Tech News

Grow Your Greens in a Hanging Gutter Garden

City living shouldn’t preclude you from working your land—even if it’s paved over in concrete. Here’s a simple, inexpensive means of creating your own ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon’ from some gutter and a chain link fence. You Should Do This If: You have limited floor space for gardening but an abundance of walls. Moment of…

Travel Cheap With a Trunk That Transforms Into Its Own Hotel Room

If you’re looking to explore the world on the cheap but the thought of sharing a hostel room with strangers creeps you out, designers Roberto De Luca and Antonio Scarponi have got you covered. The pair’s Hotello is a rolling trunk that transforms into a 43 square foot hotel room complete with a bed, a…

The Next iOS Needs to Look Like This

It’s not a good sign when the best iOS features are imaginary ones designed by people who aren’t getting paid to do it instead of, you know, Apple. Like this revamped vision for iPhone multitasking. Apple, steal this now. Australian designer Jesse Head cooked up this rendering, which imagines a beautified, more versatile iOS that…

If you’re an AT&T U-Verse subscriber, you’ll no longer have to live in frothing jealousy of those with WatchESPN.

Hollow Fiber Optic Tunnels Can Blast Data at Practically the Speed of Light

We all want faster downloads, and developments like graphene antennas promise a speedy future. There is an upper limit—the speed of light—but that should be fast enough, right? Well a new kind of hollow fiber optic cable promises to get us 99.7 percent of the way there. https://gizmodo.com/a-graphene-antenna-could-give-us-wireless-terabit-uploa-5988728 Developed by researchers at the University of…

This Impeccably Accurate CD Player Scans Your Disc Multiple Times for Errors

It turns out that even the most expensive of home stereo CD players are still occasionally susceptible of incorrectly reading the data on the disc, which can ruin the listening experience. So a company called Parasound has created the CD 1, a Linux-powered standalone CD player that actually reads a disc multiple times during playback…

Thanks to Snapseed photo editing, Google+’s updated iOS and Android apps have finally joined the photo filter bandwagon.

How Android’s Multitasking Experience Could Be Even Better

Lately I’ve been thinking about the multitasking experience on Android and I feel like there’s still a lot to improve. I love how the thumbnails come up, but in 4.2.2 they made it so that the current app joined the list of “Recent Apps”. This looks great on phones and small-sized tablets, but it looks…

Match Fixtures Are Stick-Like Sculptures of Light

Match is a customizable lighting solution made of thin rods of steel and LEDs for sculptures that crawl out of the ceiling. Designed by Jordi Vilardell and Meritxell Vidal, the fixtures make interconnecting black or white wiry webs that can be configured anyway you’d like. Every set-up is a unique composition, which the designers can…

Windows 8’s Main Apps All Just Got a Little Better

Tomorrow, Windows 8 and RT’s Mail, Calendar, and People apps will all receive updates in the Windows Store. Meaning, tomorrow, Windows 8 gets a little bit better! Here’s how the updates to the apps will break down. Mail Mail gets the most improvements of the three apps. It’ll add the ability to create, delete, or…

Little Outliner: The Cleanest, Simplest Outliner Web App Around

Little Outliner is a new editor from Dave Winer that automatically saves text locally. The HTML5 web app is a super simple, super straightforward way to create outlines. Here’s a quick how-to for using Little Outliner. You can expand and collapse headlines hierarchically, and move things around with your mouse. For example, you press return…

Our friends over at Jalopnik have rounded up the 10 worst passenger planes still in service. So, uh… safe travels?

Graphene Sponges: The New Lightest Material on the Planet

At this point, it’d be more of a surprise if graphene wasn’t an integral part of a mind-bending, record-setting new technology. But, of course, it is. Again. Enter the lightest material in the world: graphene aerogel. Aerogel is nothing new. All made primarily of air, different flavors of aerogel have been one-upping each other for…

Plants Are Green Because Chlorophyll Is an Evolutionary Champ

A few weeks ago Minute Earth raised the question of why plants are green. After all, their green color means they’re reflecting green light, so wouldn’t black plants that absorb all light be most efficient? https://gizmodo.com/we-dont-actually-know-why-plants-are-green-5990764 In theory, they would. But for whatever reason, over time it was plants that relied on chlorophyll—which gives them…

No Supersonic Tennis Balls Will Be Sneaking Up on the World’s Most Advanced Radar

The modern Naval battlefield is a cacophony of electromagnetic energy with active and jamming signals competing for dominance amid the din. This new 3D radar system however, cuts through the static of war to accurately track nearly a thousand tennis ball-sized incoming threats. Which might be moving at Mach 3 from 15 miles away. Known…

How Clouds Work: The Most Complicated Problem in Climate Change

Predicting how Earth’s climate will change in the coming years is a deeply important task for science. It also seems fairly fundamental—they’re just clouds! Thing is, cloud dynamics are incredibly problematic, to the point of being unknowable in some instances. The Verge has a very cool feature today about the problem. Essentially, it’s impossible to…

The Best Architecture Designs of the Year

The Design Museum of London has just announced the contenders for its sixth annual Designs of the Year. And their shortlist for architecture showcases 17 structures that transcend buildings to become works of art. A Room For London, (Southbank Centre), UK: Perched above Queen Elizabeth Hall at London’s Southbank Centre, the boat-shaped, one-bedroom installation offers…

Report: Spotify Will Add a Streaming Video Service

SAI reports that Spotify plans to expand beyond its on-demand streaming music service into the wild world of streaming video. According to unnamed sources, Spotify wants to take on VOD services with exclusive content, which would put the company in direct competition with companies like Netflix, Amazon, and even, if you’re willing to stretch you…

Here’s the Steve Jobs Manga You Didn’t Know You Needed

There’s manga for practically everything, and from the moment one popped about the politics of making Android devices, one about Steve Jobs was inevitable. Well, it’s here. https://gizmodo.com/android-themed-manga-comic-breaks-down-the-drama-5872399 The first chapter was published in Japan’s Kiss magazine today, and publisher Kodansha has released a few shots online for those of us who just want to…

Test Your Model-Making Skills With This Plywood Lowrider

Designer Jurgen Kuipers’ plywood Sawyer lowrider bike is as awesome to look at as it probably is to cruise around the neighborhood on. So much so that Kuipers has actually created a full-size, 1:1 scale model of the bike that comes packaged just like a plastic model kit. However, this time around a jigsaw is…