New advances in 3D printing are making it not only possible but also viable to manufacture cheap, print-on-demand, disposable drones designed simply to soar off over the horizon and never come back. Some British engineers did just that, and this is only the beginning. The team hails from the Advanced Manufacturing Research Center (AMRC) at […]
Month: March 2014
Last year Facebook debuted a nice redesign that featured big, beautiful pictures, seen above. But Facebook never rolled it out. Why? Because most people have crappy old computers. Entrepreneur Dustin Curtis had claimed that the reason for the redesign abandonment was because it didn’t drive enough advertising dollars. But Facebook product designer Julie Zhuo said […]
>After ten years of extremely expensive, slow, and politically messed up construction work–it is a long and sad story of government corruption and incompetence–Budapest, the Hungarian capital, got its fourth metro line today. Despite its ill-fated genesis and controversial usefulness, the Metro 4 is an amazing engineering, architectural, and artistic achievement, a mix of stunning […]
If your arm falls asleep for a while, it can sort of feel like it’s made of rubber. But how do you make your arm feel like it’s made of marble? According to Italian researchers, all you need is the sound of a hammer tapping stone. And some psychological trickery. You may be familiar with […]
When patience is short and waits are long, squeezing onto the bus becomes a mad, lawless scramble. And that won’t do if your buses have to transport 100,000 passengers a day, like Vancouver’s extremely busy 99 line. So transportation planners got out a camera and some tape—you can watch the results in this transfixing time-lapse […]
You may have noticed that an iPad version of Microsoft Office was released on Thursday, which was a massive improvement on the iPhone version since you can use basic features without a £100 Office 365 subscription. Well now it turns out that with a bit of fiddling you can access more than the basic features without a subscription. Get in! […]
Dieter Rams left a lasting legacy at Braun that still influences the products the company creates today. Just take a look at this simple analogue alarm clock, that’s found a clever way to compete with all the other monstrous smartphone docks vying for space on your bedside table. Instead of a hard-to-find button on the […]
There are a number of claims that Apple fanboys use to justify their fondness for a closed operating system. Something something regularity. Something something universal availability. Well I hate to break it to you, but it turns out iOS apps are twice as likely to crash compared to their Android counterparts. According to Crittercism apps […]
In surprising booze news, Wonkblog’s Christopher Ingraham gives a surprising (and classy) spin to conventional drinking wisdom: if you’re looking to get the most alcoholic punch per calorie, don’t reach for “the hard stuff.” You’re better off drinking champagne or sparkling wine. The whole evaluation is great—you really should read Ingraham’s entire data-driven look at […]
Exoplanets—planets orbiting stars that aren’t our Sun—seem to be popping out of the cosmic woodwork now that we know where and how to look for them. The Kepler mission alone has discovered 961 of them, and it’s only looking at a tiny sliver of distant space. Just think of how many we’ll find when the new […]