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We’ve Identified Those Bugs Infesting Burning Man — And It’s Not Pretty [UPDATED]

Yesterday, Burning Man organizers revealed the truth: the annual desert arts festival is infested with bugs. Swarms of them. Piles of them. What are they? Why has nobody ever seen them before, in over two decades of building mega-party spaces in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert? We found out. We asked entomologist and insect photographer Alex…

Amazing Concept Art From the Jurassic Park Cartoon That Never Got Made

Back when the original Jurassic Park came out, all sorts of spin-off projects were in development. One of them was an animated series that artist William Stout did some early concept art for. Unlike the sequels we eventually got, the cartoon brought back everyone from Jurassic Park. On his blog, Stout explained how the project…

California Is Pumping So Much Groundwater That the Land Is Sinking

The Mad Max plot playing out in California is causing all sorts of problems, not least for farmers, who have turned to pumping groundwater to irrigate crops. According to NASA, all that pumping is having an effect: in some places, the ground is sinking by two inches per month. https://gizmodo.com/learning-from-australias-drought-lessons-to-avoid-a-mad-1703693517 Subsidence — the technical word…

Bad News, Good News: Disney Is Making a Jungle Cruise Movie Starring the Rock

I’m praying that this movie is more in the mold of Pirates of the Caribbean than Tomorrowland. It doesn’t need to be a brilliant work, it just needs to be fun. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the script is coming from John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (Focus) and is going to be a period piece…

Why Google’s Modular Project Ara Smartphone Was Delayed

We won’t see Google’s awesome Project Ara smartphone till 2016, and there’s a surprisingly simple reason for that. It fell to pieces when people dropped it. Oh, it’s not as bad as it sounds: the phone’s made of removable modules, after all. It’s not like the phone actually broke. It sounds like Google’s existing idea…

A 100% Accurate (and Totally Ludicrous) Reenactment of the Dinosaurs’ Extinction

Let’s face it, you can’t show the extinction of the dinosaurs without including showing these prehistoric beasts mowing their lawns, going grocery shopping, and getting ridden by Jesus… Well, okay, so maybe this isn’t the most accurate video, but it is wickedly funny. The Slow Mo Guys and Field Day bring us this ridiculous take…

The Haunted Killer Who Believed His Crime Would Free Him From an Evil Spell

It had been eight years since Susan Mummey, “the witch of Ringtown Valley,” had put a spell on Albert Shinsky, or so he’d come to believe. The “hex,” to use the vernacular of their Pennsylvania Dutch community, made him haunted and depressed, and eventually drove him to murder. It was a brutally precise single shot…

Someone Made an R-Rated Stop Motion Animated Film About Going to Hell

The R-rated, Hollywood animated film is a rare form, indeed. Other countries release them but in the U.S., a decade could pass between two. The next one is coming sooner than you think, though, and it’ll get even more niche by using stop-motion animation to take you directly to Hell. The film, a comedy if…

Captain America: Civil War Already Has a Meme

The clash of superheroes movie doesn’t come out until May 2016. That hasn’t stopped the Internet. Fans of Captain America and The Avengers franchise are awaiting Civil War with anticipation—so much so that any release of information is hotly debated and pictures are fast transformed. After Comicbookmovie.com posted an on-set snap of The Winter Soldier/Bucky…

You’re biased about your biases. “We judge whether we have a bias by examining our thoughts, and because we believe our thoughts are rational, we often think we’re not biased when we are… And the more we convince ourselves that we don’t have certain biases, the more likely we are to exhibit them.” [Nautilus] Contact…

Tesla Is that Rarest of Things — A “High-End Disruptor”

Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla has defied expectations and succeeded — despite having an expensive, experimental product that nobody was sure even had a market. How did it happen? One analyst says it’s all about destroying the car market from the top down. Over at Forbes, business professor Jeff Dyer has a fascinating, in-depth…

Here’s A Book That Adds a Fascinating New Dimension to Posthuman Space Opera

By now, the stories of humans transcending their limitations in space have become pretty much ubiquitous. We’ve had space cyborgs, space immortals, and tons of other posthumans in space. But the new novel Edge of Dark by Brenda Cooper still represents a fascinating new approach. In Edge of Dark, a young woman named Nona goes…

Why Disney/Pixar Hired One of Its Biggest Critics to Work on Its New Movie

Cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz just announced that he’s joining the crew of Pixar’s Coco, an upcoming movie inspired by the Mexican Day of the Dead. Why is this news? Well, in addition to being a fantastic artist and the creator of the syndicated comic strip La Cucaracha, Alcaraz is a political cartoonist who’s been sharply critical…

This Neural Network Is Hilariously Bad At Describing Outer Space

Lion fish. Petri dish. Dough. According to one very befuddled artificial neural network, all of these things can be found in the short intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. The animation isn’t exactly a photorealistic depiction of space—but it’s close enough that most of us can recognize its planets, spacecraft, and other details. Yet…

Amazing Video Tour of a 1985 Home Automation System

YouTuber Avboden has a home automation system from 1985, and he recently created this video to show people how it worked. It actually has a pretty great UI, with touchscreen — and it even allows you to give commands from your 1980s ultra-modern, push-button phone. Watching this actually begs the question of why we haven’t…

Science and Post-It notes power this Rube Goldberg machine

3M used 25,000 post its, 75 rolls of that blue painter tape, and a whole bunch of other stuff to make this wildly complicated Rube Goldberg machine that’s actually really fun to watch. Unlike other Rube Goldberg machines, it’s not totally obvious how it’ll progress from one level to the next, like a slow burn…

Pent-Up Energy Causes Drops to Hurl Themselves Off a Teflon-Covered Thread

When you see a droplet resting on a counter or coalescing around a thread, you don’t generally think of it as a coiled spring, but under the right circumstances that’s what it is. In this video, we can see how the spring releases. A droplet beading on the floor, or on a spider’s web, looks…

James Cameron’s Thoughts About VFX Will Change How You Look at Movies

Few people have been as influential in the realm of digital effects as James Cameron. Seemingly with every film he releases, Cameron pioneers something new in the field. And while he may get the credit, he’s not the one doing the work. He’s not a true master of visual effects. Masters of FX is a…

The World’s Largest Version of Minesweeper Has You Trying To Clear Over 38,000 Mines

An Atlanta-based company called CineMassive who builds giant multiscreen video walls has created what is easily the world’s largest version of Minesweeper. On its hardest setting players will have to clear 38,799 mines without blowing the whole thing up and having to start over from scratch. The game is played on 24 high-definition screens that…

These DC Superhero Cafes Will Feed You Bat-Waffles

And Superman pancakes. Malaysia has two licensed DC Super Hero Cafes, with a third scheduled to open in Singapore next month. The casual dining joints, run by a company that owns a chain of DC retail stores across Asia, feature flashy comic-book theming and signature superhero dishes and drinks. It seems Batman’s domination of the…