Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Disquiet Junto Project 0112: Calendrical Score Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. This project was published…
Modern medicine has taken all the fun out of doing drugs in baseball. Stories like how Darryl Strawberry used to refuse to slide for fear of breaking the coke vials in his pocket have slowly been replaced with clinical, drab tales of creams and clears. But not to worry! The folks at No Mas TV…
If I had to pick a hammer or a tiny piece of porcelain to shatter a car window, I’d probably think nothing of it and grab the mallet. NatGeo proves me wrong. A little itty bitty piece of porcelain chipped off a spark plug does much more damage to a car window and is so…
Imagine a world with countries re-shaped to have an equal population with each other. Some little countries get absorbed to create one large country while other populous countries get their boundaries re-drawn and are split up into a bunch of difference pieces (I’m looking at you China and India). This is what that world would…
I never knew there was such a thin line between being impressive and being disgusting but artist Ani K is toeing it. Or to be more accurate, tongue-ing it. That’s because instead of using a paintbrush to paint, Ani K uses his tongue to create his artwork. He basically licks paint and then licks the…
I don’t want much. A bed to sleep on, a nice pair of shoes, some beer to drink and I’m good. Or so I thought. Now I could care less about any of that because all I want in my life is this drifting Crazy Cart XL. It’s basically the real life version of the…
A competition to re-imagine suburban surface parking lots tapped architects to transform the often-wasted space into flexible urban plazas. This entry, dubbed “Civic Arches” by Utile, Inc. Architecture + Urban Planning, proposes using the the arches beneath a Long Island Railroad viaduct to park cars of commuters during the week, then reclaim the space as…
Famous cars in movies and TV shows are just as much a character to the story as the actors and actresses. If Batman drove a Volvo or Marty McFly time traveled in a Toyota, it just wouldn’t be the same. They’re iconic. So how many of these cars do you recognize? Scott Park has a…
Synthetic muscles are generally expensive, weak, and not very durable—not exactly a welcome replacement for natural muscle. Thankfully, a research team led by University of Texas at Dallas Professor Ray Baughman just turned all of that around, making wickedly strong artificial muscle fibers from nothing more than fishing wire. In a newly published research paper,…
Aganetha Dyck has thousands, maybe millions, of collaborators for her art. Working with bees she rents from a keeper, she gives ordinary objects like shoes, footballs, helmets, and chipped thrift store knickknacks a second life—cloaked in honeycomb. For Dyck, this collaboration is a form of what she calls “interspecies communication,” where human and apian artists…
Time doesn’t stop for anybody. Seasons keep rolling one after the other. Weather could care less if you’re cold or hot or just right. And life eventually ends. This new stop motion music video directed by Toby and Pete for Chet Faker’s Talk Is Cheap examines all that in 3 minutes. It’s mesmerizing to see…
Once upon a time, in the early days of smartphones (y’know, a few years ago), a company would do everything possible to make its app look as similar to its website as possible. Now everything is topsy-turvy. Today YouTube revealed that some of the website’s new look is going to be borrowed from its mobile…
This awesome OpenKnit machine can weave a sweater from a digital pattern in about an hour—that’s cool. I mean, look at it go! Even cooler is that you can actually construct this awesome OpenKnit machine yourself. Welcome to a brave new world of textile design. GitHub‘s got the plans to put the whole thing together,…
The bike share programs that have popped up in major cities around the world make for a cheap way to get around town for a few hours—unless you’re lazy. So if you find yourself suffering from “let’s just take a cab” syndrome, you might want to consider funding this clever little briefcase called the ShareRoller…
Excuse my ignorance, northerners of the world, but I didn’t know such wonderful thingamajigs existed in that snowy world of yours. May the Gods of Snow always protect you. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
March 1953: A dummy sitting behind a protective shield in a Nevada basement used for atomic bomb testing. The mannequins used for these kinds of tests were often purchased from downtown Las Vegas department stores like J.C. Penney’s. [National Geographic’s Tumblr “Found”]
Road salt has been a point of contention lately, what with all this wintry weather. If you live in a snowy climate, you’re probably used to seeing warehouses and dump trucks full of the stuff. But where does all that ice-melting goodness come from? National Geographic brings us this fascinating, oddly soothing video explaining the…
This is the Tolbachik volcano, laying down roads of magma over the Peninsula of Kamchatka for condemned Russians to drive on their way to hell in cars equipped with dashcams. At least, that’s what it looks like in Lusika33’s photographs. It’s truly pretty—in a Mordor kind of way. Watch the rest of the series here.…
Last week, at a former bodega in Alphabet City, food designer Emilie Baltz and smart object designer Carla Diana conducted the second performance of their “Lickestra“—a “musical licking performance” involving conductive ice cream cones, four volunteers, and a pre-recorded soundtrack of peculiar tones and baselines created by musician Arone Dyer of Buke&Gase. Lured by the…
While dinosaurs have not yet been resurrected Jurassic Park-style, scientists fiddling with ancient DNA sequences have made a discovery that may turn out to be a tad more useful: a treatment for gout. That a 90 million-year-old protein could treat a modern disease is a fascinating window into evolutionary history. If you’ve heard of gout,…
