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This week in Tech Reads: coal, animal actors, wasteful government spending, and more! Coal provides 40% of the world’s electricity. It’s also a killer, whether by dangerous mining conditions or the toxic pollution it produces. Michelle Nijhuis takes a long look at how coal is produced and consumed, and asks, can it ever be clean?…
Did you guys know there is a Gizmodo subdomain where you can go for all things photographic? Yep! It’s called Reframe, and it’s where you’ll find additional coverage of gear, techniques, news, and all kinds of great stuff related to the crafts of photography and videography. Olympus SH-1: High End Image Stabilization in a Point…
The Verge just revealed that Google may venture into set-top TV devices with the as-yet-unannounced Android TV. Quoting internal documents, the report indicates Google is planning a device like Roku or the new Amazon Fire TV to put Android in your living room. Judging by the documents The Verge quotes (which so far have not…
A lot of stuff happened this week, whether it was new streaming TV devices being revealed or a new superhero sequel’s debut. From a tearjerker time capsule story to a day at the World’s Strongest Man competition, we’ve gathered our best stories of the week right here for you. It’s a Saturday brunch buffet of…
Under the sea, volcanoes erupt, building land until they break the surface as a new island. These islands evolve and change as they age, following a predictable pattern of landform evolution until one day returning to the sea. The Emerging Volcano: Niijima and Nishino-shima, Ogasawara Islands Volcanic islands are born below the waves, growing from…
Football season may be months away, but that doesn’t mean we can’t daydream about tailgating. Forget about the rickety old camp grill and cooler in the back of your van: the future of tailgating is boxGATE, a brilliantly overkill pop-up party that unfolds from a shipping container. It’s the Transformers of tailgating! Texas Tech alumni…
It must be the combination of the steel grey palette, the black accents, and their patches and rivets, but these two A-10s look especially cool and futuristic to me in this photo. Like they can be piloted by this guy: Perhaps it’s because this airplane has become such a design icon that it has already…
As of Tuesday, the venerable Windows XP operating system is going kaput. Microsoft is pulling update support for the OS, leaving it vulnerable to rapidly mutating cyber threats. There’s precious little time to make sure your computer isn’t left to the wilds of the Internet. Here’s how to make the jump to the modern era…
Grunge, drones, and fame: This is the last paragraph of the third chapter of my recently published 33 1/3 book Selected Ambient Works Volume II, about the Aphex Twin album by that name released by the labels Warp and Sire 20 years ago last month. Today marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Nirvana’s…
Sports and technology are usually thought of as estranged dance partners just a half measure out of sync, but there’s an elegant waltz between the two that’s been going on for years behind the scenes. And maybe nowhere more so than in the lead-up to March Madness. Basketball is teeming with state-of-the-art technology, but much…
The Associated Press reports that a Chinese ship involved in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has detected a “pulse” today in the southern part of the Indian Ocean. While Chinese news agencies say the signal is the same type emitted by flight data recorders, the Australian government agency coordinating the search…
Friday evening, the Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador briefly spewed up a 10-kilometer column of ash. The initial eruption was over as quickly as it started, settling down after the 5-minute burst of activity that spilled pyroclastic material onto the volcano’s flanks. Photography Credit: AP The pyroclastic flows ran down the northern and northwestern volcano flanks.…
The Spitzer Space Telescope is encouraging people to play around with its massive data release of the Milky Way in infrared. Of the offerings on #glimse360, my favourite is this cheerful nebula. Any awesome snapshots you’ve encountered while scrolling around the high-resolution panorama of our home galaxy?
Musician/Intel employee/iPhone accessorizer will.i.am appeared on a British TV show yesterday showing off his self-produced smartwatch, which he says has completely replaced his phone. If we’re to believe everything we see on TV, it’s pretty impressive. This is the clip, from Alan Carr: Chatty Man, a show that I admit I knew absolutely nothing about…
This is Max the dog and his human mom Maureen. An amazing BBC Earth report tells their story: Max became depressed when he started to smell the cancer that Maureen was developing inside her breast. It’s a really incredible tale. According to BBC Earth’s Secret Life of Dogs, “dogs watch us all the time and…
Look, I gotta be honest, I’ve watched this video a good half dozen times already and I still have no clue as to what the hell is going on. I’m assuming that this is what happens when you feed the Internet peyote, but there’s really no way to be sure.
A new television series set in Los Angeles just got the green light—but don’t look for it on NBC, AMC, or even HBO. No, Bosch—an hourlong drama about a Los Angeles homicide detective—will stream to TV sets, laptops, and mobile devices via Amazon Prime. Based on a series of mystery novels by Michael Connelly, it’s…
You can play a pinball machine forever and not have a pinball hit at a more perfect angle than this. Look at it bounce back and forth and back and forth and back and forth forever between a bumper and kicker. If only every pinball game was so easy. According to YouTube user lilmul123, this…
The week is coming to a close, and hopefully you have some time in the very near future to collapse on the couch. But when you finally get that break, you’ll still be racing through the universe at astronomical speeds. Our planet is rotating around its axis at a rate of 1,000 miles per hour,…
Some people hate doing nothing. I am not one of those people. The calmness of inactivity peacefully re-centers your soul. It’s not boring. It’s soothing. And these GIFs wonderfully made by artist Rebecca Mock perfectly capture that accomplished feeling of doing nothing. I just want to jump inside these GIFs for an hour. Or a…
