Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Hey girls, can’t decide whether or not to wear that midriff-bearing shirt out to the bar tonight? No worries, simply don this Venetian blind T-shirt and yank on the fully functional string when Joe Hottie walks by. Sure it’s ridiculous, but it’s also one-of-its-kind, and available only at art museums for the time being. Just…
The folks behind the Roomba robot vacuum appear to have another robotic helper up their sleeves. In this case, it’s of the lawn mowing variety, but the final design is anything but final if the wide variety of shapes, configurations and features are any indication. A lawn-mowing Roomba-like robot… Lawmba? Loomba? Mowba. According to a…
IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, are a sad fact of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, so you’ll see the influence of these deadly weapons in this list of the US Army‘s top inventions for 2007. Every year the Army selects the top refinements, outright new inventions, or streamlined weaponry, and pumps out a list. This…
Forget legs or treads or wheels, everyone, because tomorrow’s robots will traverse the earth on a thin film of slime, just like the humble snail. At least, that’s MIT associate professor Anette Hosoi’s vision of our robot future, and she has the “Robosnail” prototype to prove it. Since 2003, Hosoi and a revolving cadre of…
If German scientists have their way, your shirt may one day be able to pipe up with “I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.” That’s because they’ve developed a new sensor that detects muscle excitation and thus…
The Sierra Nevada Corporation claimed this week that it is ready to begin production on the MEDUSA, a damned scary ray gun that uses the “microwave audio effect” to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people’s heads. Short for Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio, MEDUSA creates the audio effect with short microwave…
I hope this SSD good/bad theme doesn’t turn into one of those long-running “good for you/bad for you” food fiascoes (is coffee on the good list again, by the way? Blogging is thirsty work.) A new bit of investigation by Laptopmag seems to challenge the Tom’s Hardware study that put SSD’s battery performance in the…
I’ve changed my mind: this has to be the most jaw-dropping NES mod ever, beating April’s one. And this time the space-time continuum is at risk of ripping. Modder Darkeru over at Ben Heck forums has twisted reality around by including an entire NES emulator system, plus controls, plus an LCD screen into an original…
For some reason or other, we’ve shown you a lot of robotic snakes here on Giz. But this new one is kind of a robot snake in reverse: it’s designed to float just beneath the surface of the sea and capture wave energy, which it then turns into electrical power. A science team in the…
Oregon resident Kent Couch finished what our friend the priest could unfortunately not: he got into a lawn chair rigged with huge party balloons, and floated his way to Idaho. https://gizmodo.com/sad-ending-flying-priest-found-dead-in-the-atlantic-g-5022283 Couch brought GPS but he also brought along a satellite phone, altimeter, and a second GPS device attached to his chair for redundancy. Then…
All you travelers coming home tomorrow from your wild and crazy Independence Day weekend vacations, don’t be one of 12,000 people who lose their laptops at airports every week. That’s right, that ain’t no typo—12,000 dudes and dudettes somehow manage to misplace their portable computers every seven days. That’s 600,000 machines a year, many containing…
Before there was the Game Boy, there was Game & Watch. DS Fanboy has a sitdown with two dudes who scoured the world to collect every Game & Watch handheld ever produced: 60 in all, each one a unique and delicious plastic bundle with a single game, like Snoopy Tennis or Donkey Kong Jr. How…
With soaring fuel costs and greenhouse gas concerns, zeppelins might get their second chance to be a relevant mode of transportation. According to the New York Times, several countries are now looking into developing dirigibles for transporting things such as sightseers, postal deliveries and scientific payloads. France’s postal service, La Poste, seems to have some…
Here’s a great product to ensure that you’ll never be invited to somebody’s backyard ever again-the “Easy Install Twist Chair.” Instead of having four legs like regular chairs, the Twist uses a corkscrew base that you plug into the ground and spin until it’s solidly placed. Bring the chair along the next time you go…
Have you ever searched for new updates with Windows Update in Vista? It’s slow as balls, no matter how beefy your machine is. But! Windows Update is getting an, um, update that will make it run a lot faster-scan times are down almost 20 percent. If you have automatic updates turned off, obviously you won’t…
Sony is probably OLED’s most vocal prophet as the TV of the future. But according to Nikkei, they’re hedging their bets and getting more serious with another next-gen display tech: field emission display, which is a lot like a good ol’ cathode ray tube, except that it’s super thin-it has all the benefits too, like…
For the ultimate game of Duck Hunt, Marksman Training Systems is offering the ST-2 shooting simulator-the first on the market for shotgun and rifle shooting. Co-developed by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, the simulator is so accurate that its used by Russian and Slovakian national clay shooting teams as a way to practice…
Someone I know once had the awesome idea of turning a laundromat (popular here in my neck of the woods) into a singles bar. With this concept washer and dryer from Indian designer Harsha Vardhan, we could up our prospective plans a notch and instead turn laundromats into singles lounges. The make believe washing machine…
Sure, you might loathe Apple with every fiber of your Windows-running being. But look at this iPod USB stick. It’s so cute. How can you hate it? It comes in 1GB and 2GB flavors for £19.95 (about $40, damn weak dollar) and £24.95 ($50). Yep, still adorable. Awwww. No? You probably hated Wall-E too. [BoysStuff…
Now that we’re headed deep into the middle of summer, it’s time to bring out water balloons and figure out ingenious ways to fling them at your enemies. Here’s a great tutorial at Instructables for making a wicked water balloon catapult using surgical tubing, a rag and other random doohickies from around the house. According…