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FLIR, or Forward-Looking Infrared, has long been a staple technology for militaries around the world, allowing operations under the cover of night without the blinding shortcomings of conventional night vision goggles. And slowly but surely, this heat-sensing imaging technology is working its way into the consumer market. Specifically, onto your iPhone. At the Association for…
Smart phones are awesome. We walk around with amazing amounts of computing power in our pocket, connected to the entirety of human knowledge. Also: Plants Vs. Zombies! Angry Birds! Grindr! But what if you bought a $600 iPhone and now just want it to be a plain phone? https://lifehacker.com/how-i-turned-my-iphone-into-a-simple-distraction-free-1175739059
Remember our friendly white hat hacker, Khalil Shreateh, who got stiffed on his just reward after identifying a Facebook bug that let him post on Zuckerberg’s wall? Well, looks like the hacker community has no intention of letting their buddy’s bank account fall to the wayside. After setting up a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe, security…
You know cable companies are unpopular. ISPs are, generally, too. But seeing just how unpopular is just too funny. As in: pretty much the entire bottom end of the list was made up of cable and internet companies. The chart here is made up of a survey of 10,000 consumers on 235 companies, across 19…
The Desert Lotus Hotel doesn’t seem like a particularly convenient place to vacation. Embedded in the rolling dunes of Inner Mongolia, the hotel is more than 500 miles west of Beijing, far from the coast or any major metropolitan centers. But it is close to one thing: Baotou, the Chinese city that mines more than…
Graphene has the power to change computing forever by making the fastest transistors ever. In theory. We just haven’t figured out how yet. Sound familiar? Fortunately, scientists have just taken a big step closer to making graphene transistors work for real. https://gizmodo.com/where-do-all-those-amazing-discoveries-go-anyway-1053115334 Graphene transistors aren’t just fast; they’re lightning fast. The speediest one to date…
Vestas‘ latest and greatest offshore wind turbine, the 8 MW V164, is designed to operate for a quarter century with minimal upkeep. To ensure that these massive turbines (their blade sweep area is equal to three football fields) are robust enough for 25 years of service in the North Atlantic, Vestas tortures its housings atop…
Samsung’s Android-powered Galaxy Camera was the first dedicated shooter that let users instantly upload their photos to their favorite social networks. And while it offered better image quality and controls over a smartphone’s built-in camera, at $500, plus the cost of a data plan, it was a tough sell. But at just $200, plus a…
Every year, China puts out millions of college graduates who can’t find jobs. Without any possibility to have a house of their own, they go to live into huge compounds—often underground—where they share rooms and bunk beds. They call them the “ant tribes.” https://kotaku.com/a-look-into-the-homes-of-chinas-ant-tribe-1107163431
We already knew Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it turns out it took a lot longer to build than anyone imagined. According to The New York Times, last summer an archeological dig about 11 miles from central Rome revealed that the Romans were erecting monuments far earlier than we previously thought. How much…
Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for crimes related to stealing government documents and sharing them with WikiLeaks. The sentence, handed down by Judge Denise Lind, is significantly less than the 60 years that the government asked the Army colonel to hand down. The judge did send the young soldier through…
A Buffalo, NY, parking meter mechanic was running a pretty lucrative criminal conspiracy one quarter at a time. Over eight years, he managed to steal $210,000, or five tons of quarters from modified meters. That’s a lot of pocket change. James Bagarozzo, quarter-rich criminal mastermind, had worked out a pretty good system for himself. As…
Some of these eight men and women will go to Mars and land on an asteroid for the first time in the history of humankind. Through rigorous tests, NASA selected them from 6,100 candidates to plan and carry the next space missions beyond Earth orbit. We can call them the Orion Eight, after the new…
Heist movies like Ocean’s Twelve and Entrapment often feature the now-cliché laser-filled room that requires a limber thief to skillfully navigate the beams lest they trigger an alarm. And as old hat as that’s become, it would admittedly still be pretty fun to try it in real life—so the folks at Nerdworking built one for…
Quadcopters offer extreme precision and control in flight, not to mention the ability to take off and land vertically. But compared to the traditional plane design used for most drones, their speed and long range capabilities are limited. So an Arizona-based drone builder called Latitude Engineering hopes to capture the best of both worlds with…
In July, Mercer published its current list of the most expensive cities in the world. Curious about the cost of living for expats, we created a collection of the priciest apartments and rentals in these cities. But what about hotels? How much will one night in the world’s most expensive towns set you back? Based…
Having teamed up with Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson, Mark Zuckerberg has plans to make the Internet available to the entire world (of course he does). If you were in any doubt about how Internet.org plans to do that, you should watch this video interview from CNN’s New Day show. https://gizmodo.com/facebook-wants-to-get-everybody-in-the-world-on-the-int-1175829249 If you wanna read…
Choice is a wonderful thing, but when it comes to digital communication, perhaps we’re starting to drown in a sea of instant message apps and chat clients. Hangouts, WhatsApp, Facebook Chat, Google Voice, Skype, a regular phone call? So many ways to contact people, and little chance of ever knowing which is best. Maybe we…
This hard shell suitcase might look like just another piece of high-end luggage, but scratch its surface and you’ll realise it’s made from recycled carpet. No, really. Developed by New Zealand designer Daniel Mclaughlin, Terracase is a hard shell suitcase made from a heady mixture of recycled carpets and bio resin derived from rapeseed oil.…
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Vevo has signed a big deal with Samsung and Apple—and may make a big announcement about an arrival on new platforms this week.
