of reasons to be excited about in 2015 thanks to The Force Awakens, but one currently stands above all — or more specifically, its toy does. The world wants BB-8, and toy maker Sphero knows it. Pretty much the…
Even though I know better and am fully aware of the very real technological limitations and have read all the tepid reviews on the stupid thing and know that first generation Apple products aren’t worth the trouble and like most humans, enjoy having a bigger number than a smaller number in my bank account, I…
You hear the phrase all the time when you’re working with computers, especially on customer service calls: “Please reboot your computer.” Why do we use the word reboot to mean “turn it off and on again”? It all goes back to tech history — and to one of the most revolutionary aspects of these computing…
This clip from Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s 2012 film Planet Ocean shows a parrotfish pulling one of the oldest tricks in the book to get away from sharks: it hides right next to coral while staying impossibly still as the sharks just swim right by it, over it and next to it while completely missing it. It’s…
A soldier in the operating system enthusiast wars has taken to the streets of Google Maps to spread a simple message, one that transcends the artificial boundaries of language and culture. If you look south of Rawlpindi, Pakistan, on Google Maps, you’ll see this unforgettable image of ruthless robot dominance and fruit submission, a tribute…
New York and DC are piles of ash, but at least your checks are clearing. That was the idea behind the Culpeper Switch, a sprawling bunker built by the Federal Reserve to keep the banks running after nuclear apocalypse. But even some Cold War-era politicians thought it was silly. The compound was built just outside…
The Apple Watch is finally here in what has been one of the longest waits for an Apple anything in the company’s history. And like almost every product in that storied produce lineage, the Apple Watch enters the retail world with some stiff competition. But where the iPod and the iPhone were stupid better than…
