Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

It’s painfully obvious that Instagram wants to watch Snapchat flame out into a pillar of dust. It has copied a number of its features, fine-tuning them and deploying them even better than Snapchat. And it looks like Instagram is back on its bullshit with a new standalone messaging app. The app, Direct, is available now for both Android and iOS in six countries—Chile, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and Uruguay, the Verge reported.

If you live in China and own an Nvidia Shield, you can now play great Wii games like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess—no need to own a Switch, a 3DS, or even the console that Twilight Princess originally appeared on. All you need to enjoy one of the best games Nintendo has ever made is a game console not actually built by Nintendo. Nintendo, I hate you for this. The company is slowly releasing its firm grip on its first-party properties, starting with smartphone games.

It’s a little more high-tech than the tattoos you might remember fishing out of the bottom of a Cracker Jack box as a kid. Engineers at MIT have developed a temporary tattoo that’s 3-D printed with living ink. The tattoo is made up of bacterial cells that are genetically programmed to light up when exposed to different types of stimuli.

Hey, here’s a question for you. If a random stranger came up to you on the street and started asking you to tell them about who you’d like to be stuck in an elevator with or what your guilty pleasures are, do you think you would: A) Tell them. B) Run for safety.

If you’ve taken a science class, you’re likely aware that DNA is the body’s instruction manual. But its language is only written in four letters: A, T, C, and G. Those who paid extra close attention will remember that RNA, the photocopy of the instructions that the cell actually uses, replaces the Ts with the letter U.

Cold season has descended upon us. You’ve got to shake these chills. You’ll do anything if there’s hope of some release from the discomfort of your booger-filled face. Two cold “remedies” might come to mind (aside from grandma’s chicken soup), namely zinc and vitamin C. But here’s something you probably don’t want to hear: Science doesn’t support these remedies’ effectiveness the same way your parents might.

Senator John McCain is learning the hard way that follows do not equal endorsements. Around noon on Monday, McCain tweeted a call to action requesting help from his audience. “We’re only 74 Twitter followers away from 3M - spread the word & help us reach this big milestone,” he tweeted. Doing the math, that means he was sitting pretty with 2,999,926 followers at the time.

Just look at this incredibly detailed photo of Jupiter’s clouds as captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. It’s an otherworldly distraction to keep our minds off all the crap that’s happening here on Earth, at least for a little while. Juno snapped this photo on October 27th when it was just 11,747 miles (18,906 km) from the tops of Jupiter’s clouds. The scale of this image is 7.75 miles for each pixel, or about 12 km/pixel.

So far, the FCC has refused to cooperate with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s investigation into identity theft during the commenting period on net neutrality repeal. So Schneiderman is using the internet to find the evidence and he needs help.

At a time when regulations, glitches, price swings, forks, hacks, and fraud can’t seem to keep the cryptocurrency-mania down, there’s a new hurdle for it to overcome: the taxman. Coinbase is one the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world and its backing by high profile investors like Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz has given it a certain amount of respectability. But it’s also a prime target for the Internal Revenue Service.