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A lone report in China’s state-run Beijing Times claims the nation is already in discussions to build an 8,000+ mile railroad connecting China, Russia, Canada, and the U.S.—including a 125 mile undersea tunnel spanning the Bering Strait. Forget taking this with a grain of salt, you’re gonna need the whole shaker. Yes, according to Wang…
Behold the deliciousBao-ser’s Castle Burger, a hot steamy bao bun filled with a “square, onion soup-braised (and seared) beef tongue patty, nested with green onion slices, quick pickle cucumber, cilantro, grilled pork belly, and a hoisin mayonnaise.” The only way this thing could be more awesome is if someone were stuffing two of them in…
When you think of Disney animation, you probably envision cartoons drawn either by hand or computer. You probably don’t think of little light-up robots that zip around a tabletop to make dot-matrix designs. But that’s exactly what Disney Research came up with in Display Swarm, a research project that makes an animated display out of…
Before the movie or even the book, the United States dedicated a park specifically to Jurassic dinosaurs. Dinosaur National Monument straddles the border between Colorado and Utah, a national park stuffed to the canyons with fossils from dinosaurs that roamed long ago. Hoplosuchus the armored crocodile from the late Jurassic is missing the very tip…
This week in Tech Reads: DIY electronic brain stimulation, a chat with the man who invented the browser tab, the strange hi-caffeine soda that fuels Germany’s hackers, and so much more! Greg Miller looks at the strangely adventurous world of do-it-yourselfers experimenting with electronic brain stimulation, using home-brewed hardware and inspired by a small clutch…
Geek.com seems to have spotted an experimental new web Gmail layout that replaces the left-side control panel with a slide-in menu, uses pins instead of stars, and adds a “reminder” feature—all within a heavily-redesigned layout. No word if this test setup will ever roll out to users. [Geek.com]
New York-based Artist James Haggerty creates crazy mosaics out of staples. Thousands and thousands of staples. The amount of detail in his series of Star Wars characters is insane! The Darth Vader piece alone was made with 10,496 multi-colored staples. “The Side” is a 40 x 32″ mosaic made with (7,696 Silver and 2,800 Red)…
Agents from the Agencia Tributaria—the Spanish IRS—announced the find of a priceless Van Gogh which disappeared from the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Vienna, Austria. Dated in 1889, the painting “Cypress, sky and field” was discovered in a safe deposit box that belonged to a Spanish fraudster. According to El Mundo (in Spanish), the 13.7 x 12.6-inch…
Dean Kamen’s DEKA Arm is an electronic prosthetic that mimics natural arm and hand movement with an amazing level of finesse. It’s controlled by electrical signals from the wearer’s muscles. This week, the DEKA Arm became the first muscle-controlled prosthetic approved by the FDA for sale to the general public. The user controls the DEKA…
Super-sharp 4k video, in the right hands, is powerful technology. Witness the grandeur of New Zealand’s dreamlike landscapes, brought straight to you by Martin Heck. This painstaking timelapse was shot over four months in some of the most remote locations across New Zealand. Those infinite skies, hulking mountains, and crystalline waters could make even the…
The American Museum of Natural History is one of Gizmodo’s favorite places in NYC, and today’s an especially cool day to visit: it’s Identification Day, when you can bring in your fossils, unidentified plants, unknown family heirlooms, or just about anything else old or unusual, and have it identified by museum experts. It’s like Antiques…
Well it’s been a busy week here at Gizmodo. We’ve been following the unexpected news around Apple and Beats by Dre, debunking more viral images that are totally fake, checking out awesome tech at Bell Labs, and so much more! Here’s what we’ve been doing all week. Beats by Apple Is Making Monster’s Big Mistake…
Holograms are super cool, but they’re hard to make at home. Pepper’s Ghost, on the other hand, is a relatively simple 19th century optical trick that looks like a 3D hologram and brought a very dead Tupac Shakur back to the stage. And Joey Shanks is here to show us how to rig up a…
The Earth’s magnetic field is the original forcefield, a wall of electromagnetic force that protects us from high-energy charged particles spewed by our sun during solar eruptions. The dance between our field and the sun is dynamic and beautiful. Charged particles impacting on the magnetic field produce aurora. Image credit: N. Tsyanenko The solar wind…
Bike theft is a major problem throughout America with an estimated 800,000 to 2 million bikes going missing each year. That’s a cost of nearly $50 million—and that’s just the small minority of thefts that are actually reported. And with ever increasing numbers of urban commuters forgoing cars for bikes, this silent epidemic only stands…
The only two options that freight trains have for accessing the east side of the Hudson River are to cross a bridge in Albany—140 painstaking miles North of New York City—or to ride a rail barge across the Hudson through the highly efficient marine-rail operation run by NYNJ Rail in Jersey City. There used to…
Not all junk stays in orbit, and not all things that land are found. A Delta 2 rocket launched in 1990, re-entering the atmosphere within months. Yet it took 18 years to discover the rocket casing on a cattle station in the Australian outback. Delta 2 rocket casing discovered while mustering cattle in Australia. Image…
The Williamsburg Bridge has spanned the East River since 1903, connecting what’s now Brooklyn’s most notoriously hip(ster) neighborhood to Manhattan. In the 1980s, the bridge was in serious disrepair—and architects wanted to replace it with a mirror-finish masterpiece topped with a restaurant. Imagine the view! DRC Consultants Inc., Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas Inc. and…
A few months ago, we got a glimpse of the amazing restoration work going on at the Washington Monument, which sustained more than 150 structural cracks during a 2011 earthquake. But a new time lapse from EarthCam illustrates the entire project in 80 seconds—and it’s awesome. The project has taken more than a year to…
A car dash cam in Mariupol—an Ukrainian city 310 miles (500 kilometers) from Crimea—captured this tank wreaking havoc through a street, smashing through a billboard, and invading road lanes going in the opposite direction. Luckily, the car driver avoided a potential collision and continued to drive like nothing had happened. Mariupol is on Ukraine’s coast…
