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Tech NewsSploidInsane Man Stings Himself With the Second Most Painful Insect on Earth
The tarantula hawk is neither a tarantula nor a hawk—it’s a very big, very mean desert wasp. And of course someone on the internet decided to get stung by one. Oddly, the tarantula hawk isn’t a particularly aggressive insect. Generally they buzz around, eating nectar and avoiding humans or other animals. It’s even the state … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech NewsHow Hackers Stole a Slew of Republican Donors’ Credit Card Info
Did you buy something from the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the past six months? If yes, there’s a good chance that your credit card information is being sold online by Russian hackers right now. Security researcher Willem de Groot discovered that customer information hackers skimmed customer information from nearly 6,000 sites, including the NRSC … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech NewsSploidThis Tiny Drum Set Sounds Amazingly Good
Who needs a set of fully-tunable miniature drums? A guy who does most of his drumming with a bearded, bandana-wearing puppet. Ricky Syers may not be a household name, but you might recognize the video of his puppet Chops expertly bashing his way through Rush’s “Tom Sawyer.” Back then Chops’ kit was repurposed aluminum cans, … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech News
These Cryptic Wikileaks Tweets Don’t Mean Julian Assange Is Dead [Update]
Earlier today, Wikileaks tweeted out a series of three terse, confusing messages, each containing a 64-character code. Now a lot of people think Julian Assange is dead. In the absence of context, some users on Twitter, Reddit, and various image boards were quick to speculate that the tweets were the result of a “dead man’s … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech NewsThis Humanoid Robot Sweats With Its Skeleton
Progress is a fight between what works the best and what’s feasible to manufacture cheaply at scale. Usually the latter wins. It’s why we used VHS instead of Betamax. It’s why most grocery store produce is utterly tasteless. And it’s why we’ve built a humanoid robot that sweats. One of the major challenges facing robotics … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech News
Hackers Claim They Wiped John Podesta’s iPhone
From the perspective of newsworthiness, Wikileak’s Podesta emails have been totally weird. Amidst revelations about an ex-Blink-182 member’s belief in extraterrestrial life, and Podesta’s own advice on cooking risotto, Trump supporters on a variety of imageboards have been sifting through the emails for anything compromising. Last night it seems they hit paydirt. Many of the … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech News
Legendary Programmer Dies for the Second Time
Those working in tech owe much of their livelihood to Dennis Ritchie. The New-York born pioneer was among the early Bell Labs alums, and is credited with both creating the C programming language and co-developing Unix. Unfortunately for those mourning his passing today, he died five years ago. Among the first to Tweet about Ritchie’s … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech News
Homeopathic Teething Products Might Have Killed 10 Kids [Update]
Homeopathy is widely (and rightly) regarded as quackery. But an ongoing FDA investigation into homeopathic teething tablets and gels for infants is attempting determine if these products led to seizures and deaths, Buzzfeed reports. The FDA warned parents back in 2010 about products sold by Hyland’s homeopathic teething products, which were found to contain belladonna … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech News
DEA Backpedals: Kratom Will Remain Legal, For Now
Opiate addicts and chronic pain sufferers were sent into a panic in August when the DEA announced its intention to place kratom’s two main constituent chemicals on schedule 1—making sale and possession of the plant illegal. Now, a preliminary document, set to be posted to the Federal Register tomorrow, reverses that decision. The Washington Post … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech NewsSploidThis Sign Spinning Competition Is Utterly Insane
There’s a whole taxonomy of people on any given street who want something from you: the clipboard activists, the donation fund folks who are too aggressive, the lady selling bad art, the creepy free massage guys. And then there’s the humble sign spinner, the platonic ideal of mild inconvenience. It should come as no surprise … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech NewsSamsungSamsung’s Fireproof Box for Galaxy Note 7 Returns Is Insane
The Galaxy Note 7 is dead, people. But recalling a product whose reputation consists solely of its propensity to burst into flames presents some obvious problems like: is it even legal to mail this thing? Samsung is imploring Note 7 owners to return their potentially explosive phones by ground mail. (Explosions and airplanes don’t get … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech NewsSploidPeople Are Using Britain’s New Plastic Money to Play Vinyl Records
The new plastic polymer £5 notes are bonkers. They can’t be crumpled, are extremely hard (though not impossible) to burn, and some wonky stuff happens if you shine a laser through the queen’s face. By far the strangest revelation about this Money Of The Future? The £5 can be used as a rudimentary record player … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech NewsHere’s Footage of NYC’s First New Subway Line in Nearly 100 Years
The above gif just looks like a subway, doing exactly the thing subways do. But this is no ordinary train—it’s the first glimpse at an infrastructure project first proposed almost a century ago. First discussed in 1919 (and then promptly abandoned due to the Great Depression thing) the Second Avenue subway will run down Manhattan’s … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
Astronauts Traveling to Mars Will Have Their Brains Bombarded by Radiation
Elon Musk made it pretty clear than anyone hoping to colonize the Red Planet has made a tactic agreement to be a blood sacrifice to SpaceX. Fine, no one said space travel was safe. But the survivors have a new danger to consider: space brain. In a study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, scientists at … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech News
These Bigots Have No Idea They’re Arguing With a Bot
Floundering social network Twitter was recently described by a former employee as “a honeypot for assholes.” Arguetron is the honeypot within the honeypot. Inspired by the work of bot-maker Nora Reed, Arguetron is a simple bot created by Sarah Nyberg built with Cheap Bots Done Quick and JSON. It tweets progressive opinions every ten minutes … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech NewsSploid
What Pilots See When They Fly Into Hurricane Matthew
The Hurricane Hunters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are perhaps the ballsiest pilots on this terrifying and vengeful planet. For the last few days they’ve been flying recon missions into Matthew—the category 3 hurricane that’s going to kill all of our children—to collect data, and post some incredible videos to Twitter. Unsurprisingly, the … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech News
Fox News on Hurricane Matthew: ‘Your Kids Die Too’
Meet Shep Smith. He’s a Fox News anchor with absolutely no meteorological credentials that we could find. That didn’t stop him from filling his Floridian viewers with a message of hope about the impending Hurricane Matthew: “This [storm] moves 20 miles to the west and you and everyone you know are dead. All of you.” … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech NewsSploidWhy Does Sonic the Hedgehog Run Faster in America?
Sonic is supposed to be fast. In fact, as an otherwise nebulous, frequently-rebooted character, that’s really all that can be said about… unless you grew up in Europe, where that was never the case to begin with. In early games Sonic’s land speed was markedly slower abroad, and it’s all due to differences between PAL … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech News
Documents Reveal Stranger Things Really Freaked Out the Department of Energy
Netflix’s runaway hit Stranger Things did a lot of things right, and chief among them: antagonizing the US Department of Energy. Of course, the DoE wasn’t going to be reduced to a stale sci-fi trope laying down and penned a blog post refuting how it was depicted by a fictional internet TV show. The DoE … Continued
By Avery Ellis -
Tech News
Archaeologists Discover Skeleton of Ancient Stoner Wrapped in Weed
Some people choose to be buried with objects that are emblematic of what they cared for in life. In the case of a 2,400-year-old skeleton recently uncovered in northwest China, that guy was all about that good bud. A team of archaeologists from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences unearthed the tomb in China’s … Continued
By Avery Ellis
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