Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Work ceased for several minutes at Gizmodo Media this afternoon as everyone stopped to listen to a four-second sound file of someone either saying “laurel” or “yanny.” No one could agree. I heard “laurel.” No joke, this question divided staff, with many insisting the other side couldn’t possibly be hearing what they claimed. It’s essentially an audio version of the god-forsaken dress.

It’s easy to look back on the original iPhone 2G with reverence. It revolutionized the mobile phone industry, and paved the way for our lives to be taken over by mobile apps. And for the three of you who yearn for a modern smartphone wrapped in 2007 design aesthetics, Spigen’s created an iPhone X case that will make your device look like Apple’s original game changer.

Four years after enduring an accident that nearly left him paralyzed, Australian mountaineer Steve Plain is now the fastest person to reach the top of the tallest mountain on each of the world’s seven continents, shattering the previous record by eight days. Earlier this morning, Plain, along with his guides Jon Gupta and Pemba Sherpa, reached the top of Mount Everest, completing the seven-summit tour in just 117 days, as AFP reports.

At 78 feet tall, and churned by a fierce storm, it’s the largest wave ever recorded in the southern hemisphere, New Zealand scientists report. “This is a very exciting event and to our knowledge it is largest wave ever recorded in the southern hemisphere,” said Tom Durrant, a senior oceanographer with MetOcean Solutions, in a statement.

Three people were reportedly injured in Texas when a family tried to feed two homeless “kittens” they had recently rescued. After doing further research online, the family determined the wayward felines were actually bobcats and turned them over to animal care services. It’s the kind of thing that could happen to anyone (who finds ferocious, vaguely pet-like animals and brings them indoors).

Build a better mousetrap, and they say the world will beat a path to your door. But the artists at Studio AATB probably shouldn’t expect much foot traffic after finding a way to use a wall-mounted robot arm to improve one of the oldest ways we have to tell time: the sun dial. Because our timekeeping is based on the movements of our solar system, it’s hard to find a more accurate way of telling time than the sun. It’s just unfortunately incredibly unreliable.

New York is big, bewildering, and complicated. When I first moved to this city, I didn’t quite grasp the subway despite my eagerness to learn. I took public transportation to the wrong boroughs, got lost each time I set foot in Brooklyn, and accidentally sent at least a handful of trusting tourists off in the wrong direction only to realize what I’d done minutes too late. I’ve lived here for seven years and only now do I truly understand the bus.

A Nebraska woman’s constantly runny nose turned out to be lot less innocuous than a typical case of the sniffles. In actuality, her skull had sprung a potentially fatal leak, one that took doctors years to finally spot and thankfully fix. In 2013, Kendra Jackson had gotten into a car accident, knocking her head hard against the dashboard. Years later, her nose—typically just one nostril at a time—started profusely running and she began regularly coughing and sneezing.

Made up of colorful scrolls cascading down a wall, artist Dima Yarovinsky’s installation “I Agree” is beautiful—at face value. If you read the fine print, however, you’ll learn that it’s a statement against our blind compliance with tech giants. Each scroll is a single tech company’s terms of service agreement, annotated at the bottom with a word count and the time it takes to read.

Emails take too long. Well, at least according to Google, which is why on Tuesday at Google I/O, the company announced a new Gmail feature called Smart Compose. The feature allows for artificial intelligence to auto-fill information in the emails you compose in an effort to cut down on the time spent typing up mindless messages. If typing emails is truly one of the bane’s of your day-to-day existence, this feature is here to alleviate that stress.