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Engineers have experimented with using sonic waves to douse flames for years—but it took a pair of students to turn the concept into an affordable, hand-held device. Viet Tran and Seth Robertson, who are both students at George Mason University, spent $600 of their own money to build their prototype, according to the school. The…
In 1871, the USS Nipsic went to Limon Bay to scout out an appropriate location for the north end of the then-soon-to-be-constructed Panama Canal. The USS Nipsic in Limon Bay in 1871 as part of the Darien Expedition. Image credit: John Moran The Darien Expedition was led by Thomas Oliver Selfridge for the U.S. Navy.…
Considered by many to be the diva of the vegetable world, over the years Mr. Potato Head has had hundreds and hundreds of outfits to choose from. And recently that includes the costumes of some of the comic book world’s best heroes, including Ant-Man who will be hitting movie theaters this summer. Earlier in the…
Watch out Dropbox, Amazon’s coming at you with a new cloud storage plan that’s ridiculously cheap. You can now store an unlimited number of files in the cloud for $60 a year. That’s five bucks a month for everything. To be perfectly clear, Amazon’s Unlimited Everything Plan allows you to “Store an infinite number of…
This 8-bit instant camera gun might be useless but it’s definitely cool. His inventor, the Moscow-based media-artist and musician Dmitry Morozov, put it together using and old Game Boy, a camera, a thermal printer, and Arduino. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Oh my sanity. Since most of us will never jump a bike off a ramp while going full speed, this video might be the closest we’ll ever get. It shows a double frontflip bike trick—which was pulled off for the first time last year—from the perspective of the rider. It’s so awesome to see the…
Skype’s best known for video and audio calling, and even a bit of old-school instant messaging, but there are plenty of other uses for it. One of these alternative uses is to set up a free, instant access home monitoring system that you can launch from your office or your vacation whenever you like. Here’s…
With spring comes the launch of another Samsung Galaxy phone. The S6 and S6 Edge are on their way into the hands of the masses, so we thought we would fire up the cameras and see how the newbies fare against tried and true competitors for the title of best smartphone camera. This time around,…
There is no greater tragedy than trying to remove a single piece of pizza from a box only to have half the pizza’s toppings come with it because it wasn’t properly sliced. The solution is to either find a pizza place where the employees actually care, or buy yourself a pizza cutter and slice it…
A few years ago, Ikea announced it had designed a better refugee shelter, using its flatpack furniture as a basis for engineering. As great an idea as it was, it wasn’t clear how the concept would ever find its way to reality. Now, these Ikea refugee shelters will be deployed—by the thousands. The Ikea Foundation…
Nature doesn’t end at the borders of a city — it’s just transformed. That’s why scientists are finding new animal species in urban areas, where the ecosystems favor scavengers, hardy weeds, and junk-eaters. It probably comes as no surprise that the sprawling city of Los Angeles is home to its own unique fly species. Today,…
Check out this five speed manual transmission 3D printed after a Toyota model—the W56 transmission. Watching how the cogwheels spin and react every time the guy changes gears is just amazing. Here’s a 3D printed Toyota 22RE engine made by the same guy: SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
CineFix is back with more 8-bit zombie deaths of The Walking Dead, this time focusing on season 3 and 4 (aka when the show left the farm and actually turned semi-decent for a little bit), and they sum up the story quite nicely. Zombies die, people die, a prison is taken over and Rick’s gang…
Apple may fight Spotify through music exclusives and…Trent Reznor from NIN will lead the app design team? All the news and rumors you missed in the past 24 hours are right here on BitStream. Apple has another big fight on its hands—this time its music streaming. Cupertino’s rumored one-up on the competition was that its…
This is the Samsung Galaxy S6. Is it the smartphone you’ve been waiting for? Hard to say—we’ve had this handset for less than 24 hours, and it’s going to take a teensy bit longer than that to properly test everything. But if you’ve got a question, any question at all, this is your chance. What…
Artist Robert Burden‘s huge mural dedicated to the Star Wars universe celebrates the galaxy far, far away through a slightly peculiar lens — in it there are over 150 Star Wars characters and vehicles, rendered in their original toy forms from Kenner’s classic toyline. Burden spent 18 months creating the mural, which will be on…
You know the rumors about how the Galaxy S6 would have dramatically less bloatware? How a bunch of the Samsung apps would be deletable if not completely optional? Yeah, not true. It’s a bummer, but the Galaxy S6 has as much bloatware as ever. At first glance, the new S6 and S6 Edge appear to…
Even though the majority of your work day is probably spent staring at a computer screen, somehow your desk gets cluttered faster than you can clean it. So following up on its Spartan-themed knife block, the talented and fully-digited woodworkers at Missing Digit Woodshop have created a desktop version that can now hold pens, pencils,…
A chameleon’s tongue is nearly two times the length of its body and it can shoot out that slimy sticky thing at 41 g, roughly four times the maximum acceleration of a fighter jet, with deadly quick accuracy: its tongue can reach its prey in 0.07 seconds. Basically, it’s an insane, superpower-like weapon to have.…
Bullet-proof protection may be about to get more bullet proof. A team of researchers has created a new kind of nanofiber that can extend to seven times its original length—and is tougher than kevlar, too. Scientists at UT Dallas have created a new kind of fiber which makes use of its electromechanical properties to absorb…
