Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
A couple of months ago, our all-powerful leader Joe Brown banned Kickstarter projects from the pages of Gizmodo. If you’re still puzzled over that decision, consider this: Kickstarter is becoming such a widely abused platform that it will soon eat itself. https://gizmodo.com/were-done-with-kickstarter-5897449 That sentiment is beautifully conveyed by today’s XKCD, which depicts a fictional Kickstarter…
While movie stars aren’t drug-free zones, movie sets are at least supposed to be. Which is why, during filming, actors have to make do with stunt-double drugs. An article in Wired neatly summarizes some of the most common stand-ins; here are a few of the best. [Wired] Methamphetamine Taking huge quantities of real meth can…
Virgin Atlantic has announced that, first in its Airbus A330s and soon in other planes, passengers will be able to make and receive cell phone calls. Virgin Atlantic has signed up to a service provided by AeroMobile, which uses GSM connections to allow voice calls from the air. Currently, the service is only up for…
Last week, along with a cool-but-crazy monochrome-only digital camera, Leica announced that it was launching a a special edition of its M9 with fashion label Hermès. It will cost an eye-watering $25,000—and this video goes some way to explaining that price. https://gizmodo.com/leica-m-monochrom-only-shoots-in-black-and-white-and-th-5909346 In fact, while the video concentrates on the Hermès collaboration, it helps explain…
Kodak may be going under, but apparently they could have started their own nuclear war if they wanted, just six years ago. Down in a basement in Rochester, NY, they had a nuclear reactor loaded with 3.5 pounds of enriched uranium—the same kind they use in atomic warheads. https://gizmodo.com/kodak-goes-belly-up-and-files-for-chapter-11-5877428 But why did Kodak have a…
I’ve been bumped on the streets by people who were texting while walking. A thousand times. It’s annoying. I guess I should be happy that the town of Fort Lee, New Jersey, have started issuing $85 tickets to any pedestrians caught texting and walking. Except I’m not. It’s a stupid law. The fact is that…
Watch this father as he jumps out of a moving car to save his baby daughter from being run over by other cars in this busy intersection of Wenzhou, a city in the east of China. It was quite the move. Apparently, the daughter managed to jump from the back to the front’s passenger seat,…
Some people thought that featuring the bizarre history of vibrators was in poor taste for Mother’s Day. Poor babies. No worries, here are ten ultra-cute, sugar-coma-inducing bear cubs dancing the conga. Happy Mother’s Day! https://gizmodo.com/the-bizarre-history-of-the-vibrator-from-cleopatras-an-5909857 Oh wait, they are licking each other’s heads. Is that bear incest? MOTHER’S DAY? RUINED AGAIN!
A dude called Flippycat thought it would be a good idea to stack 60,000 dominos to make 60 big walls and then hit them to watch them fall. I can’t blame him. It’s a satisfying view to watch all that color fall. The montage took over a distance of 14 feet, taking 65.5 hours to…
This is one amazing visualization by the U.S. Geological Survey: a picture that gives you a perfect idea of how much water there is on Earth compared to the solid materials that form its main body. It’s truly staggering: This picture shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth’s water in…
Remember when Adobe said the only way to fix a recently discovered Photoshop CS5.5 vulnerability was to upgrade to CS6? Thankfully, they’ve had a change of heart and are now working on a patch for all affected CS5.X applications. Apparently, the only push Adobe needed to do its job was the rage of the entire…
Just when I thought criminals with Facebook accounts can’t possibly be more stupid, another imbecile comes along and proves me wrong by robbing an internet cafe at gunpoint—after using one of the computers to log into Facebook and leaving his account open. It happened in the neighborhood of Calima, north of the city of Cali,…
TMZ has scored some photos of Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs. I don’t know what disgusts me more: the fact that a useless actor like Kutcher is playing Jobs or that they are milking Jobs figure already or that they got the characterization entirely wrong. https://gizmodo.com/that-ashton-kutcher-steve-jobs-movie-sounds-pretty-awfu-5902096 Actually, it’s all of the above, but the last…
Did you know that the first vibrator in history may have been invented by Egyptian Queen Cleopatra? Apparently, she had the idea of filling a hollow gourd with angry bees. The violent buzzing caused the gourd to vibrate and then… well, then, the rest is history. And that history gets weirder and weirder from there,…
The White Sea is an inlet of the Barents Sea, in the northwest coast of Russia. Its waters are cold and apparently devoid of life—until you do deep and discover an alien world full of colorful creatures that look from other planets. These amazing shots were captured by the head of the diving department of…
On January 8, 2005, a huge cyclone as strong as a Category 1 hurricane hit Sweden and Denmark. Its name was Gudrun and it blew at sustained speeds of 78.3mph (126km/h) with wind gusts of 102.5mph (165km/h). It killed 22 people and struck down 75 million cubic meters of trees. How much is 75 million…
Is there anything cuter than puppies and kittens playing? Yes, yes there is: puppies and kittens playing in slow motion thanks to the wonders of a Phantom camera. That seems to be one of the main premises of Too Cute: Puppie and Kittens. https://gizmodo.com/phantom-camera-1000-frames-per-second-scary-people-d-5485793 The show, which appears in Discovery’s Animal Planet cable channel, is…
Could you live without broadband at home? I don’t know if I could, but Apple Co-Founder and Gizmodo hero Steve Wozniak can. That’s what he has recently said in Australia talking about his home in Los Gatos, California: I don’t have broadband at my home. I, Steve Wozniak, don’t have broadband at my home. I…
This week was a busy week! Whether it was teleporting quantum objects, MIT students bringing Mario Kart into the physical realm, the rise of assassin bugs, or the disappearing clothes of a weather woman, there was no shortage of interesting news. Oh and don’t forget about our lists of the weirdest underwater monsters and the…
Scientists from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, thought it would be a great idea to investigate why the hell we spill coffee every time we walk carrying cups. Don’t you love science? Here are their results and solutions. Their experiment recorded volunteers walking with a gazillion combinations of…
