Area 51 is the most secretive military base in the United States, a base that U.S. government officials to this day still barely acknowledge because of its top secret development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. But a slew of Cold War-era documents have finally been declassified, and National Geographic has discovered a rather low-tech method the military used to hide its high-tech prototypes.
I love my laptop. It goes wherever I go. Unfortunately, that means that it also gets pretty grubby after a while. The screen gets dusty. The frame gets smudgy. The spaces between the keys fill up with crumbs of questionable origins. And my desktop? That thing is a dust bunny magnet.
Everyone knows who Charles Dickens is—the famous English author responsible for such iconic novels as Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol and The Adventures of Oliver Twist. But what if this Victorian era novelist (who died in 1870) was resurrected into today’s futuristic world? How would you explain the concept of a technology he’s never seen before? Even something that perfectly fits his area of expertise—books? How would you elucidate the Amazon Kindle?
In the past, geocaching has been an activity overlooked by most. Partly because nobody really knew what it was and partly because you needed a GPS-enabled device to participate, like a Garmin. But now, thanks to GPS-enabled Android and Apple devices, geocaching will finally be noticed by the masses in Garmin's own OpenCaching.
It seems the French have carefully observed the hacking achievements of one super clever Carnegie Mellon grad, turning his hack into a modern iPad application-to-be.
If you've yet to witness B.A.S.E. jumping, it's an activity for adrenaline junkies first publicized by filmmaker Carl Boenish in '78. The freefall sport employs ram-air parachutes, and is most commonly executed in locations such as the highly elevated El Capitan rock formation of Yosemite National Park (El Capitan is also technically the birthplace of the sport).
Hacking can't be that hard, can it? At least, that's what it seems like thanks to movies like Hackers, The Net and that last Die Hard flick. Even the Jurassic Park girl's got some game. They all look like they're typing 20wpm, yet can generate a screen full of code in the blink of an eye. Amazing. As long as they're some isolated computer nerd who's glued to their PC all day long (which is pretty much all of us these days, thanks Internet), they're a bona fide hacker.
It's remarkable that a gaming device (from Microsoft, no less) designed for geeky gamers has incited broad innovation in medicine and robotics. But that Kinect has captured the imagination of hackers-with-MBAs-in-mind is downright amazing.
Introduction PostgreSQL is a very popular Open-Source database management system. It competes heavily with many proprietary and commercial database management systems. More information on what it is and it's history can be found here and here.
Since its launch in 2001, Wikipedia has become the number one reference site on the web, used by anyone and everyone, written by anyone and everyone. With over 18 million collaboratively written articles, there's backgrounds and descriptions on practically everything—if it exists, there's probably a Wikipedia page for it.
Why is it so satisfying to squash, snap, squeeze and splatter? You know, squashing a juicy grape, snapping a twig, squeezing ketchup out of a packet—perhaps with your fist—or splattering mud across a sidewalk. But all of these actions are child's play next to animators Laura Junger and Xaver Xylophon's Joy of Destruction. The real joy of destruction is illustrated below—we're talking sawing ladies in half, exploding corn into popcorn with dynamite, burning cities, and rolling over statues wit...
Outstanding advancements in medicine and super creepy Androids aren't the only jaw-dropping inventions out there. Every once in a while, an incredibly random—and at first glance, seemingly useless—device comes along and strikes a chord of strangely deep satisfaction. Behold, the SWITL, a mysterious goo-scraper robot hand created by factory equipment manufacturer Furukawa Kikou: From what I can glean from a very rough Google translation, it sounds like the SWITL was developed for food producti...
Tired of getting calluses from incessantly strumming along to 'No Woman No Cry'? Just hook up to the brain-music system and use your brain power to play a tune instead. I'm not talking—humming along in your head. The machine, created by composer and computer-music specialist Eduardo Miranda of the University of Plymouth, UK, is composed of electrodes taped directly onto your skull that pick up tiny electrical impulses from neurons in your brain and translates them into musical rhythms on a co...
Not in the mood for a sappy ending? Well, strap in because "Emotional Response Cinema Technology" lets your own body physiology control the movie music, the special effects, and even the movie ending. A collaboration between BioControl Systems, Filmtrip, and the Sonic Arts Research Center at Queen's University Belfast, the technology was recently showcased at the SXSW film festival in Austin, TX, where the newly minted horror film Unsound interacted with the audience through wires connected t...
Holy… Lord, help us all—this isn't CG, it's for real. Meet Geminoid DK, the latest spawn from Osaka University Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro's legion of ultra-realistic Androids.
Entrepreneur Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a successful Chicago-based software and design firm that has doubled its sales every year for the past decade. Although Fried has a degree in finance, making money isn't a skill he picked up in the classroom or a book. Practice makes perfect, and Fried's experience has taught him that excelling at making money is separate from the product or services provided. Understanding the buyer and experimenting with price models are two of Fried's ke...
This past Tuesday, Amazon pushed a big software update to Kindle users the world over. While the update introduces a host of great new features—secondary page numbers that allow readers to reference real-world editions, for example—, it also takes something away. What?
According to PlayStation Network @ Home, a new app may allow hackers to ban or unban anyone they please from PSN.
Well, maybe not a real invisibility cloak—sorry Harry Potter fans—but a team of scientists at MIT's SMART Centre are on their way to producing materials that mimic actual invisibility.
Eric Jacqmain is one smart cookie. Borrowing from the same principles of Archimedes’ mythological death ray, the Indiana teenager used an ordinary fiberglass satellite dish and about 5,800 3/8" mirror tiles to create a solar weapon with the intensity of 5000x normal daylight. The powerful weapon can "melt steel, vaporize aluminum, boil concrete, turn dirt into lava, and obliterate any organic material in an instant."
I am not trying to ruin anyones hopes and dreams...BUT... Look, say you go to Graduate school in fine art. You graduate 3 years later, $100,000 in dept. You go into a workforce which is so over saturated, you can't get a job making copies at kinkos.
The exile is officially over. Let the good times roll. Unequal Technologies has just signed Michael Vick as its corporate spokesman. They have applied for 50 patents that largely employ the Dupont-created Kevlar for "shock suppression". Formally speaking, this is his first product endorsement deal since his arrest in 2007.
It may look like a modern take on Oliver Twist but, we assure you, this is for real. Before you get too alarmed, however, you should note that the headline reads "how to steal cars" and not simply "to steal cars." We are, after all, dealing with the fine people at Machine Project, a Los Angeles-based non-profit community space organized around the investigation of "art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food."
Ever wonder what your brain looks like on video games? Below, Matt Richtel of the New York Times lies in a $3 million M.R.I. scanning tube while playing a simple driving game, as researchers sit by and observe the real-time images inside Richtel's brain.
The Writers at io9.com have been running through a fantastic series of blog posts, in which they're teaching their readers about the history of great 80s sci-fi and fantasy. Because so much of this is right up my alley, I though I'd aggregate their aggregations, so to speak, and write a little retrospective of my own.
Thanks to Microsoft’s XBOX 360 motion-detecting system, Kinect, the world is becoming a play place for sci-fi style virtual reality. One of the latest hacks demonstrates the next best thing to regular old air guitar... virtual reality air guitar: Artist Chris O'Shea explains how it works:
UPDATE: New York University photography professor Wafaa Bilal talked the talk, and now he's walked the walk with his recent camera implant. And guess what? It hurt. What a surprise.
Think beautiful bokeh photography + just a hint of TRON sensuality and you have photographer Audrey Penven's lovely series entitled "Dancing with Invisible Light: A series of interactions with Kinect's infrared structured light".
Tricycle + simple plow blade = true yankee ingenuity. (Who needs a pricey snow plow vehicle?) Craig Smith recently submitted his custom contraption to MAKE:
Professor Wafaa Bilal of New York University plans to soon undergo a surgical procedure that would temporarily implant a camera in the back of his head. The project is being commissioned for an art exhibit at a new museum in Qatar. The Iraqi photographer will be a living, breathing cyborg for an entire year, during which the implanted camera will take still photos every minute, simultaneously feeding the images to monitors at the museum.
The future of technology promises more and more seamless daily interactions. Pee on your phone, test for STDS. Or perhaps more widely appealing, ditch your wallet for all-in-one easy mobility.
White: the first thing comes to my mind when I see light white is an angel, I think that this color represent the good side of everyone, the angel form of a person, sometimes you can see someone and look at him like he is a real angel, what a wonderful feeling, and even someone who is very gentle with you, you can display him in your mind with a white circle on his head.
PopSci's Gray Matter demonstrates again and again what the layman should absolutely Not Try at Home. Which is precisely what makes Gray's experiments so fun. Remember when the mad scientist fully submerged his hand in liquid nitrogen? Today's demonstration also plays with what is (quite reasonably) assumed to be extremely dangerous and painful: torching the human hand.
Remember Willy Wonka's magical gum? Wonka promised the flavors of tomato soup, roast beef, baked potato, blueberry pie and ice cream. As the avid gum lover Violet Beauregarde tested it out, she exclaimed: “It’s hot and creamy, I can actually feel? it running down my throat!” Um, yum... I think. Good news. Wonka's three course chewing gum is finally a reality-in-the-works. Scientists at the Institute of Food Research (IFR) have been developing recent advances in nanotechnology, which could pot...
Valero and Tesoro are known as the biggest oil companies in California. They have spent large amounts of money on the Proposition 23 campaign, Valero with $4,050,000 and Tesoro with $1,525,000, in hopes of passing the Proposition, which would suspend the Assemmbly Bill 32, the Global Warming Act of 2006, until unemployment drops to 5.5% for 4 consequtive quarters. Valero's stand is that the California's Global Warming Act will only cause more lost jobs for California and therefore should not ...
Last I checked pole dancing was mainstream acceptable as a form of exercise for adventurous young women and repressed housewives. Until now. This latest discovery deserves some real R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 24 Tonight one of the worlds most intense directors has a premiere of his new film.
Lucy, whose real name is BPM 37093, is a diamond roughly the size of our moon. At around 4000 kilometers in diameter (2,485 miles), Lucy is estimated to be around 10 billion trillion trillion carats. A billion trillion trillion? x 10? It's easier to imagine dividing by zero than to put this ridiculous number into perspective.
Ok, so first Periodic Tables demonstrates how a McDonald's cheeseburger breaks down in your stomach during the digestion process. Everybody has hydrochloric acid in their stomach, so drop a burger in acid and you can see it happen before your eyes (minus the amino acids a human stomach would supply). Seems innocent enough. Here's what happened after 3.5 hours: NASTY. So my question is: does healthy food look the same? What would a pile of broccoli or granola look like? Probably just as nasty....
Every day of the week, WonderHowTo curators are hard at work, scouring the web for the greatest and most inspiring how-to videos. Every Friday, we'll highlight our favorite finds.
