Tech News

24 Hours of UberFacts: So Many Lies, So Little Time

With about 6.3 million Twitter followers, UberFacts reaches millions of people with little nuggets of trivia every day. Unfortunately, many of those “fun facts” are completely wrong or misleading. I dredged up every UberFacts tweet from yesterday—all 64 of them, from midnight to midnight PST—and did a bit of fact-checking. The results weren’t encouraging. (Buzzfeed,…

How the Granddaddy of US Recon Planes Is Helping Search for Flight 370

The mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 off the coast of Vietnam has prompted a massive multinational maritime search for hints of the plane’s fate. Among the growing armada of surface and aerial search vessels is the US Navy’s venerable P-3C Orion, a long-range surveillance platform still just as effective today as it was…

​We Have an Irish Whiskey Master Here: Ask Him Whatever You Want

Check your job title at the door—unless it happens to be “Master of Whiskey” for the oldest licensed distillery in the world. In that case, we’d like to know a little more. Today, we’re lucky to have Mr. Gerry Graham from Bushmills here to answer your questions. Anything at all you want to know about…

Superhero jacket may save your life one day

The Sporty Supaheroe—a jacket that integrates white and red LEDs within a special fabric to allow joggers and bikers to be seen in the dark—won a Red Dot Design Concept Award in 2013. Now they have an Indiegogo campaign so you can buy it, along with other cool gear. If the jacket’s $1850 price tag…

Is There a Drone Flying Around the Harlem Building Collapse? (Updated)

New Yorkers were shocked on Wednesday morning when reports of a building collapse in Harlem hit the wires. It didn’t take long for smartphone cameras to fill up everyone’s social media feeds. But wait. In that one… Is that… a drone? (Update: Yep! It’s some random guy’s DJI Phantom 2.) Indeed, it looks like there’s…

Curious feet on the Martian soil

Curiosity’s wheels are slowly gaining the normal damage expected from exploring an alien world. With no where on Mars to pull in for a pit stop, the rover has been pulling stunts like driving backwards to even out wear. The photos of all six wheels are in raw colour, taken on sol 564 to check…

Migraine-Blasting Electric Headband Is Coming to The U.S.

Migraines suck, but do they suck enough that you’d strap on an electric headband that zaps your brain’s nerves to block the pain? The FDA doesn’t think that’s such a crazy notion—the agency just approved exactly such a device for treating and preventing migraine headaches. Cefaly is an electrical nerve stimulation headband that sends a…

An Early Look at Ikea’s Light, Cheap, and Portable 2014 Collection

Ikea is already the gold standard for furniture that moves well, but this year its designers are pushing the art of nomadism even further. Images of Ikea’s new PS collection have arrived, and its name—On the Move—says it all. Just a few weeks ago, Ikea announced the untimely demise of its super-popular Expedit shelving system,…

This Ad’s Amazing Optical Illusion Reveals the Hazards Of Driving

Audi’s luxury vehicles include a neat night-vision system that will automatically warn drivers about hazards on the road. And to drive home just how life-saving it can be, the company’s ad agency created a brilliant billboard in an airport with a secret hazard that was only revealed to passengers when they got closer and closer.…

Olympus Patent Imagines Variable Exposure Over Single Photographs

There’s an obvious weakness to the way that all modern cameras work: open the shutter to start an exposure, close it to finish, but whatever you do, the entire frame is bathed in light for the same length of time. Not if Olympus has anything to do with it, though. In a patent unearthed by…

The NSA Has Impersonated Facebook To Spread Malware

So the NSA is spying on you. You’ve known that for quite some time now. What you might not know much about is exactly how they’re doing, and a new report from Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald offers up some pretty grizzly details about the agency’s worldwide, automated malware network. Did you know, for instance,…

Passengers Heat This Battery Bus Shelter By Holding Each Other’s Hands

The only thing worse than the cold and snow of winter is when you’re stuck in the middle of it waiting for a bus. So to make the experience a little less awful, Duracell turned a transit shelter in Montreal into a giant battery that powered a set of warmth-providing heaters. There was a catch,…

This Contraption Cuts Vinyl Records From Digital Audio In Real Time

Sonic purists swear that everything sounds better on vinyl, and you know what? Spinning records is also just way more freaking fun. It’s common to digitize your LPs, but what if you could easily do the reverse? This dude made a device that makes it easy to press audio files into albums in real time.…

As spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple will trim its iPhone return window from 30 days to 14 as of tomorrow. Carriers had previously offered 14 days, so now at least it’s consistent across the board. Still, for Apple Store customers, that’s less than half the time to decide if parallax effect is right for you. [9to5Mac]

How International Human Rights Law Should Be Applied to NSA Spying

This past Monday, the Human Rights Committee commenced its one hundredth and tenth session in Geneva from March 10-28. During this session, the Committee will review the reports of several countries on how they are implementing the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), an international human rights treaty and one…

An Entire Day of All of Europe’s Air Travel, Visualized

This stunning video shows all the flights that cross Europe on a typical summer day. Beautifully animated, it really provides a great insight into the intensity of modern air travel. It was created by NATS, one of the UK’s air traffic control providers. Paul Beauchamp, from NATS, explains how it was made: It’s an amalgamation…

Reckon You Can Solve This Million Dollar Math Problem?

Of the seven Millenium Math Problems, each of which is worth $1 million to the person who can solve it, the Riemann hypothesis is perhaps the most difficult to crack. Reckon you’ve got what it takes? In this video, my favorite mathematician, Edward Frenkel, explains the basics of the theorem. If you can puzzle through…

Not All Online Editors Are Made Equal

What you see is possibly perhaps maybe slightly tangentially almost related to what you may or may not get. Or, WYSIPPMSTARTWYMOMNG as I like to call it. [XKCD]

Tim Berners-Lee: We Need an Online Magna Carta

Daddy of the internet Tim Berners-Lee has spoken out in an attempt to enshrine the independence of the world wide web, telling the Guardian that he believes we need an online Magna Carta to protect the rights of its users world wide. Speaking to the newspaper, he said that “we need a global constitution –…

WSJ Reaffirms Rumors That Music Streaming Is Headed to Amazon Prime

Last month, Re/codereported that Amazon was in talks to create a streaming music service to bundle with Prime subscriptions. Now, the Wall Street Journal is reaffirming that rumor. The Journal reports that Amazon is “hoping to offer an on-demand music-streaming service” to Prime customers—but it also cites people familiar with the matter as claiming that…