Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
One extraterrestrial explorer gets more than he planned for when an accidental fall into a black hole becomes a time-shifting trip through the dimensional looking glass. Pretty sure his head always looked like a pencil eraser though.
Star Wars vs Harry Potter. The Force vs magic. Jedis vs wizards. Light sabers vs wands. People born before 1990 vs the kids who come after. Who would win in this epic battle? In this ridiculously enjoyable video with CGI effects of two friends battling for sci-fi fantasy supremacy, we see a Jedi fight a…
Samsung has just announced the Galaxy K Zoom, a slim smartphone that looks like the offspring of a Galaxy S5 and a Samsung Galaxy Camera. It’s half smartphone, half camera, with 10-times optical zoom via a retracting lens. A slimmer, sleeker vversion of its predecessor, the S4 Zoom, the Samsung’s new Galaxy K Zoom boasts…
London is a city with so much history that you’re always curious about what happened before. Who stood on this street? Where did this come from? What happened when? And because London’s architecture has remarkably stayed the same over the years, it’s easy to “time travel” and compare what life was like back then to…
Head over to Gawker Recruit Dennis Mersereau’s The Vane for extensive coverage of tornadoes rampaging in the deep south. Also of interest: a television station evacuating mid-coverage and going off-air, a door thrown thirty miles, and damage reports. http://thevane.gawker.com/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-todays-tornadoes-in-t-1568792377
Park-poor Los Angeles: perhaps it’s no surprise that many of the city’s earliest parks were born of refuse lands. Flush with public land inherited from California’s land grant days, Los Angeles was practically giving away real estate in the latter half of the nineteenth century, donating lots to private individuals or auctioning off tracts to…
Dominique Ansel, the Willy Wonka of desserts and creator of the Cronut, has announced his latest imagination busting, tastebud oozing creation: The Waffogato. It takes the delicious affogato, which is basically ice cream topped with espresso, but remixes it by making the ice cream a waffle made from ice cream and mixed with Belgium waffle…
After 50 years of enthusiastic support for boldly going into the unknown, William Shatner was finally formally honoured by NASA with a Distinguished Public Service Medal. This highest honour has been awarded to only a handful of people for their support of space exploration. The original space cowboy William Shatner receiving his medal from NASA…
Watching this guy playing piano is simply astonishing. It’s an amazing example of the things the human being is capable of, no matter what his condition is. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
Add Destiny—the new game from the developers of Halo—to the list of games I would like to play forever with an Oculus Rift. The depth of these worlds seems amazing. https://kotaku.com/i-played-45-minutes-of-destiny-and-it-was-kind-of-bori-1568127899
How many things cause cancer according to science studies? Probably the same amount of things that can make you magically healthy. What is good for you is bad for you is good for you, depending on the day and which scientific study came out recently. There are so many of those studies and they all…
Yahoo has just announced that its very first foray into producing original content will be a set of two, 30-minute long comedies, one of which is being headed up by Paul Feig, the brilliant mind behind Freaks and Geeks and The Office. The Feig-produced set of eight episodes has been dubbed Other Space, and depicts…
This little bastard is the deadliest animal in the world, with an estimated 750,000 human deaths every year. According to this great visualization posted by Bill Gates, mosquitoes kill 163,780 more humans than all the other “dangerous” animals combined, including sharks, snakes, and humans—the second deadliest animal. In fact, sharks and wolves’ kills—so feared by…
Baby Boomers are getting older. Their eyesight isn’t what it used to be, and their reaction time is slowing. Even if they’ve been faithful drivers all their lives, their primary means of getting around might start to shift away from the car. Which is great news for public transit in the U.S. The AARP has…
Remember how Netflix and Comcast signed a peering deal? And how that could cost us all? Well now, the chickens are coming home to roost because Verizon’s making the same deal. Initial news of the deal came by way of a tweet, complete with confirmation by Netflix’s CEO. Details are scarce, but presumably, like Comcast’s…
One summer day last July, a six-year-old boy was walking across a dune when he disappeared, falling into a deep, narrow hole in the sand. This and two other holes that have since appeared at Indiana’s Mount Baldy are unlike anything scientists have seen before—it could be an entirely new geological phenomenon. After being buried…
If you live in Manhattan, you may have seen these tiny “missing” mice posters. They are part of a rodent control ad campaign which also has some hilarious YouTube commercials. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
The folks over at Popular Science have a new post about NASA’s trials and tribulations in creating “jet shoes” during the mid-1960s. And they look straight out of some old science fiction comic. First envisioned in 1965 by NASA engineer John D. Bird (the dashing guy in the hat and bowtie pictured above) the jet…
Keeping bees in Buffalo, pouring concrete in Los Angeles, and using the subway as a data-collection tool in Moscow. Plus, both Time and the Wall Street Journal examine our high-rising ways. Take a peek at this week’s Urban Reads. “As a city, Buffalo has some characteristics that are beneficial for undercover beekeeping. It has a…
Shigeru Ban has had a big spring, what with winning architecture’s highest prize, building disaster housing in the Philippines, and unveiling a huge luxury penthouse in NYC. The Japanese architect has many fans: Including the designer of this wooden table, who says it was inspired by his low-tech cardboard buildings. Ania Wolowska named this piece…
