Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Here’s a TV show to queue up your DVR. Our favorite Mythbusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman are teaming up to honor Steve Jobs in an hour-long documentary that’ll air on the Discovery Channel later this month. The television special will focus on the impact Steve Jobs had on other peoples lives. It’ll include interviews…
The album is actually called Weezer, but, because of its lime green cover, it’s known as the Green Album. It marked the return of the band after a five-year hiatus. It also marked the introduction of bass player Mikey Welsh who passed away this past weekend. In fact, this is the only album Mikey played…
UC-Davis researchers developed a lens that’ll turn your iPhone or any camera-enabled smartphone into a 350X microscope. The mod is a simple 1-mm ball lens mounted in rubber that’s taped to your phone’s camera. It costs about $30. Besides its obvious uses in the classroom and research field, this basic lens could be a useful…
So much news passes before our collective eyes every day that we couldn’t possibly cover it all. Mostly because much of it isn’t worth covering! But here are a some borderline tidbits we passed on, just in case. Lenovo Sends High School Science Projects Into Orbit Lenovo accepting submissions from high schoolers for its Space…
In many ways, Facebook for iPad looks the same as it does on any other device (download it here!). But it feels different. It’s immersive, and visual and intuitive and takes advantage of the unique capabilities tablets provide. https://gizmodo.com/the-official-facebook-app-for-ipad-is-finally-here-5848399/ I’ve been wanting a Facebook iPad app from the moment I bought my iPad. The standard…
The Braille system has allowed blind people to read the written word since 1825. Unfortunately, Braille doesn’t translate well to the glossy smooth surfaces of modern touch screen tablets and phones. A new app thinks it can change that. Each character in the Braille system—developed by Louis Braille for the French military—consists of a series…
If you live in a city, chances are you’ve had a few dozen subway crushes in your life. But you probably haven’t snapped off stealthy cell phone pics of hunks on the train and uploaded them to a blog to be rated (we hope). That’s what’s beeng going on since June at SubwayCrush, which is…
Everyone’s favorite hacktivists, Anonymous took down the New York Stock Exchange’s site today for two terrifyingly boring minutes. The group used a DDoS attack to briefly knock the site offline as a show of solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protestors. Trading wasn’t affected while the site was down. The group posted a YouTube video…
For $4000, a Japanese company called Real-f will make a photorealistic mask of your face they call a three-dimensional photo form. Sure, you can tell it’s fake if you look close enough. But what if you weren’t looking so closely? I could imagine a mugger wearing a mask that looked nothing like their face, and…
I had major deja vu writing this. That’s because as cool as the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is, it’s basically just the Galaxy Tab 10.1, but slightly smaller. Which actually makes it noticeably better. https://gizmodo.com/samsung-galaxy-tab-human-outside-android-inside-5806426 Why It Matters Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the best Android tablet I’ve used. It’s light, slim, quick. The Galaxy 8.9…
Christopher Columbus was kind of a bastard. Still, here we are 519 years later celebrating his accidental discovery of San Salvador. So in honor of navigation and discovery—things that actually deserve adulation—here are six awesome nautical exploration tools, past and present. Nautical Quadrant The quadrant, sextant, and astrolabe wer the most prominent navigation tools of…
When you have enough money, lighting up rooms can be as much a stylistic choice as a functional necessity. Originally designed in 1951, Jean Louis Domecq’s lamp isn’t just a classic piece of mid-century design, it’s also as flexible as a Cold War gymnast. The stainless steel floor lamp bends and twists at six different…
The results of a 5-year study of adolescents in The Netherlands shows that young people with a certain gene variant are more vulnerable to depression when they smoke pot. Until now, the link between smoking marijuana and depression was suspected, but evidence was weak. Roy Otten at the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud at Nijmegen…
After sneak peaks and mysteriously long delays, the official Facebook app for iPad is finally here. Goodbye crappy Facebook iPad apps, goodbye non-touch friendly website and say hello to wasting more time on so-called friends! It looks pretty much like the same Facebook iPad app that was previewed in July which means there’s a familiar…
Privacy took another kick to the face when California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed legislation that would require the police to obtain a warrant to search a mobile phone upon arrest of a suspect. This reverses a law passed by the state assembly just a few weeks ago. The state assembly passed the law in response…
A blurred image is the worst. And no matter how steady you think your hand is, it can be easy to ruin a shot. Luckily, Adobe’s cooking up a Photoshop feature that’ll automatically eliminate blur. You won’t believe your eyes. The motion blur-killer, demoed at the recent Adobe MAX 2011 conference, is experimental at this…
No more gym, tan, laundry for you, teenage California guidette! Guidos and guidettes might be more common in Jersey, but every state has clueless teenagers who fear not death via melanoma. That’s why California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law on Sunday that forbids teenagers between 14 and 18 from using tanning beds in the…
“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” Whoever wrote that is probably dead. That’s life. Deal with it. But and/or she didn’t die in vain—their dream lives on in the modern flashlight. Is there a dead mouse under your sink? Are you afraid of spooky things? Is your power out? Do you…
What’s occasional rapper Dr. Dre up to, besides rapping, sometimes? Planning to beat every single electronics company except Apple, GlobalGrind reports. In a recent interview, Dre said he’s got ambition far beyond hawking somewhat-overpriced headphones. When asked about his gadget dreams, he revealed their loftiness: Oh nah, I am not nervous about anything! I am…
The Galaxy S II came out pretty recently, but Samsung no care—at least if this blurry, “leaked” slide’s correct. Phandroid says what we’ve got here is a bona fide internal image of the next best Android for 2012. https://gizmodo.com/samsung-galaxy-s-ii-a-first-draft-of-your-next-android-5818202 Is it true? Maybe. Is it fake? Maybe. But the rumorific image claims a swell 2…