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New Documents Show Leading Climate Change Denier Is Full of Shit

New documents obtained by Greenpeace via freedom of information filings show that a leading climate change denier, Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, allegedly accepted $1.2 million over the past 14 years from energy companies and additionally failed to report conflicts of interest in his own research. Soon is a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for…

Update: Science Fiction Bookstore Borderlands Will Stay Open!

Here’s a huge chunk of happy news to brighten your Sunday: San Francisco’s scifi and fantasy bookstore, Borderlands, will stay open for at least another year thanks to a successful sponsorship campaign. YAY! If you’ll recall, the beloved institution (which we here at io9 are huge fans of, for many obvious reasons … and the…

Leaked Renders Show HTC’s New Flagship Phone From All Angles

HTC’s flagship phone, the One M9, is due to be announced a little over a week from now at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. You don’t have to wait to see it though, a new leak from Mobile Geeks looks to be preeeeetty on the money. The new images came from a few early online…

CastAR’s Vision of Augmented Reality Is Fun for the Whole Family

CastAR’s projected augmented reality specs have come a long way. Back in May 2013, the headset was little more than a hacked together idea by ex-Valve engineers, formed under the new company Technical Illusions. Then that idea grew with a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, and now the company has shipped its first developer headsets. To…

The Troubled Future of the World’s First Commercial Spaceport

Completed in October 2011, Spaceport America is an 18,000 acre commercial spaceport—the first of its kind in the world—that was going to be a major hub for SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, as each company toils away on developing the future of private spaceflight. It’s been more than three years since opening, and New Mexico is…

This Abandoned Hospital Isn’t From A Zombie Movie

Although this photo might look like a screengrab from a dystopian video game, or a made-for-TV zombie film, it’s actually taken in the middle of a bustling city in the UK. Mansfield General hospital opened for business in 1890, but the old hospital shut down in 1992. Although the site was sold off successfully, nothing…

There’s Still Plenty Of Time To Celebrate World Pangolin Day!

It’s the third Saturday in February, which means … it’s World Pangolin Day! (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati) This CNN post offers some ways to celebrate (get a pangolin tattoo!), with a link to this clip of Randall (the guy who let the world know that honey badgers don’t care) sharing some fun facts about everyone’s favorite…

Did an asteroid hasten the spread of black death in Europe? Dendrochronologist and author Mike Baillie says that tree rings “reveal a major event just before 1350. Something catastrophic,” similar to the Tunguska event, changed “the composition of the atmosphere and provided ideal conditions for a lethal infection to spread,” making the population more vulnerable…

This Crazy Chair Builds Itself

Building flat-pack furniture is a major pain in the ass, so much so that a MIT team has spent years and millions of dollars solving the problem. Actually, that’s not quite true: the problem they’re trying to solve is actually a far more exciting one, even if it won’t benefit Ikea quite yet. Wired has…

Scan Reveals This Buddha Statue Has A Mummy Inside

This is no ordinary Buddha statue. As the CT scan at the right clearly shows, there’s a mummy concealed inside! This fascinating artifact is currently on display as part of a mummy-themed exhibit at the Netherlands’ Drents Museum (link also offers a glimpse of a particularly rad cat mummy). It’s the first time the “Buddha…

Astronauts Take 7-Hour Spacewalk To Prepare ISS For Space Taxis

What’s worse than fiddling with cables? Trying to do it in vacuum, wearing gloves, with the sun setting every hour. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Tery Virts spent nearly seven hours to run just over 100 meters of cable reconfiguring the space station for the commercial crew program. Astronaut Terry Virts running cabling on the outside…

A Clever Push Pin Doesn’t Make Holes

Push pins and a corkboard are the most basic organisational tool around, but they kinda suck for photos — in order to stick them up, you stab a tiny hole through your grandma’s face. This neat alternative tries to solve that. Pon is a Kickstarter project that basically marries a paperclip to a thumbtack, meaning…

A World-Weary Puppy In Antarctica, Circa 1912

This poignant image (cheer up, buddy!) of a pup named “Blizzard” was taken in 1912 by Antarctic adventurer Frank Hurley, who two years later would be the photographer on Ernest Shackleton’s famed Endurance Expedition. This shot is from the First Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1911. Over a period of years, Hurley visited…

How ‘Defensive Architecture’ Is Ruining Our Cities

Cities have always struggled with the tension between the different needs of social classes who share the space. But as The Guardian documents, a new trend of defensive — and some times overtly hostile — architecture is changing the urban landscape, and not in a good way. Defensive architecture refers to modifications of buildings and…

Rumor: Taron Egerton Is Your New Han Solo

Wait, who? Get to know the name, because 25-year-old Welsh actor Taron Egerton, formerly known as “breakout star of Kingsman: The Secret Service” is rumored to be playing young Han Solo in the second standalone Star Wars film. (This builds on the rumor that the second standalone Star Wars film, slated for 2018, is actually…

Frozen Meets The Thing In This Adorably Vile Claymation Mash-Up

Animator Lee Hardcastle shares his latest creation, a lovingly gory, amazingly accurate claymation sequence that imagines what would happen if the Frozen gang enacted the blood-test scene from John Carpenter’s The Thing. The answer? Magic. Magic happens. Though it would prefer not to spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!

NASA Satellite Image Shows How Damn Cold It Is

Forget looking at historical temperature graphs and referencing how cold the North Pole is: to get your head around how goddamn frozen you are right now, just locate your house on this satellite picture, and let out a hollow, chilled laugh as you succumb to the hypothermia. https://gizmodo.com/nasa-satellite-image-shows-record-breaking-frozen-easte-1687069139

Why Do Cities Spark More Thunderstorms Than Rural Areas?

Some big cities, particularly those located in hot and humid environments, actually spawn more thunderstorms than surrounding rural areas. That’s the conclusion of a new study by Northern Illinois University researchers, which was published in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. The scientists found thunderstorm “births” were significantly higher on weekdays compared with weekend…

This Fantastic Supercut Celebrates 10 Years Of YouTube’s Best Videos

YouTube is celebrating 10 years of cat videos and Downfall parodies this month, and to celebrate, The Daily Conversation put 101 of the site’s most important, funniest and worst viral videos into this supercut. It’s a great look back at the decade of one of the internet’s biggest sites; it’s also a 16-minute primer on…

In Honor Of Lunar New Year, Here’s An Underwater Lion Dance

Happy Year of the Sheep! Here’s something you don’t see every day: divers performing a Chinese lion dance … underwater. With a big ol’ reptilian buddy providing some verrrry slow backup moves. This shot was taken at the Lunar New Year celebration February 19 at the Aquaria KLCC underwater park in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (AP…