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This week in tech reads, a deeper look at privacy, money, and the way that design affects how students learn. Ryan Lizza asks, “why won’t the president rein in the intelligence community?” [The New Yorker] Martin Austermuhle examines what Washington, D.C. does with the data from over 200 million license plate images snapped by plate…
This was a great week of learning on Gizmodo! We discovered the right way to store your Mac charger, the wrong way to pave a Russian road, looked at why a gluten-free diet could be bad for you, and debunked nine of the internet’s most popular and fictitious “fun facts.” Let’s review. The Fascinating Story…
Twitter’s oft-rumored Nearby function, a timeline showing tweets based on your current location, has been seen in the wild, according to The Wall Street Journal. Twitter wouldn’t comment except to say they’re always testing new stuff. [WSJ via AllThingsD]
Christopher Nolan’s next epic movie is called Interstellar. It’s about space travel. It comes out a year from today. That’s everything we learned about the movie from this trailer, and we’re dying to know more. Nolan isn’t giving much away with this. A haggard Matthew McConaughey, a pickup truck, a cornfield. But the historical references…
This otherworldly photo is so amazingly weird and exotic that you may think it comes from a secret colonial base in the Jovian moon of Europa. In reality, it’s the Halley VI Research Station in Antarctica as photographed by Antony Dubber, the chef of the British Antarctic Survey. The outstanding photo is part Ice Lab,…
We learned Saturday that Google has purchased Boston Dynamics, the lab of mad scientists behind some of the most awesomely scary robots ever seen. What exactly did Google get out of the deal? An army of jaw-droppingly capable robots that can walk, run, and climb through seemingly any terrain. Let’s meet the team. https://gizmodo.com/google-just-bought-crazy-walking-robot-maker-boston-dyn-1483235880 Atlas…
Waiter service too slow for you? How about a pneumatic tube that spits out sliders at 87 MILES PER HOUR? C One Espresso, a cafe in Christchurch, New Zealand, has concocted just such a plan to deliver mini-burgers straight to your table via pressurized air. The cafe already uses pneumatic tubes to deliver order slips…
You’ve just arrived in Orlando for a holiday with the in-laws, and your bags are on vacation as well—in South Dakota. Here’s how to get your worldly possessions back and get on with your relaxing. So you’re standing at the luggage carousel like an putz. Everybody else on your flight has already gotten their gear…
Google confirmed yesterday that it has acquired Boston Dynamics, maker of creepy walking humanoids and creepy running animal bots. Talk about a power couple. https://gizmodo.com/another-round-with-atlas-darpas-most-unsettling-humano-799804344 Google declined to tell The New York Times how much it paid for the robot engineering company. While Boston Dynamics works closely with the Pentagon to develop battlefield-ready robots, Google…
What do you like to do in your free time? Play boardgames? Watch Netflix? Cook quinoa? These are all perfectly normal ways to while away your days—but German hobbyist Patrick Priebe builds laser guns. This is a perfectly awesome way to spend your free time. Priebe’s latest contraption is a 12-pound aluminum laser rifle that…
The Bell Mechanical describes the drone in question as a work in progress, which begs the question as to how it might be improved. Drones in general have a holistic if not entirely natural aura to them. The distinction is that they often sound self-contained, almost automated, more field recording than composition, and yet they…
Taurobolium, the ancient Roman practice of bull sacrifice, gets a subversively psychedelic re-imagining in animator Galen Pehrson’s video for Avant-folk singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart’s latest work.
You know the drill. Your smartphone’s battery rarely lasts a full day, but carrying around a clunky external backup sounds like a hassle coupled with a burden. Unless you’ve opted for Vorson’s Bookmark which packs a 2,500 mAh battery into a remarkably thin housing that’s just 4.7 millimeters thick. There are magazines thicker than that,…
Twist-off bottle caps are supposed to be easy to open with your bare hands. But there are still some sharp metal edges to deal with, which usually has thirsty people reaching for something to protect their hand, like their shirt tails. Finally, there’s a shirt that’s designed specifically to be up to the challenge. To…
Hold a fluorescent light bulb near this table and it will suddenly flicker on. It looks like magic, but it’s simple science: An embedded circuit produces an electromagnetic field that acts on the mercury gas inside the bulbs, making them glow as if they’re plugged in. The table was designed by Florian Dussopt, a French…
The Oppo N1, a funky swivel-camera smartphone from China, hit U.S. shores this week. If you want to basically guarantee you’ll never see another person carrying your phone’s twin, this is probably the phone you want. The N1 packs a spacious 5.9 inch 1080p screen and 3610 mAh battery, but powers it with a slightly…
There are almost as many fascinating ferrofluid videos on YouTube as there are clips of kittens being cute. So it’s rare to come across one that offers anything new and interesting. But CrazyRussianHacker has done just that with this simple trick that turns ferrofluid into some kind of nightmarish liquid metal spinning saw blade. https://gizmodo.com/heres-the-best-desk-toy-since-newtons-cradle-5946897…
In a week defined by a powerful story about poverty and homelessness in New York, a bit of a bright spot: The City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development chose a scheme for a truly massive affordable housing development in Queens—all told, the development it’s part of will add a whopping 5,000 units to the…
The Washington Post is reporting that, according to a newly released internal document, the National Security Agency isn’t just swiping location data from our cell phones; they actually have the ability to decode private, encrypted data, putting all our texts and calls right at their disposal. https://gizmodo.com/oh-great-the-nsas-using-cell-phones-to-track-your-eve-1476615078 Though US Law may prohibit the NSA from…
This concept for a high-speed personal helicopter was an early expression of what would become in the years immediately after World War II an extremely popular vision of the future. — the 1943 personal helicopter of tomorrow, drawn by Alex Tremulis
