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“Cat music” is a funny YouTube search, filled with lullabies for kittens and clips of cats singing. But what happens when you take a cat’s meow, cut it up, and turn it into a club banger? Great things, my friend. Great things. YouTube team Fred V & Grafix did just that in a new video…
Forty-four years ago this week, Motorola placed the first phone call from a mobile phone. That’s a genuinely big moment, and as someone who is glued to my smartphone for at least 18 hours a day, I’m very glad that happened. Unfortunately, Motorola decided to use that moment as a “hook” for a very bad…
In the land of no wings, the KFC bucket is king. That’s the theory YouTube supergeek Peter Sripol set out to prove recently by building an RC plane with nothing but greasy KFC buckets for wings. And guess what: it worked. You’re probably thinking that a bucket-winged airplane that can actually fly is some sort…
It’s all but certain that human workers in factories and fulfillment centers are a dying breed. The last nail in their coffin might be a new robotic arm from a company called RightHand Robotics that’s not only able to teach itself how to pick up objects it’s never handled before, but it can also share…
It seems like raccoons get a bad reputation. Many people believe that they are rodents and that impression isn’t helped by their tendency to eat garbage in the dark. But raccoons seem pretty cool to me. It’s time that their image gets some rehab and this video of a couple of raccoons popping bubbles while…
While the tension between state and federal laws has created a difficult situation for cannabis users, there’s another factor that is complicating the changing attitude towards weed: hospitals. Though it isn’t legally mandated, many hospitals won’t allow people who use weed to be placed on organ transplant waiting lists. https://gizmodo.com/the-first-living-donor-uterus-transplants-have-been-per-1787437979 According to an extensive report…
There’s something about combining Lego and old Macintosh computers that is just irresistible for hobbyists. The latest edition to the canon is a cute little version of the Macintosh Classic from 1990 that uses a Raspberry Pi and an e-ink display to make it partially function. Best of all, you can have one on your…
On Tuesday, The New York Times decided to reignite the age old debate of walking versus standing on escalators. And do you know what the paper concluded? “You shouldn’t walk on escalators.” This is a patently incorrect and essentially un-American conclusion for at least four reasons. Before we delve into our very detailed and organized…
You might not know this, but we’re in the midst of an insect shape-studying renaissance. MicroCT technology—basically a lab version of the CAT scanners found at hospitals—is increasingly allowing scientists to produce detailed three-dimensional images without destroying samples. So naturally, if we’re scanning everything, we might as well scan grasshopper genitalia mid-bang. That’s right. Some…
The US Centers for Disease Control has released a sobering new study detailing the birth defect rates among pregnant American women infected by the Zika virus. It’s as bad as we feared. The CDC Vital Signs study is the first comprehensive analysis of Zika-infected pregnant women entered into the US Zika Pregnancy Registry (USZPR) from…
An artist named Daihei Shibata created a series of interstitial shorts for a Japanese educational TV show called Design Ah. They mess with viewers’ expectations of what’s going to happen, except that the unexpected ways they play out are surprisingly even more satisfying to watch. There are currently three videos in Shibata’s It’s Different From…
There are stories about vigilante Uber drivers that are funny, and there are stories that are scary. The latest news from Charleston, South Carolina is a little bit of both—but with an extra dose of the psychotic. Uber driver David Stanley Hubbard was arrested on Saturday after a pair of passengers, apparently fearing for their…
Today is Equal Pay Day, which is so chosen because it marks, on average, how much longer a woman would have to work to make the same as a man did during the previous year. Women across the country are… well, not quite “celebrating,” but marking the day with events and protests, and probably more…
UFOs. Big Foot. The Loch Ness monster. All mythologies that have propagated to explain the unexplained, the things modern science can’t quite justify or illuminate. Now one New Zealand researcher hopes to use science to shed light on the lore. Neil Gemmell is a geneticist at the University of Otago whose lab focuses on ecology…
If your culinary philosophy includes the belief that no kitchen is complete without a bamboo matcha whisk or a box of gluten-free pancake mix, then Gwyneth Paltrow is probably the lifestyle guru for you. Along with promoting sex-dust smoothies and $66 jade vagina eggs, Gwyn is of course an avid home cook with a library…
It’s known as the “death stalker”—a four-inch-long predatory arachnid capable of whipping its tail at speeds reaching 51 inches per second. Footage shot with high-speed cameras shows how the death stalker and other scorpions use their deadly tails to ward off would-be predators and catch unsuspecting prey. A research team led by evolutionary biologist Arie…
You might not associate our fleshy president’s senior counselor Kellyanne Conway with science, seeing as she popularized the term “alternative facts.” But her consulting firm received thousands of dollars from the world’s largest organization of scientists, reports STAT. The White House dumped a series of financial disclosures on Friday, including Conway’s. Her consulting fees included…
Haha, just kidding. Well, not about the prize part. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, just won the ACM Turing Award and the $1 million purse that comes with it. The sum seems menial for such a world-changing contribution, but seriously, Sir Tim will be fine. The Turing Award is also known…
Britain’s geographical isolation is one of the cornerstones of its identity which, combined with nationalist fervor, probably played at least some role in the country’s recent decision to depart from the European Union. But when the Isles first split from the rest of Europe hundreds of thousands years ago, things were considerably more violent. British…
Four years after the launch of the trashcan shaped MacPro, Apple has finally, slyly, announced a new MacPro. The news comes via John Gruber of Daring Fireball: Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which…
