Glenn House and his colleagues spent more than four years making a new toilet for the B-1 Lancer. The challenge wasn’t fitting the john into the cockpit (it went behind the front left seat), but ensuring that every part could handle life aboard a plane that can pull 5 Gs, break the sound barrier, and…

Despite being the source of all life on Earth and the definitional center of the solar system, the sun is still something of an enigma. How fast does the solar wind blow? How do those particles streaming from the sun’s surface actually achieve liftoff? What’s going on in the corona, the sun’s atmosphere? Well, NASA’s…

If you call your hacking conglomerate Evil Corp and steal tens of millions of dollars from banks and individuals over the course of a decade, you can probably expect an indictment at some point. For alleged Evil Corp leader Maksim Yakubets, it came this week, as US and UK authorities charged him and an associate…

The Xbox has a storied place in videogame history. It helped usher in the modern era of gaming, with titles like Halo introducing mechanics that would define games for years to come. Now, Xbox players (Xboxers? Xboxeteers?) have more entertainment options than ever, which can make it hard to buy for them. But whether your…

Dads are notoriously hard to buy for. Usually you’re faced with a choice between getting them something practical they probably already have, or something crazy and interesting they’ll never use. It’s a nightmare.Luckily, we’ve put together this list of gifts for dads, father figures, or anyone who appreciates handy gadgets. You might still get nothing…

Never again let Gen Xers tell you they are underserved, culture-wise. Sunday night’s TV slate proves they ain’t. That evening features not just one hour of a series derived from a transformational superhero comic book of the 1980s—Watchmen, on HBO—but two. Because Sunday is also the beginning of the CW’s Crisis on Infinite Earths.On TV,…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Trekkies were the first fandom. But universal acknowledgment does not make a truth true. In fact, Adrianne Wadewitz, a feminist scholar of 18th-century literature, set Wikipedia straight on this point over a decade ago, when she identified the first fandom subculture as the Janeites, the network of Jane…

Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score.…

“The Crown” has returned to Netflix with a new cast — Olivia Colman as a middle-aged Queen Elizabeth, Tobias Menzies as her husband Prince Philip and Helena Bonham Carter as…

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. What are…