Tech News

68 Plans For London’s Hilariously Misguided Response to the Eiffel Tower

In 1889, Paris unveiled the magnificent Eiffel Tower. It was a worldwide sensation. London, meanwhile, was green with envy. Not about to be outdone, city officials announced a competition for a grand monument of its own, and revealed 68 of the entries in a showcase catalog. Most of these designs are pretty bonkers, and thanks…

Tumblr’s Big Security Fail Was Absurdly Stupid

Tumblr just fessed up to a frankly embarrassing security flaw that exposed millions of users’ passwords. Actually, “embarrassing” might be an understatement in the broader spectrum of screw ups a company like Tumblr could make. “Astonishingly stupid” works, too. The nature of the breach itself is relatively simple. For an unknown amount of time, Tumblr…

Design the Perfect Shade With Crayola’s Make Your Own Marker Kit

Remember when you were a kid and you’d bug your parents for bigger and bigger marker sets so you could get exactly the shades you wanted? It turns out that’s not an issue for today’s kids. As long as they can convince their parents to cough up $25 (although $40 at Amazon) for Crayola’s miniature…

Watch 450 Pounds of Dynamite Take Down a Power Plant

Out with the old, in with the new. Earlier this week in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the Florida Power & Light Co. demolished one of its power plants with 450 pounds of dynamite to make way for a cleaner and more eco-friendly plant that’s slated to open in 2016. The Port Everglades plant had been in…

Grand St.: Your One Stop Shop For Weird and Awesome Gadgets

There have been countless invite-only sites for booze, fashion and other esoteric desirables for a long time. Before today Grand St. was an invite-only destination for heavily curated but quirkier gadgets, and starting today the site is open to everyone. Every week Grand St. releases four to five new gadgets and offers them until they’re…

The Basics of Home Canning and Pickling

Winter is coming and you’d better be prepared. The delectably sweet fruits and vegetables in season right now will be shriveled husks rotting in your crisper drawer by the time the snows come. That is, unless you preserve or pickle them. Here’s how to put the fruits of your home garden’s labors into delicious stasis.…

The Government Uses License Plate Scanners to Track Your Every Move

Automatic license plate readers are the most widespread location tracking technology you’ve probably never heard of. Mounted on patrol cars or stationary objects like bridges, they snap photos of every passing car, recording their plate numbers, times, and locations. At first the captured plate data was used just to check against lists of cars law…

BitTorrent’s personal cloud service, Sync, just moved into beta today. And now, it even has its own Android app. If you need some online space the NSA can’t get at, go check it out. It’s free!

Why That Budget iPhone Might Not (And Shouldn’t) Be So Budget After All

The specter of a cheaper iPhone has haunted analyst and fanboy dreams for months. Years, in some cases. But making the healthy assumption that Apple does release a less expensive iPhone in the next few months, it’s worth taking a second to remember that “cheaper” doesn’t necessarily mean “cheap.” Especially when you’re talking about Apple.…

This Lego Cylon Baseship is Frakking Awesome

As far as Cylon warships go, it doesn’t get more badass than a Baseship. Garry King built this impressive 16,387-brick, 36-pound Lego Baseship from one of the original designs by Ralph McQuarrie—the genius artist behind the original Star Wars trilogy, E.T. and the original Battlestar Galactica. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to…

This Fossil-Covered Museum Houses Australia’s Largest Dino Collection

Australia’s Outback is a forbidding land, and many of its dinosaur bones remain unexcavated. But in the early 2000s, a small family of cattle ranchers discovered a bone gold mine on their land. They set out to build a structure for their ongoing find—and their sheer enthusiasm convinced a group of architects and contractors to…

A Drone Fell From the Sky and Exploded Next to a Florida Highway

For the second time this month, a drone (this one presumed to be a QF 4) has come spiraling out of the sky. The crash and subsequent explosion happened next to US 98 near Tyndall Air Force Base in—oh what a surprise—Florida. Blocking off all traffic on the highway, the crash landing sent up a…

Every Night’s a Righteous Road Trip in a VW Camper Bunk Bed

It can’t do battle with an insane Star Wars-themed bunk bed, but for kids who are a little more grounded in reality, this Volkswagen Camper Bunk Bed is an awesome alternative. Yeah, it doesn’t have lasers, but a surfboard ladder is equivalently awesome. At seven and a half feet long and four and a half…

Oh Flexible Stainless Steel Robot, You Are So Bendy and Shiny

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the world’s first stainless steel robot with seven degrees of freedom. But before I explain what that means or why it matters, kindly take a moment to watch this Kawasaki Heavy Industries bot dance. Nice moves! Impressed? Ok, now let me explain. In mechanics, “degrees of freedom” are the number…

Apple May Have Finally Figured Out How to Make a Liquidmetal iPhone

The incredibly promising metal alloy from Liquidmetal has been around for a while, but no one’s really been able to figure out how to put the difficult-to-manufacture material to good use–until now. According to a new patent uncovered by Electronista, Apple seems to think it’s figured out the key. One day soon, you may very…

All It Took to Hijack Google Glass Was a Dumb QR Code

The scariest Google Glass hack just got fixed before anyone evil could actually use it, but the details are a little unsettling. Using nothing more than Glass’s camera and a malicious QR code, hackers would have been able to steal total control of the device if you so much as looked at the wrong thing.…

The Next Best Thing to Showering With a Dental Hygienist

Until we’re all able to shower from bed, Waterpik’s new Showerpik is the next best thing for simplifying our morning routines. It works like any other Waterpik, blasting the spaces between your teeth clean like a dental floss fire hose. But since it taps into your existing shower head you don’t need to keep a…

12 Drool-Worthy Photos of Vintage Signs in the Valley

Have you ever been to California? You should try it. Sure there are the beaches and the national parks and the movie stars and the big red bridge. There’s also the delightful consequence of near-perfect weather all year round. Stuff just doesn’t rust. Even when it rains. This is part of the reason why Americana…

This Robot Arm Is Den Mother To 30,000 Lab Mice

When experimenting with laboratory animals, it’s important to completely eliminate any outside factors that could influence the results. So to prevent infection from human handlers, Japan’s Nikkyo Technos and Yaskawa Electric have completely eliminated people from the equation with this robotic system that can autonomously care for up to 30,000 mice at once. The six-axis…

These Are the World’s Fastest SD Cards (For Now, at Least)

If you worry that your SD cards just can’t keep up with the pace, fret no longer. Toshiba has the world’s fastest SD cards, in the shape of the new Exceria Pro SDHC series, to deal with your ridiculous data acquisition needs. Designed for top-end cameras—there’s no point using these in anything cheap—the Pro SDHC…