No, I know it’s a panda falling out of a box. But what is the thing called that’s showing the panda falling out of a box? Right, right. It’s an animated GIF (Graphics Interchange Format).

Wait, did you say “GIF” as in “Good lord that’s a cute panda” or “GIF” as in “Gee whiz, that’s adorable?”

The topic of much debate since the proliferation of the animated GIF has been exactly how to say it. Hard “G” or soft “G?” According to the man who created the GIF – there’s really no debate.

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story,” Steve Wilhite told the New York Times.

There you have it. If you disagree with the creator, then you’re wrong. So, stop debating an get back to work making cat GIFs, with a soft “G” of course

The charts, which will update every Monday, feature both the top 50 most-streamed tracks of the week and the top 50 most-shared tracks of the week. They’re called the “Spotify 50″ and the “Social 50,” respectively.

“What’s so powerful about the streaming charts is they let you hear what people are really listening to, right now, and not just what they’re buying,” says content head Steve Savoca.

The widget, which is available here at charts.spotify.com, is customizable based on country and can be cycled back to reveal the top 50 tracks for the previous 4 weeks. Last month, Spotify expanded into Mexico and other parts of Asia and Europe, bringing the total countries under the umbrella to 28.

Here’s what the widget looks like. Notice the new global play counts, which will also appear on the desktop app.

Non-signed-in users will be able to browse the top tracks, but will have to log-in to their accounts in order to listen. It’s a great new way for Spotify to get more attention, and a cool way for music lovers to see what their country is currently obsessed with. This week in the U.S., it’s Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ “Can’t Hold Us,” Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” and Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive.”

In March, Spotify announced that they currently have 6 million piad subscribers out of a total 24 million users. Earlier this month, Spotify bought music discovery app Tunigo.

Quartz reports that NASA has awarded Systems & Materials Research Corporation a $125,000 grant to continue work on what company head, Anjan Contractor, calls a universal food synthesizer. As currently envisioned, the technology would use cartridges of powders and oils to create complex foods one layer at a time.

NASA is understandably interested in the technology as it would provide plenty of inexpensive food to space travelers. The current goal is to have the food cartridges last up to 30 years. It would ensure that any long distance space travel plans to Mars and beyond wouldn’t suffer from food spoilage.

Of course, space travel isn’t the only thing that this particular 3D printer would make easier. Feeding the world’s population would be a cinch if everybody owned a 3D printer and a number of inexpensive food cartridges that only doled out what a person needs so no food is wasted. It seems impossible with our current food production methods, but Contractor’s plans could very well end world hunger.

The first step in space travel and ending world hunger may just lie in the humble pizza. America’s favorite food seems to be perfectly suited to the 3D printing process as one layer of food is added at a time. In the case of pizza, the dough would be extruded onto a heated plate that bakes the dough as its being printed. Afterwards, a tomato powder would be added while being mixed with water and oil to create the sauce. Finally, a “protein layer” made up of plants or animals would be added to the top.

A 3D pizza printer may sound like some kind of revolutionary new concept, but NASA has been playing around with 3D printers for quite some time. The agency is even looking into whether or not it could deploy 3D printers to the surface of the moon to build 3D printed structures out of lunar soil.

As for 3D food printers, NASA may also want to look into Burritob0t or Google’s 3D pasta printer. There’s probably nothing quite like space travel accompanied by a steady diet of starches.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index has released its report for 2013. This year is particularly interesting as ISPs have been rated for the first time. How did they do?

The survey shows that Vierzon FiOS, the company’s fiber-based wired broadband service, has a satisfaction rating of 71. From there, the scores keep getting lower and lower until it bottoms out with Comcast at a 62.

What about the other major ISPs like Time Warner Cable and ATT? Time Warner came away with a 63 while ATT scored a bit higher with a 65. The average aggregated score among all ISPs was 65.

To put this all into perspective, ISPs were one of four industries to have an average score below 70. The others were the airline, subscription telephone and social media industries. It’s really kind of sad when ISPs are lumped in with an industry that has been the subject of bad standup comedy for decades.

So, why do consumers hate their ISPs so much? The ASCI lists the usual suspects – reliability, speed and highly monthly costs. It doesn’t help that many are also unsatisfied with the current monopolies or duopolies held by many ISPs preventing them from switching to somebody else.

There is hope, however, and that hope is Google Fiber. The ASCI says that services like Google Fiber may eventually shift ISPs to offering faster service for lower costs. It’s probably not going to happen anytime soon, but I can dream, right?

[h/t: BGR]

It’s called Pandora Premieres, and the company says it’s a new way to discover music on the site.

Pandora Premieres lets users stream entire albums from both established and emerging artists for free. You can stream any track at any time, as many times as you like until the album is officially released. Pandora says that they will offer a new selection of upcoming albums each week, and some will come with additional exclusive content such as video interviews.

“Pandora Premieres is also a new and unique vehicle for artists, both established and emerging, to reach and expand their audience. Seeing the impact of Pandora on the careers of working musicians continues to be one of the most gratifying parts of this experience,” says Pandora’s Tim Westergren.

The service is kicking off today with John Fogerty’s new album Wrote of Song for Everyone and Laura Marling’s Once I was an Eagle. You can stream these albums, on-demand, for a week.

It’s unclear at this point what kind of albums Pandora will offer with Premieres. If they end up offering pre-streams of high-profile artists, it could be a great addition to the Pandora service.

You can check it out here.

YouTube user taofledermaus has what he reckons is the first 3D printed bullet. There’s a small bit of metal in the front of the bullet to add weight, but it’s still mostly plastic.

Now, this is mostly just a hobbyist thing for now. You’re probably not going to see 3D printed bullets being loaded into guns anytime soon. Even then, 3D printed bullets, at least when fired from a shotgun, lack any kind of spin. Much like plastic riot bullets, these bullets aren’t lethal when handled correctly.

We may see more videos from taofledermaus in the future as he mentioned that he and his friends are attempting to make The Liberator. It will be interesting to see if the first fully 3D printed gun can fire what I assume to be the first 3D printed bullets.

[h/t: 3ders]

Fear not, Tumblr users. Your porn isn’t going anywhere.

For the first time since the acquisition announcement, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has made a clear decree on her company’s role in censoring content – mainly that they have none. During Yahoo’s new Flickr event Monday night in NYC, Mayer was asked directly whether she will restrict content on Tumblr.

“No, we won’t,” she said. “It’s the nature of user-generated content.”

She continued on to say that it’s important to have community tool like “NSFW” tags that Tumblr already has in place. There you go, folks, that’s about as definitive as you’re going to get.

Before those remarks, Mayer had been a little more vague about Tumblr’s porny bits.

“The width and breadth of content on Tumblr is what’s exciting and has allowed it to reach more users.” she said during a conference call Monday morning. She also said that Yahoo would have to make use of good ad targeting, to assuage any concerns from future advertisers. And there will be more ads inside Tumblr, that’s for sure.

“We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently,” said Mayer during her announcement.

At a press event in NYC, just hours after Mayer officially announced the company’s acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo unveiled a completely revamp Flickr – complete with a fresh UI redesign and a whole hell of a lot of storage.

The latter is probably the most significant news to come out of the announcement. Starting today, you now have a free terabyte of space. That’s huge. As Yahoo says, “you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.” That’s approximately 873,813 4.0 megapixel photos, 436,906 8mp photos, or 218,453 16mp photos. This upgraded storage also means that you can house longer videos on Flickr – 3 minutes at 1080p per video.

The interface has received a massive upgrade as well, as Flickr has done away with most of the white space on the site to give users a truly immersive photo experience.

“We want Flickr to be the most amazing community and place for you to share your photos. So, we’re also revealing a beautiful new design that puts photos at the heart of your Flickr experience, where they should always be. Whether it’s a sweeping landscape or a family portrait, we want every photo to be at its most spectacular,” says Flickr’s Markus Spiering. “Your homepage is now a gateway to everything you care about, and all the photos Flickr has to offer. Our new Activity Feed combines your friends’ recent uploads with activity on your own photos, and all in a beautiful design that lets you share and interact right on the page.”

The individual photo pages have been improved to highlight the image in high-res, pushing the photo information below the fold.

There are also some new paid options for the service – for $49.99 a year you can get rid of all the ads on the site, and for $499.99 you can snag 2TB of storage.

Flickr also unveiled a new Android app, which brings it up to speed with the iOS upgrade the service received a few months ago.

“The world is going mobile, and in December we took the first big step to send Flickr wherever you go with a new and beloved iPhone app. Our brand new Android app pushes the boundaries on beauty even further. We designed it with your needs in mind: how you interact, how you share, and how you view photos when you’re on the go.”

The new site is live, as is the new Android app. Check it out.

Forbes’ Andy Greenberg reports that a Wisconsin engineer going by the name of “Joe” has created his own 3D printed gun called the Lulz Liberator. The name comes from the 3D printer it was made with – the $1,725 Lulzbot. One plastic barrel survived eight shots, and they were able to fire off one more from a new barrel before nightfall.

Here’s a short video showing the test firing:

What makes this particular model more interesting is that it was printed on a hobbyist 3D printer. The original Liberator from Defense Distributed was printed on an $8,000 industrial 3D printer. The eventual goal of The Liberator project was to make it possible for hobbyists to print their own guns, but it seems that “Joe” was able to beat them to the punch.

Of course, there are some differences between the Lulz Liberator and The Liberator that must be taken into account. For starters, the Lulz Liberator uses metal screws to hold the gun together instead of the plastic pins found in the original Liberator. That could explain the stability, but Joe has another idea in mind – the plastic he used is just better. He claims that the generic ABS plastic used in hobbyist 3D printers is stronger than the official name brand ABS plastic used in industrial Stratasys printers.

Whatever the case may be, “Joe” is continuing work on something that makes a lot of people feel very uncomfortable. He’s not the only one either. Over 100,000 people downloaded the original Liberator CAD files and even more are accessing it on sites like The Pirate Bay. These people are already more than happy to share their handiwork with the world.

UK-based Charge Bikes recently shared via Vimeo that it’s now using 3D printers to make bikes. The company is printing bikes in titanium using an experimental process that’s currently being used by the aerospace industry. If widely deployed, it could help cut down on the time required to make bikes as it would allow manufacturers to create multiple parts at once.

Charge TV: Week 11: 3D Titanium Printing from Charge Bikes on Vimeo.

In the comments, Charge Bikes addressed the cost of the process as well as the weight of 3D printed bikes:

Yes, it is a more expensive process, as it is in its relative infancy, but it will become more commonplace, we believe.

How do you figure it will be heavier? Unlike a drawn tube, we haven’t had to weld the disc-brake mount on afterwards (saving weight there), nor have we had to cast a solid shape (the dropout is entirely hollow apart from the disc-brake mount itself). This process lends itself entirely to weight-saving as you precisely control the amount of material used.

SLM machines and the like are still incredibly expensive so don’t expect hobbyists to be creating metal objects in 3D printers just yet. For now, check out the progress being made in printing bikes in plastic:

[h/t: 3ders]