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In news that is so weird, you almost won’t believe it, a Russian man has volunteered to be the victim for the world’s first head transplant, which two doctors want to perform early next year. Valery Spiridonov—a 31-year-old Russian man who operates an educational software company out of his home in the small city of…
Spend enough time scrolling through social media and you’ll find one: A photo that’s too strange to just be “creepy,” too puzzling to just be “mysterious,” too sinister to just be “weird.” That, my friends, is an image that’s been cursed. In the early days of the internet, these pictures lived alongside more explicit images…
People in prison are so damn resourceful that they can turn a pen, a Walkman, a couple of paper clips, a few rubber bands, and a set of batteries into a fully functional tattoo gun. The motor, battery pack, and switch come from a Walkman that’s torn apart, the ink obviously comes from the pen,…
Call me a coward, but getting bashed in the face by a scary Russian dude with a massive shield is not my idea of a good sporting time. Sure, being covered by armor would appear to make professional knight fighting “safer” or at least “less likely to result in an immediate fatality.” But because your…
Conceptually I hate proposal videos; they feel emotionally cheap, but moreover, I’m one of those heartless single people who is neither endeared nor disdainful of happy couples. But something about this extremely cute VR proposal just gets me. Sure, the whole thing “smacks of gender”— the guy asked his soon-to-be fiancé’s parents for permission, the…
It’s called the Schlieren effect and it means that you can see stuff that’s invisible to the human eye, like changes in air density. So when you turn on a hair dryer, you can see the blast of air it shoots out. When you open a can of Coke, you can see what’s escaping into…
The New Yorker’s social media editor Saira Khan went ballistic in a lengthy Twitter rant about her experience as a Facebook curator. Her tirade comes just three days after Facebook fired all human curators from its trending news operation. Khan described “the most absurd” things she saw during her time working as a Facebook news…
In November of 1975, Australia faced one of the most uncertain periods in its political history. The Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was unexpectedly dismissed (which is to say fired) by a man named John Kerr, the Governor-General of Australia. Rumors have swirled for years about whether the CIA or British intelligence services had anything to…
Mark Zuckerberg continues making news on his Italy trip, the latest being an update on the AI he’s building to help around the house. The Facebook founder revealed he’ll be ready to demo the assistant he’s been working on throughout 2016 next month. He also revealed that, “much to [her] chagrin,” his wife Priscilla cannot…
I totally expected a supercut of touching in movies to be a bit on the creepy side but this compilation actually handles it with a surprising amount of grace. It includes some meaningful touchy scenes like Finn holding a light saber for the first time in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, fingers grazing the ring…
Last week, we asked you to imagine what President Obama was actually looking at while wearing a virtual reality headset. The official explanation, posted in celebration of the National Park Service’s 100th birthday, was that he was watching a “a virtual reality film captured during his trip to Yosemite National Park earlier this year.” But…
Did you know there’s a special way to wrap your cables that not only keeps them neat and tidy, but also makes them perfectly unfurl without tangling when you’re ready to use them? It’s the de facto way to store cables in the video, film, and music industries, and it can also help lengthen the…
The world’s most famous human ancestor, an extinct hominid named Lucy, died after falling from a tall tree, according to scientists. It’s a revelation that points to tree-dwelling behavior in recent evolutionary history, but some scientists aren’t convinced. In a new study published in Nature, paleoanthropologist John Kappelman and colleagues from the University of Texas…
Wasting beer is usually indefensible—unless you plan on blowing up whole kegs with dynamite. Obviously the guy from the Swedish dynamite channel is having an absolute field day with this. My question is: if you stand in the middle of that beer cloud and take a few deep breaths, will you catch a buzz?
In its heyday, You’re The Man Now Dog (YTMND) rode the cresting wave of early mainstream online communities, alongside its brethren like 4chan, Something Awful, and Newgrounds. The site allowed anyone to pair a gif (animated or not) with looping sound, to be voted on and shared by other users. At its peak, YTMND had…
Facebook unceremoniously fired at least 15 editors from its trending news team on Friday, as Quartz first reported. The decision to eliminate humans came three months after Gizmodo’s reporting revealed the inner workings of the trending news group, including allegations from former curators that their colleagues suppressed conservative news. Now, as Quartz reported, the trending…
Mark Zuckerberg likes to give. He gave us Facebook. He gave us the hoodie as a work uniform. He gave us his mop dog. He also likes to give gifts and trinkets, like a model of Aquila, the fancy aircraft that will allegedly bring the internet to the world. He dropped lil’ Aquila off for…
This mirror being smashed into a million pieces by a hammer at a 120,000 frames-per-second is a true sight to see. The Slow Mo Guys are back at it, showing us some more insanely delayed close ups of shattered glass. This time around, a hammer appears to fly through a mirror instantaneously, as the camera…
Does it feel like the box art for every video game these days is the protagonist… just kind of standing there with, I dunno, a gun or a sword, probably scowling? You are not alone. Jacob Christensen noticed too. Yup: video game box art these days absolutely sucks. And the reasons why are complicated. For…
Apple just sent out press invites for its next major event. As expected, the event will take place on September 7. Like last year, the iPhone event will be at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. The company is expected to unveil the iPhone 7. There are also reports we could see an…
