TechnologyDestinations

Only a narrow band of people are really that affected by daylight saving. But gosh darn it, we will complain about it loudly every year. The annual switch to daylight saving time (DST) is the hour that launched a thousand angry articles. And honestly, this is one of the few events that actually warrants them. DST, in addition to not actually being invented by America’s favorite founding father Benjamin Franklin, is mostly a terrible idea. It has several origins, two of which can be traced back to doddering old white dudes whose leisurely lives meant they were collecting bugs and golfing in the evening. They didn’t understand why more people weren’t appreciating the out-of-doors, and so introduced the idea of shifting the daylight hours, basically in order to fit their own daily routines. DST eventually gained widespread appeal (if you can really call it that) in 1916, when it was a useful way to conserve wartime coal—having more daylight hours in the evening meant people used less ...

The great thing about children is that they are all huge nerds. The toys on this list will help kids teach themselves about electronics, biology, engineering, geometry, and more. Need more ideas? Check out last year's geeky toy guide. BIGSHOT CAMERA KIT Remember constructing your own pinhole camera to learn how photography works? Now kids can build a hand-crank digital camera to learn about electronics, optics, mechanics, and more. There’s even a mode that takes 3-D photos (glasses included.) $50. SKYROCKET TOYS QUICK ATTACH MICROSCOPE This little microscope snaps over the camera of a smartphone or tablet (it claims to work with iOS and most Android devices), allowing kids to take their own photos and video of the microscopic world. When used with digital zoom, the microscope offers 30x magnification. $15, Skyrocket Toys LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 The newest generation of the classic robot-building toy is the first to include a Bluetooth radio that lets builders control th...

If you have passionate sex—or even, let’s be honest, mediocre sex—you are in the top 1 percent of all living beings. Sex is awful in the animal kingdom. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It is, after all, a means to an end for most creatures. Sexual pleasure and passion aren’t priorities when a hermaphroditic snail impales its mate with a love dart. Their goals are to make babies and die. The list of unappetizing mating rituals is extensive, but today we’re going to limit ourselves. Many of the customs are, after all, just not appealing to humans. Male camels inflate a large sac in their mouths so that it hangs out the side, cover themselves in stinky pheromones, and foam at the mouth in order to attract a mate. We’re not here to judge lady camels (or, for that matter, any male camels who find that sexy). We’re here to talk about sex that’s bad within a species. What if sex were so bad, you’d fake your own death to avoid it? One PhD student at the University of Zurich, Rassim Kh...

HOW TO BUILD A LIGHTSABER Step-by-step guide Herbert Pocket This infographic, created by Herbert Pocket, is a step-by-step guide for building a nerd's dream: grab some PVC, spray paint, LEDs, and a few other DIY trinkets, then make a lightsaber. There are a few tools in here not everyone is going to have access to (a soldering iron, for example), but if you've got them, it's a relatively simple 22 steps to your sword of the future. Make the handle out of PVC, put on some spray paint for flair, and add LEDs for the glow. If you're proficient with the tools, there's also enough wiggle room in the instructions to personalize, letting you toy with the handle width and, of course, the color. (If Samuel L. Jackson can get an exception made for a purple saber, so can you.) This would've been great for Halloween. But then again, maybe we want to wait until next year and plan a Darth Mickey costume around the Lucasfilm/Disney merge. Read More at: https://...

For the average beer drinker, the difference between an ale and a lager comes down to how the beer looks, smells, and tastes. Ales tend to be fruity-estery, while lagers are clean-tasting and frequently described as "crisp." But to a brewer, the difference is more fundamental than that. It's not color, or flavor, or aroma, or hop/grain/malt varietals or even water hardness that separates a lager from an ale. Simply put, lagers use an entirely different type of yeast during fermentation. All of the knock-on effects -- from different flavors and aromas to decreased fermentation temperatures -- arise from this difference. You'll hear some beer pedants describe the difference as "top-fermenting" (ale) vs. "bottom-fermenting" (lager) yeast, which is generally accurate, but useless to those who have no interest or experience with brewing. ALE VS. LAGER A quick graphical reference for the differences between ale and lager. The main difference for th...