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For the longest time, the medical community hasn’t had any idea what to do with people who have locked-in syndrome, the condition of being completely paralyzed from head-to-toe. Sometimes doctors don’t even know if they’re even conscious. The answer to communicating, it turns out, is to look in their eyes. Thanks to a cutting edge…
You’ll never guess which celebrity entertainer took part in a mysterious pagan ritual on a remote Caribbean island. With her bizarre feathered bikini and majestic white wings, this famous name might as well start having people sacrificed for Her amusement. https://jezebel.com/rihannas-at-a-carnival-in-barbados-with-a-flask-and-be-1032296934
No one save receipts anymore. We buy nearly everything either online or with a credit card, so since we basically have an electronic record of most of our purchases, it’s become too easy to toss any potential paper trail. But some of our payments are still made in cash, and if you really want to…
According to Japan’s nuclear watchdog group, highly radioactive water from the now-destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant has leaked into the ocean through an underground barrier and is now quickly rising towards the surface. Today, that same group reported that the toxic water has caused the ocean to exceed levels far above the legal radioactive limit. https://gizmodo.com/over-a-year-later-fukushimas-radiation-is-still-fatal-5897126…
Apple’s stock headphones aren’t exactly the most-loved product in the company’s oeuvre, even after Jony Ive’s team revamped them last year. Yet they’re free (with purchase) and produced by the millions. So Sprng, an inexpensive little plastic do-dad that makes them useful, is worth paying attention to. Sprng is the handiwork of Canadian product designers…
That custom-built malware that’s tracking down Tor network users? Turns out it might not be the FBI behind it after all. It looks like it might be the NSA. After the Firefox JavaScript exploit was uncovered, there was a rush to figure out who was behind it. At first, that looked like the FBI. The…
Today the Washington Post Company agreed to sell the Washington Post newspaper to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million in cash. This ends the Graham family’s ownership of the paper after four generations. The deal, which was made independently of Bezos’ other ventures, is expected to close within 60 days. Bezos says he has…
It’s the dog days of summer, even at 10pm your neighborhood is just slightly warmer than the surface of Venus, and everybody in town’s got their A/C units cranked up to 11. Which would explain what triggered the rolling blackout that has now left you and yours sitting in a darkened home. Just because you’re…
The charms of the patent office archives—and the hilariously insane inventions they contain—are well-known. But is it possible that a few of those failed entrepreneurs were actually onto something? New York lawyer Martin Galese thinks so—and he’s resurrecting the ghosts of patents past by offering 3D models of them online. Galese, who works as a…
“Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” – Winston Churchill, 1932 Would you eat a lab-grown hamburger? It’s not a question you have to worry too much about today, unless you have…
Landfills are pretty wretched places with all the rotting trash spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It’s no wonder humans have started building robots to do the dirty work in dumps around the world. The fact that these mechanical workers do it with lasers is just a bonus. A team of Swedish researchers from the…
If you’ve got an Android device, you’ve probably used Google’s handy one-click authentication shortcut, that handy little button that lets you sign into various Google service sites without having to enter your password. It’s super convenient! For you and for hackers. Craig Young, a researcher at security firm Tripwire, did some digging into how the…
We’ve mentioned Seiki’s crazy-cheap 50″ 4KTV several times, and today you’ll have the opportunity to pick up its smaller cousin at an even smaller price. I’m considering grabbing one to replace the aging 32″ in my bedroom. [Amazon] https://gizmodo.com/wow-a-4k-tv-for-1080-is-simply-bonkers-513578198 Top Deals D-Link 802.11ac App-Enabled Router ($71) | Newegg via TechDealDigger | Beats our previous deal…
Sitting is fantastic, but benches are boring. Imagine if the world was just littered with hammocks and swings for your own extravagant public lounging pleasure. These clever transforming swings could make that a blissfully lazy reality. The brainchild of Amsterdam-based designers Jair Straschnow and Gitte Nygaard, “Off-Ground” is a series of customizable swings that can…
Rosehip soup, goose sauced with mulberries, honeyed chicken handpies, turnip greens and sweetgrass salad… even greywater watch frog stew. These recipes from Game of Thrones—the popular TV series set in a fantasy medieval-ish world—actually look quite delicious. https://groupthink.kinja.com/a-game-of-thrones-food-blog-1021656599
Zoos began as amusements for humans, and decades of more recent noble goals such as conservation and captive breeding of endangered species has done little to change the basic dynamic of humans paying money to gawk at wild animals cruelly kept in cages. What brave country has finally ended this barbarism? [Photo via Getty Images.]…
A rental house in Munich modified their digital camera to take Stanley Kubrick’s f/0.7 lenses, which NASA commissioned from Zeiss to shoot the dark side of the moon. Meaning you can go out and shoot photos with, essentially, historical artifacts. The set of ten was commissioned by NASA for the lunar missions during the 1960s,…
Humans want to have friends. This need for companionship in a soul-crushingly indifferent world can lead us to confuse mechanical motion with human emotion, as shown in this video by researchers at the University of Calgary. Researchers John Harris and Ehud Sharlin set out to test the limits of human capability to see ourselves in…
As the Time Warner Cable-CBS impasse approaches its fourth day—with no resolution in sight—one thing has become absolutely clear; everyone involved is a big dumb dumby. A plague on them both. And a big shiny gold star to the one company that, unexpectedly, is going to come out ahead: Amazon. https://gizmodo.com/breaking-effective-5-00-pm-et-time-warner-cable-has-d-1005643729 There are plenty of…
Can you believe it’s been a full year since the Mars Curiosity rover made its absolutely spectacular red, dusty landing? Millions watched with bated breath the day that NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory began its historical journey. It may have taken everyone’s favorite interplanetary robot a little while to get up and running, but once it…
