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Bloomberg Businessweek has a neat little video about the moon photo digitization efforts over at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Oddly enough, this project is currently taking place in an abandoned McDonald’s. McMoon’s, if you will. The current mission of the McMoon’s team is to digitize photographs taken by the two lunar orbiters sent in 1966…
What’s scarier than a huge, thundering jet fighter? Most people would say, “When it’s about to drop out of the sky on my head,” but these daredevil videographers like to be right underneath the monsters. https://jalopnik.com/whats-the-lowest-flyby-ever-recorded-on-video-1166589285
While gold iPhone rumors have been floating around for weeks now, it seems AllThingsD finally has confirmation thanks to “sources in a position to know.” Here’s to imagining King Midas running frantically around Foxconn.
Full disclosure: We’ve been seeing the gold iPhone rumors for weeks now, but have largely been brushing them aside. Fake Apple rumors are as easy to come by as tangled EarPod cords this close to a new product launch, and this one in particular seemed too outlandish, too… tacky. But gold iPhone reports have reached…
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works’ Transformer TX started out as yet another design for the oft-predicted but never delivered flying car. But it’s since turned into an entirely different type of flying machine: an autonomous way for the military to airlift vehicles and cargo to dangerous areas. The Transformer TX is a DARPA-funded project that was…
New York documentarian Paul Sahner’s blog NYC Grid is a lovely project, and amongst the coolest recurring features on the site is Before & After, which compares archival images of New York monuments with photos of the same spot today. Above, we see the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge as it was in 1915, compared…
In the never-ending quest to create a hangover-proof booze, a team of Australian researchers have developed a beer that rehydrates you as you drink, thanks to a healthy serving of electrolytes. Think of it as beer-flavored Gatorade—only less disgusting, presumably. The nutrition researchers hail from the Griffith Health Institute in Queensland, and they say they’ve…
This lady told this guy: “STAY AWAY FROM ME + MY FAMILY YOU ARE SICK TRYING TO RENT AN APARTMENT IN MY BUILDING TO STALK ME. LEAVE ME ALONE!!!” https://jezebel.com/lady-gaga-accuses-perez-hilton-of-stalking-as-their-feu-1165668091
It’s looking increasingly likely that the “budget” iPhone 5C will be announced at an Apple keynote on September 10th. And we can’t get enough of the speculative renders and possible leaks. Today’s highly-suspect rumor? Colorful buttons! https://gizmodo.com/iphone-5c-rumor-roundup-everything-we-think-we-know-1108397130 These (supposedly) leaked parts come from this year’s rumor-blogger standout, Sonny Dickson. We’ve seen colorful iPhone backs like…
Chromecast is great, except for the part where your streaming options are pretty limited. They’re getting better by the day, but soon, it’ll all be a non-issue; a new app called Aircast, can already push all your videos to Chromecast. https://gizmodo.com/chromecast-is-getting-vimeo-and-redbox-instant-and-may-961630039 Koushik Dutta has been working on stream-everything functionality for the Chromecast for a while,…
Ikea’s not the only place you can get a build-your-own-furniture puzzle. If you’re into the whole open source thing, there’s a new repository of completely free furniture designs that are ripe for the downloadin’. The only hurdle? You have to actually make the pieces before you can put ’em together. OpenDesk, furniture designers Joni and…
Apple’s iOS may be undergoing the biggest change since its inception, but that doesn’t mean the spirit of the operating system hasn’t been floating around designer’s heads for hundreds of years. In 1525, before the iPhone was even a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye, German polymath Albrecht Dürer was espousing similar design principles using the…
Taking panoramic photos was once a time consuming process of carefully snapping a series of shots and then manually stitching them back together in Photoshop. Today it’s as easy as just panning across a vista with your digital camera or smartphone, but researchers at Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab have come up with an even…
Look at these poor students taking an exam at a university in Thailand: a paper headband with two paper sheets stapled to each side so they couldn’t look at the next desk during exams. It’s been a scandal in the country because people find it humiliating—understandably. https://kotaku.com/these-anti-cheating-hats-make-me-sad-1165692137
To celebrate the 275th anniversary of clockmaker Pierre Jaquet Droz opening his first workshop, the company that bears his name—even to this day—has created a fantastic timepiece that uses tiny piston-powered bellows to produce a realistic chirping bird sound. But watches have been doing that for years. What’s amazing about this piece is its tiny…
Sony’s bargain model 12GB PS3 is now available in the US for $200. Ditching the hard drive for flash-only memory, the cheapo model originally limited to Europe is now on the Sony store (but out of stock currently) for $70 less than the 500GB model. [Sony]
The J. Paul Getty Museum is home to troves of fascinating historical artifacts. And last week, the museum announced a project to give the public unfettered access to it. The Open Content Program makes 4,600 high-resolution images available for free and for any use whatsoever. Here are 11 gems to help begin your historical journey.…
Time capsules are meant to give future generations a glimpse of what life was like many years ago. But not surprisingly, humans tend to fill time capsules with only the good artifacts of a civilization, making the story seem rosier than it really was. So when archaeologists and researchers want to find out the real…
I saw Lou Donaldson play the other night. Which is crazy, because Lou Donaldson is 86. But he’s still the man. He was joking around and calling out charts. And though his range is kind of impaired at this point, he was using the limitations to be more creative with what he did have. And…
If you’re wearing a cast, something bad probably happened. You may feel crappy about it or frustrated or some other dark feeling, but you tell yourself it isn’t unbelievably itchy and just try to ignore it. Or. You draw an Iron Man arm on it and then you are a bamf anytime you do anything.…
