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Got a kid who’s ready to colonize to Mars? NASA has just released a set of Martian survival activities, suitable for grades K-12. From touring the Red Planet’s topography to building rovers and engineering artificial environments, it’s everything a future Martian explorer needs to get a head start.

We Still Don’t Know Why the Heck There Are So Many Blue Tarantulas

A very particular shade of blue hair has evolved independently on eight separate occasions and in at least three different ways in tarantulas, a new study finds. And scientists are having a hell of a time figuring out why. Like most animals with a blue hue, tarantulas don’t get their color from pigments. Rather, that…

This Twitter Fanfic Picks Up The With The Mystery Machine Gang Years Later 

In case you needed a laugh this afternoon, author Susan Jane Bigelow took to Twitter with a short fanfic about the lives of Fred, Velma and Daphne long after they were teenagers. [Susan Jane Bigelow]

Check Out This Stunning Illustration Of The Millennium Falcon

She’s the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, and this illustration of the Millennium Falcon absolutely blows us away. Drawn up by Paul Johnson, it’s part of a series of pictures that he’s drawn up of the Star Wars universe. The image of the Falcon has captivated me from the moment I saw it:…

A Graphene Microphone Could Pick Up Sounds Far Beyond the Limits of Human Hearing

Graphene, everybody’s favorite wonder material, has yet another trick up its sleeve. The ultra-strong, highly conductive carbon lattice is extraordinarily good at detecting faint and high frequency sound waves. That’s according to new research from the University of Belgrade in Serbia, where materials scientists have just built the world’s first graphene-based condenser microphone. It’s roughly…

Here’s The First Episode Of The Expanse: ‘Dulcinea’

The Expanse is set to drop on December 14th on SyFy, but the network has released the pilot episode on a whole bunch of platforms. This is a show that we’re pretty excited for, and this only gets us more excited for December. https://gizmodo.com/our-visit-to-the-mind-blowingly-realistic-spaceship-set-1743284262 In case you missed the episode, here it is:

Looking For A Good Read? Look No Further Than These Award Reading Lists

With the end of the year coming up fast, two awards have started up their annual ‘recommended reading lists’ to look back on the year’s released works. The James Tiptree Jr. award has an open call for recommendations, and you can see what the community is recommending. There’s a great list of novels being generated,…

How Fast Can We Transition to a Low-Carbon Energy System?

Starting later this month, the world’s nations will convene in traumatized Paris to hammer out commitments to slow down global climate change. Any long-term solution will require “decarbonizing” the world energy economy – that is, shifting to power sources that use little or no fossil fuel. How fast can this happen, and what could we…

Simulation of a Leg Gushing Blood Is as Gross as You’d Expect

If you’ve watched any modern action movies, you’ve probably got a pretty good mental picture of what happens when a person hemorrhages blood. But this, my friends, is the first scientific visualization of the splatterfest. Squeamish viewers, look away. Created by Jeff Eldredge and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, the video below…

The Heartwarming Story Behind R2-KT, And How She Joined Star Wars Canon

There’s a little droid that’s appeared in Star Wars in the last couple of years, R2-KT. She’s an astromech with a special purpose: memorializing a little girl who passed away in 2005. Now, it looks like she’ll appear in bigger things. In 2004, Albin Johnson and his wife noticed that their daughter Katie was having…

The Credits For The Shannara Chronicles Show Off How Our World Became Fantastic

When LOST showed up with its 10-second opening credits, we really lost something: minute or so introduction we got to a television show. MTV just released their credits for The Shannara Chronicles and it shows off just how that world transformed. There’s been some neat opening credits for these types of event-style shows: Game of…

An Up-Close Look at The Exclusive Engine for The Next Airbus

Rolls-Royce Holdings has just released this cool factory photograph of their newest large turbofan aircraft engine, the Trent 7000. It’s the seventh generation of their Trent family, and built exclusively for the upcoming Airbus airliner, the A330neo. The Airbus A330neo, successor to the Airbus A330, will be a wide-body twin-engine jet airliner, and its Trent…

Gods Of Egypt Director And Studio: “Our Casting Choices Should Have Been More Diverse”

When the trailer for Gods of Egypt came out earlier this month, everyone noticed a couple of things: it’s cast was predominantly Caucasian, which is weird, considering where and when it was set. Now, the studio and director have admitted that they could have done better there. https://gizmodo.com/the-totally-restrained-gods-of-egypt-trailer-raises-jus-1743034353 After the trailer and posters for the…

Cards Against Humanity’s Black Friday “Deal” Is the Best Worst Thing Ever

Black Friday was all-around awful this year, but once again, Cards Against Humanity made out pretty well. The secret to the party game’s success? Asking for your money, and offering nothing in return. Yes, you read that correctly. Yesterday, the creators of Cards Against Humanity launched a “sale” in which they offered to take five…

#BlackFridayParking Highlights Just How Much of the US Is Wasted on Parking Lots

A quick survey of any big-box store will show you that Americans devote far too much real estate to the parking of their vehicles. But wait, argue businesses, we need that parking for our customers! Yet even today, on the biggest shopping day of the year, chances are the parking lots near you are nowhere…

Here are All the Winners of This Year’s Dance Your PhD Contest

Science and interpretive dance met once again this year, as PhD students around the world took to the stage to bring their research to vivid life in the annual Dance Your PhD contest. Social scientist Florence Metz, a PhD student from the University of Bern in Switzerland, beat out 31 other teams to take the…

14 Exquisite Clandestine Cameras From The Golden Age of Espionage

The upcoming rare cameras auctions at Bonhams will feature rare photography equipment and accessories crafted by iconic manufacturers (Hasselblad, Leica, Nikon, Rolleiflex just to name a few). But for those who are fond of the history of spying, the real stars of the event on December 3 in Hong Kong) will be these spy-worthy clandestine…

These New Star Wars: The Force Awakens Posters Are The Ultimate Nostalgia Play

Han, Leia, Luke! Practical effects! X-Wings and TIE Fighters! All that classic music! Empires and Rebels! A lot of the impetus of The Force Awakens’s marketing has been the emphasis on nostalgia for the three movies of the original trilogy. Now there are three new amazing retro posters to add to that nostalgia. https://gizmodo.com/watch-star-wars-evolve-through-its-epic-history-of-post-1737209427 Revealed…

The World War II Tool That Changed How We Listen To Birdsong

In past centuries, birdsong experts tried to distinguish mockingbirds from thrashers by keeping their ears peeled. These days, they’re better served by eagle eyes. When studying birdsong, contemporary ornithologists use their vision as often as their hearing, picking out unique features of sounds from multicolored smudges they trace in computer windows. This approach owes much…

The NSA Will Finally Kill Its Metadata Snooping Program This Weekend

The National Security Agency is finally shutting down one of its spying programs this weekend. I do not recommend screaming I LOVE ISIS JIHAD into your phone to celebrate. The USA Freedom Act, a bill that eliminated the NSA’s bulk phone metadata collection, passed Congress in June, but the program kept going during a 180-day…