Choice is a wonderful thing, but when it comes to digital communication, perhaps we're starting to drown in a sea of instant message apps and chat clients.
You're probably sitting there thinking A convocation speech? Really? Yes, really. Stop what you're doing and watch this now. And make sure your face is firmly attached, lest you lose it in the deluge of oratory excellence you're about to experience.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and invention is the father of designing things that you can fit into your butt to sneak them into prison. And so a phone shaped exactly like a small butt plug has come into our world, and the UK government is trying to ban it.
At the forty or so seminars I give yearly, I always ask the same question: "Who here has ever received a bad handshake?" Invariably everyone raises their hands—no surprise there. Perhaps you’ve wondered, as I have, “How can so many people get something so simple as a handshake wrong?” What's even more startling is how long we remember those bad handshakes.
The pinwheel-like drawing above is nothing but black and white lines. When you look at it the right way, though, something strange and beautiful happens: it begins to flicker. You may think it's just a regular old optical illusion at first, but actually, you're looking at your very own brain waves.
After growing out a full mop of facial hair, Ben Garvin decided that a good beard should never go to waste. So he picked up his iPhone and carefully stitched together this remarkable stop motion film.
Quadcopters offer extreme precision and control in flight, not to mention the ability to take off and land vertically. But compared to the traditional plane design used for most drones, their speed and long range capabilities are limited. So an Arizona-based drone builder called Latitude Engineering hopes to capture the best of both worlds with a quadcopter and drone hybrid that doesn't need a runway, but can fly long distance missions.
Earlier this week, NASA and ESA scientists working with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft caught a glimpse of a tiny comet barreling towards the Sun. As you'll see in this video, the poor thing never had a chance.
A Buffalo, NY, parking meter mechanic was running a pretty lucrative criminal conspiracy one quarter at a time. Over eight years, he managed to steal $210,000, or five tons of quarters from modified meters. That's a lot of pocket change.
You know cable companies are unpopular. ISPs are, generally, too. But seeing just how unpopular is just too funny. As in: pretty much the entire bottom end of the list was made up of cable and internet companies.
Remember our friendly white hat hacker, Khalil Shreateh, who got stiffed on his just reward after identifying a Facebook bug that let him post on Zuckerberg's wall? Well, looks like the hacker community has no intention of letting their buddy's bank account fall to the wayside. After setting up a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe, security researcher Marc Maiffret has successfully collected $10,000 in donations for Shreateh—a full 20 times more than Facebook's withheld offering.
Before we had DVDs and Blu-rays of every Star Trek episode — before VHS tapes, even — there were trading cards that commemorated every adventure. A brand new book commemorates the lurid Topps trading-card adventures of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and we've got an exclusive peek.
Hey Coloradans! My favorite astronomer/nerd dis aficionado, Phil Plait, will be at the Boulder Science Festival. +10 Internet Points to anyone who uses one of our disses on him at the event.
Mark Cerny’s journey from 17-year-old Atari programmer to lead architect of Sony Computer Entertainment will define the next blockbuster games console.
Mark Cerny’s soft voice and youthful looks belie the position of power he holds in the video-game industry. The 49-year-old Californian is the lead architect of Sony’s PlayStation 4, the company’s forthcoming video-game console cum entertainment hub, which is destined to arrive in millions of living rooms around the globe this winter. As such he is partly responsible for defining the next generation of video-game consoles and shaping the broader influence of these increasingly pervasive devices. It is a unique challenge in technological design. Unlike PCs, smartphones, or televisions, new video-game consoles launch only intermittently, every seven years or so. The design must be robust enough to remain relevant in a rapidly shifting technological landscape over an extended period.
Over a hundred years ago, archaeologists dug up these nine blackened, corroded lumps of stone from a pre-dynastic Egyptian cemetery. But it wasn't until now that we realized just how old they are—and that they came from outer space.
Russia has been working tirelessly to modernize its military might and has already revealed some seriously intimidating firepower over the past few years. Now they're working to replace the devastating Mi-24 HIND with something even more terrifying armament—Russia's version of the AH-64 Apache, the Mi-28 Night Hunter.
When you chat with someone on Facebook, they can see when you've read one of their messages—even if you don't reply. Privy Chat solves this annoyance by hiding "Seen" messages when you chat on your phone.
Calve12 showed the movie Tron to his young daughter, who promptly had a nightmare about her father getting sucked into a computer. Here is what the daughter encountered when waking up the next morning. Ha ha, it's funny because he'll be paying for years of therapy!
This isn't exactly a news flash but hey, fast food isn't good for you. And though sometimes that burger or that hot dog might look appetizing in your head, it never looks like that in real life. Jon Feinstein's photography series about fast food takes the common items we know and love and uses a scanner to create images of them. The results are haunting, soul less and almost depressing. This is the food we enjoy!
We're back. Apologies for the missing edition last week but, you know, time off for good behavior or something. What we like to do each week is gather up the coolest comic book art that will never appear in actual comics. The reason you won't see these fine pieces of art in comics is because artists often do sketches and commissions and post them on their blogs, Tumblrs and Twitter pages. Some artists even pre-arrange commissions through their sites so be sure to check them out.
Marcio Takara is taking pre-commissions for NYCC on his Tumblr. Check out what he's posted so far. His Cassandra Cain makes me wanna cry over her absence in the New 52.
Todd Nauck posted a couple Wolverine pics for some good causes. Check out his Tumblr for more info. He also posted one of Koj from TELLOS by the late and grate Mike Wieringo.
Chris Burnham was at Wizard World Chicago and posted some of the sketches he did on his Twitter.
Agnes Garbowska continues her world tour of comic conventions (at least it seems like she's always going somewhere). She'll be at FanExpo coming up soon in Canada. You can find her schedule on her Tumblr. And we'll bend the rules a little here, the Red Sonja piece was from and exclusive cover at Larry's Comics for RED SONJA #2.
Brett Booth posted a pic of Guardian from Alpha Flight along with some BATMAN/SUPERMAN art on his blog!
Dustin Nguyen posted (or maybe reposted) some cool Mr. Freeze pics on his Tumblr in honor of Michael Ansara, the voice actor in Batman: TAS, who recently passed at 91.
Robert Atkins posted some new art on his blog. Always cool seeing his G.I. Joe pics.
Peter Nguyen posted some new art on his Tumblr. He'll be at FanExpo and NYCC so head over to his Tumblr for info on pre-commissions.
Skottie Young was at Wizard World Chicago as well and posted a bunch of art he did as well as an Axe Cop pic on his Tumblr.
That's it for this week. What did you think of all these glorious pieces? We'll have more next time.
No one really knows exactly how Apple makes sure the apps that wind up in its store are safe. All we know is that the App Store has a comparatively better track record than its Android counterpart. But nothing is ever totally safe. Researchers managed to sneak malware onto the App Store with ease by giving their app the power to transform.
