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Your pet hamster is the product of incest

Most pet hamsters in the UK and North America come from a stock of Syrian hamsters bred by biologist Israel Aharoni for scientific research. It turns out, though, that Aharoni’s hamster supply was saved by hamster siblings mating with one another. Over at the Nib, cartoonist Andy Warner outlines the history of Golden Hamsters, the…

10 Hit Movies That The Fans Hated

Every year, huge movie productions go to Comic-Con and other events to court the fans, because they know fan love will help make a movie successful. But sometimes, a movie can still make a billion dollars even in the face of blistering fan hatred. Here are 10 insanely successful movies that the fans couldn’t stand.…

What Can Crows and Ravens Teach People About Resisting Temptation?

By now you probably know about Walter Mischel’s famous 1972 marshmallow task, which used the tasty snacks to measure impulse control in children. What you might not know is why marshmallows can help us better understand what it means to be human. A new study, in which crows and ravens were subjected to a version…

This Ad’s Amazing Optical Illusion Reveals the Hazards Of Driving

Audi’s luxury vehicles include a neat night-vision system that will automatically warn drivers about hazards on the road. And to drive home just how life-saving it can be, the company’s ad agency created a brilliant billboard in an airport with a secret hazard that was only revealed to passengers when they got closer and closer.…

First descriptions of the new Godzilla monster (that isn’t Godzilla)

Ever since Gareth Edwards debuted his Godzilla trailer last month, we’ve been trying to figure out the mystery kaiju that briefly appeared in the footage.And now, thanks to a screening at SXSW, we’ve got a great idea of who this second monster just may be. Last night the brand new Godzilla movie screened a chunk…

Olympus Patent Imagines Variable Exposure Over Single Photographs

There’s an obvious weakness to the way that all modern cameras work: open the shutter to start an exposure, close it to finish, but whatever you do, the entire frame is bathed in light for the same length of time. Not if Olympus has anything to do with it, though. In a patent unearthed by…

The NSA Has Impersonated Facebook To Spread Malware

So the NSA is spying on you. You’ve known that for quite some time now. What you might not know much about is exactly how they’re doing, and a new report from Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald offers up some pretty grizzly details about the agency’s worldwide, automated malware network. Did you know, for instance,…

The Game of Thrones cast on who they think deserves the Iron Throne

As part of their big-ass feature on the upcoming season of Game of Thrones, Vanity Fair interviewed the show’s stars and asked them who they believe would be the best ruler of the Seven Kingdoms. Some of their answers will surprise you. Some won’t. As expected, Samwell Tarly has the wisest answer: “Anybody but Joffrey.”…

Listening to the Secret Sounds of the Large Hadron Collider

From the Golden Gate Bridge to an ancient Japanese bell, the physical structures around us are humming with secret sound. Artist Bill Fontana has made a career of capturing these haunting and complex soundscapes. As an artist at residence at CERN, he’s mostly recently been listening in on the world’s largest particle collider. Last week,…

Passengers Heat This Battery Bus Shelter By Holding Each Other’s Hands

The only thing worse than the cold and snow of winter is when you’re stuck in the middle of it waiting for a bus. So to make the experience a little less awful, Duracell turned a transit shelter in Montreal into a giant battery that powered a set of warmth-providing heaters. There was a catch,…

In Defense of Talking Funny

Not everyone in the United States speaks the same English, as a recent American Dialect quiz made very clear. In an essay originally published on her blog, Harmless Drudgery, lexicographer and Merriam-Webster editor Kory Stamper explains why that’s a good thing. I was talking with a friend – well, a “friend” – about some of…

These Stunning Satellite Images of Cities Were Really Made With Data

Satellite images of cities at night look wonderful—until you zoom in and realize that they’re a big, blurry mess. These gorgeous city images, made by Marc Khachfe, solve that problem—because they’re actually computer generated from OpenStreetMap data. Using the open source mapping data, Khachfe is able to create a simulated map of the light you’d…

This Contraption Cuts Vinyl Records From Digital Audio In Real Time

Sonic purists swear that everything sounds better on vinyl, and you know what? Spinning records is also just way more freaking fun. It’s common to digitize your LPs, but what if you could easily do the reverse? This dude made a device that makes it easy to press audio files into albums in real time.…

As spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple will trim its iPhone return window from 30 days to 14 as of tomorrow. Carriers had previously offered 14 days, so now at least it’s consistent across the board. Still, for Apple Store customers, that’s less than half the time to decide if parallax effect is right for you. [9to5Mac]

In the future we could use plants to mine the Earth for us

In the future we might not need humans, or even robots, to go down into the Earth and hack out chunks of metal. With a little work, plants might be able to do the mining for us. Which is good news, because mining for metals is tiring and dangerous for a human body. It requires…

How International Human Rights Law Should Be Applied to NSA Spying

This past Monday, the Human Rights Committee commenced its one hundredth and tenth session in Geneva from March 10-28. During this session, the Committee will review the reports of several countries on how they are implementing the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), an international human rights treaty and one…

Why do comics always use the same old mythologies?

Full non-Postman disclosure: Because of a delayed flight, a three-hour midnight drive across my home state, a hotel room fire alarm choosing 4:00 am to start warning of its low battery and the subsequent 20-minute disappearance of the front desk staff, I’m running on three hours of sleep. If I sound incoherent or dumb today,…

An Entire Day of All of Europe’s Air Travel, Visualized

This stunning video shows all the flights that cross Europe on a typical summer day. Beautifully animated, it really provides a great insight into the intensity of modern air travel. It was created by NATS, one of the UK’s air traffic control providers. Paul Beauchamp, from NATS, explains how it was made: It’s an amalgamation…

This GIF translation game will take over your day

Is what a particular GIF means to me the same as what it means to you? GIFGIF, an astonishingly-addictive GIF sorting game from MIT’s Media Lab, aims at finding out. Created by MIT grad students Travis Rich and Kevin Hu and The GIFGIF generator works by throwing up two GIFs, pitting them against each other…

A 9,000-year-old “ritual wand” has been discovered in Syria

A Neolithic era staff engraved with two realistic human faces has been discovered near a graveyard where some 30 people were buried without their heads. Archaeologists are now trying to determine what the ancient Syrians used it for. The bone wand was first uncovered during excavations in 2007 and 2009 at a site in southern…