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Just Look at This Freakin’ CGI Fur

When you look at fur, the light has taken an extended journey before hitting your eye, bouncing around lots of fur fibers and their microscopic structures. You can imagine that it’s quite difficult for filmmakers to render these structures in CGI. Researchers at the Universities of California in San Diego and Berkeley have devised an…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Puerto Rico Is Finally Going to Do a Proper Hurricane Maria Death Count

Puerto Rico is passing the handling of its Hurricane Maria death count to the Milken Institute of Public Health at George Washington University, Governor Ricardo Rosselló announced Thursday. The news comes after months of criticism over how the U.S. territory has been attributing the deaths of American citizens to the storm that ravaged the island…

Environmental Justice Yessenia Funes

SpaceX Payload Fairing Survives Despite Missing Recovery Net by ‘a Few Hundred Meters’

Early today, a Falcon 9 rocket delivered the PAZ radio communications satellite, along with a pair of SpaceX-owned internet satellites, to low-Earth orbit. It was an otherwise routine launch and deployment, save for the attempt to recover the rocket’s payload fairing—a feat that’s never been tried before. Normally, SpaceX tries to recover the first stage…

Space & Spaceflight George Dvorsky

Stock Price Tumble Teaches Snapchat What Happens When You Disappoint Kylie Jenner

Snapchat has long positioned itself as the place for advertisers to reach millennials while its closest competitor, Facebook, is stuck with the olds. But on Thursday, Snap executives got a lesson in the terrifying, fickle nature of its young influencers, to the tune of a $1.3 billion loss. Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, saw…

Tech News Rhett Jones

Watching That Girl From The Ring Crawl Out of a TV in AR Just Ruined My Day

Augmented reality promises to deliver us a future in which we can simply look through our screens to magically transform the world around us. It also has the potential to really fuck your day up. At least that was my experience after watching this reenactment of that iconic scene from The Ring where the ghost…

Tech News Melanie Ehrenkranz

Joss Whedon Quits the Batgirl Movie: ‘I Really Didn’t Have a Story’

Just a few months after his DC debut with Justice League, Joss Whedon is leaving its cinematic universe. Whedon has confirmed he’s no longer writing or directing Batgirl, saying he “failed” to come up with a good story. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Whedon is stepping down from creating DC’s solo Batgirl film. Whedon’s involvement…

Movies Beth Elderkin

Martian Sand Is Swallowing the Phoenix Lander and Nothing Beside Remains

The Phoenix Lander detected water on Mars during its three-month mission in 2008, and now it is being swallowed by the planet’s dust. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped the above two images, one in 2008 and the other in December of 2017. If Percy Bysshe Shelley…

Space & Spaceflight Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Bug Made It Possible to Take Over Tinder Accounts with Just a Phone Number

Vulnerabilities in Tinder and in Facebook’s Account Kit tool could have allowed a hacker to take over a user’s Tinder account—gaining access to their private messages—using only the victim’s phone number. The problem was discovered by Anand Prakash, a security researcher, and has been fixed by both Tinder and Facebook. Rather than requiring users to…

Privacy & Security Kate Conger

This Rube Goldberg Basketball Machine Has Enough Tricks to Be a Harlem Globetrotter

It seems not even basketball court jester is a job that’s safe from from the rise of the machines. Students from Georgia Tech built a giant Rube Goldberg contraption that’s capable of reproducing many of the Harlem Globetrotter’s most crowd-pleasing tricks; from spinning a ball on a finger, to simply sinking baskets. As fun as…

Sploid Andrew Liszewski

This Midwestern Flooding Is Bad

In the same week that the East Coast is dropping all-time heat records and parts of the West are experiencing freak cold snaps, the middle of the country is dealing with floods. Dangerous ones. From Louisiana to Michigan, rivers are spilling over their banks after days of heavy rainfall. Flood warnings and advisories, as well…

Earth Science Maddie Stone

Listen to the New Muppet Babies Theme, Performed by Hamilton‘s Renée Elise Goldsberry

Muppet Babies taught us all that we can make our dreams come true. And if your very oddly specific dream was “Oh boy, I wish Hamilton star Renée Elise Goldberry could sing the theme for a Muppet Babies remake,” then do we have a treat for you. Revealed by Entertainment Weekly this morning, here’s the…

Television James Whitbrook

Ryan Zinke Wants to Fight Fire With Drones

Last year the Department of the Interior flew nearly 5,000 drone missions, an 82 percent increase over 2016, according to a new report. These missions supported everything from mapping wildlife to monitoring dams, but they especially aided in fighting wildfires, which burned large swaths of the West during a long and painful fire season in…

Conservation Ari Phillips

Scientists Who Doubt Neanderthal Art Must Reckon With New Evidence From These Sweet Cave Paintings

Cave paintings in Spain were produced at least 64,000 years ago, a full 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe.

Human History George Dvorsky

Unprecedented Video Shows How DNA Is Organized in Real Time

Your body is truly amazing. Every cell inside of it is capable of organizing massive messes of DNA into chromosomes as a cell prepares to divide. That DNA, when unraveled, can span more that two meters in length, but your body’s cells whip it into tidy bundles. We’ve long known that the body can do…

Biology Kristen V. Brown

Director Duncan Jones Explains How Mute Suddenly Became a Scifi Film

There are two huge scifi movies coming from fan favorite directors this weekend. One you’ll have to head to theaters to see: Alex Garland’s Annihilation. The other—the long-awaited, highly-anticipated Mute, directed by Duncan Jones—is arriving on Netflix. Jones got his start with the amazing film Moon, directed the very solid Source Code, and recently made Warcraft,…

Movies Germain Lussier

There’s No Such Thing as a Truly ‘Wild’ Horse Anymore

An analysis of DNA spanning 5,500 years shows we’ve been wrong about the origin of domesticated horses, and the common notion that wild horses still exist is completely wrong. The oldest archaeological evidence of horse domestication dates back 5,500 years ago, to the ancient Botai people who once lived in what is now northern Kazakhstan.…

Biology George Dvorsky

Unwanted Simulated ‘Hugs’ and ‘Back Rubs’ May Now Qualify as Harassment by FreeBSD

Last week, open-source software developer FreeBSD Project updated its code of conduct to address nonconsensual “simulated physical contact” as a form of harassment. That means that sending someone descriptions of physical contact like a “hug” or a “backrub” without their consent, or after they have asked you to stop, are violations of the guidelines governing…

Tech News Melanie Ehrenkranz

The io9 History of Annihilation, From Book to Film to Controversy

When Alex Garland’s Annihilation opens Friday, it will be the end of a long journey for the film. It began way back in 2013 when Paramount bought the movie rights to Jeff VanderMeer’s book and its sequels, before they were even published. io9 has been covering Annihilation since the very beginning, and we thought it…

Movies Germain Lussier

Model Brains-on-a-Chip Reveal the Physics of Brain Folding

Brains fold in on themselves as they grow. That’s just what they do. How and why they do it is a different story, and studying it requires some pretty interesting science. Science like growing simple mini-brains on a chip under a microscope. Israeli scientists wanted to study brain folding from a physics perspective. Growing brain…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Urban Heat Created a Massive Hole in New Delhi’s Pollution-Fueled Fog

Since at least 2014, satellites have been showing odd holes in the fog over Indian cities. Scientists didn’t know why until they published a paper about it earlier this year in Geophysical Research Letters. As it turned out, the fog resulted from aerosol pollution in these cities, but cities also emit warmth, which reduces the…

Environmental Justice Yessenia Funes

Just Look at This Freakin’ CGI Fur

Puerto Rico Is Finally Going to Do a Proper Hurricane Maria Death Count

SpaceX Payload Fairing Survives Despite Missing Recovery Net by ‘a Few Hundred Meters’

Stock Price Tumble Teaches Snapchat What Happens When You Disappoint Kylie Jenner

Watching That Girl From The Ring Crawl Out of a TV in AR Just Ruined My Day

Joss Whedon Quits the Batgirl Movie: ‘I Really Didn’t Have a Story’

Martian Sand Is Swallowing the Phoenix Lander and Nothing Beside Remains

Bug Made It Possible to Take Over Tinder Accounts with Just a Phone Number

This Rube Goldberg Basketball Machine Has Enough Tricks to Be a Harlem Globetrotter

This Midwestern Flooding Is Bad

Listen to the New Muppet Babies Theme, Performed by Hamilton‘s Renée Elise Goldsberry

Ryan Zinke Wants to Fight Fire With Drones

Scientists Who Doubt Neanderthal Art Must Reckon With New Evidence From These Sweet Cave Paintings

Unprecedented Video Shows How DNA Is Organized in Real Time

Director Duncan Jones Explains How Mute Suddenly Became a Scifi Film

There’s No Such Thing as a Truly ‘Wild’ Horse Anymore

Unwanted Simulated ‘Hugs’ and ‘Back Rubs’ May Now Qualify as Harassment by FreeBSD

The io9 History of Annihilation, From Book to Film to Controversy

Model Brains-on-a-Chip Reveal the Physics of Brain Folding

Urban Heat Created a Massive Hole in New Delhi’s Pollution-Fueled Fog

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