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On August 2012, a man and his friend spotted a Google Street View car around the corner and decided to simulate a murder to prank everyone on the internet. The police found about it and investigated—more than a year later. He tells his story to the BBC: It is not the first time a gruesome…
This video—created by the Socialplane platform—shows that we don’t need phones to send messages to people. They promote the use of something way cuter instead, paper planes. I’m sure that we are overdoing this social media thing and we shouldn’t pay that much attention to our phones and all that, but I don’t think we…
An Instagram update that’s hitting today will add new more sophisticated tools to let you adjust 10 tools via sliders, including brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth and other parameters. You’ll also be able to adjust the strength of the preset filters you apply Here’s the complete set of tools from Instagram’s Help pages: Filter strength Adjust…
At its annual developer-palooza yesterday, Apple trotted out a lot of new goodies. A new iOS! A new OS X! But they also didn’t announce a whole lot of stuff we expected to see. Here’s what was missing, and our best guess at why. Apple TV SDK Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that an Apple…
Benedict Redgrove has a talent for capturing really detailed images of extremely complex technology. The image above shows part of the interior of a communications satellite, which are some of the most complex machines made by humans. Here are some more of his beautiful images. Benedict Redgrove meticulously crafts photographs of spacecraft, cars, planes, boats…
The same physics effect that allows pitchers to throw sliders and sinker balls was once used to propel ships. And if this Swedish engineering firm is successful, it will again. Known as the Magnus Effect, the phenomenon is commonly observed in the way spinning balls curve away from their initial flight paths such as the…
This weeks’ Carnival of Space #356 of astronomy-links from around the web is live, with stories on comet-photography, X-ray astronomy, aging of elliptical galaxies, and even a tidbit on Titan’s atmosphere.
iOS 8 will support “peer-to-peer AirPlay discovery and playback,” which means that you won’t need to be connected to a wireless network to use AirPlay. That’s a really nice evolution of Apple’s wireless media streaming protocol The tidbit was discovered buried within the enterprise section of Apple’s iOS 8 preview. As written, the new peer-to-peer…
These days, fires are rare enough that most of us rarely think about the state of our fire hydrants. But unfortunately, that also means we’re ignoring a dangerously decayed piece of urban infrastructure. Except for a retired NYC firefighter and inventor named George Sigelakis, that is. Meet the fire hydrant of the future. Sigelakis is…
Filling the sky with a flock of internet balloons sounds like an interesting if also sort of insane idea on paper, but in real life it’s not quite so fancy-free. And Google’s dealing with that first hand now that one of its internet balloons has crashed and caused a power outage. Yup, one of Google’s…
It’s almost time for another steamy, sweaty summer in the city—and nothing looks like it might cool you off more than that sparkling waterway winding through the center of your downtown. But can you really swim in it? In more and more cities, the answer is a refreshing yes. Your grandparents might remember taking a…
Come, young and old alike, and celebrate in the animation offerings of yesteryear’s Internet. Back before there was a YouTube or Netflix, we watched short, little flash videos, on sites like Albinoblacksheep and New Grounds, that made us roll on the floor laughing (ROFL, as it was once known). Most of the videos on this…
You’ll occasionally come across a staggering fact online about how many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every second, or how many gigs of photos are pushed to Facebook each day. So the folks at PennyStocks collected all that data into a real-time infographic illustrating the overwhelming amount of activity happening online every second.…
This Swiss toy from the 19th century is a wonderful piece of mechanics that still works like the first day, no programmed obsolescence here. When you open the box a cute little blue bird pops out and flaps his wings as if it was alive by magic spell. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome…
Now that you’ve digested everything that’s new in OS X Yosemite, you’re probably itching to try it out for yourself. The good news is that Apple’s happy for you to do so: for the first time since Cheetah in 2000, non-developers have the opportunity to give an upcoming operating system a test run. For free.…
If you were hoping to stay spoiler free about the next Star Wars films, it’s time to get off the internet. Following up on yesterday’s leak, TMZ has posted 22 more secret behind-the-scenes photos from the Star Wars Episode 7 secret production studio in the UK, including our first glimpse of the Millennium Falcon’s return.…
If driverless cars give you the jitters, how about computer-assisted trucks instead? Because two 18-wheelers in Nevada look set to use automation to make them safer and more efficient—and they could be on the roads as soon as 2015. Popular Science reports that the new computer-aided trucks, developed by Peloton Tech, can maintain a nice,…
Architect Axel de Stampa used animated GIFs to dismantle and reconstruct many of the world’s most famous contemporary buildings. The results of his tinkerings with time, space and form are like a mixture of Tetris, Transformers and mind altering drugs. Axel de Stampa is co-publisher of the 1 Week 1 Project blog about spontaneous architecture.…
Intel has just announced a new reference PC design that uses its upcoming Broadwell chipset. Usually, that wouldn’t get us excited—but this concept ushers in the prospect of silent ultrabooks and MacBook Airs. The new design uses 14 nanometer processing to create a slab of PC-grade silicon—this is the next iteration in Intel’s Core range,…
Here’s a fun little Google Maps easter egg: ask for directions from Snowdon to the Brecon Beacons in Wales, and it’ll estimate travel time by car, bus, foot, plane, bicycle, or… dragon! The journey takes 21 minutes by the country’s national emblem apparently, compared to 3 hours 20 minutes by car. [The Next Web]