Tech News

Graphene Foam Sure Looks Stunning Up-Close

This isn’t some tortured starfish or CGIed brain synapse. Nope: you’re looking at an extreme close-up of graphene foam, captured using an electron microscope. Graphene foam is made by casting a fine, metallic mesh which is then layered up with sheets of graphene. The metal is then dissolved away using chemical vapor, leaving behind a…

Inside the Weird Brains of Real-Time Translators

The world’s most powerful computers can’t perform accurate real-time translation. Yet interpreters do it with ease. Geoff Watts meets the neuroscientists who are starting to explain this remarkable ability. One morning this summer I paid a visit to the sole United Nations agency in London. The headquarters of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) sit on…

Mysterious huge flash illuminates Russian skies, puzzles scientists

This is really, really weird: Multiple sightings and dashcam videos of a gigantic yellow flash that covered the skies of the Sverdlovsk region, in Russia, have been reported on the night of November 14. Scientists and local authorities still don’t know what it is or where did it come from. Here’s another video of the…

Report: Uber Can Track Any Customer Using Its ‘God View’ Tool

Uber changed its privacy policy yesterday, but even that may not cover its back this time. Because its top New York executive, Josh Mohrer, has been using an internal tool called God View to track a journalist without her permission. Buzzfeed reports that one of its journalists, Johana Bhuiyan, used Uber to travel to a…

What Conan Thinks People Will Do With a Ten-Second Earthquake Warning

So, you’ve installed an app on your phone that gives you a full ten second warning before an earthquake hits. But what are you going to use those vital moments for? Conan thinks he knows. https://gizmodo.com/early-earthquake-warning-app-can-give-you-a-head-start-1656585210 Largely, panic, I guess? But stress can do funny things to people, too—especially if the end is nigh. Better…

Toronto—North America’s fourth-largest city—is asking courts to shut down Uber in the region.

Android Lollipop Trusted Places: Never Unlock Your Phone at Home Again

Google’s new version of Android, Lollipop, is wonderful. And now, one of our very few niggles—that its smart unlocking features didn’t also react to location—is fixed. https://gizmodo.com/i-cant-believe-how-great-android-lollipop-is-so-far-1654225045 You probably unlock your phone a lot, though you probably find there are places, like at home or maybe in your office if you trust your co-workers, where…

Map of record-breaking cold blanket covering the US

It’s not only Buffalo engulfed in a terrifying snow wall. Yesterday was the coldest November morning since 1976: More than 85% of the surface of the contiguous United States reached or fell below freezing. This is much more anomalous than last year’s polar vertex: Ten degrees celsius below normal temperatures! According to Dr. Ryan Maue,…

Quadcopter And Unmanned Helicopter Combo Is Great At Fighting Fire

Forest fires are a persistent problem for the U.S, and our best line of defence is still all too often just men on the ground with backhoes. But combining a remotely-piloted quadcopter with Kaman’s unmanned K-Max helicopter could make for a fearsome alternative to smokejumpers. The joint unmanned K-Max helicopter is already a well-established program,…

The first demo video of the world’s tallest roller coaster is terrifying

The world’s tallest roller coaster won’t even be made until 2017 and this is just a demo video of what the roller coaster is going to feel like but I’m already scared. Skyscraper at Skyplex in Orlando will be the tallest roller coaster in the world at over 500 feet tall and you ride the…

This Clever Wardrobe Hides An Entire Apartment

Thanks to the increasing price of real estate in almost every growing city, apartments are growing smaller by the year. But thankfully, architects are getting more crafty with every reduction in size. Previously, I’d have written off an 8 square meter apartment as impossibly tiny for anything but my pet hamster — but after seeing…

Tiny hamster eating too much tiny Thanksgiving food is just so cute

I love Thanksgiving. Family and food and football and more food and Fall and friends and even more food. And though all of that makes me smile, nothing captures the essence of holiday better than this tiny hamster: it ate so much tiny Thanksgiving food that you can see the guilt and worry on its…

Pebble and PayPal Give You Another Stupid Way To Pay For Stuff

Tech companies are continuing with the long, hard struggle to rid the planet of credit cards. Today’s slightly awkward solution comes courtesy of PayPal and Pebble, who will now let you ditch your wallet, provided you own a Pebble smartwatch, have a PayPal account, and shop at stores that take PayPal. The system is a…

The 500 most popular types of porn in one chart

Everybody watches porn but everybody has different tastes. And there is just so much porn to watch. But how can we figure which type of porn is most popular? This chart from Data Looks Dope’s Max Einstein reveals the top 500 video tags in porn. You’ll see everything from hardcore to Argentina. The data comes…

Google’s tweaking its search results again. This time, it’s adding a little tag to mobile-optimized results when you search from your smartphone, so that hopefully you won’t get stuck on a GeoCities page by accident. Google’s also said that it might change page ranking based on whether a site is mobile-optimized or not. [Google]

Congress Has Killed NSA Reform

Freedom has died, quite literally. To be more accurate, the USA FREEDOM Act of 2014, which sought to limit telephone record collection and reform the secret FISA courts, has failed to move forward. The bill failed in the Senate, defeated by an irritatingly close 58 to 42 (the bill needed 60 votes to move forward).…

Build your own BTTF Jules Verne Train

There were lots of disappointed folks when the last round of Lego Ideas reviews came in and the Team BTTF Jules Verne Train did not make it into the production phase. Thankfully, they have released the building instructions for Lego Digital Designer in both Locomotive and Power Functions forms. Once you create a build guide…

Stop Reading This and Go Watch Chelsea Peretti’s New Stand-Up Special

Chelsea Peretti’s new stand-up special on Netflix is amazing. Seriously, why are you reading this and not watching it right now? I honestly don’t care if you’ve seen it before. Stop reading and go watch it. Again. Are you seriously still reading this? What conceivable reason could you have? Do you think I’m going to…

Uber’s New Privacy Policy Has a Hilarious Loophole

In case you haven’t already switched to a new method of getting around town, this might help to cement your decision. Uber has published an update to its privacy policy and it includes a loophole so wide you can drive an entitled black SUV through it. Only a day after BuzzFeed published a report that…

Big wing, mostly black, all brick, this is the Lego Batmobile

Clayton Marchetti has shared this awesome rendition of the 1943 Batmobile that was the first to grace the cover of a Batman comic. It was destroyed just 3 pages after its introduction in Batman #5 but this was the first proper big wing, gadget equipped Batmobile. This build is a great homage to that car.…