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Is your iPhone’s sleep/wake button finicky? You might be in luck. On Friday, Apple announced a new program to fix a small number of iPhone 5s with faulty buttons. Just input your phone’s serial number on this page to see if you qualify. And if you do, be prepared to be without your phone for…
It won’t quite elevate your next picnic lunch to an experience akin to dining with the queen, but this compact cutlery set that includes a separate knife, spoon, and fork, is much better than eating with your fingers. The utensils are made from stainless steel, so they’re not going to instantly snap like disposable cutlery…
A belated happy birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope: Our favorite source of wonder and joy was 24 years old on April 24, and the Hubble site celebrated it with this spectacular visualization of the Monkey Head Nebula. NGC 2174 is “a star-forming region in which bright, newborn stars near the center of the nebula…
You might order a Manhattan—or a Berlin, or a London Buck—at your corner dive without giving it a second thought. But what you might not realize is how closely related urbanity and cocktails really are. The modern cocktail owes a lot to cities—and, in fact, cities owe a lot to booze. Archaeologists have long suggested…
The Morpholio Project‘s latest development uses an iPhone’s camera and flash as an impromptu pulse monitor, measuring your visceral reaction to the things you’re seeing. It’s like a lie detector for your aesthetic taste, and Morpholio’s Toru Hasegawa let me play with it. The Morpholio Project is a collaboration of architects and academics focused on…
Now that we all take photos of ourselves constantly, we need to evolve the way we think about our faces in photos. Specifically, we need to abandon the notion that photos of ourselves should include the entirety of our faces when those photos are actually much better with only half a face. Or to be…
Painting walls is a pain, but wallpapering seems like it would be way, way worse; mostly just because of the prep, and the annoying process of making sure every panel matches up. Which is what makes Cut & Paste from All the Fruits seem so cool; each roll is a mix-and-match of patterns designed to…
CORONA was the codename for the United States’ first photographic spy satellite mission. For 12 years, it brought back intel on the USSR, China, and the Middle East. But that wasn’t all its grainy, black and white images captured—it turns out it also caught an incredible number of undiscovered ancient settlements. In a fantastic story…
Denmark is a beautiful country. You really should check it out. And now, thanks to the Danish government, you can just that without leaving the comfort of you own home. Just open up Minecraft, and go exploring. It’s all there. No seriously, all of Denmark is now in Minecraft, and it’s there to send the…
High school students from around the world enter NASA’s annual design contest to dream of large-scale orbital space settlements. This year, each station also features a method to capture lucrative asteroids for in-space resource mining. The Grand Prize winners are totally awesome. Octopus asteroid-grapple on the Greenspace station. Image credit: Popov/Kovachev/Laskov. This year’s Grand Prize…
The main attraction in Kansas’s Crisis City, a disaster simulation zone, is a giant pile of rubble. It isn’t easy, you know, to make rubble that is 1) structurally sound enough for trainees to crawl over safely and 2) structurally unsound enough to simulate a real disaster. In the heart of Tornado Alley, emergency responders…
Sure, you can flip on Spotify anytime and hear what your friends are listening to. But what about seeing the music they’re streaming? A new building for a Chinese music corporation in downtown Shenzhen has a reactive LED facade that “plays” the music its users are downloading in real time. Designed by Shenzhen-based UNIT Studio,…
The Simpsons have really been a roll lately when it comes to their openings. First it was French animator Sylvain Chomet, and now we’re treated to the work of Michal Socha, a Polish filmmaker. It’s hard to say which one was better, but we can all agree that utilizing these unexpected animators has yielded some…
If you’re looking to try out an electric shaver for the first time, today’s Amazon Gold Box deal is the little brother of one of our favorite five-blade models. Panasonic Men’s 3-Blade Arc 3 Wet/Dry Rechargeable Shaver | $55 Nobody’s going to confuse this thermostat for a Nest, but it’s fully programmable and features smartphone…
We’ve already taken a look at the virtual balconies Royal Caribbean is introducing on one of its upcoming mega ships, but that’s apparently just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to over-the-top cruise amenities. On its Quantum of the Seas, set to launch in 2015, vacationers will find an observation pod that hangs…
A daughter tells her dad that he’s going to be a grandfather. He cries, overwhelmed by emotion. This, my friends, this is is what life on Earth is all about: We’re here for an infinitesimal fraction of cosmic time, your DNA is the only thing that will stay behind. At least, it will be the…
Internet indecision is a terrible thing. But Netflix Roulette offers some relief for your TV- and movie-based plight by randomly picking you something to watch. You can have the site randomly pick from every single gosh darn thing that’s on Netflix, or you can limit it to either just TV shows or just movies. You…
The internet is buzzing right now with the latest, greatest (and potentially fake) Worst Thing Ever. Meet Code Babes, the stripping amalgam of everything that’s wrong with tech culture today. Code Babe’s premise, purportedly, is to make learning to code fun by giving you an extra special sexytime motivation. Every time you pass a quiz,…
The Curiosity Rover has taken up a new hobby: astrophotography. Not content to merely photograph cool Martian rocks, the rover has captured the first image of an asteroid as seen from the surface of Mars. Nicely done, Curiosity! Ceres is a monster of an asteroid at 950 kilometers diameter, large enough to qualify as a…
Sixty years ago, scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey announced that the world finally had an efficient way to turn sunlight into electricity. On April 25, 1954, Daryl Chapin, electrical engineer, Gerald Pearson, physicist, and chemist Calvin Fuller demonstrated their invention, the first practical solar cell. It was made of silicon–which, by the way,…
