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“So, do you prefer full-immersion or ankle-deep?” Not quite the reply I’d expected from Kent Carlson, the sewer and stormwater field operations manager for the city of Los Angeles, when I requested a tour of the city’s new sewer technology. I’d reached out to Carlson after catching some intriguing photos on his Twitter feed, which…
Underneath every picture of a dog in a beekeeping suitand ice-bucket challenge videoyou see on the internet, there’s a complex framework of code. Soon, that framework will get a tiny tune-up that will make surfing the web on your phone faster than it’s ever been. When the internet on your phone gets laggy, the culprit…
Tackling a long flight of stairs is grueling enough when you’re empty-handed, but having to climb step after step while carrying something heavy? Mankind wasn’t designed to endure such torture, so thankfully we’ve invented something so we don’t have to. The folks at Akihabara News in Tokyo spotted this robotic stair-climbing dolly at a train…
Netflix indecision is the worst, so from time to time you’ll ask your friends what they’re watching. And then you forget what they told you and you’re back at square one. Now Netflix is making your life easier, by letting you recommend a show or movie to a friend directly from Netflix in a Facebook…
That camera breakdown above is reportedly Sony’s new ILCE-QX1 lens camera system. Originally leaked by the Xperia Blog, this lens is the next evolution in Sony’s determination to transform your smartphone lens into a more professional grade shooter. The biggest addition to Sony’s QX lineup, which includes the QX10 and the QX100fixed lenses, is that…
According to the Youtube description, this video—published yesterday in Reddit but shot last year—captures the moment when a tornado violently hits a village in Bashkiria, Russia. The hair-raising footage was taken from a car’s dash cam that stayed on even when the tornado was passing right over it. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome…
A decade ago, you’d assume that the idiot on the highway in front of you weaving back and forth across the yellow lines was drunk. Today, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re just trying to navigate some particularly complicated emoji. GM wants to stop the madness, and it’s betting on eye-tracking to do so.…
Sony’s A7 line of full-frame mirrorless cameras are friggin’ awesome, but there haven’t been many native lens options, especially in the realm of fast prime lenses. That’s slowly changing, and it’s starting with Zeiss. The famed lens company has announced two full-frame FE lenses under the name Loxia. There is a 35mm and a 50mm,…
A portable charger can save your butt on days when your smartphone never seems to leave your hand—but only if you remember to bring it with you. So not only has Elgato packed 6,000 mAh into its new Smart Power battery, but Bluetooth and an accompanying iOS app as well, so that it can peek…
“She was part-good before—SHE’S ALL BAD NOW!” “From the moment they met it was Murder!” “Blood-red kisses! White-hot thrills!” No other style of cinema mastered sensational taglines better than film noir, and posters from the genre’s mid-century heyday are a goddamn dark delight. Film Noir 101 is a new book from Fantagraphics that collects some…
Yesterday morning, Atlus unveiled a new trailer for the latest game in the supernatural JRPG series Persona, revealing the games’ main character. Within a matter of minutes after the reveal, fans celebrated a character they know barely anything about with some wonderful, wonderful art. Header Image Credit: すばる@インテ多謝！次スパーク on Pixiv Not much is known about…
Completely wireless music in your house is the future, and Sonos did it right first. We’ve been fond of the company for years because the system is painless to setup, easy to use, and reliable (not to mention the sound). Today, Sonos gets even simpler by killing the final wire between you and your music.…
How many laps of a roll of tape do you usually need to find the starting edge with your fingernail? Three? Four? You won’t even need fingernails with with this clever roll of electrical tape that features a wavy double-stripe pattern making the starting edge impossible to miss—all you need to do is spot the…
You wouldn’t know an interceptor from an ordinary cellphone tower, there’s no way you can. Except that when your phone connects to one, a variety of over-the-air attacks become possible—everything from eavesdropping to pushing spyware on the device. It all happens stealthily, silently. It turns out that there are way more interceptors in the United…
The colourful picture you’re looking at isn’t modern art. In fact, it’s a radar image that shows the damage caused by the earthquake that hit California’s Napa Valley at the end of last month. It’s actually an interferogram generated from two radar images snapped by Sentinel-1A, the radar imaging satellite of the European Space Agency,…
While it looks like an unearthly landscape from a distant exoplanet, this is our own Earth as seen from the International Space Station. Cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev captured this delicate moment of diffuse light and rich shadows of clouds at sunset. While this is the most recent bit of extreme beauty sent home by Artemyev, it’s…
Just like humans, algorithms vary in popularity: some get all the attention, while others languish unnoticed, even if they’re actually quite special. Which is why there’s now a dating site for them. Wait, what? No, it’s true, honest. A startup called Algorithmia is set up especially to match up researchers and data analysts with the…
Sci-fi movies are often cold and emotionless but Swedish artistSimon Stalenhagthinks otherwise. His paintings, inspired by those movies, escape from the artifices of the genre to show the calm everyday life in a post-futuristic world full robots and abandoned mechanical structures. You canbuy Simon’s prints here or pre-order his book here. SPLOID is a new…
Every morning you wake up, your hand scrabbling for the smartphone on the bedside table. Is there email, a tweet, a like on Instagram? You’re a slave to the phone, desperate for its digital hit. Update: This post originally stated that the above was an image by Banksy; it is not. It was uploaded to…
Ever wondered which nation like beer best? Which prefers to sip at a glass of wine? Or which one slams back the most spirits? Well, this map shows exactly that. This map was created byGhost in the Data using alcohol and health data from the World Health Organization. The consumption of wine, beer and spirits…
