Tech News

Good news and bad news for serial phone-flippers: Starting on the 23rd, T-Mobile’s Jump plan will let you upgrade your phone any time you want, not just twice a year. But! You’ll have to have paid off half the value of your current phone in order to swap to the newest thing, a limitation that…

Could NYC Produce All Its Own Food If It Had To?

If a catastrophic event cut off the food supply to New York, odds are you’d have to do without you triple vegan chia slaw and assorted trend vegetables. But would you go hungry? That was the question that Smithsonian posed yesterday, after an awesome, seven-month time lapse of a rooftop farm in Brooklyn appeared online.…

Video of a massive octopus wrestling with a diver underwater

In today’s heart-stopping undersea news, this is what it looks like when a camera-shy octopus just does not want its portrait taken. The poor thing was probably fed up with all the divers firing their flashes at him. Diving partners David Malvestuto Warren Murray were about 80-feet below the surface of Bluefish Cove in Carmel,…

Go Deep Inside a San Francisco Vibrator Factory

For all the mystique surrounding the female orgasm, vibrators are a surefire way for lots (and lots) of ladies to get off. I recently took a tour of Crave, a sex toy company that prototypes and fabricates its products in San Francisco; here’s a peek inside your new favorite mini pleasure machine. Crave made its…

Headphones For All Your Needs, Sony Lightning Speaker Dock [Deals]

Whatever your audio needs, we’ve got you covered with deals on three excellent sets of headphones today. First up is Klipsch Image ONE Gen 2 on-ear headphones complete with in-line controls for $50. If you’re looking to get out to the gym or go for a run, check out the Klipsch Image S5i Sport In-Ear…

A Gadget Used to Scan the Tower of Pisa Is Helping Police Fight Crime

Three-dimensional scanners are one of the newest and most futuristic gadgets in a police investigator’s toolkit. These magical, handheld little devices can create 3D models of a crime scene in mere minutes. And the technology just keeps getting better. The latest happy story about the police and their 3D scanning equipment comes from Queensland, Australia,…

This Amazing Geodesic Dome Houses a Danish Political Throwdown

Every year, 10,000 Danes come together for the Folkemødet, a celebrated “political festival” of spirited policy debate, which sounds extremely Danish. This summer, they’ll be doing so in an incredible space: A beautiful, wood-and-steel geodesic dome. Tejlgaard & Jepsen, the architects behind the dome, actually built it last year as a temporary meeting space for…

Stunning photos taken by the two Russian daredevils atop Shanghai Tower

Check out these incredible photos taken by Vadim Makhorov and Vitaliy Raskalov, the two Russian daredevils who climbed the second tallest building in the world—the 2132-foot Shanghai Tower. The contrast of the lighted clouds and the sleek towers make it look like a snap from a futuristic Earth. I guess we are living in the…

The Army’s Perfecting a Pizza That Lasts for Years and Years

Life is hard for soldiers in the battlefield, so when the troops want something that might make things a little more bearable—say, a particular food item in their meal rations—the military listens. And right now, soldiers want pizza. They want it bad. And it looks like they’re finally going to get it. Here’s the thing…

Breaking the Record for the Largest Concrete Pour in the World

New skyscrapers will do anything for attention—which is why an under-construction supertall in Los Angeles, soon to be the tallest building on the West Coast, is trying to break another record, too. Starting Saturday, construction crews will pump 21,200 cubic yards of concrete onto the Wilshire Grand site, which might make it the largest continuous…

The Experimental Hypersonic Rocket Plane That Ushered in the Space Age

Chuck Yeager’s historic supersonic flight in 1947 set off a firestorm of research into flight beyond the speed of sound. The most ambitious of these projects was the X-15 program, a top secret USAF program that aimed to test the limits of Mach 7. In X-15: The World’s Fastest Rocket Plane and the Pilots Who…

NASA sees mysterious heart in the darkness of space

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has captured this Heart in the Darkness, for all of you astronomers in love out there, “a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region of the star cluster NGC 346. NASA says that the “the nature of the heart in the darkness will remain mysterious” until they…

Watch this guy snowboarding through the streets of New York

Casey Neitstat got out his snowboard yesterday, tied a rope to a Jeep, and zoomed through the streets of New York. He even went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and snowboarded down the stairs covered with snow. Same in Central Park. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook

Tapping Into Wave Power With a Gigantic, Artificial “Seafloor Carpet”

Scientists have known for decades that muddy coastal sediments absorb the power of waves as they roll toward beaches. The result is a free service courtesy of soft ocean bottoms that diminishes the sea’s energy before it reaches the communities living beyond them. Now an engineering team is working to expand the muddy seafloor’s portfolio…

Tell Us Your Online Dating Horror Stories

On the worst OKCupid date I ever went on, the guy was 30 pounds heavier than his pics, ate wings like a slob, licked his fingers, and talked about his upset stomach the whole time. It was the worst date in history. We want to hear your online dating war stories, too. Compared to some…

Lego Contest: Recreate famous literary scenes in brick form for prizes

In anticipation of The LEGO Movie premiere, British bookstore Waterstones is holding a fantastic Lego contest. Basically, recreate your favorite literary moment “in brick form” and tweet a picture of it to @Waterstones with the hashtag #LEGOLit (you can only enter once, so make it count). Here’s some inspiration: The scene above is from “The…

This Giant Superdesk Is Bigger Than Your Average Suburban Home

When it was time for the NYC ad agency, Barbarian Group, to design a new office, they wanted to do something different. The agency wanted something more open, less inhibiting. So architect Clive Wilkinson built them an “endless table.” An endless table is exactly what it sounds like: One giant, continuous superdesk that wraps itself…

Seeking a Cheap Cell Phone Signal by the Light of the Moon

It looks like a cultish gathering of smartphone users, and in many ways it is: this image shows African migrants on the shore of Djibouti, holding their phones aloft to snatch cheap phone signal from nearby Somalia. Djibouti is a common stopping point for migrants trying to leave Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea for new lives…

London’s Iconic Routemaster Busses Are Being Scrapped For Good

It’s one of the most iconic vehicles on London’s roads, but the ageing red Routemaster bus, currently serving two routes, is set to be replaced by the modern hybrid “Boris Bus” entirely. The old-style jump-on Routemaster is in use on two “heritage” routes, the number 9 from Kensington High Street to Trafalgar Square and part…

The Science of Marrying Your Cousin

In modern western society, marrying your cousin is not well accepted, particularly in the United States. Through a combination of old prejudices and present-day conventional wisdom about inherited birth defects, first cousin marriage is seen by many as a little too close for comfort, as well as a bad idea if you want children. However,…