Tech News

Laser-Scanning Hundreds of Artificial Caves Beneath Nottingham

There are more than 450 artificial caves excavated from sandstone beneath the streets and buildings of Nottingham, England—including, legendarily, the old dungeon that once held Robin Hood. Not all of these caves are known even today, let alone mapped or studied. The city sits atop a labyrinth of human-carved spaces—some of them huge—and it will…

Upscale To 4K, Cheap Roku And Cheaper Lightning Cables, iTunes Credit

The Roku 3 is the best streaming box, so don’t miss this discount on it which almost certainly won’t last long. If you need a refresher on why this is the streaming box to buy, check out the Gizmodo review. $85. [Amazon] Don’t forget to vote on your favorite gaming keyboard. https://kotaku.com/co-op-the-best-gaming-keyboard-top-6-nominations-1447953582 Tell us what…

“The Streets Are Hollow”: On the Job With an Archaeologist in NYC

This summer, as workers labored away at a construction site at the southern tip of Manhattan, a team of archaeologists following their progress made an amazing discovery: Booze—or more specifically, the bottles it came in—from the late 1700s. Right underneath our feet. Who were these intrepid urban archaeologists? They’re called Chrysalis Archaeology, a nimble nine-person…

The Technology of Archaeology

Following on from this weekend’s International Archaeology Day, Gizmodo thought we’d take a quick look at some of the uses of digital technology in discovering, researching, and documenting historic sites, from the ancient to the comparatively recent, from the urban to the rural. It’s our own day of archaeology here on the site. Archaeology, perhaps…

Behold the Infinite Looping Glory of GIFmodo

We’ve been waiting for this day for months. Until now, it had lived as nothing more than a whisper of a dream—a fantasy. But today and without further ado, we proudly present to you the bizarre bounty that is and will forever be GIFmodo. https://gizmodo.com/heres-the-biggest-animated-gif-party-ever-and-youre-inv-5951078 It is here, in gifmodo.gizmodo.com, that we will be dropping…

Modern Day China Painted By North Korean Propaganda Artists

At first glance, The Beautiful Future—a series of paintings made in Pyongyang, North Korea—looks like standard propaganda fare: Happy citizens, lush farmlands, and bustling industry. Except something’s amiss: In the background of each painting stands an iconic piece of Beijing architecture—from the CCTV building to the Olympic Water Cube. According to The Guardian‘s Oliver Wainwright,…

Watch This Madman Recreate the iOS 7 Homescreen in Microsoft Word

Observe, citizens, as this delightfully talented and probably unhinged gentleman recreates the iOS 7 from scratch using only the tools in Microsoft Word. There is no good explanation for this, but I still can’t tear my eyes away from it. Designer Vaclav Krejci has skills! Besides building basically every last detail of the OS, he…

Discovery of DNA “Biological Clock” Could Get Us Closer to Immortality

The identification of the DNA markers associated with aging has brought us one step closer to the ever-elusive Fountain of Youth. UCLA geneticist Steve Horvath just published details about the discovery, and says that this could actually lead to drugs that reverse the process of aging. “Ultimately, it would be very exciting to develop therapy…

A First-Person Account of Debugging a Live Saturn V Rocket

We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now. This story is something that I think about in those times to…

Air passengers may get exposed to dangerous dark lightning radiation

It sounds like the beginning of Zombies on a plane—the movie starring Samuel L. Jackson that I want to see next year—but scientist have proven the existence of something called dark lightning, an invisible force that can expose unsuspecting airline passengers to sizable amounts of gamma ray radiation. “Passengers flying through a thunderstorm when a…

A Map of What Every Single Country Leads the World In

Congratulations, America! You have more lawnmower deaths than anywhere in the world. Likewise, cheers to Madagascar on the lemurs. It turns out that if you look hard enough, every country is the best at something. And this wonderful map from Doghouse Diaries looks very, hilariously hard. While it’s not like you need Wikipedia to tell…

A Mathematician Found the Formula For the Perfectly Proportioned Pizza

Making pizza at home can be healthier and cheaper than getting delivery, and you can customize it exactly how you prefer. But nailing down the size and amount of toppings for the perfect pie can be tricky, or at least it was until a mathematician from the University of Sheffield developed an actual formula that…

Building Sand Castles Is Less Frustrating When You Let a Robot Do It

What if there was a way to enjoy a day at the beach no matter the season or weather outside? California-born artist Jonathan Schipper may have just come up with the perfect solution: An art installation inside a gallery featuring a hot tub standing in for the ocean, and tons of salt doubling as sand.…

Looks Like Facebook Is Broken Right Now (Updated: It’s Back!)

Monday morning got off to a rough start for Facebook, where users reported widespread difficulty updating their status, liking and commenting on posts. The extent of the outage is so far unclear, but if Twitter whining is any indication, it’s affecting just about everybody worldwide. We tried posting on Facebook ourselves with no luck. Luckily…

Microsoft just brought out a Surface RT recovery image for users who had trouble installing Windows RT 8.1 over the weekend. Seems Microsoft had to pull the software this weekend due to installation issues. [Microsoft via ZDnet]

A Photographic Tour of Russia’s Disappearing Soviet-Era Cinemas

The phenomenon of the multiplex cinema goes back decades in America, but in Russia, the verdict is still out. Some residents aren’t happy about watching the grand—though often decaying—movie theaters of their youth traded for bland 32-screen mega theaters. Moscow-based photographer Sergey Novikov is among them. Novikov is a professional photographer who spent years documenting…

WSJ: The New iPad Mini Will Be Retina After All

With Apple’s big iPad event a day away, it’s the last second to get in any predictions, and the Wall Street Journal has a good one. According to their sources, there is definitely a retina iPad Mini in the works. https://gizmodo.com/our-new-ipad-liveblog-starts-right-here-on-10-22-at-12p-1446693465 The Wall Street Journal doesn’t pin down a release time or price for the…

Overhead Cams Replace Bored Humans in Honda’s Driverless Valet System

If worrying about your vehicle and personal possessions has always made you hesitant about using valet parking, Honda will alleviate your fears with a new system that replaces clumsy valet drivers with overhead tracking cameras and software smart enough to juggle an entire lot full of cars. First and foremost, the system does require a…

The Sony Xperia Z1S Might Be a Mini Z1 For Everyone Else

Remember the impressive-looking Xperia Z1F handset, shrinking down the flagship Sony Xperia Z1 to a more pocketable size? Some bad news; it’s pencilled in only for Asian markets. The good news? Looks like we’re getting the Xperia Z1S instead, which is basically the same phone, with a different name. That’s according to perennial leaker EvLeaks,…

Nokia Leaks Details of Its First Oversized Lumia Handset

With Windows Phone 8 now geared up for larger displays, you can expect to start seeing correspondingly large handsets. Like, for instance, the much-rumored Lumia 1520—which Nokia has now leaked details of. https://gizmodo.com/heres-the-gigantic-nokia-windows-phone-we-might-never-1263159607 The company has prematurely posted details of its first larger Windows phone on its official Chinese Tmall store. There are no images,…