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If you’re the owner of a Sony camera with an electronic viewfinder, Sony just released a nifty little app that’ll let you take a photo without touching your camera — just wave your hand over the EVF instead. The Touchless Shutter app (free download, still in beta) uses the viewfinder’s eye sensor to detect the…
Acer just released a kraken. Forty different gadgets—laptops, desktops, tablets, wearables, fitness trackers, mini PCs, monitors—for the upcoming back to school season. But the most intriguing was Acer’s mysterious new gaming tablet. The Predator. Although Acer outed its new Android gaming tablet today, it really didn’t have much to say about it. We can’t tell…
I’m not exactly sure I know what a teleportation tunnel actually is but I’d imagine it would look a lot like this. This being swimming with a million silverside fish in the ocean. It’s beautiful, like traveling through organic warp speed or being a part of a swarm from a sci-fi movie that’s about to…
Geophysicists have discovered a second, even more massive magma reservoir feeding the Yellowstone supervolcano, providing researchers with the most comprehensive picture yet of the volcanic system beneath the park. Top image: The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park. Credit: National Park Service/Jim Peaco The Yellowstone volcanic field is the surface manifestation of an upwelling…
Evidence has been piling up that neonicotinoids, a class of ubiquitous pesticides, play a role the recent decline of bees. A new study adds worrying and unexpected evidence: Bees actually prefer food contaminated with neonicotinoids—probably because it’s getting them high. This new study is important because a lot of controversy over the neonicotinoids has centered…
We’ve seen Bandai’s “Movie Realisation” takes on Star Wars before, turning Darth Vader and his Stormtroopers into Samurai — but now the line is expanding into amazing looking versions of the Royal Guards, Boba Fett and, as befitting any Star Wars toy line, more Stormtrooper variants than you can shake a stick at. https://gizmodo.com/samurai-darth-vader-leads-a-slew-of-crazy-japanese-star-1590655607 https://gizmodo.com/bandais-samurai-stormtrooper-looks-absolutely-amazing-1670694953…
Calbuco, a stratovolcano in southern Chile, began erupting yesterday at 7pm local time. First spewing massive ash clouds then, at 10pm, erupting explosively as its fragile structure collapsed inwards. Here’s all the stunning imagery and video; we’ll keep it updated as this develops. You can see it from space! https://gizmodo.com/this-huge-volcanic-eruption-in-chile-is-stunningly-beau-1699612788 AP Photo Why do Volcanoes…
It’s like Christmas morning for pedestrian advocates! This week’s New York Times Magazine is all about walking, from the very act of perambulation to all the ways that the city—any city really—is best appreciated on foot. And the cover is a street-scale work of art. This is not Photoshop! The art was shot practically, from…
Stormtroopers are the disposable pawns of the Star Wars universe, and there’s more ways for them to die than movie spin-offs planned for the next 20 years. But in addition to dying from blaster fire, TIE fighter crashes, Death Star explosions, and lightsaber attacks, it appears that melting is yet another peril the Empire’s forces…
It’s an unprecedented feat: tweaking the genomes of human embryos. In a groundbreaking move, Chinese researchers have officially done it, but the announcement comes amid a whole bunch of ethical fracas. The technique, called CRISPR, seeks out genes that could cause problems like inherited diseases. CRISPR splices DNA, replacing the trouble gene with different molecules,…
Jonas Odell asked four different people about their first time having sex and then animated their stories in this wonderfully intimate short film. Some of the stories can get funny and familiar, other are touching and enlightening while another unfortunately is really sad. But even though the stories all very personal, they’re all relatable and…
New way to find news? To call your friends? To buy vinyl? Make a video? Every smartphone platform has some big name software additions from Facebook, Rudy Huyn, and Hipstamatic. Let’s check ‘em out. Android Discollector Discollector is a long awaited Android app for people who subscribe to Discogs, a vinyl marketplace where you can…
The Army’s M4 assault rifle usually has a singular, deadly purpose: sending 5.56mm chunks of copper at things you don’t like very much. But according to Defense One, the Army is working on an attachment for the M4 that would pretty much turn it into a ray gun. The device, nicknamed ‘Burke’s Pulsar’ after its…
A crane towering over a construction site might look rock solid to the naked eye, but new video processing software developed by researchers at MIT is able to accentuate and reveal its subtle motions as it sways back and forth in the wind. And it promises to have a devastating effect on enrollment at crane…
Thanks, Obama! Wait, no, seriously—that’s who Republicans really are blaming for the massive shortage in customer service help from the IRS this season, during which hang-ups on the IRS’s tax helpline rose from 360,000 last year to 8 million in 2015. Image: AP Photo/J. David Ake The AP details a new report on these “courtesy…
The first time around, Google Glass wasn’t exactly a runaway hit. But the technology behind it will certainly be improved to the point where it can eventually be integrated into a regular pair of glasses. And for when that day gets here, there’s now a novel and subtle way to navigate your wearable display using…
Rock, paper, scissors. Paper beats rock, rock beats scissors, scissor beats paper. How do those holiest of rules apply to fire and water? Well, let’s blast a water hose at a flame thrower while the flame thrower is firing off at the water hose to find out. Guess who’s the winner? Duh, it was water.…
The long wait for the Apple Watch is almost over, but wait one second—you don’t necessarily have to rush out and spend $349 (or more) to get some of its most useful features on your wrist. You can add these tweaks and third-party apps to Android Wear to get a more Apple Watch-like experience from…
Last year, we got the chance to try playing a video game with an avatar of ourselves, thanks to a camera system which creates a complete 3D model of your person. Since most of us don’t have 90 spare cameras and a supercomptuer lying around, it’s a hard-to-repeat experience. That’s why designer Alexx Henry is…
So far, specific details are thin on the new battery designed for home use that Tesla’s announcing next week. But just based on what we do know, it’s a pretty big deal. The quest for a good battery that can store home-generated power is kind of like the holy grail for a renewable energy future.…
