The Tesla electric car. Google's self-driving car. What if you could turn these two geek dreams into one? According to Bloomberg, the idea is not that far-fetched, since Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is already "discussing" it with Google

According to the report, Musk is "considering" using Google's self-driving technology, though he prefers to call it "autopilot."

“I like the word autopilot more than I like the word self- driving. Self-driving sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars,” Musk told Bloomberg. Read more...

More about Google, Elon Musk, Tesla, Self Driving Car, and Tech

Evernote hit 1.1 million users just two months after its Chinese launch in July 2012. CEO Phil Libin revealed this week that his company now has 4 million users in China one year after its debut

On Tuesday at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing, Evernote's team in China — which has grown to 17 people — flipped the switch on the Chinese version of its Evernote Business service

Libin also discussed China's integral role in Evernote’s strategy of becoming a long-term startup that can survive up against the world’s top web giants. Libin said, within the next decade, more Chinese tech companies will go global Read more...

More about China, Apps, Evernote, Tech, and Apps Software

A question posted in the r/AskReddit thread early Tuesday asked the following question: "What is/are your 'epic' instrumental songs?"

Within a few hours, more than 40 users commented with their favorite lyric-less songs. Artists ranged from Hans Zimmer to Explosions in the Sky to Metallica to John Williams

Take a listen to them all through the Spotify playlist below. With finals coming up soon, this could serve as one noble study soundtrack for students

What are your favorite instrumental pump-you-up songs? Share your favorites in the comments Read more...

More about Reddit, Music, Playlist, Spotify, and Entertainment

An ergonomic case for tablets and e-readers aims to help users avoid the perils of Carpal tunnel syndrome and other hand-related ailments

Called Wingo, the case has "wings" on either side, under which users place their hands to hold the deviceAccording to its Kickstarter page, it aims to address problems that revolve around reading for long periods of time by reducing grip tension, filling the contours of users' fingers with grooves and allowing users to place their hands, wrists and forearms in a more "natural" reading position.

Currently, Wingo is available only for the Kindle 4, but creator Ambulant plans to develop cases for other types of e-readers and tablets by getting feedback from its Kickstarter backers Read more...

More about Case, E Readers, Tablets, Ergonomics, and Dev Design

Owners of Google Glass are reporting that Google is rolling out the device's first software update, and changing the version name to XE5

According to Phandroid, the update's improvements include bug fixes, optimizations and improvements. What's more, data syncing in the background now requires power and Wi-Fi connection, transcription of queries and messages is faster, and the battery-charge estimation has been improved.

The new features include incoming Google+ and Hangout notifications, with the ability to comment and +1 posts directly through Glass

The update can be received over-the-air; to initiate it, the device must be plugged into a charger. Read more...

More about Google, Tech, Gadgets, Project Glass, and Google Glass

Foursquare released the latest version of its app for Windows Phone 8 on Tuesday, announcing that version 3.0 is optimized especially for Nokia's Lumia smartphones.

In a blog post, Foursquare said the new app's features are "each tailored for the Metro UI," with some Lumia models even integrating data from the location-based social network into Nokia City Lens, the phone's augmented-reality browser.

According to the Windows Phone blog, the update also brings new features, such as pinning people and venues to your Start Screen, getting notifications on your lock screen, and checking-in and sharing via near-field communication. What's more, you can also use voice to search, find and check-in, among other actions Read more...

More about Foursquare, Tech, Apps Software, Mobile, and Windows Phone 8

Google is set to debut a new interface for its Maps app, according to a report.

Google Operating System, a blog that provides unofficial news about the search giant, said the update will get rid of Maps' current sidebar, and will display location information in pop-ups that appear on top of a full-screen map. The new design places greater emphasis on the map itself, rather on navigational tools such as the direction arrows and zoom functions

Another new feature of the revamped app will reportedly let users filter local search results to venues that are recommended by top reviews or people in their Google+ circles. Read more...

More about Tech, Apps Software, and Dev Design

Many of us suffer from infographic fatigue, tired of seeing yet another piece of design content that could have just as easily been summarized in a simple list, hitting the web every hour

But, at least for sports, animation technology gives the infographic new life and a wealth of additional possibilities. For example, this GIF infographic from Lumen Interactive looks like it's straight out of the pages of Harry Potter's The Daily Prophet, and shows what goes into building the perfect golf swing

It's not the first GIF infographic ever, but does point to some interesting ways that the relationship between animation and editorial can expand beyond simple lists of reaction GIFs. Check it out for yourself, below, then let us know what you think in the comments. Read more...

More about Infographics, Entertainment, and Sports

We all know some version of this story: a friend from high school meets the love of her life through her cousin's friend's sister's neighbor's first-born-child's doctor's brother's son. And in this age of online social networking, it's no surprise when those connections happen through digital platforms like Facebook.

A new Facebook app hopes to make the matchmaking process easier among your friends, so you can play Cupid in a 2013-sort-of-way. The app, appropriately named "YouShouldTotallyMeet," uses the power of your friend network to help form introductions.

With this Facebook app, you first build an app profile for a single friend that you want to set up. Note that it's probably best to ask your friend first, since you're basically serving as their wingman/wingwoman and have to know what qualities they're looking for in a potential relationship. Through the app, you then write some reasons why someone should meet your friend. Mutual friends can even vouch for them with "agree" and "disagree" votes. Then, you go through your own friends list and find people they "should totally meet." It only takes a single click to make the introduction. Read more...

More about Dating, Facebook Application, Matchmaking, Facebook Apps, and Facebook App

MLB star Matt Kemp did a beautiful thing after a recent road game between his Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants. We don't know all the details, but the above video has gone viral on the sports web

According to the clip's uploader, the young man you see in the blue sweatshirt "is fighting a tough battle." Watch as Kemp jogs over after the game, and signs the kid's baseball. Cool. Then watch as he gives the kid his hat. Sweet. Then watch as he gives the kid the jersey off his back. Awesome. Then watch as he takes off his cleats and hands them over. Amazing Read more...

More about Mlb, Entertainment, Videos, Sports, and Watercooler

A study published in this month's Nature suggests that scientists have found a region of the brain that controls aging. Turn it off, they theorize, and you could add 20 years to your life — presuming it works in humans, that is.

The research, conducted by the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York, injected mice with a substance that inhibits a particular molecule in their brains. The hormone is related to inflammation and stress, and was found to increase in the hypothalamus as the mice got older

The fact that inflammation and stress makes us look and feel older — indeed, that it helps kill us — isn't news. What is disturbing to learn is that the brain is deliberately initiating this reaction. Now, at least, we may have found how to turn it off Read more...

More about Science, Human Brain, Lifestyle, and Health Fitness

Having a good idea isn't enough to make a difference in the world. You also have to be able to sell that idea to everyone else.

That was the task at New York University's yearly Entrepreneurs' Challenge last week, where students pitch ideas before a panel of judges from NYU's Stern School of Business.

On Friday, the four finalists for the Challenge's Technology Venture Competition presented their pitches: a bio-inspired catheter, a diabetes management app, a device that can diagnose head trauma by tracking users' eye movements and an app to help researchers organize their data. They had to prove that their projects were more than useful: They had to be profitable, too. Read more...

More about Lifestyle and Health Fitness

Whether it's writer's block or a roadblock, there are many "blocks" in life, and they aren't always easy to overcome.

In this comic, Grant Snider of Incidental Comics shows us what it would be like if these blocks were literal instead of metaphorical. We're all just trying to make it to that block party, right?

You can purchase Snider's comics as prints through his poster shop.

Comic illustration by Grant Snider, Incidental Comics. Published with permission; all rights reserved. Read more...

More about Comic, Comics, Humor, Watercooler, and Incidental Comics

Tebowing it ain't, but "Kaepernicking" became a legitimate Internet thing this past football season thanks to a breakout NFL star

49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick surged to household-name status in leading San Francisco to Super Bowl XLVII in February, scoring five rushing touchdowns during his late-season onslaught. His signature post-score celebration became a kiss planted on his right bicep

Fans soon dubbed the move "Kaepernicking," and posted photos of themselves imitating the star QB to social media sites. It only kind of caught on, but Kaepernick recently nabbed his highest-profile Kaepernicker yet Read more...

More about Nfl, Entertainment, and Sports

A handful of top progressive organizations are boycotting Facebook's advertising platform for at least two weeks over commercials funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's political group.

Progressives United, MoveOn.org, CREDO, Democracy for America, the Daily Kos and the Sierra Club are among the groups taking part in the boycott. Sarah Lane, a CREDO spokesperson, told Mashable it would be impossible to quantify the dollar amount of the ads it would have otherwise placed on Facebook "because the money we would have spent on [the ads] largely depends on the performance of the buy."

The groups' decision is a response to commercials which back two senators in part for their support of the Keystone XL pipeline and expanded oil drilling in Alaska. They were funded by subsidiaries of FWD.us, Zuckerberg's political group. FWD.us broadly supports "policy changes needed to build the knowledge economy," per a spokesperson, but is specifically pursuing immigration reform as its top goal. Read more...

More about Facebook, Us World, Politics, and Us

It's 2013Where's my flying car? Answer: about eight years away.

Terrafugia is a Massachusetts company previously best known for the Transition, which is best described as a plane you can drive. Its wings fold up, meaning pilots can drive it off the runway and straight home. Which is great for pilots, but what about the rest of us?

Now Terrafugia is working on a full-on futuristic flying car, the TF-X, which it expects to start selling in the early 2020s. Think of it as a cross between a Google self-driving car, a helicopter and a plane. The carbon-fiber vehicle takes off vertically, right from your driveway (presuming you have 100 ft of clearance), using electric-powered rotor blades mounted on each side Read more...

More about Startups, Tech, Gadgets, Terrafugia, and Flying Car

Have you heard the buzz flying around Swarmageddon 2013? Billions of cicadas will blanket the east coast of the United States this year, spurring an epidemic of the heebie-jeebies.

The large, humming insects emerge from the ground every 17 years (or 13, depending on the species) and, after nearly two decades in the dirt, these bugs are ready to party. And by party, we mean shed their exoskeletons and clumsily fly into your face.

This is your summer, east coast — start your preparations now.

"Need a new look for my big above ground debut." -This Cicada

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Read more...

Streeetttttccchhhh

More about Humor, Watercooler, Pics, and Cicadas

Want to make video games? Awesome! First, just learn to code and then get ready for a lot of hard work

Or maybe notPixel Press wants to let anyone of any age create their own video game levels with just a pencil, graph paper, and an iPad or iPhone

Players simply design their level by hand, creating any traps or obstacles they want the avatar to surmount while climbing five stories and reaching the goalPixel Press uses proprietary character recognition to allow the iPad's camera to pick up the sketches and convert them to graphic elements in the level. Then the creator has to test the level, refine it and add skins to make it look like a polished game. Read more...

More about Gaming, Video Games, Kickstarter, Entertainment, and Work Play

Seriously, J-Law, tone down the cool. You're starting to be so awesome that it's like the sun — we can't stare without burning our retinas

The queen of red carpet awkwardness/hilarity, Jennifer Lawrence, continued to dominate Monday evening at the 2013 Met Gala by photobombing the one and only Sarah Jessica Parker. (It helped that Parker was wearing a cockatoo-like headpiece, adding to the splendidness of the whole moment.)

Image courtesy of TwitPic, Stacy Lambe

Sure, Lawrence looked great too, but she keeps it real. Forget fashion and galas, this chick is all about the giggles Read more...

More about Film, Watercooler, Pics, Jennifer Lawrence, and Photobombs

Facebook has made its way to Google Glass. Sharing to Facebook, that is, in the form of a third-party app appropriately named “Glass to Facebook.”

Once connected to your Facebook account, the app lets you share pictures taken with Glass to your Facebook account. The process is exceptionally similar to the how the current third-party Twitter client works for Glass, in that it makes your Facebook account a contact with which you share photos.

We gave it a whirl, and it works as advertised. After connecting my Facebook account and adding the app as a contact I was able to share a photo I had taken outside of our office window onto Facebook. Read more...

More about Facebook, App, Tech, Apps Software, and Mobile

Throughout a 20-year career in music, Snoop Dogg has never strayed far from the spotlight. He's one of hip hop's most beloved artists, a prolific performer whose ability to cross over and work with a multitude of artists has made him a household name

But his most recent move is unlike anything he's done before. Earlier this year he released Reincarnated, his 13th studio album and the first under his new moniker: Snoop Lion

Reincarnated is his new, reggae-themed album, as well as a broader multimedia project for Snoop. There's also a documentary and a companion app [iTunes link] that brings fans behind the scenes of the making of the album Read more...

More about Snoop Dogg, Entertainment, Music, Twitter, and Snoop Lion

Syria has disappeared from the Internet once again. Servers in Syria have been inaccessible from outside the country since Tuesday at approximately 6:43 UTC/2.43 p.m. ET

"On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet," writes Dan Hubbard, Chief Technology Officer at OpenDNS, an online security company

Other companies, including Akamai, Renesys and Google, also provided data that confirmed Syria's Internet outage.

Traffic drop to Syria from the @akamai platform corroborates Internet outage observed by @renesys and @bgpmon: twitter.com/akamai_soti/st…

— StateOfTheInternet (@akamai_soti) May 7, 2013 Read more...

More about Syria, Us World, and World

When the world thinks Disney, they may just think fairytales and pixie dust, happily ever after and Prince Charming. It's a blissful world with talking animals and dancing flatware

But, there's a dark theme lurking through many popular Disney films: violence. From bops on the head to full out gun fights, Disney was no stranger to action plots and thriller elements that could be taken straight out of horror movies. Although, by masking them in catchy tunes and funny genies, we all seem to forget about how dangerous it was to be a Disney character

Read more...

More about Viral Videos, Disney, Film, Watercooler, and Videos

You'll find wonderful things surfing the pages of the Internet Archive, an online library of millions of books, films, audio recordings, web pages and more

You can watch what might be the oldest "cat video" of all time — an 1894 reel from Thomas Edison's movie studio. You can check out what TheAtlantic.com's homepage looked like in 1996, via the Wayback Machine, which has recorded more than 240 billion web pages since it launched that year. You can even listen to the crackling notes of 78 rpm recordings from the 1920s.

The Internet Archive is a massive, ambitious effort to digitize the full spectrum of human knowledge. Above, a documentary from Deepspeed Media goes inside the archive to reveal what that looks like in practice Read more...

More about Library, Vimeo, California, Internet Archive, and Tech

Profanity-laced hyperbolic Craigslist ads were once novel, but now they are a genre to themselves. To get people's attention on the site these days you have to do something really remarkable

That's why we salute this ad for a used bicycle from Ryan Kutscher, an advertising copywriter. Where to start? There's the opener: "Grab a paper bag, breathe into it and calm your ass down. You're hyperventilating because you ain't never seen a deal like this before..." This leads into some fantastic claims: "It looks like Iron Man if Iron Man were a bike." "Let's talk about that three speed in-the-hub, fixed-gear transmission for a second. It's as gnarly as it is exotic. Like the tropical, saw-toothed platypus. Which is a species that does't even exist. Fortunately this crazy ass hub does." Read more...

More about Craigslist, Humor, Funny, Business, and Advertising

What's more romantic than a game of Angry Birds with your sweetie?

An Australian named Ben apparently got in touch with Rovio recently, asking the company to help him create a level that he could use to propose to his girlfriend Melissa. A Rovio representative said that instead of making the level private, Rovio actually included it into the latest level pack of Angry Birds Friends on mobile.

If having your engagement broadcast to millions of Angry Birds players isn't true love, we aren't sure what is. The level can be found as the third stage of this week's Angry Birds Friends tournament. You can see a screenshot of it above. Read more...

More about Gaming, Weddings, Angry Birds, Rovio, and Entertainment

Charles Ramsey has earned plenty of attention in the past 24 hours for helping to rescue three women in Cleveland who had been reported missing for about a decade. Now, it looks like he may be getting a perk or job opportunity from McDonald's in the not too distant future

The fast food chain took to Twitter on Tuesday to praise Ramsey for his good deed and noted, "we'll be in touch."

We salute the courage of Ohio kidnap victims & respect their privacy. Way to go Charles Ramsey- we'll be in touch.

— McDonald's Corp. (@McDonaldsCorp) May 7, 2013

As Ramsey explained in an interview Monday night, he just happened to hear a girl trying to escape from the home of one of his neighbor's while he was eating a meal from McDonald's: "I went to McDonald's. I came home. I’m eating my McDonald's. I got the day off from work, so naturally you’re doing nothing. And I hear this girl screaming and she’s going nuts." Read more...

More about Mcdonalds, Business, Marketing, Twitter, and Us

Now You See Me, the upcoming thriller about a quartet of illusionists who steal money and give the stolen cash to their magic show audiences, launched an online scavenger hunt experience to hold over fans until the movie's May 31 release

The Diamond Heist Challenge tasks participants with finding 13 diamond playing cards across the web, social networks and a recent New York Times crossword puzzle

Each uncovered card unlocks video content featuring the film's stars, who include Morgan Freeman, Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Mark Ruffalo, Dave Franco, Melanie Laurent and Michael Caine Read more...

More about Films, Entertainment, Film, and Now You See Me

Few people know how to get down better than the stars of comedies and musicals. So why take your time trying to learn those wacky, complicated, quickly-out-of-style dance moves like the Dougie and the Macarena, when you can learn the classics straight from the stars themselves?

Brazilian artist Niege Borges has improved our coolness factor ten-fold by mapping out the dance sequences from popular TV shows and movies. His artwork ranges from Tom Cruise's socks and boxers dance in Risky Business to Family Guy's "Surfin Bird" routine

Read more...

More about Art, Dancing, Watercooler, and Pics

Ever get the craving for a slice, like, right now? If you can stomach the 99-cent charge, you might want to employ Pizza Compass in the future to quell your pizza jones.

The app, which hit the App Store earlier this month, points you in the direction of the nearest pizza joint. In a limited trial, I found the app to be pretty accurate. The interface, which overlays Google Maps with slice icons representing pizzarias, is also cute

The app's creator, Dan Blackman, created it using Foursquare's API, which had ample data about pizzeria locations across the world. (He reports it works well in Amsterdam.) "This was kind of an experiment for me," says Blackman. "The idea came to me randomly and I just woke up the next day and designed it." Blackman worked with Brooklyn-based Oak Studios to distribute the app. And fandroids, don't despair. Blackman says an Android version is on the way. Read more...

More about Apps, Startups, Pizza, and Business