Aaron Kass

To mark the 100th anniversary of Chevy's logo this year, the car company has created this graphic charting the evolution of the iconic bowtie. But did you know that the origins of the slanted cross are vague at best?

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If you worry about ATM skimmers and drive a car, it's time to freak the hell out: gas pump skimmers have matured, and they're now just as good as those on ATMs.

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This image from Chinese blog WeiPhone looks like a bunch of Apple packaging in a bin. But folks it's so much more! Oh, no, actually that's exactly what it is. No one has been able to legitimize the photo yet, and it could just show some knockoff packaging, but the nomenclature makes sense at least. If the aluminum body upgrade that seems probable for September/October is called the 5S, a cheaper plastic model (also heavily rumored) could be called the 5C where C stands for "color". . . or something.

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Kinja user David Pickett claims the Spider-man vs Doctor Ock short below is technically one of the best Lego stop-motion animations ever, probably tied with the one above—Star Wars: The Han Solo Affair. But there are many more, including the ones in our old Lego animation contest. What's your favorite Lego stop-motion?

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With fewer and fewer computers packing an optical drive, you might be under the impression that the accompanying media is dead. Not if you're to believe Sony and Panasonic, who are planning to develop a next-gen optical disc with capacity of at least 300GB.

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What does it take to build a habitable structure at the bottom of the world? Quite a bit of technology, for starters. The climate of the extreme south and north poles is unlike any other. Unstable ice, immense snowfall and incredibly low temperatures can—literally, in at least one case—chew up and spit out entire buildings. Not these, though.

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Your father may have taken you camping, or driven you to cello practice, or taught you all the lyrics to Jefferson Starship songs. But chances are he didn't go the lengths Laurent Aigon. Over the last five years, at great expensive and after much effort, he built a 737 cockpit so life-like, it's been used as a training simulator.

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An incredible fact from a fascinating new Buzz Aldrin interview: the Saturn V was only making 7 inches to the gallon at the moment of launch. Of course, the fuel economy improves dramatically when you actually take into consideration the entire distance travelled.

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This NES is a painstaking recreation of the real thing—and we reckon making it was perhaps even more fun than playing the old version of Final Fantasy you have lying around.

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This amazing image isn't a black hole sucking up the contents of the Universe, or an aerial shot of some dark mysterious lake. In fact, it's the eye of a Basiliscus lizard, photographed by Suren Manvelyan.

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Jeff Bezos' child-like love and wonder of space and rockets has yielded many a great thing, including Apollo 11's #5 engine. The Amazon CEO confirmed today that the rockets dredged from the Atlantic earlier this year are, in fact, those from Apollo 11.

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Out with the old, in with the new. Earlier this week in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the Florida Power & Light Co. demolished one of its power plants with 450 pounds of dynamite to make way for a cleaner and more eco-friendly plant that's slated to open in 2016. The Port Everglades plant had been in operation since the '60s.

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It can't be easy to build a car, but the factory where Teslas are born makes it looks like a piece of cake. The folks over at Wired took a look behind the scenes to watch rolls of aluminum transform into fully functional electric cars, and it's a sight to behold.

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What’s your favorite 15 seconds of Star Wars Episode IV? If you don’t have an answer right away, no problem — someone has been painstakingly uploading the entire 1977 classic to Instagram Video as hundreds of tiny snippets. Better still, Gizmodo points out that the person behind the madness is doing it all in reverse chronological order, so that when it’s finished you’ll be able to watch the whole thing from top to bottom. That’s what you call consideration.

Few films have been as exhaustively dissected as Star Wars, but watching it as a series of clips lets you focus on the hundreds of shots and interactions between the actors that you might otherwise gloss over — if you have the patience to keep clicking through it all....

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Did you know that Netflix is cropping the hell out of movies? I didn't. But even if you had noticed, it's unlikely you realize just how bad it gets. A semi-new Tumblr called What Netflix Does has pointed out the extent of the trimming. And it's atrocious.

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A ship carrying missile material headed for North Korea was stopped in Panama today, reports the AFP. President Ricardo Martinelli tweeted that the ship, which departed Cuba with a cargo of sugar, was housing containers carrying the material, pictured below.

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Droid Life got their hands on internal Verizon slides that reveal that Verizon has plans to let its customers upgrade their phones more often. Yeah, kind of like T-Mobile's Jump plan. The 'VZ Edge' plan will supposedly let Big Red customers upgrade to a new phone once they have paid off 50% of their phone. Upgrade before your upgrade. Pay to keep paying.

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We've seen this bot before. Just this past March, we witnessed it stick a near impossible landing. And now it's stuck a quadruple backflip, which by all accounts appears to be it sixteenth feat of heroism. What can't this little guy do? Nothing.

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It's crazy hot out there this week, but this gorgeous video shot from a remote-control helicopter hovering over Niagara Falls lets you (nearly) feel the cool, refreshing spray on your sweaty overheated face.

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It starts with one domino. It branches off into different lines. It ends with 272,297 dominos being toppled over. It sounds like a cross between a snake hissing and an annoying morning alarm. It's mesmerizing. It's hypnotic. It's 10 minutes long. It's worth watching over and over. It's world record breaking for dominos toppled in a spiral. It's made by Sinners Domino Entertainment in Germany. It's insane. [Sinners Domino Entertainment via The Awesomer]

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Patio screen doors are fantastic at letting the breeze in and crucial in blocking insect intruders. But in a perfect world, we wouldn't even need them. In the real world, they'd somehow close themselves so we wouldn't be bothered with them. We can make that happen. Genius Clan McArthur rigged his screen door so it automatically closes. It's so easy you can do it too.

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Technology journalist Jessica Lessin, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, reports that Apple has been negotiating with cable companies and TV networks to allow customers to skip commercials and Apple would compensate programmers for the lost revenue.

Viewers could potentially pay Apple to skip commercials on a per show or per channel basis, get live commercial-free viewing of new episodes with the purchase of a Season Pass on the iTunes Store, or Apple could even offer an entire commercial-free TV subscription service.

Lessin writes:

In recent discussions, Apple told media executives it wants to offer a "premium" version of the service that would allow users to skip ads and would compensate television networks for the lost revenue, according to people briefed on the conversations.

Consumers, of course, are already accustomed to fast-forwarding through commercials on their DVRs, and how Apple’s technology differs is unclear.

It is a risky idea. Ad-skipping would disrupt the entrenched system of television ratings—the basis for buying TV ads. In fact, television broadcasters sued Dish Network when it introduced similar technology last year.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the D11 conference earlier this year that the company has a "grand vision" for the television, and that the current TV viewing experience "could be better". It's been previously reported that Apple wants to erase the distinction between live and on-demand video content.

Apple is rumored to have both a full-on television set as well as a more conventional set-top box in the works, in addition to its existing "hobby", as Tim Cook calls the current Apple TV box.


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The problem with most compact tripods is that while highly portable, they're really only useful for supporting lighter cameras like point-and-shoots or smartphones. But most people who'd actually need and use a tripod are probably shooting with heavier DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. So Manfrotto created the Pixi: a decent compromise between a full-sized tripod and a compact set of sticks that doesn't sacrifice usefulness for size.

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Reddit is well known for its "random acts of pizza," but the latest act of generosity from its community left one hospital overwhelmed with deliveries. On Saturday, a Reddit user posted a photo of a message taped to a window of the Los Angeles Children's Hospital that asked the world to "send pizza to room 4112" — a plea that quickly reached the site's front page. In response, members of the Reddit community sent more than 20 boxes of pizza to the hospital, giving Hazel Hammersley, a 2-year-old cancer patient, an unexpected pizza party with other children and nurses. In a blog post, Hazel's family says that "we have been absolutely humbled and surprised by the outpouring of love and support from the online community," and hopes that...

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Sports programming is driving up your television bill, and cable providers aren't happy about it. Though football, basketball, and baseball may seem to be some of the most watched content around, that's far from the truth: TV tracking firm Nielsen found that only four percent of households tune in to watch sports on average, reports The Wall Street Journal. But despite the low viewership, cable providers are paying disproportionately huge sums in order to carry networks like ESPN — and they're passing those costs along to consumers.

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Last week, a 23-year-old Chinese woman died after allegedly being electrocuted by her iPhone 5, and now Apple has confirmed that it is investigating the role its products may have played in her death. According to Reuters, Ma Ailun from China's Xinjiang region was electrocuted when she answered her iPhone 5 while it was charging. A message posted by her sister on the Sina Weibo micro-blogging site picked up a significant amount of attention after the accident, and China's official Xinhua news agency quoted police confirming the accident and subsequent death. Apple has since provided us with the following statement: "We are deeply saddened to learn of this tragic incident and offer our condolences to the Ma family. We will fully...

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