Miriam Nielsen | The Verge

Not even bats are ‘blind as a bat’

2025-01-29T11:04:08-05:00

You’ve probably come across the phrase “blind as a bat” at some point in your life. But, as it turns out, bats aren’t blind.

To figure out where this myth started and why it’s so popular, The Verge called up Winifred Frick, the senior director of conservation science at Bat Conservation International. Not only are bats not blind, most species aren’t the disease-carrying, bloodsuckers we often see on television. In fact, bats play vital roles in ecosystems around the world.

An infection called white-nose syndrome is wiping them out at alarming rates, however. It’s hard to tell how that might affect their ecosystems in the future. Check out the video above to learn more about bats, because someone definitely lied to you about these charismatic little mammals.

Your sense of smell is much stronger than you think

2025-01-29T11:04:10-05:00

My dog spends a lot of time sniffing the ground with her adorable little nose. She doesn’t care what she finds: grass, cement, flowers, fire hydrants, poop, trash cans, fences, buildings — it’s all an exciting adventure of scents to her.

And when you see that kind of behavior — not just from dogs, but plenty of other mammals — it’s easy to assume that those species must have a better sense of smell than people. After all, I don’t spend my mornings walking up to the mail person and sniffing them before accepting my mail.

If you also made the assumption that humans are subpar sniffers, you’re not alone. This myth is pretty widespread. To figure out where the idea came from, we spoke to Dr. John McGann who recently released a paper that examines how powerful the human olfactory system actually is.

Additionally, I also thought it was important to introduce my extremely cute and photogenic dog to everyone.

No, your sunscreen isn’t going to kill you

2025-01-29T11:04:14-05:00

Summer is fast approaching, and with it comes a wave of articles claiming sunscreen is toxic and bad for your health. But is it?

As anyone who has ever gotten a sunburn can attest — sun damage is real. But you can protect yourself! However, the intimidating ingredients list found on most sunscreens may leave you anxious about all those chemicals. The Verge spoke to David Leffell, a professor of dermatology and surgery at the Yale School of Medicine, to put our sunscreen fears to rest.

Hope and puppet shows: here’s what happened at the People’s Climate March

2017-04-30T09:00:03-04:00

As if to underscore the point of the Climate March, Washington, DC was muggy, sticky, and unseasonably hot. It was a perfect backdrop to the signs reading “Make the Earth cool again,” “It’s getting hot in here,” or “the Earth is melting.”

The People’s Climate March was rather cheery, as attempts to save the world go. When I arrived early, I was treated to a larger-than-life puppet show. Cardboard and papier-mâché pipelines — taller than the people holding them — spewed ominous gray clouds of CO2, methane, and “climate pollution.” Giant hands pushed them back — along with a massive, headless suit labeled “Big Oil.”

Climate change is a current problem

Though the march fell on the 100th day of Donald Trump’s presidency, it had been conceived long before the election. It was a successor of sorts to a 2014 march in New York City — where 400,000 people demanded action on climate change. Three years later, more than 200,000 people marched through the streets of DC, organizers said; an additional 370 satellite marches also happened worldwide.

The People’s Climate March was planned as a direct response to a distressing reality. There was 2016, the hottest year on record. It beat the previous record, set in 2015. The next hottest year after that was 2014. In fact, anyone who’s under the age of 31 has never experienced a colder-than-average month ever. Though climate change is often discussed as a future problem, it is, in fact, a current problem. High tides lap at Florida streets; Antarctica is splitting; allergies are getting worse; the Great Barrier Reef is hanging on by a thread.

The Trump administration has taken an aggressively denialist response. The Environmental Protection Agency is headed by Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier who has sued the EPA 14 times. There is the executive order allowing oil drilling in the Arctic; there is the executive order halting the Clean Power Plan, and undoing a temporary moratorium on new coal mine leasing on federal lands. There is, of course, the approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline’s last necessary permit. So despite the march’s original goals, many people view the climate march as a direct response to Trump’s policy. In fact, when Marine One flew over the rally gathered around the Washington Monument, hundreds of people flipped it off and yelled taunts.

Photo by Miriam Nielsen / The Verge" />

Focusing too hard on the Trump administration in some ways misses the point, since most of the signs at the protest were about the bigger picture: higher temperatures, melting ice, rising oceans and — crucially — climate justice. Two previous marches, the Women’s March and the March for Science, struggled with inclusiveness, and were widely criticized for a lack of diversity. In contrast, the front of the People’s March was led by youth representatives of some of the communities hardest hit by climate change and environmental racism: Uprose, a Brooklyn-based group that helps retrofit communities likely to be hard-hit by climate change-related flooding (among its myriad other efforts); delegates of Sunrise Ceremony Native / Indigenous Women; and several organizations local to DC. They carried signs, danced, and yelled chants into megaphones at the top of their lungs.

But behind the line of marshals in bright pink shirts blocking traffic, emergency medical technicians on bikes pedaled in circles, ready to jump in and help anyone who collapsed as the temperature crept up. And for good reason: the sultry DC afternoon peaked at 91 degrees, breaking or tying all previous heat records for the day, which had been set in 1974.

Early in the march, one of the adult guardians of the kids leading the march turned around, showing off a nearly empty bottle of orange Powerade. “I’m almost out of fuel,” he told me, shaking his bottle tiredly. But he turned back to his charges after a moment and began another round of chanting: “Can’t drink oil, keep it in the soil.”

“Can’t drink oil, keep it in the soil”

One thing seemed clear, as the march progressed. Despite the day’s high temperatures — an omen, perhaps, of the oncoming future — there was a hopefulness to the event: to the signs, the costumes, even the giant puppet show. This was, it seemed, a battle we could win. In fact, that hopefulness is probably what got the march organized in the first place. And what’s wrong with a little optimism, anyway? Even in the sweltering heat, people still showed up in their Arctic best.

Photo by Miriam Nielsen / The Verge" />

Microsoft’s E3 2016 press conference in 8 minutes

2016-06-13T17:25:00-04:00

Microsoft crammed a ton into its lengthy E3 press conference — New hardware! Specialty controllers! More Forza! More Dead Rising! More Gears of War!

Of course, many of you don’t have time to watch the entire press conference, which also contains its fair share of executive preening and corporate monologuing. We’ve condensed all the important bits into an 8-minute video.

Now you can sound like an expert, while still having time to do something else with your time, like take up carpentry or finally read that dusty copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

See all of the E3 news right here

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E3 2016: Halo 2 Wars Trailer

Watch us brutally destroy Titan’s ‘indestructible’ USB cable

2016-05-22T09:00:03-04:00

At The Verge, we take challenges seriously. When a colleague says we can’t drink a gallon of milk in an hour, we drink that milk till we faint. When our dentist says proper dental hygiene requires brushing twice a day, we brush five times a day. And when a company claims it’s made an indestructible charging cable, we destroy it — or at least we try to.

Fuse Chicken made such a statement. So we ordered a wire and put it to the test.

Granted, we immediately went from gently tying it in a knot to attacking the cable with a sword. It might be fair to say we went from 0–60 mph. And when we visited EXOvault in Brooklyn, we pushed it to a metaphorical 120 mph.

That being said, this is a damn charging cable — not a climbing cable meant to keep you from falling down a cliff. The packaging should probably say “indestructible within reasonable, everyday life events,” but that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as easily.

Your dog won’t eat through it, you won’t break it by tripping on it multiple times, and it’s pretty awesome if you want to set up your phone’s GPS and stand the device up using nothing but the cable. The cable is $35 on Fuse Chicken’s website. While we don’t suggest holding it up to a chainsaw, if you really want to use it for pull ups then go for it.

See the ridiculous way Star Wars: The Force Awakens almost opened

2016-05-06T09:26:44-04:00

On Star Wars Day, Mark Hamill confirmed that Star Wars: The Force Awakens nearly had a different — and arguably not so hot — opening sequence. The intro, detailed by Hamill in an interview with The Sun, would have featured Luke Skywalker’s severed hand floating through space, his lightsaber still clutched, just as it was at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. As the hand entered the atmosphere of Jakku, the planet where we first meet Rey, the flesh and bone would incinerate. On the planet’s surface, an alien hand would recover the lost lightsaber. Hamill speculates that hand may have belonged to Maz Kanata, the millennium-old smuggler and tavern owner who we meet midway through the film on the lush planet of Takodana.

Of course, this scene was cut. But we wanted to picture what the intro might have looked like had it been made, so our talented team of animators and editors assembled the footage, above. Give them a hand! And let’s give a hand to J.J. Abrams and the many, many other folks who made The Force Awakens. They could have done so much wrong, but instead they did so much right. The most recent episode of Movies with Mikey says it all:

Make Rey’s bread from The Force Awakens for your afternoon snack

2016-04-05T08:00:03-04:00

In under five minutes you too can make the weird, greenish, cupcake thing and feel like a starving scavenger on the desolate desert planet of Jakku —€” no begging or bartering required! The recipe comes from Jenn Fujikawa at StarWars.com.

Who doesn’t want to eat like their new favorite Jedi? Kirsten, The Verge‘s esteemed social video reporter, raves “it wasn’t awesome” and “it smelled really good, but it was not my favorite thing I ever put in my mouth.”

How to make Rey’s bread from Star Wars
Star Wars recipe: Learn to make Rey’s snack from Jakku.
Posted by The Verge on Sunday, 3 April 2016

The bread from the movie wasn’t CGI, it was a practical effect. The visual effects artists who worked on the film told MTV that it took three months to figure out the mechanics of the bread. The crew used vacuums to remove the water and puff up the bread simultaneously, but also spent countless hours designing its unique aesthetic. We, on the other hand, entertained ourselves by driving BB-8 off a table a couple of times while we cooked the bread in the microwave for 15 seconds.

If you’re chill with eating a sad cupcake, this might be the closest you’ll find yourself to Jakku, and you don’t even have to collect old empire space junk or master the art of special effects to get it.

Correction: This story originally did not properly credit StarWars.com’s writer Jenn Fujikawa. We apologize for the error, which has been corrected.

How we created our 360-degree video interview with Michelle Obama

2016-03-14T14:47:00-04:00

This morning we posted a 360-degree interview with Michelle Obama. It was an incredibly ambitious project, and we learned a lot. One of my favorite parts of shooting in 360 degrees is the ability to see the whole production (even me in the corner), including everything that went into filming the video in the White House with FLOTUS.

But what you can’t see is all the hard work and long hours that went into editing this piece. If you’re curious about what software we used, what our timeline looked like, the Jaunt and Total Cinema camera rigs we used, or how we even got started, check out this video of me, director Tom Connors, executive producer Tre Shallowhorn, sound engineer Andrew Marino and artistic director James Bareham. We’ll walk you through the whole postproduction process: from storyboarding, to animation, to finally hitting publish.

If you have any other questions, we’ll be around in the comments too!

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Michelle Obama 360° interview
Watch the first ever 360-degree video interview with Michelle Obama.
Posted by The Verge on Thursday, March 17, 2016

‘My Spock’ is the Star Trek / Hamilton mash-up the galaxy needs

2016-03-01T17:04:26-05:00

Jackson Lanzing has published a beat-for-beat parody of “My Shot,” the third song in, objectively speaking, the best musical ever, Hamilton. Paired with footage from the two recent Star Trek films, this song follows the story of everybody’s favorite nerd, Spock, from confused and angry baby vulcan to Romulan fist-fighting badass. The tale is weirdly parallel to real-life historical figure-turned musical star Alexander Hamilton.

Now I’m not going to say that this video was made for me, specifically, but as an individual raised almost exclusively on Star Trek, musicals, and family trips to Gettysburg the odds are 99 percent in favor of such a theory.

But don’t take my word for how excellent this video is. (If you haven’t already watched it, like, seriously: Why haven’t you watched it yet?) Both the creator of Hamilton, his excellency Lin Manuel Miranda and the current director of the Star Trek film franchise, J. J. Abrams are fans.