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Concept Art Writing Prompt: Hunting With The Robotic Lions’ Pride

As they trek through the open woodlands, these humans walk with creature that, at first blush, look like lions, but are actually robots in feline form. If this illustration inspires you, write a story about this unusual pride. This week’s prompt is from Robert Chew’s Big Five series, which we’ve featured before. His series of…

A Cutting Board Blade Sharpener Ensures Your Knives Are Ready To Slice

Not only does a dull blade make slicing and dicing more difficult, it can actually make working with knives a little dangerous. An unsharpened blade is more prone to slipping off food than cutting it, and then ending up somewhere painfully unwanted. So Joseph Joseph has created a cutting board with a built-in knife sharpener…

The teaser trailer for Tomorrowland is a mysteriously fun ride

It seems kind of silly to me to make a movie based off of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland but hey, the same sort of idea worked out pretty well for Pirates of the Caribbean. And after seeing the very first teaser of the movie, the movie version of Tomorrowland looks like it’s going to be a lot…

Life expectancy in the U.S. has never been higher. Americans born in 2012 can expect to live for 78.8 years (up 0.1 from 2011). But the gender gap hasn’t changed; life expectancy for men is 76.4 years and 81.2 for women. From 2011-12, death rates declined for 8 of 10 leading causes, but suicides increased…

Ultra Short Spooky Stories From A Lost And Lonely Future

Unsettling quick-take tales of criminally-inclined clones, a corporation’s attempt to bring time travel to the masses, and the very first Martian settler (arriving on a planet that may be just a little less uninhabited than we think) all await you inside. You all brought more than 500 very short stories in response to our call…

New Bionicle is still sort of Lego but not really

A few new images have been released of the upcoming Bionicle theme and I will share them with you. However, while all of this very pretty and great if you look at it from a comic book or animation standpoint, I can’t help but think, is this really Lego? Technically, it is Lego. They utilize…

Explore the Largest Steam Pipe System in the World, Hidden Beneath NYC

In its latest adventure, New York Times’Living Cityseries explores the city’s enormous underground steam distribution system. Unlike anywhere in the world, New York hides away the largest steam system that powers all types of humidification sources, preserving museum art to even dishwashers in every restaurant kitchen. A total of 2000 buildings are powered by this…

Did You Ever Ask Your Friends How To Swear In Another Language?

One of the joys of having a friend who speaks another language was asking them to teach you how to say dirty words. But what were they really telling you to say? In this comic, one guy reveals his not-so-dirty secret about those “dirty” words. You can see more of cartoonist Shenanigansen’s Owl Turd Comix…

Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro: Yes, The Hinge is a Giant Watchband

The backflipping Lenovo Yogasinglehandedly made laptops cool again. The Yoga 2 Proadded a backlit keyboard and a brilliant 3200 x 1800 QHD screen. Now, Lenovo’s going for broke with the third generation of its transforming touchscreen machine. Not only is the new $1,349 Yoga 3 Pro thinner and lighter, it has a freaking watch band…

As cities grow, their populations become more diverse — on a species level. As we move into the future, many wild animals will be living in urban areas alongside humans and their pets. Now, urban planners are figuring out new ways to make urban species diversity possible — without killing anyone.

The Main Types Of Ghost Story, And How To Recognize Them

What are ghosts? There’s a lot of debate about this – inside and outside fiction. Are ghosts the unquiet spirits of the restless dead? Or three-dimensional recordings of past tragedies? Non-human entities without bodies who can nevertheless interact with us? There are legends (and stories) about ghostly animals – or trees, or even houses –…

Your Bio-Engineered Penis Is Almost Ready

Using advanced techniques in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, doctors in the U.S. are reporting their first successes with lab-grown penises. They’ve worked in rabbits, and now scientists say they’re ready to begin testing the penises on humans. A group of researchers at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina are in…

6 Real-Life Blood Sucking Animals More Terrifying than Dracula

Dracula is probably best known for drinking blood. But while Dracula might be mostly fictional, the animals that drink blood are very real. Here are six of the world’s finest hematophages. 1. Mosquitoes Let’s start by getting the obvious one out of the way first. Mosquitoes just suck (get it?). They’re the deadliest creatures on…

The New Big Hero 6 Trailer Reveals Even More Ass-Kicking Animation

I could not be more excited for the first Disney-Marvel mashup Big Hero 6, coming to theaters this fall. In a new trailer released today at NYC’s Comic-Con, we get to see more of the action, backdropped by epic San Fransokyo views and superhero suits that were inspired by visits to real-life robotics labs. This…

Ohio’s Using a Drone to Spy on Prisoners (and Their Smuggling Friends)

Ever heard of the Panopticon? It’s a type of prison design that enables a single watchman to see everyone. Now, Ohiois experimenting with an interesting twist on that idea by putting the watchman in the sky with an infrared camera. The state’s Department of Rehabilitation and Correction plans to launch a type of drone into…

New Jurassic World Lego sets coming (YAY LEGO DINOSAURS!)

In an official press release, Universal has announced its partnership with Lego to create a line of toys to support the release of the Jurassic World movie in the summer of 2015. Which, you know, YAY LEGO DINOSAURS EVERYONE! Very cool! Though the Jurassic franchise sort of fell on its face (though it still made…

Dune and the fantastic science fiction cities of Finnian MacManus

I like Finnian MacManus’ reimagination of the worlds of Dune, the 1965 book by Frank Herbert. Above you can see the main palace in Harakkeen—a renamed city of Arrakeen in an alternative ending where House Atreides loses the war against House Harkonnen. The rest of his work is quite cool too. Finnian MacManus is a…

WSJ: Amazon Is Opening a Brick-and-Mortar Store in Manhattan

Amazon, the cyber store that sells everything, plans to open its first physical store at 7 W 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan just in time for the holiday season. The experimental store will work as a mini-warehouse for some same day deliveries in New York. It’ll surely serve as a nice little billboard, too. The…

Ashton Kutcher Must Be Stopped (Before He Corrupts Our Laptops)

It’s a little-known fact that celebrity Ashton Kutcher moonlights as a Lenovo engineer. At first, it was tolerable: a kickstand here, a bigger battery there. But now, the chisel-cheeked entrepreneur has twisted Lenovo’s latest tablets to his own foul aims: the new Yoga Tablet 2 Pro has a built-in projector. And a subwoofer. And a…

A Movie About Science Fraud Is Killing At The Korean Box Office

A movie based on the scandal surrounding disgraced South Korean cloning expert Woo-Suk Hwang has been topping box office sales in the region since it debuted last week. Via Nature newsblog: The movie, Whistleblower, shines a sympathetic light on [Hwang], the professor who in 2004 and 2005 claimed to have created stem-cell linesfrom cloned human…