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Click to viewThe engineers at MIT have come up with a way for tiny surveillance aircraft to never have to return to base. By enabling them to latch on to power lines, they can charge themselves up whenever they want. The trick to making this possible, it turns out, is making them perform a controlled…
This ad—from VPN/WAN access router company Viprinet—says: “Redundancy Creates Security”. I don’t know about you, but I would get a kernel panic in a situation like this. [Viprinet]
Amazon and the Kindle ebook store will have exclusive rights to publish works by authors such as Salman Rushdie, Oliver Sacks, and Philip Roth, among others. The 2 year agreement looks like the start of an inescapable trend: a divided ebook marketplace, where if you want access to every author in digital form, you’ll need…
Microsoft takes fighting software counterfeiting so seriously that it’s looking at crime-scene forensic technology for inspiration. Apparently the software maker is using custom microscopes to match counterfeit discs to their creators—just like bullets to guns: At a crime lab in Dublin, Microsoft’s Donal Keating uses a custom-built microscope to take 72 high-resolution images of a…
Today we’ve got a Lynxmotion manipulator arm that’s been expertly modded to be controlled by a USB mouse. [Insert image of those little green aliens from Toy Story here, gazing upwards in adoration.] The video shows how perfectly the mouse operates this thing: sliding the mouse controls its movement in all directions, the scroll wheel…
Here’s a robot learning to flip pancakes. It’s hard not to laugh, watching this dumb bot flub flip after flip. But we won’t be laughing when we’re running for our lives, slowed down by a stomach full of fluffy pancakes. Also: the robot seen here is dubbed the Barrett WAM 7 DOFs. IS GIZMODO WRITER…
Our dear Jason Chen‘s been nominated for T3’s Gadget Person of the Year award, but he’s too shy to tell everyone. So I’m doing it for him! Say congratulations to Jason and go vote for him or his fellow nominees. Voting can be done through the T3 page which has the Person of the Year…
But with seat details like an articulated back rest, three-layered padding, and leg rests that can rise up a la your favorite La-Z-Boy, it sounds like it would make a better napping experience. Taking a distinct departure from the green tech and energy saving campaigns of competitors like Honda and Toyota, Nissan has decided to…
Darth Vader must either be down on his luck or trying to gather funds for another Death Star, because he was last seen robbing a bank in Long Island, New York. Here’s what the poor bank teller faced: Scary, no? I mean, what on earth do you do if you glance up to see a…
Skeptics of modern technology, behold: a newly opened solar plant in Sicily is able to continue generating electricity long after the sun goes down. The trick lies in the plant’s use of salt to store up heat for later use. The “Archimede” facility uses what’s known as concentrated solar power, absorbing the sun’s heat and…
Zenbe has become my de-facto todo list—beating Google’s and any sort of Apple solution—for two reasons: Ease of use and cross-platform compatibility. I can make grocery list on the computer and check them off on the iPhone at Safeway. And, if you already have the iPhone version, you get this for free. It’s $3 for…
You might assume that Dyzplastic’s blank Android canvas would attract only lovers of Google’s mobile OS. But you’d be wrong, because for those with true passion, beauty is in the eye of the fanboy. The $6 Do It Yourself Android will be available at Comic-Con this week and should pop up for sale on Dyzplastics…
Apparently the Microsoft Kin has received a little Twitter software update, but it’s still not perfect: While the Kin has received a software update, it’s not the previously talked about one that would add revolutionary features like Twitter replies and re-tweets. It does add a number of other more minor Twitter updates, however, including Twitter…
Social news app Flipboard was yesterday’s hot new app, despite—or perhaps because of—technical problems that prevented some features from working. But there might be a bigger snag: Is Flipboard scraping content it doesn’t have the rights to? Flipboard, the new iPad app that renders links from your Twitter feed and favorite sites in a beautiful,…
As someone who once had to resort to a wire hanger to power up a notebook, I admire the beauty of this solution. I don’t understand how they got there, but I admire it anyway. [ThereIFixedIt]
An intrepid modder by the name of Schmidtn decided to build himself a remote control that, when it detected the foul odor of flatulence, would change the TV to a random channel. How fiendishly brilliant. Here’s his explanation: My Pops really enjoys two things; 1) channel surfing and 2) farting. So one day I was…
Some interesting news from Fortune’s Brainstorm conference: HP VP Todd Bradley says that the company’s Windows 7-running tablet, the one Steve Ballmer showed off at CES, will not be a consumer-focused product. But webOS 2.0 is arriving later this year. https://gizmodo.com/hps-windows-7-slate-device-revealed-by-steve-ballmer-5442200 That second bit comes right form the mouth of former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein,…
Hubble has detected the fastest moving hypervelocity star, even faster than the blue stellar torpedoes caught in 2009. This one moves at 1,600,000mph (2.5 million km/h). This is NASA’s theory about its origin: https://gizmodo.com/hubble-discovers-star-torpedoes-ripping-through-space-5126209 A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it…
If you want a packaged home theater that’ll soak your eyeballs in three-dee and fill your ears with THX-certified boom, Onkyo’s HT-S9300THX will oblige. It has seven theater loudspeakers, a 12″ sub, and works with all the latest 3D gear. The HT-S9300THX receiver has four 3D-Ready HDMI 1.4a inputs and will upscale video to 1080p.…
Two years ago I told you about Bellavista, the stunning treehouse community in Costa Rica’s forests that looks like the Ewoks’ village in Endor. They just upgraded it with 7.2mbps 3G access, and now they run 100% on solar power. https://gizmodo.com/bellavistas-biodigesting-treehouses-are-endor-on-earth-367835 Gizmodo reader Matthew Garza spent part of his honeymoon there and sent us these…
