Tech News

China invades Japan’s skies with their dangerous pollution

This is terrible. Japan is getting under China’s blanket of gross air contamination. The situation is getting bad pretty quickly—proof that we need to think globally about gas emission controls. It’s not just about raising sea levels in the future. It’s about getting cancer now. https://kotaku.com/chinas-pollution-is-making-japanese-air-all-crappy-1531371641

The Weirdest Thing on the Internet Tonight: Monsieur Cok

Allegories abound in this macabre tale of runaway industrialism in post-World War Europe. An enterprising defense contractor replaces his inefficient human workforce with mechanical monstrosities, a move that doesn’t sit well with his former employees. Returning with the hammer and sickle of socialist justice, one ex-bomb-maker attempts to enact his revenge, only to find that…

Jean-Claude Van Damme beats Chuck Norris with a split in space

Remember when Jean-Claude Van Damme really pulled off that impossible stunt by doing the splits with two moving trucks? And then we all laughed when Chuck Norris hilariously beat him with airplanes and CGI? Well, Van Damme just won. https://gizmodo.com/no-tricks-were-used-in-this-unbelievable-stunt-1464511530 He just shut the competition down by taking this digital wang whipping contest to space.…

Real life Gambit blows things up by throwing playing cards

Growing up, I never wanted Cyclops’ optic blast or Wolverine’s adamantium claws or Magneto’s power over magnetic fields, I wanted to throw cards like Gambit. I don’t know if that makes me an unimaginative little kid who only dreamt about realistic powers but I do know I spent many summer days throwing cards at everything.…

Teach Kids Frank Lessons About Anatomy With This Inside-Out Anglerfish

If you’re not the type to tiptoe around the truth with your kids, Rachel Ciavarella’s incredibly-detailed plush anglerfish ‘toy’ called Morris is the perfect way to give your children a somewhat disturbing crash course in anatomy. The fish turns inside-out to reveal what can only be described as an incredibly accurate representation of what you’ll…

Herding reindeers sure looks a lot like controlling alien locust swarms

When you get hundreds of reindeers together and try to move them around, they turn into one gigantic sentient-seeming swarm that spins around together. This footage, taken from above with a drone by photographer Jan Helmer Olsen, shows the stunning spirals that are created when herding reindeers. It’s got to be dizzying for them. SPLOID…

Incredibly clear footage shows the blast effect of 1953 atomic bomb

Kaboom. And fireball. And ground shake. And shockwave. And boom. AtomCentral shows us some amazingly clear HD footage restored from 1953 of the Atomic Cannon test from Upshot-Knothole Grable. In the video below, you can see cars, jeeps, buses and tanks against the backdrop of the ginormous blast’s initial burst and shockwave. The blast eventually…

Real Estate’s New Music Video Teaches You How to Play the Song

Back in the day, you had to figure out how to play songs either by listening to them or by buying a book. Then came the internet and easy access to tabs. These days the bands are doing all the work for you! Real Estate released a new video for its breezy song “Crime,” and…

Watch a great white shark fly into the air to kill a seal

Don’t worry, the seal was just a decoy. But the breaching great white shark attack was real. The Great White comes at the seal at such a high speed (up to 25mph) that it launches itself and the seal decoy it caught out of the ocean and into the air. It’s beautifully fierce, isn’t it?…

Architect Zaha Hadid Says 500 Worker Deaths Are Not Her Problem

Qatar’s overtly yonic soccer stadium, a global architectural symbol of the forthcoming 2022 World Cup, has seen its share of the nation’s staggering number of construction deaths: more than 500 Indian migrant workers have died in Qatar since January 2012. This week, the stadium’s architect—Zaha Hadid—said, well, it’s not her problem. https://gizmodo.com/the-grim-secret-behind-qatars-lavish-new-stadiums-hum-1466811510 Speaking at the…

Offshore Wind Farms Might Save Us From Hurricanes

In the matchup of wind turbine v. hurricane, our bets have traditionally been with the hurricane. But think about it this way: wind turbines are designed to suck energy out of wind. What if they could suck out so much energy that hurricanes like Katrina or Sandy never form in the first place—with the potentially…

And Yet the Hamburglar Remains At Large…

On September 24, 1996 the mayor and police chief of San Jose, California swore in Officer Mac, a McDonald’s-sponsored robot. Officially, Officer Mac’s duties were limited to educating Bay Area citizens about crime prevention. But we all know Mac was deputized for one purpose, and one purpose only: to teach kids how delicious McDonald’s food…

Boeing Is Working On a Self-Destructing Phone For Spies

Government employees who rely on Blackberry’s famously secure encryption might have another phone to choose from some day soon: Myce reports that Boeing has quietly filed papers with the FCC for a phone that self-destructs if you tamper with it. It’s called the Boeing Black, of course. But this isn’t be a phone for you…

Impressive video of a B-1B bomber crash landing on a dry lake

Check out this video of a Rockwell B-1B Lancer bomber landing at Roger Dry Lake, at Edwards Air Force Base, California. After discovering a failure in their front gear, the crew was directed to land in this location because its clay surface minimizes airplane damage. I love how it keeps a steady level for many…

The 90-Year Evolution of the Warner Bros. Logo

If you watch a lot of (older) movies you’ll notice that studio logos are generally quite consistent. The spinning globe of Universal, the Paramount mountain, the Warner Bros. shield, they’re all refined over time, but the basic premise has remained the same for decades. All studios have their main logo that appears at the beginning…

Could This Be the World’s Most Useful Couch Pillow?

It doesn’t matter how big or comfy your bed is, there’s just something undeniably satisfying about falling asleep on the couch in your living room. So Unikia created a better couch pillow, with a two-piece Flip! cushion that should let you nap comfortably and not have to worry about waking up to a sore neck…

What Cold War Nuclear Weapons Can Tell Us About Art Fraud

The identification of fakes and forgeries is a basic issue that has always raised controversy. This is unsurprising, of course–the enormous sums garnered by top paintings would turn to dust as soon as a question as to their authenticity arose. To determine whether a painting is original or not, the expertise of critics and art…

Bill Watterson’s first cartoon since the end of Calvin & Hobbes

After almost two decades retired, Bill Watterson—the genius who crafted the universally beloved Calvin & Hobbes from 1985 to 1995—has published a new cartoon: A movie poster for Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder’s Stripped. (Wait, is that Calvin 20 years later?) He appears in the movie too, in his first-ever recorded interview. Some of his…

This crazy knife-throwing video is so well made you’ll swear it’s real

Of course, this insano knife-throwing video is not real—after all, these guys are not Russian. But the fake is so well made that you’ll swear it is real. I went through it frame by frame and you can’t notice the trick. Clever. Kudos to Freddie Wong and his team. SPLOID is a new blog about…

Google will be hosting a Project Ara Developers’ Conference this spring to walk devs through its modular smartphone platform, which might one day allow people to design exactly the phone they want. Not a dev? There will be a livestream, too.