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The Deadliest Poisons in History (And Why People Stopped Using Them)

Once people figured out they could kill each other with special substances instead of sharp sticks, the proverbial poison cookie was born. However, there are only so many times you can use the same trick. As people caught on to how poisons worked, and moved them to the forefront of investigations, certain poisons fell out…

The Brave Little Toaster gets CG remake, most likely to change toaster to iPhone

The 1987 animated classic The Brave Little Toaster followed a bunch of outdated objects as they traveled across the land to be reunited with their owner. And it’s a classic piece of cinema, with glorious music, great voice actors, horribly frightening moments — and it turned us all into hoarders. And like everything great from…

Artist Skywrites the First Thousand Digits of Pi over San Francisco

Any eyes in San Francisco that weren’t focused on Apple’s announcements yesterday might have noticed something peculiar in the skies over the Bay area. As part of the ZERO1 Biennial—a months long festival celebrating the coming together of art and technology—an artist known only as Ishky used several planes to skywrite the first 1,000 digits…

This Weed-Killing Robot Dispatches Dandelions with 98 Percent Accuracy

A prototype weed-seeking automaton could change the way seven billion humans eat, as well as help to end industrial agriculture’s reliance on toxic herbicides and itinerant labor. The “Lettuce Bot” is a four-wheeled weeding machine designed and built by Indiana-based startup Blue River Technology, using a $400,000 angel investment as well as an early grant…

Google’s Star-Searching Bacon Number Tool Makes Your Brain One Degree Less Necessary

Do you know how many movies Kevin Bacon has been in? Like, seventy. He’s so prolific that the the world’s intellectuals widely accept the theory that every single person in Hollywood is removed from Kevin Bacon by no more than six direct associative on-screen links. Google recognizes that this “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” phenomenon…

Apple Might Bring Siri Voice Control to Macs

Dictation on the Mac is pretty nice, for what it is, but Apple isn’t the first to pull that off. According to a new patent application though, it might be eyeing something more ambitious: full Siri control on the Mac. Here’s an excerpt from a revised application: The electronic device may process voice commands locally…

Sexually aroused women find everything less disgusting

Let’s face it: Sex can be kinda gross. With all those body odors and fluids being traded back and forth, it’s no small miracle that humans voluntarily choose to copulate at all. But as scientists from the Netherlands have recently pointed out, our willingness to engage in sexual acts despite the yuck factor may be…

The Best Bluetooth Headphones for Less Than $500

The technology driving wireless headphones has not yet reached its full potential. But over the past few years, Bluetooth has advanced to a point that less than $500 can buy a pair of headphones with decent audio and respectable battery life. We rounded up four pairs and let ’em duke it out to see if…

Help this teacher expose her kids to some great young-adult science fiction

Here’s your worthy cause for the day. A junior high school teacher has put up a request for some funding to get her classroom new copies of Scott Westerfeld’s classic young-adult dystopian novel Uglies — and all you have to do is go over to OO.com and vote for this project to be funded by…

Jimmy Kimmel Confirms People Love the New iPhone 5, Even Though They’re Being Pranked With an iPhone 4S

The iPhone 5 has been criticized for being a boring and marginal update to the iPhone 4S—at least in terms of design, since the new handset looks a lot like its predecessor. The two phones are so similar, that when Jimmy Kimmel showed the iPhone 4S to random people on the street, passing it off…

This Beautiful 1980s Radio Looked Vintage Before “Vintage” Was a Thing

Take one look at this old teak and leather-clad Roberts radio, and you’ll swear it dates to the 1950s. But this UK-made Rolls Royce of radios comes straight from the polyester 1980s. The Roberts R900 is quite possibly the last great radio made before video killed the radio star. The R900 was produced from 1985-1990,…

What if you woke up in a different person’s body every single day?

There have been plenty of young-adult novels about young people searching for their identity — literally or figuratively. But few have taken the concept as far as Every Day, the new young-adult novel from David Levithan, the co-author of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. This is a coming-of-age story that manages to pack some age-old…

Malcolm McDowell explains why the death of Captain Kirk was such a waste

Just in case you needed another reason to love Malcolm McDowell, here you go. The Clockwork Orange star, who played the villain Soran in Star Trek: Generations, explains in a new interview with Metro why he thought Kirk’s death was a waste: “Poor old Captain Kirk,” he said in a telephone interview from California with…

This Film Reel from 1902 May Be the World’s Oldest Color Footage

The oldest known color film footage has long been traced to a reel from 1909. But that was before Michael Harvey, the curator of cinematography at the National Media Museum in England, discovered an old forgotten tin in the museum’s archives. After examining the stock, Harvey discovered it was actually color test footage dating all…

The Independence Day sequels will be all about the love… wait, what!?

Pacific Rim is going 3D… even if Guillermo del Toro doesn’t like it. Watch a Thor: The Dark World set video. Just how drunk will Woody Harrelson be in Catching Fire? Joss Whedon explains why Squirrel Girl might not be in The Avengers 2. And James Cameron explains why the Avatar sequels won’t be like…

Conan O’Brien’s Got an Even Cheaper Amazon Tablet For You

Amazon’s Kindle Fire has declared an all out price war with the iPad. But if you don’t need all those fancy color-screen bells and whistles, you can opt for the even cheaper e-ink Kindle. And if even that’s overkill, Conan O’ Brien has discovered Amazon is selling, or renting, an even cheaper solution. What the…

If You Want a Prepaid iPhone 5 You’ll Have to Wait an Extra Week

If you want to get an iPhone 5 on a conventional data plan, you can preorder tomorrow and have it in your greedy little mittens on September 21st. If prepaid is more your style? That can be arranged—but you’ll have to wait for it. Prepaid carrier Cricket will offer up the iPhone 5 on September…

Is Streaming Media Bad For the Planet?

Streaming is fast becoming the way most of us consume media, whether it’s music, TV of film. But caught up by the sheer convenience of it all, it’s easy to forget to question its environmental impacts. Could streaming actually be bad for the planet? That’s just what a study by Music Tank set out to…

This Portable Desk Is Packed With Power to Keep You Working Anywhere

For people that find themselves working literally in the middle of nowhere, a suitable spot to set up office can be a problem, let alone finding power to keep things running. But the KANZ Field Power Desk offers a solution: it’s a portable workstation that comes packed with power to keep your devices running. The…

Microsoft has openly admitted that Bing is never going to used as a verb. But you can Google on Bing, right? [Fast Co]