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Pressing a button is so 20th century. And winking or asking Google Glass to do it for you seems like quite a lot of effort, too. So, for the truly lazy, Neurocam analyzes your brainwaves to work out when you want a picture taking. Demoed at Japan’s Human Sensing 2013 conference, Neurocam uses brainwave sensors…
If the hype is to believed, Li-Fi could be the next Wi-Fi. And if that’s the case, then we’re excited—because a team of researchers has just smashed the record for visible light data transmission, pushing it to a staggering 10Gbit/s. https://gizmodo.com/chinese-scientists-invent-lightbulbs-that-emit-wi-fi-1447764194 A team of researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, Strathclyde, Oxford, and…
Motorola has announced that its new research and development team, called Project Ara, is developing an “open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones”. In other words, it wants your phone to come in bits. The guys at Moto—who have been working with Phonebloks—claim that they “want to do for hardware what the Android platform…
Scientists have invented a new low-cost method to create a safe welding flame using water as its only fuel. Called the Safeflame, the device splits water in oxygen and hydrogen, recombining them both outside of the torch’s mouth to create fire. And the only byproduct is water. In the past, this method was too pricey…
Remember kids, synthetic drugs are all fun and games until somebody loses an ear. If you dig this video, head over to The ABC’s of Death—Part Deux website and vote for it (or like it or however kids do it on the streets these days) so the guy what made it can win something or…
Living in cities, driving on freeways, going to work, sitting in cubicles, shopping at supermarkets, surrounding yourself in urban density and all around stepping away from nature makes it easy to forget how beautiful she can be. We should never forget. Photographer Shane Black and two of his friends quit their jobs this past summer…
Stop me if you’ve heard this before but… the Nexus 5, probably the most anticipated Android phone right now, popped up on the Internets before it was officially announced. https://gizmodo.com/nexus-5-pops-up-on-google-play-for-350-1447507439 In fact, it looks like the Nexus 5 has revealed its full spec list too. Can’t we just start buying this phone already, Google? This…
The beauty of math and numbers and formulas and equations and so forth is that they can work without you ever understanding how the hell they work. What seems like complete randomness is actually just a math problem! Like this slick trick with a deck of cards. Take twenty or so cards and flip over…
You could make crazy DIY Halloween decorations to scare the creeps out of trick or treaters in your neighborhood. You could dress up drones as flying ghosts or ghoulish goblins to strike fear into child-sized candy beggars. You could be the cranky old man who turns his light off and seeps scare by ignoring costume…
Here are some ideas for your Halloween costume: go as this glass squid or any of the freaky marine beasts selected by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Check out these weird creatures in these videos:
There’s both an art and a science to making the perfect mixed drink—it’s not just the stiffness of the drink but also the flashiness of the pour. At the 2013 BarBot event last weekend, guests were treated to an evening of mechanical bartenders that put Brian Flanagan’s bottle-flipping skills to shame. BarBot is an annual…
Imagine a building with a façade that opens and closes like a flower blooming. It feels like the building is alive, but in reality, it’s just inspired by life. A material that can make this happen actually does exist—it’s called Flectofin, and it’s based on a flower called the Bird of Paradise. Flectofin’s been around…
At one point and time, carrying a DSLR made you feel special. In a sea of point and shoot cameras you looked like a bonafide professional photographer—even if you never ventured past your DSLR’s Auto shooting mode. But these days everyone’s got a prosumer camera hanging around their necks, and the best way to feel…
Interaction designer Chris Woebken has taken Halloween to its logical conclusion: helping one species pass for another. As nothing more than a weekend project—more of an autumnal joke, not a serious art project—Woebken decided to extend Halloween to man’s best friend… and to dress a dog up like a cat, complete with eye holes punched…
Is there a greater honor than being asked to carve the Thanksgiving turkey? Not on that particular day of the year there isn’t. The last thing you want to do is screw things up, and that means finding the right tool for the job. That could be Joseph Joseph’s Duo Carve set, which features an…
Hey, the Nexus 5 rumor mill doesn’t sleep. These are supposedly some of the first images taken with the smartphone’s camera, and from the looks of this shot, it might not be quite as horrible as its predecessor. https://gizmodo.com/the-best-smartphone-camera-5982478 The pics—which popped up on Google+ and have since been removed—had a resolution of 3264 x…
Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones, 14.1 million iPads, and 4.6 million Macs in the last three months, on the way to earnings $7.5 billion of pure profit. Both revenue and earnings were down from the same quarter last year but… uh… yeah. That is still a huge chunk of dough.
You’re looking at the oldest human brain in the world. About 1400 years older than the previous cerebral pudding discovered near the University of York—which looks really gross, see below—this one is four thousand years old. Scientists have a weird theory about how it survived all this time. Although the brain appears to be sightly…
BASF, the largest chemical company in the world, has finally put its materials knowledge to good use: By creating a ridiculously over-engineered penny-farthing, the big-wheeled bike of the 19th century. This conceptual velocipede might never make it to the local bike shop (in fact, it definitely won’t), but that doesn’t make it any less fun…
The letterpress was a huge leap forward for mass communication when Johannes Gutenberg perfected the moveable type machine way back in the 1450s. These days, it’s considered a specialty craft. But this tiny letterpress is thoroughly modern: It’s assembled with parts printed on a standard 3D printer. Whoa. This meta-machine was designed by Technifico and…
