scary

At what point do you start worrying about the RFID tag in your passport?

<img src="http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/passport.jpg" />Does your passport look like this, with a strange-looking symbol on the bottom? Then you're in luck, for your passport co

The horrifying sounds of broken hard drives

What’s one of the scariest sounds you can hear come out of your computer? How about the telltale clicking of a broken hard drive? Once you hear that click-click-click you know it’s game ov

BigDog Robot: Imagine this thing coming at you through the woods

Good lord. If you want to see the future of warfare and fear, this is it. This is the BigDog quadraped robot designed by Boston Dynamics for DARPA and can climb over rubble, walk through snow, and eve

Lobster Eye X-Ray Inspection Device: real gadget, real name

You’ll be seeing this at the airport soon, I think. Everyone was concerned when they started saying they would install X-ray backscatter scanners at the security checkpoints, and those things co

Tech Horror Stories: Trouble in Paradise

The first of our Tech Horror Stories. If you have one you’d like to share send it to john at crunchgear.com ASAP. Spooky! So I was an IT contractor working in Honolulu. Except there’s a small

Mr. Clock Radio: Why not wake up next to an absolute creep?

Aside from looking creepy as all hell, this Mr. Clock Radio serves an important purpose: it’ll simultaneously wake you up and send you into cardiac arrest. It could be least friendly looking clo

Sky Spies: Advanced bugs invading politics?

We try really hard to stay away from discussing politics here on the Gear, mostly so as not to reveal our leftist pinko commie attitudes. This story, however, is neutral, and gadgety, and scary. Meet

iPods Can Kill

…provided you’re hiding under a tree in a thunderstorm and, freakishly, lightning hits you instead of the tree and runs down the length of the iPod earbuds and blows out your ear drums and

Legitimately Awesome Item of the Day: A Pop-Up Book of Phobias

This right here = awesome. It’s a pop-up book of phobias, including spiders, fear of death, snakes and clowns. (Hey, books were gadgets in the old days.) I have to say this book, even though I&#

Hot Fuzz: The Sleep Squad Alarm Clock

Nothing scares the living crap out of you more than the po’ kicking down your door and telling you to freeze. So if you woke up to the sound of a police officer screaming “This is the poli

Gotcha! Spider Torture

Alright, I’ll admit it. I’m arachnophobic. It’s like my only fear. Well that and germs. But that’s the only other thing. Aside from little people and gingers, though those aren

Emotion Learning Robots

They are being programmed to take sensory input and adapt responses accordingly. The researcher in charge of the operation says the behavior will be something akin to babies learning from external sti

TiFinity Titanium Toothbrush

Something about scrubbing my teeth with metal scares me. It probably has something to do with the fear that titanium would grind the enamel right off of my teeth, I think that’s it. Anyway, ther