Right now in the space of a few clicks, I as just some jerkoff with a checking account and poor judgement, could purchase shares in the likelihood that the US or Israel will attack Iran before the end of the year on InTrade. After another cup of coff…
There's nothing like the airport to remind us that, despite college degrees, fancy shoes, or six-figure incomes, we need to be handled like cattle in order for the system to flow smoothly. We queue to get your ticket, wait patiently in security lines…
Remember that time Bruce Willis and the American rock 'n roll band Aerosmith saved planet Earth by blowing up an asteroid in an act of ultimate human sacrifice? Turns out they were pretty stupid and, instead of nukes, they could have just launched a
Rosneft, the Russian state-owned oil behemoth, just signed a deal to purchase TNK-BP, Russia’s third-largest oil producer, for $55 billion. The deal makes Rosneft the largest publicly-traded oil producer. It’s a boon for private enterprise, especiall…
Right now, at 11:19 a.m. EST, artist Jonas Lund does not appear to be at his computer. Perhaps he's gone to the bathroom or to get a snack or maybe he's still asleep. Open in his browser is just one page, a pile of code at Github. You can look for yo…
Colin Furze is, according to his probably self-written "Wikipedia page":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Furze, a plumber, stuntman and filmmaker from Stamford, England, who also has an obsession with posting YouTube videos of himself hauling ass o…
US Patent No. 6,599,460 is barely comprehensible and not even the slightest bit sexy. It has to do with preventing irregularities in a certain kind of injection molding; like, if you were making a cheap, thin drinking cup in a mold from liquid plasti…
Feeling depressed? Stressed out? Doctors at Yale say the quickest and most efficient form of relief could be a healthy dose of Special K – the horse tranquilizer, not the breakfast cereal.
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 the aftermath of a rollicking dinner party in 1887, Teddy Roosevelt and his friends decided to start a club. It would be devoted to their shared passions: the thrill of the chase, pitting nature against human daring and ingenuity – a club for big…
Liquid nitrogen, the instant wart-removing, CPU cooling, cryogenic liquid that expands into gas at ratio of 1-to-694 in room temperature environments has now been linked with an unexpected gastrectomy (stomach removal) of a young woman near Lancaster…
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…
A study published last week in "the journal":http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/11/1211658109 of the National Academy of Sciences forecasts massive global urbanization between now and 2030. Researchers estimate total expansion of the planet's
I love the fact that when an undersea fiberoptic cable that's thousands of miles long is laid miles-deep on the floor of an ocean reaches its eventual destination, that cable is brought ashore by a dude in a wet suit. Like, the only difference betwee…
Four years. This is the goal set by researchers at Texas A&B for the deployment of near-commercial-scale technology to conjure regular ol' oil -- the kind that might wind up at a gas pump -- from genetically modified algae. The task is as "simple" as…
Posed by the newest video in the PBS Idea Channel series (above), it's a good question. Facebook has almost a billion users, storing on the site some 250 million photos daily. archiving a past (of sorts) along a neat timeline. In an idealized world,
Bill Moggridge, inventor of the laptop "clamshell" design passed away Saturday. His invention defined the portable computer, and his vision of the computer as an interactive device changed how people live.
It's entirely possible that this might actually make sense. The Impossible Project, who, if you recall, has been reengineering discontinued Polaroid film, has developed a prototype for a piece of hardware that takes digital images off of your iPhone
The bots that are meant to police sites like YouTube and Ustream for violations of copyright are on a rampage and stirring up trouble across the Internet. Over the course of the past month or so, the streaming of a number of major broadcast events ha…
I don't particularly like being shy. I don't think it benefits me in any way, whether in terms of regular ol' evolutionary selection or in terms of post-nature meta-survival (broad-spectrum human fulfillment, say). Shyness in humans is undesirable to…
Not all science news is "OMG Higgsbosongodparticle" or about boning or fashionable topics in nutrition. A great deal of it is really pretty boring, at least to most of us that aren't directly involved in the particular field of less-sexy science bein…
"OKFocus":http://okfoc.us/about/' game Where's the Pixel currently has "four stars":http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wheres-the-pixel/id519896406?mt=8 in the iTunes app store. Its sole app store review complains that, "sometimes I will have to touch a
"Cyborg" is a fluid term. It just means a biological something that's boosted by artificial enhancements of some kind, electronic or mechanical or robotic. So, the kid with the "3D printed exoskeleton":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/8/6/3d-printing…
