Tech News

Making Hot Air Bread Balloons With An Industrial-Strength Blower

Here is the most fun way to make bread: Prepare a massive pile of dough, brightly colored with natural dyes; cut off a small section and flatten it out; place that pizza-like sheet on top of an industrial-strength blower and watch it inflate into a toasty, instantly edible balloon. Blow Dough was the brainchild of…

Good News! Sitting Won’t Kill You After All

Sitting is undeniably one of the comfiest ways to arrange your body. Almost as good as lounging, really, and just short of “dangling worry-free from hammock.” But it has acquired a very bad rap over the past few years. A bad rap it doesn’t quite deserve. Studies say sitting will kill us in all sorts…

​So You Want To Go Spearfishing For The Very First Time

Spearfishing combines the thrill of the hunt with swimming in the ocean and eating healthy, tasty fish. We figured that sounded like fun so, last weekend, paddled kayaks to a remote beach and caught some fish. This was our very first time spearfishing. Chris (the Neptune lookalike above) and I have both wanted to try…

Report: Apple’s Got a 12-inch MacBook, 4K Desktop in Works

In the midst of updating its operating system to Yosemite, Apple seems to also have some hardware refreshes in mind. According to Mark Gurman at 9to5Mac, sources say that Apple is planning a smaller Macbook (12-inch diagonally) with a high resolution display as well as a pixel-drunk 4K iMac or standalone monitor. 9to5Mac goes on…

How to Use the Infinite Number of Email Addresses Gmail Gives You

One trick you may or may not have picked up about Gmail is that you can add in periods anywhere in the front part of your address and it makes no difference whatsoever: [email protected] works just the same as [email protected]. What’s more, you can add a plus sign and any word before the @ sign…

Augmented Reality Climbing Walls Turn Mountaineering Into a Game

There are lots of reasons to tackle a climbing wall at your local gym: it’s great exercise, it can improve your hand-eye coordination, and it helps instill useful mountaineering skills should you ever find yourself trapped on a cliff. But researchers at Aalto University in Finland want to take them one step further through the…

Finally, A Pair of Sunglasses That Will (Hopefully) Never Break

If you’re prone to breaking sunglasses just hours after you’ve bought them, hold off on ordering a bunch of replacements in bulk until you can try the I-Ultra sunglasses from Italia Independent. They’re made of stiff but forgiving rubber—everything except the lenses—so they’ll require quite a bit of effort to destroy, not just an accidental…

This is not a Hubble photo of a supernova—it’s food

Ajay Malghan makes a living by playing with food and taking pictures of it. He cuts a thin slice of carrot, kiwi or any other fruit, presses it in between two glass sheets and experiments with light, colors and proportions. The result are these awesome abstract pictures. A short documentary called The Space Within explains…

Chandra Has Been X-Raying the Universe for 15 Years

When the Chandra X-ray Observatory celebrates a launch anniversary, it goes big with exploding stars and rotating neutron stars. Today marks 15 years of precision X-ray investigations of stars, galaxies, black holes, neutron stars, and even dark energy. NASA celebrates with supernova and pulsars. Chandra is a space telescope launched on July 23, 1999 on…

A Triptych That Proves Portrait-Oriented Video Isn’t Always Horrible

Usually, we are very much against shooting video with your phone in portrait orientation, because for the most part it looks like trash. But Dan Toth did something we never thought of, using three portrait-oriented videos to make a lovely triptych of his neighborhood in Sunnyside, Queens. The three tall-and-narrow video frames stacked side-by-side make…

A Self-Powered Bike Trailer That Pulls All Of Its Own Weight

They’re a cheaper and often less stressful way to get around a big city, but compared to a car, bikes kind of suck when it comes to hauling cargo. A trailer certainly helps if you’re willing to put in the extra effort needed to haul it, but there’s now a better solution. Someone’s created a…

I wish I could spend summer in the Mediterranean driving this beauty

Italian designer Pietro Russomanno‘s Raceline is the 26-foot-long daughter of a classic Riva boat— one of my favorite vehicle designs—and a classic sports car. If I had to spend a summer in the Mediterranean riviera, this is the vehicle I’d like to have to move from coast town to coast town to eat seafood and…

Pong Was Never Intended For Public Release

Today I found out “Pong” was originally meant only as a training exercise for a new gaming developer at Atari, Allan Alcorn, and wasn’t intended to be released as a consumer product. When Alcorn was hired by Atari in 1972, Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari along with Ted Dabney, told Alcorn that he had recently…

Deals: Bluetooth on a Budget, $70 802.11ac Router, PC Peripherals

These Bluetooth headphones have fantastic reviews, 15 hours of battery life, playback controls, and a folding band. An absolute steal at $33. [Mpow Bluetooth Headphones, $33 with code MPOWAPTX] Today’s Amazon Gold Box is overflowing with PC peripherals an components for building and upgrading your new PC. Check out our earlier coverage for the complete…

North Korea Launched a Bizarre New Cooking Website “For Housewives”

Refusing to let little things like a lack of widespread internet/food access get in its way, everyone’s favorite warmongering-dictatorship-that-could has just launched its very own cooking website. Say hello to North Korea’s uncanny online food valley. The Korean Association of Cooks website had actually been announced several times over the past few years, but no…

Tiny Gold Nanomotors Spin 10x Faster Than a Race Car Engine

Nanomotors are an amazing feat of engineering: tiny gold rods less than a micrometer long, powered by ultrasonic waves to spin at crazy-fast speeds. How fast? Scientists just figured out a way to measure, and it’s astonishing: 150,000 RPM, ten times faster than the fastest race car engine. There’s still a lot researchers don’t know…

Coolio Is Releasing His Next Song on…PornHub?

More like wanker’s paradise: Rapper and hairstyle pioneer Coolio is releasing his new music through Pornhub in a bold new plan to change online music distribution forever. Update: TMZ really exaggerated this one, and I was fooled. Coolio told Rolling Stone he just recorded a promo song and has no plans or deal to release…

Hundreds of flying rays is one beautiful nightmare

This photograph of a large school of mobula rays by Eduardo Lopez Negrete is one of the entries for the 2014 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest. Keep in mind that these majestic creatures can reach a 17-foot (5.2 meter) wingspan and weigh over a ton. It may look like a nightmare but they are harmless.…

​OS X Yosemite Preview: All the New Features for Your Mac

The brand new OS X Yosemite is perhaps the most dramatic redesign of Apple’s operating system to date. Tomorrow, Apple’s launching a public beta (Sign up now!) of its forthcoming desktop OS. Here’s what you can expect to see. At this stage in the game, it’s not fair or appropriate to give the new (very…

Attention Foursquare users! Starting tomorrow, you’ll need to use Swarm to check in to the service. In a few weeks the existing Foursquare app will be getting a complete redesign focused on local search and discovery features.