Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
For all its promise of being the Next Big Thing in tech, when it comes to Google Glass, haters gotta hate. Still, if you’re gonna object to it, you may as well do it properly. Of course, this might not be strictly ethical. Or even legal for that matter. But, hey, someone is looking at…
Apple just bought a small startup company you probably never heard of called Matcha.tv. Why is this important? Because it might, maybe, could possibly reveal what Apple sees as the future of Apple TV: a channel-less oasis where it doesn’t matter what streaming service you watch your favorite TV show on as long as it’s…
The Star Wars prequels suck. Boring premises, bad scripts, confusing plots, uninteresting motives, and nonexistent character development. But, as this dude explains in this video, they could have been great movies with some very specific changes. If you watch the two videos, you will see he’s right. They could have worked perfectly fine with these…
A room full of monkeys with keyboards may eventually be able to write Shakespeare but you put 100 artists in a chatroom and they’ll create something even more amazing. According to the project’s director, BingTangHuLuer: We have held 3 animation-painting live events, but which are inconvenient for friends in other cities. So I have the…
Kickstarter can be a fantastic launching pad for people with real knowhow and real talent to make real ideas, well, real. There are a lot of wonderful success stories! At its very peak, Kickstarter gives everyone a shot at success. But there are also a lot of epic failures too. The truth is, like much…
Green shows the countries you want to live in because they have little to no Internet censorship. Yellow reveals countries that you might not want to stay in too long because they might increase censorship in the future. And if you love the Internet, you should probably avoid every other color because they all have…
Wow. This is incredible. Captured by high-definition microscopy, the footage shows the buzzing world and slimy life inside a single drop of pond water. It’s completely alien, it’s unnerving and it makes your stomach turn itself inside out. There are brown flatworms, Medusa looking nematodes, starfish-like hydras ‘defecating’ and more oozy organisms. The video was…
After beefing with Google over YouTube ads, Microsoft just re-released an official YouTube app for Windows Phone. Get it here. [Windows Phone]
Earlier today, students at California State University, Long Beach were asked to evacuate and/or take shelter after reports that there was an “armed gunman” on campus. People were told to, “lock and blockade doors, close blinds, silence cell phones and remain calm.” Scary. Luckily, there wasn’t a shooter though. It was just a guy carrying…
Some dogs love a ride in the car, other dogs hate it. Regardless, when you have a terrible car accident your pet will be thrown to its death or smashed to bits on the dashboard—unless you have a dog seatbelt, which one major car company is planning to put in new models. https://jalopnik.com/subaru-wants-to-make-car-rides-safer-for-your-dog-1125088992
Tech billionaire, electric car manufacturer and space-rocket contractor Elon Musk has everyone excited about his plan to zip people between Los Angeles and San Francisco in half an hour. But did a mysterious inventor and businessman do the same thing beneath New York City in 1869? https://gizmodo.com/how-one-inventor-secretly-built-a-pneumatic-subway-unde-1123695775
Glowing bunny rabbits aren’t just for Sherlock Holmes reboots and acid trips anymore. Scientists from the University of Hawaii recently collaborated with a team from Istanbul, Turkey, where a couple of bright green lab rabbits were just born as part of a larger effort to better understand hereditary illness and make cheaper medicine. Also: Glow-in-the-dark…
For some people, taking up to 12 different medications a day has become the unfortunate norm. And when you add another one into that already complicated heap, it isn’t always easy to identify the potentially harmful interactions in your own personal prescription cocktail. MedSnap hopes to simplify that problem by both identifying your pills and…
There’s so much we know about the habits and (terrible) behavior of modern humans, and so little we know about our ancestors before they could put everything on Twitter. That’s why it’s great to learn that we might’ve stolen valuable stick/rock technology from Neanderthals before killing them all. https://gizmodo.com/early-humans-may-have-ripped-off-neanderthal-technology-1120926300
Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that New York City’s “stop-and-frisk” violated the rights of minorities in the city. In her recommendations accompanying the ruling, Judge Shira Scheindlin ordered the NYPD to test wearable cameras in five precincts where the controversial search tactic was used. But a lot of people are wondering what effect if any…
Anti-Gay group Straight Pride UK is abusing the DMCA takedown process to censor work by a journalist. No surprise there—the DMCA is twisted for all kinds of dumb purposes. The inexplicable part? The hate group filed a takedown on… its own press release. How dare you say that we said the words that we wrote…
See that tiny green pinprick of light? That’s a speck of diamond dust trapped in the grip of a laser beam. And with its help, researchers hope to better understand the border-world between macro and quantum physics. The team, led by University of Rochester assistant professor of optics, Nick Vamivakas, has submitted a paper for…
When I was a kid and we’d visit places with fragile things, my mom would order me to “look with your eyes, not with your hands.” But exactly the opposite is encouraged in a new exhibit called Ghosts, Underpants, and Stars at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, in which kids are encouraged to…
Smurfs are some kind of idiot garbage from Nazi Germany. A company got the (presumably cheap) rights to make bad cartoons from these blue toys, and the resulting movies are predictably terrible. One funny part is there is just one female Smurf, who must be the sex interest and also the mother of all the…
There are almost as many external battery pack options for your smartphone as there are cases, and given the multitude of options there are probably two important factors to seriously consider: capacity and design. And a leading contender for both these considerations is the new Jackery Air. The battery measures in at just slightly thicker…
