Aerospace engineers have come up with some revolutionary forward-thinking amazing straight-up insane designs. Sometimes these dreams never make it off the drawing board, but sometimes—some wonderful times—they become real. And when these alien bodies lift off into the firmament, it’s like watching a spaceship transporting the human race directly into the future. Check these amazing planes out: More »
While UAVs have joined spy satellites as an indispensable part of America’s military operations—especially in delivering timely, accurate intel to troops on the ground—they are not the end-all-be-all perfect solution, even in coordination. That’s why DARPA plans to supplement these unmanned intelligence gathering platforms with jet-deployed constellations of micro-satellites. Soon, every grunt will have access to a real-time battlefield mini-map just in like video games. More »
The FBI had to rewrite the book on its domestic surveillance activities in the wake of last January’s landmark Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones. In Jones, a unanimous court held that federal agents must get a warrant to attach a GPS device to a car to track a suspect for long periods of time. But if you want to see the two memos describing how the FBI has reacted to Jones – and the new surveillance techniques the FBI is using beyond GPS trackers – you’re out of luck. The FBI says that information is “private and confidential.” More »
Among the many material forms of Art Deco—from buildings to furniture to cars—clocks somehow seem to make the best use of the machine-age motifs that make the style so wonderful. Feverish geometric forms, mind-bending symmetry, high-contrast colors, modern and ancient materials combined with ticking mechanics and streamlined electricity in order to measure something more imaginary: time. Here are 18 clocks of that era that we just adore. More »
This video is so good, so incredibly brilliant, solid and simple, that you will want to paste it all over your Facebooks and Twitters just to piss off all the IMBECILES who still claim that the Moon landings were faked.* The reason is simple: the technology to fake it didn’t exist. More »
Kim Dotcom’s Mega officially launches tomorrow, but we’re already in. From the membership plans we showed you this morning, the service might look like it’s just another online storage locker like Dropbox or Google Drive. (Update: It’s live.) But it’s way more than that. Mega is a weapon aimed straight at copyright rights holders. It’s maybe the most private, invincible file-sharing service of all time. More »
As you probably know, Instagram’s new Terms of Use, which stirred up quite an Internet tizzy, kick in tomorrow. Terms of Use for websites, are for the most part, all full of the same impenetrable legalese. Instagram’s Terms are no exception. We asked our intrepid Associate Counsel, Jesse Ma, Esq., to translate it into English, so you can actually understand it. Here it is: More »
Planetary scientists at the European Space Agency have released 3D images of the “striking upper part of the Reull Vallis region of Mars,” which reveal a 932-mile-long (1500 kilometer) river running from the Promethei Terra Highlands to the vast Hellas basin. More »
Naval history is full of fatal accidents and wartime losses. Even knowing that, it’s astonishing to think that, according to a United Nations report, there are more than 3 million shipwrecks on the ocean floor. Of course, most of them will languish, unexplored and invisible forever, but, fortunately for us, many of them have been cataloged and photographed. These are some of our favorites. More »
A prospector made an extraordinary discovery yesterday, when he found an “incredibly rare” 12-pound (5.5-kilogram) gold nugget under only 23 inches of dirt. The total price for such a happy unearthing: a whopping $300,000. And he found it in a place where hundreds searched before, all thanks to state-of-the-art technology. More »
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