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Here’s a Stunning Look at Volume 2 of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar!

Mark Danielewski blew everybody’s minds with House of Leaves. And now he’s trying to do something really ambitious and strange with his new project, The Familiar. It’s partly a serialized narrative in the style of a TV show, partly an art book, and partly a science fiction mystery. Check out a sneak peek at part…

Scientists Discover Weather on Rosetta’s Comet

Earth’s favorite comet is chock full of surprises. The latest? Weather, of sorts. According to research published this week in Nature, Comet 67P has a small weather system driven by an intense day-night cycle. We got our first hint of comet weather last August, when the Rosetta probe’s VIRTIS instrument sniffed a square kilometer-sized patch…

8 Reasons Why the Tokyo Olympics Will Be the Most Futuristic We’ve Ever Seen

In 1964, the last time Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics, the nation revealed one of the biggest mic drops in transportation history: the debut of the shinkansen, the world-famous bullet train that became a Japanese icon. The first high-speed train in the world, it spurred similar technology to spread to Europe and other East Asian…

9 Ways to Tell if a New TV Show Is Going To Be Worth Watching

It’s the start of the fall TV season, and this week alone a ton of pilots have aired. You can’t always judge a show by its pilot—they’re usually filmed months before the rest of the show, and terrible pilots lead to great shows and vice versa. So how can you decide which show to invest…

Streaming Apps Are Coming to VR Starting with Netflix Today

For those who have been itching to stream the new season of TV from the comfort of your Gear VR, a Netflix VR app will be available today, with apps for Hulu and Vimeo as well as Twitch coming on soon. At today’s Oculus developers event, the company announced that it’s getting a slew of…

This Guy Makes Art Out of Sloppy Photoshop Disasters

People spend years mastering the tools of Photoshop. They labor arduously to create seamless images with no trace of manipulation. Lucas Blalock labors arduously as well. But in his art, the artifacts of cutting, duplicating, and transforming become the very backbone of the finished product. Bear with this video produced by PBS’ Art21, because it…

Population Doomsday Scientist Attacks Pope’s Climate Message

In a rare note of dissent from a prominent scientist, Paul Ehrlich is denouncing Pope Francis’s call to action on climate change, stating that the pope’s rhetoric will be as “ineffective as ignoring the problem altogether” unless the world’s billion Catholics embrace population control. Ehrlich’s critique, which appears in Nature Climate Change today, is part…

VR is coming, and Oculus has partnered up with PC makers like ASUS, Dell, and Alienware to make an Oculus-ready lineup of gaming desktops for under 1K that meet the needed specifications to run an Oculus smoothly and worry-free. These PCs will also come with Oculus bundle options. Get ready, people. It’s happening.

The Booming Business of Making Fake Apple Stores Look Real 

The iPhone 6S arrives tomorrow morning, and Reuters says the fever-pitch demand for the latest iPhone in China is spurring a boom in phony stores that look a lot like official Apple stores–right down to the bags. Unauthorized Apple stores are a perennial story in many countries, and this year is no different. In particular,…

How can these people finish a video game in minutes while it takes you hours?

Speedrunners play video games as a race against time. It’s not about getting the highest score or beating another person in the game but rather it’s about beating everyone by getting the fastest time. Kotaku talked to some gamers who seem to see things quicker and faster (or is it slower?) than the rest of…

Samsung’s New Gear VR Only Costs $100

Samsung has been an early adopter of virtual reality, creating headsets that use its massive smartphone screens as VR displays. Now, the company has announced its third iteration of Gear VR, compatible with the S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, and the Note 5, for only $100. For the most part, it looks just like the…

Enormous Time Capsule Will Be Opened in Michigan Today, Will Probably Suck

A gigantic time capsule from 1965 is going to be opened this afternoon in Bay City, Michigan. And locals have been speculating about what could be inside. Will it be filled with old movie cameras and classic records? Priceless gems and bars of gold? Probably not. Frankly, the contents of most time capsules are pretty…

Let’s Talk About Mantis Shrimp Fight Club

The fearsome mantis shrimp has many fascinating attributes, most notably its powerful hammer-like rounded claws — technically known as “raptorial appendages” — that it uses to crack open the hard shells of its favored prey (clams and crabs) and to ward off predators. And now it seems they use them as weapons against each other,…

Remembering the Mysterious “Vela Incident” 36 Years Later

Thirty-six years ago this week, an American Vela Hotel satellite detected an atmospheric explosion over the southern Indian Ocean near the Prince Edward Islands. It was a strange event that remains controversial to this very day. On September 22nd, 1979, an American Vela Hotel satellite detected an atmospheric explosion over the southern Indian Ocean near…

Ig Nobel Informal Lectures Give Winners a Chance to Explain Themselves

The Ig Nobel awards ceremony is a marvelous spectacle encrusted with tradition. But if you really want to know how the winners did their work and why, you need to go to the Ig informal lectures, held at MIT the Saturday after the awards. The event lets winners present a short lecture to explain the…

California’s Drought Is Now Threatening Its Millennia-Old Sequoias

The drought crippling the West is the worst it has seen in 500 years—and maybe even in 1000 years. It’s so bad that it’s taking a toll on some of the region’s oldest and largest residents: California’s stately sequoia trees. According to an Associated Press story, scientists gathering data in Sequoia National Park are seeing…

How the Vietnam War Brought High-Tech Border Surveillance to America

From 1968 until 1973, the US military spent about $1 billion a year on a new computer-powered initiative intended to end the war in Vietnam. It went by many names over the years — including Practice Nine, Muscle Shoals, Illinois City and Dye Marker. But today it’s most commonly known as Operation Igloo White. Despite…

Independence Day Is Getting a Comic Series to Tie the Films Together

By the time Independence Day: Resurgence comes out next year, the original film will be 20 years old. That’s a lot of backstory to cover from how we got from aliens blowing up the White House to a “post-war” world and a united Earth Space Defense force—one we now know will be the focus of…

Jeb Bush’s Plan To Gut Net Neutrality

Jeb Bush just published a love note to big business that’d be amusing if it didn’t give me second-hand embarrassment at witnessing a governor slob-knob oligopolistic corporatism so explicitly. Bush wants to get rid of unnecessary government regulations. In making his argument against various rules, he tends to play up the idea that regular folks…

Over at Science of Us, Melissa Dahl reports on an interesting new study that suggests the distress some internet pornography users feel about their oh-so-private internet activity has far more to do with their worries about internet porn addiction than the actual amount of pornography they’re watching. Contact the author at [email protected].