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Listen To 100 White Albums Played At Once

Rutherford Chang is a vinyl collector with a singular focus: The White Album. The New York-based artist has built up an impressive catalog of almost 700 (!) numbered copies of the 1968 double album. Taken together, his findings have become a kind of beautiful exhibition, but Chang has also recorded audio from 100 pressings, and…

Dr. Hornwell Hart, professor of sociology at Bryn Mawr, declares that babies born in the year 2000 will attain the ripe old age of 200. – January 7, 1926 Anaconda Standard in Montana

There is now an asteroid named after Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon is one of the most celebrated literary science fiction authors of the past half-century, largely because of his masterwork Gravity’s Rainbow. And now Pynchon’s been given the greatest honor of all — astronomer Ernesto Guido has named an asteroid after him. On his observatory’s blog, Guido writes that he’s found a number of…

You Won’t Believe These Patterns Created by Flocks of Birds in Flight

When birds travel in flocks, their behavior takes on emergent properties. Out of the chaos of flight, gorgeous, geometric patterns coalesce. When photographers capture these patterns at exactly the right time, it’s like seeing mathematical abstractions written across the sky. Here are some of the most stunning images of flocking patterns we’ve ever seen. Ballet…

Human-ish ATLAS Robot Can (Almost) Traverse a Teenager’s Messy Bedroom

ATLAS, Boston Dynamic’s great robotic hope and the obvious star of DARPA’s Robotics Challenge, is one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever created. It’s capable of surprisingly human like movements and motions, and could one day replace soldiers in the battlefield the same way drones have replaced pilots in the skies. https://gizmodo.com/its-confirmed-darpas-atlas-humanoid-can-officially-r-1441073262 As long…

A new public toilet in Ichihara, designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, gives visitors a little extra space to contemplate nature, when nature calls. [Architizer] Images: Iwan Baan

Watch two old men dramatically re-enact a YouTube comment girl fight

This is so hilariously on point. It’s basically every silly Internet slap fight made infinitely fancier and thus even sillier. Seriously, watch these two old men perform a dramatic re-enactment of a YouTube comment fight over Harry Styles of One Direction between YouTubers Sophie Danze and JilianLovesTheBiebs and just enjoy the hell out of its…

Our Favorite Android, iOS and Windows Phone Apps of the Week

Today, let us give thanks — for touchscreens, for mobile web, for the ability to constantly be distracted by a fiveish-inch thing that fits in our pockets and never says no. Here’s the best apps you can download this week and hide under your napkin next Thursday. Multi-Platform Updates Twitter This new update is all…

You Know You Want This 60-Inch HD Arcade Machine with Built-In Kegerator

What if you combined your three favorite things into one big toy? What’s that? You would combine beer, video games, and high definition TV? No need to imagine, folks. Such a machine exists, and it only costs $5,000. Okay, $5,000 is a lot of money, but big price tags often mean big fun. The Kegerator…

​Peter Singer and David Brin to speak at animal personhood conference

The final list of speakers has been announced for Personhood Beyond the Human, a conference devoted to the issue of granting human-like legal protections to a select group of highly sapient nonhuman animals. The idea that some animals should be designated legal persons — and not just property — is starting to gain some serious…

That Doctor Who biopic is surprisingly heartbreaking

When I heard the BBC was making a 90-minute docudrama about the early years of Doctor Who, I expected lots of magic and nostalgia. But I wasn’t prepared for how emotionally intense An Adventure in Space and Time actually is. An Adventure — which airs tonight on BBC America, but already aired in the U.K.…

Play Frankenstein With These Radical Toy Blocks

If you were like me, you immediately switched the heads of your Barbies or Lego minifigures the moment you wrestled them out of the packaging. The new People Blocks by artist Andy Rementer reward our customizable toy fantasies with these hand-painted, rearrangeable wooden blocks. Rementer is known for his cast of illustrated characters. Now he’s…

This Week in Time Capsules: Are Time Capsules Still Cool?

This week in our time capsule round-up we have a new time capsule vault in Massachusetts, an “evidence packet” submitted into capsule evidence in Iowa, and some Great Recession artifacts in Florida sure to bum out the good people of tomorrow. Also, a columnist in California worries that with the kids these days all hopped…

This truly is science as art

A 3D reconstruction of the holotype skull of Euhelopus zdanskyi, an Early Cretaceous titanosauriform sauropod. The reconstruction is part of a newly published analysis of the skull by paleontologists Stephen Poropat and Benjamin Kear. Write the researchers in the latest issue of PLOS ONE: The fact that relatively complete sauropod skulls are so rare in…

Deadly Cookii monster discovered in Australia

It’s been more than a century since this huge and deadly Crambione Cookii jelly fish was spotted by American scientist Alfred Gainsborough Mayor, off the coast of Queensland. It was presumed extinct until now, when a scuba diver discovered one in the same waters.

The one myth about cats that’s actually true

Most of us know at least one cat myth. Maybe it has to do with the width of their whiskers, or their purported ability to steal breath from a baby. Most of these myths are crap. But clipnosis? Clipnosis, it turns out, is a real thing. Top photo by marcinbunsch via flickr For those unfamiliar…

I Drank a $200 Bottle of Sam Adams For Science

To some, beer is something you just swill down while watching football, and flavor is a distant after-thought. But others will sip and savor a beer, picking it apart like a connoisseur of fine wines. Those that comfortably sit in that second category won’t think twice about dropping some hard-earned money on a bottle of…

Twitter’s added an extra layer of encryption in part to make it tougher for the government to spy on users. The service will now use Perfect Forward Security just like Google, Mozilla and Facebook which creates unique encryption keys for each session.

Hang this sexy literary pin-up art with pride, and support new writers!

Science fiction and fantasy books are full of amazing female characters, who live on in your mind after you finish reading. And now, a new pin-up calendar celebrates some of the greatest heroines — like this Cory Doctorow-inspired image. Check out more below! Every year, artist Lee Moyer creates a calendar of literary pin-up art…

I can’t stop looking at these three cool spacecraft separating in space

The European Space Agency has successfully launched its mission to study how Earth’s magnetic field protects us against cosmic radiation onboard a Russian rocket. And then, the awesome thing above happened: the payload divided into three in a cool maneuver worthy of a (good) Ridley Scott sci-fi movie. From ESA: ESA’s three-satellite Swarm constellation was…