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Oldest funerary flowers ever unearthed in Israel

Today, we bury our dead with flowers – but a recently discovered gravesite on Israel’s Mount Carmel suggests we’ve been doing so for at least 12,000 years. The bygone burial site contains impressions from what appear to be intentionally placed stems and blossoms of plants like mint and sage, which may have been chosen for…

10 mindblowingly futuristic technologies that will appear by the 2030s

Two decades is not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but owing to accelerating change we can expect to see the emergence of some fairly disruptive technological innovations in the coming years. Here are 10 mindblowingly futuristic technologies that should appear by the 2030s. As a futurist, it’s my job to make predictions.…

Scientists Have Detected Massive, Unexplained Deep Space Explosions

Space is gigantic, so even though we have giant dishes trained to listen to it, we only hear a tiny slice. But scientists manning the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia stumbled on a few blips worth hearing: four mammoth radio blasts that came from far outside the galaxy. It’s not uncommon to…

These super slow-motion clips of birds flying are awesome

Stanford University researchers want to build better flying robots. In order to eventually do this, they are filming birds in flight (including hummingbirds) using an ultra-high-speed video camera. Some of the clips they’ve acquired are nothing short of amazing. As we’ve discussed before, scientists and engineers can learn to build faster, more agile robots by…

Google Glass Updates: A New App Store, Media Player and Lock Screen

With Google’s most recent update for its Glass Explorer Edition come some signs of what’s to come: a new app store, a dedicated media player and a security-conscious lock screen. The official software tweaks include a web browser—navigated with head gestures—along with tweaks to things like search and contacts. But some sifting through code reveals…

14 Infamous Computer Virus Snippets That Trace a History of Havoc

Computer viruses are almost as old as personal computers themselves, and their evolution was only hastened by the birth of Internet. And within each code is a story about its author, about the time it was written, and about the state of computing when it terrorized our hard drives. The following screenshots illustrate the history…

The women who took radium from savior to killer

The famous radium girls took the reputation of radium from the savior of the sick to the killer of the poor. Working in a factory at a time when radium was considered the best way to improve health, by the time they died, they were exhaling radon gas and their hair glowed in the dark.…

The Most Popular Dog Breeds and Names in NYC, Mapped

Earlier this year, radio station WNYC mined the the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s dog license registration database to produce this map of dog breed popularity. Unsurprisingly, small breeds are popular in the city. Well, except Labs. Nothing stops the American obsession with Labs. You can see WNYC’s data here, but the important…

Lust for life: Breaking the 120-year barrier in human aging

In rich countries, more than 80% of the population today will survive past the age of 70. About 150 years ago, only 20% did. In all this while, though, only one person lived beyond the age of 120. This has led experts to believe that there may be a limit to how long humans can…

You Can Explore Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley on Street View Now

Die-hard Harry Potter fans, you’re in luck: you can now explore Diagon Alley on Street View. Obviously, this is a Street Viewed version of the Warner Bros Harry Potter studio tour, which is found in Hertfordshire, UK—not London like in the books. But that’s OK: you can still explore all those weird old shops, like…

Microsoft has opened up public beta registration for the 2013 Xbox Live update—so if you want to get involved, go sign up.

Game of Thrones hires Neil Marshall again for the season 4 finale

Neil Marshall, director of The Descent, Centurion, Doomsday, and most notably the epic Game of Thrones episode “Blackwater,” has signed on to direct the final installment of season 4. As fans who’ve read the books and have surmised what he’ll be filming can tell you, this is A Very Good Thing. Mild spoilers (although even…

How Often Do You Clean Your Laptop?

I feel embarrassed right now. For the first time in ages, I actually paid attention to the keys on which I’m typing. And they’re filthy. I am a bad person. In fact, I don’t think I’ve cleaned this Macbook Air since I bought it about 18 months ago. That’s an awful lot of dirt and…

Mysterious Intergalactic Radio Bursts Detected

Astronomers were on a celestial fishing expedition for pulsing neutron stars and other radio bursts when they found something unexpected in archived sky sweeps conducted by the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia. Top image: The Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. Credit: Alex Cherney/terrastro.com. The powerful signal, which lasted for…

Hints About Doctor Strange, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and SHIELD!

Check out new details about the rumored Doctor Strange movie. Watch the first TV spot for Riddick. Bryan Singer teases Quicksilver. See behind the scene shots for new shows The Originals and The Tomorrow People. Plus gets hints about Teen Wolf, Under the Dome and Grimm. Doctor Strange The notion of Marvel making a Doctor…

The Frozen Lava Flows of Mars

This might seem like some kind of psychedelic artwork—but you’re actually looking a hundreds of individual lava flows, frozen in time on the side of Olympus Mons on Mars. This leading color image of the solar system’s largest volcano, taken earlier this year by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, shows the transition region between…

How the Mother of All Demos Should Have Played Out

While Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 Mother of All Demos was nothing short of iconic in the way it predicted our relationship with technology int he future, he missed a couple of tricks. So long, Douglas; the internet will miss you. [XKCD]

The Government Is (Kinda) Classifying Less Information Than Ever

Despite the fact that the government seems more enthusiastic than ever about gathering data, its taste for making it classified seems to be waning. Thisyear’s Information Security Oversight Office report reveals that, in 2012, the total number of “original classification” decisions fell over 40 percent. Original classification refers to new determinations by White House and…

There’s finally a Mega app for Anroid available which is… well, quite a lot like Dropbox’s, really. There are, apparently, iOS and Windows versions on the way, too.

The Weirdest Thing on the Internet: Stink Bug Stink

The stink bug: Nature’s skunk. Though not nearly as menacing as say, a Giant Asian Hornet, the humble stink bug doesn’t suffer fools kindly. They’ll unleash a cloud of pungent, cilantro-flavored defensive odors at the slightest provocation. So the fact that director Matthew R Day was able to direct so many of them in such…