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Why Horse Meat Once Had A Reputation For Curing Scurvy

Horse meat, while never widely popular, has from time to time been a trendy food. It’s trendiness is not unconnected to its nutritional value. These days, people value it for its iron. Once upon a time, people valued it as a cure for scurvy. Humans require a specialized diet because unlike most animals, we don’t…

Watch This Machine Juggle Four Balls Better Than a Circus Clown Can

With the potential to revolutionize everything from busking to children’s parties, a researcher named Raffaello D’Andrea at ETH Zurich has built a simple sensor-less machine using four strategically placed paddles that are able to juggle four balls in the air with surprising accuracy. The Circular Cloverleaf, as the latest iteration of Raffaello’s Blind Juggler machine…

Lego’s animated look at its new Star Wars Sith Infiltrator set

Lego recently announced an updated version of its Star Wars Sith Infiltrator set—originally released back when The Phantom Menace was in theaters—and to help convince you that the new version deserves a place in your collection, it’s created a lovely animation of the set revealing all of its new features. With Darth Maul, Qui-Gon Jinn,…

Here’s the First Artificial Leg That Can Feel

Artificial limbs have restored powers like standing and walking for those who have lost legs. But not sensation—patients couldn’t feel the ground beneath them. Until now. For the first time, researchers successfully fit a human with a “sensory enhanced” prosthetic leg that can simulate sensation. That sense of touch not only makes the wearer safer…

Marvel And Sony Are Down To Two Final Spider-Man Candidates

And we might know the final choice this week. George R. R. Martin has even more shows planned for HBO. Get a fresh look at the Fantastic Four in action. Plus, Dean Cain talks Supergirl, Michael Dorn offers another update on his Star Trek spinoff, and more Terminator Genisys footage. Spoilers Now! Spider-Man The casting…

Emoji Passwords are Coming: Harder to Hack and Easier to Remember

A UK company claims to have invented the idea of using a set of emoji to replace a PIN number, suggesting that our stupid brains find it easier to remember the silly drawing people face things — and that the increased complexity of the emoji character set makes brute-forcing into our bank accounts substantially harder.…

Cambridge University is hiring a professor of Lego

The best learning is, as any parent knows, through play. Academics at Camrbridge University agree: they’ve just received funding to recruit a Lego professorship of play in education, development and learning. The University’s Faculty of Education has will receive a total of $6 million in funding from the Lego Foundation which in part will help…

A New Way to Track Sperm Could Make IVF Easier

When men don’t have any sperm in their ejaculate and they’re trying for a baby with their partner, doctors try and extract the swimmers directly from their testicles instead. Success rates of the process are strangely low—but a new way of tracking sperm could help improve things. Usually, doctors blindly guess at where in the…

Can the Power Grid Survive a Cyberattack?

It’s very hard to overstate how important the US power grid is to American society and its economy. Every critical infrastructure, from communications to water, is built on it and every important business function from banking to milking cows is completely dependent on it. And the dependence on the grid continues to grow as more…

Maybe We Should Just Stop Worrying About Delivery Drones

It might not be sensible to go around shooting UPS delivery trucks. But the grandpa of Cedar Van Tassel makes a potentially insightful point in this cartoon: drones might be new, but society’s problems with them are rooted in perennial concerns. [Comic Nuggets]

Want to make an origami Discworld for your desk? The tumblr Folds Within Folds has a post all about how to make one.

How The Flash Effects Team Used Comics to Bring Gorilla Grodd to Life

One of the best things about The Flash’s first season was that it took on the challenge of Gorilla Grodd, a giant, talking, psychic gorilla. That would be a challenge on a movie budget, with a movie’s post-production time. The Flash did it for TV. In the case of Grodd, the show started working on…

The U.S. Navy Wants to Buy Zero-Day Security Flaws From You

Identified a security hole in a piece of well-known software? You could alert the maker to keep everyone safe — or you could sell it to the U.S. Navy, which will buy the information from you in order to build software to exploit the hole. Noted eagle eye and EFF Investigative Researcher Dave Maass happened…

North Korea Has Turned Off 3G Networks For Foreign Visitors

Visitors to North Korea now have another unusual observation to add to their list: they don’t have a shred of 3G data access during their trip. While North Koreans struggle to access the global Internet, restricted instead to domestic content, foreign visitors and residents can pay for 3G access which affords them relatively unrestricted access…

For The Soyuz Spacecraft, A “Soft” Landing Is Anything But

The massive cloud of dust thrown up by the soft landing of astronauts Terry Virts, Samantha Cristoforetti and Anton Shkaplerov when they returned from the International Space Station on Thursday makes it incredibly clear that “soft” is a relative term. The Soyuz spacecraft made a perfect soft landing near Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan on June 11, 2015.…

One Neighboring Galaxy Is a Bright Smear Across Space

The sphere surrounding the Milky Way is called the Local Volume, and it is 35 million lightyears in diameter. In the Local Volume is PGC 18431, a galaxy the Hubble caught as part of a mission to figure out how galaxies cluster and move. Explains The European Space Agency [via NASA]: Hubble’s high resolution allows…

There’s a Fallout Mobile Game, And It’s Available Right Now

During their presentation at the E3 show today, Bethesda didn’t just talk about Fallout 4; as it turns out, there’s also a Fallout game for mobile. And even better, it’s available right now (on iPad, at least). https://kotaku.com/fallout-shelter-announced-out-tonight-1711317184

This Is Why Having a Pet Dinosaur Is Just Like Having a Cat

Jurassic World may be thinking that dinosaurs are dangerous beasts hell bent on destruction, but We Have a Dinosaur makes a pretty compelling case that they’re really just big cats. Cats who hate your breakfast. Contact the author at [email protected].

Google’s Masterplan to Make Chrome Suck Less

Google Chrome has this slight problem where it hoards RAM and battery like Smaug hoards shiny things. It sucks, and it completely ruins an otherwise perfect browser. Apparently, Google is aware of Chrome’s problems, and it has a 12-step program to fix things. In a post on Google+, Peter Kasting, Senior Software Engineer on the…

Snapchat Is Adding Two-Factor Authentication, Finally

Snapchat’s security problems — and the company’s rather laid-back approach to fixing them — are infamous. But as of the latest version of the app, everyone’s favorite sexting app is making a big step in the right direction, thanks to the addition of an SMS log-in verification. The two-factor system works exactly as you’d expect,…