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Everyone wants a piece of T-Mobile. First, AT&T came knocking in 2011. Three years later, Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, the Japanese owner of Sprint, expressed interest. Now, bolstered by a growing number of subscribers and CEO John Legere’s somewhat crazed antics, a French Telecom company called Iliad is making its play. The Wall Street Journal reported…
Yesterday, photographer Mike Miley took his Canon 7D to the Oshkosh Air Show in Wisconsin, and holy crap, did he get some good shots. Chief among them is a jaw-dropping shot of two planes dancing around an explosion of Michael Bay-proportions. Holy crap. I can’t even imagine what the performance must’ve been like in real…
Back in the 1920s, a group of Soviet psychiatrists discovered that film editing manipulates not only our sense of space and time but also our emotions. That’s why editing is the magic sauce that brings a film to life—or kills it. But how is this possible? How did it come to be? This video tells…
Between UV lasers, X-ray spectrometers, and ground-penetrating radar, it’s hard not to be giddy over the hardware NASA’s 2020 Mars rover will be packing. In January, 58 proposals were submitted by researchers and engineers around the world, twice the usual number of competition entries. Today, just seven packages were selected on the basis of expanding…
With more than 30,000 locations operating today, the United States Postal Service is still the largest retail network in the US. It’s also an embattled institution that’s struggling to stay afloat. That’s why last year, it enlisted a small design studio to overhaul its look completely. Here’s what they came up with. Over the last…
Remember that fridge box you turned into a rocket ship as a kid, complete with crayon-drawn control panels and a fancy sparkle glue paint job? Yeah, that was an embarrassment to our nation compared to this NASA simulator that Jeff Highsmith designed and built for his sons. You might remember Jeff from the awesome mission…
Some of the most well-known dinosaurs that we think about today were separated by tens of millions of years. In fact, we’re closer to the time of the T-Rex than T-Rex was to the time of the Stegosaurus. Unfortunately, that documentary The Land Before Time was totally lying to us. We like to think of…
The world’s largest functioning triple-expansion steam engine is an unbelievably massive beast of a machine. For 77 years, the 62-foot-high engine—weighing in at 1,000 tons!—powered gigantic flywheels and crankshafts that pumped millions upon millions of gallons of water from west to north London. It was decommissioned in 1980, but brought back to fully-functioning life by…
Inside each of our hard, calcified teeth is a small population of living stem cells that can differentiate into many types of tissue. The origin of those stem cells has long been unknown, but scientists may now have a completely surprising answer: Cells of the nervous system can migrate into the middle of a tooth…
Danish researchers just created the Usain Bolt of networks. A team from the Technical University of Denmark used a single multi-core optical fiber to transfer 43 terabits per second, making it the world’s fastest fiber network. I’d say it makes Google Fiber look like 1996 AOL dial-up from a decrepit rural phone line, but that…
These days, almost everything you watch on TV and in theaters is shot digitally. But because Hollywood still needs film sometimes, the the biggest motion picture companies in the world are banding together to keep the lights on in Kodak’s Rochester motion picture film plant. The WSJ reports the pending deal between the world’s biggest…
20 million gallons of potable water later, the massive double “trunk line” break that’s resulted in spectacular flooding in the streets of Los Angeles and throughout the UCLA campus has finally been sealed off and crews have this bulbous blockage to thank for it. The water main break, which began Tuesday afternoon along Sunset Boulevard…
When we stepped out onto the roof, the wind whipped me sideways, and it took me a second to get my bearings. I was nine stories above Times Square, staring at the back of its biggest LED sign, and it was thrilling. Of course, standing on a dirty rooftop shouting over the cacophony of Midtown…
If a couple of years ago everything was about zombies, now it’s drones. Drones delivering pizza, drones filming fireworks, and even drones taking selfies. And of course drones spying you. And killing people. This ad shows a drone hunter taking care of those flying bastards. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us…
If you own any gadgets that use AA or D batteries, you owe it to yourself to pick up some Eneloop rechargeables. This pack comes with a pair of AAs, with D spacers, and they’ll pay for themselves after just a few cycles. [Eneloop AA 2-Pack, $7] Need a way to charge them? It doesn’t…
Is there anything scarier than the thought of being out in the woods at night with a dead flashlight? Of course there is; your smartphone could be dead too. That’s why GoalZero’s latest flashlight, the Torch 250, can be recharged with a built-in solar panel, or simply your muscles using a pop-out hand crank. Inside…
The CIA just admitted that it “improperly penetrated” Senate Intelligence Committee computers, according to The New York Times. The CIA also apologized to senior committee members. An internal investigation by the CIA confirmed allegations put forth by Senator Dianne Feinstein back in March. The Times points out that very few details are available about the…
Sinkholes are amazing. Ask USGS geologist Daniel Doctor anything you want about them. https://gizmodo.com/the-science-of-sinkholes-1573899373 https://gizmodo.com/ask-a-geologist-whatever-you-want-about-sinkholes-1613939708
Rocket Raccoon and company are ready to fight galactic threats in theaters this Friday, but the Lego tributes are already rolling in. This particular 30-second spot transforms the Guardians of the Galaxy into brick-sized replacements. Famous YouTube Lego lover Forrest Whaley takes all the credit for this one, as he continues to display an impressive…
General Douglas MacArthur once famously quipped, “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.” Obsolete military equipment should be so lucky. While most outdated systems are simply scrapped, a lucky few find new purpose after their time in service—like the Martin JRM Mars, a coastal patrol bomber that now demolishes wildfires instead of invading armies.…
