Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
This strangely alive-looking blob isn’t a prop from a sci-fi movie. It’s a smorph, a morphing material that could make the cars, trains and airplanes of tomorrow extremely aerodynamic, using the same trick that helps golf balls fly faster and straighter. At low speeds, a golf ball’s dimpled, irregular surface cuts its aerodynamic drag in…
World Cup madness is sweeping the internet—even the little yellow guy on Google Maps is wearing his soccer gear. And according to commenters, he’s wearing the uniform of whatever nation you view him in. Commenter toschlebelge shows us Google Guy’s German outfit; what’s he wearing in your lands?
A century ago today, the first shots of WWI were fired. It was the first modern conflict, fought with fatally efficient technology. Even today, crews must safely destroy bombs left untouched for a century. Erik Olsen traveled with one of those crews for The New York Times, bringing us a video glimpse at the delicate…
What a week! We got to ogle everything Google showed at I/O, we learned that cops can’t search your smartphone without a warrant, and we learned about BugJuggler, the car-flinging giant robot you see above. Let’s take a look back at the best stuff we wrote this week. HDR Is Ruining Your Photos High Dynamic…
Long-suffering pinball fans can finally play free in Oakland. Swords are being returned to their rightful owners in New York City. And America is breathing better air than we have in a decade. Sometimes we like to look at the brighter side of urban life. It’s our peek at What’s Not Ruining Our Cities Anymore.…
A couple of reports published during the course of last year suggested we unlock our phones anywhere between 110 and 150 times every single day. That’s a lot of checking, often done habitually without any deliberate thought or goal. Not only is the time you spend gazing at your mobile time you could use doing…
Fluid dynamics is beautiful and complex, with no single, simple equation to govern its dynamic behaviour. The mathematics is monstrous, with scaling factors, coefficients, and exponents customized to each fluid to reflect the quirks of its behaviours. Yet in practice, a single splash is simple beauty. This fleeting liquid sculpture is part of the Clourant…
Spend time with a Debbie Downer, and you’ll likely end up feeling blue. Turns out, the same is true digitally: Facebook’s new study says this “emotional contagion” works just as strongly through your News Feed—which they discovered after tinkering with the emotional content of nearly 700,000 random users’ feeds. Yes, as the research paper published…
You probably have a lot of important events coming up on Facebook—birthdays, get-togethers, family reunions and the like—but your default calendar app no doubt lies outside Zuck’s walled garden. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to export your Facebook events to Google Calendar, iCal, or Outlook. Head to the Events page of your Facebook account and click…
In the third gender-swapped episode of Adventure Time, Fionna and Cake take a backseat to the supremely important savior of candy-king: Lumpy Space Prince. I mean, holy shit — have you seen his eyes? Those things are like crystal mirrors of flawless beauty. I was even hoping that watching this episode would make LSP real,…
Remember those giant shredders that can chomp on anything, from cars to fridges? This mechanical monster is basically a smaller version of those, attached to an excavator arm. It can disintegrate any tree in seconds. If there’s ever a zombie apocalypse, I want to have one of these. I just can’t understand why anyone would…
Pornburger calls this The Liquid Diet, a White Castle infused Bulleit Rye patty “stirred with spicy pickle juice, a splash of tomato water, a dash of liquid smoke” that you can suck on with a bacon straw. Now you can have burgers when you go out to dance and drink, and drinks when you go…
It costs $1500, measures in at about 4 feet in diameter and causes an explosion in the sky almost half a mile long. It’s the infamous Yonshakudama firework from Japan and if you can somehow snag the sky lighting cannonball before July 4th and shoot it up at your local park, you’d probably become king…
What looks like a random steaming pile of trash is actually a clever piece of art that combines to create a stunning portrait. Made by artist Benard Pras, each item in the pile is strategically placed so that if you look at it from the right perspective, it looks like a painting. But if you…
“Inside the Actor’s Studio” is, I think we can all agree, a major snooze-fest—what with James Lipton’s monotonous droning and all. But if you want to get inside the minds of Hollywood’s elite comedians without falling asleep, look no further than the Nantucket Film Festival’s Comedy Roundtable. Since 2009, the Nantucket Film Festival has hosted…
Tangents is an occasional collection of short, lightly annotated mentions of sound-related activities. Stunning Phase: Alexander Chen has posted at this visualizaton of Steve Reich’s 1967 composition “Piano Phase.” It’s not just a lovely rendering of the original, but it connects to the notion of a graphic score, and also assists in appreciation of the…
Even though I love today’s 3D animation movies made with CG, there’s something about seeing old fashioned hand-drawn animation that makes me feel like I’m peering into another world of breathtakingly fluid characters dancing on paper. Former Disney animator Glen Keane was a master at such animation and is responsible for creating characters we adore…
Grimes has a new song, “Go” featuring Blood Diamonds. It is different than her other songs because it was supposed to be a Rihanna song, but Rihanna turned it down (for what?). Remember when Britney Spears’ label rejected “Umbrella” and then Rihanna took it and owned “Umbrella?” Well now the master has become the dumb…
Did you guys know there is a Gizmodo subdomain where you can go for all things photographic? Yep! It’s called Reframe, and it’s where you’ll find additional coverage of gear, techniques, news, and all kinds of great stuff related to the crafts of photography and videography. The Best Way Shop For a Camera Online: Look…
The winning entry — well, one of two tying winning entries — in a blues-song cover challenge launched by Kurt Anderson’s Studio 360 radio show was the work of a Disquiet Junto regular, and the result of a Disquiet Junto project. Back on May 8, Studio 360 announced its “1914 Blues Challenge,” in which listeners…
