Rain and sunlight are the key ingredients of rainbows, but many other environmental factors are required to consistently pull off this visual trick, as new research shows.
Sky Global CEO Jean-Francois Eap, who the Department of Justice indicted last week for his alleged role in providing encryption tech to international drug cartels, has shot back that the government is targeting him to destroy the “fundamental right to privacy.”
After a year of working from home, many of us are sick and tired of endless video meetings. Now we have an excuse to get out of these conference calls with a new tool called Zoom Escaper.
If Alex Cranz were a participant in this post, she would almost certainly include a photo of the “bye bitch” vape she has or any number of GIFs that are surely criminal in at least half a dozen states at whoever was being roasted. Unfortunately for all of us, after five years, she is not a roaster but the roastee.…Read more...
Nifty Gateway—an NFT marketplace that was bought out by the Winklevoss twins back in 2019—announced on Monday morning some of its users were swept up in a small-scale hack that saw their accounts and credit cards compromised.Read more...
Researchers have found microbes in the deep sea that are completely invisible to the human immune system, a somewhat unnerving discovery that suggests our bodies’ seemingly universal ability to recognize bacteria isn’t so all-inclusive.Read more...
by Germain Lussier on io9, shared by Marina Galperina on (#5FC92)
With a week off between brand new Marvel shows, what’s a fan to do? Thankfully, Disney+ delivered with a brand new one-hour special called Marvel Studios Assembled: The Making of WandaVision, which dives into how the entire show was made. Even though it’s relatively short, it’s jam-packed with cool facts and tidbits.…Read more...
by Molly Taft on Earther, shared by Brian Kahn to Giz on (#5FC64)
Jars of dirt taken from a Cold War-era military caper and lost in a freezer for decades could hold crucial new information about climate change and sea level rise. A study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists says that plant fossils found in a sample of dirt collected from a mile…Read more...
Recent research provides a clear example of the dangers of deregulation. The study found that poison center cells involving children swallowing high-powered magnets went up substantially after 2017 in the U.S., following the reversal of a ban on these products enacted years earlier.Read more...
There are a lot of reasons why Google’s Wear OS as a smartwatch platform is so frustrating. It lacks the advanced health features you see from other wearables makers, nearly all the available watches are still reliant on outdated chips, and historically, Google hasn’t been the best at delivering timely updates. Recent…Read more...
Over the weekend, people who own Cricut’s crafting machines—which are printer-like devices that can precisely slice up documents—learned of an upcoming update that will limit how often they can use the machines they’ve paid for. The company, whose cheapest machine is $180, will now start charging users a monthly…Read more...
by Dharna Noor on Earther, shared by Brian Kahn to Gi on (#5FC34)
Beijing is currently hidden under a thick, yellow blanket of noxious smog. The dust originated in a Gobi Desert sandstorm, which has killed at least six people in Mongolia. Now, northwest winds have blown the dust through across Inner Mongolia into the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Shanxi, and Hebei.
by James Whitbrook on io9, shared by Andrew Couts to on (#5FC35)
For years, fans of director Zack Snyder have wondered, often to the point of questionable fervor, what could’ve happened in an alternate world where he got to finish 2017's Justice League. Four years and tens of millions of dollars later, Warner Bros. has opened a Pandora’s box to place us in that reality—and it turns…Read more...
Weighing 2.9 tons and traveling 4.8 miles per second, this heap of old batteries is now the heaviest single piece of garbage to be jettisoned from the International Space Station.Read more...
by Ashley Reese on Jezebel, shared by Andrew Couts to on (#5FBWH)
A Pennsylvania woman allegedly released doctored photos and videos of her teenage daughter’s cheerleading rivals naked, drinking, or smoking in a desperate bid to get the girls booted off the team. She now faces multiple charges of cyber harassment of a child.
by Molly Taft on Earther, shared by Brian Kahn to Giz on (#5FBWJ)
Don’t worry, helpless fossil fuel companies: Texas is coming to your rescue. Four Republican state senators introduced a bill last week that would prevent the state from doing business with any companies that “boycott” the oil and gas industry.
It’s inevitable that one day all of us will see our jobs taken over by automatons—the real question is whether we’ll be replaced by robots, or some elaborate and surprisingly capable Lego creation like Arthur Sacek created to build perfectly stacked structures made of playing cards.Read more...
8BitDo’s SN30 Pro+ is not only a better option than nearly every other third-party controller on the market, its extreme customizability and $50 price tag makes it a better choice than even first-party controllers from Microsoft and Nintendo. But don’t run out and buy one just yet, because 8BitDo has an upgraded…Read more...
A lot of people are going to have to make a hard decision later this summer when Google removes support for unlimited storage from Google Photos, but current Pixel owners aren’t one of them.Read more...
There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the next-generation AirPods. Mostly, several leaks suggesting they’re going to look like the AirPods Pro and that the buds will launch at a rumored March event that Apple is purportedly organizing. But don’t get your hopes up. Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is throwing…Read more...
Millions of words have been devoted to Dieter Rams’ iconic hardware designs, but nothing stands as a testament to the timeliness of his creations like a 45-year-old digital alarm clock being resurrected and updated to give your smartphone a functional and stylish place to rest and recharge overnight.Read more...
by James Whitbrook and Gordon Jackson on io9, shared on (#5FBRY)
The Flash movie has lost its Henry Allen. Get a look at the Mortal Kombat movie’s take on Kabal in new footage. Marc Webb teams up with Seth Grahame-Smith for a new R.L. Stine adaptation at Disney. Plus, what’s coming on Batwoman and Van Helsing. To me, my spoilers!
Scientists, or at least their wild-haired fictional counterparts, promised us time travel and still have not delivered. Forget walking with dinosaurs or killing baby Hitler; I’d be happy just to warn my month-ago self not to make all the mistakes he’s about to. It’d also be nice to zoom past the next few months (year?…Read more...
A proposed law in India would make it a crime to mine, trade, or even hold cryptocurrencies like bitcoin in the country, according to a new report from Reuters citing a senior government official. It’s estimated roughly 8 million people in India hold some form of cryptocurrency.
SpaceX successfully launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets into space for a record ninth time on Sunday, making it the first in the company’s fleet to launch and land nine times. The Falcon 9 rocket was carrying a new cargo of 60 Starlink satellites, which are part of the company’s efforts to provide satellite internet.Read more...
Clubhouse, the invite-only audio chat app that has enamored the tech industry elite, is on the lookout for influencers. Because what social media app can be without influencers?Read more...
Due to a bizarre bug, the bird site is temporarily banning folks for tweeting the word “Memphis.” On Sunday, a number of Twitter users suddenly found their accounts locked for 12 hours apparently just for saying the word—myself included.Read more...
Happy Pi Day, fellow nerds! The yearly celebration of the mathematical constant π or pi, aka the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (and here I thought I’d never get a chance to use 9th-grade geometry in real life!). It falls on March 14 because pi written out numerically is 3.14... and then goes on…Read more...
A U.S. district judge in California has stated that Google can be sued for collecting data on users even when they use “private browsing mode” on their selected browsers.Read more...
Last weekend I attended two days of the Brunswick Music Festival in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. In front of a sea of semi-socially distanced picnickers, local bands like indie rockers RVG tore through sets they haven’t played live in a year. People chatted with their friends, hugged, and drank beer. No one wore…Read more...
Taking a page from Google’s book, Microsoft is speeding up the release schedule for its Edge browser and will issue updates every four weeks instead of six weeks, the company announced Friday.Read more...
by Jody Serrano on Earther, shared by Alyse Stanley t on (#5FAQK)
Cryptoart.wtf, the popular crypto art carbon calculator that allowed us to see the real impact the NFT buying craze is having on our poor planet, is shutting down. Its creator, Memo Akten, stated that he decided to take the site down after information from it was used “as a tool for abuse and harassment.”Read more...
by Courtney Enlow on io9, shared by Alyse Stanley to on (#5FAQM)
Maybe you missed out on stockpiling the comics that can give some background to WandaVision, or maybe you desperately miss the show and are craving whatever related content you can get. Either way, Marvel’s got your back.Read more...
Authorities say a Pennsylvania woman anonymously sent her daughter’s cheerleading coaches deepfake photos and videos of rival teammates naked, drinking, or smoking to get them kicked off the squad, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. She also reportedly sent this manipulated content to the teammates themselves and…Read more...
by Courtney Enlow on io9, shared by Alyse Stanley to on (#5FAQP)
Tiffany Haddish will star in and produce Netflix’s adaptation of Mystery Girl. The Dark Horse comic, created by Paul Tobin, follows Trine, a psychic with no memory of the last 10 years of her life, and only an omniscient voice in her head guiding her. She meets Cooper, a cop, who wants her to help him solve a case…Read more...
Apple is reportedly discontinuing its original HomePod smart speaker as the company pivots focus to the HomePod mini, its smaller and more affordable baby brother.
The seeds of the robot apocalypse are apparently being sown in Minor League Baseball. Or rather, the minor leagues appear to be one more sector of society where automation is being used to “augment” and then potentially replace human labor.Read more...
Hackers may have gotten their hands on inside intel that Microsoft shared with its security partners to exploit vulnerabilities in the company’s widely used email and calendaring software Exchange, according to a Friday Wall Street Journal report.
Elon Musk’s tweets have landed him in hot water with shareholders—again. This time, he and the Tesla board are staring down a suit from one disgruntled investor who claims some of the CEO’s tweets violate a 2019 settlement Musk had reached with the Securities and Exchange Commission meant to temper his public missives…Read more...
Our friends the bees have certain behaviors that are unhealthy to the hive and scary for passersby. One behavior, swarming, happens when a hive splits naturally with a group of bees following a new queen. This is a delicate time for the hive and could result in starved bees and a dead queen. In other words, it’s bad.Read more...