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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,…
It’s been five months since one of the greatest shows ever to grace the small screen has gone off the air, but if you’re one of the many rapt Breaking Bad fans, you’re probably still pretty deep in mourning. Fortunately for you, Hungarian designer Zsolt Molnár (Zsutti) decided to pay homage to the meth-loaded masterpiece…
Unperturbed by the scourge of vertical video shot on mobile phones, a bunch of Serious Artists have banded together for a film festival devoted exclusively to incorrectly oriented videos. Why subject our eyeballs to such unnatural composition? For art, duh. Vertical Cinema, made up of 10 specially commissioned works by experimental filmmakers, is a deliberate…
Sometimes when shooting or conceptualizing a scene, it’s hard to visualize composition without actually looking through a specific lens. This new iPhone app shows you just how hundreds of lenses will see your subject. The app is called Mark II Artist’s Viewfinder. Weird name. But yeah, what it does is simulate frame lines in your…
It’s funny watching dogs do human things. It’s funny to watch them drive cars. It’s funny to watch them sit in chairs. But, seriously, new research shows that dogs actually are just like us. At least they are when it comes to processing voices and emotion—and, now, we’ve got the brain scans to prove it.…
SunViewer posted this amazing photo by Vladimir Scheglov, taken on January 19 at the Kupol mine in the Chukotka region of Russia, just after a Coronal Mass Ejection hit Earth to produce some beautiful northern lights. He’s like “whatevs, I will just chillax and look cute here.” According to Scheglov, “the Kupol mine has banned…
With a design that promises to revolutionize flirting at the bar, Karthik Poduval’s Room For Two stool features an expanding design that allows it to seat two people when the need arises. So there doesn’t have to be an extra stool available when there’s someone you want to sidle up to. It’s of course also…
German photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt—one of the greatest artists in the history of the medium—used his Leica to take this stunning photo of a crew repairing the Graf Zeppelin in mid-air, after a storm in the middle of the Atlantic damaged the airship’s skin en route to Rio de Janeiro in 1934. It looks so surreal—like…
Expedit, we hardly knew ye. Ikea recently announced that the popular shelving system is not long for this world, and the internet responded with rage. But there’s a really good reason for Ikea to get rid of Expedit. And in fact, it’s not really going away at all. Ikea says it’s replacing Expedit with a…
It’s been almost a year since Bill Gates put out his $100,000 call for better, high-tech condoms, and we haven’t found a new defacto standard yet. But Firaz Peer and Andrew Quitmeyer of Georgia Tech have a potential solution, if you’re OK with putting electrodes on your manparts. Warning: that video might be NSFW if…
Everybody loves Die Hard. It’s the best Christmas movie, and the foundation that so many other awesome thrillers are built on. Plus it has lots of guns and explosions. This 60-second animation of the entire movie by 1A4STUDIO is just as great as the original, but in a completely different and hilarious way. Yippe-ki-yay! SPLOID…
Signal Snowboards has made a name for itself—at least outside of snowboarding circles—with its experiments using unorthodox materials to make decks. The company’s glass snowboard was surprisingly resilient on the slopes, as is its latest creation which was actually made from recyclable corrugated cardboard. https://gizmodo.com/its-shocking-how-much-abuse-this-all-glass-snowboard-ta-5986045 To make it waterproof and a little stiffer for riding,…
Gilze-Rijen is—according to The Aviationist—one of the airports with the lowest final approaches in the world. They get so low that, when you are there, you think they are going to touch down on the road that crosses the head of the runway. And in fact, that has happened. The first image by Jimmy Van…
Google’s new Project Tango is a limited-run experimental phone that’ll be handed out to 200 lucky developers next month. It’s got Kinect-like vision and a revolutionary chipset, enabling phones to see the world in a whole new way. A bit like a really sophisticated 3D scanner in a phone. It’s pretty nuts. Project Tango is…
The Audio-Technica ATH-M50s are a favorite among the Commerce Team, Lifehacker Editorial, reviewers across the Internet, and our readers. Their step-down, the M45s, are available for $50 today from Musician’s Friend, which is a great price point for quality audio on a budget. The 50s go as low as $80, but usually hover between $100-150.…
We’re almost certainly about to see Samsung’s Galaxy S5 superphone next week, the long-awaited followup to the company’s Android flagship. With competition heating up from the likes of Motorola and HTC, will it be enough to stay near the top of the heap? Here’s what we’re expecting to see. https://gizmodo.com/every-android-phone-ranked-1468382693 Design While there wasn’t a…
The New York Times Magazine has a wonderful slideshow of locations that some of the world’s best photographers go to vacation. It’s a delightful look at how creative minds approach their immediate surroundings, when not shackled by professional constraints. The post, Where the World’s Greatest Photographers Go to Get Away, features not just photos, but…
The internet can be a tough place to distinguish fact from fiction. Who has time to fact-check all those beautiful, weird, and sometimes horrifying pictures? Well, we do. Today we have ten more images you may have seen tossed around on social media recently. And all of them are lying to you. 1) Is this…
The network-analyzing super-wonks at OpenSignal have released their 2014 State of LTE report, and things aren’t looking good for U.S. smartphone users. Not only is our 4G LTE signal once again the second-slowest in the world; compared to last year’s report, it actually got more than 30% slower. The full report is generated from data…
