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A humanoid robot could kick your ass at Flight Simulator… and probably at flying a real plane, too. Researchers from KAIST in South Korea built this small, low-cost humanoid and gave it a little DIY Top Gun tutorial. You can buy this kind of robot (the Bioloid Premium) off-the-shelf, but it won’t come fully equipped…
Was it a bird? A plane? A tornado cell? Nope. The huge, slow-moving cloud picked up on radar in Illinois and Missouri last week was nothing anyone expected. The US National Weather Service reports it was actually a swarm of millions of monarch butterflies—which have been disappearing at alarming speeds over the past decade. As…
Smartphone cases are the devil’s handiwork. We know that. But that still doesn’t change the fact that, until our phones magically become 100 percent scratch proof, we’re more or less forced to wrap our phones in the wretched things. We’ve already looked at the iPhone 6 Plus, and now it’s time to outfit the smaller…
Panasonic is clearly targeting a certain demographic, or at least a specific age group, with its latest voice recorder. Because anyone who grew up before the age of MP3s, or even compact discs, will spot the RR-S30’s uncanny resemblance to an audio cassette tape. To anyone younger, it will simply look like something they vaguely…
If you’re a World of Warcraft fan, there’s nothing sweeter than a treasure chest laden with Loot – and now enterprising Etsy user GeekofManyTrades has brought a little of that loot lust to the real world with these lovely wooden treasure chests inspired by the ones from the game. Although there have been several chest…
When it introduced its ultra affordable hub a few months ago, Wink signaled that it wanted to win the smart home wars. Now, with the release of a touchscreen display and control pad called Relay, it’s clear that the Quirky off-shoot is in a hurry, too. It’s not like the home of the future is…
Dubs’ “Acoustic Filters” are snazzy new earplugs that hope to conquer one of the biggest obstacles between you and wearing crucial gear to protect your hearing. Though they’re not the first earplugs in the world, they’re some of the first that don’t look terrible. Can Dubs trick you into better hearing with design? If you…
The guys at Cooking Channel asked their fans which dish best represents their state. Then they gathered all the answers and made this amazingly delicious map with them. Here’s a selection of dishes I would eat right now: Hawai: Ahi Poke (Hawaiian Tuna Tartar) Maryland: Old Bay Steamed Blue Crabs Maine: Ben Sargent’s Lobster Roll…
The attack against ISIS in Syria has begun, according to the Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby: “US military & partner nation forces have begun striking ISIL targets in Syria using mix of fighters, bombers and Tomahawk missiles.” The US Navy has released these videos to prove it. Here are some F-18 and Growlers…
RatedRR continues with its six days of torture for the iPhone 6 Plus. And being RatedRR, at one point they had to take out the guns and shoot at it. And being a dedicated hater of gigantic phones like this or the Samsung Note, it’s a real pleasure to watch it being pulverized by a…
Kirsten Dunst plays herself in this short film directed by Matthew Frost: Two young women approach Kirsten on the street to take a selfie with her. The girls are more interested in the impact the selfie will have on their Instagram fans than in actually meeting her face to face. A sign of the times,…
Google Now has a new card, which will keep an eye on flight prices for you. If you’ve been shopping on Google’s flight comparison siterecently, it would appear that you’ll get a Now card popping up with current flight prices for your intended destination on it. Now if only it could organise all your frequent-flyer…
There’s nothing special about Dmitry Zakharov‘s idea of rendering 3D scans of his body from the inside. Except there is, because he used color and lighting in a way that makes it look beautiful—and fantastically trippy too. Dmitry Zakharov is a Russian visual artist living in Cologne, Germany. He specializes in video and animation, often…
To be a smokejumper — the front-line firefighters who parachute into forest fires — in the US, you’ve already got to be a little unhinged. To do the same job in Russia, with antique equipment, for no pay, you must be certifiably insane. The National Geographic has an in-depth feature following a band of Russian…
Ray Ozzie, former Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, has decided that voice communication — in other words, the venerable phone call — is broken, and he’s going to fix it. With an app. Talko, his solution, is an iPhone app that basically takes voice calls and voicemail, and gives it all a 21st century spruce-up.…
The pace of iPhone coverage has been a little relentless the last few weeks: first there was the announcement, then the reviews, then the laughing at idiots camping in lines for weeks. Now, the ultimate stress relief: watching Apple products get some .50-cal slow-motion loving. While we’ve certainly seen plenty of other videos of the…
Watch these metal filings mesmerizingly dance the night away as the music pumps in. The board, which is made by TechnoFrolics, uses iron dust in a choreographed magnetic field to react to noise. It looks like a field of waving dancing metal mini trees. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on…
Fresh off its 3-D printing experiment with a measly 6 stores last year, UPS is now offering 3-D printing at 100 stores nationwide. If you’ve ever wanted your very own tiny thing made out of plastic, your hour is here. The printers themselves will be Stratasys uPrint SE Plus, which UPS (naturally) says are far…
I know this picture looks like the Moon is passing perfectly between the Earth and the Sun. And I know it seems like the people in the picture are trying to look at the eclipse. But this picture taken by Reddit user MDPPatrick is not of a solar eclipse. It’s just a perfectly timed snap…
Seeing a falcon hunt down a crow from the falcon’s point of view in an aerial pursuit is not unlike seeing an airplane dogfight or a crazy aerial chase scene from an action movie. Only this is happening in nature all the time. And this particular crow has no chance against the falcons. A Reddit…
