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Last Man On Earth Solves Its Pesky Incest Problem

Phil and Carol have spent the last couple episodes of The Last Man on Earth trying to procreate so they can save the human race — but does that mean their kids will have to have kids with each other? Phil comes up with a plan to spread out the gene pool, but naturally, it…

The Strangest Discoveries That Made Me Fall in Love With Science Again

Even for people with the right inclination, the sciences aren’t always easy to enjoy. They’re exacting frustrating, and slow-to-advance — but also ever-changing. And sometimes, the most unexpected things can make you rediscover them all over again. Here are the strangest things that made me love each of the sciences. Top image: NGC 1999, image…

Why This Astronaut Thinks NASA Can Save Humanity From Extinction

Astronaut Daniel T. Barry thinks NASA’s mission to Mars is humanity’s most important endeavor yet, for reasons including the birth of Captain Kirk. We talked to him about what it’s like to explore the Final Frontier. I met Daniel T. Barry through Elliott Jessup, head of the California Academy of Sciences‘ “twilight zone” dive team…

I Used a 56K Modem for a Week and It Was Hell on Earth

In 1998, the year the first 56K modem was available for purchase, I was in the 8th grade. The 90s At that age anything that was not a video game was useless to me. Most of my reading material was still on paper. Porn was still the occasional nipple floating beneath a scrambled TV miasma.…

The Cutest Sock Puppets In The Universe, The Clangers, Are Back!

One of the weirdest things ever to air in British TV was The Clangers, a show about weird little creatures made of wool, who live on the Moon. (Doctor Who fans will remember it as the Master’s favorite TV show in “The Sea Devils.”) And now the Clangers are coming back after 40 years —…

Making a real life version of Link’s shield from The Legend of Zelda

Making a real life version of Link’s iconic Hylian Shield from the Legend of Zelda may be the most impressive weapon Man at Arms: Reforged has ever made. It required a perfect design, a lot of grunt work in curving the metal sheet, expert embossing and basically melting pieces of metal together to form the…

Last Year’s Breakout Novel Girl With All The Gifts Is Becoming A Movie

The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey was easily one of our favorite novels published last year — and Joss Whedon agreed with us. So it’s fantastic news that this book is becoming a movie called She Who Brings Gifts, starring Glenn Close. According to reports in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, besides…

Instagram’s New “Layout” App Lets You Cram Your Feed Full of Collages

Instagram is the photo-sharing app that also created the timelapse-creating app, too. Now, Instagram is looking to conquer another corner of the mobile photography world with Layout, an app for making Instagram-friendly collages. Launching today for iOS (and for Android in the coming months, as per usual), Layout basically does what third-party collage apps have…

Researchers Have Uncovered The Secrets Of The Velvet Worm’s Slime Jets!

The velvet worm hunts by bombarding its prey with a double barreled burst of slime. Now, scientists have figured out how these ooze-cannons work. GIF via NatGeoWild. Researchers led by Andrés Concha, of Adolfo Ibañez University in Santiago, used high speed video to determine that the velvet worm’s flailing slime cannons move too quickly to…

The Navy’s New Diving Suit Is Straight Out of G.I. Joe

The United States Navy recently announced a futuristic new diving suit that’s designed to use less helium. There’s only one problem: They made it look just like Cobra Eel, the mortal enemy of Wet-Suit, a G.I. Joe Navy SEAL. Images via U.S. Navy / Hasbro Contact the author at [email protected]. Public PGP key PGP fingerprint:…

This Mission: Impossible 5 Trailer Is As Ridiculous As It Needs To Be

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, a.k.a. Tom Cruise’s excuse to feel again, has released a big, bombastic trailer. And excuse me, but is that a GUN FLUTE? Let’s list off all the insane shit Cruise is seen doing in this trailer: Getting trapped in some sort of poison gas chamber. Riding VERY fast in a…

A DIY Classic Game & Watch Handheld Made With an Old Nokia Cellphone

Before the Game Boy came along, handheld gaming consoles were limited to just a single title, played on a low-quality segmented LCD display. At the time it was cutting edge stuff, but by today’s standards they kind of suck. So to scratch his nostalgic gaming itch, Instructables contributor Andrew Hannay built his own Game &…

The 9 Weirdest Implications Of The Many Worlds Interpretation

According to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, we live in an infinite web of alternate timelines. It’s a serious claim that carries some rather serious scientific, philosophical, and existential baggage. And here are the nine weirdest possible implications. Illustration by Tara Jacoby. A few years ago we did an explainer on the Many…

Closer Look At Play Arts Kai’s New Batman Reveals The Swishiest Bat-Cape

Last week we got a few teaser images for Play Arts Kai’s latest Batman figure, and while it wasn’t up to the usual craziness levels we’ve come to expect from Square-Enix, it looks great. However, new pictures reveals there is one, slightly kooky and fun aspect to the toy: a rotatable cape for maximum swooshiness.…

Math explains the best way to shuffle a deck of cards and why

Everyone who has played poker or even Go Fish knows the basics of shuffling cards. There’s the riffle shuffle (combining two halves of a decks and making a bridge), overhand shuffling (quickly splicing cards from the deck back into the deck) and regular ol’ mixing all the cards up on a table. Which way is…

Game Of Thrones Finally Admits The Show Will Spoil The Books

This was becoming increasingly obvious, but Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have finally confessed out loud the TV show adaptation, which looks to end several years before George R.R. Martin releases the series’ final volume, will be spoiling several aspects of the books. Here’s David Benioff speaking to the Oxford Union…

Marvel’s New Bi-Monthly Anthology Puts The Spotlight On Female Heroes

Marvel’s not been afraid to champion the female side of their roster recently, but now they’re going whole hog with a new anthology collection that will gather stories from their most prominent female-led comic series into one collection. Rolling under the banner of A-Force Presents — named for the upcoming all-female Avengers team that will…

The Trick to Hacking Top-Secret Computers: Just Add Heat 

Security researchers just found a way to hack into specially secured computer systems by sending messages using blasts of air. This is another example of how even the most walled-off systems can still get hacked. By messing with a computer’s thermal sensor, researchers at Ben-Gurion University were able to hack into air-gapped computers. Air-gapping is…

The Last 200 Years Of U.S. Immigration In One Chart

Just how much has the United States depended on immigrants to build itself throughout its history? This chart lays out the last few hundred years of the nation’s immigration rates to show how pivotal it was. The work of Natalia Bronshtein of Insightful Interaction, this chart uses data from the Department of Homeland Security’s Yearbook…

Hollywood heard you! Ruairí Robinson’s proof-of-concept film The Leviathan is on track to become a full-length feature. X-Men writer and producerSimon Kinberg has signed onto the project as producer with Neill Blomkamp onboard as executive producer. Let’s hope something great comes out of this.