Tech News

An Incredible 19th Century Lens Has Been Reengineered For Your DSLR

In 1840, Joseph Petzval invented an optical portrait lens, which for the rest of the century would be used to take loads of photos. Now, the retro-fanatics at Lomography have reengineered the lens from the ground up for today’s Canon and Nikon cameras. And the photos are incredible. What we’re looking at is a complete…

Video shows horrible high speed train crash in Spain

Yesterday at 8:42pm, a high speed train crashed in Galicia, Spain, killing 78 and injuring 140, 30 of them in critical condition. As the CCTV video capture shows, the train was traveling way too fast—according to the train engineer, as fast as 118mph (190km/h) more than two times the speed allowed in that track segment.…

These Dumb Insurance Claims For Lost Cell Phones are Hilarious

We’ve all misplaced our cell phone and spent what seems like hours searching for it—but some people take losing handsets to a whole new level. Chances are, you’ve never lost a phone as impressively as the people that feature in these stories. A UK-based mobile phone insurance company has released a list of its most…

House Defeats Amendment, Allowing NSA to Keep Spying on You

An amendment designed to stop the NSA from collecting phone records of millions of Americans has been narrowly defeated, 205 votes to 217, in the House of Representatives. The amendment, attached to an annual defense budget bill, was led by Michigan Congressman Justin Amash and sought to defund the NSA’s collection of phone records. Clearly,given…

Google Translate now accepts handwriting as an input—so you can offer your scrawl up to be converted.

How to Make YouTube Look Like Unix

YouTube has decided to celebrate its upcoming Geek Week event by giving its site an, um, underhaul—and making it look like Unix. If you head to the site and type “/ geekweek” into the search field, you’ll be presented with a site full of fixed width fonts and, simple colors and ASCII art. Just don’t…

The Fountain of Youth Is in Florida and It’s Radioactive

The history of the fountain of youth starts somewhere before Ponce de Leon and has ended up somehow to a water fountain in Florida. National Geographic tells a fascinating tale of how though one water fountain in Florida is radioactive, it may actually be extending the life of its drinkers. Located in the town of…

The Weirdest Thing on the Internet Tonight: Stars

So what did you do this weekend? If it was anything less than fighting space pirates from the back of an interplanetary slingshotting clay golem, you are wasting your life. Progressive house duo and real-life siblings Alexander and Yury (aka Matisse and Sadko) are quickly taking the Russian club scene by storm with Sadko acting…

What Death Looks Like: A Fast-Spreading Glowing Blue Wave

Dead is dead, some famous TV show about vacationing on an island once said. But how does dead, well, look? How do billions of cells shut off at once? An international team of researchers found that it comes in a wave. Death spreads through a special necrosis pathway that leaves dead cells as it passes…

What the Inside of Google’s Chromecast Looks Like

Curious as to what’s hiding inside the Google Chromecast dongle? Thanks to the FCC, we don’t have to wonder what the Chromecast is packing anymore. There’s a Marvell DE3005 chip and an AzurWare chip to take care of Wi-Fi duties, according to Anandtech. FCC documents actually show Chromecast details in May, with pictures of its…

I’m Going to Turn All My Instagram Pictures Into Oil Paintings

How much do you like your Instagram pictures? Enough to get a few likes? Enough to think you’d kick ass as a photographer? Enough to convert them into amazing oil paintings that you can hang on your wall? Pixelist is a company that’s trying to turn your Instagram photos into hand-made oil paintings that will…

The Depressing Truth About Being a Superhero

Whenever we watch our favorite superhero movies, we can’t help but wish we had their powers. Superhuman strength, superhuman speed, superhuman ability. It all sounds so great! But in reality, it wouldn’t be always awesome like saving pretty actresses and wearing spandex. Day to day life would suck. AndrewMFilms created a short about ‘Superhero Depression’…

These Honeycomb Sculptures Made by Bees Are Simply Majestic

Bees are amazing creatures. The yellow-and-black-striped little things make honey and royal jelly and, given a little bit of guidance, completely stellar sculptures made out of wax. In recent years, artists have picked up on the talent. The unofficial sage of honeycomb sculptures is Tomáš Libertíny. This 34-year-old Slovakian designer has perfected a method for…

Check Out the Floor Plans For the NSA’s Huge New Data Center in Utah

Construction is underway for a sprawling and seriously expensive National Security Agency data center in the Utah desert, and a set of floor plans just hit the web. It all looks appropriately intimidating. Wrapped in what we’re guessing is going to be a heavily policed perimeter row, the facility contains four data halls over several…

Loom for iOS: The Better, Cloud-Based Mobile Camera Roll

Cloud storage services are a dime a dozen these days, and just the thought of sifting through the mass to find the one that works best for you can be overwhelming. But when it comes to not just mobile-specific but also photo-specific storage, your options are pretty much cut entirely. That’s what makes Loom (which…

The Brilliantly Simple 3D-Printing Program You Never Realized You’d Need

As the days of affordable, technologically sound at-home 3D printing loom ever nearer, creative minds around the world have been dripping with the wondrous possibilities these plastic-spewing, magic machines hold. Unfortunately, magic or not, the laws of physics still apply—and your liquid plastic dreams probably don’t take into account the fact that your models are…

What is this mysterious rat-kangaroo-primate? Meet the Aye-Aye!

For more than a century after Europeans first encountered the mysterious aye-aye of Madagascar in the 1780s, scientists and biologists just could not figure out if the weird beast was a rodent or a kangaroo or some bizarre type of primate. Guess what it really is ….

Royal terror: You won’t believe the trouble these royal babies caused

Prince George of Cambridge, the new royal baby, is not the first infant to cause a big ruckus with his birth. England’s history is filled with tales of incredible savagery and violence spawned by the arrival of a new prince in this tragic kingdom.

This 1930s Family Is High On Laughing Gas Pie

Humans love to get high. So much so that people were recreationally using nitrous oxide (commonly called “laughing gas”) for nearly a century before it was used as an anaesthetic. So when chemists in the 1930s started proposing the use of nitrous oxide in consumer products like whipped cream canisters, some people naturally assumed that…

For Music Fans, Google Chromecast Is No Apple Airplay

About two and a half years after Evolver.fm started taking Google to task over its lack of a super-simple wireless music solution along the lines of Apple’s AirPlay for zapping music to speakers around the house, Google unveiled on Wednesday what some are calling its answer to AirPlay: Chromecast. The $35 Chromecast HDMI dongle plugs…