MOM! DAD! Why don’t you understand me? Why don’t you get my internet tendencies? Why don’t you instinctively know that all I want to do with my time is snap flower-crown selfies and stan Zayn on Tumblr? Why can’t you just let me be me?
Source: Gizmodo – God, Parents, You Just Don’t Understand What Teens Are Doing on the Internet
Cars emit polluting carbon dioxide (CO2) when they burn gas, but what if you could reverse the process? Scientists from the University of Washington have engineered a bacteria that can do just that: pull CO2 from the air and, using sunlight, convert…
Source: Engadget – Sun-powered bacteria turn nasty CO2 into helpful biofuel
Just months after the NetworkManager 1.2, the next major installment is now available…
Source: Phoronix – NetworkManager 1.4 Released
These are two of the magic angle LEGO sculptures created by shadow artist John V. Muntean. When rotated, they cast three different shaped shadows (in these cases a knight/mermaid/pirate ship and dragon/butterfly/jet plane) on the wall behind them. When viewed with no light to cast a shadow, they look just like a huge chunk of LEGO blocks. It just goes to show, you can’t judge a book by it’s cover. Unless that cover features a half naked couple embracing atop a stallion on the beach, in which case you know it’s going to be good and best read in the bathtub when no one else is home and an aromatherapy candle on blast.
Keep going for videos of the sculptures, as well as a clever bonus wood-cut sculpture entitled ‘Evolution’.
Source: Geekologie – Sorcery: LEGO Sculptures That Cast 3 Different Shadows When Viewed From Different Sides
Fro Design Company’s new poster, “The Upside Down,” really captures the misty, watery terror of the neighboring dimension that haunts the characters of Stranger Things. The monster is, of course, front and center—and Eleven’s looking especially badass with that Terminator-ish right eye.
Source: io9 – Hang This Awesome Stranger Things Poster Next to Your Christmas-Light Alphabet
Mac: Spotify’s darker design is great, but it’s not for everyone. If you’re nostalgic for the light theme of the now-defunct Rdio, Spotio is a clever little hack that’ll reskin Spotify to give it a similar look.
Source: LifeHacker – Spotio Gives Spotify on Mac a Rdio-Inspired Skin
Pandora may be prepping a Spotify-like subscription for launch, but that’s not keeping the internet radio service from ramping up its original content. Today, the company announced that it’s partnering with The Roots drummer and DJ Questlove on a new…
Source: Engadget – Pandora’s new internet radio station is curated by Questlove
(credit: Phillip Bradshaw)
When someone like Martin Shkreli fingers your company as greedy “vultures,” you know you’ve got problems.
For pharmaceutical company Mylan, which hiked the price of life-saving EpiPens by 400 percent since it bought the product in 2007, Shkreli’s is just one of the voices in a chorus of scorn now facing the company.
On Wednesday, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the American Medical Association (AMA) separately called on Mylan to lower the cost of the auto-injecting pens, which reverse deadly allergic reactions. Also Wednesday, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took to Facebook to declare “Mylan’s greed is apparently limitless.” The rebukes follow a steady stream of other Congress members who have questioned and expressed concern over the price increase.
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Source: Ars Technica – Rage mounts against pharma corp. that jacked cost of life-saving EpiPen by 400%
Aluminum started as one of the world’s most expensive materials because it was difficult to refine—even though it made up 8 percent of the world’s crust. But eventually aluminum became one of the cheapest materials after methods of mass producing it were invented in the 1880s. It went from $1200 per kilogram down to a dollar in 50 years.
Source: Gizmodo – How Aluminum Changed the World
What ever happened to just snapping a few LEGOs together to make a crude house or a crappy car? Creating something like this is taking LEGO design to a whole new level.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – Cool LEGO Statue Thingy of the Day
If your movie theater of choice is operated by Regal, this discounted gift card essentially amounts to ten free dollars. In most cities, that’s like a free ticket!
Source: io9 – Save on Your Next Movie Night With This Discounted Regal Gift Card
With the lights on, John V. Muntean’s Lego creations look like something a five-year-old would build. “Look, mommy, it’s a horse!” But turn the lights off, shine a spotlight on these creations, and suddenly their real raison d’être is revealed; intricate shadow designs that change as each mass of Lego bricks is turned.
Source: Gizmodo – This Guy’s Ugly Lego Creations Make Beautiful Shadow Art
We picked the CyberPower CP685AVR as our winner. (credit: Michael Hession)
This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best things for your home. Read the full article with more details and background information here.
After researching more than two dozen models, interviewing experts, and having an electrical engineer test our top candidates, we found that the CyberPower CP685AVR is the best uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for people who want to keep a home network running during a blackout of an hour or less. It’s easy to set up, it has some of the most positive user reviews in its class, and it’s the most affordable unit we found. We also like the APC BE650G1 Back-UPS, if it’s available for less. But if you need to power more than a modem and a Wi-Fi router or if you need to stay online longer, the APC BR1000G Back-UPS Pro is a better choice, with more than twice the power for less than twice the price.
The CyberPower CP685AVR will cover the basics for most people during short blackouts. In our tests it provided enough power to keep the average cable or DSL modem and Wi-Fi router running for an hour, which means you can stay online to pass the time while the lights are off—or, in a real emergency, keep your digital phone service powered so you can reach the outside world. The size of an overgrown surge protector, the CP685AVR is small enough to hide in the same corner as your networking gear, and because it has surge protection built in, you’ll have one less thing to buy. Although you could easily spend more on a UPS, you really have no reason to if you need only basic, non-critical protection and a limited amount of power.
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Source: Ars Technica – From The Wirecutter: The best uninterruptible power supply (UPS)
You will be shocked to hear this, but many of us on staff here at Kotaku play Overwatch. It’s actually pretty unusual for so many of us to be playing the same game, so we thought we’d make some weekly videos where we casually chat about what’s new with the game.
Source: Kotaku – You will be shocked to hear this, but many of us on staff here at Kotaku play Overwatch.
“Do you remember the movie Cloak & Dagger?” my editor asked. Immediately, I froze. Did he know I used to be obsessed with that little-known ’80s movie about a kid and his imaginary spy friend? He didn’t; it was just a random question, but it made me sit down and do one of the scariest things you can do as an adult film fan: re-watch a movie you loved as a kid.
Source: io9 – Cloak & Dagger May Be the Most Messed-Up Kids Movie of the ’80s
There’s another Earth out there. For real, this time. Astronomers announced on Wednesday that they had detected a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest neighbor to our solar system. Intriguingly, the planet is in the star’s “Goldilocks zone,” they said, a place that hints that it may not be too hot nor too cold. Which in turn means that liquid water could exist at the surface, and by extension, it raises the possibility of life. Nature reports:”The search for life starts now,” says Guillem Anglada-Escude, an astronomer at Queen Mary University of London and leader of the team that made the discovery. Humanity’s first chance to explore this nearby world may come from the recently announced Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which plans to build fleets of tiny laser-propelled interstellar probes in the coming decades. Travelling at 20% of the speed of light, they would take about 20 years to cover the 1.3 parsecs from Earth to Proxima Centauri. Proxima’s planet is at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth. The planet orbits its red-dwarf star — much smaller and dimmer than the Sun — every 11.2 days. “If you tried to pick the type of planet you’d most want around the type of star you’d most want, it would be this,” says David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University in New York City. “It’s thrilling.”Much about the planet is still unknown. Astronomers have some ideas about its size and distance from its parent star. Scientists say they are working off computer models that offer mere hints of what’s possible. Also, there’s no picture available for this planet as of yet.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Earth-Like Planet, With Ambitious Life Possibility, Found Orbiting the Star Next Door
Adult Swim Games is stepping in to publish an all-new ToeJam and Earl game 25 years after the original made its Sega Genesis debut.
Source: Engadget – Adult Swim is publishing ‘ToeJam and Earl: Back in the Groove’
If you carry an EpiPen in case of a deadly allergic reaction, you’ve probably noticed the price skyrocket over the last decade. The injectors now cost over $600 and still expire after a year, so it may be tempting to carry an expired EpiPen, or none at all. There’s an alternative, though: the Adrenaclick is a different device that delivers the same drug.
Source: LifeHacker – Adrenaclick Is a Cheaper Alternative to the EpiPen
Steve Rogers is a whole lot more than just saying Hail Hydra and taking orders from the Red Skull. He’s got plans. Straight-up evil plans.
Source: io9 – Yep, the Original Captain America Is Going Full Supervillain
Enlarge / The octobot, with some of its reaction system highlighted in color. (credit: Ryan Truby, Michael Wehner, and Lori Sanders, Harvard University.)
While the current generation of industrial robots is primarily made of metal, the research community has been getting interested in the potential for soft-bodied robots. These have a number of advantages, such as being easy to customize via 3D printing and providing a flexibility that lets them squeeze through tight spaces.
Many of the research demonstrations created so far, however, have had to make some compromises. For some iterations, this has meant the control hardware and power sources have been kept separate, connected to the robot via a tether. For other attempts, this has meant the final product is a mixture of hard and soft pieces.
In today’s issue of Nature, however, researchers are reporting the creation of a soft-bodied robot that carries its own fuel supply, which powers the robot through an on-board chemical reaction. Soft, flexible on-board logic then directs the reaction products to control the movement of the robot. While the result is pretty limited in what it can do, its creators make up for that with a certain cool factor, making their creation look a lot like an octopus.
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Source: Ars Technica – Behold the octobot—a fully autonomous, soft-bodied robot
