Hasta La Gadget!

When you listen to music, when its waves of sound collide with your ear, you don’t hear a wall of sound. A great deal of information might travel in a sound wave and, if that sound wave were actually a giant wave of water rushing onto a beach, you might expect to feel it as a big shove like any other big wave of water coming in from the ocean. Except that’s not what happens when this particular wave hits you. Standing there ankle deep in the surf, you brace for it to crash against your body, but when it does arrive, it’s not a “hit” at all. Instead, you feel a hundred different things at once, all on different parts of your body. Some places it’s a cool brushing, others it soft slap or the feeling of a light sunburn. And then the wave is passed. More »

The 21st century has been a real disappointment so far. Our robot servants top out at mediocre vaccums, self-driving cars are years away (and won’t be able to fly even when they do arrive), and we’re closer to inventing tricorders than phasers. A tricorder. Who wants a goddamn medical scanner when you could be blasting baddies with awesome handheld lasers? More »

Facebook’s big announcement today was Graph Search. It’s a deeply important step for Facebook. But it’s also kind of unlike other search systems out there, and adds a bunch of new ways to use Facebook. Here’s how it works. More »

Getting foreign gadgets to play nice with the local power grid is a nightmare any time you travel internationally. Here’s why every country on the planet (except yours) totally screwed up indoor wiring. More »

We learned a lot this year—and we shared a lot of it with you. Here’s the complete collection of everything we explained, defined, spelled out and broke down in 2012. More »