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Last night’s insane crash in Taipei got me wondering what it’d be like to experience such an event. So I talked to legendary adventurer Robert Young Pelton, who survived a very similar experience. Here’s his story and advice on living through it.
I deleted an app off my phone today. But there are some I’d never part with. What’s the one app you couldn’t do without? I download, test, and delete apps regularly; it’s part of the whole tech writer thing. There are some I’d have a hard time parting ways with: The Slack app lets me…
I have discovered something extremely strange about San Francisco. It has to do with how many patents the city has produced in the past 25 years. One of the most fascinating things about urban life today is that city populations are growing to historically unprecedented sizes. Basically we’re at a stage in urban evolution that…
If you track your fitness on your smartphone—and are serious about results—chances are pretty decent you’ve tried MyFitnessPal, MapMyFitness or Endomondo. Guess what? All three of them belong to sportswear company Under Armour as of right now. Or rather, a company that used to be about sportswear… and is now trying to build “the world’s…
Last night’s insane crash in Taipei got me wondering what it’d be like to experience such an event. So I talked to legendary adventurer Robert Young Pelton, who survived a very similar experience. Here’s his story and advice on living through it. Pelton is the author of travel guide series The World’s Most Dangerous Places…
Yesterday, we learned that the FAA is gearing up to start licensing business on the moon. And while this can mean any number of things for the aerospace community at-large, for Dennis M. Hope of Gardnerville, Nevada, it means one thing and one thing alone: Dennis is screwed. This is because Dennis, as the head…
There’s something about the Colossal Titan that means regardless of the form it comes in, it’s always weird looking. I mean, it is a giant skinless monstrosity that chomps on the last of humanity, but it’s an impressive feat that it still manages to get the creep factor in. Just look at that tiny, hulking…
Back in 1991 the BBC visited Los Angeles to ask if it was the city of the future. Their answer? Yes, but not in a good way. As someone who moved to L.A. back in 2010, the city I see in this BBC special is a portrait of dystopia that’s rather unfamiliar to me. Is…
When I log into Gmail, the system texts me a one-time key which I use to verify that it’s me trying to get in and not some jerk who got my login info from a password dump. You’d think my bank would have the same level of protection to make sure bad guys can’t get…
Good things—or sometimes better things—come to those who wait. And if the designs of the first round of Swatch’s innovative Sistem51 didn’t ring your bell, the Swiss watchmaker has just announced five new designs that will be arriving soon, including versions with more classic and cleaner watch faces. The five new Sistem51 models—which feature the…
The Silk Road trial verdict is in: Ross Ulbricht is the drug-trafficking criminal mastermind Dread Pirate Roberts, at least in the eyes of the Federal Court of Manhattan. Ulbricht has been found guilty of running the infamous darknet drug bazaar. A jury found the 30-year-old Californian guilty on all counts, including money laundering, drug trafficking…
It’s 2015. But sometimes it feels like our futuristic dreams are stuck in the 1950s and 60s. And there’s actually a good reason for that. The period between 1958 and 1963 might be described as a Golden Age of American Futurism, if not the Golden Age of American Futurism. Bookended by the founding of NASA…
If your phone ends up dying in the middle of the day you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. You want a giant bright screen? It’s going to cost you in battery life. And with Goal Zero’s upcoming Flip 10 charger, if you’ve got room in your pockets for a pack of Juicy Fruit…
It’s a good day for the internet: Wiredjust published an op-ed by FCC chairman Tom Wheeler detailing his new proposal for strict net neutrality rules, rules that largely resemble the terrific plan President Obama outlined a few months ago. Great! But let’s be real: An opinion piece is not a new policy. Wheeler’s proposal is…
Now this is more like it! Earlier this week, Square-Enix unveiled their rather restrained (well, for them) take on Iron Man for their Play Arts Kai Variant line, and I lamented the lack of their usual reckless abandon. They’re making up for it in the best way though with this ridiculous, wonderful Cowboy Batman. Western…
According to Nick Park’s answer to this Redditor’s question,the manufacturing cost for the original models of Wallace and Gromit is $20,000 a pop. It’s hard to believe looking at Gromit’s guts here, but knowing that every single part—including the plasticine—is custom made, it seems like a reasonable price. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us…
Like a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, these interactive maps show the relationship between all the inventors listed in Apple’s patents and its Wizard of Oz: Steve Jobs—the big red dot. He’s connected to almost every patent and team, from industrial design to hardware to user interfaces to music to security. Kenedict’s André…
Before 1948, there was something funny about the Southland’s electricity. Plug in a clock from New York and it would lose 10 minutes every hour. Spin a record on a turntable from San Francisco and it would sound deep and drowsy. Some gadgets wouldn’t work at all. The problem? Southern California’s power grid ran on…
If you were driving across the beautiful southern Colorado landscape near Pueblo, you probably wouldn’t even notice them: almost one thousand concrete storage “igloos” burrowed into the landscape. This 23,000-acre complex has stored the remaining biggest cache of chemical weapons in the US since World War II. Now, it’s the site of a huge operation…
On June 12th we get another visit to Isla Nublar in the sure-to-be-blockbuster movie Jurassic World. Along with the release of the movie comes some six Lego sets that we unfortunately still don’t have any images of. Last week, Warner Brothers announced that we would also be getting a Lego video game for Jurassic World,…
