Tech News

How LED Streetlights Will Change Cinema (And Make Cities Look Awesome)

The decision by the city of Los Angeles last year to replace its high-pressure sodium streetlights—known for their distinctive yellow hue—with new, blue-tinted LEDs might have a profound effect on at least one local industry. All of those LEDs, with their new urban color scheme, will dramatically change how the city appears on camera, thus…

The US Army now has autonomous self-driven vehicles

More Skynet news: “According to Defense-Update the Marine Corps 6×6 MTVR truck, Army M-915 trailer and the multi-steering, six-axle Palletized Loading System (PLS) truck in this convoy were programmed by soldiers and then sent along to drive around Fort Hood, Texas under completely autonomous operation.”

Paper, Facebook’s new standalone reader app, is now available for download. It’s more than just a reading app, providing the kind of content you’re actually using Facebook for on the daily, in quite a beautiful package. [App Store]

This shadow cube is a lamp is a soul trap is a magic thingamajig

Twisted Shifter spotted this beautiful light sculpture by Anila Quayyum,a laser-cut cube lamp that completely changes the room into a magic mosque. In her own words: With this large scale patterned wood project I explored intersections of culture and religion, the dynamics and interpretation of space and sight as it threaded through cultures and emerged…

How To Turn Dry Pasta Into a Rocket Engine

You may not realize it, but your kitchen is one of the most well-stocked chemistry sets you could ever hope for. And it’s not only for creating edible chemical reactions. NASA might rely on giant laboratories and factories to build its rocket engines, but all you need is a piece of pasta, a jar, some…

This Old-School Firestarting Kit Will Make You Feel Like Survivorman

At one point in time, camping was truly about getting away from it all and only relying on nature for everything you needed. But these days, most new camping gear pertains to keeping your smartphone charged. Not Francesco Faccin’s Re-Fire kit, though. It’s designed to make camping a little more rugged again—by letting you start…

All the Gear an Olympic Photographer Is Bringing to Sochi

Jeff Cable is a Bay Area photographer who has travelled the globe taking pictures, including coverage of the last three Olympic Games in Beijing, Vancouver, and London. Cable is about to head to Sochi to cover the 2014 Winter Olympics, where he’ll be blogging about his experience. To kick things off, Jeff published a rundown…

10 more clever bets guaranteed to outsmart your friends

The only thing more satisfying than winning money from your friends on a bet is pranking them in the process. Deep down we all want to be conmen, and Richard Wiseman is back with ten more bets that will let you outsmart anyone. Just make sure that in addition to outsmarting your friends you can…

More than 300 years ago, settlers traveling up the St. Lawrence River founded the small town of Verchères. To commemorate the landing, Quebec architects Les Ateliers Guyon recently installed these elegant outdoor seats along the river’s banks. The idea is to transport the “to the seventeenth century, a time without roads; when the only means…

Scientists Are Going to Create the Coldest Spot in the Known Universe

The universe is freezing. In spots like the Boomerang Nebula the temperature drops all the way down to one degree Kelvin. But if NASA scientists have their way, the known universe will have a new coldest place, and it’s going to be inside the International Space Station. The Cold Atom Lab will be an atomic…

Zoom into the Orion Nebula with this new awesome time-lapse video

In an amazing twist on timelapse videos of the night sky, physicist and photographer Isidro Villo outfitted his camera with an automated mega-zoom lens, and captured the journey from the ground to the great Orion Nebula in this video found on DIY Photography and Petapixel. Villo spent a couple of years developing the perfect rig…

A Hacker Found GPS Data in the Audio of This Police Chase Video

It’s incredibly noisy in the cockpit of a helicopter, and you’d assume the sounds you hear in any YouTube police chase video were just the deafening whine of the chopper’s engine. But as one hacker discovered, that monotonous drone can actually hide some useful data, like the helicopter’s GPS coordinates. Watching cockpit footage of a…

Every Super Bowl Tech Ad, Ranked

Unlike recent years, 2014 saw some Super Bowl ads for tech companies that were actually… good? Inconceivable! We’ve gathered them all here, in easily processed ranking form. As always, all rankings are totally subjective and legally binding. 15. Sprint – “Sprint Framily Plan – Band” This is the exact same as Sprint’s previous Framily Plan…

It Took More Than Just iPhones to Shoot Apple’s New Ad

With Macintosh turning 30 this year, you’d think Apple would go big. Maybe they’d spring for another Super Bowl commercial like the 1984 ad that changed the way the world thinks about computers. Nah… they just made an Apple promo reel that was shot entirely on iPhones—with a little help, of course. Don’t get me…

The surreal, disturbing and sometimes erotic worlds of Rachel Baran

I love the surreal worlds of Rachel Baran, a self-taught, 20-year-old photographer who creates beautiful images—sometimes disturbing, sometimes erotic, always hypnotizing. This is Rachel in her own words, as she told me in an email: I’ve been practicing photography as a hobby for somewhere around four years, but as of now I still haven’t gotten…

32 Mesmerizing Photos of Vortices, From Soap Bubbles to Spiral Galaxies

Vortices are beautiful and mysterious, found at every imaginable scale—from soap bubbles to black holes. They’re so ubiquitous, in fact, that we tend to overlook them. But new research shows that studying the simplest vortices could glean surprising scientific insights. Just look at the wonderful vortex shining in rainbow colors in the photo above. It…

Behold One of the Biggest Controlled Skyscraper Implosions Ever

It took more than 2,000 pounds of explosives to bring down this 32-story tower in Frankfurt yesterday—roughly the same amount as a Mark 84 bomb. Thankfully, since we live in the age of YouTube, there are plenty of astounding videos of the demo. A controlled implosion like this is way more difficult than it sounds.…

Latest Windows 8.1 Update Leaks Onto File-Sharing Sites

Microsoft’s latest Windows 8.1 update has hit the web early ahead of its March release, letting those happy to take a punt on an unofficial, torrented version of the update check out what’s in store for the divisive operating system. Most of the obvious improvements deal with better keyboard and mouse support, such as a…

This Beautiful Tintype Portrait of Hoffman Will Haunt Us Forever

This haunting tintype photo is probably the last studio portrait of Philip Seymour Hoffman. It was taken on January 19, 2014 at 08:59:11 PM, at The Collective and Gibson Lounge, during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead on Sunday in his Manhattan apartment. He was 46…

How Two Men Made Low-Res Fonts Look Good Forever

While we now take crisp-looking typography for granted, it wasn’t always that way. Back in the 80s, low-res fonts looked dreadful—but fortunately two men changed all that. When John Warnock and Chuck Geschke left Xerox PARC in 1982, they had with them years of experience in computer graphics, laser printers, fonts and design. In time,…