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It may be hard to believe, but that faded bit of paper you see above is actually the most sought-after and revered stamp in the world. Or at least, it will be this June, which is when it’s poised to pull in a whopping $10-20 million at auction—the most money ever spent a dirty piece…
Today the NASA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a Japanese H-IIA rocket with the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory onboard. The joint mission will collect data to map global rainfall and snowfall every three hours. And there is an awesome anime about that. Because Japan. See for yourself: (Thanks for the tip…
Having a WeMo Switch is one thing, but combining it with a motion sensor unlocks a whole new range of possibilities and IFTTT recipes. Newegg has the Switch + Motion combo pack today for just $57, which is $3 less than the previous lowest price we’ve seen. If your needs are simpler, Monoprice makes their…
It’s a goddamn beautiful thing when internet memes and nature collide into one glorious split-screen of a squirrel eating out of a Horse Head feeder. It just doesn’t get much better than this, people. Photographer Jim Zielinski snapped these, the first pics of this product in the wild, but you, too, can humiliate the little…
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could skip to the next track without taking your phone out of your pocket—or without touching anything at all? Or if you could adjust the thermostat with the flick of a wrist? You may soon be able to thanks to new gesture-recognition technology. It doesn’t even require batteries! The…
Gizmodo’s Leslie Horn went to the American Museum of Natural History to meet the Exosuit, a first-of-its-kind 6.5-feet-tall aluminum alloy rig Robotech that weighs more than 530 pounds. The $600,000 atmospheric diving suit will take humans 1,000 feet underwater at surface pressure. Check out her cool reportage here. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome…
When it comes to radical mega-infrastructure projects, we can only dream—but we dream big. Here is one such staggering proposal to build miles and miles of 1,000-foot tall super-walls that will once and forever save Tornado Alley from its eponymous natural disaster. The idea comes to us from Temple University physicist Rongjia Tao, who will…
The race to make the world’s fastest production car has turned into an all-out war, and as our pals at Jalopnik report, the viciously bonkers gearheads at Koenigsegg are readying a jaw-dropping juggernaut. It’s got all the mind-blowing stuff you’d expect: well over one thousand horsepower, a theoretical top speed of 280 MPH, carbon fiber…
The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary are crowdsourcing research about WWI-era slang. Have you found a use of “Zeppelins in a cloud” (slang for sausage and mashed potatoes) that’s older than 1925? How about a use of “shell shock” older than 1915? The OED wants to hear about it. [Chronicle of Higher Education]
Meet the Exosuit. It’s a $600,000 atmospheric diving suit capable of taking a human 1,000 feet underwater at surface pressure, and it’s the first of its kind. If you have dramatic music handy, you should go ahead and play it, because this thing is insane. What is it? It’s what Tony Stark would wear to…
Have you been frantically petitioning for signatures against the Comcast-Time Warner merger? Do you tweet profanities at @TWCHelp and @ComcastCares in the hopes that someone will see your words and feel even the slightest pangs of regret? You’re wasting your life! Because Comcast doesn’t give a fuck. https://gizmodo.com/why-the-comcast-time-warner-cable-merger-is-even-worse-1522096469 Funny or Die’s newest video poking fun…
Legendary car maker Lotus has produced a long line of exotic sports cars as beautiful as they are fast, but never motorcycles. Until now, that is. The company’s first foray into two-wheeled transportation is a work of art—the Lotus Motorcycle C-01. Created by genius designer Daniel Simon and developed by Germany’s Kodewa Performance Motorcycles, this…
Less than 1 percent of American households had a TV set in 1948. But if you were lucky enough to hail a special cab in Chicago during the summer of ’48, you got a brief taste of America’s television-obsessed future. Chicago taxi driver Charles De Lorne was able to give his passengers quite a show,…
The Mt.Gox saga just gets sadder and sadder. Not only did the company file for bankruptcy, but Mt.Gox CEO Mike Karpele went on Japanese TV a few minutes ago and admitted that everybody’s money is gone. Gone, gone, gone. How much money? According to one translation of the press conference: “The 750,000 bitcoins we kept…
Have you ever been hesitant to over-pack a vehicle with luggage or passengers because it would obscure the sightline for your rearview mirror? Nissan’s Smart rearview mirror solves that problem by alternately displaying a live video feed from a camera mounted on the back of the vehicle. Rearview cameras of course aren’t new in the…
It’s not just IDF forces and Israeli settlements that come under rocket fire; militant groups have been known to take pot shots at commercial airlines as well—such as when a pair of SAMs narrowly missed an Israeli charter shortly after it took off from a Mombasa, Kenya airfield, in 2002. To protect vulnerable aircraft from…
This Harry Potterish floating book thingamajig designed by Kiril Gitman lets you display your favorite volumes flying around your living room. Useless awesomeness. He says he was inspired by the 2012 Oscar-winning animation The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
Art can happen where you least expect it, which is definitely the case with the work of Echo Yang, who uses small toys and everyday electronics to create detailed drawings. Yang is a student of information design at Design Academy Eindhoven. In an effort to put a twist on the trend of generative design based…
Venezuelan anti-government protesters are cobbling together home-brew gas masks from just about anything they can find—including empty water bottles packed with cloth, stuffed into larger water bottles—to defend against tear gas attacks from their nation’s riot police as clashes between the two sides grow more violent by the day. Image: AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd
This is Dan, a 38-old-year old woodworker from Maryland who claims he has only eaten pizza for the last 25 years. Cheese pizza. Exclusively. He says he didn’t stop eating it despite being diagnosed with diabetes. That’s when doctors told him he had to change his diet if he didn’t want to lose his life…