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Listen to the Butt Song from Hell written on a 500-year-old painting

One section of Hieronymus Bosch’s massive triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights depicts a hellish chorus singing a song painted on the buttocks of a sinner. Now a musician has transcribed it into modern notation for our asinine listening pleasure. Amelia, a music and information systems student at Oklahoma Christian University, decided to figure out…

Flash fiction contest judged by Kim Stanley Robinson. The “3 Minute Futures” contest is looking for 500-600-word near-future hard science-fiction stories, and the top three entries will be turned into radio plays by Gates McFadden’s Ensemble Studio Theatre/Los Angeles. Top image: Baharian City from Warhammer 40K

​God’s 12 Biggest Dick Moves in the Old Testament

Before Jesus arrived and his divine father chilled out, the Old Testament God was, ironically, kind of a hellraiser. He was not a nice guy. He really liked killing people. And he may have actually been insane, if his willingness to randomly murder devout worshippers like Moses was any indication. Here are the 12 craziest,…

This Amazing Geodesic Dome Houses a Danish Political Throwdown

Every year, 10,000 Danes come together for the Folkemødet, a celebrated “political festival” of spirited policy debate, which sounds extremely Danish. This summer, they’ll be doing so in an incredible space: A beautiful, wood-and-steel geodesic dome. Tejlgaard & Jepsen, the architects behind the dome, actually built it last year as a temporary meeting space for…

Stunning photos taken by the two Russian daredevils atop Shanghai Tower

Check out these incredible photos taken by Vadim Makhorov and Vitaliy Raskalov, the two Russian daredevils who climbed the second tallest building in the world—the 2132-foot Shanghai Tower. The contrast of the lighted clouds and the sleek towers make it look like a snap from a futuristic Earth. I guess we are living in the…

How Criterion Collection Brings Movies Back From the Dead

There are few names that represent a commitment to the distribution of classic films like the Criterion Collection. Since the 1980s, they have remastered and released hundreds of movies on Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-Ray. We recently visited the Criterion headquarters in New York to get a first-hand look at the meticulous restoration process that brings…

Author Tony Burgess is here to talk to you about The n-Body Problem

In January, the io9 Book Club read Tony Burgess’ novel The n-Body Problem. Today from 11:00-12:00 PDT, Burgess is here to answer your questions! Ask him about The n-Body Problem, zombies, indie publishing, or anything else! https://gizmodo.com/the-io9-book-club-is-in-session-lets-talk-about-the-n-1520704958 Just jump into comments and ask questions, and Burgess will get to as many as he can during…

The Army’s Perfecting a Pizza That Lasts for Years and Years

Life is hard for soldiers in the battlefield, so when the troops want something that might make things a little more bearable—say, a particular food item in their meal rations—the military listens. And right now, soldiers want pizza. They want it bad. And it looks like they’re finally going to get it. Here’s the thing…

Behold! All the 2014 Best Picture Oscar Nominees in Lego

When I think of Lego minifigs, I don’t often imagine them having depraved, coke-fueled orgies.* Or orbiting earth, while overcoming intense emotional inertia. But, now that I think of it, a Lego Wolf of Wall Street would be awesome! Here are all the 2014 Oscar-nominated Best Picture films in Lego form. *I have, however, often…

Why do trolls annoy you online? Because they’re sadists.

Though not just sadists — researchers say online trolls also score above average in narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. In a new study published in Personality and Individual Differences, researchers from the University of Manitoba looked at the correlation between internet trolling and the four traits that are part of the (alarming sounding) “Dark Tetrad.” The…

The total failure of Winter’s Tale is a symptom of our magical malaise

We’ve seen a lot of terrible fantasy movies, including some awful fairy tales, in recent years. But Winter’s Tale, out today, feels like a low-water mark. Worse, it feels like a symptom of a bigger problem: we can’t imagine magic and wonder without shellacking on extra layers of heroic destiny and epic good-vs-evil battles. Spoilers…

Breaking the Record for the Largest Concrete Pour in the World

New skyscrapers will do anything for attention—which is why an under-construction supertall in Los Angeles, soon to be the tallest building on the West Coast, is trying to break another record, too. Starting Saturday, construction crews will pump 21,200 cubic yards of concrete onto the Wilshire Grand site, which might make it the largest continuous…

The Experimental Hypersonic Rocket Plane That Ushered in the Space Age

Chuck Yeager’s historic supersonic flight in 1947 set off a firestorm of research into flight beyond the speed of sound. The most ambitious of these projects was the X-15 program, a top secret USAF program that aimed to test the limits of Mach 7. In X-15: The World’s Fastest Rocket Plane and the Pilots Who…

New Star Wars Rebels characters revealed—but in LEGO form

We’ve already met ponytail-sporting fugitive Jedi Kanan from the upcoming animated series Star Wars Rebels, but now we get a peek at his fellow Rebels—or at least how they look as LEGO minifigs. https://gizmodo.com/new-jedi-kind-of-looks-like-a-guy-we-bought-weed-from-i-1520977916 LEGO has released images of two of their Star Wars Rebels sets, which LEGO is bringing to this weekend’s Toy Fair…

NASA sees mysterious heart in the darkness of space

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has captured this Heart in the Darkness, for all of you astronomers in love out there, “a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region of the star cluster NGC 346. NASA says that the “the nature of the heart in the darkness will remain mysterious” until they…

George R.R. Martin explains how to get married in Westeros

What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than with master of the wedding party George R.R. Martin? We’ve got the author exclusively explaining the wildly romantic, political complexities behind the various cultural weddings in Game of Thrones. This clip is from the special features on the new Game of Thrones: The Complete Third Season DVD…

Use the ventriloquism effect to find out if that dummy is possessed

The ventriloquism effect is what makes us think the ventriloquist’s dummy is talking, even though our ears should be able to hear that they aren’t. We can train ourselves out of it using a simple trick (but then we’d have to find out which dummies really are talking). Although it’s “the ventriloquism effect,” it could…

Pebble Steel Review: The Best Smartwatch, Now Also Beautiful

Smartwatches are awesome! Smartwatches look kinda dumb a lot of the time! They don’t have to though, and the Pebble Steel is proof. The improved look isn’t quite enough to make it the perfect smartwatch, but it goes a long, long way. What Is It? It’s pretty much the same Pebble smartwatch that took Kickstarter…

How would humanity change if we knew aliens existed?

We have yet to discover any signs of an extraterrestrial civilization — a prospect that could quite literally change overnight. Should that happen, our sense of ourselves and our place in the cosmos would forever be shaken. It could even change the course of human history. Or would it? Top image: Josh Kao; more about…

Why It’s So Hard to Find Alien LIfe

A big reason why the Fermi paradox has punch is the matter of time. Max Tegmark gets into this in his excellent new book Our Mathematical Universe (Knopf, 2014), where he runs through what many thinkers on the subject have noted: Our Sun is young enough that countless stars and the planets that orbit them…