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For reasons that still aren’t entirely clear, in July someone swapped in bleached-out U.S. flags on the Brooklyn Bridge. Almost immediately, Twitter parody @BicycleLobby claimed responsibility. Yesterday, according to the New York Times, the Manhattan district attorney’s office subpoenaed the anonymous account. When @BicycleLobby claimed responsibility for the flags last month, a bunch of news…
Happy weekend, friends! It’s time to sit back, relax, and take stock of what we all accomplished this week. Here at Gizmodo, we learned some sweet photo tricks, learned the strange saga of the Army’s new camo, got a 6-year-old LCD TV appraised by Antiques Roadshow, and more. Let’s review! Antiques Roadshow Appraised My 2008…
Google added a sneaky little update to Android Device Manager this week: A new lock screen button implores whoever found your phone to call a number that you specify. Now just hope that they’re not calling to ask for ransom. Just like before, Device Manager lets you remotely lock or wipe a lost Android device,…
Podcasting has long since broken out of the niche corners of the internet. If you haven’t gotten into it yet, it’s time to. Here’s what you need to know to get started not just enjoying the vast selection of content available online, but to create your very own show as well. Internet stardom is just…
Running a telecom cable from London through the Northwest Passage to Tokyo was, for a very long time, impossible: The sea route was solid ice year-round. Now, thanks to rising temperatures, the ice disappears from August to October, and a Canadian telecom startup wants to thread a 10,000-mile internet cable through that gap. Toronto-based Arctic…
NASA’s ISEE-3 was launched in 1977 and sent data home for 20 years. Recently, NASA discovered the abandoned satellite is still transmitting data, and turned over the controls to a group of citizen scientists. ISEE-3 zooms by the moon tomorrow, and thanks to a new Google project, you can ride along at home. When citizen…
Fifty years ago, the deep sea vehicle Alvin made its first free dive, submerging to 35 feet below the waves. Since then, DSV Alvin has been repeatedly overhauled and upgraded, keeping pace with current technology in countless dives and endless missions carrying humans into the deep blue sea. Top image: Even octopus love Alvin. Or…
3D printing can make an action figure copy of your body and face, but the hair usually ends up looking like a Lego minifig wig. The mad scientists at Disney Research just solved that, with an algorithm so powerful it can trace your hair’s shape and color with ultra-realism. The research team at Disney Research…
If you have never seen the 2005 French movie Les Chevaliers du Ciel (Sky Fighters) and you like aviation or just spectacular cinematography, you should rent it. The movie itself is as bad as Top Gun, but the combat airplane sequences are probably the best ever filmed. Here are its best moments: SPLOID is a…
A living human brain. Looks gross. But think about how amazing this is. You have one of these things inside your head, a mass of organic matter in which billions of connections make you—every memory, everything that ever was in your life is inside this mass. So yes, it may look gross, but it’s freaking…
I love dogs. I love magic tricks. I love sausages. Obviously, I was bound to love this video of dogs reacting to magic flying wieners. I like the fact that some of them get so freaked out at the sight of a delicious treat floating in front of them—but others just don’t give a damn.…
It looks so effortless for him. And not only can freediver David Helderle blow underwater bubble rings as easily as you and I blink, he can control those mini vortexes to make fun designs and spin rings. It’s like Aquaman decided to become an artist or something. FreedivingUAE writes: He can create mini vortexes that…
Our sun is an unruly sphere of plasma, magnetism, fusion, and light. It frequently spurts million-degree plasma into the coldness of space in a display of epic uncouthness, but it takes a special disregard for manners to slurp that same plasma back down magnetic field lines to rejoin the surging sphere. That’s exactly what happened…
The NHRA put together this gnarly video compilation of wild rides from the first half of the 2014 season and it’s just nuts. These drag races look a lot more like horizontal rocket launches crossed with the flames of Ghost Rider than the cars you and I drive. The slow motion ones are the best,…
I watched the movie Chef the other day and the amount of food porn neared Jiro-level. The way Jon Favreau ate in that movie made everything look delicious. Here’s a supercut of scenes in movies that are just like that, you’ll see so much happiness in the way the actors eat that you can’t help…
The other day I was informed that Bill Murray’s son used to cook at a restaurant around the corner from my house. Apparently he looks just like his dad, and it made me sad that I never sent my compliments to the chef. And then I remembered how disappointed I am about Bill Murray’s career…
Although we have a pretty good idea of what life is like in North Korea, most of what we actually see comes from carefully controlled images released by the government. “Enter Pyongyang” is an incredibly beautiful video that was shot by a Beijing-based tour company, and it might give us the most honest look yet…
In this wild world, there is love, and there is crazy love. And then there’s just crazy. Tanaka Tatsuya is full of all three. This wildly passionate Japanese artist creates adorable dioramas with miniature figurines and every day objects. The crazy part is that Tatsuya builds and photographs one of these intricate little creations every…
It began rather quietly as a underground fire at a dump in Canada’s remote northern reaches. Then in May, the fire “erupted,” spewing forth flames and toxic fumes over the city of Iqaluit. Faced with a football field-sized smoldering dump fire, this week the city council finally scrounged up the $2.2 million to put it…
Pull up a chair, Beatles fans, I have a story for you, a story about politics, pot, and rock and roll, starring John Lennon and Timothy Leary. IT’S A GOOD ONE. The story starts—as so many good ones do—in the 1960s. Specifically, it starts the day after Christmas in 1968, when Timothy Leary was arrested…
