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How To Turn a Fish Tank Into a Crazy Alien World

CGI is everywhere, but there’s something about practical effects that are just way cooler, especially when you dig into what it takes to make them happen. “Cloud Tanks” are tool that’s been used in plenty of great films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Poltergeist to make…

Sick of live-action zombie survival games? Try an overnight werewolf hunt

If you’d like to play a survival horror game, but you’re over zombies, British activity company Chillisauce offers an alternative: a night in the woods spent hunting a vicious werewolf. Chillisauce organizes stag weekends, including a zombie boot camp experience. The werewolf experience is a bit different, as participants are hunting a swift and cunning…

Have Cable Modem Rental Fees Actually Gotten You To Do Anything?

Time Warner Cable just added a snazzy little rental fee to all its customers’ bills, which hasn’t made anyone (outside of maybe the Time Warner offices) very happy. A lot of other cable companies do this too. You can get around it by buying your own modem or maybe get a better plan with more…

Blu-Ray extra ties Prometheus to Blade Runner

Now we finally know how Prometheus connects with Ridley Scott’s original Alien movie, but does it also have ties to Scott’s Blade Runner? A feature in the Prometheus Steelbook Blu-Ray suggests a connection between Prometheus’ Weyland Industries and Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation. Redditor Huxleyism found this entry from Peter Weyland’s journal in the Blu-Ray bonus…

Warning for the chronically indecisive: AT&T cut its return window for phones from 30 days down to 14. [TalkAndroid]

Prove You’re a Human By Telling This Captcha You Have the Right Feelings

Everybody wants a better Captcha. Trying to type in those distorted words can be a serious pain, and it’s becoming less and less of an impedance to ever-more-intelligent spam bots. The Civil Rights Captcha takes a different approach; you’ve got to have a little empathy. https://gizmodo.com/will-captcha-breaking-bots-soon-make-it-impossible-to-p-5938836 Instead of your run-of-the-mill alphanumeric gibberish, or random selection…

What do you do with the soil from your canal project? Why not build a futuristic island?

Turkey has long considered the construction of a new canal, one that would connect the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea and provide a safer route for tanker ships that currently navigate the Bosporus straits. But what do you do with the billion cubic meters of soil that you’ve dug out? Architect Dror Benshetrit has…

Tyrion plays Jesus in the Game of Thrones Last Supper

The Battlestar Galactica “Last Supper” will always hold a special place in our hearts, but this piece by sheilalala is great fun, giving Tyrion the center seat. As much as we all love Tyrion, however, part of the joy of a “Last Supper” piece is analyzing why certain characters are sitting where they’re sitting. Since…

How Real-Life Physics Fakes Telekinesis

We all know telekinesis can’t be real. As hard as you try, you can’t will the remote into your hand from five feet away, at least not in this reality. But still, all kinds of seemingly telekinetic forces operate around us all the time. How do they do that? Neil Turok, filling in for MinutePhysics,…

Thanks to The Oatmeal‘s fundraiser, Tesla’s lab is being purchased!

We’ve been following non-profit the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe‘s attempts to purchase the Wardenclyffe Tower property, site of inventor Nikola Tesla’s last lab. Matthew Inman, creator of the webcomic The Oatmeal, ran an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign back in August to raise money to purchase the property and smashed the group’s fundraising goal. And now,…

How Clone Wars explains proxy war to children

Yesterday’s episode of Clone Wars was one of those episodes that fully engaged the show’s “war is complicated” theme while reminding us that yes, this is a kid’s show. Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka head to Onderon to train a crew of rebels looking to overthrow their Separatist sympathizer king. There, Ahsoka runs into an old…

Rogue DMCA Notice Stakes a Bizarre Claim on the Number 45

Bogus DMCA notices are unfortunately nothing new, but one recently issued to Google from Microsoft seems to go a bit further—and get a bit more absurd—than your average takedown request. This one hit sites like Wikipedia, the BBC, TechCrunch, and AMC Theaters, seemingly over the use of the number 45. The request deals with a…

Is Earth’s closest black hole hiding inside this nebula?

This beautiful photo from the Hubble Legacy Archive offers a striking look at the Trapezium, four closely packed stars found inside the Orion nebula, some 1,500 light-years away. Lurking inside that image might be our nearest black hole neighbor. The question of which black hole is the closest to Earth is surprisingly tricky to answer.…

Hope Larson’s A Wrinkle in Time comic is a love letter to the original

Say what you will about Twilight, but its fans deserved better than the hatchet job of a comic adaptation it received. Encouraged by the burgeoning YA comics market, some publishers have put out hastily adapted comic book versions of successful prose novels that will appeal only to the most die-hard of fans. So it’s a…

How a Single Company Caused a Deadly Meningitis Outbreak

It starts with a headache, nothing major. Then the neck stiffness sets in, the high fever. That’s all the warning you have before fungal meningitis inflames your brain and takes your life. And it’s happening, all of a sudden, to unprecedented numbers of people all across America. Fungal meningitis is a devastating illness, but also…

Microscopic wasps might have “clockwork” brains

The neural pathways that make up the brain arguably represents the most fiendishly complex electrical system in the cosmos, but what if not every brain is actually electrical? One pint-sized wasp might have a mechanical brain that runs like clockwork. The greenhouse whitefly parasite measures in at about half a millimeter, but that tininess is…

My Little Ponies singing about fan conventions is kind of amazing

If ever you need a song to get yourself amped up for a convention, turn to this pony-filled video. The My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic crew espouses the joys of cosplaying, tabling, and just hanging back and tweeting about the panels in pitch-perfect song. Even if you don’t watch My Little Pony, hit play.…

GIFCTRL: Take Godlike Control Over Any GIF

Problem: you love animated GIFs, but wish you had omnipotent Time Lord-like control over their movements. Solution: GIFCTRL. You didn’t have any plans for Sunday afternoon anyway, right? Good. Because this is how you’re going to spend it. GIFCTRL displays your favorite animated loops of life-wasting in the same mega-sized format as MAXGIF before it,…

Now that everybody’s already copied The X-Files, is Chris Carter creating a copy of a copy?

It’s hard to imagine what television would look like without The X-Files to borrow from. Tons and tons of television shows have lifted pieces of the classic show’s format, about FBI agents and mysterious, sinister events. So it’s kind of sad to see that Chris Carter is creating a new show that, at first blush,…

Why do arrows have feathers?

To get the desired effect of an arrow – something pointy stuck into someone that you don’t like – all you need is a pointed stick and something to launch it. So what are all those feathers doing on the back end of an arrow. We’ll tell you the simple physics reason why arrows are…