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Ancient Europeans were lactose intolerant for 5,000 years after switching over to agriculture. DNA extracted from skulls dating from 5,700 BC to 800 BC shows that Europeans carried the genes for lactose intolerance. But that didn’t stop them from eating dairy products like milk and cheese for 4,000 years. The study shows that genomes can…

MIT’s Science Fiction Society Has 60,000 Books And Some Zany Traditions

Reason number 5,000,000,000 to wish you’d gone to MIT… There’s a great article in MIT News Magazine about the MIT Science Fiction Society, with its incredibly awesome library. Which started with a wooden crate dragged between dorm rooms in 1949 and is now a massive storehouse of awesome. According to one chemistry grad student, D.W.…

Hot Chip: I Feel Better

Music videos allow artist to convey profound emotions: Joy. Sorrow. Bliss. Anger. It’s also capable, in rare instances, of making you nearly pee your pants with laughter. Such is the case with Hot Chip’s classic 2010 video for I Feel Better. The video starts off with a slick performance from a fictional boy band called…

iPad Air 2 Teardown: Slimmer Body, Smaller Battery

The iPad Air 2 is probably most impressive for its design. The original was super slim, and somehow Apple managed to make the new iteration even thinner. But as iFixit’s teardown of the new tablet reveals, that hot design comes with a smaller battery. Maybe it’s not totally surprising that the battery got smaller. You…

Adrianne Palicki’s Mockingbird Outfit On Agents Of SHIELD Is SO GOOD

You may have seen the first Marvel Cinematic Universe appearance of Bobbi Morse, the agent codenamed Mockingbird, in last night’s Agents of SHIELD. But you haven’t seen her in her official Mockingbird superhero outfit, because Marvel just released the first pic — and it’s damn near perfect. Now that’s a suit that would look 100%…

This Is How We Imagined Aerial Warfare 120 Years Ago

These gorgeous illustrations from the late nineteenth century reveal what people imagined air combat would be like in the future. It’s pretty spectacular — and weirdly prescient, too. These illustrations come from the novels The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror and its sequel Olga Romanoff (also known as The Syren…

Wild mountain goats in the Italian Alps have gotten significantly smaller over the past few decades in response to a warming climate. Call us crazy, but rising seas seems a small price to pay for adorable tiny goats. Thanks, global warming!

Which States Have The Most Restrictive Voting Laws?

Republican candidates are poised to gain next month from new election laws in almost half the states in the U.S., where additional requirements defy a 50-year trend of easing access to the polls. This infographic shows where it’s the most difficult to cast your ballot. As Bloomberg Politics notes: In North Carolina, where Democratic U.S.…

You Probably Never Realized How Marble Is Harvested, But It’s Beautiful

Ever wondered how marble is quarried? The process, documented in this stunning short by Italian artist and filmmaker Yuri Ancarani, is utterly transfixing. Assorted observations: It’s a little unreal how beautiful this is. I never realized that raw marble is harvested in colossal slabs from the sides of mountains. That is just unreal. The quarry…

Which Series Did You Love — Until It Killed Your Favorite Character?

Death adds real stakes to a fictional universe. If nobody ever dies, then nothing feels real. And yet some deaths don’t just diminish us all, they just plain ruin a series. For good. Which science fiction or fantasy series lost its heart, or just became less good generally, when one character died? Please include a…

More Damning Evidence That Dr. Oz’s Green Coffee Bean Diet Is A Scam

Earlier this year, the fat-burning effects of green coffee bean extract – an extract touted by daytime TV’s Dr. Oz as a “miraculous” weight-loss aid – were called into question by the Federal Trade Commission. Now, the 2012 study purporting to demonstrate the extract’s effectiveness has been retracted. “The sponsors of the study cannot assure…

The FCC Just Released 2,444,672 Public Comments About Net Neutrality

The FCC’s proposed “Open Internet” rule is the single most commented-on rulemaking in the history of the agency, with nearly 4 million submissions to date. The FCC just dumped all of the words from the second commenting period, which ran from July 19th-September 15. The dump of 2,444,672 comments dwarfs the already massive heap of…

These ‘sexy’ Lord of the Rings costume designs aren’t what you’d expect

It’s less than 10 days to go till Halloween, and that means there’s weird, wonderful and just plain awful ‘sexy’ costumes out on shelves everywhere – but this trio of lovely Lord of the Rings-themed designs by MJ Alexander are for characters who don’t usually get the Sexy treatment. https://gizmodo.com/the-weirdest-and-sexiest-store-bought-halloween-costu-1644205377 Alexander’s designs aren’t your typical…

UFO Soap Pumps: Take Me To Your Lever

If you’ve seen War of the Worlds, then it only makes sense that if an alien race were to visit our planet, they’d be pretty strict about personal hygiene before making contact with humans. Those tiny bacterial organisms all over our hands pose a real threat to extraterrestrials, so what better way to scrub up…

Google Can’t Fix What’s Really Wrong With Email: Us

Today Google announced an ambitious project called Inbox, a new way to manage your Gmail that looks like an absolute godsend. There is, however, one thing that Google’s clever engineering won’t fix, and might actually make worse: The humans sending the emails. “We get more email now than ever,” say the Inbox team in their…

Scare Your Neighbors With These DIY Halloween Decorations

Still worrying over Halloween decorations? We’ve got you covered. We scoured the Internet for the best of the best Halloween goodies and brought you a list of the greatest gags and boos. Some are simple, DIY, cheapy-cheap creations; others may take a bit of finesse. But they are all sensational. Head in a Jar! This…

Read Our Exclusive Excerpt from Gail Carriger’s Waistcoats & Weaponry

Gail Carriger has been burning up the bestseller lists with her Finishing School series, and now you can read an exciting excerpt from book three, Waistcoats & Weaponry. Warning: Bladed fans ahead! Here’s a plot summary of the book, from the publisher: Sophronia continues her second year at finishing school in style—with a steel-bladed fan…

We could have had AC 50 years earlier but the ice lobby killed it

With another sweltering summer over you might have already forgotten the glory of your AC unit, the 100-year-old modern convenience which truly changed the way we live. But the U.S. might have felt the cool breeze of relief a half-century sooner, if an entire industry built on keeping things frozen hadn’t stopped the first air…

Cybercriminals Are Using Cloud Storage to Hoard Stolen Files

Cybercriminals: They’re just like us! At least, their choice of cloud storage isn’t so far off from your average non-despicable data thief. Instead of using dedicated servers to hoard stolen data, hackers have taken to using popular consumer products like Google Drive and Dropbox. “What it comes down to is, the criminals are using the…

This Tale Of An Owl Starts As A Nature Film—And Ends As A Revenge Flick

At first, The Hidden Life of the Burrowing Owl seems to be an animated nature film, explaining the life and ecology of its subject. But after the cartoon turns tragic, it becomes clear that you don’t want to mess with this burrowing owl. Animator Mike Roush wrote and directed this mix of animation and photography,…