Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Wiley discovered snow for the first time over the July 4th weekend. Won’t lie, this is pretty darn cute.
Here’s the official, anted up sequel to First Kiss,called Undress Me, which means “strangers” are taking off each other’s clothes now in a video to promote the new season of Masters of Sex. It doesn’t quite have the well acted charm of the original and you feel more like a voyeur this time around but…
If Google were a real person, he would probably have the world’s most frustrating job. I mean, Google has to deal with all the crud we type into the search engine and spit out results that match up to our perverted tastes, stoned questions, deepest fears, doddering mistakes all while trying to not to judge…
With some directors, you can immediately tell you’re watching a movie they directed just by looking at a still frame without any context. There’s a visual style they stamp on their films, a certain special effect they like, a narrative preference they utilize, basically, a trademark they have. WatchMojo came up with a list of…
The 2014 Emmy Award nominations came out today, and fans of BBC America’s Orphan Black were understandably upset when lead actress Tatiana Maslany didn’t get nominated. Maslany, after all, plays seven distinct characters on the thrilling, original, weird clone drama. I started watching Orphan Black last week after friends recommended it, and I can see…
The relationship between scent and our memory centers is well-documented, but I’m guessing sound must be located nearby, too. Certain songs and albums have a powerful tendency to cement themselves to the moment in time when you first discovered them. Four years before the success of Future Islands’s most recent album, they released a 12″…
For some of us who type all day for a living, the world is too quiet. We pine for the whir of the Xerox machine, the rattle of rotary telephones, the clackety-clack of the typewriter. A slightly romantic vision, maybe, but no longer completely impossible, thanks to this keyboard modeled to look exactly like a…
How long does it take to dissolve 1 kilogram of nitrogen in 15 kilogram of hydrazine? A not-so-little spacecraft called out for help, and in less than two hours, the internet found an answer. ISEE-3, the spacecraft from the 1970s that a crowdfunded project is trying to hijack into doing more science, needs your cleverness.…
According to observations made by the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on board the Hubble Space Telescope, the Universe is missing 80 percent of all its light. Astronomers are completely baffled: “We still don’t know for sure what it is, but at least one thing we thought we knew about the present day universe isn’t true.” Those…
A UPS—or uninterruptible power supply—beneath your desk can be a lifesaver if your building loses electricity while you’re working. However, most people don’t own one because a UPS is typically designed for power-hungry desktop computers and end up being heavy and expensive—but not APC’s new tiny and cheap Back-UPS Connect 70. After all, it’s rare…
Although you know it when you see it, it’s hard to accurately describe Memphis design without resorting to specific 1980s pop cultural references. It’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse meets Miami Vice. It’s Saved By The Bell plus Beetlejuice. And it’s all coming back, in a very big way. There’s an American Apparel line featuring those squiggly graphics.…
Think New York summers are pungent now? Imagine what it must’ve smelled like at the turn of the 20th century. Before the introduction of the automobile, horses were leaving about 2.5 million pounds of shit in the streets per day. From the book The Big Roads by Earl Swift: Crossing a street could be an…
We’ve been expecting a new batch of Intel-powered chromebooks since May, and the first one is here: meet the Acer C720, the first to pack a full-on Core i3 processor in addition to up to 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. Pretty muscular for a browser-based device. With that 1.7GHz processor and double the…
There’s a lot to love about vintage Monty Python—dead parrots, silly walks, lumberjacks, killer rabbits—but Terry Gilliam’s magic touch with his signature cut-out animations really gave the group a goofball creative edge. In this clip from the early 1970s, a fresh-faced Gilliam (with an incredible ‘do) describes his no-tech approach to the process. “Maximum effect…
Star Trek and NASA have a long, productive relationship of increasing diversity in space programs, but naming the first test space shuttle Enterprise wasn’t a quick decision.
Hunters wear camouflage clothing from head to toe to blend in with their surroundings and sneak up on their prey. But fisherman never do, so Columbia has designed color-changing shirt with what it’s calling a ‘Solar Camo’ pattern that only appears in the warmth of sunlight, helping anglers avoid being spotted and scaring the fish…
NASA exuberantly celebrated the erection of an Antares rocket today in preparation of the upcoming Orb-2 launch. Now my inner 13-year-old can’t stop snickering. Glad you’re excited for the launch, NASA! I’m just not sure it’s appropriate to show me just how excited you are… Aside from being exceedingly happy to see you, Orb-2 is…
High up in the hills of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory sit four square, blue buildings you’d be forgiven for finding nondescript. Inside, they’re decorated with drab gray carpet familiar to any cubicle worker. But it’s the buildings’ electronic guts that make them unique in the whole world. These labs—including one that rotates 270 degrees—are where…
A robot started writing a Torah today at Berlin’s Jewish Museum. It’s part of an art exhibition that will see the robot finish its work — 304,805 Hebrew letters later — in 3 months. The exhibit will be up until January 2015. From the Associated Press: The Torah-writing robot was developed by the German artists’…
As climate change begins posing new challenges to conventional outdoor food production methods, hydroponic farming has made quick gains in popularity thanks to its space- and energy-saving design. This enormous indoor lettuce farm for example—the largest of its kind in the world—produces 10,000 heads a day in less space than a single American football field…
