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You may have recently seen the heartwarming story of Australia’s oldest man (109 years young!) who knits sweaters for penguins. The story is currently making the rounds with an adorable photo purporting to show the grateful penguins of Australia’s Phillip Island. The only problem? Those penguins in that particular photo are totally fake. The photo…
You probably have to be a little crazy to be a pole vaulter. I mean, what normal person wants to catapult their bodies as high as possible? This GoPro footage of pole vaulter Allison Stokke filmed from her point of view confirms the crazy and shows the violent movements and perfect grace necessary to make…
Half the time I send an emoticon I have no idea what the person on the other end is actually seeing. Which may seem pretty trivial, but is not entirely trivial! A lot of care goes into crafting a chat or text so as to relay tone and intention without body language. The emoji is…
Like smartphones, it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate laptops just by their appearance. So if you want yours to stand out, the easiest solution is to cover the lid in hilarious, ironic, or stylish stickers. But for a little bit of added functionality, you might also want to consider DrawAttention’s giant whiteboard stickers that…
SpaceX is once again counting down to launching the Deep Space Climate Observatory, but this time with a twist: rough seas in the Atlantic mean the company will not be attempting to soft land the Falcon 9 rocket on a barge. If the launch is scrubbed again, moon will block further launch attempts until February…
Whenever someone questions the logic of a film, book or TV show, it’s almost inevitable someone will trot out Alan Moore’s ‘This is an Imaginary Story’ quote from Superman #423 in response. But they’re using it wrong – and in the process, completely missing the point of what Moore was saying. First off, it’s ridiculous…
ARGH! House of Cards season 3 was up on Netflix for a few tantalizing moments. The new season of the Kevin Spacey vehicle is supposed to drop on February 27th. But something happened and it was live today. We were watching House of Cards! And then just as quickly as it was live, it was…
Most of us can’t help it: When we think about spies, we think about James Bond. And when we think about James Bond, we think about his gadgets. But real life spies use gadgets too—and there’s no more amazing category of spy gadget than the camera. It makes sense—after all, the camera is the ultimate…
Artist Pete Ashton just took regramming to a crazy extreme. You’ve seen regrams before, maybe you’ve even done it yourself. While browsing your Instagram feed, you see something you’d like to post yourself, so you take a screenshot, and then you upload that image. For his new project “I Am Sitting In Stagram,” Ashton regrammed…
The DARPA-funded DEKA Arm System is an amazingly life-like prosthetic arm controlled directly by electric signals from the muscles. It’s the first such prosthetic available to the general public. And it can help you climb a rock wall like a badass. By plugging into the body’s electric signals, the DEKA arm allows for close to…
$848 million. That’s the amount of cash Apple is spending on what Bloomberg calls “the biggest commercial solar deal EVER.” That may seem like a crap ton of money to us, it’s still less than a percent of the $178 billion in cash Apple—aka the 55th richest country in the world—has on hand right now.…
It’s maybe not so weird that there’s not been any merchandise for Interstellar yet. I mean, it’s not really the sort of film that craves action figures. But if there were toys of the weird robots from the film, I’d buy them in an instant – or, as Redditor Espiffany did, build some! These awesome…
There are times when you don’t want your smartphone’s screen to automatically dim after a few seconds—working from a recipe, showing off photos, studying your social media strategy—but there’s no way to do this natively on stock Android (the most you can extend the delay to is 30 minutes). If you need your display on…
Most of us, when we think of asbestos, think of the insulation in old buildings up for demolition. But asbestos fibers are naturally occurring minerals, and their natural habitats are deposits that meander all over the U.S., concentrated especially in the West. When wind blows asbestos off the hills, exactly how dangerous is it? That’s…
4K? That’s so last year. 8K? Yesterday’s news. This timelapse video was shot in an astonishing 10K resolution using an 80 megapixel camera. The level of detail in these gorgeous shots is mind-boggling. Joe Capra of Scientifantastic shot this video to test out the PhaseOne IQ180 digital medium format still camera. Its 80 megapixel resolution…
Following their big success on Kickstarter last year, Warpo’s old-school style series of Lovecraftian action figures Legends of Cthulhu are getting a wider release as of today. But soon, their Cthulhu figure is getting a bumper-sized version — and io9 has an exclusive first look! First off, the four 3.75″ originally part of the kickstarter…
Saudi Arabia is building great wall — or rather, a great chainlink fence with razor wire — to “protect against ISIS” in Iraq. And it’s not the only country investing in very expensive walls right now, even though they probably won’t work. Why? Because walls aren’t just about security. They’re also powerful symbols. The Great…
In the past, one of the most obnoxious things about buying a phone on contract was how carriers could allow or deny requests to unlock it, even after you paid it off. But starting today, once you’ve paid off your contract or owned a pre-paid phone for a year, all major US carriers have to…
Conventional lighting systems suffer from a serious but seemingly unavoidable limitation: sockets. Along with wires, plugs, and fixtures, this basic infrastructure dictates where lights can go and what they could look like. How would a designer get around that? Magnets, of course! That’s what the quirky visionaries at Choi+Shine Architects have done with the BIT…
Tom Havlasek is a painter who is obsessed with motorsports. His large format pieces, all made using acrylic, capture the perfect angles of some of the most iconic race cars in history. I would love to have the Gulf Porsche and any of the cars with Marlboro livery. See if you can identify all of…
