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China’s second largest bullet train maker has recalled fifty-four trains over safety concerns. The government is also suspending future expansion of the high-speed railway while it examines the safety of existing lines. This decision comes three weeks after a major train crash took the lives of 40 passengers in Wenzhou, China. In this accident, two…
An eye tracking study of 54 users under the age of 34 shows that Facebook users and Google+ users read their homepage in the same way. Both Facebook and Google+ users begin by examining the main column where all the content is located. They then jump around from the left, right and top columns as…
Runners have yet another tool to keep track of their soaring pulse rates while they exercise. The Scosche myTrek is an arm band with a bluetooth-enabled pulse monitor that’ll send your workout stats to your iPhone or iPod touch. https://gizmodo.com/iphone-heart-monitor-tracks-your-heartbeat-unless-you-a-5056167 When you hit the pavement, you’ll wear your iOS device on one arm and the…
In this most gloriously futuristic year of 2011 we somehow find ourselves awash in videophones. In a way, they snuck up on us. And they most certainly didn’t show up in the ways that people had been predicting them for decades. The videophone was to change the way we looked at home schooling, job interviews,…
You’re healthy, active and life is good. Then, you start having pain behind your eyes, frequent killer headaches and difficulty with your vision and balance. You shake it off as nothing, but you shouldn’t. You may have a brain aneurysm. A brain aneurysm occurs when a weakness in the wall of a blood vessel causes…
Aaron Biber is an 89-year-old barber from Tottenham. He lost his wife in 2010 and, in 2011, he lost his livelihood to rioters. His story made headlines when a striking image of his ransacked barbershop hit the Internet. Speaking to the Telegraph, Biber confirmed his barbershop would likely close. He did not have insurance and…
The gaping hole in the Manhattan skyline vacated by the World Trade Center towers is a haunting and conspicuous one. But is the solution an augmented reality app that superimposes the destroyed buildings over reality? That’s debatable. There was a majesty to the towers’ place in the cityscape. And for longtime residents, an unfathomable architectural…
It’s always a bummer when you decide to try something new, only to discover that it’s not your scene. Crowdmug for iOS helps you avoid these situations by harnessing the most effective crowd motivation tool of our time: money. The premise is simple: offer cash for photos or videos of whatever place and people will…
This looks straight out of Finding Nemo or something. A fish randomly popped up in front of the camera right as the photographer snapped the picture. I want you big mouthed, grey skinned, head tilting fish. I want to eat you too. [Reddit]
The Cooper Union is a private college in Manhattan that offers an internship for students interested in science. This summer the teens studied neuroscience by experimenting with Central American cockroaches. Sounds like fun. The students replaced an antenna with a wire that would send signals to the cockroach’s brain. To understand brain function, the students…
Is this a DIY recreation of a Sarlacc pit? Maybe it’s part of a making-of documentary of a famous tub-based shock site. Actually, it does involve body modification, but it’s in the service of science, not human debasement. https://gizmodo.com/eyes-forward-asshole-quit-looking-at-my-screen-5815018 What you see above is the application of a new type of circuit that can be…
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. Ding Dong, the Streak 5 Is Dead Dell’s strange experiment is hard-to-hold tablet phones has come to…
Facebook loves doing unexpected things with your data. Now it’s culling numbers from your phone and adding them to its online database to “help you” find contacts. Don’t trust Facebook with your mom’s number? Here’s how to fix it. http://gawker.com/5829979/whats-facebook-doing-with-all-the-numbers-in-my-cell-phone If you’re syncing, Facebook’s iPhone app will pull the numbers in your phone’s contact file…
We’ve had meat dresses, bubble dresses, cocktail-serving dresses; so really, what’s so crazy about Microsoft making a wearable, paper Twitter dress? It actually looks pretty good—sort of like a tissue paper laser fairy. http://gizmodo.com/5803717/an-oxygen-bubble-dress-for-those-who-crave-clean-air-and-infinite-attention The dress uses a “corset keyboard” to project tweets onto the transparent white skirt so everyone can read them. And apparently…
Somebody’s leaked the first pictures of Android’s most delicious build to date to Android Police and RootzWiki. So, what’s new with Ice Cream Sandwich? As you can see from the shots, the UI has undergone a redesign with electric blue highlights and a revamped notification bar. Android Police also reports the inclusion of an app…
I’ve been on a cocktail tip lately where all I want to drink is these fancy (and expensive!) cocktails that take a whole lotta ingredients, meticulous management, violent shaking and some tender love and care to make. I never imagined myself making them at home but with Speakeasy Cocktails teaching me, I just might. What’s…
Colin Rich has captured LA at night like you have never seen it before. The video, which you must see in HD and full screen, is so exquisitely perfect it gives me sensory overload. It took Colin six months of carefully planned, painstaking time lapse photography sessions to create these three gorgeous minutes. I was…
Slate’s Farhad Manjoo and Emily Yoffe had a discussion today about whether or not it’s rude to talk with your earbuds in. But is rudeness the issue with this particular practice, or is it another factor entirely? It’s not that rude. Sure, someone barking at you with their earbuds in is kind of annoying. But…
Did you know Twitter lets you upload pictures now? Yeah. So in return TwitPic lets you, um, Twitter. That’s right TwitPic cloned Twitter. I can’t even tell if it’s a joke. For real, is this a joke? Instead of tweets, retweets and follows, Heello.com offers you pings, echoes, and listens. It’s basically a stripped-down carbon…
I don’t know who’s crazier. The madman operating the backhoe, the dudes hanging off the backhoe, the insensate kids’ parents, or the fearless kids themselves. Probably all of them. Perhaps this is a national pastime in Hungary’s countryside. I sure wish it were in Spain. [The Daily What]
