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Behold Mophie’s Mil-Spec Waterproof Battery Case For the iPhone

Mophie has long made some of the best backup batteries and battery cases you can get. The company’s upgrading its line of Juice Pack cases for the iPhone with a new model that’s waterproof. Not even a toilet can conquer your iPhone now. The new Juice Pack H2PRO provides 2750mAh of backup power for your…

Martin Freeman Joins the Already Huge Captain America: Civil War Cast

Captain America: Civil War just got even more crowded. Martin Freeman (The Hobbit, Sherlock) has just joined the Marvel universe in an unnamed role. Could he be Spider-Man? Of course not, although that would be hilarious. Freeman will debut his character in Civil War, which is slated for May 6, 2016 — and the next…

Big Whales Have Nerves Like Bungee Cords

This nerve can stretch to twice its resting length. Did you just squirm? If you did, you probably know that the nerves of vertebrates are notoriously inelastic things, and that stretching them even a little bit can result in painful injury. But the nerve in this image is special. In fact, it’s evolved to stretch…

Chemistry Is Easier To Learn When It’s Disguised As a Card Game

Putting “I won three games in a row” on your resume probably isn’t going to get you in the door at Dow Chemical, but a new card game called Ion that has players attempting to make compounds using the element cards they’ve been dealt could certainly be a solid first step towards getting your PhD…

Tuesday Game Room: Out With The New Order, In With The Old Blood Edition

It’s time to return to Castle Wolfenstein (no, not that Return to Castle Wolfenstein) this week as the surprisingly good Wolfenstein: The New Order gets some more DLC. But that’s not all for this week’s gaming — come tell us what you’ve been playing in this week’s edition of Tuesday Game Room! What have you…

Microsoft Surface 3 Review: The Tablet I Want At The Price I Don’t

I’m dancing on the grave of Microsoft’s original Surface tablet, and I feel no remorse. It’s hard to feel sad—it was a beautifully crafted ten-inch tablet that ran a crippled version of Windows. It was awful. Now it’s dead, and I’ve got a way better tablet. I’m so happy. What Is It? It’s a cheaper,…

Microsoft’s Surface 3 tablet goes on sale today, and you can trade in an old, busted Surface RT for $150 off. Read our review first? [Microsoft]

Watch dogs shake colorful paint off themselves in slow motion

Pour a dog some paint and it might just give you a Jackson Pollock painting in return. This slow motion video that’s supposed to help awareness for dog adoption shows dogs splattering paint onto the walls by shaking themselves dry. It’s kind of funny to see the colors leap off the dog. SPLOID is delicious…

A Total Solar Eclipse Makes the Arctic Look Like an Alien World 

The solar eclipse in March has been photographed to death—from every which angle and even from space. But here’s a late contender for what may be the evocative photos of the eclipse yet: a glowing black dot over a barren snowscape, as captured by astronomers observing the sun’s magnetic field. Back in March, the Solar…

io9 Book Club Is In Session: Let’s Talk About The Mechanical!

Welcome to the monthly meeting of the io9 Book Club. This month, we’ve read The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis. Jump into comments to get started talking about it! What is this io9 Book Club all about? We meet once a month to discuss a book we’ve all read together, and then we have an online…

I Got Skimmed in Mexico

When I got back from vacation in Mexico, my bank sent me an alarming email with the subject “Declined Purchases,” which struck me as weird because I didn’t get declined the whole trip. The bank listed the locations—a perfume store and an Autozone in a town I didn’t visit—and I yelled: “I’ve been skimmed!” “You’ve…

Most Young Americans Think Premarital Sex is No Big Deal

American attitudes about sex continue to change, from one generation to the next. A new study from San Diego State University using data from the General Social Survey, published today in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, shows that Millennials are more likely to think premarital sex is OK than their Boomer or Gen-X parents —…

This Little Guy Proves That Australia Was Always A Penal Colony

This is a monito de monte, a little faux-monkey that hops around South America. He’s a very special kind of marsupial, one that proves that Australia was always the where all the oddballs were abandoned, only to thrive. The monito de monte’s name gives you a hint as to where it comes from. Spanish? Mountains?…

San Francisco’s Plan to Turn Stadium Parking Into Affordable Housing

The affordable housing crisis in San Francisco has reached a fever pitch, with even George Lucas helping out. Here’s another smart solution that chips away at the problem: Swapping a parking lot with a new neighborhood, courtesy of one of the city’s most influential landowners, the San Francisco Giants. Right now, the swath of bayfront…

These customized Avengers Lego Minifigs are incredibly detailed

To Lego’s credit, given how tiny its minifigs are, they already come with an impressive amount of detail. But if you’ve been slowly building your own Lego Avengers team and find all the Age of Ultron minifigs lacking, get inspired by YouTuber michaelmgf’s incredible customizations that take detailing to a whole new level. A steady…

This Vampire-like Suction Device Lets Patients Draw Blood At Home

Patients dealing with cancer or infectious diseases require frequent blood tests to monitor their conditions. And though important, frequent trips to the doctor to give samples can be very time-consuming. But a small device called the HemoLink that uses gentle vacuum pressure promises to let patients easily draw their own blood at home. Using the…

That Horrible Starfish Disease May Be Spreading To Northern Waters

There’s a plague currently afflicting starfish along the North American West Coast. Called sea star wasting disease, it’s a terrifying affliction that causes echinoderms to tear themselves apart. Now, for the first time ever, the disease has been spotted in northern waters—a possible consequence of global warming. The recent discovery of sea star wasting disease…

What It’s Like To Live In a Tiny Apartment Inside America’s Oldest Mall

The average new US home is about 2,600 square feet. You’ll get less than ten percent of that in these micro-apartments, which at their smallest are just 225 feet and make an art of fitting a life into a very sweet-looking closet. Core77’s Rain Noe brings us a video of the “micro-lofts” at the Arcade…

9 Dumbest Ways To Reboot The Marvel Movie Universe

Avengers: Age of Ultron launches Phase 3 of Marvel’s movie universe. Which means even more interconnected stories, and brings us closer to the inevitable time when the universe is crushed under its own weight and has to restart from scratch. Here are the nine absolute worst ways that Marvel could reboot its movies. And yes,…

US Air Force F-16 Thunderbirds don’t even look like planes in this photo

I never get sick of photos of the USAF Thunderbirds doing their thing because they make real life look way cooler than any sort of movie or video game or fake effects. This picture of four Thunderbirds doing the “Diamond Bottom Up Pass maneuver” is taken at such an angle that they don’t even look…