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“It’s dead quiet, and you feel like you’re the last man on earth. That’s incredibly rare in New York,” says urban explorer Steve Duncan. Filmmaker Jon Kasbe followed Duncan—who many of you might recognize from 2011’s Undercity—down a sewer for the short film, A Beautiful Waste, released in July. As they make their way through…
For over a century, every last bit of paper money that’s circulated around the United States has come from just one single supplier, Crane & Co. But as The Washington Post found out, that century of loyalty was almost for naught when the 90s came along and brought with it a new menace to American…
An intricate device like a camera doesn’t seem like an obvious build-it-yourself project. But when there’s a will there’s a way, and one way is Last Camera. It’s a 35mm film camera you put together for some real-life Instagrammy, analog fun. This little black box comes with 2 interchangeable lenses, a 22mm and 45mm. It…
Because it never gets boring to look inside creatures, living or dead, here’s Cleared: a photo series by Adam Summers that straddles the super-narrow divide between science and art, showing deceased fish in various states of transparency to expose their complex insides. https://gizmodo.com/ges-new-fast-ct-scanner-captures-insane-images-in-a-he-1482904872 The project was created by Summers, associate director of the Comparative Vertebrate…
San Francisco’s tech companies are bringing it down, L.A.’s having trouble growing up, plus sexy cabbies, vertical cemeteries, Bloomberg’s next act, and much, much more in this week’s Urban Reads. Michael Bloomberg is starting an urban think tank and taking most of his City Hall team with him [New York Times] The 60-year-old theory that…
Well, this is a bummer. FAT—the UK collective that’s built some of the most annoyingly brilliant buildings of the past two decades—is no more. Haven’t heard of FAT? Let us explain. FAT—it stands for Fashion Architecture Taste—is Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland, and Sam Jacob, three British architects who created their own studio in the early…
As wonderful as Apple’s MagSafe connector is at preventing your laptop from accidentally getting yanked off a desk, it’s far from perfect. Try actually using your laptop on your lap, or in bed, and you’ll find your power cord disconnecting more often than not. A problem that’s far from dire, but one that is thankfully…
Here’s what it looks like to fire a weapon. Oh? You’re not impressed? Right. I understand. Because every first person shooter video game that kids play these days looks exactly like this. Hell, to be honest, the video games might look even more realistic than real life (if that makes any sense). YouTube user cheekflapperer…
Oh, the things humans will do to get their grubby hands on gold—a metal mostly prized for its ornamental use, hoarded in bank vaults and jewelry boxes, though we’ve arbitrarily decided it’s worth, uh, its weight in gold.* The deepest gold mine in the world is Mponeng, a 2.5-mile hole in the ground in South…
Gizmodo’s “Best Books of 2013” list has just been posted and includes three contributions from your humble blogger of all things retrofuture. Included on my list is the new Nikola Tesla biography by W. Bernard Carlson. It really is the best Tesla biography ever written and avoids the hero worship that has unfortunately tainted most…
This photo of a Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter being tested in a wind tunnel comes from the archives of the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, the national aeronautics and space research centre of Germany. It doesn’t feel like a photo from 1940. This facility actually looks from the future. Most people associate wind tunnels…
2013 was another good year for books, those dry old lumps of paper and ink, so we’ve rounded up the year’s best in tech, science, design, architecture, urbanism, food, and more. We’ve also tapped our friends at Paleofuture and Edible Geography for their own lists, which appear below—and we hope to hear from all of…
Our nation’s talking heads love to blame real world crime on various forms of media. Whether it’s sexual video games, poopmouth song lyrics, or violent movies, we’re led to believe that junk media creates deviance. But this is far from a new phenomenon. In fact, your great-great grandparents probably heard identical warnings about the new…
A built-in battery-powered light is the easiest way to check the time on your watch in the middle of the night. But what if your watch doesn’t have a battery? Schofield’s new Blacklamp Carbon features a hand-wound movement, but still manages to stay visible in the dark of night thanks to a material developed by…
Almost 400 firefighters battled a blaze in an unfinished building in Guangzhou, China, until the wee hours of the morning earlier today. The tower has been incomplete since 1998—since then, it’s been used as a warehouse rather than as a luxury residence. [Photo: ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images]
What are you going to remember from the year 2013? Will you think of all the great people we’ve lost? Will you think about Miley’s tongue? Will you think about Game of Thrones or Orange Is the New Black? Sports? Twerking? Viral videos? Movies? iPhones? Xbox Ones and PS4s? Maybe all of that. Maybe more.…
Roku continue to impress with both the features and the pricing of its streaming boxes. The Roku LT, the budget model of the 2013 lineup, is available for $37 today, which is $2 more than a Chromecast. It drops the resolution to 720p and doesn’t have the headphone out on the remote, but also, it’s…
Anyone who’s ever driven in a southern thunderstorm knows that windshield wipers suck. They smear water more than they remove it, and, my God, is that “whip-flick” sound annoying. Well, worry no more. McLaren says it’s doing away with wipers altogether in favor of fighter jet technology that keeps windshields clean. The British supercar company…
A federal judge just ruled the NSA’s widespread collection of phone records is most likely unconstitutional and gave the go ahead for plaintiffs to file a lawsuit. And pending appeal, the judge said that the data collection should be halted. Of course, until that appeal goes through, the NSA will continue spying. The ruling sounds…
What’s that you say? Santa’s existence is actually impossible? Sure you may have heard some of these facts stated before, but never this musically—or with this much absurd animation. Sorry to steal your joy, but the big man would have to travel 3,000 times the speed of sound to reach every child in the world.…
