Tech News

The best and weirdest PornHub ads that didn’t make the cut

PornHub is celebrating an amateur ad contest. The finalists are in this short list, where you can vote for your favorite, but there are some unique videos that didn’t make the cut. Here are the best and weirdest of the ones that were left out. But the best of them all—selected or not—is this one,…

Paul Smith’s Take on the Anglepoise Is a Brilliant Riot of Color

When Paul Smith got his hands on the design icon that is the Anglepoise Type75 desk lamp, the result was always going to be striking—and spattered with clashing colors, it certainly is. The special edition of the lamp uses Smith’s trademark discordant color choices to pick out each element of the lamp’s mechanical workings in…

Look at Where Antarctica Is Losing Ice Faster Than Ever

This image might look pretty, but it holds a glum message: it shows that the Antarctic ice sheet is now losing 159 billion tonnes of ice each year. We already knew that Antarctica was melting, but this image—created by a team of scientists from the UK’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling using data from…

Zigzagging light of unknown origin spotted in Hawaii (Updated)

There’s nothing more befuddling than looking up at the sky and seeing a strange light appear out of nowhere. Your adult brain tells you it can’t be what you want it to be but when you check with adult-brained officials, they’re clueless too. That’s what just happened in Hawaii. A mysterious zigzagging light popped up…

This rotating sphere is a physical animation and not a 3D render

Artist Takeshi Murata has physically animated this sphere using kinetic motion and strobes—it is not a 3D render. It is in fact a type of zoetrope, a rotating illusion originating in the nineteenth century, and was designed on a computer then fabricated by craftsmen and mechanical engineers. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff.…

You Can Pre-Order a Surface Pro 3 Right Now

Microsoft’s new Surface Pro 3 could finally be a laptop replacement that really works—but you can find out for yourself by pre-ordering one right now. https://gizmodo.com/surface-pro-3-hands-on-a-laptop-replacement-that-just-1579032058 The Surface Pro 3 is now available for pre-order—along with the Surface Pro Type Cover and Surface Pen—in 22 countries worldwide. The Core i7 Surface Pro 3 is available…

A GIF of a Vine of a Video of a Flipbook of a GIF of a Video

Take a video of roller coaster ride. Then GIF it. Make a flipbook from your GIF. Record a video of that flipbook in action. Put it on Vine. Turn that into a GIF. And this is what you get! Created by Televandalist using Flipbookit, this is perhaps the most ridiculously recursive moving image on the…

How the NSA Is Transforming Law Enforcement

If you’ve been imagining NSA surveillance as something distant, with analysts sitting in remote data centers quietly analyzing metadata—stop now. NSA surveillance has become a part of day-to-day law enforcement fabric in the United States. The Snowden disclosures that were made public as part of Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide drive this point…

Apple’s iWork for iCloud has been updated to allow 100 people to collaborate on Keynote, Numbers or Pages files—which can now be up to 1GB in size, too.

You Could Drive Your Car Onto This Rainbow-Shaped Pier

It’s safe to say that a more distinctive pier never adorned the Southland’s shore. Unlike the many pleasure piers that stretched beyond the breakers only to dead-end above the ocean’s swells, the Rainbow Pier in Long Beach, California, extended more than a quarter-mile into the cold Pacific before arcing back to shore. The 3,800-foot-long structure…

NASA is getting ready to communicate with aliens (Update 4)

“We can say little, if anything, about what these patterns [above] signify, why they were cut into rocks, or who created them. For all intents and purposes, they might have been made by aliens.” When a new NASA book on alien communications has a paragraph like that, you better pay attention. Read the update at…

Why Don’t All Metro Buses Transform into Intergalactic Robo-Fighters?

I don’t know what Bondibots are (I don’t speak French), I don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing when not fighting their way across the galaxy, playing soccer, or jamming on gigantic guitars—driving old people around maybe?—and I really don’t know what the hell is going on in this video. All I do know…

Discover the secretive Pyongyang in this exclusive 22-minute GoPro tour

Aram Pram—a Singapore-based virtual tour photographer—says that he got special permission from the North Korean government to produce this exclusive 22-minute GoPro tour of Pyongyang. After seeing the entire thing, it kind of looks like any nondescript American city. Pram—who runs DPRK 360, a project that aims to graphically document the entire Communist country—claims the…

Flying tire crashes into a car on the road out of nowhere

Imagine cruising down the freeway, possibly on your way to a weekend away from the city, singing songs with your BFF, making future plans about what to do in August, thinking about what kind of food to grab when SMACK. A flying tire crashes itself into your car barely missing your windshield. If it was…

Animation teaches you all that happened in World War II in 7 minutes

I really wish YouTube and the Internet as we know it today existed when I was in high school. So instead of reading textbooks and taking notes in class, I could just watch YouTube videos and Wikipedia entries on any test I had coming up. Seriously, I could have dozed off in class and just…

How to Make an Ad for Porn That Isn’t Two People F*cking

Porn! The internet is full of it—so full, in fact, that PornHub has decided to set itself apart by running an ad campaign in the blinding, unobscured light of day. Which, for a company specializing in smut, is easier said than done. Naturally, public ads for porn are going to take a little more finesse…

A Free Leyland Kirby Album for 40 Days (and Nights)

In time for his 40th birthday, Leyland Kirby uploaded a 40-track set — one composition for each year — of short works under the umbrella title We Drink to Forget the Coming Storm. It’s an elegiac collection of nameless songs, each comprised of, as he describes it, “the same elements piano, digital strings and synthesized…

Here are 7 facts about the X-Men that you might not know

Excited about X-Men: Days of Future Past? Yeah, we are too. Would you be as excited if the movie was called The Merry Mutants: Days of Future Past? Probably not as much! That was the name Stan Lee originally wanted to call the X-Men until Marvel put the kibosh on that. Yeah! Marvel’s great! But…

“How I Met Your Indian Mother” Is A Love Story As Old As Time

In the sense that arranged marriages have been a common practice forever. This is creator Ransomniac’s first animation ever, and it’s well done considering that fact. Plus it’s a hilarious riff on what’s possibly the world’s longest love story. [via /r/animation]

This Developer Is Rebuilding Your Childhood Bedroom For Oculus Rift

What happens when you use technology from the future to rebuild the world of past? Nostalgic developer Roy Lazarovich is trying to figure that out with a new project called MemoRift. Put simply, he’s building a bedroom from the 1980s that you can explore using Oculus Rift. So far, Lazarovich has managed to emulate a…