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I can’t help but laugh when I watch these CGI silly putty creatures fall down and smack the ground and then have their buddy fall down on top of them and smack them and have another buddy fall down on both of them and smack them and then have them all sort of melt together…
Commander Scott Kelly is halfway through his year in space today. While his body is slowly degrading into a mess of bulging eyeballs and atrophied muscles, his artistic sensibilities are being kept in shape with an endless array of gorgeous settings to photograph for our vicarious viewing pleasure. April 5, 2015: The Easter Bunny visits…
In 2012, when San Diego police used DNA testing to try and solve the 1984 beachside rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, they came up with two suspects: a convicted rapist who’d died in 2011, and a man who’d worked as a SDPD crime-lab analyst from 1982-2002. Was the analyst guilty … or had…
Rose gold, rose schmold. The frenzy over Apple’s ingenious marketing of a pink phone (not their first!) as “rose gold” has reached a fever-pitch. The New Yorker devotes 1000 words to a history of the metal alloy, and its implications for our “rose-gilded age.” “The Semiotics of Rose Gold” is currently #1 on the magazine’s…
Climate change often feels like a big, abstract problem, but it’s already having a tangible impact on communities worldwide. If you’re curious how rising global temperatures will affect your neighborhood, a fascinating new forecast site can help you find out. WXshift is a data-driven “weather channel” launched today by the nonprofit research and journalism outfit…
An easy way to weed out un-fun people who you shouldn’t hang out with is to find folks who don’t enjoy the Fast and Furious series and then stay far, far away from them because they don’t enjoy the best thing in life: stuff that is just stupid but awesome and totally silly but so…
Robot ethicists have launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots, seeking a ban on the development of robotic sexytimes. The reality of pleasure bots is fast approaching. Mechanical toys for sexual pleasure already exist, of course, and hardware developers are working to incorporate A.I. into their designs. A company called True Companion claims to be producing…
This year, the LEGO BIONICLE line, the toy line that helped save LEGO from financial catastrophe, has been rebooted and relaunched. And it’s pretty rad. LEGO originally introduced its BIONICLE line about 15 years ago, and it was initially a sub-part of the Technic series, due to each set’s technic elements. It’s marketed to kids…
Hurricanes and blizzards are petty trifles compared with the weather phenomenon that troubles apocalypse preppers: They’re worried about a giant electromagnetic storm wiping out all technology. It’s an unlikely scenario — a massive solar storm strikes only about once every 500 years — but if the Earth was hit by one, power grids across the…
The world can never have too much excellent science writing. 3 Quarks Daily has their annual nomination list of articles ready for you to read, learn something new, and vote on your favourites. Disclosure: Yes, that’s my Guide to Pluto holding down the dwarf-planet nomination.
What did Jimmy watch?
If it’d been pigeons, he might have gotten away with it. But a 19-year-old Rhode Island man who mowed over three seagulls in a beach parking lot is facing felony charges for “maliciously killing or wounding animals.” Really, if nobody’d seen him do it, he also might’ve gotten away with it. But as Boston’s WCBV…
Halloween without Jack O’Lanterns is like Time Warner Cable without all the headaches—the two just go hand-in-hand. But if your carving skills don’t exist, or you hate scraping out pumpkin guts, these pre-carved fake Star Wars pumpkins will still impress the neighborhood kids. Each $20 12-inch pumpkin can be illuminated with a bulb from within,…
There is perhaps no single typographer whose work can be found in such a diverse range of applications. Adrian Frutiger, who died last week at age 87, created typefaces that make you feel at home in every single place you see them, from subway stations to your computer keyboard. The Swiss typographer was born in…
Remember the first Republican primary debate, co-hosted by Facebook? You couldn’t watch it online unless you had a cable subscription. Which made no sense at all! It was co-hosted by Facebook for Trump’s sake! But cordcutting fans of the political circus can now rejoice! Wednesday’s debate, hosted by CNN, will be available to anybody with…
Lightning is beautiful and sprites delightful, but pulsating blue jets are even more fascinating when zapping out the top of an epic storm. Astronaut Andreas Mogensen captured the first-ever video of blue jets as seen from the International Space Station. Mogensen was the first astronaut from Denmark to leave the planet, and managed to get…
The latest addition to 3DlightFX’s line of three-dimensional night lights is this wonderful model of the Millennium Falcon that appears to be tearing a fiery hole in your wall as it makes the jump to light speed. It’s all an illusion, of course, accomplished with a flame decal you stick to a wall and then…
Humans spend a lot of time and energy wondering if there’s anybody else out there. But what if we got unequivocal evidence that there was? In this week’s future, a probe that is extremely similar to the Voyager probes that we sent out in the 1970’s shows up in our solar system. In case you’re…
Brownies are absolutely delicious and probably one of my favorite things in the whole world. It’s a wonderful little treat. What’s not wonderful? When you mass produce them and have to pour buckets of ingredients to mix them up to create a oozy brown sludge that can be baked. Oh well, at least they’ll still…
Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting’s latest project is “Left for Dead,” an ongoing series of deeply-researched articles and accompanying podcasts addressing a fascinating and tragic mystery: why are there so many unidentified and unclaimed bodies in America? And there’s more: “Left for Dead” also includes the development of an online tool that allows…
