Strava is a fitness app that allows users to map their jogging routes, and recently it released a heatmap of where people are getting their fat-burn on around the world—secret military bases included. Oops. Strava released the heatmaps in November, and they showed off the fun side of generating data points while you sweat. But then someone came along and ruined all the fun. An Australian student tweeted that the route maps made United States military bases across the world easily iden ...read more

Sick of asking people for a light? Trying to put the spark back into your life? One solution: Buy yourself a flamethrower. If you're looking to burn a hole in your pocket, Elon Musk's Boring Company is selling the fiery devices for just $500 (plus taxes and shipping), and by all indications, they're going fast. Musk has been tweeting order counts by the thousand, and he most recently pegged the number at 7,000. The Tesla and SpaceX founder says he's planning to sell 20,000 total, in what ...read more

People think they want holograms, but they (usually) don’t. These are illusions, images trapped on two-dimensional surfaces that give the impression of a three-dimensional object. What people really want are “volumetric images” — a display of free-floating light that actually takes up 3-D space, visible from all angles. (Bonus points if you can interact with it.) Many of the coolest movies have them, from Tony Stark’s displays in Iron Man, to the projection table i ...read more

These goblins don't work in banks, nor do they lurk in basements. They do, however, creep through the underbrush and conceal themselves in forest canopies in the hopes of waylaying oblivious passers-by. Goblin spiders are tiny, usually on the order of just a few millimeters long, but they can be ferocious hunters. One paper describes them leaping onto the backs of springtails and biting them into submission, despite their unfortunate steed's attempts to throw them off. There are many spec ...read more

"Social priming" has recently been one of the most controversial topics in psychological science. With failures to replicate proliferating, the field has been called a train-wreck. But what exactly is it? Here's how I defined social priming in a 2016 post: “Social priming” has been the punching-bag of psychology for the past few years. The term “social priming” refers to the idea that subtle cues can exert large, unconscious influences on human behaviour. The classi ...read more

By January of 1986 America was already bored with spaceflight. It was, in part, NASA’s own fault. The government agency had debuted the space shuttle program five years earlier with an aggressive public-relations message that the reusable vehicles would make access to space both affordable and routine. Projected frequency: more than 50 flights a year. But had space flight become… too routine? Even as the shuttle undertook fewer than one-tenth that many flights, excitement quickly ...read more

"The Ring of Fire is really active!" Yup, that's what the headlines say. The supposed "Ring of Fire" -- the chain of volcanoes and earthquakes that sits at edge of the Pacific Ocean -- appears to be in the news a lot right now because of the eruptions in the Philippines and Indonesia and earthquakes in Alaska and California. However, this is all normal for these parts of the world, so let's not get all worked up about it. Let's start off with the basics: the "Ring of Fire" is not a thing, ...read more

Photo: flickr/phphoto2010 You’ve probably heard of “false confessions,” when pressure from the police and long interrogations can make someone confess to a crime they didn’t actually commit. According to this study, it’s actually not that difficult to give someone a false memory of a serious crime. Here, researchers tried to make undergraduate volunteers believe they had committed a crime when they were younger by conducting interviews in which the researchers use ...read more

For several months, my grandfather—Ralph Bianchi—has been battling stage four kidney cancer. On Monday, that battle ended when he passed peacefully in his sleep. While you can read his obituary in today's Boston Globe, a few hundred words cannot wholly capture his legacy. Ralph Bianchi was an engineer and pioneer who dedicated his career to cleaning up the messes of others.  I wrote the following post in June of 2010, when an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oi ...read more