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Sure, tech ads repeat the same tropes over and over and over. But as The Week points out, Samsung’s first ad for Galaxy Gear is strikingly similar to Apple’s first ad for the iPhone. Samsung’s spot premiered yesterday during Sunday’s NFL games. It walks you through all the times we’ve seen fancy watches crop up…
LG unveiled the “world’s first flexible OLED panel for smartphones” on Monday morning and bragged about how products with “enhanced performance and differentiated designs” would follow next year. A fully flexible smartphone is probably not going to be among those exciting new things, however. Flexible displays are new and exciting, and there’s no reason to…
In a sport where the difference between winning and losing is measured in thousandths of a second, squeezing every last ounce of speed out of your F1 racecar is absolutely imperative. A new collaboration between GE and Caterham aims to do just that—by leveraging the power of big data and materials science. First of all,…
CT, or computed tomography, scans are to x-rays what 3D movies are to classic 2D flicks. But instead of being just some gimmick to lure patrons into a theater, CT scans result in 3D models that let doctors study internal medical conditions in amazing detail. But why stop there? Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have…
Learning to play a new instrument is an exciting endeavour until you get caught up in the hours of mind-numbing practice required to get proficient. But if learning the piano is up next on your bucket list, you’ll be desperate to get your hands on this clever projection system that makes learning the ivories easier—and…
For a while, novelty celebrity voiceovers were all the rage when it came to GPS navigation units. But the Sunshine Aquarium in Tokyo has come up with a far more adorable way to get to your destination: by following a muster of virtual waddling penguins. Penguin NAVI allows tourists to find their way from anywhere…
Scientists have developed a new technique which allows them to visualize gene activity in thousands of cell, simultaneously. That will allow them to understand how our cells function like never before—and it looks damn pretty, too. While scientists have been able to measure gene activity in cells for a long ol’ time, until now the…
LG has confirmed that rumors about a new curved smartphone are accurate—and it’ll appear in November.
Unboxing videos are perhaps the biggest waste of YouTube storage to grace the planet: watch a pimple-faced youth take a phone out of a cardboard container and play with some basic functions! Woo. But here’s one worth watching. Put together by the guys at Numberphile, this calculator unboxing does a wonderful job of parodying the…
Thom Yorke has already made his feelings on music streaming services known: he doesn’t like them. But now he’s spoken at length about Spotify and the current state of music distribution and he’s… well, angry. Speaking to the Mexican website Sopitas, Yorke has expanded on some of his criticisms of Spotify and its ilk. Here…
One starts, then everyone follows. Well, possibly: leaked images of HTC’s rumored new One Max smartphone appear to show a fingerprint scanner nestled amongst its hardware, a la iPhone 5S. The pictures, which turned up on Chinese social network Sina Weibo, show the monstrous phone with its back removed, where a fingerprint scanner sits between…
Two years ago a NASA engineer named Mark Rober emailed us a halloween costume that used two iPads to make it look like you had a gaping hole in your stomach. This year the system is both more refined, and more gruesome. Last year’s costumes (dubbed Digital Dudz) were cool if, frankly, a little janky.…
You remember this, right? Moldovan pop group O-Zone released “Dragostea din tei” in Romania in 2003, and it got really popular when it had its worldwide release in 2004. Then callow youth Gary Brolsma of New Jersey posted a video of himself lip syncing and dancing along to the song. Obviously, because it was 2004,…
In March we covered Memoto, a lifelogging camera that takes two photos a minute while you’re wearing it. It was in the preorder stage then and with $500,000 more than expected from its November Kickstarter, it had an ambitious April shipping timeframe. Which obviously didn’t happen. BUT now it’s actually going to ship on November…
Ross Ulbricht’s arrest last week included an FBI seizure of about 26,000 Bitcoins. But you can’t just stick Bitcoins under your mattress. Even if you’re the FBI they have to be in a wallet somewhere. And people know where. Internet denizens found the wallet and have been contributing tiny sums, we’re talking 0.00000001 BTC here,…
Not to be outdone by the sheer magnitude of the NSA’s PRISM program, Russia’s FSB security service is preparing to monitor every single communication made by competitors and spectators alike during the 2014 winter games in Sochi, according to a report by The Guardian. The system, called Sorm, will be supported through new infrastructure installed…
I watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air from a young age. I was so young that my hands weren’t strong enough to turn the knobs of my parents’ retro TV. I’m totally serious. I had to have someone turn on the TV and change the channel for me. And somehow there was never an adult…
People have instagrammed and live tweeted from pretty much everywhere. The peak of a mountain, the birth of a baby, the toilet. Users don’t seem to crave permission. But somehow the idea for a social media-themed hotel keeps coming up, and The New York Times notes that another one started in Majorca this summer. Sol…
Ah the second anniversary of someone’s death. The biography is a bestseller. The movie with Ashton Kutcher is out. The mourning process is on its natural course. But one more thing has to happen: new action figures. Sure, there may be a model from February, but that was then and this is now. Enter the…
There are a lot of wall chargers and docks out there for iOS devices. A lot. So many. But it’s nice to see one that’s simple, portable, flexible, and smartly designed. It’s just sort of a relief. If you need this, here it is, and it’s 10 bucks. Done. The Rolio by Blue Lounge uses…
