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At the Texas Heart Institute, doctors have developed an artificial heart replacement that produces no discernible pulse or audible heartbeat. Put your ear against the chest of a patient with this implant, and all you’ll hear is a faint humming sound. Touch their wrist, and there will be no pulse. The machine is a continuous-flow…
The product engineers at Pioneer know what it’s like to pull out an ear bud and find it caked with sticky, gross ear wax. Rather than clean the earphones with your shirt, Pioneer wants you to throw them in your washing machine. The company’s Washable Earphones are waterproof to one meter and can withstand the…
When I look up my childhood apartment on Google Maps, I see the fences in the park across the street. But if I look up Israel, I get a muddy brown mess—because Congress said so, by law. Give it a try. While most parts of the US (and much of the globe) are filled with…
In one of the ballsiest bank break-ins in recent memory, a team of hackers based in Eastern Europe managed to crack open Citigroup’s massive store of their customers’ personal financial data. Just by hacking Citi’s customer website. The hackers broke in by impersonating legitimate credit card holders on the Citibank website: Once inside, they leapfrogged…
J&R Fire has developed the PFE-1, a flashlight-sized (or fleshlight-sized) fire extinguisher that’s easy to use with one hand. It’s a one-time-use extinguisher that’s activated by a single button and can shoot the coolant out 10 feet. https://gizmodo.com/the-avatar-fleshlight-actually-happened-5651323 Sorta looks like a vibrator, too, but I don’t think you’d want to go there with this…
Reusable bag-maker, ChicoBag, isn’t some soulless corporation. Its face is Bagmonster, the plastic-bag covered mascot created by founder Andy Keller (seen above). The same cannot be said about its litigious-attackers, three of the nation’s largest disposable, plastic bag manufacturers. These bag barons, Hilex Poly Company, Superbag Operating, and Advance Polybag, claim that ChicoBag is causing…
John Sulston, along with Sarah Chan and John Harris, write that scientific process is being stymied due to excessive ownership of scientific intellectual property. One of the more troubling statistics? Private companies have patented nearly 20% of human genes. For example, it is estimated that some 20% of individual human genes have been patented already…
Twitter made its way into iOS 5 and its code may have inadvertently coughed up information about the next generation iPad. This rumor was started when someone was poking around the SDK and found images in the Twitter.framework that have a retina-like resolution of 1,536 x 2,048. This is far from a confirmation, but we…
You, my friend, are eating a sad hot dog. Why? Cause if you’re not using the Happy Hot Dog Man to make the perfect cuts and slices to turns your dog into a little human character, you’re doing it wrong. It’s like a toy…that you can eat! Or a weiner to play dress up with.…
Polish sculptor Marek Tomasik spent three years collecting junk PCs. And with those, he covered an entire 16’x14’x15 room from top to bottom with the guts of those PCs (it’s what any sane person would do, right?). Even better, it’s viewable as an interactive 3D map. The vast majority of the pieces have been mounted…
Adobe recently released three touch-friendly imaging apps for the iPad including Adobe Eazel, Adobe Color Lava and Adobe Nav. One month after their debut, the trio have been updated with a handful of new features and a surprising price drop. The apps were already reasonably priced when they launched, but now they can be had…
To Infinity and Beyond | This week’s shooting challenge offers limitless beauty. https://gizmodo.com/30-glimpses-into-infinity-5811777 The 8 Most Bizarre, Intriguing, and Otherwise Cool Documents the NSA Just Declassified https://gizmodo.com/the-8-most-bizarre-intriguing-and-otherwise-cool-docu-5811502 It was spring cleaning time at the NSA, who dropped a staggering 50,000 pages of declassified documents into the hands of the National Archives. A lot’s on the…
The above video demonstrates extremely precise robotic hand and finger manipulation. It was designed to make use of a high-speed camera and tactile sensors to enable throwing, catching, and even grasping. I hope it’s only used for good. [BoingBoing]
The Pocket HiFi C4 Pro media player from Colorfly has an engraved wood backing and retro brassy front that gives the player a distinctive look, but for the audiophile, it’s the quality under the hood that counts. The Colorfly is as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside. The media player includes…
Garco the robot became Garco the music critic for the May 29, 1954 episode of Los Angeles TV’s Juke Box Jury. Hosted by Peter Potter, the show appeared on KNXT (now KCBS) and featured a panel of celebrity judges who would critique the latest music releases. On this particular episode Garco appeared with Ann Robinson,…
This is curious: InfiniteApple is saying they’ve confirmed that iCloud is powered by Microsoft’s Azure, at least for the moment. The folks at InfiniteApple sent files to and from iPhones with iOS 5 beta installed and monitored the traffic. They concluded that iCloud doesn’t actually store anything. Instead, it simply “manages links” to content stored…
Here’s food for thought: Some cities are considerably more densely populated than others. Imagine packing all 6.9 billion people in the world into a city you know. How much space would that megacity take up? Per Square Mile made these infographics to give you an idea of what you’d find. In the image above, they…
Ron Johnson, the current head of Apple’s retail stores, will be leaving Cupertino this November to head up J.C. Penney as their chief executive. Johnson is largely responsible for the look and feel of today’s Apple stores, and is credited with their success. Losing him is a blow to Apple, but analysts believe their retail…
Sure, you don’t get the big screen or banging sound system, but watching movies on an iPad feels more intimate. But where do you find movies to watch? Jump into the iTunes store, skip over to Netflix and dance with Hulu? Not exactly efficient. Fanhattan for iPad points you exactly where you need to go…
After this long winter, spring’s warmth has begun to melt all that pesky snow. In the Northwest, the resulting runoff helps power everyday life. Only this year there’s too much power for them to handle. The waters that came with spring went on to overwhelm the Federal Columbia River Power System, creating so much electricity…
