Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Early today, NBC 4 in Washington published several dozen pages of White House work orders it had obtained. Within the long, mundane requests (“please turn temperature up 1.5 degrees higher”) and repairs one expects with a building over 200 years old were orders which suggest there are several types of infestations—mice, cockroaches, and ants—in one of our nation’s most iconic structures.

As a science reporter, I’m a supplement skeptic. I know most supplements don’t work and that lax regulations mean that supplement makers sometimes put out products that are poor quality or even unsafe. And yet, ever since my hair stylist mentioned to me a few years ago that she’s noticed clients who take biotin really do see their hair grow faster and stronger, I’ve religiously popped a biotin capsule every day.

The oceans’s deepest point is Challenger Deep, a chasm8,184 meters (26,850 feet) below the surface. Few fish species can stand this dark, hostile environment—but scientists have identified one that flourishes. Meet the Mariana snailfish or Pseudoliparis swirei, the deepest fish species collected from the ocean floor.

In software, there are bugs, and there are dangerous bugs. It looks like macOS High Sierra has one of those dangerous bugs; one that could give someone full access to virtually any user account. And holy buckets, it is scary. Turkish software developer Lemi Orhan Ergin pointed out an apparent macOS security vulnerability in a tweet on Tuesday afternoon.

A battered wooden fishing vessel containing eight partially skeletonized bodies washed ashore in northern Japan over the weekend. Disturbingly, it’s just the latest in a string of similar “ghost ships” that seem to be coming from North Korea. At the moment, it’s unclear how long the boat had been floating in the Sea of Japan before it was found, but it can take only a few weeks for bodies to fully turn into skeletons in warm, humid environments.

On Sunday, one man decided to take to the skies with a consumer drone to spread his manifesto over two NFL stadiums in California. He probably would’ve been better off just posting on Reddit. The San Francisco 49ers were entering the second quarter of their face-off against the Seattle Seahawks at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara when a suspect who has not been publicly identified flew a drone over the crowd.

After 11 years, Tumblr’s founder and public face David Karp announced his resignation from the company in a staff email this afternoon. The once booming platform which attracted artists, bloggers, and fandom communities in droves was purchased by in May of 2013 Yahoo for the obscene figure of $1 billion under Marissa Meyer’s leadership, but consistently struggled to find a road to profitability.

61-year-old stuntman and amateur Flat Earth theory researcher “Mad” Mike Hughes, who planned to launch himself some 1,800 feet up at 500 miles per hourin an untested homemade steam-powered rocket over the Mojave Desert ghost town of Amboy, California on Saturday in some sort of gambit to prove the Earth is flat (spoilers: it’s not), will not be doing any of that that this weekend.

61-year-old DIY enthusiast and stuntman “Mad” Mike Hughes is planning his first manned launch of a homemade, $20,000 steam-powered rocket with “RESEARCH FLAT EARTH” written on the side on Saturday, the Associated Press reported.

Federico Ciccarese and his company, Youbionic, imagine a not-too-distant future where everything we see is enhanced through augmented reality, and our body’s ability to interact with the world is upgraded through augmented physicality. What does that look like? For starters, a $2,000+ 3D-printed glove that puts two hands on the end of your arms, instead of just one. The potential benefits to an upgrade like this are immediately obvious.