Tech News

If This Amazing Transforming Candle Isn’t On Your Birthday Cake, Your Family Doesn’t Love You

Presumably developed at some top-secret DARPA-funded research lab, what you’re looking at here is the future of birthday cake candle technology, available today. Believe it or not, for just $20 you can order a three-pack of these spinning candles that shoot flames before opening like a flower, all the while playing Happy Birthday. But obviously…

Super Bowl Blackout Caused by “Abnormality” That Led to a Breaker Freakout

What turned out the lights in the Superdome last night? Actually, we still don’t know! But Entergy—the company responsible for keeping the lights on at the Super Bowl—has released a statement that amounts to a blown fuse, origin unknown. The lights were out for 34 minutes during last night’s Ravens-49ers slugfest, a delay that led…

All of John Kerry’s State Department Tweets Will End with “JK” and Confuse Entire World

John Kerry has proven to be a mostly-uncontroversial candidate for Secretary of State, but there’s a new wrinkle: now that he’s in charge of world diplomacy, he’s going to sign his tweets with JK. What could go wrong! Sure, most people who matter will probably understand that “THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR TO BARBADOS HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED…

Super Bowl Tech Ads: From Worst to Best

The best part of the Super Bowl was the Beyoncé half time show. The second best part of the Super Bowl were the commercials. Here are our favorite tech ads, ranked from worst to best. 7. GoDaddy’s nerd-on-model makeout was gross, patronizing, and gross. Please don’t watch it unless you want to puke. Cringe. 6.…

Ionizing Blaster Stops Dust From Sticking To Your Camera’s Sensor

If you’re tired of ‘dust-busting’ every single photo you take in Photoshop, you can solve the problem at its source with this ionizing FireFly air blaster that promises to neutralize the static charge on dust particles so they easily fall off your camera’s sensor. FireFly’s $130 DSC-2000 comes with a Giottos Rocket Blower so it…

USB Energy Monitor Exposes How Power-Hungry Your Flash Drive Is

Don’t be so smug the next time you walk away from a trade show with a mountain of free flash drives. They require electricity too, and with this simple USB power monitor you can calculate just how much those supposedly ‘free’ giveaways are contributing to your monthly power bill. The $50 monitor sits between a…

Anonymous Leaked Account Data for 4,000 Bank Executives on a Government Website

After hacking up government websites last week, and the week before, Anonymous has pulled off another hack to push their agenda of reforming computer crime law in the wake of Aaron Swartz’s suicide. This time, they’ve leaked names, addresses, and other information about over 4,000 bank executives. And they did it all on a government…

Would You Buy Ebooks on a Pay-As-You-Read Basis?

A start-up called TotalBooX, baed in Tel Aviv, is planning to “disrupt” the ebook market by selling books on a pay-as-you-read basis. But would you be interested? The idea is simple: instead of paying for a book up front—which is easy to do rashly with 1-click purchasing—you instead pay a small fee for each page…

Hands Down the Nerdiest Way To Say I Love You

If the object of your affection cares more about chemistry and physics than chocolate and flowers, for $75 you can skip the card and get them this tiny aerogel heart that weighs next to nothing. Developed as a remarkably efficient insulator, aerogel is 96 percent air by volume, so it’s impossibly lightweight. However, it’s also…

Over 450 Super Bowl photos/second were posted to Instagram during the game, largely of TVs or people watching them.

What Happens When a 900MPH Ping Pong Serve Hits Your Paddle

There’s no shortage of plans online for building a simple ping pong cannon that can fire balls at hundreds of miles per hour. But you’re probably not going to find the details of Purdue University Professor Mark French’s cannon, since his creation can accelerate a ping pong ball to 900 miles per hour, or just…

Saturn I In A Chrysler Ad

via paykanhunter.com

This Text String Crashes Almost Any App on a Mac Running Mountain Lion

Here’s a weird little OS X quirk: the eight-character code above seems to cause pretty much any app on a Mac running Mountain Lion to crash, instantly. It’s not clear why, but tapping in the code seems to cause most apps running on Mountain Lion to crash, losing any open files in the process. Interestingly,…

A Stunning Hand Knotted Carpet Of Mars’ Surface

Nearly 90% of Mars’ surface has been mapped by the high-resolution stereo camera on ESA’s Mars Express, which celebrates ten years since launch this June. The mosaic above comprises 2702 individual swaths of the martian surface, up to and including the spacecraft’s 10 821st orbit of the planet, which it completed on 30 June 2012.…

Confirmed: Richard III’s Skeleton Found Underneath a Parking Lot

A team of archaeologists has announced that the remains of a body found beneath a parking lot in the city of Leicester, UK, in fact belong to ancient English King Richard III. You know, the one who died over 500 years ago. In a press conference held this morning, researchers at the University of Leicester…

The Sounds Your Dial-Up Modem Used to Make, Visualized

Though your old dial-up modem (hopefully) now sits in a junk yard somewhere, its beeps and whistles surely remain etched into your brain. With this massive image, Oona Räisänen decided to explain every single note your modem used to make—and it’s fascinating. If you click the image above, you’ll be able to explore the visualization…

Apple’s asserting its superiority by rolling out an appstore.com URL to make ads everywhere that little bit prettier.

Was BlackBerry’s Super Bowl Ad the Dumbest Tech Ad You’ve Ever Seen?

BlackBerry’s Super Bowl ad from last night was… uh… interesting. The company claimed that in 30 seconds, it was easier to show us what BB10 couldn’t do—which is perhaps some of the laziest marketing ever. But the real question is, is this the dumbest tech advert you’ve ever seen? And, if not, what was? Post…

HP’s First Chromebook: Big Screen, Little Else

HP has announced its first Chromebook, and it’s notable for the fact that its screen is much larger than models from the likes of Samsung, Acer, and Lenovo. Sadly, there’s not an awful lot else to set it apart. Unlike most Chromebooks, that pack a screen somewhere between 11 and 12 inches, HP’s Pavilion 14…

You Have To Wait One More Day for an iPhone 5 Jailbreak

That iOS 6.1 jailbreak that was maybe probably definitely supposed to come out today, courtesy of evad3rs? Bad news; it’s not coming until tomorrow. Despite the rumored (and hoped) Super Bowl-day launch date, we’ll all have to wait just a little longer. When the jailbreak does eventually come through, it’ll support all iPhones, iPads, and…