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Growing replacement organs in a lab and transplanting them is science-fiction dream-turned-very-possible-reality, but so far it’s been limited to simple tissues. Today, MIT published findings on successful attempts to build functional heart tissue, using a modified machine originally meant to build integrated circuits. Growing heart tissue in the lab presents an enormous challenge. If the…
Drone photography: If you’re not against it because of the Constitution, you’re against it because of how over-hyped it is. But in the hands of enterprising architecture fans, unmanned airborne cameras are also letting us explore some of the most important structures ever built from entirely new angles. Today, it’s Paris’ 1897 glass-and-steel icon, the…
BenQ is the go to brand for Major League Gaming, and we heartily recommend it for your unranked home games as well. This BenQ 24″ 120Hz 1080p LED monitor is jam-packed with features ranging from expectedly high refresh rates to a switch that allows quick toggling between multiple display setting profiles. 3D, HDMI, 12M:1 contrast…
Here’s one of those things you’d always think was a joke but turned out to be real—the filmmakers behind Ashton Kutcher Steve Jobs movie have made an Instagram trailer. Open Roads Studios claims it’s the first Instagram trailer, made from 15 seconds’ worth of the official preview we saw a few weeks back. It features…
At one point or another, who of us hasn’t risked losing a finger by opening a pair of scissors and using them as a quick, impromptu knife? It turns out they’re a pretty good way to open taped boxes without horribly slicing what’s inside, so Quirky took the idea and created a pair of scissors…
Edward Snowden can’t stay in Moscow’s airport forever. The American whistleblower hero needs to get to a safe haven in Bolivia or Iceland or wherever, before he is assassinated by Barack Obama’s drones. Why not dress like Vladimir Putin dressed as a horseman warrior and just ride into the forest? Summer is way too hot…
This is why we can’t have nice things. Recently declassified video footage from Northern Afghanistan shows that piloting a drone isn’t nearly as easy as it seems, even when it’s still on the ground. During a night launch from Mazar-e-Sharif air base on March 17, 2010, an IAI Heron UAV got away from its pilot…
Have you heard about these newfangled X-ray machines? We should put ’em in everything! We should literally use them to X-ray people’s feet to fit them for shoes. It sounds like a retro-parody cartoon, but it’s not. It’s what actually happened in the 1940s. Smallish wooden podiums housing radioactive material for casual-foot X-rays, shoe-fitting fluoroscopes…
While me and you and everyone we know weren’t paying attention, BlackBerry invented a nice big shiny new phone, the A10. It’s definitely different! And at this point, that might be just what BlackBerry needs. There aren’t many details available from the video other than that the A10 is a decidedly bigger phone than the…
When the Board of Commissioners of Central Park decided it was time to build Central Park in 1857, they announced a design contest with a prize to the tune of $2,000 (around $50,000 today). Obviously, it was Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s design won. But there were 33 other failed entries, only five of…
That Boeing 787 Dreamlinerthat caught fire in London on Friday? Investigators are reportedly looking into the “emergency locator transmitter” as the possible source. This is important because it could mean the fire didn’t come from the battery system, which was the issuethe last time a Dreamliner caught fire.
The cascade of smartwatch rumors—be they iWatch, Surface, or other—increases daily. By this point, smartwatches of every shape and stripe seem inevitable. But there are so, so many reasons why they shouldn’t happen. Not any time soon, at least. To get a sense of the sheer volume of smartwatches on the horizon, you can look…
The problem with most compact tripods is that while highly portable, they’re really only useful for supporting lighter cameras like point-and-shoots or smartphones. But most people who’d actually need and use a tripod are probably shooting with heavier DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. So Manfrotto created the Pixi: a decent compromise between a full-sized tripod and…
Negri Electronics is offering pre-orders for unlocked Nokia Lumia 1020 phones, at the guffaw-inducing price of $735. This phone is pretty amazing, especially in the camera department, so if you’ve just gotta have one before they arrive at AT&T later this month, here’s your chance. [Ubergizmo]
Aviary has just launched its popular photo editor app for Windows Phone 8 and it’s free for a limited time. Download it now! It’s free!
There’s something undeniably surreal about early cave paintings, something otherworldly or even psychedelic. And according to a team of international scientists, that’s because the cave painters were doing mind-bending drugs while painting them. Researchers Tom Froese, Alexander Woodward and Takashi Ikegami from Tokyo recently published a comprehensive study of over 40,000 years worth of cave…
Many artists are inspired by nature, but few collaborate with it in quite the same way as John Knuth. When you look at his paintings, you see broad swaths of color that appear to be meticulous impressionistic abstractions. But what you are actually looking at is the vomit of thousands of flies. To make the…
Ride-sharing service Uber is adding fare splitting to its iPhone and Android apps. So you can look forward to fewer empty promises from friends to pay you back for that late-night Uber ride.
Just because Cern researchers discovered the Higgs Boson particle last year doesn’t mean it’s time to close up shop on the biggest scientific instrument humanity ever created. Instead, the scientific community has plans to upgrade and retrofit the Large Hadron Collider with bigger, better, and more powerful systems over the next decade—like the US LHC…
Big, complex puzzles get all the attention, but doesn’t the other end of the spectrum deserve a little love? Take the smallest jigsaw puzzle in the world, for example. It’s not that complicated to put together, but only if you’ve got a magnifying glass and one hell of a fine touch. Created by researchers at…
