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Legendarily unaffordable Tokyo is no longer the priciest metropolis in the world—it has been supplanted by another, far more inaccessible city. Want to take a guess who it is? It’s not New York. It’s not San Francisco. The world’s most expensive city is… Singapore. The bi-annual Worldwide Cost of Living study by the Economist Intelligence…
We’ve been hearing for sometime about Microsoft’s forthcoming Cortana assistant, set to arrive in Windows Phone 8.1. Here’s a video that appears to show the new Siri-clone in action. And it looks pretty damn good. The video illustrates much of what’s been rumored: Cortana is a truly personal personal assistant, asking about your interests, tastes,…
Who needs color when good old black and white photography is so simply beautiful? Here are the results from this week’s Shooting Challenge. Winner: Happy Husky I was in Titlis near Engleberg this weekend shooting some night time photography with stars etc then I remembered the shooting challenge. This Husky was so happy bounding around…
An anonymous Northern California couple out walking their dog recently discovered six rusty canisters buried on their property. The canisters were filled with 19th century gold coins, worth about $10 million today. Who’s responsible for that much buried treasure? You might just be looking at him. Several theories have emerged about the Saddle Ridge time…
Happy (?) budget day! NASA is running a teleconference on how they plan on spending $17.6 billion in 2015. Discussion is lively on #NASABudget, and you can submit comments to the press conference using #AskNASA. It’s old news that the NASA budget is tiny compared to annual pizza consumption (nearly $36.8 billion in 2012), or…
A monster virus comes back from ancient times to wreak havoc on mankind. That may sound like a blurb from a science fiction novel, but as scientists have known for some time, it’s not at all impossible. And thanks to the recent revival of a 30,000-year-old giant virus in Siberia, there’s increasing concern that it…
The Sony Alpha NEX-7 is a tiny camera with a huge sensor, and you can get a nice bundle today on eBay for a great price. $950 gets you the camera, kit lens, case, extra battery, and a UV filter. For comparison’s sake, Amazon has never charged less than $998 for the camera and lens…
Back-of-the-envelope math suggests that a human in a normal wingsuit running at ridiculously quick speeds (11 m/s), or in a quadruple-sized wingsuit running at normal speeds, could soar through methane clouds on Saturn’s moon. Okay, fine, as an undergrad class project, it glosses over some of the critical details like drag and how to actually…
The first rule of 8-bit Fight Club is—shut up and take my money! Seriously, I really don’t know why the CineFix people keep making these videos instead of just hiring some developers to make these awesomeness real. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratoryis one of those places that makes magic. Originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, this facility is where many modern discoveries about how matter works were made. Six researchers have earned Nobel prizes for their work at SLAC. It’s also where the first website in North America was built. Today,…
Today’s challenge: how do you profess your passion for all-things-space in a fried breakfast food? For a literal approach, I refuse to allow the pancake-astronaut meme to be the first, last, and only word in astronomy-based pancakes when so many other scrumptious possibilities exist. Even though renowned pancake-artist Saipancakeshas tackled fractals, he hasn’t produced a…
Londoners! The luckiest amongst you will be treated to a bizarre new public event next week, hosted by culinary wunderkinder Bompas & Parr. On Friday, March 14th, before a live, paying audience, “food writer, pop-up chef and Sunday Times columnist Gizzi Erskine” will “swallow a medical grade pill-cam which will broadcast its footage live to…
Even when it’s just team deathmatch in a dark, smelly room inside the local roller rink, laser tag is awesome. So imagine how cool it would be if you could liberate it, and play an open-source version wherever you want with game-types you made up. It’d be like a video game in real life! Or…
Today is Mardi Gras, and like any booze-fueled street celebration, that means tons of full-bladdered revelers seeking out a place to relieve themselves. Thankfully, technology’s here to save New Orleans from becoming a literal Urinetown. Meet AirPnP, the web app that lets you do your business in the privacy of a stranger’s home. As the…
They’re being targeted as harbingers of evil as their buses chug through otherwise inaccessible, gentrified neighborhoods. Now San Francisco’s tech workers are fighting back with a networking event called theTech Workers Against Displacement Happy Hour, that, in addition to sounding like a whole lot of fun, hopes to gather attendees who are “sick of being…
First the iPhone camera was used for a microscope. Now it’s being used in astrophotography.
Quantum computing is being hailed as the future of data processing, with promises of performing calculations thousands of times faster than modern supercomputers while consuming magnitudes less electricity. And in the span of just two years the only commercially available quantum computer, the D-Wave One, has already doubled its computational power. Kiss your law goodbye,…
I don’t like most tattoos, but I have to recognize that, when the artist is good, they can be admirable works of art. Like this pen on an ear—it looks so real it’s surreal! It could have been created by Salvador Dalí or René Magritte. Especially Dalí, looking at the melting ear: SPLOID is a…
Technically they are fusilli, but whatever, I just can’t stop looking at this GIF, which I made from the pasta episode of Sci Channel’sHow It’s Made. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
What is it about going to a famous place that makes you feel like you need to “leave your mark by defiling the spot with your name?” It’s a particular problem, as you might imagine, at the Great Wall of China. China’s solution? Let people do it—in a few specific spots. The Guardian reports that…
