Tech News

Pouring Saltwater Over Graphene Generates Electricity

A team of Chinese scientists did an impossible-sounding thing. They created electricity simply by dragging a droplet of saltwater across a layer of graphene. No big fires, no greenhouse gases, no fuss. They created energy with just a miracle material and one of the most plentiful substances on Earth. The science behind the effect is…

A Rainbow Film of Evaporation

Evaporation drives convection within a thin film of soap, where the combination of iridescence and fluid dynamics exemplify the beauty of physics. It’s a mini drama in three parts, tidy layers tangling into a Rorschach test of chaotic squiggles. All three images were submitted to the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics image gallery…

Report: This Could Be Amazon’s Rumored 3D Smartphone

BGR has photos it claims show the long-rumored Amazonsmartphone. According to the report, the phone sports six cameras, and a novel hardware interface that creates a glasses-free 3D effect. What you’re looking at in the image above is a photo of the phone covered in a protective case that obfuscates its design, so that unauthorized…

Scanning the Background

Scanner’s reworking of a track by Alan Dunn and Martyn Rainford is the latest in a series of efforts by the duo to explore the idea of “background.” The source audio for their remix is their A History of Background CD. This remix by Scanner is part of a dubplate made for an exhibit currently…

Pentax 645Z: The Medium Format DSLR Gets a Major Sensor Upgrade

Medium format digital cameras are out of reach for most, but Pentax has been providing ones on the “affordable” side (under $10k), for a few years now. Their new guy, the 645Z, packs a brand new, friggin large, 51 megapixel CMOS sensor. How is that different from the old 645D? Well, that camera, and all…

Apple CarPlay Comes to Pioneer’s Aftermarket Infotainment Systems

Apple iOS car integration is coming to loads more vehicles now, thanks to a firmware update that’ll make CarPlay available through Pioneer’s popular aftermarket in-dash infotainment systems. Apple is at long last jumping into in-car “infotainment” systems. As we recently saw in a Volvo demo, CarPlay basically puts iOS in your car’s dash, allowing you…

It’s a Shame To Think These 3D Milled Ice Cubes Will Melt Away

You can find silicone ice cube moulds for everything from perfect spheres to gummy bears these days. But if you’re throwing a dinner party and really want to impress your guests, nothing says “I have too much money and free time” like using a 3D milling machine to sculpt a frozen drink-chilling masterpiece like this.…

8 Images of Hyper-Modern South Korea Compared With Its Past

Korea has undergone rapid change over the last century, with Seoul metamorphosing from the first East Asian city to light its royal palace with electricity to arguably the most modern city in the world. Photographer Sungseok Ahn captured change by setting up a screen and projecting the old on top of the new. I ran…

Discounted Today: USB3 Sticks, SD/microSD Cards, $2000 Flash Drives

Today’s Amazon Gold Box features flash storage ranging from 16GB to 2TB, and we’re not talking external hard drives. Pick up a new flash drive or memory card, or get your hands on the DataTraveler HyperX Predator 1TB USB3 Flash Drive, which is sitting at a new low by $100. [Amazon] USB3 Flash Drives Kingston…

Anyone Can Buy Google Glass Today, Starting Now

If you’ve long lusted over a pair of the world’s geekiest glasses, today all your Christmases come at once. For one day only, Google is allowing any United States resident to buy Glass. The folks at Mountain View still expect you to become a Glass Explorer—which means ponying up $1,500 for the privilege—but you will…

Amazing Arcade Flight Simulator Spins Players Completely Upside-Down

The arcades that dominated the 1980s and 1990s slowly died off as home video game consoles became more and more capable, but there are apparently still some good reasons to keep a pocket full of quarters handy. Namely this arcade simulator for a game called War Thunder that puts Afterburner to shame. Most arcade simulators…

Dyson’s Massive Floating Trash Vacuum Could Clean Up Our Rivers

James Dyson’s has an idea for a new form of sucking machine—one so large it requires an entire barge to house it. The idea here is to let a giant water-going vessel free and allow it to “mine” rivers of all the floating junk that’s been tossed away into waterway everywhere since man first invented…

How to Check If Your Android Device Could Be Hacked via Heartbleed

Heartbleed is causing heartache on hundreds of servers all over the internet, but security researchers have also warned that the bug could allow direct hacks of Android, too. Here’s how to check if your device is at risk. While researchers at security firm Symantec happily report that the major browsers don’t rely on the OpenSSL…

10-Gigabit Wi-Fi Is Promised By 2015

Think your 802.11ac Wi-Fi is fast? Think again: Quantenna Communications has announced that it’s working on a chipset due 2015 that will supports speeds of up to a staggering 10 Gbps. Most current high-speed wireless chipsets send and receive three data streams at once, and are referred to as 3×3 MIMO chipsets (that last bit…

Was This the World’s First Emoticon?

The emoticon might be older than we thought. This passage of text, which includes a cheeky smiley, is taken from Robert Herrick’s 1648 poem To Fortune—and it might be the first ever use of an emoticon. Literary critic Levi Stahl thought the punctuation might be a typo in his copy of of Hesperides, but he…

FBI Wants 52 Million Photos in its Face Recognition Database by 2015

New documents released by the FBI show that the Bureau is well on its way toward its goal of a fully operational face recognition database by this summer. EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuitfor information on Next Generation Identification (NGI)—the FBI’s massive biometric database that may hold records…

Try the Super-Secure USB Drive OS That Edward Snowden Insists on Using

We all know that Edward Snowden insists on secure email, but he’s also very picky about his operating systems, too. In fact, he uses a free, super-secure version of Linux—called Tails—that fits on a USB stick and can be used on any computer without leaving a trace. Linux installs on USB sticks are nothing new,…

Microsoft’s Office Online—the free, web-based version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote—is headed for the Chrome Web Store as a series of apps.

Mind-blowing video shows how humans are basically bad copies of amoebas

Vsauce, the master answerer of life’s toughest questions and professional blower of minds, tackles something so philosophical in his latest video that you’ll start to wonder what in the hell our purpose is on this Earth. And if it’s any different than a purpose of a rock. It starts with the discussion of art and…

Here are 12 of the best long takes in movie history

There are few legal things that can teleport you to another world as well as an excellent long film take in a movie. When those happen—think of those scenes in Children of Men or Goodfellas—you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie anymore, you feel like you’re seeing it happen in real life. Like you’re…