Tech News

Worm Run, Solve the Outbreak, and More

Evade space worms, diagnosis an outbreak in a rural village, and read a little Charles Dickens. Nope, not retelling your dream from last night, just previewing a few of the things you can do with this round of the week’s best iPad apps. Worm Run: Here’s another game you might get addicted to—in Worm Run,…

New Googleplex First Look: A 1.1 Million-Square-Foot Monster Optimized By Nerds

Vanity Fair has a nice look at the new Google headquarters, including a rendering of the mammoth 1.1 million-square-foot campus. The new campus is called “Bay View.” At first, you think you’re just looking at a bunch of boring identical buildings. But it’s designed like a search algorithm to get employees from start to finish…

Guam’s Solving Its Snake Problem With a Horrifying Rain of Poisoned Mouse Paratroopers

Guam has a problem with brown tree snakes. Specifically, it has two million brown tree snakes, and they’re slowly decimating other native species. So scientists have come up with a solution, the only logical one really: fill a bunch of dead mice with painkillers, give each corpse a tiny parachute, and throw them all out…

What Happens To Your Brain When You Get Black-Out Drunk?

You wake up in an unfamiliar room, missing a button or two, with a few stains on your shirt that you’re hoping are food-related. The last thing you remember from the night before was downing that fourth shot of Cuervo. Okay, so you blacked out. But what exactly does that mean? What did alcohol do…

This Gorgeous Timelapse of Australia’s Outback Isn’t Just Monochrome—It’s Infra-Red

Australia’s Canberra region is as beautiful as it is rugged. While the area may explode in color and life after seasonal rains, it is equally inhospitable during droughts. To capture this dichotomy, acrylic artist Phil Ryan teamed with photographer Glen Ryan in Karst Country. Karst topography, with its dramatically eroded limestone formations, is found throughout…

Let’s Talk About Whatever You Want for the Next Hour

Hey, guess what? It’s Friday! We’re sure you’re feeling just as restless as we are, so to help the day fly by, we’ll be hanging around this thread to talk about anything you want for the next hour. No more work no more! Unless you’re Wagner, in which case you’re on a plane to Barcelona…

Watch This Hypnotizing Footage Of a Rainbow Mercury Spinning Through Space

While Curiosity’s off drilling into the surface of Mars, plenty of other man-made, space-bound machines are surveying the rest of the solar system, and coming with some pretty cool stuff. NASA’s MESSENGER, for instance, put together quite the mesmerizing footage of Mercury’s spin. Stitched together out of over 1,000 shots, the little movie shows roughly…

You can now call friends directly from Facebook’s iOS app. And habitual drunk Facebookers everywhere shudder in unison.

The Best Possible Use For All Your Mismatched Socks

As cliche as the problem sounds, socks really do have a way of going missing in the wash. But why resort to just throwing single socks away, or suffering the embarassment of wearing a mismatched pair, when you can just stitch them all together into a eye-catching throw rug? Or, if you can’t sew worth…

Is It Okayyyyyy To Say Heyyyyyyyyyy?

There’s a virus we need to talk about. It’s spread between our brains, fingers, and keyboards, we rarely think about it, and we almost all do it. Maybe it’s harmless. Or maybe it’s corroding our entire language. Ughhhhhhhhhhh! We’ve been typing like some horrible mix between Bravo reality TV star, child, and moaning animal for…

This Aeropress Coffee Maker Is Your Deal of the Day

The Aeropress is a cult coffee maker that is absolutely adored by its devotees. In fact, there’s an annual international competition to see who can make the best cup of coffee using an Aeropress. (This year it’s in Melbourne, Australia.) Coffee snobs love the Aeropress because it is perfect for experimentation and has a superfast…

These Whale Mech Toys Give Us an Excuse To Post the Most Amazingly Insane Cartoon We’ve Ever Seen

Think of every unhinged video you’ve ever seen on YouTube, and multiply that by a billion. Then, and only then, will you be able to comprehend the amazingness that is the Mechawhales: A couple of short, cel-shaded CG cartoons starring a gigantic sperm whale that’s not only able to navigate dry land, but also wage…

Wikipedia plans to roll out a low-bandwidth version of the site accessible via text. Because the more you know.

A Florida Woman Was Shot by an Oven

Among items on the short list of “things that shouldn’t be stored in an oven,” live ammunition ranks near the top—just below live babies and gasoline. That’s because, as Myth Busters has taught us and one Florida woman learned this week, live ammo and high temperatures make for an explosive combination. Aalaya Walker just wanted…

A Bottle Cap Pencil Sharpener Is Pure Genius

If you prefer the feel of writing or sketching with a freshly sharpened pencil and are fastidious about keeping hydrated, this clever piece of synergy is going to blow your mind. Designed for use on standard plastic water bottles, this pencil sharpening bottle cap is a brilliantly obvious way to deal with pencil shavings. It…

Cup Holders Prove that Even the Simplest Tech Can Take Forever to Catch On

You would never buy a car without cup holders like you’d never buy a car without seat belts. A secure place to store your scalding coffee so you can concentrate on driving and put both hands on the wheel isn’t a convenience—it’s a safety feature. And it wasn’t even standard on cars until the 1980’s.…

Apple Theft Is So Bad That the NYPD Has a Dedicated iTheft Division

It should come as no surprise that iPhones and iPads are prime targets for theft, but it’s gotten really bad in New York City. It’s so bad that, according to the New York Post, the NYPD is setting up a unit specifically to handle iDevice theft and work with Apple to track down the thieves.…

Radical New Image Sensor Turns your Entire Display Into a Digital Camera

Researchers at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria have developed a new kind of image sensor that could one day revolutionize the form factor of digital cameras. Instead of a postage stamp-sized digital eye, the sensor is a flat, flexible, transparent plastic sheet that could be invisibly overlayed on displays, or just used as…

Google Has Killed Android (the Brand)

There are days where a trend you noticed becomes absolutely visible. Today is one of those days. I have seen the Android brand disappear over time. First, it was the Nexus, then Samsung came with the Galaxy brand, who made Android less relevant. Now, Android is just invisible. I thought Google was losing a war…

Conan: Google Glass Is Only Preparing the World For Google ASS

Wearing a computer on your face may sound ridiculous, but according to Conan, Google Glass only marks the first step in the search giant’s ambitions in wearable computing. The real destination? Your ass. Full video below: [Conan via Mashable]