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This is the story of Manny, a 13 year old boy from Tijuana who has to pay the bills for his family. Weak, poor, desperate, Manny is ripe prey for the merciless Mexican drug lords who sent him into the Arizona desert as a mule. But things are not what they seem. The reality is…
When it comes to buying gadgets and electronics there’s always going to be compromise. To get the features you want, you’ll have to learn to live with things you don’t. Take these headphones, for example. For just $20 they probably don’t sound amazing, but the inline remote and mic is shaped like an adorably tiny…
In the past week you may have heard people start to talk about something called Ello. Though it sounds like a cockney-accented greeting, it’s actually a new social network with one major selling point: It doesn’t have any ads. Ello is setting itself up to be the anti-Facebook, and apparently people are flooding it—it’s at…
Last night, HTC showed a video teaser hinting at an upcoming camera-type offering. Today, we’ve got more details, and a few glimpses at what that camera could possibly look like. Meet what looks to be RECamera, a periscope-like mini-camera that seems squarely aimed at the GoPro. HTC hasn’t said anything official about the tiny cam…
Shellshock is newly discovered vulnerability in software that’s in computer systems we use everyday. It’s kind of like Heartbleed, the Open/SSL bug that scared everyone senseless a few months ago and remains unpatched on thousands of systems. According to some experts, however, Shellshock could be way worse, and it’s been around for decades. Shellshock affects…
Good makeup is key to create believable fictional characters. That’s why moviegoers at Cinefix decided to pay homage to the best movie makeup artists by putting together this list of the best ten makeup transformations of all time: Here’s the full list: Mystique from X-Men (2000) Makeup Artist: Gordon Smith Tootsie (1982) Makeup Artist: Allen…
If you’re an electronics company that builds cutting-edge sensors the average consumer never actually sees in a device, how do you go about promoting your work? Japan’s Murata does so by building adorable little robots capable of impressive stunts—like riding unicycles or performing cheerleader routines while balancing on rolling balls—and then sending them to endless…
The brothers Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia claim they recorded the voice of a Russian cosmonaut as her capsule burned in re-entry on November 1963. This short film contains that recording and dramatizes the events. No matter if it’s true or not, the short film is terrifying. This is the translation of the audio allegedly captured…
Yesterday, iOS 8.0.1 showed up and turned a whole bunch of new iPhones into iPod Touches. You can fix it now if you take the right steps, but the official patch from Apple might take a few days. From Apple’s support page on the subject, which also walks you through the revert-to-iOS-8 process: We are…
Polar has made plenty of GPS exercise watches, an activity tracker, and even a GPS watch-slash-activity tracker, but this is the first time the company has made a wearable device that looks good and won’t break the bank. At $200, we could actually see the Polar M400 ending up on some wrists. The M400 is,…
When the soul-crushingly simple, single-serving messaging app Yo hit the App Store this past summer, people couldn’t say enough about the app that said barely anything at all. But given our pseudo-surveillance state and similar apps’ privacy concerns, we wondered—could the government be spying on (or even just talking about) Yo? After submitting requests to…
The British Museum is one of the world’s most iconic collections of artefacts and art from thousands of years of human history – and now it wants to recreate itself in Minecraft as part of a debate on the relationship between the public and art collections in the Digital Age. The plan is to have…
Through apps and accessories our smartphones can be almost any digital tool we could ever need, including a thermal camera as FLIR showed us earlier this year. Not surprisingly, competing products to the FLIR ONE have started to appear, including the Seek thermal camera which promises a considerably smaller form factor and a cheaper price…
One of the things I hate the most from tex-mex food is burritos. Maybe it’s because I’m from Spain and mixing rice with a flour tortilla is not in my culinary DNA. But this chili con queso burrito made me so hungry that I’m willing to give up my nationality for one bite.* *Not really.…
I’m a sucker for kaleidoscopic videos. Their trippy geometrical shapes, the colors, and how they perfectly blend with the music often hypnotize me. If I were a doctor, I would always prescribe this along with every box of Ambien pills. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
City libraries are an embodiment of the spirit of higher learning that governments are supposed to be all about, and nowhere is that more true than Calgary’s about-to-be-built Central Library. The mock-ups show a towering glass library that’s loosely inspired by the foothills that surround Calgary, giving it a sense of wilderness often lacking from…
After the recent spate of celeb nude leaks, and the years-long Snowden saga, privacy is becoming an ever-hotter topic in the tech realm. That’s where WEDG, a personal cloud that aims to keep your data safe — and out of the reach of the government — comes in. WEDG is basically a personal server, that…
Think that you have it hard, with your internship forcing you to work 8-hour days making coffee for no pay? Well, a WSJ report might make you feel a little better: Chinese factories are relying on cheap intern labour to keep the manufacturing dream alive. Chinese tech factories have long been under fire for atrocious…
“You need some anthrax” is probably not the diagnosis you’d like to hear from your family doctor; but if one MIT team has their way, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. A MIT research team were apparently just sitting around one evening, and wondered what would happen if you used the anthrax bacteria to deliver…
Maglev trains have been promised as the future of public transport since about forever, but high-speed magnetic levitation systems are rapidly gaining a serious reputation — something Japan’s public demonstration of its high-speed maglev system is only going to help. The test was carried out by the Central Japan Railway Company, and was the first…
