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The Sad, Inevitable Oculus Rift Boob-Grabbing Game Is Here

You can do some cool shit with the Oculus Rift: You can simulate what flying feels like, or use it to pick out your next car. And if you have less experience with the female anatomy than Steve Carell in The 40 Year Old Virgin, now you can use it to simulate grabbing a handful…

​Stop Using The Term “Superclusters” —They Don’t Actually Exist

Earlier this week, we saw spectacular images of Laniakea, an enormous supercluster of galaxies that also holds the Milky Way. But astrophysicist Ethan Siegel says that supercluster is a meaningless term—a measurement of cosmic phantasms that have no real structure. Yes, there are clusters of galaxies, and they’re pretty impressive, often containing upwards of a…

Father And Son Forget A Key Part Of Their Yearly Offering To A Dark God

A man drives with his father to make their yearly sacrifice to some malevolent power. Fruit? Check. Animal bones? Check. But when they realize they’ve forgotten the most important component of their offering, they have to change their plans. Directed by Ryan Patch, The Offering is a tense film that is less about shocks than…

Animated Tron-Like Paint Jobs Are the Perfect Aftermarket Upgrade

Last year a company called Darkside Scientific wowed us with an electroluminescent paint known as LumiLor that was completely invisible under lights, but glowed with a bright intensity in the dark. And now the company has revealed an even cooler application of LumiLor: Giving a Tesla S an animated, glowing paint job. It’s a great…

Before Whale Falls, There Were Ichthyosaur Falls

When a whale dies out in the open ocean, its body slowly drifts to the seafloor, where it breathes life into a temporary ecosystem. But whales weren’t the first ones to live on after death; Jurassic giants did too. When a whale’s lifeless body finally rests on the ocean’s floor, tiny deep sea creatures turn…

James McAvoy Will Star In X-Men: Apocalypse, But His Hair Might Not

Actor James McAvoy, who plays Charles Xavier/Professor X in the nu-X-Men movie franchise, told HuffPo that the only thing he knows about his character in the upcoming, 1980s-set sequel Apocalypse that he believes he’s “losing my hair finally.” So check that off the list of cinematic X-universe discrepancies. I wonder how he’ll lose it. Will…

Seriously, Why Did Everybody Think This Movie Was So Scary?

Sometimes a movie comes out and everybody says it’s terrifying, so you go see it. And it’s no big deal — maybe there’s a jump scare or two, but basically you’re unmoved. What is the worst offender in this category? My pick is Insidious, which I know will make me unpopular — but what else…

Alan Moore Just Wrote A Novel So Enormous People Can’t Pick It Up

The acclaimed author of Watchmen has recently finished his second novel, Jerusalem. Two interesting facts about it: 1) it’s not set in Jerusalem, but Northampton, England, and 2) at over one million words, it’s almost twice the size of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Moore has said he doubts people will even be able to…

The NSA Was Going to Fine Yahoo $250K a Day If It Didn’t Join PRISM

When we first learned about NSA metadata collection, we wondered how readily the biggest tech companies acquiesced to the government. Today we start to find out. This is the story of how Yahoo was coerced into PRISM, as told by court documents cited by the Washington Post today. According to the documents, corroborated by a…

There’s a new Rocket Raccoon Toy out and it’s absolutely terrifying

The rush to capitalise on Guardians of the Galaxy’s box office success with tie in merchandise has lead to some pretty strange items – take this official Guitar and Guitar strap, for example – but none are quite so petrifying as this new Vinyl creation by Frank Kozik. Not even anime Rocket! https://gizmodo.com/the-guardians-of-the-galaxys-anime-debut-must-be-seen-t-1632599032 It’s not…

Concept Art Writing Prompt: The Horrors In The Ruins

This week, we have a very special animated Concept Art Writing Prompt, which combines a real New Jersey ruin with a pack of strange, gargantuan creatures. Can you spin a story inspired by this scene? Artist Kevin Weir transforms photographs from the US Library of Congress into weird and sometimes frightening animated GIFs. You can…

Plankton Makes This Dinosaur Toy Glow, Batteries Not Required

As the story goes, the folks at BioPop were trying to make a sustainable light that relied on something other than man-made batteries. They tried using a bioluminescent plankton called dinoflagellates, but the tiny creatures required too much intervention to be a practical light source. They would, however, make for a really neat desk toy,…

The Paradoxes That Define Our Relationship With Science Fiction

Science fiction is the literature of change and discovery. So there are no limits to how far a science fiction story can go… except for scientific plausibility. And yet, science fiction is created by and for human beings, with all our weird limitations. So here are eight paradoxes that shape our relationship with SF. Top…

The Top 100 Songs of All Time as Graphs and Diagrams

Billboard’s top 100 list of all time—well, of all time since the Hot 100 list began in 1958 anyway—is a nostalgia trip through American music of the past half century. Even if you’re a cold-hearted music snob, Nathan Yau’s charts and diagrams are a fun, clever spin on these familiar old songs. A few months…

Astrobiologists can now add a new term to their lexicon: The Venus Zone. It describes the area around a star in which a planet is likely to exhibit the inhospitable hell-like conditions found on the planet Venus. The concept will help astronomers determine which exoplanets are more analogous to Earth, and thus friendlier to alien…

Reading Harry Potter Could Make You A Better Person

Three studies suggest that J.K. Rowling’s storytelling style can sow the seeds of empathy in the minds of her readers. Over at Scientific American, Bret Stetka reports on a trio of studies led by University of Modena and Reggio Emilia psychologist Loris Vezzali that suggests the “greatest magic” of the Harry Potter series may be…

Candy Company Sorry Its Gummy Candy Came Out Penis-Shaped

You know that excited, blissful feeling that comes when you’re just about to chow down on a fresh pack of gummy bears, but then you notice you’re actually holding a fistful of penises? Because after a little mixup at the gummy bear factory, a whole bunch of kids in New Zealand do. And the company…

This Animated Field Guide To North American Butterflies Is Mesmerizing

Few infographs capture the liveliness of their subjects, but Eleanor Lutz’s lovely chart of 42 North American butterflies reminds us that these are living beings as each butterfly flaps its wings. Lutz, who blogs at Tabletop Whale, is a designer with a degree in molecular biology, and her infographs combine her interests in art and…

Bryan Fuller Promises To Keep American Gods‘ Orgasm Of Death Scene

The long-awaited television adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is moving forward, helmed by Pushing Daisies and Hannibal’s Bryan Fuller. Naturally, we’re nervous, but this recent interview with Fuller has calmed many of our fears. Spoiler talk ahead. In an lengthy interview with Den of Geek (which we highlighted earlier today), Fuller outlined a few…

The Natural Moss on This Wooden Bookcase Is Preserved Forever in Resin

Your usual piece of wooden furniture—cut, sanded, painted— bears little resemblance to the tree it came from. So to create the Undergrowth bookcase, Italian design duo Alcaroldeliberately took the opposite tack, preserving the unhewn edges of their lumber—moss and lichen and all. The oak wood itself comes from logs found in the undergrowth of the…