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At this point, nobody’s surprised to hear that the authorities can track your cell phone. But what you might not realize is just how easy and how incredibly cheap it is. On Thursday, a pair of privacy researchers published a paper in the Yale Law Journal that breaks the cost of surveillance out into handy…
Perhaps you remember the wildly successful but also controversial Glowing Plant Kickstarter. Perhaps you’re even patiently waiting for your glow-in-the-dark seeds, due to arrive in…September 2014. For the less patient among you, another company has beat the Kickstarted folks to the glow-in-the-dark punch. St. Louis-based Bioglow will be auctioning off twenty glow-in-the-dark cultivated tobacco plants,…
This is the interior of one of the four Doomsday Planes operated by the Air Force. These planes would keep the Secretary of Defense and the top brass of the US military alive in case of massive terrorist attacks, nuclear strikes, asteroids hitting Earth, super volcano eruptions, and zombie invasions. Based at Offutt Air Force…
A backup battery for your phone is only useful if you’re willing to carry it with you. So Native Union has come up with the JUMP which integrates a little extra power into your smartphone’s charging cable, ensuring it’s light enough to carry and always has a little bit of extra power to keep your…
Building the perfect battery is a hard problem. Batteries either too inefficient or too expensive or too unstable to power the renewable gadgets of the future. But a team of Harvard scientists just built a new kind of battery with a molecule found in food, and it could solve these problems. The molecules in question…
Even with perfect typography, a stunning design, or a novel shape, a business card is still an antiquated way to share your contact details. So the folks over at TechKeys—makers of custom keyboards—wanted to design a card that reflected their work and left a lasting impression—and what better way to do that than with a…
Africa is home to some of the poorest road networks in the world, which act as a major barrier for trade, education and healthcare. Not for long, though—as it’s embarking on a frenetic road-building exercise that could revolutionize the entire continent. You only need look at the numbers to realize that Africa’s roads need attention.…
These days, a set of velcro straps across the top of your kicks just isn’t enough to impress your sneaker freak friends. To guarantee you’re the envy of everyone on your block, forget about dropping hundreds on the latest pair of Nikes—instead, strap a pair of these Light Kicks LED strips to your feet. https://gizmodo.com/nike-has-put-the-best-thing-from-the-1980s-into-a-set-o-1468198892…
Last week, we learned that digital music sales dropped for the first time since iTunes in 2013. Thanks to Billboard and Nielsen’s fresh year-end music report, we now know that there was significant 32 percent uptick in music streams in 2013. This doesn’t prove that Spotify and the like are killing music sales, but it…
So remember a few weeks ago when Target admitted that hackers had swiped the data of 40 million customers, but no one needed to worry because it was all encrypted? Well, Target’s starting to realize that quite a bit more data was swiped than it previously thought—specifically, the names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail…
A bulb is a bulb is a bulb. Wait, no, not—not when it looks like this it isn’t. These energy-efficient bulbs make low power consumption a form of high art. Designed by Plumen, which arguably created the first nice-looking energy efficient bulb back in 2011, this is the second model: Plumen 002. And, as every-day,…
Have you ever slept beneath the bones of a T-Rex? What about next to the Declaration of Independence? It’s been nearly three decades since I read From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but the plot—two kids run away from home and take up residence at the Met, eventually solving a mystery,…
PlayStation Now—the streaming game service—will, weirdly, require a proprietary DualShock controller to play PS3 games on TVs, phones and tablets.
I hate the Porsche Panamera with a vengeance* but this video of a man melting its ice sculpture in reverse is quite pretty. I find the illusion of the ice being created from flames quite mesmerizing. * Porsches are for two people only—sorry frustrated rich parents with no taste. SPLOID is a new blog about…
Humans like to see things where there’s nothing but visual patterns. Even NASA: the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has captured an “image [that] shows the energized remains of a dead star, a structure nicknamed the Hand of God after its resemblance to a hand.” Except now it looks more like The Flaming Fist of…
Google has updated Gmail with a feature that some of you might not appreciate. Now, simply typing in someone’s name into the ‘To’ field will automatically grab their address from Google+, and, worse, the service is applied to your account by default. Google announced the feature on its Gmail blog yesterday, and have clarified to…
It’s not just because it’s dark. Well, it partly is, but more accurately it’s a result of a complex series of biological processes which give rise to something called circadian rhythms. This video by Sci Show explains how they work—and how they regulate all kinds of different processes in our bodies, from eating to behavior.…
It’s no secret that China is choking on smog, but the problem has gotten so bad recently that hotels have started issuing guests with gas masks to use during their stay. For real. https://gizmodo.com/beijing-is-choking-on-smog-5976356 Redditor Mthomaseddy posted this picture of an elegantly packaged gas mask, which was sat in his room when he arrived at…
Headphones can transform any awkward social situation. Fact. [Doghouse Diaries]
Google has given Google Play Services for Android a big update—adding turn-based multiplayer support, a preliminary Google Drive API, and improved battery life for all users who run Location Reporting.
