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While individually cheap, the cost of your streaming subscriptions can pile up. If you’re feeling the pinch, check out Splitflix. The new service facilitates splitting the cost of your Netflix and Hulu subscriptions with another person. Awesome, as long as it lasts. For $1 a month, Splitflix will anonymously set you up with someone who…
For all of Sony’s troubles, their commitment to R&D is something that can never be questioned. Their latest achievement is a wireless radio component that operates on the 60 gigahertz frequency and can transfer 6.3 gigabits per second. According to The Verge, that’s good enough to exchange 50 gigs of data in under a minute.…
Michael Harper is an idiot. The 36-year-old Englishman was in the middle of robbing a power sub-station when he decided, hey, why not urinate on the power transformer. The transformer exploded, Harper caught on fire, and 2,000 people lost power. Dunce. Harper and an accomplice were stealing copper wire (naturally) from the station. To get…
It was a major breakthrough in 1995: After 13 months, scientists finally sequenced the entire genome of a bacteria for the first time. These days, a gene-slinger can do it in a few seconds. With a USB stick. It’s called the MinION, and the scientists at Oxford Nanopore Technologies who built it say the disposable…
If you happen have a handful of unused speaker drivers, some fiberglass, and a length of vacuum hose, you too can fashion a three-way speaker out of some Ikea salad bowls. Using three of Ikea’s Blanda Matt bowls, along with three Baren Hangs pegs as feet, you can have yourself a three way speaker that…
Imagine looking up to the sky every night just to see the Halloween orange and chimney red glow from dozens of volcanoes on the surface of the Moon. According to new research paper just published in Nature Geosciences, humans could enjoy such a show in the future. Imagine that: Mooncanoes! Using recent moonquake information gathered…
Nokia Siemens is going to demo HSPA+ Multiflow—a new cell tech that lets phones talk to two cell towers at once—at Mobile World Congress. It’s the first time that the tech, which can apparently double data speeds, will be shown working on stuff you might actually be able to buy. HSPA+ Multiflow works by sending…
The Department of Defense has confirmed that an Air Force U-28A—a plane dedicated to shadowy spec ops—crashed over Djibouti this weekend, killing all aboard. Nobody yet knows what took the commando plane down. Djibouti, Voice of America explains, is home to Camp Lemonnier, the only official military base in Africa—though there are other installations operated…
When a Swedish man drove down a deserted forest road near Umeaa, Sweden last December 19th, he was probably looking forward to Christmas. But that day, his car somehow became buried under a mountain of snow. He was trapped there for two months, suffering insanely low temperatures, with no access to food. Last Sunday, he…
Every year, there’s a temporal waterfall seemingly flowing with lava down the East side of El Capitan, the massive granite formation in Yosemite Park, California. Only people at the right place and time are able to see it. It’s called the Horsetail Fall. And, of course, there’s no magma involved. It’s an optical effect produced…
Even the rich are sinking in Europe: the 198-foot (60.2-meter) superyacht Yogi sunk under a Force 8 storm in the Mediterranean Sea on Friday. This video, just released today, shows the Hellenic Air Force rescuing the passengers in the middle of the gale. Clearly, it’s not a good year for ships. The boat sunk to…
On Tuesday night, ABC will broadcast a special Nightline episode that takes a look into Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China. To whet your appetite, though, here’s a sneak preview of what ABC is planning to offer up. It looks set to paint a fairly bleak picture: the pace of work means that interviews…
A software development student from the UK has been sentenced to eight months in prison, after infiltrating the servers of Facebook between April and May last year. Facebook spent $200,000 dealing with the crime, which sparked a huge investigation by the FBI and British authorities. The 26-year-old student claims he had “wanted to identify vulnerabilities…
In the ongoing quest to push processor performance, the key is being able to effectively shrink their component parts. A new transistor, based on a single atom, may go further than helping speed things up: it could shatter Moore’s Law. For the uninitiated, Moore’s Law simply suggests that the number of transistors that can be…
According to leaked documents seen by The Verge, Barnes & Noble is launching an 8GB version of its Nook Tablet this week. That drop in capacity means one thing: it’s planning to match, or undercut, the Kindle Fire. The news comes from a leaked Walmart document. From The Verge: “All we know for sure is…
Last week we saw what might be the iPad 3’s high-res display. Now, MacRumors is suggesting that the logic board of the new iPad is out in the wild. How likely it is to be real is, obviously, up for debate. https://gizmodo.com/leaked-display-may-be-definitive-proof-of-ipad-3-double-5886141 This photo, originally posted at Chinese site WeiPhone, shows what is claimed to…
If you thought Intel’s Atom processor line was dead, think again: the company is launching a new version of the silicon, code named Rosepoint. Don’t be too quick to dismiss it, either, because it sounds like the new mobile processor could mean business. Wired reports that the new line of chips should bring significant reductions…
If, for some reason, you still use Google Latitude, you’ll find you can now gain points for your check-ins, meaning you can be ranked on a global leaderboard. Yes, Latitude Leaderboards rips off another idea from Foursquare. The question is, though: who’ll bother to use it? The feature was launched over the weekend, without much…
Samsung has announced that it is spinning out its LCD division as a separate company, to be called Samsung Display, on April 1st. The move will see Samsung retain only its OLED production, in a bid to streamline its struggling display section. While Samsung’s performance in the smartphone and tablet LCD sector has been impressive…
Rather than just crashing web pages, Spanish anonymous members had the balls to crash the equivalent of the Oscars ceremony in Madrid today. Three members of Anonymous sneaked past extreme police and private security controls to jump onto the stage as the event was at one of its highest points, as this image shows. Pedro…
