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French engineers have been experimenting with a technique that could redirect seismic energy away from structures such as cities, dams, and nuclear power plants, sparing them from damage. It involves digging large, cylindrical boreholes into the ground, forming a defensive geometry of lace-like arrays that, researchers hope, could deflect seismic waves and thus make whole…
The Olympic Games are often a bittersweet milestone for a city, filled with economic and political ups and downs. But it would appear that Oslo’s 2022 aspirations are set for success in the hands of Norwegian design firm Snøhetta, which has executed one of the most elegant Olympic bids in history. The fact that Snøhetta…
To us, the bridge is a way to get across the water, but to cormorants in San Francisco Bay, the old Bay Bridge is home sweet home. And the 800 protected birds currently nesting there are not very keen on moving to the new Bay Bridge span—despite its shiny $700,000 bird “condos.” If Caltrans can’t…
300 empty desks were placed in the street outside Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters earlier today as part of a protest demanding extra funding for disadvantaged youth. The 300 desks are meant to represent the approximate number of students who drop out of LAUSD every month. [Photo by Richard Vogel/AP]
Taking a full spoon of corn starch in your mouth and blowing on a flame while someone films it in slow motion looks like a lot of fun. Just don’t do this if you don’t want to burn down your home or your eyebrows, ok? OK! SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join…
Picnic season is upon us: Time for outside snacking, beers on the grass, sun on the face, and wind in the hair. These good times are often—and unfortunately—punctuated by the scourge of ground-sitters the world over: the inevitable wet butt mark that comes from settling down on damp earth. If only there was something to…
YouTube is chock full of falling domino videos, but Numberphile’s Matt Parker may have trumped them all with a complicated 10,000 domino setup that just so happens to function as a very crude computer. How is such a thing even possible? This primer video explains the basics. Depending on how you choose to start the…
MediaFire is going after Google Drive by offering some dirt cheap pricing for its recentlyoverhauled cloud storage. If you sign up now, you can get 1TB for $2.50 per month—or $25 per year. Under the new plans, the regular $5 1TB price point is still half what Google Drive costs. Definitely hard to argue with…
Even if the mention of trigonometry, calculus, or algebra gets your heart racing and your palms sweating, you still might appreciate this watch that demonstrates the first proposition in book one of Euclid’s Elements. Because even if you don’t know what that means, you can still look like you do, while still easily telling the…
Author Michael Lewis is best known for uncovering hidden corners of our present, whether in baseball (Moneyball), the financial collapse (The Big Short), or high frequency trading (this month’s Flash Boys). But in the September 26th, 1996 issue of the New York Times Magazine, Lewis took a swing at predicting the future. It’s too early…
We’ve seen eavesdropping issues in Chrome before, like one exploit that lets sites ask for permission to the microphone, and then keeps listening long, long after. But now a new one discovered by Guy Aharonovsky goes a step further: it triggers listening with no permission, even if your microphone is completely disabled. The trick is…
Where on Earth is this freaky lava pool? Why do people hate love locks? Is it true that fire ants love the suburbs? And what do the soon-to-be-lost sounds of the industrial age sound like? All your answers are here, in this week’s landscape reads! A Campaign to Ban Love Locks In Paris Who hates…
Transit maps are as unique as the cities they represent. To know Tokyo’s subway, you have to know the quirks of its subway map; to navigate NYC, you have to familiarize yourself with its mapping idiosyncrasies, too. But what if design was standardized across every city in the world? That’s the idea behind INAT, a…
GFZ animated the recent Chilean megaquake and aftershocks sequence. It looks like despite releasing a lot of energy, the earthquakes have not closed the seismic gap. That means the built-up stress wasn’t sufficiently released to significantly reduce the seismic hazard in the future. In seismology, silence is never to be trusted as it means that…
Worried that you’ve piled your plate too high at the buffet? Researchers at SRI—the folks who created Siri before Apple bought it—are working on a new app that uses image recognition and clever AI to provide a fairly accurate estimate of the calories you’re about to consume. Similar apps already exist, but they either rely…
As far as newspaper ads go, the classifieds are an especially boring section of tiny text and identically spaced columns. But it doesn’t always have to be so! This ingenious little ad for Corona’s kitchens by Colombia-based designer Felipe Salazar plays with the geometry of classified ads. An entire kitchen, complete with gas hood and…
A coalition of 100 investors announced plans to build a “Chinese-controlled economic zone” populated by skyscrapers and luxury residences. Their new city will be in Kenya, but the goal is to “match the glamour of Dubai.” What would motivate investors to go to the trouble of building a massive new city in a country other…
For the second year running, a satellite image of the Canary Islands has won the annual Earth Observatory photography contest. To celebrate, they’ve posted a compilation of some of their favourite images of the islands from years-gone-past.
Last week, we challenged you to photograph a shadow puppet. Of the millions of Gizmodo readers, only three of you were brave enough to take on the challenge. We celebrate you hand-shadow-heroes today. WINNER: Freeze I’ve been looking for an excuse to use Star Wars figures in a Gizmodo Challenge. I kinda followed the instructions.…
Put on your headphones and enjoy this fascinating view over the shoulder of a watchmaker, full of beautifully crispy closeups of the manufacturing and assembly of a Nomos Glashütte watch. I only have one complaint: I wish it weren’t three minutes but five hours long—my autonomous sensory meridian response was off the charts while I…
