The Week: Most Recent from Chris Gayomali

Sadly, you are uglier than you think

The Week — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:44:00 -0400

In Dove's "Real Beauty Sketches" ad, several women describe what they think they look like to an FBI-trained sketch artist, who can't see the women, and draws them only based on their descriptions. Then each woman chats with a benevolent stranger, who adoringly describes that same woman to the artist. The twist — okay, it's not really a twist — is that the second portrait, based on a stranger's description, is always more attractive than the one created from each woman describing herself.

Dramatic piano! Tears flow! You are your own worst enemy! #WeAreBeautiful!

It's a nice message...

GIF creator: It's pronounced JIF!

The Week — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:00:00 -0400

GIFs are the increasingly ubiquitous animated images that have become the "aesthetic calling card of modern internet culture," as Amy O'Leary at The New York Times puts it. You know, something like this:

But as prevalent as GIFs are, the acronym's pronunciation remains one of those ongoing internet debates that, for whatever reason, simply refuses to die. And the argument has returned to center stage once again, this time thanks to someone who should know a thing or two about how to pronounce it: GIF's father.

Steve Wilhite created the Graphics Interchange Format in 1987 while working at CompuServe...

Is the Xbox One the smart TV we've all been waiting for?

The Week — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:35:00 -0400

Microsoft unveiled a new entertainment center called the Xbox One yesterday. As expected, it's crammed with all sorts of Jetsons-age technology.

For example: It can run multiple apps at once on a split screen, allowing you to watch a movie while Skyping with friends. Voice sensors ostensibly allow you to bark commands like, "Xbox, go to ESPN!" Its unrivaled motion-sensing Kinect comes standard, allowing you to navigate through entertainment menus with a Jedi-like wave of your hand. The system is even said to play video games.

It's so amazing, in fact, that the Xbox One "effectively creates what...

Flickr's gorgeous redesign: Can 1 terabyte of free data win back users?

The Week — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:11:00 -0400

Flickr is back, y'all. The premier photo service of yore just received a very pretty, next-level redesign that aggressively touts high-definition photos front and center.

In addition to the aesthetic facelift — which eliminates a lot of the wasteful white space that used to drape the website — Flickr users now get an unprecedented 1 terabyte of photo space for the ultra-competitive price of absolutely free. (!!!) That works out to about 500,000 high-res selfies at 7MB each.

The fact that New Flickr was unveiled shortly after Yahoo announced a $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr is...

Why NASA is funding a 3D pizza printer

The Week — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:37:00 -0400

You could argue that the different eras of human history have been defined by a few key innovations. Advancements in agriculture some 10,000 years ago allowed our nomadic ancestors to finally stay put in one place. Alexander Graham Bell and his rivals changed telecommunications forever in the 19th century with the advent of the phone. The Internet's rise in the '90s sparked an era of boundless information, and the smartphone in 2007 put that information in the palm of our hands.

All of which is sure be to eclipsed by what could be mankind's greatest achievement to date. Behold: The 3D pizza printer...

7 purported health benefits of drinking coffee

The Week — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:15:00 -0400

"Often people think of coffee just as a vehicle for caffeine," writes Dr. Rob van Dam of the Harvard School of Public Health. "But it's actually a very complex beverage," containing hundreds of different chemical compounds. Grown in more than 70 countries around the world, coffee has something of a contentious history with health experts, who have long cautioned that over-consumption may be detrimental to our health. More recent studies, however, paint a rosier picture for the Coffea plant's roasted berries (they're not actually beans), suggesting that when consumed in moderate amounts —...

Croatia's land mine–detecting honey bees

The Week — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:32:00 -0400

Crazy ants may be causing headaches for homeowners in the southeastern United States. But over in Croatia, insects — honey bees, to be precise — are being tapped for more useful ends: Detecting dangerous and undetonated land mines.

Croatia is littered with what NatureWorldNews terms "the relics of war." An estimated 90,000 land mines were planted from 1991 to 1995 during the Balkan Wars that tore the former Yugoslavia apart. In the two decades since, undetonated mines have claimed 316 lives, including 66 de-miners, reports the Associated Press.

Enter Nikola Kezic, a professor and...

'Crazy ants' invade the U.S. Southeast: What you should know

The Week — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:41:00 -0400

Aside from their nasty sting, fire ants are a relatively docile bunch. They'll leave you alone as long as you keep an eye out for their mounds. But a new, and possibly more treacherous threat is mounting in the form of invasive "crazy ants," which are beginning to displace fire ant populations from Texas all the way east to Florida, notes Douglas Main at LiveScience. Here's what you should know about America's newest pest menace:

Where did these crazy ants come from?
Populations of the Rasberry crazy ant (Nylanderia fulva) originally started popping up in Houston back in 2002. Since then they've...

Why the Yahoo deal is great for Tumblr

The Week — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:23:00 -0400

It's a done deal: Yahoo has officially snatched up Tumblr, and its place at the Internet cool kids table, for $1.1 billion in cash.

Tumblr will continue to operate independently from Yahoo, David Karp will remain as Tumblr's CEO, and the social blogging platform's team and its product roadmap will stay the same. "We promise not to screw it up," wrote Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer at her (what else?) new Tumblr, complete with this custom, spaz-inducing GIF:

For Yahoo, the benefits are clear: 90 million Tumblr blogs, 89 million new posts a day, 900 posts every second, and, most critically, that coveted...

The week's best of the internet

The Week — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:14:00 -0400

1. The most beautiful man in the world
"Ahmed Angel must've been sent down from heaven to model for us, and he is 100 percent perfect," writes Buzzfeed. Hot fire.

2. Bandz-a-make Stephanie Tanner dance
If you knew an obscure Full House clip could sync up perfectly with one of last year's best rap tracks, shame on you. How rude, indeed. (Via Vine)

3. Recurring developments
This interactive single-serving site does a neat job of tallying all of Arrested Development's inside jokes and what episodes they appeared in. It's the perfect refresher course before the series comes back.

4. The best...

Why Google Glass' privacy concerns are grossly overstated

The Week — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:19:00 -0400

Google Glass, the not-really-made-of-glass monocle you have to yell at, already has more than a few problems on its plate. Fast Co. Design notes that Glass was suspiciously missing from every presenter's face during the I/O keynote, suggesting that it's still "a little weird" to don in public. And Wired's Marcus Wohlsen theorizes that the device is simply "too rational" to be a hit, and may be doomed to go the way of the Segway.

What shouldn't be a problem, argues Dan Nosowitz as Popular Science, is the headset's overstated surveillance concerns, which are exemplified in a "very serious" petition...

Can you buy cool? Yahoo reportedly looking to purchase Tumblr

The Week — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:57:00 -0400

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wants to have it all, including getting 18-to-24-year-olds to think her company is cool. And lo and behold: Peter Kafka and Kara Swisher at All Things D report that Yahoo is in "serious talks" to partner with or buy what many adults consider the swaggiest hangout on that Internet thingamajig: Tumblr.

It's not the first time that Mayer has reportedly shown interest in "the New York-based hipster blogging service," as All Things D puts it. Only now Tumblr has climbed to a somewhat puzzling $1 billion valuation, and has shown — sometimes to a fault — that it's...

Scientists: Climate change is real

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:04:00 -0400

As if the backing of NASA, 18 independent American scientific societies, and an intergovernmental panel established under the United Nations weren't enough to quell the protests popping up in comment sections across the Internet, a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters confirms — once again — that climatologists almost unanimously believe that climate change is directly related to human-made carbon emissions.

Researchers pored over nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers from 1991 to 2011. These papers, according to Michael Todd at Pacific Standard...

Why do we lie? A look at the evolution of mendacity

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:34:00 -0400

The answer to the question "Why do we lie?" seems fairly obvious: The truth is messy, inconvenient, and a time-consuming pain to untangle. Hence, the existence of little white lies: "I'm on my way!" when really you're still brushing your teeth.

It turns out that there's scientific evidence to back that theory. A new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B looks at the phenomenon of lying through an evolutionary lens, and the research suggests that lying has helped grease the wheels of human interactions for ages.

"Tactical deception," claim the study's authors, "[or] the misrepresentation...

Why tech critics are scoffing at Google's Larry Page

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:09:00 -0400

"Every story I read about Google is 'us versus some other company' or some stupid thing. We should be building great things that don't exist. Being negative isn't how we make progress."

That was Google CEO Larry Page at yesterday's Google I/O developer conference. The apparent call for unity was an odd punctuation mark at the end of a long day of announcing new products, considering Google's dogged reputation for copying and improving on the competition. After all, the company even unveiled a new music subscription service à la Spotify yesterday.

"Google is the company that built...

Google's big day of announcements: 3 new features you should know about

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:39:00 -0400

At Google I/O on Wednesday, a procession of executives took the stage to announce all sorts of sweet new products. The four-hour (!!!) presentation included a Samsung Galaxy S4 with stock Android and a new streaming music service to take on Spotify. There was an awful lot of other stuff announced, too. Here are the top three highlights:

1. Voice search goes casual
Typing words into a search bar may soon be passé. In a slide promising "the end of search as we know it," Google's Amit Singhal showcased a more deeply integrated — and much smarter — voice search for Google...