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We live on a spectacular, bizarre, wonderful, weird, confusing, awe-inspiring planet. NASA’s Earth Day campaign sent me hunting for a few of the places that leave me delighted. Where are your favourite spots on this strange planet of ours? Top image: Lake Gairdner National Park in South Australia contains the largest salt lakes in Australia…
Back in the days of the Manhattan Project, the government set up a string of National Labs devoted to creating nuclear weapons. Now, those labs are playing a role in the opposite task: stopping them. A secret facility in Tennessee that replicates Iran’s nuclear capabilities was key to the recent negotiations. The deal, which seeks…
Though it might look like some sort of condom testing or water balloon making, what you’re actually looking at is bologna being made. The natural casing gets fitted over a stuffing horn and filled with a meat mixture of beef, pork and seasoning. It’s then smacked with a spike and smoked until it comes out…
Bobkitten or regular kitten? While both look cute nibbling on your finger, one might actually eat that finger. This is the latest litter born in the Santa Monica Mountains. Pictured here are B326 and B327. Two bobcat kittens just born in the wild in the Simi Hills, north of Los Angeles. Their mom wears a…
It’s a remarkable technology capable of looking inside a human being, but magnetic resonance imaging—or MRI—machines are finicky and require a patient to remain absolutely still while it does its thing. But researchers at the University of Illinois have found a way to capture up to 100 frames per second on an MRI machine allowing…
Much like the I Heart NY logo or the Hollywood Sign, the sign welcoming visitors to Las Vegas was not meant as a grand gesture when it was conceived. What was a simple act of civic self promotion—an ad, really—became a piece of public art and eventually an icon in the public domain, plastered on…
The dangerous and unenviable task of cleaning up the Fukushima reactor has hit its latest snag: Two snake-like reconnaissance bots had to be abandoned inside the reactor—after one got stuck and another’s camera was damaged by radiation. The Fukushima cleanup relies almost entirely on robots because radiation levels inside the reactor are still too dangerous…
In the future, we might be able to zoom in from an impossible far off distance and see a target like some insane sniper. Daniel Taylor made this simulation that shows what an extreme 343x super ridiculous zoom would look like and it’s crazy to imagine that this could be real. In the future, they…
Our dentists constantly remind us to replace our toothbrushes every 90 days so they’re most effective at battling plaque, but how often do we really remember to do that? To make it easier, Brush Buddies has created the 90 Day Brush featuring a timer and built-in LCD display that reminds users exactly when it’s time…
We’re right in the middle of simultaneous Apple and Star Wars product orgies, and it’s suddenly become clear to me why Apple and Star Wars are pretty much the same brand, only in different industries. They Were Born in the Geek Grassroots Before the days of Star Wars mania and Apple obsessives, entrepreneurs aimed to…
You usually see these kinds of gravity-powered walking toys made out of wood, but Jason Allemann has come up with a way to construct them out of Lego instead. And all you need to build your own walking duck and kangaroo is the proper Lego pieces, and the laws of the universe to still be…
Google’s Project Fi is the company’s long-rumored wireless carrier service for mobile devices. But far from a traditional plan, Google’s might be the most flexible out there—while also saving you a bundle of money. Unlike Google’s other public infrastructure program Google Fiber, for which the company is physically putting fiber in the ground, Google isn’t…
Facebook’s quest to conquer your phone continues with Hello, a new dialer app that replaces the one that comes natively installed on your Android phone. And if you’re not partial to anything, it’s probably worth a try. Facebook’s endless app proliferation is tedious. (Tedious people call this proliferation “unbundling.”) But the new Facebook dialer app…
It’s not something anyone likes to think about, but your smartphone—or your laptop, or the battery in your hybrid car—created a huge amount of toxic and radioactive waste. And now we know what happens to that waste in the long term. It returns to the earth, mingles with sludge, and finds its way into clay…
I started thinking about 3D printing, I mean really started thinking about it, in 2012. I was eking out an existence as a penny-pinching grad student at the time, so a $3,000 machine that squirts out hot plastic and builds frivolous knick-knacks wasn’t exactly fixated in my cerebrum. In September of that year, I picked…
Waze works by requiring its users to manually report what they see on the road: traffic jams, potholes, speed traps. Now the City of Los Angeles will ask its Wazers to be vigilant about reporting one more thing: The vehicles possibly involved in hit-and-run collisions. Much like the Amber Alerts which are delivered to phones…
We’ve known for a while that Striker Eureka would be NECA’s next plus sized Pacific Rim toy — but now that the figure is hitting shelves next week, the company have released more pictures of the toy, and it’s looking rather lovely indeed. https://gizmodo.com/looks-like-striker-eureka-is-the-next-plus-sized-pacifi-1667179332 The 18” figure isn’t just packed with amazing details and a…
An anti-vaccination group in Australia is facing backlash today over a Facebook post that claims vaccination is just like rape. The page, associated with the Australian Vaccination Skeptics Network, featured an image that’s offensive to pretty much anyone with eyes and the ability to read. The post showed a man holding his hand over a…
We’ve all seen anthropomorphic objects. But what would it look like if everything around you had actual eyes and was looking at you? For this week’s Shooting Challenge, let’s find out. The Challenge Take a photo of a manmade object or element of nature on which you’ve added a pair of eyes. The Technique OK,…
If you turned on the Cardinals v Nationals game last night, you witnessed the first live broadcast of Major League Baseball’s awesome new player tracking and statistics system. This is Statcast: The incredibly fast, incredibly detailed art of playing baseball, broken down into easy to digest metrics that make sense. Hell yeah. Here’s the first…
