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Concrete Business Cards Are Impractical and Exquisite Works of Art

A French creative agency, Murmure, has furnished its employees with some rather cumbersome, custom-cut and embossed concrete business cards. The cards come each with its own built-to-scale wooden shipping pallet and can be kept from crumbling inside a miniature, protective black carrying case. This material, so characteristic of our environment, was enhanced by using the…

Tech News Molly Oswaks

Pavlovian Pacifier Teaches Premature Babies to Eat

Infants born at full term are able to feed themselves thanks to their instinctive sucking reflex and the fully developed muscles needed to extract milk from their mothers. But every year in the U.S., more 500,000 infants are born prematurely, few of them with the muscular strength needed to acquire nourishment from either their mother…

Tech News Molly Oswaks

Finally, a Legitimate Excuse for Playing With Our Lasers!

We’ve made fun in past of Wicked Lasers and their vast inventory of seemingly useless laser devices. Now, at long last, it seems we’ve found a legitimate excuse for playing with out lasers. https://gizmodo.com/and-lo-another-useless-laser-was-born-5903623 A team of researchers from Leibniz University, in Hannover, Germany, is hard at work on a sophisticated laser that is able…

Tech News Molly Oswaks

New York Legislation Would Ban Anonymous Online Speech

Did you hear the one about the New York state lawmakers who forgot about the First Amendment in the name of combating cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks”? Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous…

Tech News David Kravets - Wired

Better Cell Phone Towers Kill People (Updated)

AT&T’s network sucked in 2008, glutted with iPhones and facing the menace of a 3G rollout. So like its competition, it put together a slapdash operation to build towers at any cost. Even a human cost, ProPublica reports. A joint investigation by ProPublica and PBS’ Frontline dug up a corporate culture of rampant neglect, workplace…

Tech News Sam Biddle

Picture of the Day, May 22, 2012

DAWN IN THE CYLINDER | Concept artist Mikko Kinnunen created this amazing environment, showing the sun rising at one end of a massive cylindrical habitat. See more of his work on his site. Want to read today’s io9 stories a different way? Check out our blog view. You can also catch recent episodes of the…

io9 Annalee Newitz

Is Sitting and Standing Really the Future Of Workplace Comfort?

After designing footwear for several years, Martin Keen decided that he could apply the same knowledge he used to create comfortable shoes to furniture, resulting in an unorthodox workstation called the Locus that has users sitting and standing at the same time. It seems the jury is still out on what exactly makes for the…

Health Andrew Liszewski

When a vampire bootleg Mickey Mouse tried to invade Japan before World War II

Continuing right along with our unofficial exploration of all things simultaneously insane, horrific, and Disney-related comes “Toybox Series #3: Picture Book 1936,″ a 1934 Japanese propaganda cartoon by Komatsuzawa Hajime. https://gizmodo.com/vintage-disneyland-character-costumes-were-the-fabric-o-5912099 https://gizmodo.com/behold-the-mickey-mouse-gas-mask-from-world-war-ii-5888018 Like American propaganda of the era (1, 2), this animation also channeled Walt’s happy cartoon creations. Unlike those cartoons, this short featured Mickey…

Movies Cyriaque Lamar

Aliens recreated with puppets? Game over, man!

What better way to recreate the dark R-rated world of James Cameron’s bloody Aliens than with puppets! The Meat and Potato Theatre of Salt Lake City, Utah is putting on a puppet musical recreating Aliens. And we think that’s just spectacular. Here’s the information from their official website: “In a world…where singing puppets can’t hear…

Movies Meredith Woerner

A breathtaking excerpt from Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel 2312

You may know Kim Stanley Robinson from magnificent works like the Mars Trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt. Now he’s back with a new novel called 2312, out today, which is about colonizing the solar system 300 years from now. But it’s also about a lot of other things, like art and family…

Books & Comics Annalee Newitz

Grow an Indoor Garden on Your Wall With a Sleek, Magnetic Planter System

From its humble beginnings as an—ahem—Kickstarter project, Urbio has parlayed a successful fundraising drive into actual indoor gardening products that actual people can buy. On display at ICFF 2012, the Urbio system makes use of planter bins and wall tiles formed of polypropylene, and held together by neodymium magnets, the Urbio system combines a clean…

Tech News Adrian Covert

This TED-Ed video contains one glaring mistake

Call me anal-retentive, but I find it more than a little ironic that a TED-Ed video about the importance of units, whole number place value, decimal place value, and fractions features an animation of apples being sold for 0.79 cents each (see 00:25). Not $0.79 each. Zero-point-seven-nine cents apiece. Either that’s a mistake, or those…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez

ooVoo: Video Chat With A Dozen Friends at a Time

Skype might be the proxy video chat service for a lot of people, but it only supports 10 call participants at a time. ooVoo, on the other hand, lets you have a massive conversation with 12 people at a time. What does it do? It connects with Facebook to let you host conversations with as…

Tech News Leslie Horn

Why we so desperately want Snow White and the Huntsman to be good

We need Snow White and the Huntsman to be good. It’s moved past mere desire to a full-on burning inflammation in our fantasy loins. Why? Perhaps it’s because what we’ve seen in the trailers so far looks pretty damn good. We were raised on Beastmaster, Willow, Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, but there’s been a fantasy…

Movies Meredith Woerner

How One Man Faked His Own Internet Death

Death is scary. Suicide is scary. And when you’re a valued member of a long-standing community who supports and helps one another, you don’t fake awful stories about either to sadden and embarrass your friends. You don’t ruin years of relationships to pull a stupid gag that demeans true tragedies. You don’t create a fake…

Tech News Casey Chan

On Eureka, computers are way too smart for their own good

Yesterday’s Eureka showed in two very different ways just how dangerous it can be for AI to become as smart and clever as humans. The first story had our heroes facing the ultimate disaster simulation, while the other story, well… Let’s just say that some pretty damn massive spoilers lie ahead! “Worst Case Scenario” has…

Television Alasdair Wilkins

Backpack Flash Turns You Into a One-Person Photography Studio

It’s hard for clients to understand why photographers charge so much for photos. So if you find yourself in the same situation as Ian Spanier—who was hired for a shoot with no money for an assistant—you too can build this impressive looking backpack studio flash rig. The getup starts with a sturdy LowePro backpack designed…

Tech News Andrew Liszewski

Baseball Mitt Wallets Resurrect Your Favorite Old Glove

There’s nothing like a perfectly worn-in catching mitt. Soft and slightly tattered, it hugs your hand in the most wonderfully familiar, comfortable way. And now, you can stash your money in them, too. Fielders Choice’s wallets are crafted from those friendly old baseball gloves. Starting at $60, they’re nostalgic and cool, lovely relics of America’s…

Tech News Leslie Horn

Famous Literary Critic Stanley Fish Explains Why You’re Wrong to Care About Spoilers

Stanley Fish is perhaps most famous for chipping away at the idea that texts have real meanings and moral principles matter, with all his deconstruction-y lit-crittery. But now he’s causing a new stir, by claiming that spoilers don’t matter, and people who complain about spoilers aren’t really enjoying texts the right way. At least, that’s…

Movies Charlie Jane Anders

There’s a Ridiculous Traffic Jam of People Trying to Climb Mount Everest

Even though four people died trying to climb Mount Everest last weekend and even if reaching the summit costs more than a Porsche, it’s not stopping people from attempting to scale the highest point on Earth. In fact, there’s so many people trying to climb Mount Everest that it’s causing a human traffic jam. https://gizmodo.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-climb-mount-everest-more-than-5887413…

Tech News Casey Chan

Concrete Business Cards Are Impractical and Exquisite Works of Art

Pavlovian Pacifier Teaches Premature Babies to Eat

Finally, a Legitimate Excuse for Playing With Our Lasers!

New York Legislation Would Ban Anonymous Online Speech

Better Cell Phone Towers Kill People (Updated)

Picture of the Day, May 22, 2012

Is Sitting and Standing Really the Future Of Workplace Comfort?

When a vampire bootleg Mickey Mouse tried to invade Japan before World War II

Aliens recreated with puppets? Game over, man!

A breathtaking excerpt from Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel 2312

Grow an Indoor Garden on Your Wall With a Sleek, Magnetic Planter System

This TED-Ed video contains one glaring mistake

ooVoo: Video Chat With A Dozen Friends at a Time

Why we so desperately want Snow White and the Huntsman to be good

How One Man Faked His Own Internet Death

On Eureka, computers are way too smart for their own good

Backpack Flash Turns You Into a One-Person Photography Studio

Baseball Mitt Wallets Resurrect Your Favorite Old Glove

Famous Literary Critic Stanley Fish Explains Why You’re Wrong to Care About Spoilers

There’s a Ridiculous Traffic Jam of People Trying to Climb Mount Everest

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