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Chances are you’ve looked at the work of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones at least one time today. The type designers are behind many of the world’s most-loved fonts, like Gotham, made famous by Obama’s 2008 campaign. But according to a nasty legal document making the rounds today, the duo has parted ways. http://gawker.com/font-gods-hoefler-frere-jones-split-in-nasty-corporat-1503534833 As…
The San Pedro de Atacama region of Northern Chile is one of the prettiest and most desolated places in the planet. It also has the clearest and darkest sky on Earth. Nicholas Buer went there to take one of the most beautiful time lapses I’ve seen: The Atacama is well-known for what are arguably the…
Last year, Adobe showed off a demo of RAW photo processing on the iPad. It was impressive, relying on some hefty cloud processing to carry the heavy load of massive uncompressed data files. The end game for that research is almost certainly a version of Lightroom that would work on tablets. It looks like that…
The Wall Street Journal unearthed a recently-filed Amazon patent for “anticipatory shipping,” a setup where the products you buy start traveling to your nearest shipping hub before you’ve clicked the purchase button. Welcome to the future, folks. According to the document filed in December, Amazon would consider things like previous orders and searches, wish lists,…
As simple as a Brita pitcher is to use for filtering water, who has time to wait for gravity to do its work when you’re not at home? With a little downward force on your end, the Grayl cup will purify 16 ounces of water in just 15 seconds, making it better-tasting and safer to…
It hasn’t been a great decade for air travel. And while crappily designed boarding passes aren’t at the very top of my list of axes to grind with the airline industry, they’re more important than you might think. Just take a look at this great version by UK designer Peter Smart for proof. Smart is…
As two-dimensional graphene has become one of the most lusted-after materials in science, many have wondered if there might be a 3D counterpart that we could actually build things with. A team of scientists at the Berkeley Lab just offered an affirmative answer. Well, almost. A team lead by Oxford’s Yulin Chen just confirmed that…
For the same baffling reasons they do many other things, the Japanese have been competing in synchronized team precision walking since 1966. They call it Shuudan Koudou and, as you can imagine, they do it perfectly well and it looks perfectly crazy. Go to 1:30 in the video above to start seeing the crazy action.…
The Roku 3 is arguably the most capable and flexible streaming box you can buy, and that headphone jack-sporting remote is a stroke of genius. If you don’t mind getting a refurb, Newegg will sell you one for just $70 today. Refurb Roku 3 | $70 With Promo Code EMCPWWC56 In addition to looking cool,…
This week’s time capsule news round-up has some future artifacts at a hospital in Ohio, kids in Minnesota who are sure to make you feel ancient, and a wooden box in Australia with “a secret inside.” 1964 loo capsule unearthed in the UK A rather inconveniently placed time capsule has been discovered in the UK…
Smashed your iPhone 5C screen recently? Looks like your days of picking shards of glass from your palms are numbered. Starting next week, Apple will finally start offering in-store screen repairs/replacementsfor 5C usersat any Apple Store. For those of you carrying a 5S, don’t worry; your day will come—eventually.
Target’s heart may be in the right place, but its latest blunder in the holiday hacking fiasco proves that the company still has quite a bit of learning to do when it comes to restoring consumer confidence. Lesson number one: If you’re going to make a conciliatory gesture through email, for god’s sake, don’t make…
If you’ve ever lamented the fact that putting your sofa right next to a warm crackling fireplace was dangerous, carbon nanotubes might one day come to the rescue—again. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology—or NIST—have created a carbon nanotube-based coating that makes the foam used in furniture considerably less flammable. https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-tiniest-saw-is-made-from-diamond-coated-car-1078896278 The…
In a major speech Friday morning, President Obama scaled back the NSA’s surveillance operations and redefines how we collect intelligence overseas. In brief, he ordered the end of the bulk telephony metadata program (in its current from) and spying on foreign leaders. Beyond that, though, the future remains murky. Truth be told, Obama did announce…
When an advanced Soviet submarine sank in the Pacific in 1968, the CIA decided to risk World War III on a daring covert mission, using this massive barge to raise the sunken vessel and pry out its secrets. After Soviet submarine K-129 sank 1,500 miles Northwest of Oahu in March of 1968, few held out…
Every year, the American Institute of Architects invites its members—some 83,000 licensed architects—to enter the buildings they’ve designed in the past five years for an award. It’s about as solid an award as an architect can receive, and this year’s winners were just made public. The projects range from museums to train stations to hotels;…
At 11 AM President Obama is set to announce his reforms to the NSA’s expansive surveillance programs. Leaked information suggests he might be curtailing the agency’s spy powers significantly. What’s he going to announce? Follow along with the stream embedded below. https://gizmodo.com/reuters-obama-to-stop-nsa-spying-on-phone-records-with-1503325216
The last ATM you used probably didn’t feel very cutting-edge compared to your smartphone. That’s because it’s probably running Windows XP, an operating system so old, Microsoft will stop supporting it in April. How did the once-futuristic automatic teller machine get so far behind? Fragmentation, basically. There are over 400,000 ATMs in the U.S., many…
The underwater world is a strange and haunting one. This NASA Earth Observatory photograph captures the ethereal beauty of underwater sand dunes in the Bahamas. Tides and ocean currents shape the underwater sand much like wind on land, but the result is just different enough to be otherworldly. NASA first published this image thirteen years…
Spend too much time rooting around in your Gmail inbox but then somehow manage to miss that one important email when it actually comes in? It’s happened to all of us. But if you set up the awesome Chrome extension Checker Plus for Gmail it never has to happen again. Programmed by Jason Savard, Checker…
