Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
The Pale Blue Dot—a book that should be mandatory for every single student in the world—is a vision of the cosmos that will inspire you to be a better human being. It’s full of memorable passages but this is the best—the one that gives its title to the book. Put on your headphones and listen:…
In recent years, people have been buying more and more vinyl records—and now, demand for music etched into this aging format is so hot that the country’s largest plant is increasing its capacity by more than 50 percent. The Tennessean reports that United Record Pressing LLC in Nashville just bought a 142,000-square-foot warehouse where it…
If you’re a regular rider, you’re already familiar with the soul-lifting thrill of spending some quality time in the open air before after the daily grind: heart beating, blood pumping, sweat gently flowing, and the world flying by your handlebars. If you’re not—and we’ve all been there!—it can be a little intimidating to know where…
It’s a problem as old as sailing itself. Ever since man set out sea, barnacles have been clinging like, well, barnacles to ships, growing into bumpy masses that slows down vessels and wastes fuel. Could the solution to this age-old dilemma be a new coat of special paint? It’s not as simple as it sounds.…
We often think of subscription radio in the U.S. as a fairly new idea. But back in the 1940s, one company was trying to make ad-free subscription radio a reality. How would they make sure people paid? By protecting their broadcast from freeloaders with shrieking cat noises. Understandably, ads weren’t a very popular idea with…
This is a grain of interstellar dust. To get one of these, your best bet is to get into a spaceship for a couple hundred years and get close enough to a red giant star, near its atmosphere. That’s where they’re formed and ejected into space. Or, like NASA, you can create a machine to…
Strava, a popular fitness-tracking app for runners and cyclists, just announced a new initiative. Because the app collects so much location information about people on the move, the company is now selling its data to local governments, where city planners can put it to use. Good idea! Just think about it. It’s city planners’ job…
HTC’s new-for-2014 One is a bold and beautiful smartphone, and for 24 hours tomorrow it’s a killer deal: just $100 through HTC’s online store. The deal starts at midnight tonight and ends at midnight on May 8th, with a two-year contract on AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint.
The online fund-begging havens of Kickstarter and Indiegogo (among quite a few others) are bursting with wild, fantastical visions of things once thought impossible. Some of them are awesome, some outlandish, some flat-out insane. These are but a few. Whether these craziest of projects are scams or the masterminds behind them have actually lost their…
A plethora of portable pocketable power promotions per your purchasing pleasure if you please. First up is the Anker Astro Mini, my personal favorite external battery, because it’s the one I’ll actually carry around. Anker is the favorite external battery brand of our readers and our team, in fact their Anker 3E was our 7th…
It almost seems too easy. With government funding, a trio of British companies recently developed a new way to build circuit boards that makes them 90-percent recyclable. In fact, all you have to do to recycle them is dunk them in hot water and scrape off the circuits with a business card. The innovation was…
A virus has wiped out the population of earth…minus one. You’re the last person, living in a world built for billions. For this week’s Shooting Challenge, capture this feeling by featuring just one subject in a vast urban or natural landscape. The Challenge Take a photo in which just one person is featured in a…
Why a Raleigh neighborhood wants to tear down a modern house. How a suburb in Cleveland eradicated the school bus. Where Millennials are moving (hint: wherever the transit is). Plus Los Angeles’s Instagramming mayor and Vegas’s quest to legalize weed, all in this week’s Urban Reads. Neighborhood politics at their worst: A halfway constructed home…
On April 27th, a tornado cut through Mayflower and Vilonia, Arkansas. The EF4 storm had winds raging at between 267 and 322 kilometers per hour, wrecking devastation. A new satellite image reveals the 66 kilometer path of destruction. The tornado ripped up vegetation, tossed around debris, and destroyed structures all along the brown band in…
Biking is a beautiful thing until you get doored. Or hit. Accidents are scary and it can be tough to know your rights as a cyclist and what to do after you pound the pavement. Josh Zisson is a Boston-based bike lawyer, and he’s here this afternoon to answer your questions. Before we get into…
The live stream from the International Space Station has become my new default “Stare into Space” activity. From the over 300,000 other people in the room with me right now, I’m not the only one fascinated! Fair warning: the group chat can collect people who wouldn’t know wonder if it poked them in the eye…
Like so many NYC businesses, Primo Flat Fix occupies a nearly 100-year-old building. But this Queens, garage sits on a very peculiar piece of dirt: The former site of Wolff-Alport Chemical Company, a rare-earth supplier that furnished the Atomic Energy Commission with radioactive thorium—when it wasn’t dumping the toxic material in the sewer. That makes…
Landing or taking off in heavy crosswinds really sucks no matter which plane you’re in. It could be the biggest airliner in the world, a prop plane, or these F-18s taking off in 30 to 40-knot crosswinds—it looks fun from the outside, but it really sucks for the pilot and everyone else inside. SPLOID is…
At the Bike Expo New York over the weekend, I got the chance to meet Jeff Crystal of Voltaic Systems, a New York-based maker of photovoltaic systems. Crystal built a mobile charging station on the back of his bike that can supply devices with a charge within minutes. If there ever was an apocalypse–this is…
On March 29th, the sun released an X-class flare. It was caught by five high-quality solar observatories on the ground and in space, creating the most detailed observations of an intense flare in history. This beautiful, rich data will help researchers better understand what triggers flares. Composite of data sources capturing the flare: SDO [bottom/left],…
