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The award-winning and very affordable Moose Road residence by Mork-Ulnes Architects is designed to avoid interfering with the nearby trees. It’s even built on stilts so as not to disrupt the roots. Asthese photos of the interior make clear, it’s perfect for the Spartan family.

Pyramids from space

While participating in a Q&A as part of #LiveFromSpace, astronaut Douglas H. Wheelock shared this photograph of the Egyptian pyramids, as photographed from the ISS in December 2013. I love the sharpness of the shadows: it’s so clean that it reads like an optical illusion.

NASA-Backed Study Says Humanity Is Pretty Much Screwed (Updated)

Hope you’ve enjoyed civilized life, folks. Because a new study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says the world’s industrial societies are poised to collapse under the weight of their own unsustainable appetites for resources. There goes the weekend . . . and everything after it for the rest of our lives. Update: NASA…

Today’s Dose of “Awww”: Gorilla Gives Birth in Rare C-Section

Earlier this week, an 18-year-old gorilla named Imami gave birth to a baby girl at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. She was closely monitored throughout the labor process by the zoo’s veterinary staff, and when she showed no signs of progress, she was transported to the Safari Park hospital for an emergency c-section. In…

Guy perfectly sings Frozen’s Let It Go as 21 classic Disney characters

Everyone is doing Disney’sFrozen videos and covers lately, but this has to be the best yet: Watch Brian Hull singing Let It Go impersonating 21 classic Disney and Pixar (which is now Disney too) characters, which is extremely hard to do while singing. Really amazing talent. He really nailed it. The list of characters: Captain…

Atmospheric re-entry, as seen from the ISS

Last year, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) carried cargo to the ISS using their HTV-4 spacecraft. To return the favour, a stationary camera on the ISS captured this awe-inspiring photograph of HTV-4 returning to Earth. HTV-4 was launched on August 4th, 2013, and stayed docked to the International Space Station until September 4th. This…

Boten Anna, the spam-killer!

This week, the traffic on the Space subsite grew enough to attract our first spam-comment since I started as writer/editor. To commemorate the rise in traffic that attacked spammers, here’s a Euro-pop flashback praising artificial intelligence and spam-fighting. Boten Anna is a song by Basshunter about an anti-spam comment-moderator bot. The chorus translates as: I…

Holy crap, these bionic arms look just like Doc Ock’s

Designed by German engineering firm Festo, these claw-tipped, artificially intelligent arms were designed to mimic the utility and movement of an elephant’s trunk – but the resemblance to Dock Ock’s writhing limbs is just uncanny. Festo, the same firm that brought us the mechanical seagull, calls the bionic elephant trunks “Dynamic Handling Assistants.” (How benign-sounding!)…

What’s Your Proudest Online Accomplishment?

The internet is the place to pump your ideas out and hope they’ll resonate with someone somewhere. When digital strangers agree with your opinions, fawn over your pictures, or laugh at your jokes, it feels good, man. What was your biggest internet hit? The one I’ll always remember is a post I wrote on a…

This week in Tech Reads: internet drones, bee brain surgery, the continued search for Flight 370, and more. Jordan Golson explains how, despite all the tracking and navigation technology out there, it’s still possible to lose an airplane in 2014. [Wired] Brian Fung shows us how we know that Flight 370 kept flying for hours…

A total lack of death from the skies

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission spotted an asteroid! 2014 EN45 is large (800 m), dark, and not going to kill us. At it’s closest-approach on March 17th, it’s going to pass by a downright spacious 19 million kilometres (or 49.8 times the Earth-moon distance). In related news, the Bad Astronomer has a nice…

Navy Virtual Reality, NiceBooby.Net, Fake UberFacts, and More

Well this was a hell of a week. We blew the lid off of NBC’s collection of dirty-name URLs, debunked 24 hours’ worth of fake UberFacts, toured China’s largest ghost city, and more. Let’s take a look back, shall we? Amazon Prime Is Still the Best Deal in Tech Today, the fateful news came down…

Watch this impersonator sing “Let it Go” in TWENTY-ONE Disney voices

We know, we know. There’ve been enough covers of Frozen’s “Let it Go” by this point to play out from now until eternity. But voice-impersonator Brian Hull’s may just be the most impressive of them all. Watch him sing Frozen’s theme song in the voices of 21 Disney and Pixar characters. He totally nails it.…

Lego Robot With a Smartphone Brain Shatters Rubik’s Cube World Record

Cubestormer 3 is a robot with just one job—to solve a scrambled Rubik’s Cube as swiftly as possible. Today, at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, UK, it did the task in an astounding 3.253 seconds, faster than any human or robot in the world. Just look at that thing go. The third-generation robot was…

A sobering reminder of the risks inherent to space exploration

Via YouTuber Fabio Baccaglioni comes a solemn compilation of rocket launch failures, from the early days of space exploration to present. That it’s just shy of 32 minutes long is a testament to something that can’t be overemphasized: getting to space is hard. It’s grueling, it’s dangerous, and, as we all know too well, it…

Shamrock Science Will Help You Get Lucky on St. Patrick’s Day

Finding a four-leaf clover is supposed to be all about good luck, but who says you can’t boost your odds? The super-nerds at Scientific American are here to tell you exactly how to find a four-leafer using science, rather than superstition. It’s still a game of probability, but knowing how much area you’ll need to…

Train Your Brain to Get Smarter, Faster

Though we can’t all hope to match Sherlock Holmes’ preternatural deduction abilities and knack for witty repartee, with a little practice you can build a Mind Palace just as lavish as the famed detective’s. Here’s how you can improve your memory and reasoning skills in your free time. Techniques In the latest BBC spin on…

This fascinating auditory illusion transforms normal speech into music

Turn your speakers on and listen up – it’s experiment time. Sometimes, the only thing separating speech from music is repetition, and the speech-to-song illusion proves it. In an outstanding feature published over at Aeon, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis – director of the music cognition lab at the University of Arkansas – explores why humans so…

The space-time continuum in carpet-format

A games shop in Paris embraced the rubber-sheet metaphor of space-time to guide their interior design. The illusion is so convincing I can imagine shoppers occasionally stumble when their eyes and feet disagree about where exactly to expect the floor. My only quibble is that I wish the display consoles were in the center of…

Take two minutes to watch this bloody astronaut-on-alien battle

Take a heavy dose of Alien, add a lamprey-shaped monster and a bit of shag carpeting, and you’ve got Malaise, a fast and fun short film about an astronaut fleeing the hungry creature aboard her ship. Daniel Beaulieu made Malaise as his final project for Vancouver Film School’s 3D animation program. Alien is a clear…