"Mind-Controlled" Airplanes Might Just Become a Thing
Mind-controlled airplane powered by the pilot's brainwaves? Hold on for a moment while we look for the nearest emergency exit.
While the bread and butter of Gizmodo UK is in the bits and bytes of technology, we have a lot of fun in the off-topic areas, with many of the stories being filed in the WTF category. Bookmark this page for the sillier stories, from ridiculous examples of body-art, to... sausages made of skittles?
Mind-controlled airplane powered by the pilot's brainwaves? Hold on for a moment while we look for the nearest emergency exit.
We all know that bacon smells so heavenly, it can tempt vegetarians. But why does it smell so good? Now we know why.
One freak blizzard doesn't prove or deny the existence of climate change. That's because weather and climate are two different things. For those who don't quite understand that, Neil deGrasse Tyson has you covered.
Without synapses, your neurons wouldn't be able to communicate and your brain would be little more than a ball of meat. Exactly what synapses look like has been a mystery until now, and it turns out that even though their job is simple, they're complicated as hell.
Yeast is integral to a lot of things, booze in particular. When a brewery in Cockermouth flooded, killing their yeast supply, all seemed lost. Fortunately there are those who keep yeast samples as a back-up in case such a disaster occurs. Read on to find out more.
In many respects, YouTube is still about watching people fail in spectacular ways and injure themselves. But it turns out there's serious scientific research into the faceplant video.
Bzzz. Bzzzzzzz. Bzzzz. That's the sound of a house fly slowly driving you insane, but it's music to the ears of a team of computer scientists and entomologists at UC Riverside. These meticulous folks came up with a way to collect data on insects by tracking the distinct melodies of their wings in flight.
We've all been left scratching our heads wondering how our brains could have been tricked by an optical illusion we looked at. But it turns out your sense of hearing is just as susceptible to being fooled.
Human teleportation may still be some way off, but this sounds like it could herald really fast broadband so... come on you brave scientists.
The new SpaceX Dragon V2 seems to be an amazing machine.
Turns out that consuming cannabis before going to town on some meth could keep your brains from scrambling themselves. Newly published research out of the University of Cagliari suggests that THC, the active cannabinoid compound that gets you stoned, could protect your brain from the inflammatory effects of methamphetamine use.
Milk is full of a sugar called lactose, which needs a special enzyme called lactase to break it down. But children used to stop producing the enzyme around the age of 4 or 5—and those of us who still make it are, in fact, mutants.
The average adult contains about 5 litres of blood. The average drunk contains lots of alcohol. So could you, in theory, have a cheap—if messy—night out by turning vampiric for the evening?
Phosphorus is an essential element for life. Forms of it are found in DNA, RNA, and all living cell membranes. It is the sixth most abundant element in any living organism. Phosphorus can also be highly poisonous and combustible (white phosphorus is used in many destructive weapons, such as napalm). It was also the first element discovered since ancient times. The person who made this discovery was Hennig Brand in 1669, who did so while he was playing around with large amounts of human urine.
It's been 48 years since England lifted the World Cup and, despite producing some of football's brightest stars, our national players always seem to crack under the pressure of the occasion. So what are they getting wrong? Acclaimed physicist Professor Stephen Hawking thinks he's figured out what a procession of England managers have failed to -- and he's got a formula to prove it.
31 years is a long time for a hotel to keep the décor the same. But things are a little different aboard the ISS, where lab rats have been shuttled back and forth from Earth in the same modular boxes since 1983. Now, NASA has unveiled a new rat pod—and it could help us learn how to keep human passengers healthy as we travel further and further into space.
