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The Practical Way to Get that Martian Colony You’ve Been Wanting

Over at The Nib, Zach Weinersmith has a hilarious webcomic about how scientists get government funding these days. These are just the first couple of panels — if you want to see how it all turns out, head over to The Nib on Medium.

Disturbing Pollution Map of California Confirms that Freeways Are Evil

Reporters at the Los Angeles Times have used data from the California EPA to put together a fascinating interactive map that shows levels of pollution, water toxicity, and ozone concentrations over California. Surprise — most of the environmental impact is around freeways. You can visit the map to search for any region you’d like within…

Thoughts for Your Penny: The One-Cent Piece Is Worth a Century of Type

Every few years, there are calls to retire the American penny (as cumbersome and too expensive to produce), and rebuttals to preserve it (for posterity and price stability). I don’t know how or when this question will be answered. Personally, I would not miss the gobs of metal in my pockets, but I would miss…

Scientists finally reveal secret origin behind 1960s deep ocean mystery

An international team of researchers have finally discovered the source of a weird, low-frequency rhythmic sound that has puzzled scientists and submarine sonar operators for more than half a century. Listen to it. No kaijus, folks. It’s the Antarctic minke whale or Balaenoptera bonaerensis. The fact that the sound appeared “in higher and lower latitudes…

Yet Another Green/White Census Map

Hey, look! It’s another, “Which census districts are empty?” map, this time for France. Interestingly, this map is a population density map in one-kilometer grids, lacking the harsh borders of census tracts as in the maps we’ve looked at recently. Green marks areas with no census-residents; white marks areas with census-residents. Image credit: @matamix. Thanks…

The 10 Weirdest Calculations You Can Make Online Right Now

Chances are, you’ve used one of the many useful calculating tools available online: How much would a monthly mortgage cost me with today’s interest rates? What time is it on another continent? But there are far more exotic and weird calculators on the Internet. Here are ten of the most unusual. 1) Build Your Home…

Descend Into the Weird, Dark World of Unseen YouTube Videos

With 100 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, no one human being will ever be able to bear witness to even a fraction of YouTube’s plentiful bounty. But now, thanks to Petit Tube, we can at least graze the surface of all the weird, wonderful, an often disturbing clips that might otherwise…

Chat About The Latest Nikola Tesla Biography With The Author

Welcome to the Paleofuture Book Club, where we discuss the coolest books about retro-futures and the history of technology! Today we’re talking about Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson. The book is, of course, about the late inventor Nikola Tesla and we have the author joining us to take your questions.…

Feel What It’s Like to Drown With This Terrifying Simulator

Forget coffee. If you’re still in dire need of a little morning boost, we guarantee that nothing will be quite as effective as the adrenaline rush you’ll get from swimming for your life in this online drowning simulator. This is not for the faint of heart. The stress-inducing site comes courtesy of Sortie En Mar,…

Beware The Batman Will Return In The Most Embarrassing Way Possible

When last we heard of Beware the Batman, WB’s latest DC animated series, it had been mysteriously yanked from the Saturday morning DC Nation block after a mere 11 episodes. Now CN will finally air the remaining 15… but at 3:00 am on Saturday nights. The show will join the Toonami block at the impressively…

Why the HBO-Amazon Deal Is Good for Everyone (Except Netflix)

HBO and Amazon just put a ring on it with a giant, multi-year deal that will put HBO originals on Amazon Prime exclusively. Woooooo! That means you don’t need an HBO subscription to watch old episodes of everything from the Wire to Eastbound & Down. And in this game of everything-but-Game-of-Thrones, everyone wins; Amazon, HBO,…

More People Need To Know About Carolyn Porco

We didn’t think it was possible to love Carolyn Porco – team lead of NASA’s Cassini Mission – any more than we already did. We were wrong. This interview – in which Porco discusses her fascination with astronomy and planets, and how that fascination led her down her remarkable career path – was conducted by…

Chat with the Woman Who Photographs the World’s Oldest Living Things

Artist Rachel Sussman has traveled to all seven continents in her tireless quest to document millennia-old lichen, moss, bacteria, trees, shrubs, and even underground forests. Her book, The Oldest Living Things in the World, gathers 30 of these specimens into one gorgeous volume. Sussman has been working closely with biologists and other scientists on this…

The First All-Drone Band Is Actually Pretty Good

Drones can be used for so much more than delivering Amazon packages and killing people! For instance, they can also play a pretty mean cover of “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” KMel Robotics designed and programmed the hexrotors to play it and other songs, and the drones’ first live performance will be USA Science & Engineering Festival…

This Utility Truck Can Exterminate a Pothole Every 120 Seconds

Getting crews out to patch roads is sometimes more trouble than its worth. It snarls traffic for hours at a time, costs counties and states hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and typically only fixes the problem for a short time. But this gravel-blasting utility truck aims to make the permanent patch process faster than…

Nightmare: Disney Turning “It’s A Small World” Ride Into A Movie

Disney has decided to turn the nightmare song loop that is their “It’s A Small World” ride into a feature film. Good luck getting this song out of your head today. Originally created for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, no one at Disney thought it would become an iconic section of each theme park…

Chemical reactions that look like sorcery

This is not a video trick. A person pours a transparent liquid and, suddenly, it turns black. It’s the magic of chemistry, Mr. White. The reaction above is called the iodine clock reaction, which is a classic demonstration of chemical kinetics. But there are others, more complex and cooler than this. The Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillating reaction…

Unravel the Mysteries Of the Arduino With This Crash Course Starter Kit

If there’s one common feature among all the cool hacks and DIY projects you’ll find online these days, it’s that they’re usually made with an Arduino microcontroller of some sort. But if you lack the programming and electronics know-how to use an Arduino to bring your own creations to life, this simple starter kit will…

If you’re in the Berkeley area tonight, 4/23, come see io9 editor Annalee Newitz talk about mass extinction and survival at Moe’s Books. That’s at 7:30 in the venerable bookstore’s basement, and admission is free. See you there … if you survive!

​Why That Game Of Thrones Scene Upset Us More Than The Red Wedding

Greetings, all! Your friendly neighborhood post-apocalyptic fake mailman here, ready to answer your letters! And, apparently, deliver a bunch of Chinese restaurant menus? I have no idea where they’re coming from. I just open my mailbag and they’re already in there. It’s kind of freaking me out. Spoilers for this past weekend’s Game of Thrones…