At the Google I/O after-party the other night, there was one bartender in particular that stood out. It wasn't the drink he made, or the friendly chatter. It was more than he weighed several tons and could break you with the flick of the wrist. Meet the Makr Shakr. Read More >>

Look at the adorable GIF above. What you're seeing is nothing more than a blob of disconnected, alternating smaller blobs. So why do our brains tell us that we're looking at a trotting dalmation? It's all because of a little trick our brains are playing on us known as the Law of Closure. Read More >>

How does the Army train soldiers for guerrilla combat in cities and villages they've never visited? By building replicas of those villages, training a force of fake "insurgents," and hiring actors to populate the scenes. Welcome to Fort Irwin, a 1,000-square mile Army Base where many soldiers train before deploying overseas. Read More >>

It's Friday afternoon, and as our attentions turn to those more off-topic, we thought you might like our brand new weekly Chatroom+, where instead of us asking the questions, you ask the questions and help each other out with the answers. This week, Rik from Southampton emailed asking for our hay fever tips -- can anyone recommend anything that actually kills the sodding thing off? Read More >>

Although we do our best to write comprehensive guides to rooting various Android phones, there are more handsets out there than we ever thought humanly possible. So, to give you a good starting point, we've put together a more general guide and jargon-buster, so that when some dick insults you on a forum, at least you'll know what he's saying. Read More >>

Amongst the slurry of updates Google announced yesterday at I/O was a new feature set for Google+ designed to make your photos better, prettier, and more fun, without you really having to do anything. It's ambitious, and it sounds cool. Unfortunately, in its current implementation, it's hit and miss. Read More >>

Are we on the verge of a third industrial revolution? The editors at The Economist certainly think so. But while rapid prototyping and the open source movement have been around for decades now, we had yet to see anyone take a truly comprehensive look at the transformation in manufacturing. That is, until the New Museum's latest show, Adhocracy, came along. Read More >>

Google just dropped a metric ton of Google on us. Sorting through it all, it's clear that the company's not just trying to put new goodness into the world; it's trying to blow plenty of existing products and services out of the water. Here are all the things Google's looking to unseat and uppercut into the spike pit. Read More >>

Google might have just added a huge feature to Search. It's trying to make it conversational, like a Google Now for the desktop. Read More >>

Google has some new stuff coming up for Maps for Android. Details aren't super detailed right now, and of course we'll believe some of this when we see it, but the claims are pretty incredible. Read More >>

Wrapping presents for Christmas or for someone's birthday is a pleasure in most cases. Wrapping luxury cars and towering trees and Space Shuttles, though, takes it to a whole new level. Read More >>

'Completely flat', 'like Android', 'Microsoft-flat' etc., etc., etc. The talk about how Apple are going to 'flatten out' its UI style has set the rumour-mills ablaze with completely spurious conjecture. So I thought I'd add to it. However, let's approach this not from 'what one insider source told someone' but instead from evidence of progression within some of the top iOS apps. Read More >>

Google I/O is almost upon us, and that means, presumably, some updates to Android. We might not see a full-on update to a new version (5.0) announced at tonight's keynote, but we do expect some changes. And while the wishlist might not be as long as it has been in years past, there's still plenty left to do. Here's what we're hoping for. Read More >>

If you listen to the architect Kengo Kuma, the craze for kyosho jutaku, that distinctly Japanese variant of the micro home, started in the thirteenth century, when the poet Kamo no Chomei penned an essay about the joys of living in a shack called An Account of My Hut. Contemporaneously speaking, though, micro homes became a thing in the 1990s, when rising real estate prices and a nagging recession spurred many young Tokyo residents to reconsider suburbia. Read More >>

Today, at the BlackBerry Live Keynote, the company announced that it will be launching BBM on iOS and Android this Summer. This is a big move for the company that has found itself increasingly trapped in a prison of its own making. Read More >>