Written by Joseph Albahari In 1987, an urban legend was born. It was reported that 14 trucks of Atari products were taken from a factory in El Paso, Texas to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The legend revolved around the failure of one particular game: “ET: The Extraterrestrial.” Zak Penn, writer of “The Avengers,” was intrigued by this tale ...

Written by: Joseph Albahari Are your passwords safe? That depends on when you last changed them. On April 7, it was made public that the security of the Internet was compromised by the Heartbleed bug. Heartbleed, or CVE-2014-0160 as it is technically named, is an OpenSSL security bug that has affected about 17 percent of the internet’s websites. The bug ...

This diagram shows the position of Kepler-186f with its host star in relation to Earth. (Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech)   Not too big, not too small. Not too hot, not too cold, maybe just right. Since humans took their first peek into the vast universe that lies right outside our planet, we’ve asked the question, “is there anyone else out ...

(The Pillars of Creation, located in the eagle nebula.)   As the awesome Douglas Adams wrote, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how mind-bogglingly big it is.” Everyone knows that the unit to measure distance in space is the light year. Have you ever considered what that actually means though? Just one light year is a distance ...

  Written by: Ivey Ingalls-Rubin Have you ever been curious, or annoyed with your dog spinning in circles, walking over here and then over there just to find a spot to poo. Well according to a team of Czech and German researchers, they might not just be trying to bug you. Canines may have an inner compass that dictates how, ...

Written by: Joseph Albahari With the help of generous Kickstarter donations, tech company Oculus VR was set to revolutionize the world of gaming. But in March, much to the dismay of the Internet, Facebook decided to buy Oculus VR for $2 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, commented on the deal after it was made public. “After games, we’re ...

    (Photo Credit: researcher Andreas Keller (above) Rockefeller University)   The human nose might not seem so impressive when you’ve got lassie finding lost persons, bloodhounds hunting down criminals, and German Sheppard’s busting you for the coconuts you had to bring back from Costa Rica. With our few hundred scent receptors it’s hard to give our snouts any respect, ...

Written by: Joseph Albahari While most people are focusing on the Final Four of college basketball, there’s another kind of “March Madness” going on in the world of finance. Electronic Arts, the company behind the Battlefield games, the Madden games and The Sims, has been dethroned as The Consumerist’s “Worst Company in America.” The Consumerist, a consumer’s finance blog, holds ...

Written by: Ivey Ingalls-Rubin Hello? Is there anybody else out there? Our universe does not solely exist on its own, according to an extraordinary claim that has captivated cosmologists.  If you’ve become a fan of science fiction then most likely you’ve come across this theory before. The idea is that within this thing we’ve labeled time and space, there are ...

(Photo Cred: Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.) Written by: Ivey Ingalls-Rubin Consumers never seem to be satisfied with the current wave of technology. Always wanting more, wanting it better, faster and more convenient. The generation seems to want to be purely immersed in whatever it is their listening to, playing, or in this case watching. Japanese researchers from the ...