Gooey bio-slime breasts and one vengeful GPS

Snot fetishists, your day has come! This week in cult check out the very naked (and very slimy) trailer for Contagion, a glimpse at the Makoto Shinkai’s new anime movie, and Tom Holland’s (Fright Night, Thinner) latest project. Twisted Tales Horror legend Tom Holland has been busy putting together a collection of horror shorts entitled…

Esther Inglis-Arkell Bio

Esther Inglis-Arkell is a senior reporter at io9, writing science pieces and occasional rants about how movies should be more to her taste. Currently Esther lives in a cave in the foggiest part of San Francisco, where she spends her days writing and snarling at stray shafts of sunlight. She grew up in suburban California,…

The Walking Dead proves that zombies make family reunions extremely awkward

On tonight’s episode of The Walking Dead (“Tell It To The Frogs”) a confused reunion transpired, we met more survivors, people lost their minds, and Rick played hero. All in all, just a normal day at the end of civilization. PRO: Merle: Portrait of a Lunatic Hillbilly. The episode picks up exactly where the last…

Annalee Newitz Bio

Annalee Newitz is the founder and editor-in-chief of io9. She has been writing about science, the future, and popular culture for over a decade, and has published articles in Wired, Popular Science, New Scientist, The Washington Post, 2600, The Believer and New York Magazine. Formerly she was a contributing editor at Wired magazine, a policy…

Stephanie Fox Bio

Stephanie Fox turns data into designs. As io9’s graphic designer, she’s created loads of illustrations and infographics to make science (and science fiction) easier to understand. Her work has been featured on fistfuls of websites and printed in Annals of Improbable Research and H+ Magazine. Before moving from her frozen native land, she helped break…

The web’s best optical illusion videos…and how they trick your brain

The human brain is one of the most remarkable things on this planet…but that doesn’t mean it can’t make mistakes, particularly when it comes to how we see the world. Here are five mind-blowing optical illusions and how they work. Before we get started, I just want to assure everyone – these videos are all…

Meet the people who make io9 run.

Plans for a domed city in a kilometer-wide Siberian diamond mine

Here are plans for Eco-City 2020, a 100,000-person domed city built in the kilometer-wide and 550-meter-deep Mir diamond mine in the Yakutia Republic. According to designers AB Elise, the mine will be powered by the Siberian sun. Here’s a description of AB Elise’s plan from Evolo: The new city is planned to be divided in…

Bat brains boost the volume of sounds they really need to hear

Even in loud settings with tons of different noises, we seem to have a knack for focusing in on the most important sounds, particularly sounds of danger. If we’re anything like bats, it’s because our neurons make those sounds louder. Our ability to know what sounds to focus in on and which to ignore is…

Star Wars fan builds his own floating lightsaber training droid

YouTube user TroopTrent has built his own hovering lightsaber training droid from A New Hope. Of course, the droid doesn’t attack you, but nothing’s stopping you from wearing a frosted helmet and complaining at it. [Spotted on Nerdcore]

Criminally misleading comic book ad shilled a precognitive robot brain for $5

In 1968’s Silver Surfer 3, this advertisement for the Digi Comp I Electronic Computer Brain, hawked a psychic computer that used for telling the future and “studying space age miracles.” Oh, 1960s copywriters, unencumbered the laws of reality. Here’s the Digi Comp I in action. Notice all the space age miracles bursting out as if…

Take your chances with fun, pulpy Version 43

Charming gangsters, lots of gun-fighting, and one insufferable robot cop: Version 43, Philip Palmer’s latest, is a cracker-jack pulp-noir deep-space blast. Far-future Earth is a peaceful place, with little crime and few anti-social personalities. That’s because whenever someone commits a serious offense, they’re offered a shot at a new life on the distant planet of…

The Walking Disaster!

Well friends, let’s do it to it, shall we? ON TO DISASTER!!! As always click to enlarge. THE WALKING DEAD: Well, AMC has an honest to god hit on their hands. They’ve gotten the attention of the critics since Mad Men first graced the air, but now they’re getting people, and people means money, and…

A good night’s sleep is crucial to remembering the waking world

Humans spend about a third our their entire lives asleep…at least, that’s the theory. Lots of people get by on significantly less sleep, but this has its trade-offs. And memory is one of the biggest victims of not enough sleep. Many people, either by necessity or by choice, don’t get as much sleep as researchers…

Mapping the Seven Kingdoms

Want to see a map of the continent of Westeros from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire? Of course you do. Also, see how Martin’s fictional continent stacks up with Europe. I’ve talked about this map briefly before, but renewed discussion on the subject of the size of Westeros and the Seven…

Divine Proportions in male nipple re-positioning

For aesthetic reasons, plastic surgeons are sometimes required to re-position male nipples – after dramatic weight-loss for example. In such a case they are presented, in effect, with a substantially blank canvas. But the presently accepted methods for calculating ideal nipple locations are far from straightforward. “Currently available guidelines create areolas that are too large,…

New discovery could be best hint yet of the elusive Higgs boson

The Higgs boson is the missing particle that would complete the standard model of particle physics, but so far we’ve found little to even suggest it actually exists. But a new finding might just have come from a decaying Higgs. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is one of several individual detectors that comprise the…

Necropanspermia: was life created by zombie cells from outer space?

Sure, that’s maybe the most ridiculous question we’ve posed. But a new theory suggests life’s building blocks did originate in outer space, although they couldn’t have survived traveling to Earth. And with an awesome name like necropanspermia, it’s worth considering. Panspermia often gets mixed up with a lot of bonkers theories about ancient aliens seeding…

Darren Aronofsky’s Wolverine movie has a title — “The Wolverine”

Darren Aronofsky’s revealed the title of his follow-up to X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It will be called The Wolverine, and the director asserts that the film isn’t a sequel to Wolverine’s prior mouthless Deadpool adventure/team-up with the Black Eyed Peas. [Hitfix]

I live in a hot spot

John Denver proclaimed it “almost heaven”, but a group of geoscientists are implying it’s a little more like the opposite. Most of the rest of the world doesn’t think of West Virginia as a hot spot, but it is. It’s just been overlooked. A recent study funded by Google (more on that) updated the Geothermal…