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It looks like a flying saucer, but it’s actually a cool vehicle to admire the landscape while enjoying a drink and sitting comfortably on a sofa: The Air Leben, an aerial tramway with a slowly rotating lounge cabin that allows everyone to enjoy the view from all angles as they slowly move over the mountains.…
Destructive testing holds a special place in my heart. The idea is to take a material and push it beyonds its limits, recording the moment of failure. General Electric has started a new campaign gratuitously running these destructive tests on innocent every-day objects. Crushing a block of ice is fun. Image credit: General Electric Sure,…
Driving around L.A. during the last month, you might have noticed a flash of fluorescent yellow and neon pink breaking up the monotony of lawns. It’s a project called Wildflowering L.A. which planted 50 lots around Los Angeles in native seeds. This week, the plantings hit peak bloom, transforming swatches of property across the city…
Lag is the worst. Anyone who has ever used technology can tell you that first hand. But what if your whole world lagged. With the Oculus Rift you can find out. Spoilers: It sucks. As part of a project/ad for fiber internet provider ume.net, four volunteers donned an Oculus Rift outfitted with an outward-facing camera,…
When you reference Ezra Pound’s statement that “The artist is the antennae of the race” at SETI, the “antennae” part takes on a whole richer meaning. SETI hosts weekly colloquium at its Mountain View, California, offices, and a few times a year those talks put aside interstellar science and are, instead, organized by SETI’s artist-in-residence.…
Visitors to the Museum of Science in Boston are always in for a hair-raising treat when they enter the facility’s Theater of Electricity. This small amphitheater is actually the permanent home of the largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generator on the planet—a pair of 40-foot high spheres crackling with up to 5,000,000 volts of electricity.…
The ghost of Brutalism is alive and well in Granada, where Mediomundo Arquitectos have drawn on the past without sacrificing modern technology, since it houses the schools of physiotherapy, nursing, podiatry, and geriatric care at Granada University. Despite its foreboding exterior, the entire building is ventilated naturally—one detail you won’t find in most Brutalist buildings…
See that painting right there? It’s fake as hell, but you might never know the difference. And you can get your very own Van Faux for $200, max, thanks to a Russian startup called Prixel. No one will ever know the difference (probably). Prixel has developed a technique that perfectly mimics the artist’s brushstrokes in…
This fluff-ball in space is E0102, the debris left over from a massive stellar explosion in the Small Magellanic Cloud. It’s located 190,000 light years away in the constellation Tucana, and it’s a favourite target of NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observer. E0102 was one of the first objects Chandra looked at, mere months after the telescope…
I don’t know what this is. I don’t know where it comes from, I don’t know what’s doing on the road, I don’t know its propulsion method, and I don’t know who is Maverick and Goose here. But I know that, even while it looks ridiculous, I want a ride. SPLOID is a new blog…
We’ve all heard about how well Google’s self-driving car does on the highway. But is that so impressive? Heck, put on cruise control and an audiobook, and any car seems like it can drive itself on an Interstate. The latest update from Mountain View, however, suggests that this miracle vehicle is entering a new phase…
Boyhood is a new film by Richard Linklater coming out on July 11. Critics are raving about it, with a surprisingly perfect 100% score in Rotten Tomatoes. But regardless of how good it is, this movie has already made cinema history: It was filmed with the same actors over a 12-year period from 2002 to…
Exactly 20 years ago, NPR staffer Dennis Fuze circulated a memorandum to his colleagues announcing that the venerable public broadcasting powerhouse would be getting something called “internet.” In 2014, the memo seems adorably naive—which just shows you how much technology has evolved since 1994. There is a lot of choice language in this memo but…
Random starburst embroidery? No, that’s a map of ARPANET, the early predecessor of the internet as we know it, from 1983. The late-in-life network was immortalized in yarn by the artist and designer Debbie Millman. https://gizmodo.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-arpanet-1969-1989-in-one-gif-1258090851 The map is based on a more exacting atlas of ARPANET, which had declined in the late 1980s. ARPANET…
You may have thrown your 3D glasses away a long while back, but not this little critter. After all, this praying mantis has had his glued to his face by scientists in the name of “research.” In fact, this is what Newcastle University scientists in the UK are doing to try and understand the eyes…
Skype just made group video calling available to all users for free instead of being locked under Premium. Looks like someone is catching up to Hangouts.
The Comcast-TWC merger is a terrifying prospect, but there’s the small chance it might not go through. Comcast is doing everything it can to make sure to minimize that chance though. In a new proposal, it’s offered to drop nearly 4 million customers, so long as the merger goes through. If the merger is approved,…
Microsoft is going to take its TV seriously. That’s been clear ever since it established its own internal studio and dropped the bombshell that it was working on a live-action Halo series produced by none other than Steven Spielberg. Now, Microsoft is spilling the beans on the rest of its Xbox TV launch line-up, and…
Good news, clutz: these glasses swap the usual screws in their hinges for magnets, allowing you to swap the arms easily—and making them harder to break, too. The brainchild of Japanese studio Nendo, these Magne-hinge spectacles use disk-shaped magnets in the arms to clip neatly between two similar parts on either side of the lens…
They’re not as awkward to transport as a piano or a cello, but guitars are far from being the easiest instrument to travel with. And if air guitar never really satisfies your desire to play while away from your instrument, this pen-sized single-string playable guitar might be a better traveling companion. Currently trying to raise…
