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Okay, seriously NASA, release your staff for the holidays. They’re clearly bored, and when nerds with access to world-class planetary data get bored, bad stuff happens. Case in point? Christmas Pluto. Hasn’t Pluto suffered enough indignities? First, to have its planetary status revoked, then, to be memeified by the internet? (Have we already forgotten Wrecking…
Turns out, the hard shell of a coconut is really, really good at trapping the heat of the molten copper! Because once you fill up the little brown ball with the molten copper, it stays hot forever and brings everything to a boil. What do you get left with once it all cools down? This…
‘Tis the season for rendering architectural icons out of cookies and plotting to murder your family in a remote mountain resort. Now the two best things about Christmastime are together at last. Over at r/movies, eudicotyledon says his family made this incredibly disturbing yet very wonderful gingerbread version of the Overlook Hotel from the film…
RC aircraft builders strive for extreme accuracy in their scaled-down versions of real-life planes. And what looks like one of Virgin Atlantic’s 747-400s doing a low-pass fly-by is actually an 18-feet long RC model of the airliner built and piloted by Adi Pitz. Even with Adi and some members of the ground crew in the…
Earlier this year, a maintenance worker found a golden scepter in a Jerusalem cemetery. Antiquity experts were stumped, prompting a six-month long investigation into its origin. A Facebook user has now correctly identified the object — and well, let’s just say it’s not what they thought it was. “To tell you the truth, I’ve never…
The same way you really only buy sugary breakfast cereals for the smattering of marshmallows they include, this $20 tin of Justice League paperclips is still worth every last penny even if you toss all but the ten Batman clips it comes with. That’s not to imply that other Justice League characters like Superman, the…
If you were idly wondering what it might be like to visit the High Canadian Arctic in the dead of winter, this incredible new shot of a cup of hot tea freezing in mid-air sums it up nicely: Cold. As. Hell. The breathtaking image above was captured by photographer Michael Davies and his buddy Markus,…
We often associate jukeboxes with 1950s teenagers and rock and roll and such. At least I do. But the rise of the jukebox actually occurred long before Elvis was ever cued up at any Milwaukee soda shop. In this photo from April of 1948 we see engineer Myron Holbert, who’s showing off the Seeburg Select-O-Matic…
It was 101 years ago this very night that something miraculous happened along the Western Front. After months of bitter fighting, soldiers on both sides gathered in no-man’s-land in a spontaneous show of peace and goodwill. Here’s what happened on that historic day — and why it marked the end of an era. In December…
When Columbia House filed for bankruptcy this year, I was mostly surprised the mail-order music brand famous for selling eight CDs for a penny was still around. Not only is the company already back, it’s switching music formats. Columbia House will sell vinyl now. While the rise of digital music sales tanked the company’s original…
It’s expected to cost a staggering $20,000 if it ever goes into production, and its battery can only power the device’s 36 fans for about six minutes. But unlike all the other hoverboards grabbing the media’s attention these days, Arca Space’s hoverboard actually hovers. The private space company—one of the 26 teams that competed for…
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is finally in theaters and toppling box office records day to day, but that’s not going to stop Disney from squeezing even more money from fans on the merchandising side. Besides, BB-8 seems tailor-made to be turned into an ice sphere. This silicon ice sphere mold from Kotobukiya can be…
Americans love to go eat to out, and have for a long time. But the way we like to do that has changed quite a bit in the last five decades—and in one way in particular. The USDA recently released data on the $700 billion market for eating out—and how that differs from what we…
This incredible aircraft is modeled after the Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet and pretty much mimics it in every way, except it’s at 1/13 scale. Which makes it a very enormous model airplane! Its wingspan is 16 feet wide, its nearly 18 feet long, and it weighs about 150 pounds. Built by Adi Pitz, it’s pretty…
Christmas lights are a uniquely American tradition. That’s not just because the first electric Christmas lights appeared in America. The tradition embodies a certain American-ness, an ingenuity and hunger for innovation, that’s easily overlooked. America doesn’t just make things. America makes things spectacular. The tradition of light and Christmas dates further back than America and…
Well this is certainly convenient. If you’ve always wanted to be a Jedi (or a Sith) but weren’t born with an abundance of Midichlorians, someone has finally bottled the Force and will happily sell it to you for a mere $16. Sounds like the bargain of the century, right? Unfortunately there’s a catch, and it’s…
It’s just a teensy bit goofy to be swinging lightsabers around in the forest dressed as Jedi and Sith but it’s also a helluva lot of fun because these guys are so good at handling the lightsabers that you could totally convince me that they’ve managed to tap into The Force in real life. The…
Micro-unit developments—new apartments that are 400 square feet or smaller—are sprouting up all over the country as cities try to cram more housing into their neighborhoods. New York City’s first micro-unit development opened this month and it’s controversial—even in a city where people already pay top dollar to live in tiny apartments. We recently took…
Who doesn’t love a surprise at this time of year? Well, researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in France certainly do, so they’ve created a new kind of inkjet printing technique that produces images that appear different depending on the viewing angle. The team had been playing around with halftone printing—where tiny dots…
If a UK intelligence agency’s holiday puzzle wasn’t enough to keep you entertained, how about something a little more difficult? This crossword puzzle is based on the computer science language of regular expressions, and it should keep you busy for… some time. Regular expressions are a sequence of characters that define a search pattern. They’re…
