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You may remember our friend Destin at Smarter Every Day shooting an AK-47 underwater. It was a cool experiment, but the pressure caused the aquarium to shatter, ruining what we now know would have been an amazing shot. To solve this problem, he built a sort of reverse-periscope for a Phantom camera and shot the…
It’s easy to forget plants are “alive” because they hardly move on their own. No more. This timelapse of plants growing and blooming and shooting up and blossoming shows plants move like aliens. Every time you see a new plant, you think it’s a new species from outer space. It’s not until you see the…
Things in this quiet seaside town are not what they initally appear. Not the faux-colored pencil on cardboard animation motif and especially not the gigantic green liquidus humanoid that just washed into this old man’s fishing net. Animated by Mo’Sam, the team of Mohamed Fadera and Sami Guellaï, and co-produced by Dailymotion, Tulkou follows the…
Imagine you’re the police. Imagine you’re in your police car. Imagine eating a donut. Imagine complaining about life to your partner. Imagine seeing a car with two obviously blown tires drive by. Imagine pulling that car over. Imagine seeing that the driver driving the car was using a makeshift steering wheel made from… locking pliers.…
Well, to consider this anything other than fantastic is to be wrong. Photographer Karsten Wegener teamed up with designer Silke Baltruschat and food stylist Raik Holst to create ‘Sausage in Art’, art which recreates famous paintings by using… deli meats, sausages, eggs, pickles and more. It might not look as good as the original, but…
My music taste can be regarded as anywhere from generally untrustworthy to unforgivingly mainstream. So if you don’t enjoy this soundtrack selection, I don’t blame ya. Put it on mute. This ain’t about the music. What’s awesome about this music video is that it’s a 24 hour timelapse video. As in it was created in…
Internet dating site Plenty of Fish is making it easier than ever for star-crossed lovers of Lego to find each other. Just peruse their “Users Interested In legos” tag to learn more about these love-lorn Lego Romeos. Take CrazyLegoMan for instance. He majored in biology and is looking for some sexy Christian Lego fan to…
Like the awesome moving pictures in Harry Potter and the silliness of six second Vines, this video shows what art by Van Gogh would look like if the paintings he created could move. That is, how the candles would flicker, how the shadows would be cast, how the Sun would rise, how people would move,…
Disney Research, a partnership between the mouse-eared entertainment juggernaut and universities around the globe, is on a virtual reality roll. Its latest development, an algorithm that turns 2D photographs into 3D landscapes, can transform a regular photo into a video game-style environment, using consumer-grade computer hardware. The program senses the depth of objects in a…
The mechanical computers of yesterday may have been enormous, difficult to program, and amazingly clunky—but they sure were beautiful to watch in action. Released theatrically by Popular Science on August 6, 1948, this short film played before Paramount Pictures movies and demonstrated to the public how computers were freeing “research of old limitations” and provided…
The Transmission Control Protocol is like a crossing guard for the internet, regulating traffic to keep things flowing. Sure, engineers are constantly working to improve it, but it’s manmade, so there’s always room for human error. But researchers at MIT have created a computer system that could fix all that—and make the internet two to…
At the American Museum of Natural History’s two-week camp Capturing Dinosaurs: Reconstructing Extinct Species Through Digital Fabrication, a group of teens learned the processes and tools used by paleontologists for studying dinosaur bones and digitally reconstructing them. And we got to tag along for some of it. It all begins in the deep underbelly of…
A team of scientists in Switzerland has managed to cram 11,011 electrodes onto a single two-millimeter-by-two-millimeter piece of silicon to create a microchip that works just like an actual brain. The best part about this so-called neuromorphic chips? They can feel. Don’t over interpret the word “feel” though. The brain-like microchips built by scientists at…
We’ve become a lazy, lazy people. If there’s two things that really bring us together, it’s an irrational demand for instant gratification and a desire to have as little face-to-face interaction as is humanly possible. Now on the one hand, this is probably the beginning of society’s grand demise. But on the other, doing things…
We’re used to participating in Christie’s auctions as mere spectators, gawking at items like the Maharaja of Patiala’s banqueting service or the original Apple 1. But this week, Christie’s is offering up a collection of National Geographic’s most iconic shots—and they’re surprisingly affordable. The nine-day, online-only auction celebrates the magazine’s 125th birthday, so it includes…
Do ducks snore? Of course they do. But you probably have never seen very cute video of a sleeping duck snoring. Experts say all snoring is very annoying unless an adorable little duck is the one guilty of snoring.
The season for backyard barbeques and pool parties is upon us! But with the summer sun smothering the East Coast, who wants to crowd their ears into a pair of headphones or jam silicone buds down their ear canals? Instead, here are four easy ways to bring your playlist poolside. Reuse Old Computer Speakers The…
File this under batshit crazy. Verizon is now offering a 500/100Mbps service tier where FiOS is available. According to Verizon, you’ll be able to download a 2 hour HD movie in 1.4 minutes and upload a 2 hour HD video in 6.9 minutes. Fast, right? Assuming you get the advertised speeds, of course. The newly…
The extreme far north (or south) isn’t the only place on Earth that spends the winter locked in perpetual darkness. Beginning in September and ending in March, the Norwegian town of Rjukan is cast into a perpetual shadow. But no longer: This month, engineers are completing The Mirror Project, a system that will shed winter…
Well over two years after the Tōhuku earthquake and tsunami, TEPCO officials admit that radioactive groundwater has been leaking into the nearby ocean for, well, two years. The confession came just one day after an election that brought Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s pro-nuclear party a solid majority, and months after watchdogs raised the red flag…
