Dr John All was taking snow samples on his own on Mount Himlung — in Nepal’s Himalayas — when the glacier broke under his feet. He fell into a 21m crevasse and suffered multiple injuries, but he managed to escape using an ice pick, filming himself during an agonic adventure that lasted six hours. More » ...
Remember the great “pink slime” panic of 2012? Well, it’s back — both pink slime and the ridiculous panic surrounding it. More » ...
Oh gluten, the least trendy protein of our time. As gluten-free has transcended science and exploded into diet fad, scientists increasingly suspect that gluten intolerance — apart from actual celiac disease — doesn’t exist at all. The true culprit could be a group of carbohydrates, including one in wheat called fructan. More » ...
Video: I’ve seen them firing many times, but I’ve to confess that I’ve never seen one of these missiles systems getting loaded. It seems as easy as inserting a cartridge in a Nintendo Entertainment system. More » ...
The Catlin Seaview Survey is a Google and University of Queensland project using a nifty underwater camera rig to create a zoomable, 360-degree image of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Destin from SmarterEveryDay got to hitch a ride with the team that records this sea-floor Street View. You don’t want to miss this. More » ...
So you want NASA to fly you to the moon and let you play among the stars. Maybe let you see what spring is like on a-Jupiter and Mars? Well, you’re going to need more than a solid Sinatra impression to get NASA to accept you into its spacefaring ranks — a whole lot more. More » ...
In pro wrestling, the moves may be fake choreographed, but the glittering gold-and-leather championship belts are very real. And while most of what happens at the WWE comes out of an enormously wealthy corporate powerhouse, CNN Money shows us the humble origins of those testosterone-cherished waist trophies: Dave Millican’s house in Tony, Alabama. More » ...
Video: Prolific doodler Marty Cooper carries around animation cels, a marker, and some Wite-Out as he wanders the city, creating whimsical scenes that turn mundane background imagery into charming mini-stories. And he painstakingly captures them on his iPhone to create the animated world of Aug(De)Mented Reality. More » ...
With all the excitement over the potential for consumer-level, affordable 3D printers, everyone’s clearly forgotten about lasers — specifically laser-engraving. If you had the gear at home, you’d be burning things onto other things left, right and centre, but short of spending a few thousand dollars on a professional device, this isn’t a realistic or practical endeavour. Enter Melbourne-based Darkly...
With Soylent to eat (or I guess drink) and Palcohol to drink (or maybe eat), it seems the kitchen of the future will just be a blender. But don’t haul your stove to the curb just yet: an admittedly small study says that mice who ate nothing but powdered nutrient ended up more sickly than their friends who had to chew. More » ...
Solid-state drives (SSDs) are already fast, in fact, a little too fast . That doesn’t mean we’re going to say no to even more performance, even if data transport protocols need to catch up. While flash memory itself continues to improve in durability, speed and density, there’s also work ongoing on the software side, with a team of researchers in Japan reportedly boosting existing drive speeds with...
Video: I’m fairly certain that the idea of jumping over an island has never crossed my mind in all my years of thinking. But if you’re a champion kitesurfer like Youri Zoon and you stumble across a small enough island, well, that’s just another day on the beach for you. Jumping the damn thing and nailing it is just how you live. Watch Zoon catch the perfect gust of wind and fly over an entire 36.6m...
A new US political party, designed by software devs and engineers, is joining the race in California. If elected, PlaceAVote’s Congressional candidates vow to decide on every bill based on the majority vote of their constituents — as measured via online polling. Could that sort of direct, digital democracy improve how Congress works? Would it make government more dysfunctional? (Is the latter even...
Video: Get ready, my friends. Get ready to feel all kinds of emotions. Get ready to love, to cry, to hate, to look away, to stop this video in disgust only to start playing it again because you can’t resist keep looking at it. Get ready for every single Nicolas Cage laugh ever compiled in one single video. The clip includes 64 movies, from Best of Times (1981) to Rage (2014). More » ...
Despite the billions upon billions of dollars funnelled into the hungry maw of the military over the past 70 years, some technology has remained the same since World War II — including the smoke grenade. Now, the US Army is choosing a new version that, in theory, will be slightly less toxic than the “classic” model. More » ...
Vampires and zombies, ruined castles and gloomy dungeons: the scary tropes of Gothic horror, which first terrorised the world 250 years ago with the publication of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto , still colonise our imaginations today. What better way to celebrate the anniversary than by mixing yourself a Silver Bullet or Nosferatini and settling in for a Twilight marathon or to re-read Mary Shelley’s...
Living in a glass house is cool, but it has its own inconveniences. That’s why this sliding roof is such a good idea. It gives you privacy, protects you from the heat in summer and the cold in winter. So when the weather is perfect and no one is looking you know what to do. More » ...
Humans aren’t the only mammals to make friends — elephants, horses, whales and plenty more form strong social bonds that aren’t connected to reproduction — but it’s only the smartest that do. Why is that? More » ...
Bad Lip Reading did it again. This time they poke fun at American Idol, showing how funny the show can be — but only when it’s dubbed. More » ...
There’s a reason brands like Nerf and Tonka are popular with parents: it’s because they’re almost impossible for kids to destroy. So Marblue decided to take a similar approach with its headphones designed for kids, by making the frame out of nearly indestructible foam. And, of course, they called them Headfoams. More » ...