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Wiring everyone up to a single power grid is all well and good—until there’s an outage. But what if we could mitigate outages by supplementing the one big grid with lots of smaller ones powered by renewable energy? The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project aims to find out. The five-year, $178 million Pacific Northwest…
The last we heard of the Power Mac G4 Cube—a computer everyone loved, but no one could quite figure out—was in a press release from 2001. Twelve years later, we’ve finally met its beautiful, brilliant, and not altogether sane successor. Back in July of 2001, the future of the Cube wasn’t entirely clear. In a…
You can already get beloved board games like Monopoly on your tablet that provide a somewhat similar experience to the original cardboard sets. But they’ll never fully replace those old versions because they lack the tangible satisfaction of grabbing a pair of dice, going through your shaking ritual, and tossing them across the table—oh wait,…
The arguably unnecessary race to “revolutionize email” just found another contender in Norwegian software company Opera. After stripping its Opera 15 browser of a mail client, the group is officially releasing Opera Mail as a standalone desktop app. The Mail app conveniently makes use of tabs in the same way you might see in a…
We’re quite fond of both the iPhone and iPad versions of Traktor DJ. Rather than mimic the turntable rigs of yore, they’re DJ apps admirably designed with interfaces tailored to touchscreen interfaces. Today, the app’s developer, Native Instruments, announced small piece of hardware designed to control the apps. Traktor Kontrol Z1 is a lightweight two-channel…
AMD just one-upped its own series of eight-core FX processors, and the golden child of this newest lineup is unquestionably the FX-9590, which they claim to be the world’s “first-ever 5 GHz processor.” While technically that record was already beat—and by AMD themselves, no less—it is, in fact, the first commercially available 5GHz CPU processor.…
Last we saw the Basis B1 it hadn’t launched with an app and users had been relegated to syncing the activity tracker with their desktop. Today that changes for some users with the launch of the Android app. If you have one the supported devices—the list can be found here but it’s all Samsung devices—you’ll…
Microsoft Research has come up with a clever way to let users actually feel what they’re interacting with on a touchscreen. And it doesn’t involve complex finger contraptions, or bulky gloves. Instead, the researchers simply installed the display on a robotic mount that moves in response to where and what is being touched, simulating an…
It took photographer/storm chaser/all-around brave guy Mike Olbinski four years to capture this footage of the formation of a supercell near Booker, Texas. That is some real commitment, and it finally paid off in an awesome way. Shot in the Central Plains of Texas, the footage was captured on a Canon 5D Mark II with…
Yesterday’s sad news about astronaut Chris Hadfield’s surprise retirement made me wonder what was the most remarkable performance of the Canadian astronaut during the time he spent on the International Space Station. And yes, without any doubts, the cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity was the most entertaining. https://gizmodo.com/chris-hadfield-astronaut-extraordinaire-announces-his-512472683 Hadfield’s Oddity is a one-of-a-kind event:…
Los Angeles is inextricably bound to the advent of electricity in American cities—it might technically be the city of angels, but it’s really the city of lights. And lucky for us, the transformation of LA from a dark backwater to radiant city of lights was widely documented. At Huntington Library’s sprawling Edison Archives, 70,000 photos…
OpenStreetMap, the free wiki world map, is a wonderful little project that has become hugely successful. Now, the team behind it has released a report which explains how it’s changed over the last eight years—and some of the results are damn pretty. The database now contains over 21 million miles of road data and 78…
If you’re eager for a taste of OS X Mavericks, how about using its rather nice wallpaper? Apple has made it available online—go get it.
Yesterday’s announcement of OS X Mavericks unveiled some pretty cool new features coming to your Mac—but Cook and co forgot to explain just which computers would support the new OS. Fortunately, Apple Insider has chatted with people familiar with the Mavericks Developer Preview to draw up a list of the Macs which are compatible with…
For all the media coverage telling the US public it should be up in arms about the NSA’s phone tracking, a new study from Pew suggests that the majority of the population couldn’t care less—and in fact support the practice. https://gizmodo.com/what-is-prism-511875267 Seems that 56 percent of Americans think that tracking phone call metadata is an…
The devil’s in the detail, and when it comes to iOS that even includes the tiny elements that make up its icons. Like the new Maps one, which is focussed around Apple’s upcoming Spaceship Campus. Unlike the last icon, which suggested you drive off a bridge, the new one is centered on the plot of…
One of the questions we had about the PS4 before tonight was what kind of storage would it be packing. How big would it be? Is it built in? Would it be removable? Well, Sony answered it in their Japan press release for the PlayStation 4. It’s a 500GB HDD, just like the Xbox One.…
It’s E3, and along with the new consoles, we’re also getting treated to a new line of Alienware laptops. The new trio of machines boast fresh 700M series Nvidia graphics and Intel’s new 4th generation Haswell chips, along with a new look that’s more like that X51 tower (which is getting its own guts update)…
Is the humble banana really a superfood in disguise, one capable of revitalizing the British Isles after a tidal flood of misanthropy? Yann Gorriz thinks so. The documentarian has assembled this extraordinary explanation of Britain’s and India’s tightly-woven histories and the bananas that could save them both.
It’s throwdown time. We’ve finally got prices on both of this generation’s flagship consoles and PS4 is coming in low at $400, undercutting the Xbox One by a cool $100. The console war is on. https://gizmodo.com/the-xbox-one-launches-in-november-for-500-512324271 Between the lower price point, and the total lack of used game restrictions, Sony is definitely aiming for a…
