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1996: “IDC predicts that by January 1997, up to a fifth of America’s top 500 companies boasting Web sites will have either closed them down or frozen their growth. Although more people are expected to peek at the Web this year, many will cancel their subscriptions and go back to watching television.” [Times of London]
Autonomous vehicles are likely going to have to do more than just drive themselves: They’re also going to have to organize carpools. GM’s EN-V was cute and all, but this Akka Link & Go 2.0 is more like a tiny bus—which is a much more reasonable proposition for a self-driving, car-sharing fleet. Released this week…
A cloaking device that makes you appear completely invisible is still trapped in the realm of science fiction. But researchers at Duke University have successfully created a cloaking device that works with sound instead, making an object completely invisible to SONAR and other acoustic imaging techniques. So how does a bunch of perforated plastic sheets…
This battered diamond has survived a “journey to hell and back,” and it has a pretty specular story to tell. Spat out from deep inside the earth, it is our first direct evidence for a scientific theory that says that vast amounts of water are trapped deep inside Earth’s mantle. Discovered by miners who thought…
I don’t even know what I’m looking at here. I think I see some eyes and a beak attached some oversized head attached to the body of a spider. It’s a pelican spider. “They look like little birds,” says Hannah Wood of the University of California, Davis. The spider’s body is about the size of…
It must be fun to invent something. One day it does not exist, and the next day it exists. But how would you feel if you didn’t exactly know why your new invention worked? The minds behind this all-new microscopic engine could tell you. Ask Vitaly Svetovoy at the University of Twente. The electrical engineer…
How do you sing happy birthday to a computer? Or, more specifically, how do you sing happy birthday to a system of hyperlinked files accessible, by the internet, that live inside your computer (and phone, and tablet, and so on)? It is, after all, the World Wide Web’s 25th birthday. On March 12, 1989, British…
It’s amazing to me that professional free divers can hold their breath for 15 or 20 minutes while swimming into the ocean’s depths. It’s even more amazing that, sometimes, they push themselves so hard that their superhuman efforts end in their own death. Robert González explains how they do it in io9. Bonus: here’s a…
Bourbon is to Kentucky as rum is to the Caribbean, so what the heck is this distiller doing letting barrels of the stuff age on a ship bound for the Panama canal? If you ask Jefferson’s Bourbon, they’re just harnessing the motion of the ocean in pursuit of better booze. It’s chemistry! Gimmicky premise aside,…
“Essential” gear is a relative term. Each situation and budget has its own necessities. But this video of noted photog Chase Jarvis explaining his core kits is a solid breakdown of how to be ready for any situation. Just like the tip videos we posted yesterday, it’s worth nothing that there are tons of gear…
Those living in apartments or homes without central air have to come to terms with ugly, boxy air conditioners hanging out their windows. It’s either that, or be roasted alive in the summer. But it doesn’t have to be that way, not when LG is somehow packing air conditioners into these ultra-slim housings that hang…
Looks like it’s time to start giving 10-year-olds a little more credit where their scientific claims are concerned. According to a new study from Aston University in Birmingham, England, they were right all along—five seconds really does make a difference in terms of food safety. To finally put an end to the age-old edibility debate,…
Just like the CPU in your computer, the human brain has an optimal temperature where it runs best. But unlike a computer’s CPU, there’s no built-in fan to chill the brain when it starts to run hot. Which is why researchers now believe that yawning is actually the body’s physiological way of keeping the brain…
Every new communications technology has that honeymoon period where a select group of people embraces it as the key to utopia. And then come the trolls. Even early radio had miscreants who would send out false distress signals. The people least prepared for their trollish ways? Canadians. The Huffington Post has dug up a CBC…
Would you know Reddit or Twitter if you were only looking at their layouts? You might not think so—but you’d be surprised how well you know the structure of your most-used sites. Now, you can take a test to find out. Dedesign the Web is a fun lil’ quiz built by Chicago digital design outfit…
Twitter user Chris (RaiderTex52) just posted this photograph taken yesterday by his friend Ryan Scott, flying at 38,000 feet northwest of Amarillo, Texas. It’s a massive haboob—the arabic term for a type of intense dust storm. It just looks like The Nothingness is eating Texas like a good juicy steak. SPLOID is a new blog…
If you have been salivating over the Sony A7 or A7r full-frame mirrorless cameras, now may be the time to pull the trigger. There is a deal going on with select retailers that will give you $300 off the purchase price when you trade in ANY old camera. Trade-in deals are pretty common with manufacturers,…
Alright. Pack it up, people. I don’t care if you skate or not—I don’t—because, either way, I think we should all take a little day trip and go chill out on this floating ramp in the middle of Lake Tahoe. Why build a floating ramp? Why not build a floating ramp? It took 300 hours…
These lumpy, interconnected tubes of concrete, like wet rolls of old newspaper, are from a series of speculative architectural images by artist Dionisio Gonzalez, on display at Gallery Yusto in Malaga, Spain, until March 20th. Gonzalez claims the designs offer “disaster-resistance,” something that—with no structural testing, no wind-load assessment, and an awful lot of plate…
If you edit a lot of video, you may be familiar with Red Giant, maker of many useful post-production tools and plugins. Now you can access their offerings through a new subscription service called Universe, mirroring what Adobe did with Creative Cloud. Instead of purchasing individual licenses for software packages, Universe lets you pay a…
