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We love to imagine how biotechnology might one day enhance our fleshy bodies, but too often, Earth’s wildlife are left out of the future entirely. Enter Kathryn Fleming’s future zoo, filled with a menagerie of fantastical, slightly disturbing, genetically modified mutants. With last year’s sobering news that 40% of all wild vertebrates have disappeared from…
Green may be the Plant Kingdom’s color of choice, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it takes only a little chemical tuning to turn chlorophyll—the light-absorbing pigment that colors plants green—blue, red, orange, or any other hue under the sun. As reported in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B, scientists have…
Legos have been experiencing something of a renaissance lately. With adults now using their childhood building bricks in more creative ways than ever, it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to bring a portable, customizable, Lego-based desktop computer into the world. Top image via Total Geekdom And there’s no one more fit…
Hoo boy. Sailor Moon Crystal has been on on the mend these past few weeks, but it kind of fell apart here. Awful pacing issues, nigh on incomprehensibility, and weird, weird romance were the hallmarks of the day — but at least Sailor Pluto showed up. Act 19 is kind of a mess. Not only…
If you’ve ever managed to finish a Rubik’s cube, you might be a little proud of the fact (I certainly would be.) That is, at least, before you saw this stop motion robot love story video, the result of someone solving 1,300 Rubik’s cubes nearly a thousand times each. The video was animated in 3D…
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca.) wants to remove The Anarchist Cookbook from the internet— you know, that notorious DIY bomb-making manual that has been around since the 1970s, is still available in print, the one you can buy on Amazon and find literally thousands of places online and offline for a pittance. Feinstein made her modest,…
Will the Apple Watch be so radically different we won’t understand how to use it at first? Perhaps so: Apple has produced a series of videos to teach Watch-wearers how the interface will work—videos which give us the best look yet at what our wrist-computer future might hold. (They also double as handy marketing tools.)…
This week at Gizmodo, we investigated the science behind music’s “loudness war,” eyedrops that biohackers claim are for night vision, mushrooms that could save the Earth, and why hammocks are the worst. Enjoy! Samsung Galaxy S6 Review: Not The Next Big Thing, Just a Fantastic Phone Remember the good old Samsung Galaxy S III? It…
What a week. I’m about to go spend my weekend with extended family and old friends. What a weekend. What’ve you got lined up? This week I asked you all about your favorite form of social media, and I’ve been pondering the question a lot myself. I’m going to start hanging around Google+ more, as…
Did you know that it’s illegal to tinker with the code in your in-car computer? Thanks to the nuances of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you’re not even supposed to inspect the inner workings of your vehicle’s circuitry. This is absurd, which is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is fighting for a better…
Do you consider yourself a transit nerd? The Center for Neighborhood Technology has a doozy of a challenge for you: A quiz that asks you to name a US city based on a map of its public transportation system. The rub: It only shows you the stops. You can’t see the routes. The online quizis…
Dear Lord. Cleaning the windows of skyscrapers is already a scary enough job but cleaning windows of the 91st floor of the 1600-foot tall Shanghai World Financial Center while the wind violently throws around the scaffolding like some unhinged, unbuckled roller coaster swing? That is absolutely pants laundering terrifying. The workers were thankfully rescued but…
Joni Mitchell was hospitalized this week, but the songwriter has been sick for years. She has described her debilitating illness as “a slow, unpredictable killer–a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year.” Yet doctors have described this same illness as an internet meme, a delusion…
The iPad turns five today. That’s five years of reading emails at breakfast on slabs of glass and aluminum, five years of snuggling up with Netflix. Five years of wondering what the hell we were thinking when we first heard about this subtly transformative device. Five years! Nearly two-and-a-half million people have feasted their eyes…
It is the annual Peeps dilemma: To diorama or dip in dark chocolate? This year, the most polarizing sweets on the planet have become the most polarizing beverage in the dairy case. Yes, there is Peeps milk. It is real and kind of gross but I’m still going to drink it on Easter morning. With…
Avalanches are powerful forces of nature, but they’re also the result of millions of tiny snowflakes bonded—or not bonded—together just so. Looking at avalanches falling down mountains can only tell you so much. At Montana State University’s “subzero lab,” scientists are studying how avalanches happen by recreating them flake by flake. The subzero lab is…
Right now, India’s in the middle of launching a massive, $18 billion plan to finally bring the country’s shoddy internet up to speed. There’s just one little problem: Adorable monkeys just can’t stop eating its delicious, delicious data cables. Specifically, its the 3,000 year-old holy city of Varanasi that’s having the hardest time getting an…
Here are twelve KC-135 Stratotanker refueling airplanes all lined up on the runway like a dozen ducks in a row. It was part of an aerial exercise at the Kadena Air Base in Japan where the Stratotankers pumped 50 aircraft with 800,000 pounds of fuel. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or…
Many of us are still slack-jawed over Apple’s announcement nearly a month ago that its Midas-touched wearable will go for a cool $10,000 at least. Unfortch for the rich and/or people who are bad with money, that doesn’t include the protection plan, an expensive one that comes with a set up hotline! 9to5Mac says for…
As countless films, books, and conspiracy theories have recounted, the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln came to dramatic ends when the men were struck by assassins’ bullets. Lesser-known are the deaths of James A. Garfield and William McKinley, who suffered the same fate, though both clung to life for days after. The…
