Throwing an "art party"? Looking for a real challenging, jaw-dropper installation to greet your hordes of relevant guests? Yeah? Why not rent the tragic sport-utility vehicle from the slowest, most anticlimactic celebrity car chase in history?
If your'e going to steal an iPad, do it right. Don't gank one of an unsuspecting subway passenger or stash it in your pants before sprinting out of an Apple store. Go to the airport hangar where the expensive little devices are kept after they arrive…
Attention seekers of justices, destroyers of evil, lovers of birds: BP is going to pay. Two-and-a-half years after its Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, pissing 206 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexi…
What do you do when you're one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers and you've garnered global controversy for claims of low wages and substandard working conditions? Honhai, the Taiwanese company that owns Foxconn, decided last year it w…
Let's have a little talk about secrets. There are all kinds of secrets out there in the world: personal secrets, state secrets, secret recipes, secret sauces, top secrets, secret levels in video games, Victoria's Secret. The list goes on. But as we'r…
Bow down to the Titan supercomputer, puny mortals. Because the Titan just earned the title for the world's most powerful supercomputer, and it is not fucking around. Built by Cray Inc., "the supercomputer company," and Nvidia, the Titan is the result…
China's largest and eminently loathable electronics manufacturer Foxconn is taking the fall for the iPhone 5 shortage that's annoyed consumers and worried investors in recent weeks. What's the holdup? They don't have enough parts? They're training ne…
Remember _The Hunt for the Red October_, that terrific movie from the 1990s starring Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery running around on submarines? The Red October was this new Soviet super sub that was virtually undetectable by radar and rigged up with…
Spider silk is pretty amazing stuff. Pound for pound, it's as strong as steel and more durable than Kevlar. It can be stretched to incredible lengths, but it's no more cumbersome than cotton or nylon. Because it's so awesome, scientists have long bee…
_In a new column,_ Tech Support, _we offer three high-tech solutions to an everyday ailment, each somewhat more sophisticated than the next, and all made possible by the magic of science and any extra cash you might have lying around._*Help! My breat…
After the zombie apocalypse — or any kind of apocalypse, really — has ruined our food supply and left a stinking heap of corpses in the streets, sooner or later we're gonna have to face the fact that we'll to have to eat something. So perhap…
The U.S. Navy wasn't kidding when they said they wanted to transition their fleet on to a more sustainable fuel model. The announcement came earlier this summer when top brass finally came to the realization that it didn't make great sense to continu…
It's often easy to find advances in robot technology a little bit unsettling, if not downright scary. Practically as long as man has been making machines, we've been worried that they'll evolve and one day take over everything. Of course, for this to…
Standing outside the Apple's 5th Avenue Flagship store with Caitlin, Motherboard's press-savvy intern, I'm overcome by a contact high from sleep-deprived iPhone fanatics. The layers of sweat and dust, the jitteriness of the first dozen overnighters,
We've all seen it happen. You're standing in line at the grocery store, perusing the latest Us Weekly and thinking about buying a pack of gum, when here comes the 21st-century mom, basket full of kale and kombucha, pushing a stroller with a little on…
In the wars of the future, solider's eyes alone won't be enough to hunt down insurgents. They'll need a little bit of extra help from the new brain wave-powered binoculars that DARPA just invented. Nicknamed the "Luke Skywalker" binoculars when they
Two Romanian hackers have fessed up to their involvement in a three-year-long credit card conspiracy that targeted over 150 Subway sandwich shops and as many as 146,000 of their unsuspecting customers. From 2008 to 2010, Iulian Dolan and Cezar Iulian…
In _Hard Eight_, Paul Thomas Anderson's first feature, John C. Reilly becomes the gambling protege of Phillip Baker Hall. Like some of Bret Easton Ellis' returning characters, Anderson scripted Phillip Baker Hall, in _Boogie Nights_ and _Magnolia_, t…
3D printing was already impressive. I mean, this is technology that can take a computer file and turn it into a real life thing. Pretty much anything, too — sculptures, burritos, human fetuses, bicycles, bones, cars, kidneys, assault weapons. One big…
Twitter really gave it the old college try with the Malcolm Harris case. The Occupy protester was arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge last fall, along with about 700 other kids trying to stand up to the banks. Like those hundred or so other protesters, H…
Amateurish films funded by religious fundamentalists aren’t uncommon. But translate them into the language of other religious fundamentalists, and you can spark a hell-storm of murderous fury. Yesterday a chanting crowd of approximately 2,000 Egyp…
DARPA's four-legged, load-bearing robotic mule was already impressive. AlphaDog could trot around on all fours for 20 miles without refueling. It could carry up to 400 pounds of gear up hills. It could even pick itself back up if it got knocked over…
Of all the tributes to the victims of 9/11 – from the small and personal to the national and epic – few will prove as enduring as the one created by JPL and employees at Honeybee Robotics: two small pieces of the World Trade Center towers currently s…
