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I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a…
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don’t host raves inside active volcanoes. “But Dr. No did it” is no excuse. That man is a board-certified internist and licensed super-villain.
Yes, like a slinky. These marble-looking sculptures that look like they’re from Ancient Greece are actually completely malleable, deformable, slinky-like art pieces. You see, the sculptures are made from thousands of sheets of paper to appear solid when still. When you tug at the sculpture though, you can stretch it out however you like. It’s…
Sometimes things sound real but are completely fake. Those fake facts are just so convenient sounding and come perfectly wrapped in a bow tie that they spread like a disease. And then there are other facts that sound like complete made up bullshit but are actually real. Those are the scary ones. The shared souls…
Like, holy crap. Can you believe that that picture above is actually a photograph of wildebeests in Kenya and not some painting that is hung in a decorated hall of an art museum? It’s unreal. It looks like fantasy land. But it’s from a photo competition. In Focus shared the shortlist of winners of the…
It’s a little unfair that giant states with tiny populations get so much room for such few people. I mean, especially since states on the east coast are living on top of each other in cramped borders. So let’s change that with a fun little thought exercise and a spin on how to look at…
I don’t think I am as good at anything as these guys are at juggling. Seriously, like not even walking or sleeping or eating or brushing my teeth. They’re so good at throwing multiple random objects in the air and then catching it perfectly that they must be able to use their minds to control…
Privacy is a big deal in the home. That’s why we have walls and curtains and doors and things. Because after all, you don’t want even your closest friends and relatives to see what you’re up to all the time. Unless you live in Shanghai’s Vertical Glass House. With glass ceilings and floors, privacy is…
When you stop to think about it, it’s pretty crazy what technology lets us do everyday. We all have tiny super computers in our pockets. We send people to do crazy science in space like it ain’t no thang. So why can’t we just make MacBook power adapters a little bit smaller. It’s a question…
This is one of the most dramatic, unique and beautiful astronomy images ever captured by the Hubble Space Telescope: The protostar Herbig-Haro 24, located in the L1630 cloud within the Orion B group, 1,500 light years from Earth. That beam is made by particle jets emanating from the primitive star: Frequently when a star forms,…
We’ve all had that thought while playing with origami: “If this paper swan were bigger, I would live in it.” Okay, so maybe not all of us have had that thought, but it certainly crossed the minds of the architects at Make,in London, who recently designed these crazy folding kiosks. Each kiosk is essentially a…
When the ground beneath you stops being solid, what do you do? Jump on it like a trampoline! Seriously, it may be a little dangerous but it looks like oodles of fun. Like you’re walking on water only it’s really still the ground. The phenomenon is known as soil liquefaction and it gets pretty gnarly,…
When it comes to clothes, you get to put on a new outfit every day. But when it comes to decor, you’re stuck with the same designs for years. But with this clever LED Page Turner Lamp, which is built into a coiled notebook, you can mix things up from day to day and even…
Skeleton has to be the most badass Winter Olympics sport. Just one athlete, sliding down an ice-covered speed hill, head first, on a metal-bladed plank. Viciously simple, blisteringly fast. Olympic sliders take special pride in their custom painted helmets, which are also suitably badass. My favorite is the screamin’ eagle of Team USA’s Katie Uhlaender.…
This looks like a bizarrely-colored aerial image of a city at night, but in reality it’s something much smaller, and much more fascinating: the tiny scaffolding and organelles that make up a single human cell. Harvard researchers caught this view using a new technique powered by light-up strands of custom-built DNA. The method, called Exchange-PAINT,…
Forget retina scans and fingerprints. Turns out, body odor is a shockingly accurate biometric identifier. And according to new research from a team of Spanish scientists, it could change the way security checkpoints work. A team from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid just announced initial findings of a new study that tested the accuracy of…
Authorities may have finally pinpointed the source of the massive Target security breach that allowed hackers to swipe the credit and debit card information of up to 40 million customers. So who’s the culprit? One extremely unfortunate HVAC maintenance man. According to security blogger Brian Krebs, that “third party vendor” who Target had been piling…
What you’re looking at here are necklaces without the chain. The pieces in Maria Jennifer Carew‘s LessISseries are kind of like decorative paperclips for your clothes: unconventional, yes, but clever as hell and lovely, too. The super-simple adornments come in a ton of different bold geometries—all 3D printed, of course—and a few different materials: black…
Today, I walked down the street to my local independent bookstore, spied a title I’d been meaning to buy in the window, whipped out my phone, scanned the cover, and within seconds, I’d placed an order. I saved $7. It’ll be on my desk by Friday. It was easy, it was seamless, it wasn’t a…
The closest most of us will get to 432 Park Avenue—the 1,400-foot skyscraper rising in midtown Manhattan—is ogling it from the deli across the street. But in this adorable little video, the structural engineer behind the building leads us through its upper floors. Silvian Marcus, the CEO of the global structural engineering firm WSP, recently…
