After five years and $115 million of development, the Freightliner SuperTruck is Daimler's answer to a lofty challenge set by the Department Of Energy: "improve semi-truck fuel economy by at least 50 percent." This concept blows that benchmark out of the water.
Our favorite posts on Giz this week cover everything from the surprising history of brands to the human lab rats researching nootropics on Reddit. We fucked around with some gadgets, baked a laptop in the oven, and paid a drunk guy to evaluate our web design. Then we swung a hatchet around. Enjoy!
We don't usually think of talking to ghosts as a high-tech activity. But one guy is making a living off of ghost hunting apps, and his story from homelessness to app entrepreneur is actually pretty extraordinary.
Marijuana. Pot. Weed. Whatever you call it, it's the most popular illegal drug in the world, gaining support for legalization for both medicinal and recreational purposes. But what does marijuana actually do to us? Let's take a look at this fascinating drug, its health effects, and potential concerns about using it.
People have varying thresholds of tolerance for putting up with ignorance, dickishness, and other crap online. What does it take for you to head straight for the "Block" button on social media?
A San Francisco jury has ruled against all four claims of gender discrimination and retaliation by termination brought by Ellen Pao against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, in what many are calling a landmark case for Silicon Valley. Pao is currently the interim CEO of Reddit. [Valleywag]
Github is getting hammered by a huge distributed-denial-of-service attack. Looks like it pissed off the wrong pro-censorship group: The attack is aimed at two popular Github projects, Great Fire and CN-NY Times, that help Chinese citizens get around their government's restrictive online censors to access blocked…
I don't see anything excessive about this at all. Instead, I see a chocolate fountain I'd like to install at my house. I now crave a giant chocolate Easter egg I could spend 40 days and 40 nights eating. And I want every meal I eat to be put together by these joy givers who artfully assemble this humungous…
We asked for the worst stories you had about working in IT. You rose to the challenge and then some. We may need to wipe and reboot our brains to recover from these.
Even though the majority of your work day is probably spent staring at a computer screen, somehow your desk gets cluttered faster than you can clean it. So following up on its Spartan-themed knife block, the talented and fully-digited woodworkers at Missing Digit Woodshop have created a desktop version that can now…
The evolution of any smartphone is a long, drawn-out process. But when you cram it all down into a four-second GIF, the results are pretty mesmerizing.
The Royal Navy's successful invasion of Jamaica in 1655 had a lot of terribly negative outcomes. The commanders ended up in the Tower of London. Many of the English sailors fell sick or starved. A lot of Spanish settlers died. But there was one undeniably positive outcome: rum.
The butterfly is one of nature's most graceful creations, but with upgrades from Festo, this robotic doppleganger is better equipped to navigate large spaces. It might flap and flutter like the real thing, but this butterfly is 100 percent artificial—although the branding on the wings probably gave that away.
Here are some things that won't make water boil faster: watching the pot, adding salt. And here's something that does: nanostructures made from plant viruses, which subtly alter the physical properties of bubbling water.
Today at 12:42 p.m. PDT/3:42 p.m. EDT, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is scheduled to begin his year-long journey to the International Space Station — a voyage which, if successful, will surpass the U.S. record for longest-duration human spaceflight by more than 100 days.
A shotgun shell can achieve anything from lightly peppering a clay target at close range to taking down a deer at 35 yards. And that huge variance in capability can all come out the business end of a single gun. That's because you can precisely tailor what's inside a shell to your specific needs. Here's how.
Getting your first bike means two things: you're free to explore your neighborhood farther than you ever could, and you can finally prove which of your friends is indeed fastest—a coveted honor when you're six-years-old. So if it's speed on two wheels you're after, what could possibly be faster than a dragster bicycle?
We're still trying to understand the horrific Germanwings tragedy. But already, some people are suggesting it could have been prevented if a computer had been flying the plane. But that's not the solution. We spoke to an expert about why an A.I. pilot would open up an entirely new set of risks and complications.
You've done this. I've done this. We've all done this before. Daniel Koren completely nails the hilarious truth about using the microwave late at night and how our initial goodwill for silence is negated by our stupidity and desire for hot food. We all start out as a do good superhero and end up as his goofy klutz of…
