Tech News

Scarlett Johansson Chooses SodaStream Over Humanitarian Group

Scarlett Johansson’s SodaStream endorsement just came at a price; she’s been ousted as an Oxfam International ambassador, with a spokesman citing “a fundamental difference of opinion” as her reason for stepping down (read: fired) from the international humanitarian organization. Controversy started surrounding the actress’s partnership with the group as soon as she came out in…

Insane Russians jumping off 1,000-foot rock walls

Here’s another heartbeat-accelerating video courtesy of your usual bunch of suicidal Russians: Ropejumping off the rock walls of North Nassrani, in Jordan. The crazy thing about ropejumping is that you really risk your physical integrity by doing it. The ropes are not elastic, like in bungee jumping. It all depends on physics: [Unlike bungee jumping]…

Can Motorola Still Be Awesome Without Google?

You can make all kinds of guesses about why Google sold Motorola. Did it only want the patents all along? Is it making nice with Samsung? But a more pressing question has been weighing on our minds: “So uh… what about the Moto X?” In a year where more and more manufacturers surrendered to stock…

Wastewater from Cheese is Generating Electricity in Wisconsin

As the country’s largest producer of cheese, Wisconsin is also the country’s largest producer of cheese waste. But why think of that as a bad thing? In the hands of some enterprising Wisconsinites, what was once wastewater is now electricity. This is, after all, the same state that’s using salty cheese brine to de-ice its…

Mayan Modernism: Designs for a huge museum of Mayan Culture, planned for completion in Guatemala City by 2017, are “inspired by the language of Mayan temple architecture,” according to its architects. I wonder if the jungle overgrowth comes included. [Over,Under and Harry Gugger Studio] Courtesy Harry Gugger Studio and over,under. Rendering completed by Neoscape.

This Wonder Tub Has a Built-in Sink, Speakers, and Digital Controls

It might reduce the number of bathroom fixtures you need to scrub come cleaning day, but the built-in sink on this curvaceous Symbiosis bathtub from Desnahemisfera hopefully doesn’t drain into the tub to conserve water usage—because that would be disgusting. Thankfully, the designers didn’t feel that anyone would want to bathe in toothpaste spit either.…

20 Awesome Stickers From When Your Suitcase Told Stories

There was a time when well-traveled luggage looked like the suitcase above: covered with travel stickers, trophies of every adventurous explorer. My father, who spent his youth traveling across Europe in the 60s and 70s kept his weary suitcase for a long time; as a child, I admired all those well-aged little pictures of remote…

SwiftKey’s Coming to iOS! (Inside a Note-Taking App)

SwiftKey is one of the best keyboard replacements you can get on Android, and now it’s bringing its note-taking talents to iOS with the launch of a new app called SwiftKey Note. Now, its not a keyboard stand-in like its Android brethren—iOS makes that impossible—but the in-app keyboard includes many of the same predictive features…

Twitter Shut Me Down

At 25, I found myself running a very profitable black hat advertising platform. The platform was called Followgen, and I was its sole creator; a self-identified ‘hacker’ and reluctant resident of New York City. At the time, Followgen was just six months old, and I believed its days were numbered. The problem was that Followgen…

Facebook’s Reader App, Called Paper, Is Official–and It’s Beautiful

After much speculative rumor, Facebook this morning announced the arrival of a new standalone iPhone app called Paper. https://gizmodo.com/rumor-facebook-could-launch-a-flipboard-like-reader-th-1501734936 Available February 3rd on iOS, it looks like it’ll be rather more than just a plain old reading app. Rather, it looks to provide most of the content that people use Facebook for day-to-day, but in…

Mark Zuckerberg Talks Fragmenting Apps, Anonymous Facebook and… Poke

Ahead of Facebook’s 10th anniversary on February 4th, Bloomberg Businessweek scored an interview with Mark Zuckerberg to chat about the company’s future. Here are some choice cuts from the social network’s head honcho, before you go read the whole thing. On a shift towards fragmenting Facebook’s apps: “We just think that there are all these…

A Stunning Visualization of the Polar Vortex

There is no shortage of stunning photographs that record how the US was frozen solid earlier this month, but this animated GIF brings the big freeze to life in stunning technicolor. https://gizmodo.com/14-frozen-photos-of-the-polar-vortex-1510773256 Generated by the data visualizer Earth, this animation is taken from a fully interactive version that allows you to zoom in and out,…

The Evolution of the Meter

Though you’ve likely never given it much thought, a universally accepted unit of measurement like the humble meter is an amazing thing. It lets scientists separated by culture, language, race and even thousands of miles of geography work together on equations and problems like they were sitting next to each other. So how did this…

How Architects Use Computational Design to Get You the Best Views

Designing and constructing a building is not an easy task; guaranteeing everyone is happy with their view from the thing is almost impossible. But these days, architects are using intelligent computational design to make sure as many people as possible get an amazing view from their desk. This video shows how it’s possible to use…

This Beautiful Map of the Internet Is Insanely Detailed

Visualizing the internet is almost as difficult as ignoring trolls, but that didn’t stop Jay Jason Simons from having a damn good try. The result is this beautiful and insanely detailed map. Apparently a work-in-progress, the map currently represents a small slice of the internet because, as Simons explains, “otherwise, this map would be unreadable…

Facebook’s New Cold Storage: 10,000 Blu-Ray Discs, 1 Petabyte of Data

Facebook has a whole heap of data to store, but much of it sits so deep within our profiles that it rarely need to be served. So the social network has been trying to develop cold storage systems to file older content away—and a new prototype uses Blu-Ray discs. Whilst talking at this year’s Open…

According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is planning to equip third-party brick-and-mortar retailers with checkout systems built around Kindle Fire tablets and credit card readers. Just like all those stores that already use iPads in the same way?

Rainy Day IDM

Yesterday’s featured track took the chitinous sound of insects as the inspiration for its beats. Today’s track likewise takes nature as its point of origin, but more along the lines of the Aphex Twin song mentioned earlier. In the Aphex Twin piece, “Grey Stripe” off Selected Ambient Works Volume II, the audio is more sound…

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 16 (“Grey Stripe”)

I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a…

The Weirdest Thing on the Internet Tonight: Juste de l’eau

In the golden era of maritime exploration, a lonely piglet dreams of escaping his island home’s isolation only to realize that no matter where you go, you cannot escape yourself. Carlos De Carvalho produced this this visually-arresting animated short.