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Space This Week

It’s time for another link-round-up of space-related stories that we didn’t cover this week! Consequences of the impending El Niño for 60 locations around the United States. Science history! How Apollo 12 Helped Solve the Skydiver Meteorite Mystery Building the Giant Magellan Telescope Astronomy graduate students can apply for a summer school on Education &…

Thousands of Tons of Nazi Chemical Weapons Are Hiding in the Baltic Sea

When the Nazis surrendered their weapons at the end of World War II, the Allies got rid of them in a way that made sense in the 1940s: they dumped it all into the water. Mustard gas and other chemical weapons—estimates ranging from 13,000 to 300,000 tons—are now slowly leaking into the Baltic Sea. The…

Okay, Why Wasn’t This Iron Man 3‘s Credit Sequence?

Seriously, what’s better than Iron Man credits, set to the “The Stripper,” that feature a dancing animated suit coming apart? Nothing. The answer is nothing. Higher quality video can be found at Art of the Title’s interview with creative director Danny Yount, who says of this bit of concept art: The first presentation I did…

Game of Thrones Creator Says Drones Are Worse Than The Dothraki

Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has definitely come up with some of the most shocking ways to kill people, from gasp-inducing beheadings to blood-spattered Red Weddings. But in an interview with Rolling Stone, Martin says the way we engage in modern warfare is far more brutal. When speaking about the remorse that some…

Pro-Science Religious Terrorists Are Orphan Black‘s Creepiest Foes Yet

Wow. Our clones had four very separate threads last night, and the biggest moments took place far from the Dyad. Secrets were revealed, quips were quipped, and one of our clones has found herself in deep, deep trouble. At first, it looked like this episode was going to be slower and quieter than the premiere,…

Nine Eyes in the Pacific Ocean

Mataiva Atoll is a single island in the Tuamotu Archipelago, a small part of the longest chain of atolls in the world. An atoll is just a ring-shaped island, a sandy reef with a central lagoon, but Mataiva is a little bit strange. Mataiva’s lagoon has internal structure. Along with that whole evolution-thing for animals,…

That Time Scientists Secretly Used Spanish Fly to Give Kids Blisters

“Spanish fly” refers to an actual chemical – one that is much more likely to cause blisters than arousal. It’s still not okay to expose kids to it, but a secret experiment in the 1950s did exactly that. Spanish fly, the drug that is supposed to induce uncontrollable arousal in those who eat it, comes…

Adorable Tokyo Metro Posters Remind Passengers to Be Polite

Since 1974, Tokyo’s Metro has created cute, quirky posters for their subway system to remind passengers of proper etiquette. Each fiscal year they roll out a new set of characters as the ambassadors of good manners, and for 2014 they’ve just revealed a new mascot (he’s the lion in the center poster). New posters appear…

Astronomers Have Discovered A Star That’s As Cold As Ice

A very strange object called WISE J085510.83-071442.5 lies just 7.2 light-years from the earth. Discovered by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), it is nominally one of those not-quite-planets-not-quite-stars known as a brown dwarf. Because they are so much smaller and cooler than stars, brown dwarfs appear red and faint. But astronomer Kevin Luhman noticed…

The Still-Frozen Great Lakes Could Mean Cold Temperatures All Summer

Last time we checked in with the Great Lakes, it was in the bone-chilling depths of the Polar Vortex, and a record-breaking 88 percent of the lakes were frozen. Now, here we are, at the end of April, and the lakes are still 30 percent frozen, which could mean a colder summer for the country.…

Rare Indian Burial Ground Quietly Destroyed for Million Dollar Houses

A 4,500-year-old American Indian burial ground—one of the richest and best preserved found in California in the past century—has been paved over for a multimillion dollar housing development in the Bay Area. And archeologists are pissed. One angry archeologist had this amazing quip in the San Francisco Chronicle, which broke the story. “The developer was…

This Trick Will Let You See Anything Without Glasses

If you’re ever in a fix without glasses but need to see, this trick lets you see the world again—however blurry you vision is. Minute Physics explains the science behind the trick, which just requires you to make a tiny little hole with your hand to peer through. Somehow, magically, it brings a blurry world…

This Week’s Top Comedy Video: Bald Earth

Earth’s climate is changing, and the evidence is clear—with the loss of the polar ice caps, earth is obviously going bald. But the debate rages on: does a bald earth need help, or can our planet’s chrome dome be downright sexy? For the rest of this week’s top comedy videos, head on over to SplitSider.…

Fabulous New Illustrations for a Steampunk Homage to Jules Verne

Mahendra Singh is an illustrator best known for work that is meticulously researched, intelligent to the point of phosphorescence and executed with obsessive craftsmanship. It should go without saying, then, that his illustrations for steampunk Jules Verne tribute 20 Trillion Leagues Under the Sea are nothing short of fantastic. I first met Mahendra—a self-described “ink-stained…

​At Last, Continuum Gives Us The Meeting We’ve Been Waiting For

You have to give it to Continuum. Most shows would have made us wait a whole season for the meeting that takes place in the clip above. But the Canadian time-travel show just jumps straight ahead… although the meeting doesn’t play out the way we’d have expected. Spoilers ahead… So yeah, the two Alecs have…

Witness the Tragedy of the World’s Last Reader With The Twilight Zone

Old troves and the newly-discovered intrigue around them was sort of our theme today, what with the discovery of decades-old Atari game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. It’s a theme that always gets me thinking of one of The Twilight Zone’s most influential episodes: “Time Enough at Last.” Henry Bemis is a beleaguered bookworm…

This little alien monster is fundamental to cancer research

Cool scanning electron microscope image taken by Annie Cavanagh and David McCarthy: A zebra fish larva 32 hours after hatching from its egg. Zebra fish are one of the fundamental cornerstones of cancer, cardiovascular, immune system, infectious diseases and drugs research in laboratories all over the world. It looks like an alien monster at this…

Does Digital Media Make Physical Artifacts Obsolete?

Today, diggers unearthed a cache of Atari 2600 game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. Game aficionados have told the urban legend around the buried games for decades. Now I’m wondering: in a world of digital-only media, will this sort of discovery cease to exist? What do you think? I’m sort of torn about it.…

This Mystery Bike Lock’s Hidden Keyhole Makes it Un-Pickable

Picking a lock is surprisingly easy with practice. So the makers of this mystery bike lock came up with a brilliant and novel solution: bury the keyhole deep inside the lock mechanism. It’s unpickable, because you simply can’t get your picks into the lock. And it’s got lock picking hobbyists stumped. We’re not sure where…

This week in Tech Reads: how data from Apollo 12 debunked the “skydiver meteorite,” facial recognition software that performs better than the human brain, a literary easter egg on Amazon’s Kindle, and more, more, more! Philip Metzger explains how Apollo 12 discoveries proved that the “meteorite” caught on video whizzing by a Norwegian skydiver was…