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Tech NewsSploidFake murder on Google Street View attracts attention of real police
On August 2012, a man and his friend spotted a Google Street View car around the corner and decided to simulate a murder to prank everyone on the internet. The police found about it and investigated—more than a year later. He tells his story to the BBC: It is not the first time a gruesome … Continued
By James Baker -
Tech NewsSploidThe world would be a much better place if we used paper airplane texts
This video—created by the Socialplane platform—shows that we don’t need phones to send messages to people. They promote the use of something way cuter instead, paper planes. I’m sure that we are overdoing this social media thing and we shouldn’t pay that much attention to our phones and all that, but I don’t think we … Continued
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io9A New Technique Could Erase Painful Memories — Or Bring Them Back
By using pulses of light, researchers at the UC San Diego School of Medicine have produced, erased, and restored fearful memories in rats. It’s a finding that could have profound implications for people struggling with neurodegenerative and anxiety disorders. The study, though not the first to implant a memory in a rodent, is the first … Continued
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Tech News
Instagram Update Adds More Sophisticated Photo Editing Tools
An Instagram update that’s hitting today will add new more sophisticated tools to let you adjust 10 tools via sliders, including brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth and other parameters. You’ll also be able to adjust the strength of the preset filters you apply Here’s the complete set of tools from Instagram’s Help pages: Filter strength Adjust … Continued
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Tech News
Everything Apple Didn’t Announce At WWDC
At its annual developer-palooza yesterday, Apple trotted out a lot of new goodies. A new iOS! A new OS X! But they also didn’t announce a whole lot of stuff we expected to see. Here’s what was missing, and our best guess at why. Apple TV SDK Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that an Apple … Continued
By Leslie Horn -
io9
Breaking Bad Complete, Star Trek TOS, Falling Skies, Chromecast Deal
Head back to Albequerque and re-live one of the greatest TV series ever made with the complete Breaking Bad Blu-ray set for just $130. It’s never been below $160 until today. That’s a great deal, bitch. DVD also available for $100. [Breaking Bad: The Complete Series, $130] We featured a great deal yesterday on old … Continued
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Tech NewsSploid
The interior of a communications satellite is a cable nightmare
Benedict Redgrove has a talent for capturing really detailed images of extremely complex technology. The image above shows part of the interior of a communications satellite, which are some of the most complex machines made by humans. Here are some more of his beautiful images. Benedict Redgrove meticulously crafts photographs of spacecraft, cars, planes, boats … Continued
By Jesus Diaz -
Tech News
The Mega Ships of Tomorrow May Be Driven by Technology From the Past
The same physics effect that allows pitchers to throw sliders and sinker balls was once used to propel ships. And if this Swedish engineering firm is successful, it will again. Known as the Magnus Effect, the phenomenon is commonly observed in the way spinning balls curve away from their initial flight paths such as the … Continued
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io9
What The Dragons On Game Of Thrones Teach Us About Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear winter is coming. As George R.R. Martin has acknowledged, “dragons are the nuclear deterrent” in his epic fantasy. One security analyst agrees, and argues that Game of Thrones teaches us a great deal about the benefits and dangers bestowed upon nations who wield these ultimate weapons of destructions. Writing in the Bulletin of the … Continued
By Mark Strauss -
io9The Saddest Ghost Story You’ll Read This Year
When Ginny and Bobby were teenagers, they stayed in a haunted house and saw a ghost. Now Virginia and Robert are all grown up, and it’s their last chance to see the ghost a second time, before the house is torn down. That’s the deceptively simple premise of Richard Butner’s moving story, “Circa.” Butner’s story, … Continued
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io9
The First Religion Devoted to Evolution
Julian Huxley (1887-1975) is remembered as one of the most eminent biologists and science writers of the 20th century. He’s less well known for what he considered to be his true life’s work: the establishment of a new religion he called “evolutionary humanism.” Huxley was the grandson of Charles Darwin’s friend and “bulldog,” Thomas Henry … Continued
Jon W. Phillips -
ScienceSpace & SpaceflightNeil deGrasse Tyson Explains Everything Wrong With the Movie Gravity
Gravity is a positively stunning, occasionally horrifying cinematic masterpiece. Of course, that said, it’s got its share of problems. And no one has been more irked by these discrepancies than everyones favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Now, you can listen to the man himself sound off on every single scientific inaccuracy in delightful detail. And … Continued
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io9
Starlight Could Be What Makes Planets So Different from Each Other
The planet Mercury is oddly iron rich. So are some exoplanets. Scientists trying to work out how this happened have come up with a crazy theory. Starlight itself might be sorting out the solar system through a technique called electrophoresis. When scientists started looking at the solar system, they noticed something odd. Mercury, the innermost … Continued
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Tech News
AirPlay Won’t Need a Wi-Fi Connection in iOS 8
iOS 8 will support “peer-to-peer AirPlay discovery and playback,” which means that you won’t need to be connected to a wireless network to use AirPlay. That’s a really nice evolution of Apple’s wireless media streaming protocol The tidbit was discovered buried within the enterprise section of Apple’s iOS 8 preview. As written, the new peer-to-peer … Continued
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io9TrailersNew Trailer For The Strain Reveals Unlife As A Vampiric Thrall Sucks
(No pun intended.) If you thought the 30-second trailer for Guillermo del Toro and FX’s adaptation of The Strain was creepy, this 90-second trailer… well… actually, I’d say it’s probably exactly three times as creepy as the 30-second trailer. Some pretty basic math there. I’ll be doing the recaps for the show when it premieres … Continued
By Rob Bricken -
Tech NewsThe Decrepit, Unreliable Fire Hydrant Just Got a Brilliant Upgrade
These days, fires are rare enough that most of us rarely think about the state of our fire hydrants. But unfortunately, that also means we’re ignoring a dangerously decayed piece of urban infrastructure. Except for a retired NYC firefighter and inventor named George Sigelakis, that is. Meet the fire hydrant of the future. Sigelakis is … Continued
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io9Indiana Jones Kind Of Sucks At Day-To-Day Life
Oh yes, it’s fun to hang out with the action-adventurer when he’s galavanting around the world in search of mystical relics. But what happens once he’s completed his lifelong quest? It turns out that he’s utterly useless in mundane life. Dylan Allen wrote and directed the short film Epilogue, which stars Chris Henry Coffey and … Continued
By Lauren Davis -
io9
Every Letter In The Alphabet Graphed By Its Frequency of Use
Some letters in the alphabet are workhorses, showing up everywhere and often, while others (looking at you, “Z”) are much rarer. But just where does each letter appear with the most frequency? This series of graphs, which plots out the frequency of appearance for each letter, shows us. [UPDATED] David Taylor over at Prooffreader put … Continued
By Ria Misra -
Tech News
Your Reminder That Internet Balloons in the Sky Can Also Fall Down
Filling the sky with a flock of internet balloons sounds like an interesting if also sort of insane idea on paper, but in real life it’s not quite so fancy-free. And Google’s dealing with that first hand now that one of its internet balloons has crashed and caused a power outage. Yup, one of Google’s … Continued
By Eric Limer