Last month, two artists grabbed headlines across the world by announcing that they had snuck a hacked Kinect Sensor into the Neues Museum in Berlin and done a guerrilla 3D scan of the bust of Queen Nefertiti, a precious artwork from ancient Egypt. Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles called their work The Other Nefertiti and released their data file to … Read More → "One of the greatest art heists of our time was actually a data hack"

You know your annoying friend who needs to take like a million photos of their waffles, spend another five minutes applying filters from three different apps, and then post the best of the batch on Instagram with hashtags like #omnomnom and #foodporn before they even take a bite?

They might be on to something.

Read More → "Instagramming your food could make it taste better: study"

Google stunned the world by defeating Go legend Lee Se-dol yesterday, and it wasn’t a fluke — AlphaGo, the AI program developed by Google’s DeepMind unit, has just won the second game of a five-game Go match being held in Seoul, South Korea. AlphaGo prevailed in a gripping battle … Read More → "Google’s DeepMind beats Lee Se-dol again to go 2-0 up in historic Go series"

Everyone reading this has stared at a targeted ad wondering why anyone thought it applied to them. A new study shows that making people guess why a targeted ad applies to them, and feel flattered by it, gets them to open their wallets—and just maybe become a better person.

Nobody is entirely immune to the power of suggestion, especially if that suggestion is flattering. … Read More → "Study shows that flattering targeted ads would be a great method of social control"

Technology is kind of like paper. You can only fold a piece of paper in half so many times; likewise, there’s a limit to how small technology can get—unless you combine the two ideas. Engineers at Brigham Young University have devised origami-inspired surgical tools that unfold and expand inside the body. The team described their methods this … Read More → "Engineers are using 3D printers to create origami-inspired surgical tools"

Stock photography is a big field, and with it comes some nice photos, but also some serious stinkers.

Case in point, especially for Makers: the photo below. In it, a woman is performing a delicate operation on a circuit board using a soldering iron. At first glance, cool, nice photo. But if you hone in, you realize there’s something downright frightening about her soldering technique. Rather than holding the iron& … Read More → "Everything about this “Beautiful Woman Soldering” stock photo Is wrong"

The researchers conducted a study that they will be presenting next week at an international conference on robot-human interaction, so the full paper hasn’t yet been published. However, an early press release and preliminary paper give some of the details of the study, which initially set out to find out whether high-rise occupants would be likely to trust a robot’s instructions in an … Read More → "Humans may put too much trust in robots"

Scientists compiled a list of 331 Australian land-based mammal species, which they categorized as the “good,” the “bad,” and the “ugly” based on their estimates of public and scientific perceptions. As you’d expect, the “good” ones were koalas, kangaroos, and their relatives. “Bad” animals were introduced and invasive species like rabbits and foxes, and “ugly” animals were native rodents and bats … Read More → "Researchers say ‘ugly’ animals get less scientific attention"

One tenth of all furniture in Britain is from Ikea. Together with the rest of the European, Asian and North American sales – that’s a hell of a lot of furniture. But along with all the misplaced screws and marital arguments that come with its flat-pack furniture, comes a fair amount of packaging too. While the bulk of its cardboard … Read More → "Ikea might use fungi to replace its polystyrene packaging"

Would you just look at him? Sprung to life out of a Pixar movie, the ghostly little fella pictured above was discovered last month by Deep Discoverer, the deep-diving robot that travels with NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer. Spotted 4,290 meters beneath the surface, it’s the deepest observation of a so-called < … Read More → "Deep-diving robot discovers mysterious and adorable octopus species"