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Need a car? 500+ government vehicles just sitting around Washington DC

Government waste is a funny thing, because most everyone is outraged when they hear about real wasted money, but it’s only anti-government reactionaries who use such stories to justify taking away needed services from the elderly and sick children. Still, there are more than 500 good cars just sitting around federal property in Washington. Like…

Bluetooth Ski Helmet Speakers End Frozen Lift-Line Fingers Forever

Some purists will definitely argue with this, but skiing (or snowboarding) isn’t really complete without music. Not to mention the necessity of making and receiving phone calls with your comrades. Thus, most of us spend each lift ride fumbling with gloves, wires, and buttons in sub-freezing temperatures. No longer. The company that brought you the…

Cyclopean sunglasses, blocky rolling pins and other improbable objects

From Italian artist Giuseppe Colarusso comes an outlandish collection of both handmade objects and digital creations that he describes as “unlikely… but not impossible.” All images featured by permission of Giuseppe Colarusso Each of the items featured in the series (an ongoing project that Colarusso has titled “Improbabilità,” or “Improbability”), is improbable for a different…

PRISM Is Just the Social Network You Never Knew You Signed Up For

Afraid of PRISM? Think it sounds like a horrible government-sanctioned infringement on your privacy? You’re just thinking about it wrong. It’s a social network! It’s for sharing! And accounts are mandatory! https://gizmodo.com/what-is-prism-511875267 Whipped up by the folks at Datacoup—a service that aims to let you “reclaim and unlock the value of your personal data”—GetPrsm pitches…

Shooting Challenge: One Color

Last week, you showed off your monochrome skills in classic silver. This week, you’ll take a photo in a different way: Find a scene that’s predominantly one color, and capture that color to its fullest. The Challenge Photograph a scene that’s predominantly one color. You can find something natural, manmade, or even lit or painted…

Can This Off-Kilter Hotel Reframe the Peruvian Coastline?

Just as world’s most famous off-center landmark has ever-so-slowly started to straighten up, a new structure on the Peruvian coast just might nab the sought-after title of Best Spot To Be Photographed Looking Like You’re Holding Up An Entire Building. The Unbalanced Hotel comes from the minds of Madrid-based architecture firm OOIIO, whose architects felt…

What’s your favorite (or least favorite) disaster porn?

This is the era of disaster porn. From Transformers: Dark of the Moon to 2012 to Man of Steel to Star Trek Into Darkness, every movie shows cities being trashed. Sometimes the whole planet gets borked. So what’s the most satisfying disaster porn of all time? Or the most gratuitous? Please include a picture or…

Literate people now posting “selfies” with their showoff bookshelves

People are idiots! But not you, of course. You’re not like the others. You know how to read! Also, you are a conspicuous consumer of printed matter sold by publishing corporations. Post some pictures of yourself with your carefully messy bookshelf and you’ve got the latest trend to warn other people away from you. https://jezebel.com/bookshelfies-are-selfies-for-people-who-can-read-1175293372

The Fukushima radiation nightmare isn’t over. Japanese officials have upgraded from a level 1 to a level 3 “radiological event” alert after discovering that highly radioactive water is leaking from the plant into the ground nearby.

A Look Inside the Workshop of Brooklyn Bike Builder Horse Cycles

As the number of cyclists in New York grows each year, more and more bike shops have popped up around the city to meet demand. A growing group of them specialize in entirely handmade, custom bike frames—like six-year-old Horse Cycles, a custom steel frame workshop in Brooklyn. This week Horse’s founder, Thomas Callahan, gave me…

UK Moves to Ban Phones Designed to Fit Up Prisoner Butts

Necessity is the mother of invention, and invention is the father of designing things that you can fit into your butt to sneak them into prison. And so a phone shaped exactly like a small butt plug has come into our world, and the UK government is trying to ban it. The phones in question…

Beach monster season kicks off with dead devil beast

A terrifying and disgusting dead sea serpent washed up on Spain’s southeastern coast last week, spooking vacationers and bringing military officials to the tiny beach town of Villaricos. What is the 13-foot-long beast? And what sea monsters will August deliver next? http://gawker.com/what-the-hell-is-this-horned-sea-monster-that-washed-as-1177984154

This new app makes casual sex as easy as ordering in Seamless

Kate Dries says the Pure app is “for people who want casual sex but don’t want the bullshit of Craigslist or the hours it takes to online flirt with someone on OkCupid.” A Seamless Snapchat hybrid for sex. https://jezebel.com/the-endless-quest-for-a-hookup-app-women-will-actually-1177735667

The NSA Collected Thousands of Non-Terrorism-Related Communications

In a not-so-startling revelation, the declassification of three secret court opinions on Wednesday show that the NSA hasn’t just been collecting communications related to terrorism investigations. It’s been collecting all kinds of stuff from unsuspecting Americans. The details don’t exactly instill confidence in our nation’s intelligence sector. As the Associated Press explains, the NSA “scooped…

How to Turn Cutting-Edge Science into a Page-Turning Thriller

Author James Rollins has been compared to Michael Crichton, and his latest book The Eye of God includes biohacking, DIY mad science and other current ideas. In this essay, he talks about visiting Fermilab and explains the secrets of transforming science into a cracking good read. Turning Science into Fiction By James Rollins “Tell me…

What are these incredible red lights in the sky?

Of you look close enough and for a long enough time, you will see this uncanny and extremely rare lights in the sky. They are called red sprites. What are they? https://gizmodo.com/ethereal-photos-capture-rare-red-lightning-phenomenon-1177809208

How The World’s End rejects ‘drunken, misogynistic’ manchild films

In The World’s End, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost gather their former best friends to drink their old hometown dry. But when we talked to Pegg, Frost and director Edgar Wright, they told us how this apocalyptic comedy isn’t like your usual “drunken midlife crisis” film. Plus the secret of using genre to tell a…

A free Mario game for iPhone or Android would actually suck

Many iPhone and Android owners dream of having the Nintendo classics for their touch gadgets, but as this Kotaku article demonstrates, a Mario game reinvented for touch screen only will be really terrible. Especially if it’s free. https://kotaku.com/the-horror-if-super-mario-bros-3-was-made-in-2013-for-1168392829

A Soft Squishy Lamp You Can Cram Anywhere (Even Under Your Head)

No one wants to be told what they can and cannot do in their home, even when it comes to lamps. So someone has finally found a way to stick it to ‘big lighting’ with a lamp that you can install almost anywhere. Our deliverer of illumination freedom is an artist named Simon Frambach who…

Germany is the first European country to recognize a third gender

Starting this November, German parents will be able to select male, female, or “indeterminate” when filling out their newborn’s birth certificate. This means that parents won’t have to label their baby’s gender, thereby allowing those born with intersex characteristics to make a decision later in life. Or not. The new law, which goes into effect…