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While you’re waiting for Android L to come down the pipe, here’s a useful hack you can apply to your current Google-powered phone or tablet. You no doubt spend much of your day switching between locations, from home to work to the gym, and reconfiguring your device each time can be a chore. With the…
With sinuous lines, flawless grey skin, and four powerful turbofan engines straight out of a contemporary sci-fi movie, the iconic C-17 Globemaster has a surprisingly spacious exterior, with a 170,858 pound maximum payload. Inside, it’s a total mess of cables, wires, pipes, and hundreds of gadgets that the average admirer can hardly see through. The…
A completely new species of bug—a ground beetle named Duvalius abyssimus—was recently discovered by scientists exploring the subterranean fauna living up to 1.5 miles below the earth’s surface in the Krubera-Voronja caves, Russia. The new creature has adapted to a life without light in the world’s deepest cave system, with extended antennae and a body…
We know that little is off-limits to the prying eyes of the NSA. But what is surprising is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court gave it free reign to spy on virtually whoever it wished back in 2010. https://gizmodo.com/all-the-nsa-revelations-in-one-easy-to-read-chart-1598415452 A report from the Washington Post reveals that the FISA court certified a list of 193…
Samsung recently commissioned an independent inspection of 100 of its suppliers in China. Surprise: their working conditions are still dreadful. Mercifully, the report does at least report that there’s currently no child labor used in the factories that manufacture Samsung products. But the rest makes for depressing reading. https://gizmodo.com/samsung-denies-new-claims-of-underage-workers-in-its-su-5968732 Most of the factories fail to…
In Lord of the Rings, Legolas claims to be able to count the exact number of horsemen five leagues away—that’s over 17 miles—even discerning their leader as very tall. But would that ever be possible? In this video, Minute Physics imagines the perfect pair of eyes to establish if physics could ever actually allow Leoglas…
This is not a typical David Cronenberg film. You won’t find his classic exuberant makeup effects or visceral transformations. The Nest is just two characters having a conversation in a long point-of-view shot. It’s so good that I sat through the entire nine minutes without blinking. It completely twisted my mind. The film was commissioned…
Got an OUYA? Now, a $60 annual subscription will get you free access to all the titles available on the device. It’s like the Netflix of Android gaming.
SkyTran—a NASA Space Act company—is finally building a pilot of its computer-controlled, two-person high speed maglev transport system. Cars run 20-feet above the ground and can be ordered by a smartphone app. While the initial trial in Israel will only involve a 1,500-feet closed campus loop, the plan is to build something much larger in…
Samsung has just announced a new, smaller version of its Galaxy S5 flagship—and it manages to pack many of the features of its bigger brother, while just losing a little of its speed. In particular, it carries many of the same sensors as its sibling, including waterproof certification, power-saving modes, a heart rate monitor, fingerprint…
I’ve seen posters composed by real life objects before but this one is huge. It’s 26 feet wide (8 meters), 42 feet long (13 meters) and 5 feet high (160 centimeters). The poster was made by the design studio Snask for the Malmö Festival in Scandinavia. This is how they made it: SPLOID is a…
Sony sold off its PC business earlier this year, but like a phoenix, Vaio is rising from the flames. And, err, it looks quite a lot like it did before . https://gizmodo.com/sony-is-selling-off-its-vaio-pc-business-1517260383 The arguably iconic PC brand has been brought back to life by Japan Industrial Partners, and is initially launching with Vaio Fit and…
Smart bulbs ain’t cheap, but GE has decided to enter your smart home with a new LED bulb called Link, which promises to make intelligent lighting cheaper. Well, a bit cheaper at least. It has a point: Philips’ latest Hue bulbs cost $60 a pop, which is quite a lot for a bulb. GE’s new…
By now, there are so many NSA revelations that it’s hard to discern one from the other. But fortunately Pro Publica has put together this lovely chart which shows which of the agency’s missions are most controversial. The data sits on an interactive grid where x-axis relates to location (domestic at the right, foreign at…
This is the mother of all hacks, the genius device that saved the Apollo XIII crew from dying in their emergency return to Earth, as photographed during that trip using one of their Hasselblad cameras. Here are the actual step-by-step instructions that helped turn this mission into NASA’s most successful failure ever. Why did they…
The star Wolf-Rayet WR124 disintegrates in the constellation Sagitta, 10,900 light years from Earth. The fiery explosive halo is made of “glowing gas globs each typically over 30 times more massive than the Earth being expelled by violent stellar winds.” And the incredible thing is that this is not even a supernova. Wolf-Rayet star WR…
You’ll get lost watching him work. I definitely did. Cliff Denton is a ‘putter’ for Ernest Wright & Sons, the last remaining hand manufacturer of scissors there is, and he literally puts together scissors with his hands. He’s a master at it. Watching him work is mesmerizing and satisfying to see. It’s basically art. I…
There are few things more mesmerizing than the How It’s Madeseries. One of them is infinite GIF loops made from the How It’s Made series. Hereto I present you the magic robot fingers that make pretzels forever for your collective ogling. One day we will make a How It’s Made infinite GIF loop of how…
If Captain America was a realistic representation of the United States of America instead of some well groomed side part and perfectly pectoral’d ideal of a man, well, he’d be much fatter, much dumber and much more wasteful. Using the USA’s statistics and rankings in how it compares to different countries around the world in…
Radio Free Ul-quoma is the somewhat imposing name under which Andrew Gladstone-Heighton of Gateshead, England, posts his material at his soundcloud.com account. Perhaps the “Ul-quoma” part is intended as a reference to Ul Qoma, the twin city of Besźel in China Miéville’s great novel The City & the City. Gladstone-Heighton’s most recently uploaded track, “Codeine,”…
