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Why the hell are these F-18 pilots taking off from public roads?

Watch these F-18 pilots training to take off and land on public roads, a skill they used to practice more often back in the Cold War days, when they had to be ready in case the Soviet Union decided to bomb their airfields during an invasion. Taking off and landing on public roads used to…

Sunday Deals On The iPad Mini Retina, Kindle Paperwhite, 2DS, And More

Today in the rarely discounted/most desired items we cover category, we’ve got great deals on both the iPad Mini Retina and the Kindle Paperwhite. Best Buy is the proprietor of both discounts, knocking $50 off all iPad Mini with Retina Display models, and 20 bucks off the Paperwhite. These are the Commerce Team’s choices for…

Crowdfund shark research and a cyberpunk film by Larry Hama

The man who built up GI Joe’s mythology in comics has a new story to tell about Homeland Security’s Cyber Crime Division. You can also help fund documentaries about women in comics and Batman collaborator Bill Finger—or send your dollars toward research into the feeding habits of sharks. What are the feeding habits of threatened…

How Jurassic Park Made Tiny Flesh-Eating Dino Puppets So Scary

There’s a lot of CGI deployed in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and you’d be forgiven for assuming that most of the dino-action was cooked up by a computer. Not so the tiny little compsognathus, a carnivorous chicken-like beast that was cooked up with plastic molds and fishing line. While some of the shots of…

If MySpace Had a Facebook Look Back Video

Facebook’s look-back videos are a delightful—if sentimental—look at the last few years of your social media existence. But that’s because you’ve had a great decade! What about the less fortunate? What would, say, MySpace’s look back video be? Oh, right, it would be hilarious. The only thing this lovely parody on Funny or Die is…

Here’s the first recorded instance of the F-word in English

And it’s a monk expressing his displeasure at an abbot. In the margins of a guide to moral conduct. Because of course. Technically, “fuck” appeared two times before this. In 1500, it was used in a satirical poem to describe some friars. In that case, nothing like “fuck” was actually written out. Instead, the word…

There Are 1000x More Ways to Knot a Tie Than We Thought

You’ve got your Windsor, your half-Windsor, and… well, that’s pretty much it. Except, of course, for the 168,998 other ways that science has determined it’s possible to knot a tie. That’s a thousand times more than we previously thought. All it took to figure it out was a repeat viewing of The Matrix Reloaded. Our…

What would Middle Earth look like from space?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s hand-drawn maps of Middle Earth have long fueled readers’ imaginations about the land of Hobbits, wizards, and Elves, and a group of fantasy cartographers are imagining what the world’s terrain might look like in 3D. The Middle Earth Digital Elevation Model Project is a collaborative effort to create a complete digital model of…

A Rechargeable LED Cork That Turns Empty Bottles Into Lamps

For many of us it will still be a few months before dinner parties on the back patio are feasible again—but there’s no reason you can’t start preparing now. A winter of heavy drinking has probably left you with a mountain of empty wine bottles that can now easily be repurposed as stylish lamps with…

A soldier in an experimental supersuit storms a Nazi research facility

Captain Joseph Colburn is a WWII special field operative who wears a prototype suit that can render its wearer invisible. But when he is sent to investigate a mysterious laboratory on the Polish border, Captain Coburn discovers a dark secret that could alter the course of the war. While Project Arbiter starts off as an…

Good news! You can’t get pregnant via gun bullet!

Today medical journals rarely intentionally publish jokes. How pleasant that in the 1800s they took a more enlightened attitude towards merriment. Sure, it led to a brief period when the public was sure women could get pregnant via bullet, but think of the laughs. Legrand Capers was born in 1834. He went to medical school…

Artist draws silly new heads for his fellow commuters

Here’s a fun game that October Jones plays when he’s on the train: 1) Pick another passenger. 2) Choose a fictional character that you think matches the passenger or their attire. 3) Sketch that character’s head on a sticky note. 4) Ignore the stares from everyone else as you chuckle to yourself. Jones is probably…

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 6 (“Mould”)

I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a…

This Week’s Top Comedy Video: Reggie Watts Teaches Science

Man, imagine if you could go back in time and replace your dull, boring high school science teacher with someone cool. Someone who’d help make you smart, and listen to your feelings too. Someone like Reggie Watts. You literally wouldn’t believe all the stuff he’d teach you. Find more hilarity, including Paul F. Tompkins’ interview…

Even On His 180th Birthday, Mendeleev Is Still Predicting New Elements

If Dmitri Mendeleev was alive, we’d be wishing him a happy birthday today. He’s not—and thank goodness, because he’d be a 180-year-old science-zombie. But Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements is a scientific treasure, one that’s still predicting elements we haven’t yet discovered. Talk about prescient. As this fun little cartoon from TED-ed points out,…

Are Olympic Athletes Listening to Performance-Enhancing Music?

You’ve probably noticed a lot of Olympic athletes jamming out with their headphones on moments before competition. Is this just a little last-minute entertainment? Or are they listening to specially-designed playlists to give them some sort of competitive edge? While a song might not make the difference between gold medal and last place, science says…

No GPS Signal? No Problem: This Little Chip Knows Where You Are

GPS is a godsend when it works. Problem is, there are plenty of places it doesn’t work—tall skyscrapers, concrete overpasses, and other huge structures all block the satellite signal you need to navigate. Luckily, Swiss company u-blox just devised a chip that keeps you on course when the satellites drop out, using the most old-fashioned…

The 20 Best #SixWordPaperTitle Tweets

We’re not sure how the #SixWordPaperTitle hashtag began, but we know how it will end: in a sea of dry-witted honesty, one that deconstructs the verbose, jargon-y, and overwrought conventions that plague the titles of academic papers with wave after pithy wave of good-natured (and not-so-good-natured) criticism. As far as we can tell, this hashtag’s…

Do You Ever Click On In-App Advertisements?

“I’ll just ignore the ads,” you tell yourself whenever you choose a free app instead of paying for the no-ad version. But nobody can really ignore those ads—they’re splattered all across your screen. And somebody’s gotta be clicking on them. Is it you? You can tell us. I started wondering about this earlier today, when…

This week in Tech Reads: Microsoft’s new CEO, Steve Wozniak’s view of where Apple should head next, ancient computer art, and much more! In The New Yorker, Matt Buchanan gives us a view of how Microsoft, and its new CEO Satya Nadella, want the world to look. [The New Yorker] Long-time Apple guy Steve Wozniak…