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The Sony SRF-39FP: The Audio Player of Choice in Prison

It might not look much, but the Sony SRF-39FP pocket AM/FM radio is regarded as the audio player of choice in prisons across the U.S. The New Yorker has an excellent feature about the use of the radio in prison. Unlike many consumer electronic devices you’ll see these days, the SRF-39FP has a transparent plastic…

The Weirdest Thing on the Internet Tonight: Waiter

A hardworking barrista drinks himself sideways, on mescalin apparently, in this surreal animated short film by Ryoji Yamada.

Watch Classical Paintings Come Alive, in Beauty

Italian animator Rino Stefano Tagliafierro breathes subtle (and not-so-subtle) life into dozens of classical paintings in his captivating short, Beauty. [Fair warning: here be nudity, sex, violence and death. Sometimes all at once.] The film, Tagliafierro writes, is “a path of sighs through the emotions of life. A tribute to the art and her disarming…

Lightning struck Rio’s Jesus Christ statue and broke off his fingers

Rio de Janeiro, which has been getting lit up with lightning storms this week, just got hit with another one—and this one struck the city’s famous 125-foot tall Christ the Redeemer statue on top of the Corcovado mountain. A lightning bolt broke off a few fingers on his right hand. According to the National Institute…

How ILM created Hong Kong with special effects just to destroy it

Probably the most insane fight sequence of Pacific Rim was when a Jaeger fought a Kaiju in the streets of Hong Kong. The entire city was destroyed, glass shards flew everywhere, neon lights were exploding, streets were being crushed, shipping containers somehow were involved and the whole battle was just beyond epic. Here’s how ILM…

Animated ghost story about death in winter somehow has a happy ending

A woodsman, a nest of mice, and a fox form their own ecosystem in the cozy short film. Tragedy strikes when that ecosystem breaks down, but this story still manages to end with a smile. Jake Armstrong and Erin Kilkenny’s Mountain Ash is a standout piece from a larger anthology of animated shorts by members…

Bird steals camera hidden in an egg and films entire penguin colony

From BBC’s Penguin – Sky in the Huddle, comes this adorable footage taken by John Dowder of a bird of prey, the Striated Caracara, stealing a hidden camera inside a Penguin egg and taking it for a fly to film an entire Penguin colony. The bird made sure to get the camera angle just right…

Hiroo Onoda has died at the age of 91. He was the last Japanese imperial soldier to emerge from hiding in a jungle in the Philippines and surrender —nearly 30 years after the end of World War II.

Tilt-shift effect photos of the universe make the vast cosmos look tiny

These images look like miniature models of familiar galaxies and nebulae, the grand structures of space made small. But they are in fact real pieces of space porn digitally manipulated to look like tilt-shift photographs. redditor TheScienceLlama made these images using the tilt-shift filter in Photoshop CS6. TheScienceLlama notes that the effect works better for…

A simple chart shows how the dogs we love today evolved from a wolf

How did we get from wolves to dogs of all sizes? How do pugs and chihuahuas and pit bulls and English bulldogs and German shepherds and so forth all come from the big Grey Wolf? Evolution! We domesticated wolves by adopting cubs and feeding them and slowly changing their habits. Over generations, the wolves changed…

This is a blood cell balanced on the head of a pin

This incredible image was captured using a scanning electron microscope. It’s been colorized to provide contrast, but this is actually what it would look like if you balanced one red blood cell on a pin. Amazing. Via Microscope Pics

Twitter SNAFU lets researchers identify a new kind of harrassment

It’s a kind of online harassment that happens all the time, but which we haven’t really named. Over at Model View Culture, computer security researcher Leigh Honeywell calls it “opportunistic.” And a recent change at Twitter made it clear how this kind of harassment works. Honeywell describes what “opportunistic” harassment is: Online harassment varies dramatically…

Gestural Sound, Gestural Drawing

Warren Craghead is a master of the casual artistic action. There are the field recordings (as housed at his soundcloud.com/craghead account), such as those of a playdate, an ice storm, a shirt being ironed, and an office. And there are the gestural drawings that comprise his primary activity. He lives a life of seeming constant…

Why do birds fly in a V formation?

To save energy? Well, yes, there’s that. But the energy-conservation hypothesis went largely untested for many years. Now, results from a rather creatively designed experiment have confirmed what we’ve long supposed about flying formations – but not without raising some downright baffling questions in the process. Ed Yong dissects some of the finer points of…

The secret soundtracks of novels

Does your favorite novel have a secret soundtrack, a series of songs that the author listened to (or thought about the novel’s characters listening to) while they were writing? Today, author Ann Leckie stopped in to answer questions about her novel, Ancillary Justice, and, in response to a question by commenter APartyofOne about the basis…

Astronomers discover a black hole orbiting a spinning star

There’s a star about 8,500 light-years away that’s spinning so fast its surface speed exceeds 620,000 mph. Astronomers are familiar with these kinds of stars, but this one’s wholly unique in that it has a rather strange companion: a black hole. To date, astronomers have catalogued more than 80 of these Be type stars. They’re…

Starchitects, Bridges, Drought: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

Starchitects don’t build ’em like they used to—and now one’s getting sued for it. Chris Christie remains in troubled waters over a bridge. And if you thought the Polar Vortex was bad, how about the looming Emergency Drought? It’s all this week in What’s Ruining Our Cities. Starchitecture is ruining Valencia, Spain The City of…

These Buildings Can Actually Move by Rotating

After displaying some immobile, but twisted-looking buildings and skyscrapers, we’re ready to show you real rotating buildings. These buildings are quite simply incredible. https://gizmodo.com/these-sky-twisters-are-the-21st-centurys-answer-to-the-1465123926 The Villa Girasole (means Sunflower), designed and built by the Italian engineer Angelo Invernizzi between 1929 and 1935 near Verona, Italy. The L-shaped two-story house rests on a circular base, which…

Stretchy New Sensors Can Be Woven into Clothes That ‘Feel’

Imagine if your sweater was actually one big computer that responded to being stretched, pressed, or adjusted. That cyborg-inspired future could now be a reality thanks to a team of scientists that has used nanowires to create a new wearable, multifunctional sensor. The sensor uses some of the same technology that’s at work in smartphone…

The amazing life of a travel photographer

Half the fun of being a travel photographer—in fact make that 100% of the fun—is the crazy adventures I often get to do as part of my job. Such as this rappel into the “Lost World” in New Zealand’s famous Waitomo Caves. Before capturing this image I had to abseil down that very line myself,…