Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Building flat-pack furniture is a major pain in the ass, so much so that a MIT team has spent years and millions of dollars solving the problem. Actually, that’s not quite true: the problem they’re trying to solve is actually a far more exciting one, even if it won’t benefit Ikea quite yet. Wired has…
What’s worse than fiddling with cables? Trying to do it in vacuum, wearing gloves, with the sun setting every hour. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Tery Virts spent nearly seven hours to run just over 100 meters of cable reconfiguring the space station for the commercial crew program. Astronaut Terry Virts running cabling on the outside…
Push pins and a corkboard are the most basic organisational tool around, but they kinda suck for photos — in order to stick them up, you stab a tiny hole through your grandma’s face. This neat alternative tries to solve that. Pon is a Kickstarter project that basically marries a paperclip to a thumbtack, meaning…
Cities have always struggled with the tension between the different needs of social classes who share the space. But as The Guardian documents, a new trend of defensive — and some times overtly hostile — architecture is changing the urban landscape, and not in a good way. Defensive architecture refers to modifications of buildings and…
Forget looking at historical temperature graphs and referencing how cold the North Pole is: to get your head around how goddamn frozen you are right now, just locate your house on this satellite picture, and let out a hollow, chilled laugh as you succumb to the hypothermia. https://gizmodo.com/nasa-satellite-image-shows-record-breaking-frozen-easte-1687069139
YouTube is celebrating 10 years of cat videos and Downfall parodies this month, and to celebrate, The Daily Conversation put 101 of the site’s most important, funniest and worst viral videos into this supercut. It’s a great look back at the decade of one of the internet’s biggest sites; it’s also a 16-minute primer on…
Tunnel-boring machines are genuine marvels of modern technology — self-contained contraptions big enough to build entire subway tunnels, a job that used to require thousands of pick-axes and the sacrifice of quite a few lives. But once construction is finished, getting the machines out can take months. This timelapse shows the breakthrough and removal of…
Amazon is great and all, but an unfortunate side-effect of buying stuff sight unseen on the ‘net is that sometimes you end up with stuff you didn’t really mean to buy. I’m not saying that’s the reason I have three power strips for European plugs under my bed, but…yeah. I should probably read the description…
Lenovo’s pre-installation of the Superfish adware is one of the biggest fuck-ups the company could have made, but at least it’s cleaning up fairly quickly: it created a custom uninstall tool to clean your computer of the program and its certificates, and in a responsibly transparent move, also posted the source code and license of…
Okay, it’s not exactly a robot—but I bet it’s still the craziest thing you’ve seen all day. Japanese juice and ketchup company Kagome built a freaking wearable tomato dispenser for a runner at the Japan Marathon this weekend. The video pretty much speaks for itself: What’s really going on here? Believe it or not, it’s…
By this stage, it’s fairly clear that flying cars aren’t going to happen any time soon, despite what the media might want to say. And there’s a simple reason for that — the whole concept of flying cars is pretty stupid in the first place. Vsauce uses this video to explain why a number of…
Don’t call it a comeback, but Sailor Moon Crystal delivered a strong episode this week, off of the back of a solid opening to the ‘Black Moon’ story line. The only problem is, is it too late for us to start caring? https://gizmodo.com/on-sailor-moon-crystal-change-might-actually-be-a-good-1684390364 Thankfully, Act 16 gets most of its B-Plot out of the way…
Pick your pop culture reference—the Fortress of Solitude or Hoth—and brush the mountains in cotton candy white and add water raging underneath the frozen sheets and you get a little bit close to what Niagara Falls looks like right now. NBC News has footage of the frozen Niagara Falls and it looks like another planet.…
I don’t wear a watch and I hate time and yet I’m still so very impressed with the movement of this watch by FP Journe. It’s stunning and it is the most complicated watch that FP Journe makes because it’s a grande sonniere watch. Which means, it’s a complication that is able to audibly chime…
I love this video about Ryan Neil, an American Bonsai master, because not only do I get to watch him work but I also get to hear him talk about the art of Bonsai. Neil reveals the amount of respect and consideration you need to be able to craft these beautiful pieces of art from…
The annual Las Vegas Shooting Hunting and Outdoor Trade show is the biggest gun show in America, attracting 33,000 people each year. And Sarah Palin. I was about the only visitor not wearing a pistol, but I did manage to find some neat new stuff. https://gizmodo.com/what-i-learned-at-the-biggest-gun-show-in-vegas-1687031172
Here you can see a composite satellite photo of two cyclones hitting northern Australia within six hours of each other this week. In the upper left is Cyclone Lam, and in the lower right is Cyclone Marcia. It’s beautiful but also terrifying. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory: Northern Australia was battered by two potent tropical…
Just an hour or so ago, one of the tallest residential towers in the world, the 79-story Marina Torch Tower in Dubai, made good on its namesake and burst into flames. So far, over 20 floors seem to have been affected. According to the BBC, the fire seemed to start around the 50th floor, and…
People are always howling about how you NEED to switch to Apple or Android devices. iOS is the best! Android is the … whatever rhymes with Android and is awesome! Sometimes they have perfectly good reasons for switching. Other times, not so much. What are the worst reasons you’ve heard? Hey it’s Friday afternoon and…
Fight Club 2 is here, the first 6 pages of Chuck Palahniuk’s 10-isssue comic book maxiseries illustrated by Cameron Stewart and published by Dark Horse are here. The first issue will hit the stores on May 27. Check out the cover and the first page: The synopsis: Fight Club 2 takes place alternately in the…
