Latest

A Chart Of The Most Commonly Used Keys Shows Our Actual Musical Tastes

Switching a song into a different key can entirely change the way that song feels. So what does this chart, which shows which musical keys are most commonly used, tell us about the way we actually like to listen to music? Spotify’s Kenny Ning put together this chart of the most commonly used song keys…

A Terrifying Tale Of Greed, Copycat Schemes, And Cyanide-Laced Medicine 

Nobody was ever convicted in the 1982 Chicago Tylenol Murders. But in 1986, when two Seattle-area people died after ingesting Excedrin laced with cyanide, Stella Nickell was nabbed for the copycat crime; one of the victims was her husband. Nearly 30 years later, the case hasn’t gotten any less bizarre. The tale, chronicled in Gregg…

Marvel Confirms Scarlet Witch And Quicksilver Are No Longer Mutants

In the run-up to their appearance in Age of Ultron, much hubbub was made over the true origins of Pietro and Wanda Maximoff. At first the comics cast doubt on Magneto’s parentage of the mutant twins, and then Marvel’s own movie altered their origin once more. And now, it’s been retconned again. A new page…

Making a cube in a cube in a cube from one block of metal is impressive

There is probably some negotiation with the Earth’s magnetic poles or some sort of magic going on here because somehow this guy is able to make a cube inside a cube inside a cube from a metal block. I have no idea what’s going on in the video half the time but watching the block…

Even An Android Would Cry At These Age Of Ultron Toys

Hot Toy’soddly adorable line of “Artist Mix” vinyl toys is back, and although there’s lots of cool looking stuff to be seen, let’s be real: The best of the bunch is the wonderful little vinyl Vision. Eschewing the company’s usual brand of jaw-droppingly lifelike (and ridiculously articulated) for a chunky Vinyl style, Hot Toy’s collaboration…

Stars Get All Lopsided And Slosh Around Before Exploding

Stars may be spherical, but that doesn’t mean they explode in a symmetrical and uniform fashion. As a new study shows, stars dramatically writhe and contort before going supernova, blasting their cores in one direction and ejected material in another. Supernova 1987A (Credit: ESA/Hubble/NASA). The new study by astrophysicists from UC Berkeley and the California…

13 Years of Cloud-Watching Makes a Beautiful Visual of the Earth

This beautiful map shows an average of all of the available cloud observations from the Aqua satellite. The shades of blue represent the cloudiness of our planet. The visual is based on data acquired from July 2002 until April 2015, offering a top-down view that shows where the satellite’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer saw clouds…

BOOMco’s New Dartsplosion Fires 72 Rounds Ensuring Total Dart Supremacy

A lot of blaster fans were skeptical when Mattel decided it wanted a piece of Hasbro’s near-dominant marketshare; after all, we were all weened on Nerf weaponry. But the BOOMco line has so far delivered some impressive blasters, and its new 72-round Dartsplosion looks like it’s poised to snatch the crown from Nerf’s giant Rhino-Fire.…

How to Use the Bento App for an Ultra-Personalized Android Home Screen

There are plenty of alternative Android launchers looking to replace your stock experience—Nova, Apex and Aviate among them—but Bento is designed to take on Google Now at what it does best: personalization. The launcher’s features include smart app sorting, prioritized notifications and embedded app information and here’s how to set it up. Right now Bento…

Dark Star Offers A Melancholy, Intimate Portrait Of Artist H.R. Giger

There’s a sadness running through Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World — a portrait of the Swiss artist whose most famous creation was the title character in Alien. It comes from knowing that its subject died last year. But the mood suits this appreciative study of a man who counted fear and death among his muses.…

The Reason We Won’t Have Autonomous Cars Any Time Soon

Driving a car is easy. Engine on, eyes open, foot on the gas and you’re all set. So why is it taking autonomous cars so long to learn? Right now, a fleet of self-driving cars is cruising the roads of Mountain View daily—along with some smaller fleets of custom prototypes that Google’s also testing in…

Why Flies May Be the Future of Forensic Science

We still know very little about the insect species that colonise a cadaver. But the latest published study from Sibyl Bucheli’s lab at Sam Houston State University, Texas, suggests they are far more diverse than we had previously imagined. The study was led by Bucheli’s former PhD student Natalie Lindgren, who placed four cadavers on…

Scott K. Johnson at Ars Technica examines the history of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the many different theories about how the mountains came to be and whether they’ve been growing or shrinking over time. It’s a more complicated issue than you’d think .

Some Worker Bees Are Secretly Asexual Double Agents

Worker bees are mindless, cooperative robots who stick to their hives their entire life… with one exception. One study of the large-earth bumblebee discovered worker bees were raising drones that somehow contained the genes of different hives. So where did they come from? Queen bees, after a mating flight, lay eggs that turn into mostly…

This GIF Party Cannot Be Stopped

No need to keep it to yourself, folks! There’s plenty of GIF party here for us all. What did you do this week? Did you go someplace exciting? Did you make a new friend? Did you finish a longstanding project or kick one off? Tell us all about it using our most truly universal language:…

Wait, Is This River Floating?

NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly just tweeted this photo, that he took from aboard the International Space Station. You can see the Bighorn River, which stretches through Wyoming and Montana… and, wait, why does it look like it’s floating? The explanation for this optical illusion is known as relief inversion, and you may often experience it…

Bird Strike Does Disturbing Damage To The Nose Of A 737

Looking at the caved-in nose of this Boeing 737-800, you’d think it flew into a flying water buffalo. But the damage was caused by a single bird — a potent reminder of what can happen when objects collide at high speed. The incident occurred earlier this week during Turkish Airlines flight TK2004 from Istanbul to…

This Image Shows Just How Much Electron Microscopes Have Improved

Cryo-electron microscopes are used to understand the microscopic work in exquisite detail—but until now, they’ve struggled to capture images at the atomic and molecular level. That’s changing. A new paper, published in Science, reveals that researchers from the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, have been pushing the technique’s abilities to its limits.…

The Strangest New Star Wars Rumor Isn’t Even About The Force Awakens

Kevin Feige discusses the Marvel universe post-Infinity War. Hugh Jackman says Wolverine 3 will be his last film as the character. The Arrow/Flash spinoff gets a name and synopsis. Plus casting news for Fear The Walking Dead, Shadowhunters, and the Annihilation movie. So many spoilers! Top image: Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Star Wars Episode…

The Answer to Tackling Superbugs Could Be More Superbugs

Hard-to-kill bacteria or “superbugs” have become a major problem for hospitals. Between 5% and 12% of hospital patients in the EU are thought to acquire an infection during their stay, with many caused by bacteria such as Clostridium difficile (C. diff) that are resistant to antibiotics. In the US, C. diff is the leading cause…