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I don’t know how Ignacio Torres captures and processes these mashups of falling people, smoke and 3D galaxies, but his animated 3D GIFs are simply awesome. [Ignacio Torres] https://gizmodo.com/learning-from-carl-sagan-even-cat-sh-t-is-made-of-star-5605805
Last night, a few hundred lucky readerfolk and museum fanboys got the chance to steal away into the American Museum of Natural History for an after hours, behind-the-scenes tour of one of the great nerd meccas in the world. The evening’s revelries began in the Hayden Planetarium, where we got a quick tour of the…
When I was in college—college, my god, did that really happen? like really truly, with the shots and the khakis and the one roommate who never showered but knew Yeats better than Yeats’ mother?—we played video games. We played them with the kind of high functioning beta-male vigor that would’ve been better spent on grades…
In the US you can see four different specialists when your plugs need work. Why not? But in Liberia, where 181 doctors treat four million people, the doctor you’re seeing is the only game in town. Several towns, actually. The featured group on Philanthroper today is Switchboard, a nonprofit started earlier this year to adress…
Sprint owns a majority of Clearwire, the company it partners with to deliver 4G WiMax. Clearwire is a troubled little company: It poops money like a baby with bloody diarrhea, and it needs to spend $600 millionish to upgrade its network to LTE. https://gizmodo.com/clearwire-joins-team-lte-effectively-abandoning-wimax-5827500/#comments So Sprint’s thinking about buying the rest of the company outright,…
This seems impossible. The thought of having to use a computer every single day without knowing how to keyboard search is maddening. And yet, according to a Google researcher, almost the entire human population lives this way. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal relays this confounding stat after sitting down with Google’s Dan Russell: “I do these…
A group of people who’ve bought new iPhone 4s in China are claiming that they’re actually refurbished iPhones. Their evidence is that the warranties, which typically last a year for new phones, only had warranties as little as 6 months. This is what happened according to two customers who bought new iPhones at the Xidan…
Apple just seeded Beta 6 for iOS 5 to developer accounts. Beta 5 was released two weeks ago, and with the iPhone announcement due within a few weeks, iOS 5 should be just about done. Here’s some of the polish added in Beta 6. There are a lot of bug fixes in this release. iCloud…
Last year, a rental scammer conned my pregnant wife and me out of $5,100 and very nearly left us homeless. I wrote about it on Tumblr. Almost immediately, 50 people “liked” my bad news. Jerks. Of course, what they were trying to do was express sympathy or solidarity. They wanted to say “I’m with you,…
How cute is this little-widdle whale speaker? It wraps around iPhones, and plugs right into the audio jack with its trusty 3.5mm jack. Unfortunately he’s native to the Korean waters, but hopefully he’ll swim over to the US where he’ll sell for around $30. [EarlyAdopterShop via Technabob]
Does Facebook ever feel a little too quiet for your liking? Feel like there aren’t enough bits of info streaming at you in realtime? Facebook understands. That’s why they’re starting to roll out their latest feature: the Ticker. The blog All Facebook says the Ticker will appear concurrently with the main feed, with the intention…
Instead of putting up with a mild pin-prick whenever your blood sugar levels need testing, Japanese scientists have invented a little implant that glows when the levels change. No pain, and a free glowstick for raves—high five, science! The Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo found that a fluorescent fiber sensor with…
Just like they tweaked their evidence against Samsung with the Galaxy Tab, it looks like Apple has flubbed evidence regarding the Samsung Galaxy S too. They shrunk the image of the Samsung phone to look like the size of an iPhone, even though it’s not. https://gizmodo.com/apple-presents-misleading-evidence-in-german-case-again-5831208 Officially, the Samsung Galaxy S is 122.4 by 64.2…
I usually don’t like robots. Not my style, really. So what is it about these bots? The spunky ponytail made from wires? The CD hips? I don’t know but I think I’m in love. Too bad these “girls” are only advertisements for a gym. Made by Murilo Melo, its a series of posters for Companhia…
We’ve seen the law’s efforts to smash Anonymous’ hacker network from the outside—mostly teens getting rounded up and cuffed. But what’s the offensive look like on the inside? Ars Technica got a firsthand look at the police work. The FOIA-liberated documents go back to ’08, before Anonymous was known for going on tears like the…
This horrific-looking, chicken-devouring contraption is the E-Z Catch chicken harvester. It swallows up live chickens like feathered Reese’s Pieces. Fair warning: Watching the video might ruin your lunch. But that’s not the whole story. Harvesting chickens by hand is back-breaking work—often called the worst job in the poultry industry. But since the advent of the…
Killstreak Reward! The RC-XD in Call of Duty: Black Ops is a remote controlled bomb so fun to use that it’s no surprise the government’s been drooling over the combat potential of bots like the new iRobot 110 IRL. Like the RC-XD, the backpack-bot is agile, quick and tough with the ability to survive 15-foot…
Why is there a mid-grade Android flip phone on a site full of brazen iPhone fanboys? (Yeah, we admit it. What. WHAT.) It’s not the first Android flip phone. It’s not the first Hello Kitty phone. It’s not even very desirable. But it’s way better than an iPhone. Whaaaaaaaaat? This is the SoftBank 007SH KT.…
I was just browsing Pantone’s site—y’know, eyeing up their markers—when I noticed they sell customizable Pantone USB sticks. Not a bad little present for a design-fiend, and they start at just $13 for 1GB. [Pantone] https://gizmodo.com/is-it-wrong-to-crave-a-big-box-of-dual-ended-pantone-ma-5825178
If you drive by Riverside, Iowa—like Madolan Greene was doing when she took this photo—you will find this monument remembering that Captain James T. Kirk will be born here, son of George and Winona Kirk. Brilliant. [Flickr—Thanks Karl!]
