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Nature has a nice dive into the scientific quest to grow complex organs like a human heart. No, it hasn’t been done yet—but it’s surprisingly within reach. Right now, researchers are trying to marry two different scientific accomplishments: growing healthy, beating heart cells and growing simple hollow organs like bladders. The idea is to try…
In its biggest update yet, Vine is trying to beef up its isolated and popular service—people love Vine, but once you’re in Vine, it’s so lonely! The billboard new feature? “Revines”, which are exactly what they sound like. The newly updated iOS app now has 15 content channels that make browsing for stuff inside Vine…
The New York Times has finally called in the experts to explain why so many apple pies turn out so badly. This great visualization is based on comments from Amy Rowat, a biophysicist at UCLA who teaches a class that covers the delicate science of apple pies. That might sound ludicrous to some, but it…
The North Korea YouTube account is the country’s officially recognized, premier means of reaching Western audiences. It’s also utterly insane. But it starts to make a little more sense once you meet the people behind it. The odd first thing you’ll notice about the North Korea YouTube page—created specifically to win the hearts and minds…
This psychedelic take on an iconic photo is the official poster for jOBs.
The fine folks at B&H Photo are heavily discounting the Canon EOS M 18MP Mirrorless Camera for a limited time. $300 gets you the camera body with the EF-M 22mm f/2 STM Lens, and you also have the option of bumping it up to $350 to get a 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM Lens instead. These…
I love the Mac Pro. I love its simplicity and its ingenious engineering. And I would like it even more if it were encapsulated in glass, like in these 3D renderings created by our friend Martin Hajek, who painstakingly modeled its guts following Apple’s transparent prototype displayed at WWDC 2013. Of course, there a couple…
As you kick back under a glittering shower of high-production-value pyrotechnics on Independence Day this year, take a second to remember how the modern firework started out: As a tiny, but startling, accident. In China, roughly 2,200 years ago, the first firework was just a reed of bamboo roasting over a fire. And just like…
Douglas Engelbart, an internet pioneer and developer of the early computer mouse, passed away early this morning at the age of 88. Engelbart was involved in the development of the ARPANET—the precursor to the modern internet—and showed off hypertext long before most people had interacted with a computer, let alone touched a networked computer. On…
As far as entry costs go, a drum kit can be a little expensive compared to a beater guitar or bass. This Nikon shutter percussion symphony takes it to a whole new multi-thousand-dollar level. Photographer Benjamin Von Wong got the idea from for this Nikon symphony watching a video that compares shutter sounds from different…
A modern assembly line can churn out a new vehicle every few minutes, but when carmakers want to build and test a prototype, it takes weeks to produce the dies and moulds needed to stamp out a custom one-off part. So Ford has developed a fantastic new prototyping machine that functions kind of like a…
The New York Times has confirmed that Samsung has acquired streaming TV company Boxee. It’s not a monumental deal, but if anything the purchase will probably help Samsung slightly improve its connected TV interface.
Your email and phone call metadata certainly isn’t private, but maybe you were holding out hope that good old fashioned snail mail somehow avoided big brother’s living gaze. The Smoking Gun broke the bad news a month ago, and now the New York Times is confirming that nope, that’s all being tracked too. Surprise surprise.…
Combining a simple red laser pointer with a Star Trek phaser toy seems so incredibly obvious, but apparently it’s taken this long for a clever entrepreneur to put those pieces together and come up with thisadorable keychain that actually fires a glowing blast. That, or it’s taken years to negotiate the Star Trek licensing rights.…
In a summer filled with painfully stupid, joyless blockbusters, Disney’s The Lone Ranger offers a very special brand of insultingly terrible boring nonsense. But is it the year’s stupidest movie, or just in the Top 10? At least the western’s “accessories collection is made by a Lakota Sioux leatherworker named Gabriel GoodBuffalo.” “A Pirates of…
Nobody wants to spend their vacation day studying history, but if you’re feeling particularly patriotic tomorrow, you can head on over to Google Maps where Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello residence is now available to explore using Google Street View. You can virtually wander around outside the property on its sprawling greens, or head indoors and explore…
Americans love things that sparkle, things that glow, and especially things that blow up. So it makes sense that on America’s birthday, we take great pride in our various spectacles of light and noise. Today, there are countless YouTube videos and how-to websites showing how to create your own firecrackers and noisemakers. But back in…
Tomorrow’s barbeque is going to be epic, a cookout for the ages. But first you’ll need to make sure your grill is up to the task. Here’s how to turn your fire pit up to 11 in time for the 4th. Cooked to the Grills Stuck between open flame and charring flesh, your grill’s cooking…
Why put your luggage in the belly of an aircraft when your luggage can be the belly of an aircraft? Enter the Aviator collection, suitcases that look like they could take the flight to your destination all on their own. Designed by Timothy Oulton, the Aviator collection is a four-piece set with a distressed aluminum…
The Uranium-235 and -238 we use in modern nuclear fission reactors are humanity’s single most energy-dense fuel source (1,546,000,000 MJ/L), but that potent power potential comes at a steep price—and not just during natural disasters. Its radioactive plutonium byproducts remain lethally irradiated for millennia. That’s why one pioneering Nordic company is developing an alternative fuel…
