Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Twelve students at a Houston preschool were injured on Tuesday when a class science experiment didn’t go as planned. Most reportedly had minor burns but seven of the students had to be rushed to a local hospital. According to CNN, the incident occurred at the Yellow School which is run by Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church. The students were outdoors watching an unidentified teacher demonstrate how to make colored flames using boric acid and methanol.

Remember yesterday when First Lady Melania Trump swatted away Donald’s extended hand? Well, the President just landed in Rome, and it looks like things are still a bit shaky in the Trump household. Donald Trump is a tremendous asshole to his wife, Melania. And the internet has seen that play out in GIF form ever since the day he was inaugurated. We have a GIF that will surely be inducted into the GIF Hall of Fame, where her smile turns to a depressed look as soon as he turns his back.

Imagine this thing that has actually happened: Your infant has a strangely-shaped skin lesion. Seeing this disgusting skin lesion and thinking it might be anthrax, you take your child to the doctor. “Doc, I think I my kid has anthrax,” you might say. The doctor’s eyes roll. “It’s obviously a spider bite,” doc probably replies. Turns out your kid had anthrax all along.

It was a story that was too good to pass up. The Svalbard ‘doomsday’ seed vault had flooded because of global warming-induced high temperatures melting the surrounding permafrost. But according to one of the vault’s creators, the reports are pretty overblown and everything’s fine. Well, the vault’s fine. The apocalypse is still ticking along nicely.

It’s hot. It’s been hot. It’s going to be hot. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration just released its 2017 summer temperature outlook for the United States. And hopefully this won’t surprise you, but chances are that this summer will be hotter than average. The map might look confusing, at least it confused me at first, since red usually means “hotter” and blue usually means “colder.

When a celebrity dies unexpectedly, there’s a strange new ritual that fans partake in as we remember the person’s contributions to our lives. We scour the internet for the social media posts for a glimpse of their last moments. In the case of Chris Cornell, the lead singer for Soundgarden who died last night at the age of 52, we have his last tweet. The tweet was posted at 8:06pm Eastern time and showed the marquee in Detroit just before his last show.

This morning, Wired magazine published an early look into Apple’s brand new spaceship campus. The giant circle features the kinds of ridiculous details you might expect from Apple, like sliding glass doors that weigh 440,000 pounds each and 9,000 trees supposedly durable enough to survive the forthcoming climate crisis.

Have you ever dreamed about impressing the people around your neighborhood with preachy Banksy-inspired graffiti? SketchAR is an augmented reality drawing app that uses a smartphone and its camera to let you trace images. And when used with a device that supports Google’s Project Tango technology, suddenly anyone can become a tagger who doesn’t suck. The app, available for both iOS and Android, has been around for about a month.

Have you seen that 1977 Time magazine cover proclaiming that you need to prepare for the coming Ice Age? It’s popular on right wing sites that claim climate change is a hoax. But the magazine cover itself is 100 percent fake. Good thing nobody printed it off and showed it to the president though, right? Yes, according to Politico, Trump’s staff regularly prints articles from the internet and hands them to the president.

The US Air Force’s secretive X-37B spaceplane landed yesterday after 718 days in orbit—just twelve days shy of a full two years. What was it doing up there in the sky? The government won’t say. Even the spaceplane’s budget is a secret. But the X-37B’s landing wasn’t so stealth. The spaceplane caused a sonic boom that woke up people living near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.