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Adjustable Firehose Swings Turn the World Into a Playground

Sitting is fantastic, but benches are boring. Imagine if the world was just littered with hammocks and swings for your own extravagant public lounging pleasure. These clever transforming swings could make that a blissfully lazy reality. The brainchild of Amsterdam-based designers Jair Straschnow and Gitte Nygaard, “Off-Ground” is a series of customizable swings that can…

Game of Thrones’ recipes look really delicious

Rosehip soup, goose sauced with mulberries, honeyed chicken handpies, turnip greens and sweetgrass salad… even greywater watch frog stew. These recipes from Game of Thrones—the popular TV series set in a fantasy medieval-ish world—actually look quite delicious. https://groupthink.kinja.com/a-game-of-thrones-food-blog-1021656599

Zoos are prisons: One brave country decides to shut them all down!

Zoos began as amusements for humans, and decades of more recent noble goals such as conservation and captive breeding of endangered species has done little to change the basic dynamic of humans paying money to gawk at wild animals cruelly kept in cages. What brave country has finally ended this barbarism? [Photo via Getty Images.]…

You Can Shoot Photos with Stanley Kubrick’s NASA Space Lenses

A rental house in Munich modified their digital camera to take Stanley Kubrick’s f/0.7 lenses, which NASA commissioned from Zeiss to shoot the dark side of the moon. Meaning you can go out and shoot photos with, essentially, historical artifacts. The set of ten was commissioned by NASA for the lunar missions during the 1960s,…

First set pics of Tomorrowland bring back the world of yesterday

Behold, the retro world of Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof’s mysterious Tomorrowland movie. So this is what a film inspired by a box of random Disney World crap from 1952 looks like. Retro! https://gizmodo.com/a-look-inside-the-mystery-box-that-inspired-brad-birds-5978681 The images, taken by photographer Bob Glassford for VCF, show (we’re assuming) the early world of George Clooney’s movie. Allegedly about…

People Are So Lonely They’ll Make Friends With A Robotic Stick

Humans want to have friends. This need for companionship in a soul-crushingly indifferent world can lead us to confuse mechanical motion with human emotion, as shown in this video by researchers at the University of Calgary. Researchers John Harris and Ehud Sharlin set out to test the limits of human capability to see ourselves in…

What we know now about cholesterol that we didn’t 10 years ago

Cholesterol is bad and lowering cholesterol is good. Well, at least this is what we’ve been led to believe for nearly four decades. But it’s a misconception — a big, fat stinking lie. Here’s what we’re learning about cholesterol — and what it really means to your health. Cholesterol is the smoking gun that frequently…

The One Big Winner From the Time Warner Cable-CBS Slapfight

As the Time Warner Cable-CBS impasse approaches its fourth day—with no resolution in sight—one thing has become absolutely clear; everyone involved is a big dumb dumby. A plague on them both. And a big shiny gold star to the one company that, unexpectedly, is going to come out ahead: Amazon. https://gizmodo.com/breaking-effective-5-00-pm-et-time-warner-cable-has-d-1005643729 There are plenty of…

Falling Skies is a graduate seminar in why science fiction fails on TV

Seriously, last night’s Falling Skies season finale was like a masterclass in fail. Pulled punches. Alien clichés, done badly. Characters with no purpose. And most of all, a story that seemed to be going nowhere. Spoilers ahead… I’ve had profoundly mixed feelings about Falling Skies season three, which seemed to be trying to make a…

Costa Rica to close all government-funded zoos

Costa Rica is internationally recognized for its environmental spirit. Now, in keeping with this reputation, country officials have announced that the nation will close all federally funded zoos, releasing captive animals to either the wild or rescue centers by as early as May 2014. Above: A razor beak toucan, Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images Via International Business…

Curiosity’s Greatest Hits in Its One Year on Mars

Can you believe it’s been a full year since the Mars Curiosity rover made its absolutely spectacular red, dusty landing? Millions watched with bated breath the day that NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory began its historical journey. It may have taken everyone’s favorite interplanetary robot a little while to get up and running, but once it…

12 Movies and TV Shows That Commit Crimes Against Neuroscience

Science is abused in a lot of Hollywood movies and TV, but perhaps none worse than neuroscience. Movies get it all wrong, from mental illness and brain damage, to psychoactive drugs, memory, and even how neuroscientists work. Here are twelve movies and shows that do the worst job representing the reality of the human brain.…

London sewer workers discover world’s most disgusting blob

What’s incredibly gross and the size of a bus? Here’s a hint: London’s sewer workers discovered the giant blob under the city, after masses of Londoners reported they could no longer flush their own human excrement down their toilets. [Photo of London sewer worker via Getty Images.] https://jalopnik.com/bus-sized-lump-of-fat-called-a-fatburg-discovered-i-1028805797

Another six baseball stars caught using banned Superman drugs

Pro sports hasn’t been the same since players learned the benefits of taking drugs that turn them into actual Supermen. It’s almost impossible to play baseball or any pro sport at the level fans expect without doping up on these performance-enhancing laboratory inventions. See which half-dozen new names are on the guilty list. https://deadspin.com/the-full-list-of-suspended-biogenesis-clients-1029648603

Inside the Celestial Workshop That Makes the World’s Fastest Yachts

Very few people have ever stepped foot on a boat made by yacht design studio Wally—builder of the fastest yachts on the planet—and even fewer have stepped foot inside their loud, hot workshop in Monte Carlo. British photographer Benedict Redgrove is one of them. Here’s what a $33 million yacht looks like before the paint…

ABC is definitely talking to Lucasfilm about a Star Wars TV show

Perhaps anticipating that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to get a jillion viewers and a bajillion in ad revenue, ABC Entertainment Group president Paul Lee is already looking at another major genre franchise to come to his channel — namely, Star Wars. Via The New York Times: “We’ve started conversations with them,” Paul Lee told…

Turns out indie RSS reader The Old Reader isn’t going to shut down after all; they got a bunch of help from some anonymous feed-readin’ benefactor. But who could it be?

Mutant Burger: Laboratory meat finally put on a bun

Industrial meat production is barbaric and disgusting—and don’t forget that belches and farts from stockyard corn-fed animals produce more greenhouse gases than automobiles. So the race is on to produce gross meat products without the beasts themselves. Has a breakthrough finally arrived? [Photo of vegetarian protesters via Getty Images.] https://jezebel.com/the-in-vitro-burger-is-here-and-it-tastes-like-a-prote-1027472269

Did an apple really fall onto Isaac Newton’s head?

A few weeks ago I wrote about famous science urban legends. I left one out, because I thought it was too obviously a myth to be worth putting on the list. Turns out, it actually happened. https://gizmodo.com/10-urban-legends-about-famous-scientists-834494406 What’s the most simple-minded science urban legend you could ever come up with? Here’s a hint, it’s been…

Is the FBI Trying to Expose the Anonymous Internet Using Malware?

Over the weekend, security researchers noticed some strange activity happening on the Tor network, an anonymous “darknet” used for everything from private browsing to selling drugs. Some hacker appeared to be using custom-made malware to identify its users. But according to Wired’s sources, this was no hacker. It was the FBI. http://kotaku.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imaginable This is particularly…