Tech News

Which State Will Get Tesla’s Gargantuan Battery Factory?

Electric car maker Tesla wants a cheaper, faster way to produce the lithium ion batteries that power its cars, and the company has settled on a gargantuan solution: the so-called “gigafactory” that, if all goes as planned, will crank out more lithium ion batteries than the entire world produced in 2013. The location for the…

13 Umbrellas To Keep You Dry and Looking Fly

April showers bring May flowers, but April showers are also made of rain. Spring is nice, but with it comes immense amounts of precipitation. To survive the next few weeks of rain and make it through to summer, you’re going to need an umbrella. And why not one that looks cool? We’ve rounded up some…

Hypnotic Flapping Wing Turbines Keep Working in the Gentlest Breeze

There have been many proposed alternatives to the spinning propeller blades used on wind turbines installed all over the county, but none as unorthodox as Festo’s new DualWingGenerator. Inspired by the company’s work on winged flying robots, the design keeps working when winds are as slow as nine miles per hour. https://gizmodo.com/this-delightful-dragonfly-drone-swims-swiftly-through-t-5992899 So how on…

Rare Photos of NYC’s Museums Under Construction

Museums are lightning rods for criticism. The most public of all buildings, they’re also the most vulnerable, and even long-accepted classics faced scorn in their infancy. Today we’re taking a look at vintage photographs of New York City’s famous museums while under construction. It’s hard to believe now, but Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum endured…

Get this precious retro Hobbit game into my iPad right now

I fondly remember one of the very first games I played on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum: The Hobbit, a text adventure with crude illustrations that was probably made in BASIC. It was crap. But this Hobbit game looks great. So good that it makes me hate the Cinefix guys for making these awesome videos without…

Use Your Favorite USB Keyboard On Your Phone With This Backup Battery

It can be hard to choose a backup battery when the market is as flooded as Bluetooth speakers and iPhone cases have become. Manufacturers are now finding ways to include added value with their emergency power supplies, like Cerevo’s new EneBrick that can turn your favorite USB keyboard into a wireless Bluetooth accessory for your…

Watch Every Cyber Attack in the World in Real Time

Kasperkspy Labs recently launched a beautifully terrifying interactive map that shows online threats arounds the world in real time. In practice, it’s a global visualization of cyber attacks that, Kaspersky hopes, will motivate you to buy their security software. But it’s still a hell of a spectacle. The interactive is also informative. The data displayed…

Why Freezing Yourself Is a Terrible Way to Achieve Immortality

What happens after we die? It’s a question that has plagued the human mind since we first developed the concept of “death.” The search for an answer—and, more importantly, a means of circumventing its effects—has encited organized religion and served to shape one of the foundations of human culture. We’ve built pyramids to house our…

30 Photos Taken Straight Up

We look down at our feet all the time, while view directly above is often. Here are 30 photographs that celebrate the oft-overlooked view…no pun intended. WINNER: Notre Dame × An upshot of the Notre Dame cathedral in Strasbourg, France. A magnificent building and a must see if you get the chance. – Nils Rohwer…

This Paleo Beer Is Made With Yeast From a 35 Million-Year-Old Fossil

As microbrewers continue their quest to brew beer with ever stranger ingredients, here is one possible winner: Yeast living on the 35 million year-old fossil of an extinct whale. Bone Dusters Paleo Brew is the alcoholic brainchild of a paleontology lover and a brew brewer, and it may soon be coming to a tap near…

Crazy camera trick takes the Hitchcock zoom to a whole new LSD level

You know the Hitchcock zoom effect: A camera on a dolly moves back or forward as the lenses zoom in or out, changing the field of view. French photographer Micaël Reynaud has created a new variation of the technique—which you can see above—combining the dolly zoom with slit-scan photography. The dolly zoom effect was developed…

Why One of World’s Most Remote Places Has the Fastest Internet

Ever been to Bjørndalen? No, of course you haven’t: This tiny town, located in a remote area of Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago controlled by Norway, has more polar bears than humans. Curiously, it’s also home to some of the country’s fastest internet speeds. Broadband companies see Svalbard as a testing ground for new infrastructure—a kind…

Join the Debate: 3D Printed Guns or Government Regulation?

Here’s the question: in a world where the design of a 3D printed gun is freely available on the internet, can we—or should we–regulate open source design? Or are limits impossible in a world of anonymous file sharing? Does any attempt at control go against the whole spirit of open source, decentralized innovation? “We cannot…

How to hack your air conditioner thermostat to make a wall explode

Sponsored by the game Watch Dogs, the folks at RatedRR explain how you can hack into anything in real life—from cameras to AC units to smart power outlets to wireless LED lights—to use those home devices as remote bomb detonators. And of course, their demonstration includes actual bombs and explosions for your cheering pleasure. SPLOID…

$150 Chromebook, Futurama Box Set, Bluetooth Speaker, Nikons [Deals]

Acer has refilled its refurbished goody bag with $150 Acer C720 Chromebooks, as well as the touchscreen-toting C720P for $220. The C720 line is regarded for its best-in-class battery life, and is the commerce team’s pick for best Chromebook. These sold out quickly last time they were available, so don’t delay. refurb Acer C720 Chromebook…

9 People Who Thought Gmail Might Be an April Fools’ Prank

Gmail’s officially entering its tender tween years today, and after a decade with the internet’s favorite email service, we can barely even remember our lives without it. But then, that’s why we have the internet—to remember for us. Google chose a pretty dubious day to announce the birth of Gmail (April 1, 2004), so news…

London’s plan to grow up might go down, Elon Musk’s quest to make electric cars cool, and funny anti-Rob Ford ads appear in Toronto. Plus: Learning from streets in Vietnam, Paris, and Manhattan. All this and more in this week’s Urban Reads. A large and influential group of Londoners have launched a campaign against 200…

Hackers Can Now Create Fake Traffic Jams

A couple of Israeli students figured out a way to create fake traffic jams using the popular, Google-owned Waze GPS app. And while it sounds silly at first, these kinds of infrastructure hacks could have serious consequences as we depend more and more on data to help us get around town. The Waze hack is…

Before and After Photographs of the Washington Landslide

The U.S. Geological Survey has posted a pair of before-and-after Landsat photographs for the landslide in Oso, Washington. The landslide collapsed on March 22nd, burying the community of Oso and briefly blocking the river. https://gizmodo.com/hazard-risk-and-the-steelhead-landslide-in-washington-1551357211 Before: January 18, 2014 After: March 23, 2014 Head over to the USGS website for an interactive slider, where you…

Why OKCupid Took a Stand Against Mozilla’s Anti-Gay Rights CEO

Today, most tech companies are polluting the internet with stupid pranks. But there’s one brave statement being made on the internet that isn’t a dumb joke at all. OKCupid is blocking Mozilla Firefox users from its service with a message encouraging them to use other web browsers. Why? Mozilla’s CEO supports anti-gay causes, and as…