Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Vertical farms are all the rage, yet these systems are often expensive, messy, and utterly impractical for most urban dwellers. The Robotic Urban Farm System (RUFS) by Better Living Through Robotics improves on nearly every shortfall of the typical system: It uses very little water, no soil, and is made from accessible, affordable parts, with…
Flickr just announced a fun, new—albeit kind of pricey—program called Flickr Wall Art. All you have to do to turn your Flickr photos into a large canvas, photo mount, or book is select your preferences on the new Create portal. Two clicks—and at least $50—later, and your living room’s newest adornment is on the way.…
Love it or loathe it, Steampunk is an alluring aesthetic to turn to for creating wacky and wonderful looking inventions – and in this new book by Lego builder Guy Himber there’s plenty to enjoy, with not a superfluous cog in sight. There’s a lot of plastic bricks though. Header Image: The cover of the…
Winter is upon us, and so is the death of our outdoor plants. Polish design studio Lightovo want to help you preserve a little slice of your garden through the winter using its handblown glass lamp called Milo. Think of it as a hybrid terrarium and pendant lamp. The lamp fits just about any small…
The wait is over. Mailbox for OS X, the Dropbox-owned email client, has exited beta and is now open for anyone to try. [Mailbox App h/t The Verge]
Rumorhas it that on Thursday, Apple will announce new iMacs with Retina displays. How much will this computer cost you? Logic dictates that all those extra pixels will add up to very pricey, but there’s reason to think it might not be as bad as you think. Let’s see what a little Apple history can…
The amount of dexterity and patience that it takes to construct a ship in a bottle has always been something that has fascinated me. I obviously love building Lego, but the thought of doing that inside of a bottle has never crossed my mind until today. Builder Bangooh has melded these two hobbies beautifully and…
Check out the latest hit at Japanese parties: $5,000 latex dolls that pour drinks from their nipples when you squeeze their boobs. It looks disturbing. What’s going to be next, Japan? Male and female android fountains wandering around parties serving drinks from their lower naughty bits? But of course. SPLOID is a new blog about…
The next time you find yourself walking across the corner of Maiden Lane and Broadway in Lower Manhattan, remember to look down. In front of what used to be the William Barthman Jeweler is something unexpected: a working clock, embedded in the sidewalk like a precious gem. Installed in 1884, this clock stood as an…
Photographer Julian Tryba sent us this crazy time-lapse of Boston which, actually, is not a time-lapse but a layer-lapse: The objects in each sequence—buildings, vehicles, the sky—run at different speeds and times than others. That’s because he has layered them, animating each layer separately. He explains how he did it: Traditional time-lapses are constrained by…
Want an easy way to liven up your day? Download the new Earth View from Google Mapsextension for Chrome. It shows you a striking new satellite image every time you open a new tab, and it’s delightful. There’s seriously nothing else to it. Once installed, instead of seeing the boring old white page and search…
You know Facebook stickers—the brighter, louder cousin of the common emoji that has thus far been relegated to the world of Messenger? All that’s about to change. Now, we can finally use Facebook stickersin comments to ambiguously say all the things that we’d rather not. Of course, you’ll only be able to insert the stickers…
Present kids with old tech and see how they react—it’s an old trick we’ve seen YouTube’d to death. But just when you thought there was nothing left to squeeze out of it, the gag done got Clickholed. See kids react to a Boombox (with a recording of their parents fighting). Just watch. It’s perfect. [Clickhole…
The United Kingdom and Ireland pack so many geologically fascinating locations in a small area, it’s hard to pick which ones are the most gorgeous, the most scientifically important, or even the most downright useful. Lucky for us, the Geological Society curated a list of the Top 100 Geosites. Top image: Giant’s Causeway tells a…
My wife loves technology. Hell, she spotted the job posting that landed me my first tech writing gig. She also loves sharing snapshots with friends. So when I told her that the Sony RX100 IIIcould sling amazing selfies to Instagram with a tap of her phone, she was understandably stoked. When we packed our bags…
A team of researchers in Singapore have developed a next generation lithium-ion batterythat can recharge a battery to 70-percent in just two minutes. That means it would charge an entire electric car in just 15 minutes. And here’s the kicker: it lasts over 20 years. Normally, it’s safe to be skeptical about new battery technology,…
From 1967 until 1973 NASA employed the services of Raymond Loewy, a legendary figure in the design world. Loewy’s firm produced over 3,000 designs for NASA during this time. And everything they produced for the space agency would fit perfectly in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — like the Loewy space taxi pictured above.…
Monoprice’s Cherry MX Black mechanical gaming keyboard is on sale today for just $60 with free shipping, and an extra Columbus Day promo code knocks another 10% off. This is about as cheap as you’ll ever see a decent mechanical keyboard. [Monoprice Cherry MX Black Mechanical Gaming Keyboard, $60] If you’re running low on iTunes…
Electric brand apple crate label from the turn of the 20th century in the National Museum of American History collection. Electric brand apples were shipped from Wenatchee, Washington by the Mann Fruit Company. Factually is Gizmodo’s new blog of fun facts, interesting photos, and weird trivia. Join us on Twitter and Facebook.
Play Arts Kai’s unrepentantly mad appropriation of their DC license continues! Square-Enix brought their A-game to New York Comic Con , but it wasn’t just Tetsuya Nomura’s Catwoman that gave use their bizarre look at Batman’s Rogues gallery there – there were also these figures of Harley Quinn and the Joker too. The prototypes of…
