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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…
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…
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…
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…
Here’s International Space Station commander Koichi Wakata posing with robot AFJ013 in NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. It doesn’t get closer to the future than this, folks. I’m so jealous. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
Astounding moron Sergio Rodriguez got slapped with a 14-year prison sentence earlier this month, convicted of aiming a laser pointer at an emergency medical helicopter taking a young patient to Children’s Hospital of Central California. Remember folks, trying to blind pilots midair is a very, very bad idea. The criminal complaint against Rodriguez, obtained by…
The fakes just keep on coming. And frankly it’s hard to keep up with all the internet-fueled deception. Today we’re taking a look at a few more dubious images that you may have seen floating around the web recently. Punking Putin? Airplane selfies? Rocket to Uranus? Fake, fake, and definitely fake. 1) Is this a…
Looks like someone finally found a use for the LinkedIn profile you’ve been sitting on for the past five years. Thanks to a new browser extension, you can now reveal the email address of any one of LinkedIn’s roughly 260 million users—whether you’re connected to them or not. The extension, Sell Hack, was first uncovered…
Barely a week since successfully completing sea trials after a three year hiatus, the venerable research sub Alvin is already earning back the $42 million in hardware upgrades and engineering retrofits it’s received—showing off its spacious new three-crew cabin with a quick dive to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But this is no…
io9’s Ron Miller has a roundup of all the early design specs for the the space shuttle. Really cool stuff. They remind me of the pre-Apollo years—with all those US Air Force awesomely shiny experimental jets and rocket planes flew by the Chuck Yeager and company. https://gizmodo.com/early-design-specs-show-the-space-shuttle-could-have-be-1528524224
Take heed, because there’s a lot of bad stuff out there on the internet today. But there’s one thing that’s very good and useful: it’s Gmail, and today your favorite email service is celebrating its tenth birthday. According to Wikipedia, Gmail was launched on April 1, 2004. At the time, it was an invitation-only beta…
If you have cable, the Xbox One’s TV-controlling powers are a great feature; having a list of just the channels you watch is how all cable-surfing should be. But if you have cable, you probably also have a DVR, and the Xbox One has been useless at controlling it. Until now. With updates rolling out…
The New York Public Library scanned a huge number of maps. The maps are released under a Creative Commons license, so they’re in the public domain for you to study, modify, and modify, or whatever other cartographic desire your little heart holds. A chart of the West Indies from Cape Cod to River Oronoque. Filed…
Amazon is hosting a TV-centric event in New York on Wednesday, where it will most likely reveal a streaming device. So what’s that lil’ thing going to look like? Here are the mostly likely answers to your biggest questions. What will it look like? Most signs point to a dongle, a la Chromecast or Roku’s…
Comedy Central’s new iOS app will allow you to watch full episodes of their popular shows the day after they air. The most recent episode will be available to everyone, but you’ll need to prove a TV subscription to go deeper into a series.
Keith Emerson’s massive modular synthesizer was the centerpiece of his persona as the virtuoso keyboard player in progressive rock super group Emerson, Lake, & Palmer. The custom rig was his throne. Moog just spent three years reverse engineering the thing. Who’s got $90,000 lying around to buy it? So far, Moog is only teasing the…
A week of calamity in landscapes reads! Did microbes cause the largest mass extinction in earth’s history? Why is California sinking? What did we learn from the biggest earthquake in America fifty years ago? And, closer to home, how dangerous should a playground be? How the Biggest Earthquake in U.S. History Changed Science “There were…
Your business card isn’t just some way to share your contact info. It represents you and your company, and it can be a great way to make a first impression. So how does a professional lighting designer make a big impact with his business card? With a design that’s completely dependent on light. Created by…
Cities change: skyscrapers go up, row houses are torn down, neighborhoods gentrify, earthquakes destroy. Vintage photographs of cities can be fascinating in and of themselves, but the familiar unfamiliarity of these time-warped photographs are especially intriguing. From San Francisco to St. Petersburg, here are how cities have changed—and not changed—over the years. See history peek…
