Tech News

A Surreal Jaunt Through the Largest Mall in North America

The West Edmonton Mall is the largest mall in North America, a five-million-square-foot-waterslide-and-roller-coaster-filled alternate reality where Albertans can escape brutal winters and mosquito-clouded summers. But in “Waterpark,” the directorial debut of Canadian filmmaker Evan Prosofsky, the mall is cast as a place where placid indoor humans spend their entire lives being entertained. “I never seemed…

Throw & Grow Confetti Turns Celebrations Into Lush Flower Gardens

Are you worried about the eco-impact of all that tossed confetti at your upcoming nuptials? Or maybe you don’t want to have to pay someone to clean it all up. Either way, just opt for Niko Niko’s new Throw & Grow eco-friendly confetti. Made of a biodegradable paper-like material shaped like little blossoms, the confetti…

Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Is Here To Answer Your Questions

It’s an undeniable fact that Reddit is a massively important cog in the Internet machine — and thus, by default, its founder Alexis Ohanian is also a pretty big deal in his own right. But this wasn’t always the case. Back in the day, before Reddit was even an alien-shaped gleam in his and co-founder…

Have You Ever Seen Spacecraft Solar Panels From Behind?

I like very much the following behind-the-scenes photos the European Space Agency published on its blog and on its Facebook page. While ATV-4 is getting ready for launch on 5 June in Kourou, French Guiana, elsewhere in the world people are finishing ATV-5’s components. Here an engineer at Dutch Space is performing final checks on…

This Is the Camera That Found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Law enforcement didn’t pull any punches during its manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, going so far as to lock down an entire metropolis while they searched. Even when officers thought they had the second suspect cornered in Watertown boat, they confirmed their suspicions with a camera that can spot people from up to 10…

Verizon will kick off pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy S4 tomorrow. No word on when you might actually get it, though.

How the Pirates of the Caribbean Became an Animatronic Adventure

Did you know that the Pirates of the Caribbean, one of the most iconic theme park attractions of all time, was originally going to be just a walkthrough wax museum at Disneyland? How lame would that have been? Thankfully, during the upgrades to the park for its new New Orleans Square, Walt Disney got caught…

Watch The Martian Landscape In Stereo

Enjoy this freshly released NASA image of Mars taken by Curiosity rover in January from ‘John Klein’ stone. Raw Left and right eyes of the Navigation Camera (Navcam) in NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took the dozens of images combined into this stereo scene of the rover and its surroundings. The component images were taken during…

All Music Boxes Should Look Like Bond Villain Speedboats

MB&F is known for its horological creations that eschew the form factors of traditional watch design. But the company has now taken its expertise in designing mechanical timekeeping wonders and applied it to the world of music boxes, resulting in what looks like a cross between a hydroplane and a retroriffic time machine. https://gizmodo.com/this-watch-is-like-strapping-a-muscle-car-to-your-wrist-5965834 The…

The Human Printer: An Automaton Powered By Art Students

“Machines have less problems,” Andy Warhol famously said in 1963. “I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?” Andy was born a few decades too early to see it through, but a group of art students, who go by the Human Printer, are now living his dream. The Human Printer, or HP (see what they…

How Rare Are Your Physical Traits?

Did your parents ever tell you you were special when you were growing up? If you answered “no,” that’s depressing and we’re sorry. But if you answered “yes,” we have some good news: they probably weren’t lying! At least when it comes to who you are on the outside—you know, the stuff that really matters.…

An Introduction To Complications: The Tourbillon

Editor’s note: This is part three in a series of introductory pieces on watches from our friends at Hodinkee. You can read part one here and part two here. https://gizmodo.com/an-introduction-to-the-mechanical-watch-5994787 Let’s face it, there are a lot of well-engineered and beautiful inventions that you wouldn’t exactly call useful (here’s a good example). In watchmaking, the…

A Look Inside Afghanistan’s Almost-Apple Store

Fake Apple stores are nothing new. China has a slew of them, all polished and shiny, appearing almost as if they are the genuine article at a glance. Quartz dug up some details on Afghanistan’s (fake) Apple store, and though it’s a bit more frumpy than most, it still gets the job done. https://gizmodo.com/fake-chinese-apple-store-looks-amazingly-real-5822918 Located…

Children of the 1980s Build Their Cities of Tomorrow

When I was in second grade I made a diorama of a city of the future. This was the early 1990s and the diorama was supposed to represent the year 2000—somehow still lightyears away for a young kid during the George H. W. Bush administration. My little diorama city had cars that ran on a…

Splitsider Presents: A Place to Buy Awesome Comedy Where the Artists Actually Get Paid

The push towards DRM-free distribution has come in fits and spurts; Louis CK helped pioneer and popularize the model, but to date there still hasn’t been a centralized hub where you can buy high-quality comedy, for a little bit of money, that the artist gets to keep. https://gizmodo.com/louis-ck-spent-his-own-stupid-money-to-stream-his-new-s-5866889 Splitsider Presents, a new offshoot of internet…

Apple’s announced its Worldwide Developers Conference will kick off June 10th in San Francisco. Brace yourself for news.

Booze-Tracking Bluetooth Breathalyzer Counts Down Your Return To Sobriety

An experienced imbiber has a pretty good idea of when they’ll return to the land of the sober based on what type, and how much hooch they’ve consumed. But if you need a more detailed ETA on when you might be able to drive, walk, or even stand again, the BACtrack breathalyzer connects to a…

Reddit co-founder (and new author!) Alexis Ohanian will be answering your questions at noon. – Sponsored

NASA Drew This Giant Penis on the Surface of Mars

Apparently, this drawing of the male genitals etched into the surface of Mars—which has popped up on NASA’s website—was just an amusing accident. Either that, or a very dirty-minded individual got hold of the controls of NASA’s ageing Opportunity Mars rover. As if it wasn’t bad enough it got replaced by Curiosity and left on…

Nokia’s Asha 210 Is a Social QWERTY Phone Two Years Late

Just over two years after HTC released the Status—a QWERTY phone with Facebook integration that never even really mattered at the time—Nokia has decided to roll out its own version: the Asha 210. https://gizmodo.com/the-facebook-phone-review-lets-just-pretend-this-isnt-5821278 Nokia’s social phone does at least take into account current trends: in the West and Latin America, it will have a…