This week’s puzzle is an optimization problem: Can you determine the fastest way to toast and butter three slices of bread? (It’s harder than it sounds.) SUNDAY PUZZLE #35: Optimizing Toast This week’s puzzle was suggested by reader Caroline S. Upon further investigation, I found that it traces back, as many puzzles do, to puzzle … Continued
Take Flight, the debut album from The Write Brothers, equal parts rapper Devon Ewalt and producer Dante Davinci is a seamless blend of geeky wordplay and hip hop. It’s a fun, engaging record, one that’s catchy and intimate at the same time. Joined by guest vocals by the likes of Annie Costa, Caroline Rose, and … Continued
Welcome to Reading List, a weekly collection of great tech reads from around the web. This week we explore the future of organ banking, the role of art in humanizing data-driven cities, and more! Enjoy. Once an organ is removed from its donor, there’s a very short period of time in which it can be … Continued
Controlling your house’s thermostat with your phone may seem cutting edge, but in the 1980s, you could program a Commodore Amiga to do the exact same thing. Thirty years later, one such archaic system, at least, is still hard at work. In 1985, the Grand Rapids School Public School District purchased a Commodore Amiga to … Continued
Elon Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa, just as the Space Race was drawing to a close. It seems as though he had missed the best bits – so perhaps that is what inspired by the man who would later spend his billions on doing his damndest to kickstart humanity back into the … Continued
China’s gobbling Uber up. And it’s about to see a lot more of the black cab ride-hailing service, according to a letter leaked to The Financial Times last Thursday, in which Uber CEO Travis Kalanick revealed his intentions to raise over a billion dollars to expand UberChina. Uber is still dwarfed in China by competitor … Continued
This is it: the final consumer version of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. It’s coming Q1 2016, and it looks just like the version that leaked two days ago! We went to see Oculus’s announcement live in San Francisco. Here’s the scoop. We’re not getting raw specs or a price point today, but Oculus … Continued
Orphan Black sent a few of its characters abroad this week in search of answers — and boy, did they find a big, weird one. But the best storyline of the week happens at home, when one of our Leda clones makes a very deep — and violent — familial connection. From the moment that … Continued
Almost every time we have a look, Saturn seems to become even more incredible. Space rain falls from icy rings into the gas giant’s atmosphere. Two of its moons, Titan and Enceladus, are among the best candidates in our solar system for finding alien life. The latest revelation? Saturn’s faint, outermost ring is an absolute … Continued
Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World has pulled in an astonishing $204.6 million debut in North America, and $511.8 million worldwide. The film has overtaken Avengers: Age of Ultron’s record take in the United States (although it hasn’t quite overtaken the original Avengers film from 2012), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 for the … Continued
A student enrolled at Crafton Hills College has protested the inclusion of a number of graphic novels in the curriculum for her English 250 course. Tara Shultz, along with her parents and friends have called for the “eradic[ation] [of the books] from the system,” and have complained to the College’s administrators over their inclusion. The … Continued
One of the world’s largest academic publishing companies wants to scrub the internet of pirated science. That’d be Elsevier, which recently filed a complaint at a New York district court against Library Genesis and SciHub.org, two massive online hubs for scientific research articles. The sites, which are both popular in developing countries like India and … Continued
In March 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a pair of giant statues dating to the 6th century in the Bamyan valley in central Afghanistan. Now, the statues have been resurrected with 3D light projection technology. A Chinese couple, Janson Yu and Liyan Hu worked to develop a projector at the cost of … Continued
Think about how many keyboard shortcuts you’ve memorized. Now think about how much better your life would be if you knew a hundred, or a thousand, more. Why force ourselves to memorize shortcuts anyway, when we now have the technology to build infinitely customizable screens? Why, indeed? With its new keyboard concept, Sonder is offering … Continued
There’s destruction porn, and then there’s destroying the most absurd luxury item you can get your hands on, just because. Of course, I’m talking about Apple’s 18k, 10 thousand dollar gold timepiece. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of it. Most of us would never have the balls or spare chunk change to actually do … Continued
The image you’re looking at is a glimpse into our future. Welcome to July 2099, according to 21 different climate models. CO2 concentrations have topped 900 parts per million, comprising nearly 0.1 percent of our atmosphere. (In early 2015, we hit 400). The predictions shown in this daily max temperature map come from a new … Continued
This morning, the Philae Lander has re-awoken from its hibernation on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, according to a blog post from the European Space Agency. Rosetta’s lander Philae wakes up from hibernation The lander has been in hibernation mode since November, after coming to rest in a shady part of the comet’s surface. Now, with the comet … Continued
3D printing has become a cheap and versatile way of creating new solid objects — but some materials have so far refused to be shaped using the manufacturing technology. Now, researchers at MIT have finally developed a way to 3D print optically transparent glass. While it’s easy enough to 3D print using all kinds of … Continued
