Tech News

Fukushima’s Leaking Radioactive Water into the Ocean After All

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…

The Invention of Jaywalking Was a Massive Shaming Campaign

Before the invention of the car, jaywalking wasn’t a recognized concept. Want to get across the street? Then just walk across the street—nobody’s going to stop you. But the rise of the automobile posed a new problem for people of the early 20th century. While the median state-designated speed limit for American cities was just…

These Internet-Themed Crayons from the 90s Are Hilariously Dated

A long, long time ago, in a land where people had yet to even ponder words like “Reddit” and “Twitter,” a bright-eyed arts and crafts company decided to embrace this crazy thing called the information superhighway. The year was 1997, and that company was Crayola. The results are absolutely glorious. Dubbed the “Techno Brite” collection,…

Dealzmodo: 802.11ac Router, Headphones And Headsets, Big Media Section

Cylindrical is the new black. 802.11ac is here and it’s time to take advantage. $80 is a killer price for an 802.11ac router, to say nothing of the fact that it’s app-enabled and looks pretty cool too. It’ll play very nice with one of the those new MacBooks we found you a deal on (still…

If You Want This iOS Screen-Recording App You’d Better Hustle

xRec, which appeared in the iTunes store on Saturday, promises to record everything on your iPhone’s screen — including apps that prohibit screengrabs. If you’re into that sneaky kind of thing, you better grab it fast, because we don’t expect it to stay in iTunes very long. UPDATE: A reader informs us that this app…

Netflix for Giant Arcade Consoles Is So Crazy It Just Might Work

Buying an old-school arcade console is a big investment. Ms. Pac-Man bragging rights don’t just cost a lot of money—you pay the price in real estate. That whole corner of your living room gone for just one measly game. A new service called All You Can Arcade sort of makes this proposition worthwhile. For $75…

3D Printers Might Get Way Cheaper After 2014

The 3D printing “revolution” isn’t just being held up by the state of the technology. It’s also being held up by the sheer cost of a 3D printer. But in February 2014, some key patents will expire, leaving an opening for competitors come in with cheaper alternatives. The patents in question are for a technology…

Here Come The Leap Motion Music Apps

Leap Motion launched its groundbreaking motion detection module on Monday, allowing anyone to connect a little box to their Mac or Windows computer that can detect gestures more precisely than Microsoft Kinect can, for a mere $80. Eventually, Leap Motion technology will be integrated into computers, so you won’t even need to buy a separate…

The 10 Most Expensive Photographs in the World

Sometimes photographers amaze us with their ability to uniquely reflect the world around us and get a look at it from a different angle. Other times, they depict images so disgusting or banal that it’s impossible to understand why so many consider their photographs masterpieces. The art market is inscrutable, especially when it comes to…

An Otherworldly Gordian Knot Sculpture That Dares You To Climb It

Normally, a gallery’s white walls are meant to foreground the art. In the case of Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira‘s latest sculpture, Baitogogo, they are the art. The giant Gordian Knot is currently installed in Paris gallery Palais de Tokyo, and it fits into Oliveira’s canon quite nicely. The artist is known for massive organic installations…

You Won’t Believe How Smart Dumbphones Actually Are

In spite of iOS and Android’s quest towards world domination, it’s easy for us overprivileged first-world residents to forget that the spread of the smartphone doesn’t affect everyone. In fact, only half of all mobile phones shipped in 2013 are expected to be smartphones. The rest are the slower, clunkier, and exponentially cheaper devices officially…

Enormous Robot Is the Most Complicated Way to Mix Salad Dressing

If you’ve got 1500 pounds of—uhhh—stuff to mix up, nothing will do the stirring faster than this huge robotic mixing system. As you can see in the video above, it really is very effective at mixing things up. Terrifyingly effective. DigInfo reports that the mixing system uses a super-flexible multi-axis, multi-directional robotic arm to stir…

7 Brilliant Reinventions of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map

The world has changed in countless ways since Buckminster Fuller invented the Dymaxion map in 1943. Wars have come and gone, populations have changed, and entire generations have passed. But Bucky’s map endures, thanks to its endless adaptability—and to prove it, the Buckminster Fuller Institute recently invited the public to help reinvent the map for…

The Cutest Way To Celebrate The Moon-Landing

Mankind’s greatest achievement was celebrated almost every country in the world. The famous Hungarian china manufacturer, the Zsolnay Porcelain Manufacture made these children’s plates depicting astronauts on the Moon, in the early Seventies. My favourite is the one with two astronauts collecting soil samples with the Lunar Module in the background… …because: Photo: Attila Nagy/space.io9.com

Samsung’s Beautiful Curved OLED TV Comes to the USA for a Mere $15,000

Back at CES we were floored by Samsung’s crazy/beautiful 55-inch curved OLED television. They were an eyegasm of light-emitting diodes with a subtle but enticing cinematic bend. Secretly, we never thought we’d ever see one in real life since they just reek of CES flashiness that never turns into real-life anything. We were so wrong.…

The New SkyDrive Might Be the Best Cloud Storage Yet

SkyDrive in Windows 8.1 has a secret weapon no one’s talked very much about. It’s actually pretty amazing, in that small sort of way that doesn’t change much, but still manages to completely alter how you use something. In fact, it might just make SkyDrive the best cloud service around. If you install Dropbox, SkyDrive,…

This Robotic Crab Will Scuttle the Sea for Historic Sunken Treasures

One problem with conventional ROVs is that while their propellers are plenty strong enough to kick up columns of silt from the sea floor, they typically lack the power to effectively navigate in strong currents, which limits where and how well they can survey a given area. But this new underwater explorer sidesteps both of…

Canary: This Might Be Your Home Security System of The Future

Things that were once dumb are now smart. At least that’s the trend for home appliances as of late. Canary, the self-proclaimed world’s first smart home security system, is launching today on Indiegogo and it might actually work. Crammed into the cylindrical tube is a menagerie of sensors and doohickeys that when combined form the…

The UK Moves to Block All Internet Porn by Default

British Prime Minister David Cameron announced a sweeping set of reforms on Monday that seeks to limit access to online pornography and do away with the more obscene materials. In a speech, Cameron outlined a new filter system that will compel all British internet users to select whether or not they want family-friendly filters in…

AT&T is offering a $200 online discount for early iPhone upgrades, bringing the price of a 16GB iPhone 5 to $450. The offer, open to all customers regardless of current phone or contract end date, seems to be an effort to boost sales leading up to the iPhone 5S debut. Updated: An AT&T spokesperson reached…