Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
The uproar over New York’s new bike share system is mostly due to very human shortcomings (one crotchety human in particular, actually). But it can also be blamed on the shortcomings of city infrastructure, which hasn’t quite caught up to the demand for new, more efficient ways of storing velocipedes. But if we look to…
Letting future dads experience the best parts of a pregnancy minus the agonizing pain of birth, Huggies has developed a pair of belts that translate the baby’s motions and kicks from the mother’s belly to the father’s. Working with the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency in Argentina, Huggies created the belt to help sell both…
The Financial Times is reporting that Nokia will finally kill off Symbian once and for all this summer. So long, underpowered Nokia smartphones. While Nokia still shipped 500,000 Symbian handsets in the first quarter of this year, it seems to be over the ageing OS. Sure, it’s taken a while for its Windows Phone handsets…
This expanse of metal might not look much, but it’s actually the NASA test facility that allows engine manufacturers to simulate flying through the upper atmosphere—and ensure engines don’t fail when things get too cold. The facility allows engineers to simulate conditions where large quantities of freezing particles are ingested by the engine, which can…
Spend much time on YouTube, and you’ll have no doubt seen videos get stuck at 301 views. But while you might think that’s some sort of software glitch, it could be something far, far more sinister. Just kidding. Of course it’s a software glitch. [XKCD]
Rumors have swirled about the existence of a Galaxy S4 Zoom cameraphone for the past few months—and now Samsung has officially announced its existence. The phone packs a 16-megapixel sensor and is capable of 10x optical zoom, achieved by rotating a ring that surrounds the lens. That same ring also launched the camera app, and…
If you share one Netflix account within your household—be it with friends, family or whoever else—chances are you all share different tastes. Soon, you won’t have to worry about getting a weird set of recommendations thanks to their viewing habits, though—because you’ll soon be able set up multiple user accounts on a single Netflix account.…
While Google’s Glass has been on the block for a while, we’ve yet to see a thorough teardown of the hardware tucked away inside its slender frame. Wait no longer, though, because the folks over at Catwig have now taken the thing apart. Ultimately—and perhaps unsurprisingly—the thing turns out to be rather simple. Inside the…
They just don’t make music videos like they used to. Don’t worry, that’s a good thing. https://gizmodo.com/the-weirdest-thing-on-the-internet-tonight-melt-yourse-5995289 To match the warm, fuzzy, psychedelic wall of sound of Brian Grainger’s six-string sonade Swamp Bike, Christopher Kirk and the team from Mindbomb Films Inc created an equally-trippy visual in the form of a wall of slowly eclipsing…
12 hours of battery life on the 2013 MacBook Air is simply ridiculous (though it’s also sort of ridiculous that it’s ridiculous). iFixit’s task force took apart this year’s MBA, which is pretty identical to last year’s MBA, to see what’s new and how it can squeeze so much juice. iFixit found that the 2013…
Gamers who consider their core hard have always thought of Kinect as just some gimmick Wii-successor that they’d never use because true gamers use analog sticks or fight pads or morse code or something. And maybe the first Kinect was like that. The Kinect 2 on Xbox One? Completely different. It’s truly an extension of…
Microsoft, for some reason, decided to breathe new life into the aging Xbox 360 by giving it another facelift. This time, it was done to match the design ethos of the Xbox One. But where the Xbox One looks bold and retro future and almost quietly intimidating, the new old Xbox 360 looks like a…
To promote its new record label, Beck’s took inspiration from Thomas Edison’s phonograph—a precursor to the record player that used wax cylinders instead of vinyl discs—to create what it’s claiming is the world’s first playable beer bottle. And since Guinness is still battling with U2 over music rights, they just might be right. Using a…
A high school student built this sexy 4-foot long, Mass Effect 2 replica of the Normandy SR2, and it’s simply gorgeous. Ben Caulkins completed this build while preparing for college and taking the SATs. So, it’s no wonder that it took him 7 months. You might remember Ben from this HALO Master Chief Lego costume…
We finally have AirDrop for iOS—which is great news! But that still doesn’t change the fact that you can only share between Apple devices, leaving your Windows brethren high and dry. Fortunately, a similar service called Filedrop just hit iOS, meaning you’re free to share and share alike. What does it do? Lets you share…
China may be quick on the path to constructing the world’s newest tallest building ever, but should they succeed, their reign is probably going to be fairly short-lived—and all because of an elevator. More specifically, an elevator that can travel up to 1000 meters—two times higher than any built before it. https://gizmodo.com/chinas-radical-plan-to-build-the-worlds-tallest-build-510487766 Developed by Finnish…
Apple CEO Tim Cook surprised everyone at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) when he invited a tiny robotics startup onto the stage. Out came Boris Sofman, the chief executive of the fast-growing artificially intelligent robotics company Anki. What followed was a glitchy demo of Anki Drive, a seemingly mundane toy car game and the…
Every time you go to the beach, little grains of sand will inevitably follow you home. But thanks to a hidden mesh compartment, the genius Shake Bag keeps the sand on the shore where it belongs. From the outside, the bag looks like a regular old beach tote, but when you remove a velcro flap,…
Dutch furniture designer Wieki Somers is based in Rotterdam—but for her latest collection of bizarre lamps, she travelled east, to the land of the rising sun, where she found inspiration in the form of Samurai flags, Geisha culture, and traditional Japanese gardening techniques. The series is called Mitate, which, according to the studio, “signifies the…
Basically every digital image sensor out there relies on silicon photodiodes to capture light. Jointly developed by researchers at Panasonic and Fujifilm, a new image sensor technology uses an organic layer instead—and early tests results of the technology blow the status quo away. The new organic CMOS image sensor technology is currently being presented by…