Concept Art for Robert Rodriguez’s Scrapped Red Sonja Movie

Five years ago, Robert Rodriguez was determined to make a movie about Red Sonja, the She-Devil With a Sword, starring his then-fiancee Rose McGowan. The film never happened, but you can see some fairly epic concept art. Update: We removed the art at the request of the artists. The only official images we ever saw…

Toilet seats are actually quite clean, and those bacteria they do harbor are mostly harmless. Over at Slate, microbiologist David Coil explains why he’d sooner lick a porcelain throne than a cell phone – and why neither is likely to do him any harm.(Now let’s see him put his money mouth where his mouth is.)

On Helix, scientists go completely nuts in zombietown

We’re on episode three of Helix, which means it’s day three of the black goo zombie outbreak in a remote arctic research station run by a mysterious scientist and his hunky Canadian sidekick. And the hunky CDC people who’ve come to rescue them can’t do their jobs because scientists are crazy! Spoilers ahead. Helix is…

This has got to be the most depressed Ewok in the galaxy

And yes, that includes the poor little Ewok who tried to shake his deceased friend back awake in Return of the Jedi. I can tell you that this is the new music video from a band called the Marijuana Deathsquads, appropriately titled “Ewok Sadness”, but that’s not really going to explain anything to you. In…

Report: Paramount Pictures Cuts Film, Goes All-Digital in U.S.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Paramount Pictures is the first major Hollywood studio to ditch 35mm film and go all-digital for United States theater releases, with The Wolf of Wall Street being shipped to theaters in digital format only. Sorry film fans, it sounds like that’s a wrap. https://gizmodo.com/its-crazy-how-much-of-the-wolf-of-wall-street-is-actua-1501402962 The L.A. Times’ report credits…

This meticulously crafted 777-replica is made of manila folders

This is genuinely incredible. Luca Iaconi-Stewart may just be the world’s greatest paper-airplane-maker. Seriously – this guy’s work makes your crease-and-fold creations look like utter child’s play. Top photo by Luca Iaconi-Stewart via his extensive flickr album According to a mini-profile published yesterday at Wired Design, Iaconi-Stewart has been working on this 1:60-scale jetliner for…

​Dracula opens up an all-you-can-drink buffet

Things fall apart. Things fall apart even faster if you’re a hot-headed scientist bent on vengeance, a leader of an evil cult whose children have been kidnapped, a man who’s fiancé is in love with your boss, a lesbian in the 19th century, or even just a centuries-old vampire with dreams of revenge and/or free…

Johnson & Johnson Removes Formaldehyde From “No Tears” Baby Shampoo

The company claims your exposure to formaldehyde (an organic compound, and known carcinogen, widely used in medicine, industry, and research) in an apple is 15-times greater than it is in a bottle of their shampoo. And yet, the company is making moves to remove it from its iconic product. https://gizmodo.com/what-if-natural-products-came-with-a-list-of-ingredient-1503320184 Via The NYT: The shampoo…

​Grimm does another Wesen o’ the Week episode, but it does it well

Grimm backtracked a bit after its last two excellent episodes, reverting to the Wesen-o’the-Week formula that it has used so faithfully — and consistently — ceaselessly, one might say — over the last few years. But the spirit of innovation is still kickin’, and darned if it isn’t used to tell us a story that’s…

Google Charts the History of Modern Music

Google recently began tracking its user’s music uploads. What’s it doing with that data? A number of things, to be sure, and here’s one we like very much: Google Research has created a rich, multilayered, interactive chart of musical evolution by visualizing which albums from eras-gone-by remain in our music libraries today. Google’s visualization (dubbed,…

Good ‘ol fashioned fisticuffs on the return of Archer

This week we get some of your favorite cartoons back! Adventure Time returns with a splash, giving us all invitations to the Apple Wedding, while we get front row seats to the FBI raid of ISIS on Archer. As always – minor spoilers ahead! Adventure Time – “Apple Wedding” Mr. Pig and Tree Trunks tie…

Watch Classical Paintings Come Alive, in Beauty

Italian animator Rino Stefano Tagliafierro breathes subtle (and not-so-subtle) life into dozens of classical paintings in his captivating short, Beauty. [Fair warning: here be nudity, sex, violence and death. Sometimes all at once.] The film, Tagliafierro writes, is “a path of sighs through the emotions of life. A tribute to the art and her disarming…

Animated ghost story about death in winter somehow has a happy ending

A woodsman, a nest of mice, and a fox form their own ecosystem in the cozy short film. Tragedy strikes when that ecosystem breaks down, but this story still manages to end with a smile. Jake Armstrong and Erin Kilkenny’s Mountain Ash is a standout piece from a larger anthology of animated shorts by members…

Tilt-shift effect photos of the universe make the vast cosmos look tiny

These images look like miniature models of familiar galaxies and nebulae, the grand structures of space made small. But they are in fact real pieces of space porn digitally manipulated to look like tilt-shift photographs. redditor TheScienceLlama made these images using the tilt-shift filter in Photoshop CS6. TheScienceLlama notes that the effect works better for…

Hiroo Onoda has died at the age of 91. He was the last Japanese imperial soldier to emerge from hiding in a jungle in the Philippines and surrender —nearly 30 years after the end of World War II.

This is a blood cell balanced on the head of a pin

This incredible image was captured using a scanning electron microscope. It’s been colorized to provide contrast, but this is actually what it would look like if you balanced one red blood cell on a pin. Amazing. Via Microscope Pics

Twitter SNAFU lets researchers identify a new kind of harrassment

It’s a kind of online harassment that happens all the time, but which we haven’t really named. Over at Model View Culture, computer security researcher Leigh Honeywell calls it “opportunistic.” And a recent change at Twitter made it clear how this kind of harassment works. Honeywell describes what “opportunistic” harassment is: Online harassment varies dramatically…

Why do birds fly in a V formation?

To save energy? Well, yes, there’s that. But the energy-conservation hypothesis went largely untested for many years. Now, results from a rather creatively designed experiment have confirmed what we’ve long supposed about flying formations – but not without raising some downright baffling questions in the process. Ed Yong dissects some of the finer points of…

The secret soundtracks of novels

Does your favorite novel have a secret soundtrack, a series of songs that the author listened to (or thought about the novel’s characters listening to) while they were writing? Today, author Ann Leckie stopped in to answer questions about her novel, Ancillary Justice, and, in response to a question by commenter APartyofOne about the basis…

Astronomers discover a black hole orbiting a spinning star

There’s a star about 8,500 light-years away that’s spinning so fast its surface speed exceeds 620,000 mph. Astronomers are familiar with these kinds of stars, but this one’s wholly unique in that it has a rather strange companion: a black hole. To date, astronomers have catalogued more than 80 of these Be type stars. They’re…