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On Monday, the internet was all kinds of excited over the fact that hundreds of new emoji were soon to arrive. Now, the Unicode Consortium has published a chart which shows us what they’ll actually look like. The list highlights the 240 news Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs that are being added to version 7.0 of…
Two of the three toys above are not toys at all but rather printed pictures perfectly mimicking the detail and look of the other toy. It’s a wonderful illusion, a can easily rolls over the first two objects (the printed pictures) and gets stopped by the third object (the actual toy). If you never saw…
If you’re like most people, when you cut a cake you simply take a wedge out, making two lines from the edge straight into the center. But there’s a far, far better way to take a slice, based on maths that’s over 100 years old. In this video, mathematician Alex Bellos describes how you can…
The way we cut cakes is wrong. That old traditional style of slicing a wedge and leaving the rest? It ruins the cake and creates imperfect slices. How can we cut it better? How can we eat more delicious cake? Numberphile says the most scientific way to cut a cake is to slice an entire…
As conventional sources of clean water dry up, we’re looking ever farther, wider, and deeper. In a long feature on unusual sources of water, Nature leads us somewhere especially unexpected—into the middle of a desert. The Sahara Forest Project wants to prove we can green the desert, turning barren land into oases of cucumbers and…
Disney’s answer to the likes of Adventure Time and The Regular Show returns at the beginning of August for its second season. The new season will give the cast plenty to do, with new creatures to combat and plenty of weird stuff going on in the Mystery Shack. Specifically, Dipper and Mabel will continue unraveling…
Twenty years ago today you were glued to your TV watching OJ Simpson lead the LAPD on a low-speed chase in that now-infamous white Bronco. But that wasn’t the only thing happening. 30 for 30: June 17, 1994 is the story of that and several unrelated sports developments that serendipitously happened on the same day.…
20-year-old self-taught illustrator Heather Rooney has an uncanny ability to capture people’s faces in photorealistic drawings made just colored pencils. So picture perfect that they look like printed photos—but they are not. Check out her time-lapse videos. Here’s LeBron James. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
If you’ve been enjoying any of the World Cup matches over the last several days, you’ve likely seen a new addition to the referee’s arsenal: a spray-on foam. And if you’re not a soccer expert, you’ve probably wondered where it came from. So what is this stuff and how do I get it off my…
Today, the British government revealed its justification for surveilling its citizens’ every move on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. UK citizens communicating using the aforementioned services are considered to be using “external communications,” as the companies are not based in the UK. It’s a distinction with staggering implications. Charles Farr, the Director General of…
I love words. I love them on their own, and also in my music. But when I listen to Adebisi Shank, that all goes away. I never want to hear words again. Just a badass guitar riff over and over forever. “Genki Shank” off Adebisi Shank’s This Is The Second Album Of A Band Called…
There are lots of fun ways to watch machines show-off: see them play massive Jenga games; ooh and aah as they draw peens and portraits; or, in the case of Carrara Robotics, check out a wire-saw saturated with diamond dust slice through a chunk of marble like it it’s absolutely nothing. One of the coolest…
Nothing tops talent when it comes to how well a soccer player performs on the field, but believe it or not, how inflated (or under-inflated) a soccer ball is can affect how the ball moves when kicked. You can throw your antiquated pressure gauge away, though, because there’s now an app called BallTune that can…
January 2000: Truck concept vehicle from Ford called “The 24.7” featuring technologies like internet, hands-free mobile phone, real-time route assistance, weather reports and stock read-outs. [Getty Images]
These days, ambitious new skyscrapers are blanketed in a cloud of “green” buzzwords. Wind turbines! Hydrogen fuel cells! Insect farms! (Yes, insect farms.) Then there’s Phoenix Towers, which has all of the above and more and looks like this. Let’s call it what it is: a greenwashed dick-measuring contest. The monstrosity, recently unveiled by the…
The FBI cares what you have to say on Twitter. It cares so much that it created an 83-page document about “Twitter Shorthand.” The guide includes 2,800 entries that basically amount to every acronym known to man—along with quite a few that I didn’t even know existed. Here’s one: WYLABOCTGWTR. That string of characters evidently…
A focus on dense, walkable development allows cities to pack more economic punch per square foot, according to a new study. In Washington DC, deemed the most walkable U.S. city, the most walkable areas in the city take up less than one percent of the total acreage, but represent almost half of the most wealth-generating…
I really came close to barfing while watching this video of a mother toad having baby toads off its back. “Her offsprings have developed from egg to toad in her back, and now it’s time to move on,” says the narrator. No, narrator, now it’s time to kill it with a machete, then douse it…
Fresh off of settling a lawsuit that accused it of collusion with publishers, Apple is ready to take the money you were planning to give to Amazon but can’t. Since Amazon is in a fight with Hachette—the world’s largest bookstore and one of the world’s largest publishers respectively—and refuses to let customers pre-order any books…
Supparat Thepparat is an illustrator who creates some really cool surreal imagery for advertising agencies. Without their commercial context, his cities peeling from the Earth’s crust, the open air mines on fish flesh, or a dog peeling off his coat are as artistic and surreal as any painting by Salvador Dalí.* * Which is kind…
