It’s still weird, isn’t it? German Chancellor Angela Merkel is palling around with robots at every opportunity, with her most recent robo-encounter happening just yesterday on ‘Girl’s Day’ at the chancellery in Berlin.
In 1854, at the height of the California Gold Rush, the San Francisco Mint produced less than 300 special $5 coins. Only three were known to survive into modern times. Until today, that is. Now there are four.
Later this month, Van Eaton Galleries is holding an auction of art and memorabilia from designer Rolly Crump. The eccentric artist helped design some of Disney’s most iconic theme park rides, and some of the most fascinating items going up for sale come from Crump’s early days working on what would become the Haunted…
Have you ever seen the 1981 BBC miniseries version of The Day of the Triffids? My wife was recently rewatching the classic scifi tale and she saw something that she’d never noticed before: Someone eating Tide laundry detergent. Or at least trying to eat it.
Harvey Weinstein is a disgraced movie producer who will be remembered as one of the most vile sexual predators to ever emerge from Hollywood. But before the “open secret” of his crimes truly became open, Weinstein was hobnobbing with politicians nearly as often as he was making movies. One of those politicians was…
If you’ve seen any old gangster movies, you’re probably familiar with the phrase: “Calling all cars, calling all cars!” It became a cliche for when police headquarters sent out an alert via radio. But radio hasn’t been around forever. And at the dawn of radio technology, there were some pretty goofy-looking devices…
The Rajneesshee cult started building their utopian city of the future in rural Oregon during the early 1980s. And while it all began with peace and love, it ended with attempted murder, the exploitation of thousands of homeless people, and cult leaders who ordered the poisoning of an entire town by spraying salad…
As I vaguely recall, 2001: A Space Odyssey might have been trying to tell us something about the dangers of artificial intelligence. But I haven’t seen the movie in years, and instead of morals, all I can remember is how cool HAL9000 seemed, so I’m already fantasizing about making room on my wall for this replica of…
On June 12th, 1886, a German ship in the Indian Ocean tossed a bottle into the water to track the currents. Amazingly, that bottle was discovered earlier this year on a beach in Australia, making it the oldest message in a bottle ever found—a time capsule, 131 years in the making.
The hand-cranked radio allows people in remote communities to have access to modern broadcasting—all without needing an external power source, aside from your own hand. The technology’s British inventor, Trevor Baylis, died today at the age of 80. The death of Baylis was announced by David Bunting, the chief executive…
The 1985 Master Development Plan for the city of Las Vegas included a cover illustration straight out of Tron. It’s unclear who designed it, but if it wasn’t Syd Mead himself, it was someone who clearly took a lot of inspiration from the legendary artist.
There are lots of reasons the Back to the Future films are considered one of the best trilogies of all time, not the least of which being Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Emmett Brown. The character is what most people think of when they hear the term “mad scientist,” and Juliana LePine manages to perfectly capture his…
On Monday, video surfaced on Reddit showing a SkyRunner “flying car” crashing into a building. And while the video is certainly horrifying, there wasn’t any context for the accident—just the typical Reddit jokes. But we just learned more from SkyRunner. Thankfully, both the pilot and the passenger survived.
Gary Cooper was one of Hollywood’s most iconic leading men. He starred in classic movies like High Noon (1952), Sergeant York (1941) and For Whom The Bell Tolls (1943) just to name a few. But while Cooper was a conservative Republican, there was a brief moment when the FBI thought he might be a communist. Seriously.
Back when a brand-new company called Google was getting its first trickle of angel investment from the likes of Jeff Bezos and others, early netizens could already use a service called G-mail in 1998. Mainly, it was used by fans of a certain obese, lasagna-loving cartoon cat.
John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of the 1996 manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” has died. He was 70 years old.
For all of the Trump administration’s lies, the Trump era has introduced a strange new brand of truth-telling among White House officials. For example, Ben Carson recently described what an attack on the US electrical grid would look like, and it’s not pretty. In Carson’s opinion, America would look like the 2013…
Yusuke Murata, who illustrates One-Punch Man for Weekly Young Jump, is doing a manga version of Back to the Future.
If you had to guess the percentage of American households that had a fallout shelter in the 1960s, what would you say? Fifty percent? Twenty-five percent? As low as 10 percent? In reality, just 1.4 percent of Americans had a nuclear fallout shelter in 1962. And the study that gave us that figure provides a fascinating…
Winter weather gotcha down? How about some sweet vintage robot pics to cheer you up? Vintage robot pics on the beaches of Venice, California, no less.
