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If skiing isn’t enough of a thrill for you, why not up the ante and zoom through a whole forest? And if that’s still not enough for you, why not make it even scarier by going at warp freaking speed? That’s what Candide Thovex and Aziz Benkrich did. The GoPro footage from their latest ski…
What’s the matter White America? Police brutality and corruption ain’t so harmless when the shoe’s on the other foot, is it.
If archaeology was once about digging through dirt, it is increasingly—like almost every other profession—about programming computers. Bernie Frischer, an Indiana University “archaeo-informaticist,” has came up with a new theory about two Roman monuments. His finding are based on 3D reconstructions of the monuments using video game technology and calculations of the sun’s position 2,000…
Roberta the Robot demonstrates an electric carving knife to Christmas shoppers in the Macy’s department store basement in New York, Nov. 17, 1966. [AP Photo] If Roberta “the robot” looks a bit odd, that might be because she wasn’t actually a robot. She also went by quite a few different names. But boy, was she…
Here’s something you will want in your closet: clothes that never stain. Hell, they never even get wet. This Silic T-shirt basically cleans itself with hydrophobic nanotechnology. That means no matter what you spill on it, it’ll never damage the shirt. It’s not exactly new technology but hydrophobic nanotechnology is something that always feels magical.…
With a breakthrough that will hopefully eventually trickle down to tea kettles, coffee machines, and even showerheads, researchers at the Hamburg Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Germany have devised a way to boil water to 600 degrees celsius in less than a trillionth of a second. To put that into perspective, as the folks…
Twitter lit up with wows Thursday morning as this handsome photograph of Broadway and Franklin Street in Manhattan circa 1850 got passed around. According to one source, it’s “believed to be the earliest photograph taken of New York City.” That would be cool—if it were true. It’s not. Sure it looks old—there’s a horse and…
In 1881, longtime Harper’s cartoonist Thomas Nast created this satirical sketch of what New York would look like by the turn of the century—lampooning new building technologies like the elevator and elevator break. By lambasting the race to build ever-higher, Nastforesaw the future of Lower Manhattan. [PTAK Science Books; Paleofuture]
Sharing a single set of earbuds is bad, but being at the mercy of another person controlling the volume when using a headphone splitter isn’t great either. The folks at Wicked Audio have just solved that problem, thanks to this simple splitter that gives each listener their own volume dial. The Wicked Audio Splitter is…
Not every photo you take on your phone will be good. Many will be terrible. Until now, we’ve used filters in Instagram or Twitter to give these flops a little spunk. Well a new iOS app called Fragment takes a different approach to filters: Rather than adding a gauzy haze over your images, it shatters…
There’s no shortage of vacant real estate in Detroit, which has seen a quarter of its population flee since 2000—it’s estimated that over 78,000 buildings are sitting abandoned. But there are plenty of efforts to bring a new wave of young creatives to town, like this plan to fix up homes and give them to…
This is the Grand Prize Winner of National Geographic’s best photo of the year competition, taken by Seattle-based photographer Paul Souders. It’s titled The Ice Bear, and it features a female polar bear staring at Paul from underwater. It’s an outstanding image, but I think the rest of his series are equally good—or even better!…
Hundreds of pounds of freshly caught fish are express-mailed to a building in the small town of Onjuku, Japan, everyday. There, a team quickly slices and dices the fish into fillets. But this is no kitchen, and the fresh fish are definitely not for consumption. The building belongs to the quasi-governmental Marine Ecology Research Institute,…
Terry Gilliam’s 1985 cult classic Brazil is a wonderfully dark examination of bureaucracy in a brutally oppressive future. But its backdrop — the lead-up to Christmas — makes it one of the best Christmas movies of all time. Unlike Die Hard. Which is a bullshit choice for a favorite Christmas movie. Remember when scenes of…
Imagine if objects built themselves. You just dump raw material into a bucket, wait ten minutes, and BOOM: it’s a beautiful crystal. Turns out this is actually possible using a process called directed assembly. A team of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania recently used this method to build tiny flower-shaped liquid crystals that can…
Remember Jean-Claude Van Damme’s split between two Volvo trucks, the ad that wasn’t computer generated but an actual stunt? Well, Chuck Norris splitting between two Lockheed C-5 Galaxy with a squad of special forces on top of his hat is CGI. But that doesn’t matter, because if Chuck wanted, Chuck would totally do it. https://jalopnik.com/jean-claude-van-dammes-split-between-two-moving-trucks-1464285108…
If you were thinking about baking and building a gingerbread house this holiday season to impress your friends, don’t waste your time. Because Caroline Eriksson has easily claimed the title of ‘most awesome gingerbread thing’ for 2013 with this unbelievably magnificent gingerbread Optimus Prime. We won’t even deduct points for her modeling it after the…
For at least a couple years now, OS X has started to look more and more like iOS. Lion brought Launchpad and columns of app icons. Mavericks gave us Maps and a cleaned up interface. For his imagining of the next iteration of Apple’s operating system, one designer just said, “Screw it. Let’s make them…
In 1968, model Vicki Dunlap was featured in newspapers around the country as the face of the future. But that stylish makeup of tomorrow wasn’t just for show. It was to protect from L.A.’s smog-filled air. From the Associated Press about this “woman of the year 2000”: A Los Angeles engineer thinks women living in…
As Michael Bloomberg’s reign comes to a close, our mayor/billionaire underwriter is talking up his next move, which involves teaching other cities to be more like New York. But behind the scenes, he’s also scrambling to push through dozens of building projects that will define his legacy. A few days ago, the mayor announced his…
