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Arthur C. Clarke made it his business to look into the future. And just like the dozens of prognosticators who would come before and after him, he got a few things right and a few things wrong. AT&T has just uploaded a video from a conference at MIT wherein Clarke describes the future from the…
With enough booze in your system, you feel like you can do anything—from singing like a Grammy-winning artist, to fighting a bouncer, to climbing a mountain. And while none of those are remotely even true, you can at least feel like you’ve conquered Oregon’s Mount Hood every time you down a brew from this hand-blown…
The area in southern Spain known as mar del plástico is a landscape dominated by vast stretches of greenhouse farms. From the ground, it looks like nothing but roads winding through a maze of covered crops. But when seen from the air in photographer Bernhard Lang’s images, things look a bit more surreal. Lang’s extensive…
Move over graphene, today is silicene’s day to shine. Silicene is a single-atom thick layer of silicon, whose theoretical properties could have exciting applications in computer chips. Now, scientists havemade the first silicene transistor, and guess what, it’s amazingly fast. Graphene and silicene are both single-atom thick materials (though graphene is made of carbon), whose…
Did you know that only five percent of Americans travel abroad each year? Beat the odds, get a passport and go see the world. It’s easier than you might think. Here’s our starter guide for the new traveler. I’m an American, but I grew up in England, my family now lives in rural France and…
The SEC just revealed that the vast majority of brokerages and financial advisers have been hit with cyberattacks. The agency’s report also reveals: “One adviser reported a loss in excess of $75,000 related to a fraudulent email, for which the client was made whole.” LOL what? That’s a pretty large sum of money to lose…
Vaccines are not part of some evil plot to poison our children. But there are plenty of terribly misguided people who believe they are! And their beliefs didn’t just materialize out of nowhere. A new videofrom the New York Times explains how we got to this terrifying point in American history — a seemingly upside…
Lockheed Martin has published a surprising listof all the stuff that flew to space in the first Orion test. You are looking at one of the items: A Tyrannosaurus Rex’s tooth fossil sent by the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Here’s another one: A Cookie Monster’s cookie and Ernie’s original rubber duckie. More items:…
Helvetica and Times New Roman are legendary, instantly recognizable typefaces, and they’re both owned by the biggest type conglomerate in the world. Now, that company is adding emoji and stickers to its holdings. Monotype—which owns some of the most ubiquitous typefaces of both our digital and physical worlds—announced yesterday that it had acquired a small…
We’ve featured Jon Lazar’s excellent customised Lego Friends Dolls before, but he’s back, and it’s not just Superheroines getting the treatment this time – a veritable gamut of Pop culture heroes have been turned into the Friends Dolls. It’s always cool to see people customise their own heroes out of the standard lego style, but…
Among other predictions, Interstellar offered us some clues about the future of farming. Long story short: It’s all about the robots. From field scouting drones to robotic harvesters, the industry that keeps you fed is becoming totally dominated by autonomous machines. Blue River LettuceBot2 This highly popular robot attaches to a tractor and thins out…
Tiny capacious flash drives not only make it easy to carry gigs and gigs of data wherever you go, they also makes it easy to lose gigs and gigs of data. So if you’ve had more flash drives go MIA than you prefer to remember, Toshiba will now let you password protect those lost files…
Kevin Bollaert, a 28-year-old San Diego revenge porn website operator, gained notoriety by hosting a website to post embarrassing or sexually explicit images of men’s former romantic partners on a now-defunct website called UGotPosted. Bollaert set up a second website, ChangeMyReputation, and charged people (by and large, women) $350 a pop to take the photos…
Coffee. We owe it our lives and our sanity. And so for this week’s Shooting Challenge, we photographed the bejeezus out of it. Winner: Good Morning No description given. Rodrigo Ergueta Sharikat Biru-Biru It was a very chill sunday and we decided to check this new coffee shop in town called Sharikat Biru-Biru. My friend…
Last year, the Radio Shack in my neighborhood burned to the ground. We waited months for it to be rebuilt, and at last (joy!) it was — now I can walk up the street and buy weird connector cables and Arduino kits again. Unfortunately, Radio Shack the company isn’t doing quite as well. In fact,…
The New York State Attorney Generalsent cease and desist letters today to GNC, Walmart, Target, and Walgreens for selling store brand herbal supplements that, well, straight up lied about what’s inside them. DNA tests found that four out of five herbal supplements did not have the herb on their labels. Instead, they were made of…
From SpaceX: “America’s next gen crewed spacecraft is almost ready for a test flight. Pad abort vehicle shipping to FL shortly.” The pad and in-flight abort test were projected for January 2015 but it seems to be delayed. SpaceX says the first manned test will be on December 2017 at the latest. SPLOID is delicious…
It’s the calm before the storm that is mid-february this week, but it’s not a complete loss: Telltale are returning to Westeros for their next episode of Game of Thrones-ian shenanigans, and they’re bringing everyone’s favourite mumbler Jon Snow with them. Let’s talk gaming in this week’s Tuesday Game Room! What have you been playing…
Sometimes in this world, you want to make someone as wildly uncomfortable as humanly possible. That’s why Facebook’s here. It’s a fact many of us have been neglecting in recent months, what with our Twittter and our Instagrams and our Yik Yaks—we’ve been forgetting about the world of mischief potential within the walls of Zuck’s…
Feast your eyes on the beautiful concept design work of John Liberto. Cruisers, fighters, or mechas, I like all his work. The Osprey-ish drone gunship above really struck me because it feels so real that I can imagine it coming to a war near you in the next decade. The rest of his designs belong…
