Spend Your Weekend Breaking Down Identity And Bodies With Some Radical New Artworks

The annual Photoville festival, filling a bunch of Brooklyn shipping containers with artwork, is happening this weekend. And one of the containers is being curated by artist Claire Christerson, who created an exhibition about identity, the body, and prosthetics. Including some pretty fantastical artworks. Warning: One image might be slightly NSFW, maybe. “Its basically just…

The World’s First Rap-Battle Action Musical Is Here—And It’s Spectacular!

What you see here might not compute. It might not seem real. But let me tell you that not only is Tokyo Tribe real, it’s magnificent. An off-the-wall, insane film that’s simultaneously a rap musical and a kung-fu action gang film with science fiction and fantasy elements. Tokyo Tribe has been bumping around the festival…

Here’s What Happens When You Throw Water Into Hot Oil

It’s a bad idea to try to put out an oil fire with water, and this video will show you why. It will also show you a drop of water crazily growing and shrinking, over and over, inside some hot oil. Here we see water drops in hot oil. Starting at 1:58, the drops undergo…

Huge Communities of Crayfish Are Living Right Underneath The Prairies

If you ever spend a humid night walking around the American prairie, you might run into one of these. It’s a prairie crayfish, and it and all of its friends have been living under your feet. We see crayfish in rivers and streams. They need to keep their gills wet to survive. But they’ve become…

This Week’s io9 Newsstand Is Not Just About 9/11

This morning, The New Yorker heralded the arrival of Speculative 9/11 Fiction with trepidation, calling the trend “unsettling.” The article is partly a commentary on how fiction of any kind deals with traumatic, culture-shaping events, and partly a review of the new anthology In the Shadow of the Towers: Speculative Fiction in a Post-9/11 World…

This New Clip From The Martian Includes A Plan So Crazy, It Just Might Work

One of your astronauts is stranded on Mars. The rest of his crew is on their way back to Earth. How the heck do you turn the crew around fast enough to rescue the astronaut before he starves to death? Donald Glover has a plan in a new clip from The Martian—but it’s nuts. In…

This Artificially Intelligent Boss Means the Workplace Will Never Be the Same

Suddenly, your boss doesn’t seem so bad. Japanese firm Hitachi is now using artificially intelligent managers, in what may be a world’s first. These AI bosses can not only issue workflows and employee duties in real time, they can even find ways to improve employee efficiency. A week ago, Hitachi announced its new initiative via…

The Most Perfect Way That Star Wars Could Troll Everybody

Actually, there are a LOT of ways that Star Wars could troll its fans, and audiences in general. Almost a whole galaxy’s worth of ways, in fact. But commenter Sean Kelley hit on a great one. In response to the question about whether Star Wars: The Force Awakens should have a post-credits scene, Kelley imagined…

Should Star Wars: The Force Awakens Have a Post-Credits Sequence?

There’s a new rumor going around that The Force Awakens will have a post-credits sequence when it debuts in December. We don’t know what it would be—a promo for Rogue One, maybe a teaser for Episode VIII—or if it even exists. But some people are losing their minds at the idea. So what do you…

Which Horror Movie “Spooky Kid” Was the Absolute Spookiest of Them All?

It’s only 50 days until Halloween, so naturally we’ve got horror on the brain. Spooky kids have been a part of scary movies as long as the genre’s been around; it’s just so unnerving to see a pint-sized kid that’s possessed, a drippy-haired demon, precociously evil, a vampire, a cannibal … Anyway, there’s a huge…

Hold This Magnet In Your Hand and It Stops Being a Magnet

If you love a magnet, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s due to a temperature called Curie. Look, I’m not a poet. Just read this. Magnetism requires a degree of order. A magnet is a piece of metal in which the magnetic moment of its atoms are in line. We’ve talked…

Drool Over This Exclusive Look At The Official Game of Thrones Astrolabe

Game of Thrones has the coolest opening sequence on television, thanks to that insane orrery showing the relief map of Westeros along with the heavens. And io9 is proud to bring you an exclusive video showing the official Game of Thrones Astrolabe as it spins. Plus you can enter to win one for yourself, right…

Recognize Space Whisky for What It Is: A Long Con to Sell You Gross, Expensive Whisky

I love space. I love whisky. So how could the attempt to combine the two go so horribly wrong? Like this. Just like this. In case you haven’t heard, Scotch-purveyor Ardbeg retrieved their whisky experiment—which spent two years aging out in the microgravity of the International Space Station—and held a taste test recently. So just…

The World’s Coolest Poster Convention Gets a Goofy Warriors-Inspired One-Sheet

Anyone who collects posters has heard of Mondo. They’re the Austin, TX-based company making some of the best limited-edition, collectable posters in the world. Next month, they’re hosting their second convention: MondoCon. MondoCon takes place October 3-4 in Austin, and will feature two days of pure awesome for collectors. There will be panels on the…

California’s pistachio trees may look prolific this year but crack open many of those shells and you’ll find something surprising: nothing. NPR’sThe Salt has the story of what’s behind this year’s “ghost crop”—and when (and how) we can expect it back.

Forget Spider-Gwen, Gwenpool Is Gwen Stacy’s Latest Superhero Persona

The Gwenaissance continues! Following the debut of Spider-Gwen a year ago, Marvel has seemingly gone gaga for Gwen Stacy. First was Spider-Gwen’s appearance in Spider-Verse. Then she became every Marvel Superhero ever in a series of variant covers. And now, she’s getting another comic… as Gwenpool! Gwenpool first started out as a variant cover for…

8 Scientific Discoveries That Prove Evolution is Real

When explaining human origins, a staggering 42% of all Americans still ascribe to a creationist interpretation—despite the fact that there’s plenty of evidence to support the theory of natural selection. Here are some of the most potent scientific discoveries that prove Darwin was right. Discovering DNA One of the more remarkable things about On the…

Kimberly Peirce’s Remake of Carrie Struggled With Vagina-Phobic Execs Who Couldn’t Say “Vagina”

When Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce remade Carrie in 2013, everyone dismissed her version of the film as an unnecessary do-over. But Peirce had some ideas for how to make her version stand apart—including an awesomely weird ending, which freaked out studio executives who couldn’t even say the word “vagina.” By all accounts, the…

Behold the Bronzed Brilliance of Legends of Tomorrow‘s Hawkman and Hawkgirl

We’ve known for a while that Hawkgirl would be joining the cast of the CW’s superhero teamup series Legends of Tomorrow—and then we learned that Hawkman would be joining her. But aside from a minor tease in the trailer, we’ve not seen either hero in all their glory… until now, that is. The CW and…

The Best Ways To Celebrate Marty McFly’s Arrival in 2015

It’s a huge year in the history of Back to the Future. It’s the 30th anniversary of the film’s 1985 release, as well as the year Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to in Part II. That latter date, October 21, 2015, is fast approaching, and if you’re a fan of the franchise, there are…