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National Geographic’s Photo of the Day—captured by Simon Kwan—shows Hong Kong in all its glorious urban madness. When I first saw it I thought it was a collage made with multiple shots and mirrored images. It’s not. It’s just the city photographed from Beacon Hill. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us…
If you find having a favourite map projection a delightfully geeky quirk, you’re going to want to raise a toast in honour of Jean-Félix Picard. Geodetics and cartography owe a debt of gratitude to the 17th century scientist who made the first accurate measurement of the Earth’s size. https://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-map-projections-warp-your-understanding-of-1499317119 Jean-Félix Picard was born on this…
Apparently, someone over at the EPA can’t stop playing Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, either. The tweet’s been live for the past hour, and as of the time of posting, it’s still up. Will the EPA delete the tweet? Can they still finish their photo shoot on time? Will they ever rise to the esteemed ranks of…
Here’s an insanely scary ride for those who need to feel like they’re close to dying in order to feel like they’re living: the Sky Tower in Tivoli Friheden in Denmark. They hang you from a safety rope—then they cut it off and you free fall at 55 mph down onto a net 100 foot…
The New Yorker debuted a breezy redesign of its website today, part of a larger overhaul of print and digital offerings that the publication has been rolling out over the last six months. But perhaps even more exciting is the fact that the magazine’s archives dating back to 2007 will be free for the rest…
Our eyes are too slow and our brains are too easily fooled. Just watch this video where Illusionist Eric Leclerc shows off by reading our minds through a simple YouTube video. He plays around with us in the beginning but at the end, he just jumped through the computer screen to peer into our wrinkled…
The Internet isn’t just a repository of humanity’s information (and porn), it could soon serve as a final resting place for the mind after our bodies wear out. Johnny Depp attempts to do just that—but with disastrous results—in Transcendence. But how close are we to accomplishing the same in real life? Quite close, according to…
In these decades after the Cold War, “nuclear winter” is an idea that can feel as remote as science fiction. But using state-of-the-art climate models, scientist have calculated exactly what nuclear winter will look like after even a small, regional conflict. Boy is it bad. This uplifting climate news come to us from a journal…
Chuck Palahniuk is writing the second part of Fight Club. It won’t be a new film (yet?)—Dark Horse is publishing this new story in a 10-issue maxiseries illustrated by Cameron Stewart, starting in 2015. Fight Club 2 takes place alternately in the future and the past. It picks up a decade after the ending of…
After World War II, the future of commercial air travel was supposed to be fantastic. There were promises that planes like Northrop Grumman’s flying wing would become the norm for civilian flying. These promises were often made to Baby Boomers — young, impressionable kids of the 1950s and 60s — like in this cutaway drawing…
Japan is a peaceful nation, in no small part because its post-World War II constitution required it. All that changed last month when President Shinzo Abe ended the ban that’s kept Japan’s army in check since 1945. And do you know what the country did next? It started buying drones. Lots and lots of drones.…
If all the reports of UFO sightings are real, then Earth must be the most popular destination in the Universe. Obviously, that’s a ridiculous anthropocentric notion, as Dr. Carl Sagan explains in the must-see 1966 CBS documentary UFO: Friend, Foe, or Fantasy hosted by Walter Cronkite. Listen to Sagan at the 51:55 mark. I like…
Microsoft has been steadily improving Windows 8, but naturally there’s still a new version in the works. And according to some leaked screenshots of a dev build obtained by Myce, it’ll include both the Start Menu we know is on the way, but also windowed Metro/Modern-style apps. The duo of screenshots obtained by Myce are…
Here’s a little fun fact for your next Australia-themed dinner party: female marsupials all have three vaginas. That includes kangaroos, koalas, quokkas, and those cube-pooping wombats. https://gizmodo.com/wombat-poop-is-cube-shaped-1603606922 From Ed Yong at National Geographic: This set-up is shared by all marsupials – the group of mammals that raise their young in pouches. Koalas, wombats and Tasmanian…
There’s not an ice-cold beverage in the world that can refresh and cool you as effectively as an air-conditioned room can, but the IcyBreeze cooler offers up both options, just in case. Fill it with ice and it keeps drinks cold all day long, but add a little water and extend the hose on top…
One of the most earth-shattering things that David Rees has learned about flipping a coin: It’s not random. “It’s a physical process,” he says. “And if you can reduce the number of variables involved, you can control the outcome.” Yes, it is possible to learn how to flip a coin, and Rees can show you…
What do the White House and YouPorn have in common? Their websites both use canvas fingerprinting, a newer form of online tracking designed to make it hard to hide. ProPublica investigated the pervasive shadowing method, developed as an insidious alternative to cookies so websites can keep tabs on where their visitors browse online. [Update: YouPorn…
Imagine if we could track every single cell in an organism as it develops. The sheer volume of information about how life forms and works would be invaluable for scientific research. The only problem is the startling amount to computational power it would take to crunch that much data. At least, until now it was.…
It looks like the white dots in this optical illusion are all orbiting an imaginary point in space that, at the same time, is orbiting the center of that red circle. They are not. In reality, they are all moving in straight lines going from one side of the red circle to the opposite one.…
Apple just released the latest build of OS X Yosemite, including a brand new iTunes. It’s only a little bit anti-climactic. Version 12.0 does indeed look a lot like Version 11.3, the version that’s probably on your computer. But it’s got some neat little treats nevertheless. The first thing you’ll notice, of course, is the…
