Sure, it looks like an old answering machine, but to serious synth dorks, the Stylophone has full-on legend status. Invented in 1967 by Brian Jarvis, it's an analog synth with a curious interface tweak: you use a stylus to play it. That contributed t…
It's been exactly a year since California Governor Jerry Brown declared "October 16 to be Steve Jobs Day":http://mashable.com/2011/10/15/steve-jobs-day-california-october-16-stanford/. It apparently was a one year-only holiday, but it still stands as…
In the early 1930s, physicist Karl Jansky published "stunning results":http://cosmology.carnegiescience.edu/timeline/1964/karl-janskys-radio-antenna of a study in which he detected radio waves emanating from the center of the Milky Way. Jansky's work…
_*Welcome back to Motherboard Vault, our weekly digging up of videos from Motherboard's ever-growing library.*_ Just about everybody considers "electronic music" a tired phrase in this era of a million genres and subgenres. It's not that it's a ba…
Despite the best efforts of Republicans in Congress, the U.S. military really "wants biofuels":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/8/28/the-navy-wants-biofuels-but-congress-won-t-let-it-have-them--2. If the Pentagon ever gets its way, that kind of massi…
Jack the Dripper was my favorite artist as a kid, and why wouldn't he be? Could there be anything cooler to a youngster wearing neon Taz shirts than a guy who became a legend for making a huge mess? (I still like Pollock as a grown-up, but now I'd ha…
It was 3pm when we got word that Dan Deacon wanted to hang out with Motherboard. We'd just finished shooting giant telescopes in West Virginia (_shhh_ spoilers!) but we knew it would be worth it to make the 5 hour trek to Baltimore to check in on Dea…
Today's the ninth anniversary of the Northeast blackout "that left around 55 million people in the dark":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003. I was comfortably nestled in Northern California back then, and honestly blackouts weren…
I couldn't tell you the last time I sat down and read a magazine or newspaper section from front to back, but it's been half a decade at least. Partly it's because a few of my favorite magazines have died, and partly because the job description of an…
The only thing holding me back from being a cyborg -- aside from cost, science, a robo-averse girlfriend, and a fear of being stared at -- is the fact that once you go bot, you probably can't go back. I like being flesh and blood, even if my old sack…
You ever sit around staring at your little tank of Sea Monkeys wondering when they're going to build a civilization and massive rectangular buildings in your honor? Yeah, me too, but they never do. Come to think of it, nothing in nature looks like ou…
Tomorrow, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is set to announce some of the most highly-anticipated — and poorly-embargoed - findings in recent memory: evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson. Now, we won’t know for sure until…
You remember putting a donk on everything, right? It was "a meme":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckMvj1piK58 -- these English dudes in a studio talking about putting a donk on it, and a "donk" was just this sound like a drainpipe being hit with a bat…
I was enjoying a NY Times dispatch from Silicon Valley about Ellen Pao, a junior partner “at the distinguished venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,” who’s brought a sexual discrimination lawsuit against her employer. It’s a key l…
I've been having a lot of nightmares lately. Don't ask me why -- could be the kimchi taco binge lately -- but they've been good and gory. So, like when you listen to the song that's stuck in your head _just to get the damn thing outta there_, I thoug…
On assignment for Motherboard, Vice co-founder Shane Smith traveled to London to meet with Spike Jonze during the production of _Where the Wild Things Are_. It took 300 artists and specialists to develop an innovative and heavily work-intensive way o…
Kinetic, psychotropic visual soundscapes. Give me a second to catch my breath, but that's the best description I can come up with for what musician/sculptor "Felix Thorn":http://www.felixsmachines.com/home/ does. It seems that ever since someone publ…
