Tech News

The Coolest Paintings From Google’s Project to Immortalize Street Art

Street art is mutable by definition. But Google Street View, the archiver of all worldly street-borne phenomena from gentrification to wildlife, wants to change that with its Google Street Art Project—an archival website of the world’s street art from Buenos Ares to Atlanta. The project, which launched today on a stand-alone site affiliated with Google’s…

Extremely rare photo of two armed F-16s escorting a Boeing Dreamliner

The Aviationist caught these cool selfies of two Royal Netherlands Air Force pilots escorting a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner in F-16 fighter jets fully armed for air interception duties. But don’t worry, it’s not a terrorism alarm. They were just welcoming the country’s first Dreamliner. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on…

Deals: Nest Thermostat Up To $67 Off, Treadmill Desk, LED Flood Lights

Amazon today is taking $20 off the Nest Learning Thermostat. That’s pretty decent as far as Nest deals go, but if you have an Amazon Visa Card, you can add in promo code THI20ARC to bring the price all the way down to $183. [Nest Learning Thermostat, $229 or $183 with Amazon Visa and Promo…

Your Heart Won’t Skip a Beat When You Spill On Fake Keyboard Coasters

Despite their remarkable ability to survive daily abuse, you still can’t help but feel a little panicked when you’ve accidentally spilled a drink across your keyboard. Unless your keyboard’s made from soft, flexible silicone and is specifically designed to be used as drink coasters, and not for typing. The complete set of these four interlocking…

An Artificial Landmark in the Arctic

Ice sheets don’t have many landmarks, but the IceBridge flight path between the Humboldt and Petermann Glacier contains one straight out of history: the 1947 crash site of the B-29 Superfortress, Kee Bird. Operation IceBridge is a NASA mission to monitor ice, making annual flights since 2009 to track changes in glaciers, ice sheets, and…

How a Better Food Tray Is Saving Virgin Atlantic Millions

Every ounce counts when you’re hoisting several hundred tons of steel into the air and flying it across an ocean. So does every second flight attendants spend waiting on the people inside. Those ounces and seconds add up—and that’s why Virgin Atlantic spent $168 million on a transformative redesign of its meal trays. It sounds…

The NSA Won’t Hand Over Data Because It Literally Can’t Keep Track of It

Last week, a US District judge ordered the NSA to stop destroying data that pertains to a pre-Snowden lawsuit against the agency. There’s just one teensy weensy problem with that: Apparently NSA’s systems handle so much data that it literally cannot find what it’s supposed to stop deleting. The data, which the NSA collects under…

This British Banshee Is Built to Be Blown Up

Missile and anti-aircraft defense crews need live fire practice too. But since they can’t very well be expected to shoot at a piloted target, the UK’s Royal Navy instead takes pot shots at this low-cost screamer. Unmanned systems have long been employed as live-fire targets for militaries around the world. In fact, the very first…

Is There Any Reason to Jailbreak After iOS 8?

For millions of people, the entire point of having an iPhone is the ability to jailbreak; without the tweaks and modifications that come with liberation from Apple’s walled garden, the iPhone just wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. But after iOS 8, will there be any point? Or has Apple made jailbreaking obsolete? It’s not…

The FAA Just Approved the United States’ First Commercial Drone

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has awarded permission for the first commercial drone over land to BP, of all companies. The oil company’s partner, drone manufacturer AeroVironment, flew its first commercial flight in Alaska on Sunday. And it didn’t just send a dinky quadcopter to do the job either. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the country’s first commercial…

How To Check Facebook Without Going on Facebook

Here’s the situation: you’re interested in what’s happening in the lives of a few of your friends, but you’re reluctant to open up Facebook lest you get submerged in the usual tide of branded offers, game requests, and inane updates from people you haven’t seen for several years. Don’t worry! There are ways to check…

The World’s Smallest Electric Vehicle Is More Compact Than a Carry-On

Trikelet, which is being billed as the world’s smallest electric vehicle, is probably not going to suffice for your morning commute if you’re coming in from the suburbs. But to get you from wherever you park your car to your desk, it sure beats having to fight the rat race on foot. With three wheels…

Giant metal cylinder of unknown origin appears in Siberia

This 16-foot-long metal cylinder of unknown origin recently washed up in a Siberian village following severe flooding. Nobody knows where it came from but Aleksey Yaskin, a professor of aerospace engineering at Biysk Technology University, told Reuters that it may be the first stage of a rocket. This looks like the first stage [of a…

There’s a Whole New Type of Stone And It’s Made From Our Plastic

Congratulations, humanity: After millennia of building cathedrals and toiling over great works of art and science, we’ve finally created something that will far outlast us. It’s called Plastiglomerate, a stone made out of molten plastic, and yes, we should probably be ashamed of ourselves. In a study published yesterday in the Geological Society of America,…

Mac OS X Yosemite Under the Magnifying Glass

Apple revealed a sneak peek into Mac OS X Yosemite earlier this week. Not surprisingly, Apple updated its desktop OS to match iOS 7’s design language. The new OS X now embodies a brighter and flatter styling, coupled with icon updates, font changes, and translucent materials. Here’s a quick look at the visual design changes…

You Won’t Know What’s Real Or What’s Fake In This Baffling Printer Ad

Apparently the best way to sell printers isn’t by boasting about its features, color fidelity, or DPI. It’s by blowing our minds with a bunch of optical illusions that leave us wondering if anything in our lives is actually real, or just a printed ruse. Canon created the ad to hawk its PIXUS printers in…

MakerBot has a new iOS app out that lets you track your 3D-printed projects from afar. You can see an image of what’s being built in real-time, you know, so you don’t end up with colossal failures like these.

7 Buildings That Look Exactly Like What Happens Inside

A duck that sells duck eggs. A picnic basket that makes picnic baskets. A donut hole that sells donuts out of a hole in its center. Some kind of Alice in Wonderland-esque acid trip? Nope, these are all real buildings that take their functions very literally. These structures are examples of novelty architecture, or programmatic…

Apple Patent Hints at a Weightlifting Tracker for the iWatch

If feeling the burn isn’t enough, a new patent issued to Apple suggests that it might, maybe, possibly be working on a weightlifting tracker that will work with itsimminent possible smartwatch. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple U.S. Patent No. 8,749,380— “Shoe wear-out sensor, body-bar sensing system, unitless activity assessment and associated…

iOS developer Hamza Sood has discovered secret settings in the iOS 8 beta hinting that the next version of Apple’s mobile OS could allow users to customize the pop-up Control Center—including adding, removing, and reorganizing shortcuts.