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TechCrunch reports that your Facebook news feed is getting a design touchup. Nothing major: new fonts, “bolder” images, and a simplified left sidebar. As for the gloriousoverhaul we were supposed to get last year—still no word.
If you fancy yourself a designer of sorts, you’re going to love Blu Homes. This California-based company makes beautiful, incredibly customizable prefab houses that also happen to be environmentally friendly. You can design your own without leaving the comfort of your couch. But beware: You will get sucked in. These things are cool, and Blu’s…
NASA’s Dr. Bill Cooke, Danielle Moser, and Rhianna Blaauw are be running a Reddit “Ask me anything!” today at 1pm CST (2pm EST, 11am PST. Dear XKCD: I love you.) From the press release, Cooke specializes in meteoroid environment and its effects on space vehicles of all sorts, and spends time making meteor shower forecasts…
Hello and welcome to the real life Fortress of Solitude. This unbelievably beautiful cavern is inside Vatnajökull, Iceland’s biggest glacier, captured by photographer Kate Friend, who took a stunning series of shots inside this 8,000-square-kilometer ice mass. Can you believe this pic wasn’t color-corrected in Photoshop? The blues are so crisp and so clear, I…
Maps are great. Maps help us get where we need to go and can sometimes teach us things about the world we live in. But unfortunately, the internet has been infected by a scourge of stupid maps. And stupid maps are making us dumber. Let’s look at the map above. Maybe this map wanted to…
Once upon a time, Valentina Tereshkova was a textile factor worker who made a hobby of jumping off of stuff with parachutes. On June 16, 1963, she was the first woman to make it into space, piloting Vostok 6 through 48 orbits in 70.8 hours. Today is her birthday. Valentina Tereshkova looking suitably unamused in…
Hubble and Chandra telescopes have captured an image of a galaxy being destroyed, torn apart by invisible cosmic forces 200 million light-years from us, in the constellation Triangulum Australe. Honestly, my brain just can’t comprehend the scale of this event. Description from Hubble: Our spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy lives in a comparatively quiet backwater region…
How do you go about creating an iconic and awe-inspiring photograph from the tallest building in America? If you’reTIME, you climb right to the top and set up a 360-degree interactive panorama using not one but 567 images of NYC in all its glory. This making-of video that TIME just put on their website goes…
The Tomahawk is among the most widely used and effective conventional weapons in the US arsenal, especially since we began covertly launching them from the safety of submerged submarines during the Cold War. Recently, Raytheon debuted the latest upgrades to its newest generation of Tomahawks—cruise missiles smarter and more adaptable than ever before. Originally introduced…
Thought crocodiles and alligators were the kings of the river? Otters and pythons don’t agree at all. This image sequence from the Lake Woodruff National Wildlife Reserve—spotted by PourMeCoffee—shows an otter killing a juvenile gator. Hell yeah. Otters are not that cute when they are pissed off, right? Otter preying on alligator at Lake Woodruff…
Beautiful arches, like the art deco skeletal system of a lost urban era, can be found throughout New York City, from Grand Central Terminal to bars and restaurants. Created with tiles by the Spanish father-and-son duo, Rafael Guastavino and his junior namesake, these structures were also marvels of artistic engineering, combining intricate brickwork with functional…
Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake has been building her location-based exploration service Findery for years, with access only available to a select group of testers. Today,it goes live to the world. There are already slews of apps that use your location to tell you more about what’s going on around you, so why would…
Leslie Rollins’s “30 Minute Drumming for Journeying” appears to be exactly that, a rhythmic sonic space to get mentally lost in. Technically it isn’t a drone, in that it has a steady, distinct beat, but a drone can also mean a steady repetitive sound, and on that count this is most certainly a member of…
An Apple patent published today details a theoretical feature that would enable your mobile device to detect an emergency and alert your designated contacts or the police. And y’know what? It actually makes a lot of sense. The patent application for “mobile emergency attack and failsafe detection” outlines a series of ways your smartphone could…
That selfie of a Danish F-16 pilot firing a Sidewinder missile is actually a frame from a cool video. I’d rather have a perfect animated selfie in an infinite GIF loop, though, so I made this one. Here’s another shot as seen from the side. And the original video: SPLOID is a new blog about…
Ever wondered what it would sound like if computers could talk to each other? Yes, we have an internet that links all the machines in a vast and glorious global network. But what if they really talked? What if computers could communicate using sounds that humans can’t hear? It could work like a very powerful…
Building on yesterday’s theme, we have close encounters with space-rocks all the time. Here’s your round-up of recent past, upcoming future, and newly-discovered things that aren’t hitting us. Yesterday at 7:20 PST, 2014EF moseyed by at 0.4 lunar distances, then snuggled up to the moon less than three hours later. In between those two approaches…
Spotify just bought “music intelligence” company, The Echo Nest. In other words, it just bought the data machine that powers rival services like Rdio, iHeartRadio, Nokia MixRadio, Twitter Music and others. The Echo Nest is a “music intelligence” company that uses a combination of machine listening and intense web scraping to build up the databases…
Like Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen who lost his arm in an accident but kept on performing, aspiring drummer Jason Barnes didn’t let losing his right arm two years ago deter him from realizing his dream. He built a crude prosthetic using springs that allowed him to keep on drumming, but after enrolling at the…
These extremely rare, previously unseen travel posters make me want to travel back in time and visit a Japan of another era. These beautiful graphics were recently rediscovered, and they’ll auctioned off at the Vintage Movie Posters Signature Auction this month. According to Collector’s Weekly, the posters were found in by an unwitting student, and…
