Tech News

Should We Freak Out That a Common Herbicide Is “Probably Carcinogenic?”

Glyphosate, better known as Roundup, is widely used to kill weeds, especially along with genetically modified crops engineered to be glyphosate-resistant. The World Health Organization today released an assessment calling the weedkiller “probably carcinogenic.” But it’s not as scary as it sounds. The reason is subtle but worth understanding. The WHO’s Agency for Research on…

Watching a CD spin so fast that it gets warped and shatters is so fun

The Slow Mo Guys spun a CD (a Spotify playlist shaped like a circle mirror, kids) so fast that it started warping and then eventually shattered into a hundred little pieces. You can see the disc spinning at 23,000 RPM and getting bent out of shape until it just gives out, all at once. So…

GM Is Developing Smarter Headlights That Will Follow a Driver’s Gaze

There are already cars on the road with intelligent headlights that can sweep left or right to improve visibility as a vehicle steers into a turn. But Opel/Vauxhall, a European subsidiary of GM, are developing next-generation headlight systems that can keep track of where a driver’s looking, and automatically re-direct the lights in that direction.…

The Emergency Escape Rockets For The Crew Dragon Are Surprisingly Quiet

A pair of SuperDraco engines firing at the same time is far quieter than I thought it would be. The dual firing is part of SpaceX pad abort testing for the rocket engines, ensuring both engines can simultaneously ignite and throttle if they need to carry the Crew Dragon to safety. Top image: SuperDraco engine…

Facebook is gunning hard for YouTube with its new embeddable video feature, which lets people take videos posted to Facebook and put them on other sites. Before, if you decided to put a video on Facebook and wanted to share it elsewhere you basically had to re-upload it to another site or simply link back…

Grumpy Americans of the 1970s Wanted to Rewrite the Constitution

The 1970s was a rough time for most Americans. The economy was tanking, inflation was out of control, and thanks to the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal, few people had anything good to say about their government. Which is why predictions about the future from this era are so fascinating. No matter what your political…

Barbed Wire’s Dark, Deadly History

In the mid 1800s, not many (non-native) Americans had ever been west of the Mississippi. When Frederick Law Olmstead visited the west in the 1850s, he remarked that the plains looked like a sea of grasses that moved “in swells after a great storm.” Massive herds of buffalo wandered the plains. Cowboys shepherded cattle across…

Facebook Is Finally Getting Messaging Right

Facebook wants to be your everything, and the next step in its long and deliberate journey to subsume the entire world is here. Messenger, Facebook’s separate (and now genuinely useful) messaging app, is growing up and you have every reason to be excited. Up until now, Messenger and its growing list of functions were entirely…

Facebook Will Put 360-Degree Spherical Videos Right In Your News Feed

I think that 360-degree video is going to be a big deal. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg agrees! He just announced that Facebook will be able to embed spherical videos right in your News Feed, much like YouTube 360. So what’s spherical video, anyhow? I could tell you, but why not just show you instead? Here’s a…

An App That Turns Your Texts to Songs Is a Wonderful Disaster

What if the worst possible text messages you could receive were delivered as singing telegrams? We decided to use an app that turns text into song to find out. Ditty is a new app that rides on top of Facebook’s Messenger app, and takes whatever messages you write and attempts to crush them into the…

Making this 24 carrot gold cake is pure alchemy

One of the reasons I desperately want to time travel is to blow the minds of people in the past with just the simplest of things today. Imagine going back hundreds of years and baking this gold 24 ‘carrot’ cake. With a few drops of food coloring and a few edible gold leaf sheets, I’d…

The Best Cylon Design Is Being Turned Into A Cutesy Funko Pop

Okay, it’s ending may have caused a lot of anger, but on the whole the Battlestar Galactica reboot was pretty great. Its redesign for the Cylons was great, too — but nothing beats the retro-tastic original Cylon design. All the more better then that it’s the Classic Battlestar Galactica getting the Funko treatment! Four figures…

This Table Listens to Your Boring Meetings and Pulls Out the Good Stuff

Meetings can be horrible, unproductive, and maddening. Can a high-tech conference table make them bearable? The New York Times R&D Lab have tackle the problem with the lab’s latest project. The Semantic Listening Table is an attempt to make sense of the chaotic conversation. The smart table combines pervasive data collection and the internet of…

The complete visual history of the Walt Disney logo before Disney movies

Ever since the Walt Disney Pictures logo debuted before The Black Cauldron in 1985, Disney has been tweaking and re-styling and creating multiple variations of the iconic magic castle logo that pops up right before its movies. For a while it’s a simple 2D logo stamped on a blue background but eventually it turned 3D…

A Key-Sized Pebble Watch Charger You’ll Never Forget At Home

The Pebble smartwatch boasts vastly superior battery life to Apple’s upcoming wearable, but that doesn’t mean you still don’t have to regularly keep it charged. So following up on its key-sized smartphone chargers, Nomad is introducing the tiny NomadKey Pebble that includes a magnetic connector for attaching to and charging the smartwatch. It’s small enough…

It’s Time for Mandatory Voting—And We Have the Technology to Do It

The voting system in the US is deplorable. Not only is our methodology outdated, we have the lowest turnout rate of any developed nation. The solution to almost every election-related challenge is to make voting mandatory. And with a little tech reform, we could do it in time for the 2016 presidential election. Part of…

Shooting Challenge: Lights Out

It’s Earth Hour this weekend. And no matter how you feel about its message, I think we can all agree that seeing cities blanketed in darkness is chilling. So for this week’s Shooting Challenge, photograph the darkness of Earth Hour. The Challenge Take a photograph during Earth Hour—March 28 from 8:30-9:30pm—when all the lights are…

Feast your eyes on these cool geometric infinite loops

These infinite loop GIFs by Dutch graphic designer Florian de Looij are so beautiful and perfectly crafted that I spent a while trapped inside their geometric patterns and moving colors. Florian de Looij is a graphic designer based in Ermelo, Netherlands. You can Follow him on Twitter and check out his work on his website.…

Skip the Taxidermy and Put Glowing Star Wars Heads On Your Walls

Continuing the recent decorating trend of glowing stuff smashing through walls we now have three of the most popular Star Wars characters joining the fray. Designed more for kids or gaming rooms these 3D heads are completely self-contained so there’s no unsightly power cords to be hidden, and thanks to LEDs inside they always remain…

10 Tricks to Make Yourself a Google Play Music Master

Between iTunes and Spotify, Google’s own Play Music can get forgotten about, but it has lots going for it. Whether you’re a non-paying user listening to your own tracks or paying monthly for access to Google’s entire library (and YouTube Music Key) there’s plenty to explore. Here are 10 tips to help you get more…