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Painters always sign their canvases, so why shouldn’t bakers—proud of their tasty treats—not sign their work as well? But since pens don’t work on dough, and Sharpies are probably an even worse idea, Etsy seller Zuzia Zuber will create a custom rolling pin for you, embossed with a repeating pattern of “made by (your name…
It’s the first full day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, which calls for celebration. Yesterday, on the equinox itself, you may have balanced eggs on end, danced in a circle with bells on your legs, or simply admired the animated horticultural Google doodle. Today, however, it is time to update your Happy Hour beverage…
Back in 1999, the Stardust mission launched to trap particles of a comet and return the sample to Earth. The Stardust spacecraft made its scheduled rendezvous with Comet Wild 2 in 2004, captured comet-dust in aerogel, and successfully returned the samples. The rest of the story is complicated and cool enough to be saved for…
The answer was obvious. If you’re Russian, anyway. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
It’s Friday! Time to sit back, relax, and enjoy a genuinely satisfying session of Suck the Balls. Designer Niklas Roy‘s interactive installation shows just how much fun can be had with pneumatic tubes, a vacuum, and a pit of yellow plastic spheres. (Spoiler alert: lots of fun.) Great gifs by Prosthetic Knowledge. No, this is…
Shot at City Lights in San Francisco last night:
It’s hard to get excited over something as antiquated as a music box when the phone in your pocket can play back a symphony. But there’s still something oddly appealing about this twelve-track sequencer that skips the digital samples for a row of random music boxes. Created by the folks at Quadrature, the ‘Twelve’, as…
Shot just before my Aphex Twin 33 1/3 book reading last night:
In a story that united geologists with rare car enthusiasts last month, a massive sinkhole opened up beneath the National Corvette Museums’s Skydome, swallowing eight rare cars into its cavernous depths. Since then, the museum has worked tirelessly to recover the cars and fill in the sinkhole so that the Skydome can open anew. But…
Below, except the opposite. Image by oliveromg/Shutterstock https://gizmodo.com/how-not-to-piss-people-off-in-a-group-text-message-1548840694
On the first day of spring, Grant “The King of Random” Thompson blew up a snowman to bits and filmed it in slow motion—150 times slower than real life. It’s oddly satisfying.* *[Because fuck winter already, really. I want to kill all the snowmen in the world—JD] SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff.…
The farm hands no longer have to double-check to make sure old Mrs. O’Leary didn’t leave the lantern in the shed again. Because this LED alternative called the M Lamp won’t get hot enough to start any fires, no matter how hard a cow kicks it. The M Lamp’s aluminum housing hides a rechargeable lithium-ion…
New Yorkers are freaking out about a Wall Street Journal story today that says Citi Bike is in trouble, “moving quickly to raise tens of millions of dollars” to save the system, which has been devastated by an unusually brutal winter. The never-ending death march of cold and snow is only partially to blame for…
The Kerbal Space Program isn’t so much a game as it is a space-themed sandbox physics engines with adorable Kerbals to sacrifice to your scientific curiosity. NASA is a fan of these expressive explorers, and paired up with the game to make an asteroid exploration extension. Kerbonaut Jebediah Kerman accidentally testing the limits of reaching…
This week in our round-up of time capsule news we have a 20-year-old McDonald’s capsule that only 90s kids will understand, a “time barrel” in Maine, and kids in the UK who learn that we eventually get old and die. Kids bury capsule at elderly care facility with predictions for 2064 A group of schoolchildren…
It’s a shame you can’t unsubscribe from group texts. This week I was one of the recipients of a never-ending text bacchanal with a bunch of people I didn’t know. But it wasn’t fun or consensual. It was just a good reminder that we need to talk about text etiquette. It would be a helluva…
DARPA is investigating handheld UV laser devices to help soldiers detect biological and chemical weapons from a safe distance. But when they master that technology, it won’t just be used on the battlefield; it could also help public health workers detect and track outbreaks of communicable diseases. Fighting flu with lasers? This really is the…
The Department of Agriculture doesn’t usually meddle in architecture, but this week at an event at the White House, it announced an unusual project: A $1 million competition for high-rise buildings built out of wood—and another million that will go to educating architects about it. You might remember that President Obama signed a new $956…
Today’s best deals include the best smoke alarm money can buy, a popular Qi pad for wireless-charging phones, Monoprice’s famous IPS monitor, and a whole lot more. Have a good weekend, everybody! The Nest Protect took the seemingly mundane and static smoke alarm, and brought the entire product category into the future. The downside; it…
Need another way to think about gravitational waves? PhD Comics has it in cosmologist-approved comic format. https://gizmodo.com/have-physicists-detected-gravitational-waves-yes-1545591865 (Why am I just teasing you with it here? Because content-creators own their work, but this is cool enough to bring to your attention. So, go clicky-clicky & check it out.) Need more context? We’ve also got the…
