Articles by BoingBoing from January 2013

From Art Lebedev studios, the "octopus" plunger, which creates the amusing illusion of a tentacled poop-monster's questing appendage reaching up out of the pan. (via JWZ)...

Public Knowledge's Michael Weinberg, who wrote "It Will Be Awesome if They Don't Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology", a fantastic ...

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Supertasters are seemingly normal humans who have more bumps on their tongues — a difference that allows them to taste more intensely than average people and (as a side effect) to detect bitter ...

Finland's Varusteleka sells a multipurpose "Jerven Fjellduken" tarpaulin that you're meant to wear, sleep under, and sleep in. It makes you look like a well-camouflaged Nordic Nazgul. Jerven bag, thos...

The winning recipes from the 2012 Aeropress championships give me the fear. Clearly I have not been paying enough attention to this. 17 grams of coffee (light roasted fresh crop washed Sidamo from Hea...

Here's a lovely video shot at the XS4ALL ISP data-center outside of Amsterdam, in which the many twinkling, blinking lights are synchronized to a sprightly piano score....

Messing with ants for fun (and scientific profit) ...

Jackson 5ive, the wonderful 1971 animated series starring the voice of a young Michael Jackson and his brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, and Marlin, is now available on DVD and digital download!...

SpaceX and Tesla founder/owner Elon Musk says he believes the lithium-ion batteries installed on the troubled Boeing 787 aircraft are no good, by design. "Unfortunately, the pack architecture supplied...

A chronology of songs sung by women who are trying to capture the hearts of guys. "It all went downhill after 1996. Or uphill... depending on how you look at it." ...

"Operatic shenanigans at the Edwardian Ball 2013, with the Vau de Vire Society, excessive corsetry and several steampunk googles sightings!"...

Just look at them. Chiquita Banana Cookbook From '40s Is Bizarre (PHOTOS) (Thanks, Rebecca!)...

Via the pro-Tibetan-sovereignty news website Phayul comes new reports that Chinese authorities in central Tibet have detained some of the senior-most monks at three major monasteries: Sera, Ganden, an...

How do we know when a species no longer exists in a given area? The process, as explained by Brian Switek, is grimly fascinating. Scientists used dogs to find piles of rhino poop between October of 20...

Anecdotes aren't data, but they do make data memorable. Alice Bell has a list of books that use storytelling and narrative to explain the often complicated science of climate change. One of the books ...

Shane Nickerson's "Tricks to Successful Internetting" is a 15-point list of Internet attitudinal sins -- vices that we all indulge in more often than we like to admit. It's uncomfortable reading, but ...

Extreme maker and MacArthur "Genius" Saul Griffih, of inflatable robots and algorithmically-designed hoodie fame, writes: (My independent research lab) Otherlab has recently received ARPA-e awards for...

Extreme maker and MacArthur "Genius" Saul Griffih, of inflatable robots and algorithmically-designed hoodie fame, writes: (My independent research lab) Otherlab has recently received ARPA-e awards for...

avid S. Gallant had a part-time job working as a "numb meat puppet" for Canada Revenue Agency, answering phones and dealing with people who were often grumpy and thick. He vented his frustration by cr...

Instructables user smartin014 wants to show you how to make your own set of bagpipes out of PVC pipes and a plastic bag....

An Internet K-Hole day is a good day. The Internet K-Hole is an infrequently updated blog. Each post contains a large number of found photographs, mainly from the 1980s and 1990s. Some of the photos a...

Courier Prime is a new version of IBM's classic public domain typeface, redesigned by Quote-Unquote Apps to look good in print and on-screen. I'm a big fan of the original, whose legendary legibility ...

Quarterly Co. is a "subscription service for wonderful things. [They] send people physical items in the mail from influential contributors of their choice." Today, they interviewed me about my Quarter...

My friend and noted vernacular photo collector Randall de Rijk turned me on to the excellent blog "Darrin's Car Photos" that consists solely of great vintage snapshots of various vehicles!...

In the latest episode of Bullseye with Jesse Thorn I talked about two cards games I've been enjoying with my family lately: The Struggle for Catan, a spin-off of the colony-building board game Settler...

Conor Friedersdorf, the man behind The Best of Journalism e-newsletter, shares his list of "102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories from 2012," many of which we've linked to from Boing Boing and plenty tha...

Heroes in Action have a line of Presidential Monster action figures, including JFK as the Phantom of the White House, Mitt Romney Ronald Reagan as The Ronmy, GW Bush as Zombush, Bill Clinton as Wolf B...

Telepathy, remote healing and Einstein-Rosen bridges: Our DNA stores data like a computers memory system. Not only that, but our genetic code uses grammar rules and syntax in a way that closely mirror...

Here's a bit of good news: Charlie Stross has sold another trilogy in his fantastic Merchant Princes series, a highly original take on heroic fantasy, with the DHS and real-world economics thrown in f...

If Microsoft designed the world's greatest toaster, it would put full-bore Windows on it and call it the Oxidizing Thermodynamic Energy Transfer Platform for Bread Pro. CNET's Luke Westaway: Only a th...

Etsy seller boonerings has a $385 titanium "utility ring" with five in-built tools: "a working bottle opener, a straight blade perfect for cutting packing tape or fishing line, a serrated blade for to...

Tomorrow night, I'll be interviewing Peter Hook, the legendary bassist for Joy Division and New Order, live on stage at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Peter has a fascinating new memoir...

Gateflan posted this remarkable item to Reddit, where the hunt is on for the allegedly mean-spirited customer. He that oppresseth the poor reproacheth his Maker: but he that honoureth him hath mercy o...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH you can receive helpful information about the fact that YOU are a computer criminal....

RIM's long-awaited Blackberry Z10 was revealed today. Reviews are up, too: "good enough to buy time" seems to be the general consensus. Joshua Topolsky : "The Z10 is a good smartphone. Frankly, it's a...

Eric Andre offers the Internet-visiting public a compendium of up-for-grabs band names. Band names are the original Twitter: hyper-compressed witticisms meant to leap off a poster wheatpasted to a tel...

Here's a thing: a kid's WWII evacuee costume, including a little routing tag, which is just the thing if your kids want to cosplay the trauma of being separated from their parents, who might die in th...

Makies are the custom, 3D printed dolls that come from MakieLab, the company my wife Alice founded. The first couple revs of the doll were all bone white, due to limitations of the high-wearing, kid-s...

Apple announced a new update to its iPad line Tuesday: a 9.7-inch Retina iPad with 128 GB of storage, twice its previous maximum capacity. "Everything else about Apple's tablet is the same, including ...

According to this NYT report, Boeing officials knew the lithium-ion batteries used on the 787 Dreamliners "had experienced multiple problems that raised questions about their reliability." Two battery...

Get ready for YouTube pay-per-view: the online video service is planning to launch paid subscriptions for individual channels on its video platform, reports AdAge. "The first paid channels will cost s...

Cyclists in Los Angeles effectively closed the 10 freeway in West Covina for about ten minutes on Sunday, as one of them proposed to his girlfriend in a cloud of pink smoke....

"Venezuelan valley framed by misty clouds - mysterious, beautiful and surreal."—Chris Hadfield As I've blogged before, Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield is currently living in space aboard the I...

Amazing color footage from 1938. The Three Stooges at the Steel Pier, Atlantic City, New Jersey. Film by George Mann of the comedy dance team, Barto and Mann....

Photo: Shutterstock Bloomberg, via @Cabel: Reynolds founded and led the Baltimore studio known as Zynga East, which produced the game FrontierVille. Prior to Zynga, he earned acclaim as the lead desig...

Here's the trailer for the new season of Charlie Booker's Channel 4 science fiction series Black Mirror....

Yesterday I mentioned a book I'd read as a child called Strangely Enough, by C.B. Colby. It got me thinking about a similar book that I enjoyed as an 11-year-old called Stranger Than Science, by Frank...

Brian sez, "At CES, someone told me that there are something like 15 consumer 3D printers on the market. Turns out that was a low-ball. Kits included, there are 24 in this roundup -- and that's not in...

Portlandia's new season is just unbelievably, astonishingly good. Here are two standout clips from recent episodes: Nerds, and Fart Patio....

San Francisco-based mobile device case company Dodocase has a handsome-lookin' iPad 2/3/4 case for Valentine's day. The "Vintage Love" DODOcase is handcrafted using traditional bookbinding techniques,...

A beautiful time-lapse of the starry, Gemenids meteor filled skies over Death Valley, California....

A terse Disney press release announced yesterday that the new Brad Bird movie will be called "Tomorrowland," and star George Clooney. It's not clear what it'll be about, but I have hopes for something...

What, exactly, is "sextortion"? "Its a familiar script: boy chats up girl (or sometimes boy) online, hacks her or his e-mail, asks for or steals nude photos, and threatens the victim with the possibil...

An incredibly labor-intensive animated flipbook version of PSY's "Gangnam Style." ...

The company behind Livecode has a Kickstarter up to create an open source version of Livecode with many improvements over the current closed version....

From Brilliant Knitwit's Tumblr, an optical illusion TARDIS scarf, knitted as a gift. From the front, it just appears to be a striped scarf; at the right angle, the hidden TARDIS heaves into view. Loo...

Jeffrey sez, The algorithmic overlords of Alibaba are sending me astonishing stuff via their "suggested crapgadgets you might be interested in" hourly email. Wireless car key duplicators and GPS jamme...

My little brother and I went to the Blue Ridge Parkway Folk Art Center in Asheville, NC, today and ran across this very cool piece of maker history — a scroll saw operated by a pulley powered co...

In the late 1990s, Kokie's Place was a legendary Williamsburg, Brooklyn bar where a guy would sell you cocaine from a closet in the back. A few years ago, Vice magazine presented an oral history of th...

You will have heard that the US Copyright Office has lifted the temporary ruling under which you were allowed to unlock your phone. EFF explains in detail what this ruling means (it's not what you thi...

In 1978 a team of Russian geologists took a helicopter to a remote part of Siberia and encountered a family that had not had contact with anyone for 40 years. The family were Old Believers -- members ...

"Since regular sky surveys began in the 1990s," says Don Yeomans of NASA's Near Earth Object Program says, "we've never seen an object this big get so close to Earth." That's about 5% of the average d...

Joe Tombari and eight of his friends have been playing a game of tag that they started in the schoolyard. That was twenty-three years ago. Tombari and his buddies are in their 40s now, and the game co...

A small and entirely perfect gallery of desiderata from the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, 1962: the golden age of misleading tchotchke advertisement. Some more amusing ads from the pages of Fa...

The Perception Of Magic' discusses the public's idea of magic, how it's changing and what magicians can do to elevate the image of their art....

Did you catch Mark Dery's profound feature on the first-ever footage of a giant squid at home in the deep: The Kraken Wakes: What Architeuthis is Trying to Tell Us...

Vancouver, Canada-based Artist Hin Mizushima, right, stitched this lovely commissioned felt work for They Might Be Giants' new iOS song app. The app is available now, as a free download. ...

On Sunday, a man walked into a Kroger grocery store in Charlottesville, Virginia with a loaded AR-15 assault rifle on his back. Why? Because he could. From NBC29: Charlottesville police drew their gun...

The WTO agreement is supposed to guarantee level playing fields for its member states, allowing each to sell into the others' markets. But US law bans online gambling, which is the major export from A...

Kim Zetter at Wired News reports: "The two leaders of a congressional committee have sent a letter to the Department of Justice demanding a briefing on why the department chose to so fervently pursue ...

Via Martyn Williams comes word that North Korea's Pyongyang Broadcasting Station (), a Korean-language propaganda network aimed at neighboring countries, is launching a new website this week: The new ...

French DJ/producer Breakbot recently released a limited version of his album "By Your Side" pressed in chocolate. Yes, you can play it. Amazingly, sugar-and-chocolate records have been produced since ...

Photographer Jon Siegel, who lives in Japan and works throughout Asia, shares these portraits in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, and explains: It was a pleasure and an absolute honor to be allowed to wat...

Nathan Grayson reports on an epic battle fought between factions inside Eve Online, in which thousands of players participated. See that pic up there? Would you just look at that mess? The battle, whi...

Leandro Almeida of Rio de Janeiro was cleaning out a storeroom at his family's home when a neighbor noticed a tortoise in a box meant for the trash. Turns out, the tortoise was Manuela, a family pet w...

Skylanders character artist discusses his mural with his young son....

Here is a gallery of unfortunate models falling over, largely because of the stupid shoes they're being made to wear....

Spotted today in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool: these dazzling 3D-printed forms, created and photographed by Boing Boing reader Jessica Rosenkrantz of Nervous System, "an experimental design studio that...

I love everything about this old Hammermill Paper ad -- it's part Richard Scarry jobs-you-can-do collage, part propaganda for the wonder of paper, and all awesome. Hammermill Paper...

The Consumer Federation of America did a mystery shopper review of several auto insurers and found that drivers with at-fault accidents paid lower premiums than drivers with spotless records -- provid...

Amoeba Records -- the amazing California music superstore -- has relaunched Amoeba.com, with a huge selection of downloadable music rarities, digitized from old vinyl. In some cases, the store has tra...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!...

The Mr. Gugu & Miss Go "Photorealistic Sweaters" line is one of those so-bad-it's-good uses of technology: full-garment screens of kitschy, colorful subjects on sweaters. I can't tell if they're ...

The publishers of Dead Island: Riptide produced this remarkable promotional item, a mangled female torso, to maximize its appeal to gaming's all-important squirrel-skinning minsogynst demographic. Joh...

The publishers of Dead Island: Riptide produced this remarkable promotional item, a mangled female torso, to maximize its appeal to gaming's all-important squirrel-skinning minsogynst demographic. Joh...

Just look at them. Jun Gil Park (via Jim!)...

When I was a kid, I got my hands on a copy of C.B. Colby's book of "hair raisers and incredible happenings," called Strangely Enough. I believed every story in it about "oddities in science and nature...

The wonderful photographer and writer NK Guy writes, As photographers and geeks we tend to obsess about the products we buy. Countless hours are spent poring over catalogues, reading reviews, arguing ...

Via Noah Shachtman at Wired's Danger Room blog, this NYT item about the Pentagon beefing up its cybersecurity staff, which currently number 900. As Noah puts it: "What do you do with a Cyber Command t...

Apple today released iOS 6.1. This latest update to its mobile operating system brings LTE compatibility to 36 new iPhone carriers and 23 new iPad carriers globally, and tweaks to two Apple services: ...

On the heels of reports that Google and Yahoo require probable-cause warrants to give authorities e-mail and cloud-stored content belonging to users, "despite federal law not always demanding that," T...

At the The Freedom of the Press Foundation blog, Trevor Timm digs deeper into disturbing news (covered here in Saturdays Washington Post) of an FBI investigation of a large number of government offici...

John Markoff in the New York Times reports about a group of researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute who managed to store 739k of digital information in synthetic DNA molecules, "then recr...

Beautiful cover designs for "A Unit for Teachers" books published for the Schools Council by MacDonald Educational Ltd., London, 1972-1973. "Minibeasts and Colored Things" (via The Simonsound)...

Richard Metgzer tries out a pair of Audeze for the first time. Photo: Xeni Jardin Our pal Richard Metzger of Dangerous Minds, one of the most serious music lovers and audiophiles I know, got his hands...

Wherein I present the results of and detail the technical feats needed to stitch together imagery from six cameras into interactive fully spherical imagery and video taken from a balloon sent up to ne...

Miriam Goldstein, marine biologist and blogger, is abandoning her fantastic blog to "spend a year at the center of United States environmental policy." She will serve as a policy fellow and work with ...

Our friends at Music from the Hearts of Space, the long-running radio and now internet program dedicated to ambient music, are organizing an ambient music conference in Marin County, CA. The Ambicon e...

Seth Godin lists 11 reasons why airports are awful. He nails it. I sometimes drive from LA to SF just so I don't have to take my shoes off at the airport's TSA performance space. 5. By removing slack,...

A group of pranksters posed as panhandlers and filled a New York City subway car....

You'll have heard that Jonathan Coulton's iconic cover of Baby's Got Back was plagiarised by the Fox TV show "Glee" (it's not the first time). Coulton's story has been widely reported, but Fox/Glee ha...

In The Tinkerers, Alec Foege presents a version of American history told through feats of engineering, large and small. He argues that reports of tinkering’s death have been greatly exaggerated;...

Madeleine Scinto, a reporter for the New York Post, wrote a story about a 4-million-dollar ecstasy operation in the North East. She wore blue eyeshadow, an oversized sweatshirt and Birkenstocks, still...

"Goatse Mail will offer email addresses on the internets most awesome domain: Goatse.cx. Users will be able to have their very own @goatse.cx email address using their existing Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail o...

The Boy Scouts of America is telling several media outlets that they are seriously considering a new policy that would end discrimination based on sexual orientation — at least as a national org...

As regular BB readers know, I'm a huge fan of Fleetwood Mac's California cocaine trilogy of albums. No surprise then that I got a real kick out of this t-shirt emblazoned with a stylized illustration ...

As regular BB readers know, I'm a huge fan of Fleetwood Mac's California cocaine trilogy of albums. No surprise then that I got a real kick out of this t-shirt emblazoned with a stylized illustration ...

On the rare occasion, a dreamy, jangly, coming-of-age pop song can make me dance like a moron in the kitchen. Download Teenage, put down the knife, press play, and behold the power of Londons Veronica...

The video from Aaron Swartz's memorial in San Francisco isn't the kind of thing you weep over. It's the kind of thing you stand up and salute....

The Forever Alone statue, originally featured on BB as a limited edition, is now in full production at Think Geek—and just $40 a pop....

This week on my podcast, I've posted a reading (MP3) from Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, which will be published on February 5 -- that's one week from tomorrow!...

It's all his fault. (Thanks, Matt!, via G+)...

Government Attic queried various states for their lists of forbidden license plates, and has begun posting the results. The most striking quality of the lists are their sheer size: states ban words wi...

David Ng has a great guide to building your very own sub-atomic-particle-spotting device....

"At its most base level, everything is nuts. So f#*$ it." In which a bartender from Queens becomes obsessed with theoretical physics....

For no particular reason, here is a graph of maternal mortality rates in England and Wales between 1850 and 1970. The Daily Beast also has an informative article on eclampsia, specifically, though you...

Bill Willingham's amazing graphic novel series Fables is one of those unbelievably, game-changingly epic series, one where I'm just as excited to get a peek at the edges of the world and the backstory...

The latest page of The Final Quest: Prologue is published online first for the first time here at Boing Boing. First time reader? You're a few issues behind....

Ars Technica's got an amazing piece on the Newegg fight against a patent troll called Soverain Software, who had been extorting a 1% royalty on all transactions from ecommerce companies with a bogus s...

Captured live on video in its deep-sea element, for the first time, the Kraken of tall tales and sea shanties—Architeuthis, the giant squid—is coming into sharp focus, a flesh-and-blood re...

Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, comes out on Feb 5, and as with my previous books, I'm going to be making it available as a free CC-licensed download. Whenever that happens, lots of people wri...

From Backdrops R Us, a grid of Fox News talking heads alongside classic shots of scenes from Canadian comedy show Kids in the Hall (particularly members of the troupe in drag). The resemblances are un...

Mennyi made a video in which he performs "Ode to Joy" by kicking broken plates around....

Rick Prelinger sez, "I'm not a Detroiter, but I've been visiting from time to time since the 1980s, and I hope you will too. It's really unfortunate that most of what we see and hear about it amounts ...

Mark Marino and Rob Wittig say, For the first 3 weeks of January, the verified Twitter account of reality TV star Spencer Pratt (of MTV's The Hills) became the site for a literary performance art proj...

A fascinating article in The Verge looks at the history of casino cheating and talks to Ted Whiting, director of surveillance at the Aria casino in Vegas, who specced out a huge, showy CCTV room with ...

Quirky, a collective for inventors of clever household gadgets, recently accused OXO of ripping off one of its popular designs, the Broom Groomer, whose toothed dustbin that may be used to strip the b...

I liked Seth Godin's "Eleven things organizations can learn from airports," wherein he notes, "[Of course, this post isnt actually about airports]." 2. Problems persist because organizations defend th...

Quirky, a collective for inventors of clever household gadgets, recently accused OXO of ripping off one of its popular designs, the Broom Groomer, whose toothed dustbin may be used to strip the brush ...

Open Source Ecology founder Marcin Jakubowski and the OSE team explain the philosophy behind their work and the open source movement as a whole. ...

Little Brother up for The Atlantic's Feb book-club choice The Atlantic's book club, 1book140, is asking for votes on its book for February. I'm surprised and delighted to see my novel Little Brother o...

Here's a fascinating look at the history of sex and computer graphics: a massive, critical Air Force military system was retasked (often) to render a pinup girl cribbed from a 1956 calendar. This was ...

Activists in Berlin have created a game called Camover where they move through public spaces in disguise, smashing CCTV cameras, recording the act and uploading it to YouTube for points....

The wonderful, edible weirdos at the Eat Your Heart Out blog are throwing an anatomical heart pop-up shop for Valentine's day in east London, at the site of this month's edible horror installation on ...

Last week, CNET's tech writers were ordered not to praise a gadget made by a courtroom enemy of parent company CBS. Now, their news team has also been given its editorial marching orders. Tim Carmody ...

Podium Cycling sells this boss Pee-Wee Herman skinsuit for your Big Adventures. They also do Spider-Man and various other novelties (light-up Tron, "hipster," etc), but Pee-Wee takes the cake. Pee-wee...

Two days after a group of Somali islamist militants vowed to execute Kenyan hostages, and tweeted a video of a captive pleading for the Kenyan government to help free them, the militant group's Twitte...

Our appeal was denied likely due to ongoing FBI probe into #Wikileaks. The probe is wrong and must be dropped; it is an affront to justice.— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) January 26, 2013 In Virgin...

Perhaps. Soutirage poured classic wines at Davos party hosted by Sean Parker (January 25, 2013Yountville, CA) Soutirage, a fine and rare wine retail and lifestyle company that provides wine enthusiast...

Lama Losang Samten explains some of the history and symbolism behind the Tibetan "Wheel of Life" mandala....

Lama Losang Samten explains some of the history and symbolism behind the Tibetan "Wheel of Life" mandala....

Declan McCullagh writes at CNET News: "State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose...

Declan McCullagh writes at CNET News: "State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose...

HULK SMASH!!!! vine.co/v/b5PqdxaUUPa— Jeremy Cabalona(@jeremycabo) January 25, 2013 Craig Kanalley has a good breakdown over at HuffPo about Twitter's acquisition/launch of Vine, an iOS app desc...

Sigh. Because, like, the whole gender role thing is binary. But, binary as in, are you Betty or are you Veronica. It hits stores February 7. More pix here. (HT: @marynmck)...

A little reminder that Boing Boing has a Boing Boing video page where you can surf and share our video posts. Who needs words? Other than the words it takes to describe these awesome videos to you. So...

They do love their goat's milk. ...

My friend John Schwartz at the New York Times wrote "Oddly Normal," a wonderful book about how he and his wife Jeanne worked through challenges to learn how best to support their son Joe, who is gay. ...

I'd completely forgotten Red Dwarf. Such a wonderful series. The cat is legendary....

What do you need to catch a giant squid? At The Verge, Arikia Millikan goes behind-the-scenes on the recent, successful expedition to capture the kraken on video for the first time....

"Punk Voyager" is this week's story on the Escape Pod podcast, and it is fucking amazing. It's Shaenon Garrity story about punks at the twilight of the 1970s who are drunkenly outraged to discover tha...

"A rape victim could be charged with a felony and face up to three years in prison if she aborts a child conceived in that rape, according to a bill proposed by New Mexico state Rep. Cathrynn Brown (R...

...a young fan named Zach who happens to have cancer, and is a patient in a Seattle hospital. ...

This debate is partly about semantics, and partly about the fact that evolution is more like a curve than a stair-step....

At Esquire, Miles Raymer has a top-ten list of theCraziest Drummers Ever. I'm not normally a fan of listicles, but this is more than mere linkbait. The illustrations by Jeremy Wheeler are fantastic!...

When the feds busted the Unabomber they found a live bomb under his bed. They needed it for evidence. But they also needed it to not explode. Enter a crack team of bomb experts who were flown in to Mo...

Artist Michelle Vaughan's 100 Tweets is a hand typeset letterpress project printed at The Arm in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For 100 Tweets, I spent months combing my Twitter feed in search of 100 comment...

There is no single definition of comfort. My newest column for The New York Times Magazine explores the different cultural definitions of pleasant living, how those traditions affect energy use in dif...

From Bela Lugosiin Dracula to Lon Chaney, Jr.'s The Wolf Man to Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, the classic 1920s-1960s monster flicks defined horror cinema for a generation....

In the interview I posted earlier today, SETI's Seth Shostak talked about how Hollywood has to make their science more accurate today than they did 40 years ago. That's because today's movie-watching ...

Spooky says: "Reborn baby dolls have been around for a few years now, and while some people love them so much they actually treat them like real babies, their ultra-realistic look creep a lot of peopl...

There is some truth to the American ideal of meritocracy. But there's a lot of myth, as well. Biologist Danielle Lee describes her experience coaching poor kids in St. Louis on science fair projects &...

Minute Physics tackles the greatest mystery in all the Internet and solves it with the power of science (and pedantry)...

The pro-Tibetan sovereignty news site phayul.com reports that Jigjey Kyab, 17, was found dead this week due to suspected self-poisoning, just before a planned self-immolation. The teen doused himself ...

Jenny McCarthy and vaccines. Dr. Jen Gunter explains why this is the Oprah mea culpa interview doctors really want to see....

tldr; Increase your sense of awe. (Via Dan Pink)...

A lion in Kenya is curious about a GoPro camera mounted on a radio-controlled car....

Artist Robert Shetterly's ongoing series of portraits of "Americans Who Tell The Truth" includes a recently-unveiled painting of John Kiriakou, the former CIA agent and counterterrorism adviser who be...

The Hi-Fi Honeydrops have been making quite a scene in the Los Angeles swing scene. ...

And here I am complaining about the rain in Los Angeles. (Via biotv)...

How awesome is this cover for the forthcoming UK edition of Rapture of the Nerds? Way, way awesome....

A former CIA officer whom the government spent five years trying to convict for disclosing classified information was today sentenced to 30 months in jail. He is the first CIA officer in history to fa...

Forrest Wickman at Slate has an explainer on the "mic drop," popularized anew by President Barack Obama. "The mic drop has been employed by rappers and comedians since at least the 1980s, and its grow...

Best viewed after licking your pet Sonoran Desert toad. (Via Dose Nation)...

A large-scale study of patients belonging to the Kaiser Permanente health care system has found "a significant increase in the number of children diagnosed with Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorde...

A coalition of journalists, privacy advocates, and Internet activists have published an open letter to Skype and Microsoft, calling on them to "publicly document Skypes security and privacy practices"...

Sidney Perkowitz is a physics professor at Emory University, and the author of several books that blend science and pop culture, including Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World....

A gap separates people who do science and the people who make science fiction, but that's no problem, thanks to the people who bridge the two....

Larry Lessig will give a lecture on the law and Aaron Swartz. Details to come....

Tim Maughan sez, "I've been wanting to thank all the BB readers that checked out my book Paintwork after Cory reviewed it last year - and what better way than some free stuff. Here's my gamification o...

John Brownlee tells the story of "a photograph of Steve Jobs so incredible, so deserved of being considered iconic, that you simply cant believe that no one has ever even heard of it."...

After years of waiting, Alien fans were shocked yesterday by the appalling state of the trailer for Aliens: Colonial Marines. Badly-acted and terribly-scripted, it made the forthcoming game look amate...

UPDATE: Reader Pat David went the extra mile and improved the trailer a different way: by keeping the music and sound effects but removing the dreadful voiceover: "turns out it's a center-panned vocal...

A case before the German Federal Court of Justice has ended with a man being awarded damages for an erroneous Internet disconnection by his ISP. He sued on the grounds that being deprived of the Inter...

A many as 10,000 crocodiles are "on the loose" in South Africa following floods on the Limpopo river. [Reuters]...

The death of massively multiplayer games, reliant on expensive infrastructure to stay alive, is more final than most. But doomed worlds can enjoy an afterlife in the Creative Commons: the developers o...

I've previously reviewed Phil and Kaja Foglios' Agatha H books, these being prose adaptations of their spectacular, award-winning Girl Genius comics. Now, the UK's Titan Books has brought out the firs...

The artist lineup has just been announced for the annual Coachella music and arts festival in the California desert. Wu Tang Clan, Jurassic 5, Sigur Rs, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Father John Misty,...

At a memorial for Aaron Swartz in San Francisco tonight at Internet Archive (live video stream here), Carl Malamud spoke about the late activist and developer. Aaron was part of an army of citizens th...

Someone posts a question about the electoral process; Tim replies: "I think you must think you're talking to Bill O'Reilly, not Tim O'Reilly the technical publisher, but I'll take a stab at it anyway....

The voice of James Earl Jones is back at CNN, intoning This is CNN in Vaderesque baritone. "Its restoration was a symbolic first act by Jeff Zucker, the new chief executive of CNN Worldwide, whose fir...

Okay. I surrender to our fuzzy, sweater-bedecked pony overlords. (HT: @katiezez)...

Negroponte tells all. The short version: because Nigeria....

Google's latest transparency report reveals that the company has refused to turn over stored email to law enforcement unless a warrant is presented. The ancient Electronic Communications Privacy Act a...

Why is it that these hamsters playing on a spinning contraption are so entertaining?...

Why is it that these hamsters playing on a spinning contraption are so entertaining?...

In Japan, this dog helps his owner walk the cattle every morning....

Kickstarter for a film described as the story of "two people with muscular dystrophy who go on a hilarious first date....

Andrew Rasiej sez, "Susan Crawford wrote OpEd piece for NYT which could h easily be titled "If I was the Chairwoman of the FCC". Not only has there never been a woman chair of the FCC, Susan is the US...

Gerri Detweiler of credit.com has an article about sleazy engagement ring financing. [H]ere is what some of the major jewelry stores are currently advertising. With all of these plans, if you make one...

Matt Richardson says: "I've seen plenty of secret doors on the interiors of houses, but never an secret exterior door." (Via Boing Boing Community on G+)...

Last week, my wife started reading Wild, by Cheryl Strayed. She couldn't put it down. I was sick in bed with the flu, and was looking for anything that would distract me from feeling sorry for myself,...

The German Herald reports that men serving in the elite Wachbataillon unit of the German army are developing breasts on their left pectorals. A doctor who is treating the men says that their trademark...

Jesse Thorn says: "My friend Oliver Wang (proprietor of Soul Sides and prof at CSULB) wrote this great little thing." At first glance, this image of a DJ working the turntables, with a cleavage-baring...

The Wrap: "J.J. Abrams will direct the next "Star Wars" film for Disney, taking stewardship of one of Hollywood's most iconic and lucrative film franchises, an individual with knowledge of the product...

Millions of calories, one thick skin....

Sometime between 1956-1958 an unknown IBM employee wrote a punchcard program that displayed the above pin-up girl on the screens of the US military's two billion dollar Semi-Automatic Ground Environme...

Instructables author Patrik has rigged up a homemade bioprinter, a 3D printer that "prints" in biological material....

Anecdotes aren't data — but they do make data memorable....

If my home was the Discovery One, I would listen to my space age bachelor pad music on this Rosita Stereo Commander Luxus stereo paired beautifully with Grundig Audiorama 8000 HiFi speakers, both c.19...

Mehdi Sadaghdar shows you how (not) to make a rail gun....

In a follow up to my feature on oral herpes, University of Texas biology professor Chris Sullivan explains how the virus that causes cold sores hides in your body. ...

Over at DesignTAXI, a small collection of "celebrity" business cards including the likes of Einstein, Freud, Warhol, and, er, Zuckerberg. (via NextDraft)...

Steve sez, "In 1926 Hugo (Award) Gernsback established the science fiction genre with the introduction of Amazing Stories magazine. Sadly, the magazine ended its run in 2005. Now it has returned once ...

From Chapter 40 of Anne of Ingleside: Anne sneezed. She began to be afraid she was taking a cold in the head. How ghastly it would be to sniffle all through dinner under the eyes of Mrs. Andrew Dawson...

From Chapter 40 of Anne of Ingleside: Anne sneezed. She began to be afraid she was taking a cold in the head. How ghastly it would be to sniffle all through dinner under the eyes of Mrs. Andrew Dawson...

The Beau Brummels guest star as the Beau Brummelstones on The Flintstones....

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responds to an inane question during Wednesday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. The event concerned an attack on the a consular building in Benghaz...

This happened in my friend's henhouse this morning. My friend Kate Hastings, who took this photo, thinks this egg froze because the hen cracked it slightly. But it also looks like the kind of expansio...

"A license to drive drunk? Some small-town politicians think it's just the tonic for rural Ireland." [Associated Press]...

A page from 16th C German manuscript ("Das Feuer Buch") from the University of Pennsylvania's collection, depicts a cat and a bird attacking a castle with bombs strapped to them. As if that wasn't eno...

Microsoft cancels negative memories of its products with positive memories of the age in which they existed....

A recent change to the Finnish Constitution allows the public to put any subject to put legislative proposals up for a Parliamentary vote by garnering 50,000 or more signatures. A hugely successful pr...

At Feministing, Zerlina collects some useful Hillary Clinton gifs from yesterday's Benghazi hearings: "How to deal with a mansplainer starring Hillary Clinton."...

From ETOnline....

Rick Schertle is the creator of one of our most popular projects in MAKE: the compressed air rocket launcher, which uses PVC pipe and a sprinkler valve to blast a paper rocket high into the air. Rick ...

It was really, really cold outside today, so I decided to use the opportunity to show my kids what happens when you throw really hot (boiling) water in the air outside at this temperature....

A number of Irish graphic designers got together and visually demonstrated some inane and hilarious client feedback. If you've ever worked in advertising you know these are tame. (via 22 Words)...

If you liked the REM's Losing My Religion shifted to a major key post, check out Eliot Van Buskirk's Evolver post on recreating the effect using Celemony Melodyne, a package that sells for $99 and up....

Twitter's just released Vine, a video sharing app designed to make it easy to create and embed short snippets of high-quality, low-bandwidth video on the web. The shortcomings of animated GIFs, and th...

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi writes: "In Zimbabwe as well as most parts of southern Africa, mopane worms are a staple part of the diet in rural areas and are considered a delicacy in the cities." [AP]...

Other manly scents available from ManHands' Etsy store include leather, cash and bacon. [via Uncrate]...

Just look at it. Katachi Golden Objects (Thanks, Jonni!)...

The title of this Ikea ad, "Forgetting to stay hidden", offers a tip-off to its content—Reuters reports that a transgender group called it "negative and stereotypical" and "a gross violation of ...

Chris Vizzini registered the term "Gaymer" as a trademark, then sent a cease-and-decist letter to Reddit over /r/gaymers, the section of the site dedicated to gay gamers and their interests. The right...

Cory wrote on Monday about Ahmed Al-Kabaz, the Dawson College Comp Sci student who found a massive bug on his school's website that left total data on thousands of students vulnerable to an easy hack....

Etsy seller Michael McLane made this smashing Master Chief Helmet Tiffany-style stained-glass lampshade, and is selling it for a mere $840. This is a full size Halo Master Chief Helmet made from Stain...

The BBC reports on how Americans with Scottish ancestry contrive haggis, a banned delicacy containing mashed sheep's lung, liver and heart, suet, oatmeal, etc., all boiled in a stomach: "There's alway...

The BBC reports on how Americans with Scottish ancestry contrive haggis, a banned delicacy containing mashed sheep's lung, liver and heart, suet, oatmeal, etc., all boiled in a stomach: "There's alway...

Last weekend marked the Sundance screening of Escape From Tomorrow, a guerrilla film shot without permission at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. It sounds like a fun film, but a lot of publications, ...

On the Vintage Ads LJ group, the awesome Man Writing Slash has rounded up a series of old ads that use mechanical methaphors for the human body. One of my favorite ad tropes is the Body=Machine/Body=F...

This is my buddy, Leonard.Miss him when I'm on the road.#curlytailpugrescue twitter.com/robinwilliams/— Robin Williams (@robinwilliams) January 23, 2013 Pug snapshots. His first tweet ever was p...

"Bloomberg Billionaires" is an intriguing example of information design. The net wealth of the world's 100 most rich human beings, in an interactive display....

A dog takes a horse for a walk....

As America's phone and cable companies roll out their "six strikes" plans (which they voluntarily adopted in cooperation with the big film companies), it's becoming clear that operating a public Inter...

Lish from The Henry Ford Museum writes, "Henry Ford Museum in metro Detroit is hosting a National Day of Courage in honor of Rosa Parks' 100th birthday. We're encouraging folks to share a digital badg...

Photo by Joshua Hirst....

An excellent recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 math/current affairs show "More or Less" dramatized "The Parable of the Ox," a short article by John Kay originally published in the Financial Times (pay...

Boing Boing favorite Brian Ewing (Ghosbusters in a Rat Fink car, Anatomical Frankenstein) has a line of Valentine's cards with scratch-off secret messages: I collaborated with animator CRANKBUNNY to c...

Agency Wank collects the extra-inane slogans used by advertising agencies to advertise themselves. It's amazing how many of these sound like David Brent quotes. [via Joel]...

Carl Malamud sez, "If you are in the Bay Area, please come to the Internet Archive Thursday evening for a memorial honoring Aaron Swartz. The program will be streamed on the net."...

Researchers have successfully stored information in synthetic DNA and then sequenced the DNA to read the data. Nick Goldman and his colleagues from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) encoded ...

Earlier this month I wrote about four of my favorite podcasts. I promised to follow it up with more of my favorite podcasts. It has taken me this long to live up to that promise. I think there will be...

Yes, there's a recession, writes Bernard Condon and Paul Wiseman at the Associated Press. "Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers. They're being o...

Eclectech sez, "UK artist Phillip Blackman is creating fantasic and gruesome zombie bears (undead teds), including this excellent valentines bear offering you his heart." Valentine UnDeadTed offering ...

Guys, some proprietors of some high-end restaurants do not want you taking smartphone snapshots of your food and sharing them on social media sites and the New York Times is on it....

A year after a 16-year-old girl in Morocco committed suicide after being forced to marry the man who raped her, the northern African nation's government announced plans to change the law to outlaw the...

Kim Dotcom's new "Mega" site "appears to be legal and is akin to a Dropbox or Google Drive on encryption steroids," writes David Kravets of Wired News. The site reached more than a million members in ...

Author and NYU professor Clay Shirky writes about one of the imperatives he believes the death of Aaron Swartz should bring to life: "We need to take care of the people in our community who are depres...

The National Security Archive, a nonprofit founded by journalists and scholars in 1985 "to check rising government secrecy," has published all of the available official government documents about the ...

From this carefully-curated selection. [Acid Cow]...

Just look at it. Shibuya Banana Vending Machine (Thanks, Brent!)...

The astounding, amazing, brilliant comics creator Kyle Baker has thwacked a whack of his graphic novels onto the tubes, for free, including my all-time favorite Baker, "Why I Hate Saturn." Run, don't ...

Just look at it. This is how cold it is in Norway right now. (i.imgur.com) (Thanks, arbitrary aardvark!)...

Occupy Wall Street and Reverend Billy put on one of the largest, most elaborate pieces of street art I've ever seen: a mass wedding between humans and corporations on Wall Street....

Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello are reactivating their side project The Postal Service just in time for the 10th anniversary of the band's only album, "Give Up."...

Our pal Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life, is joining MAKE executive editor Stett Holbrook for a live video han...

Our pal Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life, is joining MAKE executive editor Stett Holbrook for a live video han...

In 1985, Charles Bronson went 8-bit in the Death Wish 3 computer game from Gremlin Graphics for the ZX Spectrum, Armstrad CPC, and Commodore 64....

Suicide Girls has just published part two of its two-part interview with me about Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother (here's part one). In it, we talk about activism, clicktivism, and the future o...

Zack sez, "Just did an interview with Sylvia Toth, who uses public-domain images in a unique way -- she creates sugar cookies with images from 1940s comics printed onto icing sheets with food coloring...

Bitcoin-based casinos are reporting pretty serious, six-figure profits on a series of games wherein players' apopheniac tendencies cause them to hallucinate non-randomness in the performance of a pseu...

At the recent Kennedy Center Honors event that celebrated Led Zeppelin among other artists, Heart (with Jason Bonham on drums) performed a magnificent cover of "Stairway to Heaven."...

My Institute for the Future colleague Jake Dunagan is hosting a 24-hour online forecasting game to imagine the future of government services and civic engagement. It's called Connected Citizens and th...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Louis discovers that he's not the only one who knows how to create a fictional text conversation....

Titan Books is reissuing the thrillers of spy novelist Helen MacInnes, starting with Pray for a Brave Heart and Above Suspicion. Below, an excerpt from Above Suspicion, her first novel, which was publ...

Thanks to our delightful sponsor ShanaLogic, sellers of handmade and independently-designed jewelry, apparel, gifts, and other curious creations. Naturally, I'm digging this Cryptozoology Glow-in-the-...

Jayson sez, "Gygax magazine is a quarterly adventure-gaming magazine, created in the spirit of such iconic '80s journals as Dragon, White Dwarf, Adventure Gaming, and Pegasus. At the helm are Gary Gyg...

How exactly did a nuclear power plant generate snowfall in southwest Pennsylvania? Science. "The ultra cold air streaming in from the northwest interacted with the hot steam emitted from the plant res...

David Shiffman of Southern Fried Science can tell if that shark in flooded city streets after a storm photo is a fake, by the pixels....

"The sequel to Smash TV's critically acclaimed "Skinemax", Memorex is a 50 minute VJ odyssey, a tribute to an entire generation who grew up with only a TV and a VCR for a babysitter. Sourced from over...

Illustrator David Pelham produced some of Penguin UK's most iconic 1970s book-covers. Kadrey's got a small gallery of the best of 'em, works of art every one. Some of David Pelhams brilliant 70s SF co...

A recent grant is enough to keep Aquarius, the world's only remaining underwater research habitat, actively maintained by its salty crew. But it won't cover scientific mission funding. Aquarius lives,...

The first annual Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day brings attention to the ways, subtle and otherwise, in which female journalists are objectified and trivialized. Here's organizer (and BB contributor)...

Zachariah Scott created this wonderful machinima video, "The Turret Anthem," capturing a marvellous musical performance by the Portal Turrets in Glados's chamber:...

$110 gets you a set of Beyond Bedding's Treasure Cove Pirate bedding -- comforter, shams, and a collection of appliques. It's markketed as "Children's Bedding," but a) it comes in queen size, and b) g...

Just look at him. Noticed some snipers hanging out on the roof during the inaugural parade. Zoomed in to find him enjoying a banana. (Thanks, Richard!)...

The Stonewall Riots kicked off on June 28, 1969, and marked a turning-point in the gay rights movement. Today, they're remembered as a kind of shot heard round the world, but at the time, the coverage...

Rosemary says: "At school we are all busy putting together our portfolios to apply for co op placements this summer and one of my teachers keeps talking about ‘making art you want to get hired t...

Rosemary says: "At school we are all busy putting together our portfolios to apply for co op placements this summer and one of my teachers keeps talking about ‘making art you want to get hired t...

Matt Richardson says: "I've never seen a license plate flipper before, have you? From the video's description: 'This is meant to be used off road or show room for show cars and not meant for use to av...

Alexandra sez, "The Good Night Lamp lets you stay in touch with your loved ones by turning on a Big Lamp that remotely turns on a network of Little Lamps around the world. Wifi-enabled, collecting the...

Photo: patrick.ward04. Ken Murray, Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC, writes about his experience of how his peers in medicine tend to handle end-of-life issues. Its not a frequen...

My friend, David Lang, co-creator of the OpenROV remote control underwater robot, is working on a new book about makers and making, and he has launched a kickstarted to fund it. In a span of several m...

At The Awl, veteran headline-writer Choire Sicha deconstructs how headline-writing has been transformed by the search for SEO-optimized traffic boostfulness....

Radio producer Jess Hill, who has been working in the Middle East, wrote an account of what the experience of having a grand mal seizure was like. She wrote the post a week after the episode, and two ...

It is definitely now the future. A new venture is joining the effort to extract mineral resources on asteroids. The announcement of plans by Deep Space Industries to exploit the rare metals present in...

December 4, 1974: Donald Sherman who lives with Moebius Syndrome, a neurological disorder resulting in impaired speech among other challenges, uses a computer to order a pizza over the telephone....

Adafruit has announced "Gemma," a bite-sized, Arduino compatible board intended for use in wearable electronics projects. It measures 1" in diameter, and while it's not shipping yet, they're taking na...

Do you speak cop talk? It's that exaggeratedly wordy, descriptive-but-vague language that police officers sometimes use when describing a crime. Once you are aware of cop talk, it sounds fairly ridicu...

I have seen artists draw pictures that become unskewed in a mirrored cylinder, but this is the first time I've seen a sculptor use this technique. Beautiful. The Skewed, Anamorphic Sculptures and Engi...

Above are two delightful works by Marshka, the print company that beginning in 1974 melded the style of Japanese woodblock prints with Pop Art to eventually dominate dentist offices, hotel rooms, corp...

Michael Shermer on why neither side of the American political spectrum gets a pass when it comes to acceptance of science. Includes this interesting (and often overlooked) detail from recent national ...

Finally. Oh, and in case you were wondering: "Genetic analysis shows that the sessile crustaceans can broadcast sperm in water." (Science News)...

From the 1996 film Vibrations. (via @chris_carter_)...

The original Batmobile driven on the 1960s TV series sold for auction on Saturday for $4.6 million. The seller was legendary kustom car king George Barris who had transformed the 1955 Lincoln Futura f...

I hadn't realized that James Taylor had gone so avant-garde. (Thanks, Chris Arkenberg!)...

Vintage video of the Sunset Strip teen riot of November 12, 1966....

"Yeager — who made that frightening video promising he would start killing people if gun control legislation progressed — has had his handgun carry permit suspended by state officials, acc...

Matt Richardson says: Photography is not a Crime has been one of my must-read blogs for a long time. The owner, Carlos Miller, posts stories of people getting hassled or even arrested for using their ...

Instead of giving six men hammers, they hired five men to open the cardboard box containing the 127 fake iPhones and one man to drive an excavator over the phones. (Thanks, Joly MacFie!)...

This amazing video shows some divers helping a dolphin, who very obviously comes to them for help. Americablog reports......

Unexplained Things Are Out There shares the story of a purportedly 300 Million year old bit of something found in some Russian coal. The metal detail was supposedly 300 million years old and yet the s...

For the record, a Harvard scientist is NOT looking for an "adventurous woman" to give birth to a cloned Neanderthal. Ladies, you can stop filling out those application forms. Apparently, geneticist Ge...

These flat ceramic disks were either playing pieces for an ancient Roman game, or, possibly, really uncomfortable toilet paper. Scientists are investigating....

As Matt Lynley put it, "Meanwhile, in space ..."...

Reuters: "A cloud of harmless gas smelling of sweat and rotten eggs leaked out of a chemicals factory in northwest France and wafted across the English Channel as far as London on Tuesday."...

The CST-01 is presented as the world's thinnest watch, with an e-ink display and flexible battery embedded in a stainless steel band less than a millimeter thick. Weighing 12 grams, the cuff is design...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!...

Gareth Morgan wants cats gotten rid of. Claiming that the pets threaten New Zealand's native birds, the activist launched a website, Cats to Go, to convince his countrymen and women of the feline thre...

Jere7my sez, "This lovely young woman brought the house down at Arisia this year with her stunning "TARDIS Princess" dress. A "door" on the skirt opened to show the TARDIS control room, giving it the ...

For $12, Gama Go will sell you a mould that makes skull-shaped ice cubes. Not technically cubes, though, are they? P.S. This reminded me that we require pyramid-shaped ice cubes (i.e. pyramids) for ou...

The X100 series failed, in my view, as $500 "high end" netbooks: hot-running, clunky, and generally not up to Thinkpad snuff. Replacing Windows with Chrome OS and tailoring the system to its needs cou...

A "footlong" sandwich was measured to be merely 11 inches in length at a Subway restaurant in Australia. [Reuters]...

I can't believe I hadn't seen this trailer until today. It's based on Max Brooks' novel, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. I was so excited that it took me a while to pay attention to th...

A Dutch architecture firm plans on using a D-Shape 3D printer to output a house in the shape of a Mobius strip, a project they estimate will take 18 months: Dutch architecture studio Universe Architec...

Here's Mitch Resnick of the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Group (whence the kids' programming language Scratch comes) doing a TedX talk about the role of programming in education....

The New York Times's Brooks Barnes has some tantalizing details on "Escape From Tomorrow," the art-house movie I blogged about yesterday, which was shot in part at Walt Disney World and Disneyland: Hi...

There was the time Richard Harris was drinking in a pub with his new friend, Robert Mitchum. An aggressive man intruded and demanded an autograph from Mitchum, who took the proffered book and signed i...

Designer and theorist Edward Tufte was a friend and mentor of Aaron Swartz's. At Saturday's memorial to Aaron at the Cooper Union in NYC, Tufte remembered both Aaron and his own hacking career, invent...

Here's a great self-working card trick to teach your kids. If they are old enough to spell, they will love performing it for their friends. I learned about the trick, which was invented by magician Ji...

"This calf was part of a herd, and was probably a lookout sent to scout the area and signal the others if it finds food. The animal probably did not see the well, and fell in as a result." (Via Arbroa...

Mount Carmel Area Elementary School in Pennsylvania suspended a five-year-old girl for pointing a Hello Kitty bubble-gun at another student, characterizing this as a "terrorist threat." The little gir...

This week on podcast, I read my remembrance of Aaron Swartz (MP3), and the afterword he wrote for my upcoming novel Homeland....

81. Being beaten up by the thieves and thrown in the store vault, having the vault door closed on his foot, and then having the air supply cut off by the giggling thieves 106. Being fed poisoned sushi...

I've turned old steamer trunks into furniture before, and while it looks great, it's often a bit impractical. Restoration Hardware has released a line of nicely turned out, usable furniture that looks...

Dose Nation lauds it an "amazing turd of institutional anti-drug propaganda."...

Learn to break an apple apart with your bare hands. Make a marshmallow gun. Breathe fire. The Cobbler is your video guide to hands-on, science-based projects that filled with fun....

Up north — in Canada and other places where snowy winters are reliable (and reliably heavy) — you find more animals whose fur comes in various shades of white. This is true even for specie...

A handy guide to the changing body of knowledge about sloth biology and sloth behavior. Includes the surprise (discussed here before in an interview with a zoologist from the Smithsonian's National Zo...

The United States Geological Survey has an interesting FAQ report on dowsing — the practice of attempting to locate underground water with divining rods. It's got some interesting history and co...

@afrobluedc sang MY mashup on NBC last Nov. youtube.com/watch?v=yaX4xG Now I find out @gleeonfox aired/sells SAME combo?! youtube.com/watch?v=urTFed— DJ Earworm (@djearworm) February 22, 2012 La...

The science of skunked beer — or why clear glass bottles are the bane of brew....

Invented in 1801, Jacquard looms are really an add-on to already existent mechanical loom systems, which allowed those looms to create patterns more complex and intricate than anything that had been d...

Ariana Kelly: "Between 1997 and 2000, when Pacific Bell retired the number at the request of the Mojave Forest Service, the phone received thousands of calls, dozens each day. When asked why they call...

Someone has gone to the trouble (I don't know how but would suspect using Melodyne DNA or somesuch) of processing REM's minor-scale downer hit 'Losing My Religion' so that all the minor notes are now ...

You'll see it everywhere today, in stories seeded by tourism companies and charities: it is "Blue Monday", the most depressed day of the year. It's bullshit, Ben Goldacre reminds us, originally devise...

Now we are 13....

The latest page of The Final Quest: Prologue is published online first for the first time here at Boing Boing. First time reader? You're a few issues behind....

Hundreds is a minimalist puzzle game from Semi Secret Software, the makers of Canabalt. Each of its 100 levels is filled with one or more floating circles. When you press down on a circle, its numeric...

Sound it Out # 39: Guided by Voices - She Lives in an Airport (MP3) Dayton, Ohios legendary Guided by Voices broke up in 2004. Over the course of a 21-year run theyd gone through numerous personnel ch...

Ahmed Al-Khabaz was a 20-year-old computer science student at Dawson College in Montreal, until he discovered a big, glaring bug in Omnivox, software widely used by Quebec's junior college system. The...

Jason Shron is nuts for VIA Rail trains, so he re-created a car in his basement, down to the minutest detail (he bought a to-be-scrapped VIA car and harvested its fittings)....

Zack sez, "Mel Birnkant, creator of the Outer Space Men and major Disney collector, has a section on his website paying tribute to his friend Charles Ponstingl, who did amazing, elaborate wood carving...

"Escape From Tomorrow" is an indie movie screening at Sundance that was shot, seemingly without permission, at Walt Disney World. The film sounds pretty good, though the reviewer who saw it thinks it'...

From English Russia, original source unknown, "These are the Chechen homemade guns. There is a risk that the war will never end if they use such weapons..." No way to tell how accurate that descriptio...

A couple of cities back, in another century, I lived in a giant, illegal warehouse loft with tons of space, and in that loft, I built a most wonderful tiki-bar, with novelty bottles and stools that lo...

From Veronica Varlow: "The story behind it is even more intense, as the girl featured in the video is Tora, who was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her father and step-mother and six ot...

More of Bunnie Huang's amazing series on manufacturing in China for makers (part one): today, it's a piece on understanding and designing to the constraints of the kind of manufacturing a startup can ...

Jonathan Coulton has publicly shamed Fox for plagiarizing his arrangement for "Baby's Got Back" on its TV show "Glee": Hey look, @gleeonfox ripped off my cover of Baby Got Back: bit.ly/WME9Ho. Never e...

Bunnie Huang: "Back when I was a graduate student there, I extracted security keys from the original Microsoft Xbox video game console. I still remember the crushing disappointment of receiving a lett...

Unknown source, unknown provenance, and it's gotta be a shoop, but what a goddamned thing this would be, were it real. How french watch works (Thanks, Ben!)...

FStoppers has the story and the proof. "Mr. SG Collins makes a pretty compelling argument claiming that neither NASA nor Stanley Kubrick were actually technologically capable of producing a video that...

They're the mullet of cold-protective clothing. Half glove, half mitten — really, fingerless gloves with a handy mitten flip-top. They are also fantastic. Now, partly, this is a matter of person...

The TV show Lost in Space featured a marvellous, transparent, caterpillar-tread space-rover called "The Chariot," which was adapted from a snow vehicle, but was groovily and spacily modded into someth...

This welding mask uses near RT HDR video to ensure you see just how sloppy that weld was....

*click*...

Nina Paley has released her landmark animated feature Sita Sings the Blues under a CC0 license (as close to putting it in the public domain as you can get). She did it because of a "vow of nonviolence...

A group at Ohio State has been designing studies to measure the physiological response to massage, and they're trying to eliminate the placebo effect. So they're massaging rabbits. Alex Hutchinson at ...

A classic Lance Armstrong Nike TV ad, back when he was facing early doping accusations in 2001....

"Segundo," a photograph shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Bill Benson....

The bow tie really makes this work....

The history of sneezing powder is unexpectedly fascinating, a tale of an obsessive prankster, whose burning passion to make people sneeze drove him to out-and-out chemical warfare: No one's entirely s...

"Segundo," a photograph shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Bill Benson....

Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz (2002). Photo: Rich Gibson CC BY "My three year old, Tess, putting her arms around my neck, holding me as tight as she possibly could, promising me 'the doctors will p...

REN TVBolshoi Ballet chief Sergei Filin, 43, was about to arrive at his home around midnight Thursday when an unidentified attacker tossed acid in his face, causing severe burns to his eyes. State-run...

That's so messed up, it's not even wrong....

There are three things very wrong in this article at Livestrong.com, which my friend Meredith Yayanos pointed me to just now via Twitter. One, "nutrition" and "Velveeta" used in the same sentence at a...

This comprehensive, user friendly video shows you how to assemble the Powercube; Open Source Ecology's modular power unit....

Dierdre from the I-School at Berkeley sez, "Did you take part in history? Want to contribute your story? We want to know it. Contribute to a knowledge base designed to shed light on the public's role ...

Huge swirls in the sea off of Mumbai, India. Photo: Chris Hadfield/NASA Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is currently living in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as Flight Engin...

Tim Harford (Undercover Economist, guest blogger, statistical superhero) has a new show on BBC Radio 4, called Pop Up Economics: well-told tales about the dismal science. The inaugural episode (MP3) i...

Lavie Tidhar writes, "We are now running the second World SF Travel Fund fund-raiser. The Fund was established in 2011 to help bring one or two international persons involved in science fiction, fanta...

Anti-cancer-quackery blogger Robert Blaskiewicz has a blog post up that details how Houston-based "alternative cancer treatment" practitioner Stanislaw Burzynski (photo at left) whom many reasoned min...

In an interview with Mother Jones, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey shares his view that "climate change is perfectly natural and not necessarily bad," and his belief that "free-enterprise capitalism works...

A fun new Science Channel show starring popular podcasters Josh and Chuck of the Discovery-owned website howstuffworks.com. ...

A fun new Science Channel show starring popular podcasters Josh and Chuck of the Discovery-owned website howstuffworks.com. ...

The TSA has given the boot to Rapiscan, maker of about half of the pornoscanners in use in America's airports: TSA gave Rapiscan until June 2013 to come up with a software upgrade to prevent the scann...

This comprehensive, user friendly video shows you how to assembly the Liberator CEB Press; the worlds first open source, automated compressed earth brick making machine....

This news item is a few days old, but I'm just learning of it. A 50-year-old woman in Washington state is charged with manslaughter, for having reportedly smothered her boyfriend to death by lying on ...

A kitty cat experiences snow, and finds it delightful....

Flu season is in winter. Okay, great. But why? (Consider this an open thread for all your favorite humidifier recommendations.)...

This gentleman has an opinion. And he can see you, you little rats....

Astronaut Chris Hadfield shows us how to clip your fingernails in space! It's a bit different in zero gravity....

In the latest "dose makes the poison" news: If you consume enough chili peppers (or even chili powder), it can act as a neurotoxin....

The focus on video games as a source of American gun violence is driving me a bit crazy, so I just wanted to toss some evidence out there. Even though most of you have likely long suspected the two th...

Hey, that's not a Canadian sugar maple leaf! That is very clearly the leaf of the invasive Norway maple....

Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600 magazine sez, "We've gotten such a strong response to this and wanted to make sure anyone who knew Aaron - or who simply knew OF him - got a chance to hear the hour-long t...

"Strange Fruits" by Berlin-based artist Sarah Illenberger. (via Neatorama)...

A hilarious description of one of nature's weirder-looking creations. All true. All weird. ...

Lovely example of a garage converted into a modernist apartment. Of course, it begs the question: Where do you park? (I'm kidding.) Provenance unknown. (via Reddit)...

The US Department of Defense is launching a research effort to develop underwater robots/sensor platforms that would hibernate on the ocean floor until they "wake up when commanded, and deploy to surf...

To celebrate both Internet Freedom Day and MLK Day, we made a video containing the complete 17-minute 'I Have a Dream' speech... so people can share it on Facebook, Twitter, and their blogs. Doing jus...

The silence of Harpers is again broken for one of publisher John R. MacArthur's rants about the internet age. This time, Google is the target; he regards it as a parasite whose "logistical support for...

The silence of Harper's is again broken for one of publisher John R. MacArthur's rants about the internet age. This time, Google is the target; he regards it as a parasite whose "logistical support fo...

The silence of Harper's is again broken for one of publisher John R. MacArthur's rants about the internet age. This time, Google is the target; he regards it as a parasite whose "logistical support fo...

After Twitter added me to its "suggested user" list, my follow count skyrocketed from a thousand to a million in a few months. But artificial popularity turned a conversation into a stand-up show, I l...

Nerdcore rapper Dan Bull has recorded a moving musical tribute to Aaron Swartz, and produced an accompanying video....

Rina writes, "Join SF in SF as they begin their 8th year of presenting science fiction authors and films in the Bay Area, this Saturday, January 19th. Steven Gould, author of JUMPER, and the new seque...

Last night I finally got to see one of Evil Miss Cakehead's edible horror installations in person. The Helpers is a grotesque, edible pop-up shop in Bethnal Green Road near Brick Lane, which opened la...

This comprehensive, user friendly video shows you how to assemble the Powercube; Open Source Ecology's modular power unit....

Carmen Ortiz, the US Attorney who hounded Aaron Swartz, threatening him with 35 years in prison for downloading scholarly articles from MIT's open WiFi network, has released a statement explaining how...

The people have spoken. I offered to have my head 3D-scanned while making a ridiculous face originated by John "Rubberface" Scalzi if enough was donated to Jay Lake's cancer treatment fundraiser. Afte...

Jon found this $200 DNA sequencer on GovDeals, a site listing government surplus equipment. He notes, "I figured I should share this so that maybe some do-gooder out there might be able to use the dev...

Out Run was a great game, a true classic that came to define the mid-80s renaissance of arcade culture. As its buzz died down, though, my friends and I, arcade rats all, traded (and invented) rumors a...

OutRun was a great game, a true classic that came to define the mid-80s renaissance of arcade culture. As its buzz died down, though, my friends and I, arcade rats all, traded (and invented) rumors ab...

TIL: That what we think of as "pain" is actually two different things. The most basic sense is called nociception — a non-subjective reflex that drives lots of animals to pull away from dangerou...

A blog which offers helpful critiques of some of the weirder parts of nature....

Aaron Swartz's New York friends are planning a memorial service and tribute to him this Saturday at The Great Hall of The Cooper Union. Use the link below to RSVP. If you knew Aaron and are interested...

According to a new book, the human overbite developed at different times, in different places — and was always coincident with the widespread use of eating utensils. In Europe, for instance, evi...

Both the Bible and the Indiana State Legislature have tried to redefine pi to equal something much more simple than 3.14159265358979323846264338327950 ......

Learn your letters — from "anthrax" to "zoonoses"....

NPR's Robert Krulwich circled this bright spot on a night-time satellite image of the United States. As Krulwich points out, this cluster of lights is new — it wasn't there in 2005. And it's not...

Jeff sez, "My friend Chanel Reynolds's husband Jose Hernando was killed while cycling in 2009. She's created the Get Your Shit Together website to help you prepare for the worst now so that your famil...

Long before I was finally able to get my hands on a "white box" edition of Dungeons & Dragons, I was able to get my own copy low-rent competitor, Tunnels & Trolls....

Melinda Marx (Groucho's daughter) put out a few pop records, and in this clip, her famous pop introduces her to the Hollywood Palace audience.Dig that choreography!"...

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI seeking details of its surveillance policy -- who it spies upon, and how, and under what circumstances. The F...

Above is a demo of a prototype "Origami Condom" that is meant to be much easier to, er, deploy. It's silicone (non-disposable?) with a fluid lining that's "supposed to mimic the vaginal environment, s...

Scott Snibbe, the developer for Bjrks "Biophilia" app, has developed an iOS app for the Philip Glass remix projec: REWORK_. ...

At "BargainBinBlasphemy," vinyl album covers of pop-rock icons are upgraded into Black Metal....

An animated short on the escalating drug cartel violence on the US-Mexico border....

A talented group of pogo stick enthusiasts, displaying mad skills....

Design firm DoKC Lab created these excellent Space Invaders-inspired chairs. "Game Over" (via Juxtapoz)...

In 2002, a fellow paid 75 cents at a New York City flea market for a curious acetate recording of the Velvet Underground. Turns out, the acetate contained early recorded takes and mixes of songs that ...

Senior campaign staffers who worked for Michelle Bachmann in the 2012 race say that she's refused to pay them unless they sign an NDA promising not to disclose any criminal and unethical activity they...

The story behind Larry Adler, Flexidisks and Echo, "the magazine you play on your phonograph."...

I don't have to say more about Aaron Swartz's death; I knew knew him a little, but felt his loss keenly. As coverage appeared, however, I found myself concerned about his legacy. Aaron did so much in ...

University of Florida grad student Andrew Gray built the Bird Buggy for his parrot to drive around the house....

Westerado is a fantastic free browser game, a western whodunnit and revenge story that combines great scene-setting visuals with easily-grasped and simplified JRPG conventions. If you've ever played Z...

They're still figuring out whether it was a well-planed heist or simply an everyday burglar's lucky day....

John Siracusa marvels at how conspicuously awful the software was in stuff like cable boxes and televisions at this year's CES: "All of this software is terrible in the same handful of ways. Its buggy...

The Cutting Room Floor collects hidden messages in videogames, but it's Cabel Sasser who most eloquently recalls them. Here's some developer trash-talk, from the Amiga age's pirate-infested waters: Il...

At The Verge, Laura June takes us on a beautifully-illustrated journey through the life story of the American video arcade: If youve never been inside a real arcade, it could be hard to distinguish on...

Michael Geist sez, Nearly one year ago, the U.S. government launched a global takedown of Megaupload.com, with arrests of the leading executives in New Zealand and the execution of search warrants in ...

After a series of mishaps and problems—the latest being an electrical fire before takeoff in Japan—Boeing's 787 Dreamliners have been grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration. Only ...

4chan's worksafe GIF board a treasure trove of excellent content before it hits the social media tracts has a great thread of space GIFs up now. I've selected a few of the best after the jump. There ...

Students from the University of Illinois have launched a Kickstarter project for an internet of things garden control system....

Scientists are beginning to question the idea that free-radicals cause aging and, with that, the entire basis of the antioxidant industrial complex. Maybe, now, everything can stop tasting of acai ber...

I'm planning a several week trip in my VW camper to Baja. As my traveling companion is particular about breakfast, I figured coffee was going to be awful important. I will trust Tonx for our beans but...

Science blogger Matt Springer analyzes the surprisingly fascinating math behind Reddit upvotes....

Architects are turning an old cold storage facility into modern office buildings. But first, they have to thaw it out. ...

Space Station Commander Sunny Williams takes you on an in-depth tour of humankind's home away from home in space. ...

Surprisingly, they're not all long, Germanic compound words (generally a font of useful no-equivalent words): 8. Tartle (Scots) The nearly onomatopoeic word for that panicky hesitation just before you...

"Because the shipment's paperwork was not in order, agents confiscated the heads and sent them to the Cook County Medical Examiner for safekeeping." [Reuters]...

A tour of old technology user manuals. Highlight: A Volkswagen repair guide that urges you to bond spiritually with your vehicle....

It's a little late, but I kind of love these 2013 props made by PaperandPancakes on Etsy. How did you write your New Year's resolutions? I don't mean, like, the tools you used — pencil and paper...

Noah Swartz (brother of Aaron) writes, "The MIT society for open science has made a petition asking for an apology from MIT: (we understand that there is an investigation, but the thought process is t...

In the NYT today, a feature by John Eligon about Williston, North Dakota, a new fuel boom town situated atop rich shale oil formations. Migrant laboring men come here from all over, in search of jobs....

Maria Waltherr-Willard, 61, is a former high school teacher. In a lawsuit filed in Ohio, she accuses school district administrators of discriminating against her because of her rare phobia, which caus...

Responding to a question in his confirmation hearings about whether the death penalty should be applied to rapists, Indonesian Supreme Court candidate Daming Sanusi reportedly said, "Consideration nee...

"As more facts emerge regarding the conduct of the federal prosecutors in the case of Aaron Swartz - Massachusetts' US attorney Carmen Ortiz and assistant US attorney Stephen Heymann," writes Glenn Gr...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Zero Dark Thirty's depiction of torture as an effective means of gathering information is defended....

The WSJ reports that "millions of mental-health records remain missing from the national database that gun dealers use to run background checks on potential buyers," according to new analysis of the f...

A man in Venezuela "sacrificed" his mom in a brutal murder, as a spiritual offering for the health of President Hugo Chavez, who has advanced cancer. He hit his mother, who was 80; then he severed her...

Kathryn Bigelow: 'Zero Dark Thirty' torture criticism is invalid, because "I'm a pacifist." The problem isn't so much that torture scenes existed; but that their presence in a faux-documentary made th...

Is it possible for someone's chess ability to leap, suddenly, from mundane mastership to world-beating? Many are convinced that Bulgarian player Ivanov Borislav is cheating—but they cannot figur...

The Center for Science in the Public Interest's annual list of "food porn"--items that have more calories in them than one might expect--identifies Cheesecake Factory's Bistro Shrimp Pasta as its wors...

Aaron Swartz killed himself two years to the day after he was charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a controversial legislation that some courts have interpreted as making it a felo...

IO9 profiles Zack Kopplin, a 19-year-old, five-year veteran of the fight against teaching creationism in Louisiana's science classes. Kopplin was a student when the a law came into effect allowing tea...

Mimi sez, A new research report released by the Connected Learning Research Network is a call for educators, parents, youth, media-makers, geeks, creatives and intellectuals everywhere to work togethe...

David sez, "Last September, the UK parliament earmarked 10 Million pounds from the science budget to support open access scientific publishing. Earlier this week, the UK parliament announced that they...

The superintendent at a housing complex in suburban New York will go to prison for 6.5 years for "entering a tenant's apartment and having sex with a Labrador retriever." (NY Post)...

"My life is sort of weird. I don't back off from things."—John McAfee, the newest weird resident of Portlandia. The software millionaire is on the run from police in Belize, and says he plans on...

Ken Bohn / San Diego Zoo The Los Angeles Times has a cute photo slideshow up with fresh shots of Xiao Liwu, the 5 1/2-month-old male panda at the San Diego Zoo, who has been receiving some health chec...

Even during and after Bahrains bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, the U.S. "continued to provide weapons and maintenance to the small Mideast nation," Defense Department documents released ...

"Scientology leader David Miscavige has been trumpeting his church's 'milestone year,' but the mysterious religion is alienating scores of its most faithful followers with what they call a real estate...

"My life is sort of weird. I don't back off from things."—John McAfee, the newest weird resident of Portlandia. The software millionaire is on the run from police in Belize, and says he plans on...

"Something horrible happened in Homs on December 23. Exactly what that horrible event was still isnt clear," writes Noah Shachtman at Danger Room. There is some speculation today that Syria dropped th...

Jennifer Granick: "Towards Learning from Losing Aaron Swartz." Over the weekend, I learned that Aaron Swartz had taken his own life. I cried, and am still crying, for him, his family, for the close fr...

Jennifer Granick: "Towards Learning from Losing Aaron Swartz." Over the weekend, I learned that Aaron Swartz had taken his own life. I cried, and am still crying, for him, his family, for the close fr...

"We should prevent what happened to Aaron from happening to other Internet users," Rep. Zoe Lofgren announced today on Reddit. "I'm introducing 'Aaron's Law' to change the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act...

A US judge has ruled that Agence France-Presse and The Washington Post improperly used photographs that journalist Daniel Morel tweeted in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in January 2010. AFP ar...

A US judge has ruled that Agence France-Presse and The Washington Post improperly used photographs that journalist Daniel Morel tweeted in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in January 2010. AFP ar...

Tanya Angus, 34, was 7 feet 2 inches tall and weighed about 400 pounds. She had "gigantism." The Las Vegas woman who couldn't stop growing has died....

Tanya Angus, 34, was 7 feet 2 inches tall and weighed about 400 pounds. She had "gigantism." The Las Vegas woman who couldn't stop growing has died....

"SPONSORED: The Taliban Is A Vibrant And Thriving Political Movement." An Advertorial at The Onion....

"SPONSORED: The Taliban Is A Vibrant And Thriving Political Movement." An Advertorial at The Onion....

e filmed a train ride four times. One time for each season; winter, spring, summer and autumn....

Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways today announced plans to ground their entire fleet of Boeing 787 Dreamliners, after yet another one of the planes made an emergency landing in Japan on Wednesday ...

On Play This Thing, Sebastian Sohn writes about Bowling Solitaire, a "smarter solitaire" invented by Eurogame design legend Sid Sackson in the 1970s: The late Sid Sackson, a pioneer game designer, was...

Tim Wu, Columbia law professor and technology law expert, has a very well-written piece in the New Yorker describing the point-scoring culture of America's prosecutors and its incompatibility with the...

Jim Munroe writes, "GHOSTS WITH SHIT JOBS just came out on iTunes/Amazon/Xbox/PS3 as a $5 rental and we're doing this thing where if you organize a screening party you could win a videochat Q&A w...

William sez, "On August 2, 1978, a landmark decision in Reno Federal Court ruled prostitutes are actually brothel employees and therein lies the SIC coding problem unique to Nevada. My father in law w...

Trevor Timm, my colleague at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, says, "Aaron Swartz worked a lot with MuckRock in the years before he died. Michael Morisy, MuckRock's founder, just wrote a really gr...

Wayne Dobson is being plagued by people looking for their cellphones. "What has become a powerful tool for police hunting down bad guys and people who lose their phones or who call 911 has backfired o...

If you're in Southern California, here's a week-long event well worth checking out. Starting this weekend, The Santa Barbara Summit for Tibet (SBST) is hosting a "Tibetan Cultural Week of Celebration ...

If you're in Southern California, here's a week-long event well worth checking out. Starting this weekend, The Santa Barbara Summit for Tibet (SBST) is hosting a "Tibetan Cultural Week of Celebration ...

We've gathered lots of excellent internet video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page: • Televised police chase zips past man recording it on his TV. • A dubstep-loving b...

BB pal Russell Walks created this wonderful Gallifreyan Perpetual Calendar and Galactic Star Chart for Timelords and their fans. It enables you to "find the day of the week for any date between 1600 a...

A fellow was purportedly recording a police chase on TV when the chase went right by his house....

This is Scott's Hut located on Antarctica's Ross Island as it appears on Google Street View. It was built in 1911 by Robert Falcon Scott's British Antarctic Expedition and has been almost perfectly pr...

"Horse DNA has been found in some beef burgers being sold in UK and Irish supermarkets, the Republic of Ireland's food safety authority (FSAI) has said." [BBC]...

I'm late getting to this (my own fault, I missed an important email), but We: Robot, the Robotics and the Law Conference at Stanford Law School is still accepting papers until Jan 18. Last year's even...

Photo: "Clematis 2013" Copyright 2013 by Katinka Matson. View larger size. Each year, literary ber-agent and big idea wrangler John Brockman of Edge.org poses a question to an assortment of scientist...

"Just my bird Harvey dropping some fat beats."...

John Scalzi's smashing, existentialist sf novel Redshirts is out in paperback today (I reviewed it last June). Caloo, callay!...

Some incredibly dedicated and talented maniacs have created a shot-for-shot live action recreation of Toy Story....

"What happens when you translate The Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song through every language on Google Translate.... and then BACK into english?"...

Etsy seller GuitarPickCollection sells handmade guitar (mandolin, banjo, etc) picks made from coins and slugs that have been formed to suit. I was never much of a guitar player and so I can't guess wh...

A playful brain is a more adaptive brain, writes ethologist Sergio Pellis in The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience. In his studies, he found that play-deprived rats fared worse in...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!...

Virginia Postrel reports finding this ad in a 1974 issue of Vogue, three years before George Lucas's Star Wars was first released to theaters. Inspiration ... or common descent from a shared ancestor?...

In today's XKCD What If?, Randall Munroe answers the question, "From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?" posed by Alex Lahey: At supersonic and hype...

Aaron Swartz's friends and colleagues at the Internet Archive will be holding a memorial gathering for him on January 24 from 7PM onward at the Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco 9411...

I made an animated presentation about broadband and mobile data caps - specifically, how they discourage innovation, how the excuses used to justify data caps don't hold water, and the real reasons t...

Brian Guthrie writes, Aaron was a tireless supporter of the open internet and an old-school hacker. To honor his memory and his contributions to technical community, Aaron's family and friends wanted ...

Michael, from Muckrock (a site that helps you make Freedom of Information Act requests) sez, "Aaron Swartz was one of MuckRock's earliest users, and a steadfast friend and advisor. He regularly sugges...

Under His unforgiving majesty Cthulhu, the Order of Dagon expanded more in 2012 than in any 12 months of its 180-year history. 2012 was a milestone year for the Dark Cult, with the dread message sprea...

The BBK BitTorrent box is a €90 set-top Android box that can stream content downloaded over BitTorrent directly to your TV; it can pull programming from the wider Internet, or from computers on ...

Not Pacman is Stabyourself's Pacman variant in which the whole field is subject to wild rotations that cause all the game sprites to tumble....

(Via Laughing Squid)...

I don't think the "We the People" petitions at Whitehouse.gov have an effect on what the Obama administration decides to do, but I signed this one anyway: Remove United States District Attorney Carmen...

They were pretty nice about my ruining their afternoon, except for a moment when I was talking smack about those flat/small/fashionable Mac keyboards and I think I heard nearby developers scoff at me ...

Jane Kenoyer of Hi-Fructose says: Eric Standley works with hundreds of layers of colored paper creating intricate laser cut stain glass windows. These beautifully constructed works are made up of inte...

For the last several years I've been using a Fujitsu S1500 ScanSnap scanner to digitaly store all my paper documents. As I've said before, the ScanSnap truly was a life changer for me. I had no idea t...

Have you ever wondered what castrated testicles would look like, if they were lovingly rendered in chocolate? Wonder no more....

The crab-louse is in apparent decline, a situation that some doctors and entomologists attribute to widespread Brazilian waxing. Though, as Skepchick points out, there's a huge industry that stands to...

Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. Subscribe to Gweek on iTunes | Subscribe via R...

Simon Beck creates stunningly intricate patterns in the snow by walking (carefully) in raquettes neige (snowshoes). "On average they take about 10 hours to really do it properly, some are a little un...

Jake Fried's "The Deep End," hand-drawn ink and white-out animation....

As previously mentioned, I have committed to recreating a funny face made by John Scalzi, then getting my head 3D scanned while pulling said face, and releasing the scan as a CC-BY download on Thingiv...

Same-sex character romances will finally be added to Star Wars-themed online world The Old Republic—but on only one of the massively-multiplayer roleplaying game's worlds....

Industrial design student Paulo Goldstein's "Repair is Beautiful" project is about fixing broken items like lamps, headphones, and chairs with unusual bits of detritus like string, metal odds-and-sodd...

Hilary "Chartgirl" Sargent has produced another amazing chart, chronicling the many feuds of the suspected orangutan and noted troll: "Donald Trump: FEUDWHORE."  Infographic: Understanding the We...

I've written an essay on how copyright enforcement laws let entertainment companies get away with paying less to artists for the O'Reilly Tools of Change blog. The ToC folks asked to to contribute som...

Or, rather, there can be. But it's really, really awkward....

The Horniman museum in London has this German wood-turned disc from which individual toy cows may be sliced in its Handling Collection. For some reason, I never imagined that this is where wooden anim...

The US government has dismissed the case against Aaron Swartz. In the wake of the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz, the United States Attorney decided to formally drop the pending charges against the 26...

Lorraine Robinson from Fairy Meadows Miniatures made this dollhouse inside a guitar for her daughter, as a 25th birthday present: "She is a music and travel buff and just about to start a new episode ...

Toby sez, "Orchestrated Text takes the brilliant content found in the liner notes of classical music CDs, and creates a deeper music streaming experience. Users click on a piece to play it, and read a...

The experience of watching a magician ranges from the painful to the wonderful and everything in-between....

I've carried a Fisher Space Pen Bullet on and off since I was a kid. ("Write underwater and upside down!") I usually lose them in a matter of weeks, but while I can manage to hold on to one I do appre...

Sarah Marshall and Michael Magnes offer The 17 Best Failed TV Shows Of The 80s (As Judged By Their Openings) Be sure to stay at least long enough to find out why Voyagers star Jon-Erik Hexum suddenly ...

This morning, my son and I watched the "Fight Fighters" episode of Gravity Falls for what seems like the fifth time. Turns out, you can now tackle that dastardly Rumble McSkirmich yourself in Disney's...

High school teacher Maria C. Waltherr-Willard, 61, is suing a school district for discrimination, claiming it pushed her to resign because of her age but also her disability. Waltherr-Willard has pedo...

MIT president Rafael Reif sent out a university-wide email yesterday announcing an investigation into the school's involvement in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. He's appointed MIT professor Hal Abel...

"Songs for Unusual Creatures," featuring the Kronos Quartet and the Aye-Aye....

Over at our sponsor Intel's My Life Scoop site, I wrote about several modern tube amps to warm up your digital music. In the ongoing analog vs. digital debate, there are myriad measurements involving ...

Pixelated indie RPG Minecraft now has the ability to use animated textures for its chunky world-blocks. Perhaps you're thinking that the modding community will be use this feature to create subtly-win...

Evan B.'s been a Lego hobbyist since 1998 and reports winning numerous contests for his incredible work. His flickr photostream is full of minifig marvels; you can buy his book, How to build Forklifts...

For years, Australia's censors effectively banned games with graphic violence, making titles such as Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat hard to charge money for. At Ars Technica, David Cornish writes ...

Urooj Kahn, 46, died of cyanide poisoning after winning a $1m lottery jackpot. He left no will, and the suspicion around the circumstances of his death led to a probate battle over the cash. This week...

Fredrik Hjelmquist, operator of a music store in Sweden, has invented a hi-fi coffin so that the dead may listen to their favorite tunes in the afterlife....

Reuters: "The three meter-long (9.1 foot) non-poisonous Amethystine python appeared about an hour into the Qantas flight between Cairns in northern Queensland and the Papua New Guinean capital of Port...

Enjoy the latest page of Elfquest. First time reader? Catch up at the comic's official homepage....

In a guest editorial on Naked Capitalism, Matt Stoller reminds us that Aaron Swartz's politics weren't just about digital freedom: he saw free software and open networks as instrumental to eliminating...

Illustration: tisserande Maria Konnikova is the author of Mastermind: How to think Like Sherlock Holmes, out January 2013 from Viking, and a blogger at Scientific American. Visit her website and follo...

Kurt Wurk has collected a number of images from the lost decade. [Pinterest]...

Just look at it. The Peeled Banana Ice Cream...

Beijing's air quality is so bad the EPA doesn't have a scale that goes up far enough to define it. [Edward Wong at the NYT]...

Tony from the StarShipSofa science fiction podcast writes, "On the 26th January Spider Robinson with deliver his live online lecture How To Write Science Fiction... with Spider Robinson over at StarSh...

Kathe Koja's brilliant novel Under the Poppy -- a dark, romantic, swirling wartime intrigue -- was adapted for stage in her hometown of Detroit....

Brewster Kahle, Carl Malamud, and Aaron Swartz's other radical archivist friends have put together an open repository for peoples' electronic Aaron Swartz files. Brewster writes, "The Web team of the ...

Our pal Tony Moore, co-creator of The Walking Dead, has good news to share about his comic book title: Fear Agent (written by Rick Remender). He says: [The first issue] is available for free on the Da...

Just released: the trailer for the upcoming documentary "TPB:AFK" about the founders of the Pirate Bay. ...

Last week, I blogged about the fundraiser to help sf writer Jay Lake with his cancer therapy (he's hoping to have his genome sequenced and to find some new avenues for treatment) and expenses. The fun...

Scott Weaver is a San Francisco sculptor who spend 35 years building the most stupendously gorgeously wonderful toothpick sculpture....

America's largest ISPs took the chickenshit step of agreeing to voluntarily police copyright on behalf of the movie studios and record labels, with a "six strikes" system that involves a series of eve...

Nick Mamatas (author of such wonderful books as Sensation) formerly lived in Battleboro, VT, once home to amateur press enthusiast Arthur H. Goodenough, who was a correspondent of HP "Cthulhu" Lovecra...

Fermi's Paradox speculates that the fact that our civilization has not yet encountered evidence of alien civilization implies that such life must not exist. In "Tapeworm Logic," Charlie Stross brillia...

"Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group, on the grounds that the company's vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims… lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the la...

Popcorn time! "On his program last night, Beck revealed that his intention to 'go Galt' is quite literal, unveiling grandiose plans to create an entirely self-sustaining community called Independence ...

Sculptor Jeremy Mayer writes, "This is my latest project- a portrait commission. The client, Mark Pelzner, came to me with 3 typewriters bequeathed to him by his late father, Marvyn Pelzner. Mark want...

Filabot, "The Personal Filament Maker" is an ongoing open-source hardware kit project that aims to perfect a plastic grinder/melter that you can use to turn scrap plastic (including failed 3D printout...

Jimmie P Rodgers shows off and describes the thinking behind his new tattoo, which provides a crib for resistor code, symbolizes the rainbow queer pride flag, and is also five inches long and can be u...

I'm in Toronto visiting my family with my daughter, Poesy. I was intrigued by Makerkids, a makerspace for children that does after-school and summer programs for kids who want to hack toys, use the wo...

Alex Stamos, a computer security and forensics expert, was one of the expert witnesses in US v Swartz, the vindictive case brought against Aaron Swartz for walking into an unlocked computer closet, an...

Here's a note from Aaron Swartz's family, with details about his memorial service in Chicago next week, and the charity they've nominated for donations in Aaron's name: Our beloved brother, son, frien...

We are having fun in the G+ Boing Boing community. Our friend Rob Walker posted this photo and said: I was in San Francisco recently and walking from Market/8th to the SF CalTrain station I kept ...

Quinn Norton, who was Aaron Swartz's lover, remembers him: We used to have a fight about how much the internet would grieve if he died. I was right, but the last word you get in as the still living is...

Larry Lessig's remembrance of Aaron Swartz, the young activist who took his life last night, is beautiful and angry, and expresses an important insight into the vindictive, disgusting behavior of the ...

My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I'm still digesting it -- I suspect I'll be digesting it for a long time -- but I...

Responding to a successful petition requesting the construction of a Death Star, the White House responds with "This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For", an explanation of the station's fo...

You've got TWO HOURS to get in on Jeffrey Beebe's Kickstarter to produce limited edition prints of his maps of Refactoria, an autobiographical D&D style kingdom....

I'm bananas for this Woody Allen figurine from Bigshot Toyworks. Klim Kozinevich says: Here is a quick peek at something new. We were working with the amazing Stan Chow on this limited edition Woody A...

January 8, 2013...

My 17yo niece Katie Graef cruised the halls of the 2013 Surf Expo in Florida this week, and spotted two particularly Boing-y items: Above and below, boards shaped by Ricky Carroll and airbrushed by Jo...

An 8-week old foster puppy gets some training from a 6-month old foster puppy pal....

The SF Chronicle reports that a federal judge in San Francisco has "indignantly rejected" the Obama administration's attempt to use secret evidence to thwart the efforts of a former Stanford student t...

Former Gizmodo gadget writer and chief editorial whip-cracker Brian Lam has covered many a CES in his time; since leaving Gawker media for ocean adventures and his Wirecutter electronics blog, I think...

An 8-week old foster puppy gets some training from a 6-month old foster puppy pal....

The ACLU points to the TSA's recently-issued Market Research Announcement, "in which the agency expresses a desire to expand its Pre-Check whitelist program by allowing private companies to carry out ...

"Free the dogs, arrest the criminals!," shouted protesters in Mexico City today—they say the 50-or-so feral dogs captured after five recent human deaths in a local park are innocent. Officials a...

A couple of weeks ago my family started playing the card game Anomia. We are enjoying our gaming nights so much that we started playing a new card game called The Struggle for Catan. It's similar to t...

There will be no bacon on Elon Musk's Mars. UPDATE:Elon Musk would like you to know that he is not trying to be the Emperor of Mars and has no authority to ban meat there. (Thanks Carl Franzen!)...

At ProPublica, Cora Currier has a useful and straightforward explainer piece up, outlining Everything We Know So Far About [US] Drone Strikes....

Global Voices: "Seven months after the sentencing a Twitter user to five years in jail for defaming the Emir of Kuwait, another Twitter user Ayyad Al-Harbi was sentenced this Monday to two years in ja...

At The Pulitzer Center website, a feature on the work of investigative journalist Kathleen E. McLaughlin, an American reporter working in Africa whose current work focuses on how Chinas health program...

Filmmaker Laura Poitras follows the tragic return home to Yemen of a Guantnamo Bay prison detainee, Adnan Latif....

Spoiler alert: "Whiskers" dies....

"I think Teddy's had a happy new year," observes his handler....

During an interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy of UK's Channel Four News about his new slavesploitation film, Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino said something really unfortunate. Face, meet palm. (HT...

A waterboarding scene from the film "Zero Dark Thirty." Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the New York University Center on Law and Security and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's F...

I hope those onion rings weren't fried in transfat! From Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson, by E. Jean Carroll. (Via World's Best Ever)...

A long-awaited investigation of top UK entertainer Jimmy Savile, who died in 2011, reveals that he sexually assaulted hundreds at BBC premises and at hospitals where he performed charity work. The vic...

Popular Science visits a goo hawker at CES 2012. (Via Salon)...

Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck? President Obama refused to address this pressing question. But science has the answer. (Via Tim Maly and kottke)...

"It's the best I've ever seen in my whole life. The most exciting thing." (Via Worlds' Best Ever)...

The Magic Castle is celebrating its 50th birthday. It is one of my favorite places on earth....

This Labradoodle named Charles lives in Norfolk, Virginia where he's frequently mistaken for a lion on the loose. Apparently, 911 dispatchers received three separate 911 calls this week reporting the ...

Graphic/package designers Ron & Ryan Clark of Invisible Creature created a marvelous holiday gift for their six best clients: a custom LEGO set. Sure beats a fruit basket! Edition of 6 sets. 444 ...

This cacophony of musical cultures is "the national anthems of all 193 member states of the United Nations, plus Palestine and the Holy See/Vatican City (the two United Nations non-member observer sta...

The world's finest portrait artist Drew Friedman's take on comics legend Jack Kirby....

Fifteen years before David Cronenberg adapted J.G. Ballard's novel CRASH to the big screen -- and two years before the novel even came out -- Ballard himself starred in this short for BBC 4....

In comic books, radiation exposure always leads to awesome superpowers. In reality, not so much. Except in the case of Cladosporium cladosporioides, a fungus exposed to high doses of radiation during ...

Tech site CNET was about to give Dish Network's latest set-top box a best-of-show editorial award, but rescinded the plaudits because its parent company, CBS, is suing the manufacturer. Mathew Ingram ...

Here's an image from a patent filing made in 1931. Now, what do you think it is? I'll give you a hint: It's a medical device. Find the answer at Ptak Science Books...

It's been a good week for pedantry. In a guest blog post at Scientific American, Kyle Hill discusses the durability of spaceship windows — both in the real world, and in Joss Whedon's movie Sere...

Jonathan McIntosh's "Buffy vs Edward" video is a classic: a mashup that's been viewed millions of times on YouTube, discussed in the halls of the US Copyright Office, and cited in a Library of Congres...

NPR have finally posted the full concert footage from David Byrne and St Vincent's Love This Giant concert tour, which went around last fall. It was one of the most amazing shows I've ever seen....

A couple of nights ago I was listening to Jesse Thorn's Bullseye radio show and podcast. It was a terrific episode. His guests were singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, and one-man idea factory Seth Godin. B...

At The Economist, Glenn Fleishman laments the freezing of the public domain in America under relentless entertainment-industry lobbying, even as Europeans enjoy an annual movement of cultural history ...

My next novel, Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother) is out in a few weeks, and I recently sat down with Nicole Powers from Suicide Girls for an interview about the book and the issues it raises, es...

My friend Craig Yoe has put together a new book with a bunch of vintage comic book stories about comic book artists! What's cooler than comics about cartoonist? NOTHING! This is mind-blowing, full-col...

Love this cover art for the new Penguin edition of 1984. [Designer David] Pearson says that the design went through numerous iterations "to establish just the right amount of print obliteration. Event...

Thanks for being awesome, Romwe (Via PS Disasters)...

Programming plays a huge role in our world, and though its uses are often functional, a growing community of artists use code as their medium....

A bizarre charge in an already bizarre trial: prosecutors in the US-v-Manning case say Osama bin Laden got classified cables Bradley Manning passed to Wikileaks. The NYT reports that "Military prosecu...

The Computer Museum in Linkping, Sweden has a "50 Years of File-Sharing" exhibition on that includes a machine characterized as the first Pirate Bay server, though there's some nuance to that descript...

The Computer Museum in Linkping, Sweden has a "50 Years of File-Sharing" exhibition on that includes a machine characterized as the first Pirate Bay server, though there's some nuance to that descript...

Since 2003, Waxy.org's Andy Baio has been documenting evidence of pirated/leaked Oscars screeners— in other words, copies of nominated films sent to Academy Awards voters which then make their w...

A photo of a kitten named Wheatley captured and shared by Boing Boing reader Beckitten in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool....

Remember the story making the internet rounds about a 70-year-old Saudi man who bought a teen bride for $20,000? They are reported to have divorced. Turns out he was more like 85, too, and it was less...

The Food and Drug Administration today announced it will require the makers of popular sleeping pills like Ambien and Zolpimist to reduce the recommended dosage in half for women, "after laboratory st...

ABC News reports that a team of scientists who analyzed the brain tissue of the late NFL star Junior Seau after his 2012 suicide "have concluded the football player suffered a debilitating brain disea...

I got to join in on a great conversation this morning on Minnesota Public Radio's "The Daily Circuit", all about the Higgs Boson and what it means for the future of physics. This is a fascinating issu...

A photograph that shows the Hiroshima atomic bomb cloud split into two sections, one over the other, has been released by the curator of a peace museum in Japan. It was discovered among archival items...

Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "Jay Lake is an award-winning American author of ten science fiction novels and over 300 short stories. He is also one of more than a million Americans who have colon cancer....

Thanks to our sponsor, Mulholland Books, publisher of Warren Ellis' "brutal, hard-boiled cop novel" Gun Machine. From Cory's review of Gun Machine: Gun Machine is a novel that never stops to draw brea...

Yes, I know it is going to require an Internet connection to play, but look at how pretty it is!...

Local news outlets in Southern California are reporting that two students have been shot in a school shooting at Taft Union High School in largely agricultural Kern County, CA. KABC-TV reports at leas...

Tony Papa says: "A very interesting story about how a liberal U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy who has a drug addiction problem suddenly becomes an outspoken opponent of the legalization of marijuana." ̶...

"Swedish prosecutors have issued international arrest warrants for two Britons suspected of masterminding a smuggling ring involving Chinese garlic." [AP]...

Here are our top posts of 2012. Now you can enjoy them all over again! ...

Here, in concise and precise language, is the best pricking of the security bubble I've seen: Security is an ideal language for suppressing rights because it combines a universality and neutrality in ...

"Wednesday Trump made headlines when he challenged Bill Maher to pay up the $ 5 million dollars he is owed. On Monday night’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Maher mocked Trump’s offer to Pres...

Drug giant Eli Lilly this week settled a lawsuit brought by four sisters with breast cancer who believe their disease was caused by a pregnancy drug their mother took during pregnancy in the 1950s. Th...

Drug giant Eli Lilly this week settled a lawsuit brought by four sisters with breast cancer who believe their disease was caused by a pregnancy drug their mother took during pregnancy in the 1950s. Th...

Richard Perry/The New York Times A worthy and overlooked story in the NYT by Elizabeth Rosenthal about a new economic riptide hitting Central America, a result of America's changing corn policy. The U...

Upworthy, a startup that helps promote material via "viral" distribution, has posted a short slideshow with some interesting (and depressing -- it all comes down to horrible Facebook) insights into ho...

Cosmic Log has a terrific list of night-sky highlights for 2013. Some of them look interesting enough to keep me up past my strictly-observed 9 PM bedtime. November-December for Comet ISON: Will ISON ...

Some of the best music 2012 sounded a lot like the 1970s, replete with analog synths, occult pretensions, powery pop, ambient landscapes, and heavy guitars. 2012 felt like a dark time, and some of the...

My friend and MAKE contributor Matt Richardson says: Over the past few months, Shawn Wallace and I have been writing a book called Getting Started with Raspberry Pi. It's about how to use and make thi...

Bob Basset -- Boing Boing favorites, steampunk and fetish maskmakers -- have issued a rather lovely art calendar for 2013 with Mell Ghandy. Bob Basset and Mell Ghandy Art Calendar 2013...

The NYC Department of Transport has revamped its notoriously complex parking-rules signs, so that they're slightly less cryptic. It's a very nice example of good information design! NYC DOT Commission...

Nominations are open again for science fiction's Hugo Awards -- if you attended last year's WorldCon or have supported/bought a membership for this year's con, you get a vote. There's a lively LJ grou...

One of my favorite Instagram and/or Twitter feeds right now is PornEdits. The example shown here is the creation of contributor @Airborn0280....

"Yes, there really are Newtown truthers," writes Alex Seitz-Wald in Salon. And they can tell by the pixels....

At Skift, an interesting piece on the short-term apartment rental startup Airbnb's growing pains in NYC. The service is increasingly popular, but Skift writer Jason Clampet says "a basic search on Air...

Megan Amram, comic genius: "The New York Times would like to issue corrections for the wedding announcement of Mr. Adam Penview to Ms. Katie Jasper that ran in yesterdays paper."...

The Texas student who sued over her school's insistence that she wear an RFID-embedded ID card has lost her appeal. The school had offered to issue her an RFID-free ID badge, but her family felt that ...

Michael G. Santos spent 25 years in prison. On Quora, he wrote eloquently about what it was like to experience new forms of technology after so many years of incarceration, with no access to the inter...

The 2012 pop hit "Call Me Maybe," layered 147 times in its acapella form by Dan Deacon. It's a much more interesting song as a blast of free-form noise....

A powerful documentary film about the risks for journalists operating in Mexico....

"I found this adorable piece of pragmatic relationship advice from a child on the floor of my subway stop this morning," Jeff Simmermon tells Boing Boing. "Its so loving and level-headed, and fair to ...

Self-described "Magician Prankster!" Magic Of Rahat produced this clever video demonstrating an effective "invisible driver" prank....

Buzzing around the internet this week: Polish security researcher and professor Wojciech Mazurczyk (left) claims to be developing a way to hide secret, un-eavesdroppable messages in "silent" packets t...

For reasons I'm not entirely clear on, Paleos sells a chainmail "barefoot" running shoe: Delinda is not a shoe, it's a piece of jewelry! Suitable for strolling, hiking and walking on natural surfaces ...

In the LA Times, an interesting piece on the dangerous nature of working in reality television. As shows compete against each other to present the grossest, riskiest, and most outlandish spectacles, t...

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are studying how the seemingly innocuous things we do in our homes and offices can have big impacts on our health. One of those things is cooki...

A long-read you may have missed in the New York Times by Scott Shane, on the story of John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst and case officer who is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 25 to 30 months in p...

Children's literature is about the wonder of discovering new worlds, the power of imagination, and the all the little triumphs and defeats that make up a life. It's also an excellent place to find hyp...

How did Foosball spread from parlors in Fin de sicle Europe to rec rooms mainstay and dot-com cliche? In the new issue of Smithsonian, Derek Workman delves into the history of tabletop football and it...

Image uncredited, but please comment if you know its provenance! It's from a clever Garnier Fructis ad campaign by Publicis; more here! (via Reddit)...

On Twitter's engineering blog, a fascinating description of how Twitter uses a blend of machine intelligence and Mechanical Turk tasks to figure out, in real time, what is going on in the world: Befor...

Andrea Stinga and Federico Gonzalez created this delightful animated "ABC" list of 26 influential and important architects and their buildings....

Dennis Romboy with Deseret News writes that police raided a man's home as he grieved for his wife, searching for her prescription medication. According to a lawsuit he has filed, they told him that Ut...

Denis Burakov, 27, broke his neck when the giant translucent sphere he was riding in headed the wrong way, sending him on a 1.5 kilometer-long plunge down a mountain slope. Another occupant of the bal...

Sol Yurick, author of The Warriors (1965), has died. The novel -- which in 1979 led to the classic cult film of the same name -- was inspired by Yurick's experiences working in the New York City Depar...

Jeremy Kun, a mathematics PhD student at the University of Illinois in Chicago, has posted a wonderful primer on probability theory for programmers on his blog. It's a subject vital to machine learnin...

Jay Lake -- friend, science fiction writer, dad -- has cancer. It's gone into remission, it's recurred. His prognosis isn't good. He's working with a documentary team to produce a film about his life,...

The World Discovery Box looks to be a fantastic starter wunderkammer for kids (and adults)! The cabinet of curiosity is preloaded with rocks, fossils, shells, bugs in lucite, and other natural and sci...

Here's a potentially interesting book that I found on Free Book Sifter, a website that lists all the free Kindle books available on Amazon. It's called I Want it Now! A Memoir of Life on the Set of Wi...

MakerBot have announced an update to its Replicator 2 3D printer, this one an experimental model with two heads: Targeting a higher-end market, the 2X features dual heads for printing more-complex obj...

Hasbro announced it is holding an election to oust one of Monopoly's existing game pieces and replacing it with a new one. The existing pieces are: race car, iron, Scottie dog, wheelbarrow, shoe, top ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH the forging of platinum coin defeats a nefarious threat to deliberately cause grave harm to America....

Niall de Buitlear sez, A member of Athlone Town Council is trying to have a state-owned piece of art removed from a public art gallery. The artwork by Shane Cullen features transcripts of messages smu...

Happy mutant, cyberpunk, and painter Rudy Rucker is hanging a show of his art at Borderlands Cafe and Science Fiction Bookstore in San Francisco's Mission district. Another great reason to visit an am...

The Library of Congress occupies three massive and ornate buildings in the center of Washington, D.C. But those edifices house just part of the collection, which spans hundreds of miles of shelves acr...

Vanity Fair's history of the making of The Blues Brothers is amazing, a story as madcap and improbable as the movie itself (though there's a lot more coke in the story of the movie). This is one of my...

Eric sez, "Reddit has a thread posted in which the user yoshiwars shares photos of his briefcase, which has been packed with performance parts and multi-OS booting. An impressive hack!" r/Cyberpunk se...

Game magazine Kill Screen is running a 10-day online game jam for the forthcoming Ouya linux game console, beginning next week. Founder Jamin Warren says they've built a $45,000 prize pool and gathere...

From the remarkable keyboard of allium, in the comment thread for this post: "Rocky...is that you? My God, what did those Pottsylvanian bastards do to you?" It was my own government that did this, I t...

My latest Guardian column is about positive externalities, the value that bystanders get from the stuff you're already doing: That's the crux of this irrational fear of positive externalities: "If som...

In a conversation about the iconic look, feel and nature of the Porsche 911, I was reminded of this. My favorite commercial of all time. ...

The Invisible Flea. The Spirit Hand. The Spirit in the Bottle. The Floating Body. I couldn't resist ordering Spooky Magic when I was about eight years old and saw it in the Scholastic Book newsletter....

Seems there are 181,000 social media gurus on twitter. Here began the zombie apocalypse. (via NextDraft)...

Here's a sneak preview of Noble Nutlings, which will be released tomorrow in the iTunes store in the US (it's currently available in Canada, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, and Finland). The game w...

When a large crack rang through the air, followed by a rumble, Robert and Chris Wills knew to grab their cameras and start shooting. Chris, a geologist, and his son Robert knew they were in for the sh...

It's nice to see that reality TV has gotten classy. (Via Laughing Squid)...

The FBI and Ernst and Young have released a list of top-ten phrases that indicate corporate fraud, based on data-mining evidence from real corporate fraud investigations. In total more than 3,000 term...

Growing up in Santa Monica I was fascinated with stories of the once bustling beach and sea front. Stories of floating Casinos and gambling ships were favorite tales. Santa Monica College shares this ...

Miami Vice: a short documentary about the thought that went into every shot, and every unconstructed sportcoat. ...

Joey deVilla (AKA the Accordion Guy) says: "An online acquaintance of mine stumbled across this gem left for waitstaff by a patron." Some suggested interpretations of this message include: “You ...

Today is David Bowie's 66th birthday and in celebration, he has released "Where Are We Now?," a song off his new studio album coming in March....

What?!...

jOBS, a biographical film on the life of Steve Jobs, will be out in April according to its makers. Ashton Kutcher plays the late Apple co-founder....

Somewhere between two-cans-and-a-string and Ma Bell lies the barbed wire fence telephone networks used by ranchers in the early 20th century. From CF Eckhardt's short history of these "rural telephone...

A blog post by Amanda Palmer "on internet hatred" has gone viral, attracting a large number of personal stories of bullying and online abuse, and wisdom on how to cope....

Wired News' Ryan Tate writes about why social media activity "is more readily used to convict you in a court of law than to defend you." The short version: "getting private information out of Facebook...

Aaron Sandusky, who operates three medical marijuana dispensaries in California, has been sentenced to 10 years behind bars for selling medical marijuana through his dispensaries. Selling pot through ...

My Institute for the Future colleague Bradley Kreit and collaborators have launched a new online forecasting game you can play today and tomorrow about the future of hospitals. From a press release: T...

Portland, OR police say 32-year-old Caleb Grotberg used his "dreadlocked" hair to choke his girlfriend during a domestic assault. She was taken to a hospital "with several non-life threatening injurie...

Human rights advocates say a 70-year-old man has married a 15-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia, after the girl's parents sold her to him for about $20,000. News of the transaction emerged after the man c...

Still from video of giant squid, courtesy NHK/NEP/Discovery Channel. Discovery Channel and Japan's NHK teamed up to capture video of one of the most elusive and fascinating deep ocean creatures: the g...

We know that lead exposure can be dangerous. We know that it can cause brain damage. But what levels are dangerous. How does that damage express itself? And how do you separate the effects of lead poi...

You may have seen ads from a current AIG campaign with the tagline Thank you America. After paying back its $182 billion bailout, the board of American International Group Inc. meets Wednesday to cons...

The widow of legendary Chilean poet, theatre director, folk singer, and activist Victor Jara (left), who was brutally tortured and killed by Chilean army officers during the South American country's c...

"[I]f Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling, Treasury could avoid catastrophe by creating a … single trillion-dollar coin — deposit it in the Federal Reserve, and, boom, problem solve...

We've talked here before about the crazy things you can find when you read the "Methods" section of a scientific research paper. (Ostensibly, that's the boring part.) If you want a quick laugh this mo...

Handmade Charlotte shows you how to make a kids' crafts studio for about $50. I like the crayon storage cubbies, which allow you to sort crayons by color. Perfect for kids (and more likely, parents) w...

Yesterday, Australia experienced its hottest nationwide average temperature ever — 40.33 degrees C (104.6 degrees F). Today, the country's national weather bureau added a new color to official w...

By the same folks who brought you Last Minute Auction ("an hour or less, a buck or less on eBay"), here's another great site for discriminating cheapskates: FreebookSifter.com. If you’re a digit...

In the past year, I've had multiple social scientists tell me that people are the hardest thing to study. Sure, you don't need a Large Hadron Collider. And the chances of suddenly requiring a HAZMAT s...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!...

We're proud to welcome Nicholas Gurewitch, who did The Perry Bible Fellowship for his college newspaper between 2001 and 2004, and then for newspapers (including The Guardian between 2004 and 2007. H...

Tech-enthusiast Eirik Solheim (@eirikso) at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) was out fooling around with his quard-copter this weekend, and managed to sneak up on a slightly confused moose...

I don't quite know what I expected....

Liam sez, "On the tail of the CC-licensed Muslim SF Anthology: there's a recently-released collection of African SF stories, called Afro SF. It's a collection of stuff written by folks in and around t...

Melissa Christie's screen-printed zombie sheet set is sadly no longer in the stream of commerce, but it's a very nice -- and well-executed -- idea. I never sleep alone (via Crazy Abalone)...

Marlene sez, "I have knit my son a tres chic R2D2 hat. It is based on a pattern I found on the Ravelry website by Carissa Browning. I'm very pleased with how it has turned out." Ravelry: marlene-duck'...

ThinkGeek's sold-out Minecraft Light-Up Torch is funnier if you speak one of the Commonwealth English variants where "torch" is a synonym for "flashlight" -- but even in the rest of the world, it's st...

A Boing Boing reader says: Thought you might enjoy this... A group of teens has begun stacking picnic tables in Spokane, WA (where I live). They've hit a couple times at local parks and the authoritie...

Tauntr's "Star Wars Taxidermy" is inspired photoshoppery, but it'd be even better as a series of physical installations. I would hang these guys in my office in a SECOND. Star Wars Taxidermy (via Neat...

In this episode of Gweek I interviewed one of my publishing heroes, Jay Kinney. Jay was a founding member of the underground comics movement in the late 1960s beginning with Bijou Funnies in 1968. In ...

Bacteria living zero-gravity environments become more virulent. People living in zero-gravity environments have less-than-fully-functional immune systems. The result is a danger for space travelers th...

It turns out that if you put a GoPro camera on the slider of a trombone, facing you, and then play a number, you get a perfectly synched, awesomely comical, mesmerizing video....

Last week, Mother Jones published a really fascinating article arguing that the crime wave that swept through America between the 1960s and 1980s can largely be blamed on leaded gasoline — and t...

On Saturday, a bluefin tuna was sold at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market tuna auction for $1.76 million. Which is a little crazy. (Also crazy, the size of the fish in question.) But the amount paid for thi...

So, the downside is that you are being eaten alive, from the inside out, by a wasp larva. On the plus side, though, at least it has the courtesy to disinfect you as it goes along. At Nature News you c...

Several years ago, Dean Wareham (ex-Galaxie 500) and Britta Phillips (ex-Luna) created an alluring soundtrack of new songs and covers to accompany Andy Warhol's famed "Screen Tests" shot at The Factor...

A Dec 22 article in the Economist looks at the thriving world of webcomics and suggests that they have broken the awful cycle of mediocre newspaper comics -- a cycle that Bill Watterson decried when h...

From Edward Howe Forbush's Rats And Rat Riddance (1914): At the Farm and Trade School on Thompson's Island, where the boy pupils are taught to kill rats, as all boys should be, there is a henhouse bui...

Scott and Hannah turned an old ladder into a book shelf. Neat idea!...

Andrew DeGraff created a series of excellent story maps for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. Above, "Paths of Hope." The work is currently hanging at Gallery1988: Melrose in Los Angeles and view...

DIYPhotography.net has the story and the link. Seems Adobe'd rather have you register it than pirate. Kudos Adobe!...

Pykrete is a WWII-era experimental material made by mixing wood pulp with ice. It's easy to make, easy to work with, and it's bulletproof: If so, wed like to humbly suggest that you consider pykrete f...

Here are The Go-Go's performing "We Got The Beat" from the legendary 1982 film "Urgh! A Music War." ...

I saw Jenny Ryan's Instragram photo of her new alarm clock, and I had to get one. It replaced our guest bedroom digital alarm clock, which is ugly and suffers from the "what does this button do?" synd...

Ashley Gilreath created this remarkable necklace from tiny photos of her ancestors. "I casted dollhouse frames from sterling silver and bronze, and printed my family directly onto the glass," she says...

Two men were arrested for holding up a KFC near Brisbane, Australia, but they had actually planned on robbing the jewelry shop next door. The gentlemen had broken through a wall in the building yet en...

Ware writes: On December 14th, I helped chaperone my daughters second-grade-class field trip to a local production of The Nutcracker, where I spent most of my time not watching the ballet but marvelli...

Robots play Motorhead. Loud....

Gawker shares David Schneider's tale of woe. "There at the gate was his guitar stuck between the service elevator an a loading dock rail making 'this crazy sound' of 'metal on metal.'"...

George MacDonald's The Golden Key is a classic fairy tale in the truest form. A young boy hears a tale from his great-aunt about a golden key at the foot of the rainbow, and charges into Fairyland to ...

I was killing time in a used bookstore last week and ran across a copy of Billy Collins' Picnic, Lightning, this resulted in an instant purchase. Collins' poetry presents images so strong I can only d...

As the subprime bubble continues to burst in Spain, locksmiths find themselves complicit in putting families out on the street. In Pamplona, the local locksmiths have banded together and will not acce...

A calendar of men posing with 1970s cars while wearing underpants is said to be a big hit in Germany. You may view this calendar in its entirety online. [h/t The Awl]...

PetaPixel has the story. "By combining his love of old, run-down VW buses and the tradition photo booth, hes created the Photo Bus, a rentable photo booth on wheels available for whatever soiree your...

"The Lehi City Council has renamed Morning Glory Road after a technology company planning to relocate to the street raised concerns about the name's sexual connotation." [Daily Herald]...

REUTERS/Ben Nelms A man, wearing a "goat mask", runs into the English Bay during the annual New Year's Day Polar Bear Swim in Vancouver, British Columbia....

YouTube recently wiped billions of views from some record labels' videos. Here's how to follow in their footsteps and buy views, Facebook likes, and Twitter followers! [Dailydot via Waxy]...

Enjoy the latest page of Elfquest. First time reader? Catch up at the comic's official homepage....

The fun folks at Pixeljam have released a challenging new side-scroller called "Potatoman Seeks the Troof," in which you play a little spud in search of enlightenment, traversing a series of difficult...

Scientific American excerpts a chapter from Kevin Dutton's book The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, describing a visit to a high-security ward...

I want to all of the gemlike microcars of the mid-20th century seen here on Fine Car's flickrstream....

Tams Knya, who produced the beer-can X-wing fighters, has also done a great series of Star Wars silhouettes cut out of vinyl record albums. star wars silhouettes vinyl records art (Thanks, Tams!)...

Callie looks into the wide, wide lens....

This is pretty cool: Berlin's C-base, home to the Chaos Communications Club, has spawned a theatre troupe called C-artre. They've produced a theatrical adaptation of my short story "When Sysadmins Rul...

Marin's Jonathan Frieman set out driving in the carpool lane with his articles of incorporation in the passenger seat, and when he was ticketed, he offered this defense: Corporations are people, I had...

This beautiful, rainbow hued igloo was designed by Edmonton's Brigid Burton, who wanted to entertain her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend (an engineer student), visiting from New Zealand over win...

You know those cool commemorative coins that the US Mint keeps issuing? Turns out that they're a handy way for Congress to get around the ban on porky earmarks for their home district. As reported las...

The headline says it all: after the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko passed a law making it illegal to clap (because dissidents began using applause as a form of protest), his cops began round...

The Chinese website Tencent reports that a father got so upset with his son's nonstop MMO playing that he hired an in-game hit-squad to kill his son's character whenever it spawned, in the hopes of di...

The Kansas City Star reports. "'Can a natural person change into this monster that many fear?' Alfredo Carbajal, the militias main spokesman, said in an interview. 'The possibilities are yes, it can h...

On his blog, Bunnie Huang -- legendary hardware hacker turned entrepreneur -- has begun a four-part series explaining how to have electronics manufactured in south China. This post focuses on the BOM ...

The Vintage Ads LJ group is having a Forties weekend, and there's some amazing stuff coming through at the moment. The palettes, the illustration style, the layouts and the fonts -- all pure gold. Exh...

In May 2013, "Asperger's Syndrome" will be removed as a diagnosis from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), leaving "high functioning autism" in its ...

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad sez, "I am the editor of Islam and Science Fiction which has been previously featured on Boing Boing. Back in 2007 I co-edited "A Mosque Among the Stars, an anthology of musli...

Dave sez, This little blog is my attempt to keep track of all of the comings and goings of Canada's Conservative government. Every week I spend an hour or two putting together a weekly round-up of the...

Thanks Glen Norris!...

Chinese tourists say a crooked tour-operator who'd promised them the best sightseeing in New Zealand and a buffet dinner instead took them to a bunch of public parks and then dumped them in the line a...

Kristin sez, "Based in Loveland, Colorado, LulzBot designs, builds, and sells desktop 3D printers, parts, and plastics for entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, and experimenters. They've just launched...

My friend Diana Eng is a fashion designer. She says: A couple of years ago trend forecasters at Premiere Vision said a highlighter neon yellow would be a big color for Fall/Winter 2012. I’ve bee...

Click the link to this MP3 file in a new tab and then start the video as soon as it starts playing....

The Orange County register shares the story of an under-employed couple who visited the park daily. 'It was a way to keep ourselves occupied because we didn't have jobs,' said Mickesh about the initia...

Check out this amazing reel of Paul Frees trying out different narration choices for the Disneyland Haunted Mansion. It comes from the excellent (and out of print) Haunted Mansion Original Soundtrack,...

When it comes to discerning truth from myth, our enemy is ourselves — and ourselves really, Really, REALLY like to turn chance events into coherent narratives. (Via Kellan)...

Here's some evidence supporting the idea that the increase in autism diagnoses is just that — an increase in diagnoses, not an increase in incidence. Increases in autism diagnosis aren't evenly ...

I'm not sure David Brent is even qualified to play Gandalf in this mashup, but I'll take it! ...

This is the difference between low kinetic energy (top) and high kinetic energy (bottom), as illustrated in the 1956 Disney book Our Friend the Atom. It may be useful in visualizing some of the ideas ...

Okay, which of you all just got busted for smuggling narwhal tusks? Fess up. It was either one of you, somebody from Reddit, or both, right? Image: N is for narwhal - finished, a Creative Commons Attr...

Co-creator of The Venture Bros. Jackson Publick was kind enough to update everyone on the status of the upcoming fifth season of the show. And while we'll be waiting a little longer than expected for ...

The Aeroccino 3 is a sleekly designed product about the size of a can of peaches that heats and froths milk to super fluffy consistency in about thirty seconds making for perfect cappuccinos, lattes o...

NASA image of the Crab Nebula, a remnant of a supernova. Scientists think that Galactic Cosmic Radiation comes from places like this. Space is full of radiation. It's impossible to escape. Imagine sta...

When I was finishing grade school the works of Daniel Pinkwater delighted me. I read his stories over and over and The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death is a life long favorite. Reminiscing with ...

Last month, I brought you the delightful news that Adafruit was launching a kids' puppet show about electronics called Circuit Playground. Now Adafruit has begun to offer plushie toys based on the cha...

Johan Vinet made this inspired login-screen for a notional, never-was 16-bit Calvin and Hobbes game. Calvin and Hobbes - what the 16-bit video game could have been (Sega Genesis or Atari ST version) (...

Introducing a new monthly comic strip on Boing Boing, from Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall....

If you caught last month's post on my upcoming tour in February for Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, you'll have seen that I'm meant to be speaking in Albuquerque, NM on the evening of Feb 11, ...

The Deep End, which was drawn entirely with ink, coffee, and white-out....

REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco A man is seen wrapped with pythons, some which include the Albino Burmese Python, as part of a show celebrating the coming Year of the Snake in the Chinese calendar. Spectators lo...

Bandai has released the Chogokin King Robo Mickey & Friends, a voltronoid multi-robot toy made from classic Disney characters. It's about $132 plus shipping from Japan: 7 little robots combine to...

Inception is a tool for breaking into computers with full-disk encryption. It assumes that you have access to a suspended/screen-locked computer whose disk is encrypted. You access the machine over it...

There are many reasons to be grateful to be alive, and owning this brand new facsimile edition of artist Jim Woodring's Moleskine sketchbooks is as good as any. Jim Woodring is rarely without a pocket...

Attention makers! MAKE magazine is working on a new television project, and we're looking for a couple of hosts. Do you love making stuff? Are you itching to travel the country and meet other makers w...

Medicalert bracelets can apparently be had with any arbitrary string for about $50. This gag-gift from an anonymous redditor is a rather funny choice. A medic-alert bracelet like this might be sensibl...

One reason you can tell Jimmy DiResta is a true craftsman is that he makes what he does look easy. If I tried to make this leather and canvas tool bag, who knows what kind of crazy-angled trapezoid I'...

Christopher sez, A lot of people were frustrated in 2011 when the North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill written by Time Warner Cable to revoke local authority to build community-owned networks...

Christopher sez, A lot of people were frustrated in 2011 when the North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill written by Time Warner Cable to revoke local authority to build community-owned networks...

Carla and I freaked out our 9-year-old daughter Jane when we sat down to play Anomia the other night. That's because we were laughing hysterically. "I've never seen you guys like this before," she sai...

Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600: The Hacker Quarterly magazine writes, "2600 has gone and remastered the second year of its publication from way back in 1985. The original issues have been rearranged int...

Amy Joyce writes about losing her mother to cancer, not long after she became a mom herself. "When I started thinking about writing about losing my mom, I thought I would be able to fill pages with wh...

My latest Locus column is "Where Characters Come From," and it advances a neurological theory for why fiction works, and where writers find their characters. As a writer, I know that theres a point in...

Matthew wanted Lori to marry him, so he secretly dissected a Kinder Surprise Egg and loaded it with a custom toy containing a down-on-one-knee robot version of himself complete with tiny toy engagemen...

I have breast cancer, and I am going in for more surgery tomorrow. Awakening, by Joshua Lang in The Atlantic, may not have been the best choice for pre-op reading material, but it is a fascinating pie...

One of Community's most notable and popular writers, Megan Ganz, has announced in a Reddit post that she's taken a position at ABC's Modern Family. While it's sad to see her go, it's hard to blame her...

Scientists are amassing evidence that suggests exposure to tetraethyl lead — the additive once used in almost all the gasoline sold in the United States — could account for the dramatic in...

Back in July, I told you about an crane system used to lower tourists into the now-empty lava tubes of an extinct volcano. Now, you can travel down into Iceland's Thrihnukagigur volcano yourself ̵...

Absolute zero is supposed to be the coldest cold — 0 Kelvin, the point where atoms stop moving. But researchers at the University of Munich say it's possible to get colder than that, an idea the...

Homeopathy is based on the principle of diluting an herb with water until none of the substance remains, then selling the water for $10—or $100. Inert powders are also used as the dilutant, with...

I'm delighted to announce that my novel Pirate Cinema is a finalist for this year's Prometheus Award, given by the Libertarian Futurist Society. Winning the Prometheus for Little Brother, and being no...

The incredibly fun-sounding new animated series from IFC, Out There, has assembled a heck of a great cast to voice its characters. In addition to series creator Ryan Quincy, who is providing the voice...

What is it about old boxer engines that thrills me so?...

I generally have little use for couture in all its incarnations, but Vuitton's combination steamer trunk and portable* library skewers me like an arrow. Nice old steamer trunks aren't cheap, but I'm s...

Taken at Whaler's Cove in California's Point Lobos State Natural Reserve. The cabin is next to one of the finest shore entry dive sites in the world. Such an amazing spot. Jason Wehmhoener has been ma...

Dark Roasted Blend has a beautiful gallery of Spreepark PlanterWald (originally called Kulturpark Planterwald) a Soviet-era abandoned themepark in central Berlin, which is gracefully rotting away. Thi...

Anthony Bourdain has some hard-hitting questions about the characters on Nickelodeon's tween favorite iCarly, and he asked them on Twitter last night. Among his inquiries: "Does Spencer have a job? Be...

Now there's a trailer for Warren Ellis's Gun Machine, narrated by Wil Wheaton and drawn by the incomparable Ben Templesmith, a real happy mutant trifecta....

One of my favorite artists of all time, the incomparable Tom Waits will be appearing on this Sunday, January 6th's, episode of the Simpsons!...

I had a lot of time on my hands this holiday season and decided to get an arduino kit (I have solar panels I want to aim for max efficiency during the day, on a VW van.) A lot of intro titles seemed i...

After getting caught in the act -- specifically, the act of masturbating at Hollywood's Tiki Theater (for adults) -- Fred Willard has avoided trial after completing a "diversion program for minor sexu...

December 1973: The month that astronauts rebelled against NASA....

Meet the robot that pukes for science. ...

Sony knows....

After I converted my parents from drinking filter coffee to making their morning brew with an Aeropress (something I do with missionary zeal wherever I go), the next step was to replace their antiquat...

Here's a great list of last year's most interesting horror-themed games from independent developers. [Indiegames.com]...

The Chromebox, a tiny Chrome OS desktop computer from Samsung, is getting a new look. The new model is white and blobby instead of silver, black and squarey, but otherwise much the same as the current...

Angela Potter, a teacher in Waikato, NZ, has a funny definition of "vindictive": "My ex-boyfriend is an avid and very successful fisherman who asked me to protect his collection of GPS fishing spot co...

Prisoners in France used a table leg in part of a not-so-elaborate plan to escape Colmar, a 14th century penitentiary originally used as a convent. [Reuters]...

Gamestick is "the most portable TV games console ever created" — it's a HDMI dongle, the size of a large thumbdrive, that slots into its own bundled game controller when not in use. At $80, it'l...

Andy Borowitz tells the harrowing tale of his near-death experience with severe intestinal trouble. A good poop joke should certainly not go unappreciated, and this is a brilliantly told and hilarious...

From the Riker Ipsum generator: Well, that's certainly good to know. Fear is the true enemy, the only enemy. Yes, absolutely, I do indeed concur, wholeheartedly! They were just sucked into space. My o...

Joshua Glenn and Elizabeth Foy Larsen, editors of the fantastic kids' activity book Unbored have an article in the Huffington Post about the power of making in the classroom. In fact, the idea of "lea...

Joe Mullin's Ars Technica piece, "Patent trolls want $1,000for using scanners," is an excellent, blood-boiling piece detailing the ease with which the US patent system can be used for pure extortion. ...

Here's a round up of some of our favorite projects that appeared in the pages of Make magazine last year. Above, the $4 Hot Air Balloon, by Jesse Brumberger. For all you readers who enjoy that special...

This Chef'n Bananza Banana Slicer has some odd reviews on Amazon....

(MSOE staff member Jordan Weston shows the finished rapid-prototyped piece constructed of sintered nylon.) The face vessels made by African-Americans 150 years ago in Edgefield, South Carolina, might ...

The wonderful Jon Singer has a weird sort of problem, and you are the sort of people who might help him. He is custodian of a traditional Javanese gamelan (~1.5t worth) and it needs a home. From Patri...

Mastaba Snoopy is surreal and wonderful dystopian science fiction choose-your-own adventure whose premise is that an all-powerful alien has mistaken a Peanuts book for a guide to human interaction, an...

Click here to play episode. Apps for Kids is Boing Boing's podcast about cool smartphone apps for kids and parents. My co-host is my 9-year-old daughter, Jane Frauenfelder. In this episode of Apps for...

Vomiting Larry is a humanoid robot designed to projectile vomit all over a lab at the Health and Safety Laboratory in Derbyshire, England. He's helping scientists learn about how diseases spread. Warn...

This is a book about "doin' what comes naturally". Which is to say, sex. But what kind of sex? With whom? And to what purpose? At what point do things like gender expression, sex, reproduction, and ch...

My friend Nishat Kurwa of Turnstyle News is traveling in the Middle East right now where she spotted this striking painting by Eric Esmail Parnes in the UAE's Maraya Art Centre. It's titled "Neo Orien...

Bruce Sterling has written a new paranormal romance (!), Love is Strange, and in honor of its publication, many hands have been recruited to ask weighty questions of the wise fellow: Cory Doctorow: Do...

We've gathered fresh video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page: • Nine animated shorts about our relationship with cars during the Golden Age of the automobile. • Polic...

A number of news organizations are running "oddly enough" items this week about the hundreds of weird laws that went into effect on January 1, 2013. Among them: Registered sex offenders in Illinois wi...

The key to running a successful dating service for tigers: Lots and lots of samples of poop....

On Christmas Eve, word broke of newly-released FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act: they provide new evidence that The Federal Bureau of Investigation assigned counterterrorism...

The ACLU sends word today that the San Francisco District Attorney has agreed to withdraw subpoenas seeking Twitter users account information after the ACLU and EFF filed an amicus brief. Snip from an...

I always forget that Los Angeles has a subway at all, let alone the fact that it used to have a much more extensive one. Parts of that old subway have sat, abandoned, beneath streets and buildings for...

At the Huffington Post, actor and activist John Cusack has a conversation with George Washington Law School professor and constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, and Kevin McCabe, a pal of Cusack. The...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tried experimenting with electronic voting this year, to disastrous results (e.g., getting logged out if your password isn't strong enough, then waiting...

Gisella Perl was Romanian and Jewish. She was a gynaecologist at a time and place where very few women went into the medical professions. In 1944, she and her entire family were shipped off to Auschwi...

Cory and his lovely family stayed with my family for a couple of weeks over the summer. The highlight of the visit was Cory and Alice's daughter Poesy, who is cute, smart, curious, and funny (just as ...

Treehugger reports on the coming catastrophe, seems some of techs biggest names could get quite wet. "Companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Dell, LinkedIn, Intuit, Intel, Cisco, Citrix, Oracle and o...

Amid sez, "In the 1950s and 1960s, as cars became a fixture of contemporary life, animators made all kinds of films about automobile culture, exploring its history, its prevalence within society, its ...

Information designer Jess Bachman created Wikipedia Remembers 2012, an interactive feature about the top 100 public figures who died in 2012 as ranked by the number of words in their Wikipedia entries...

A great piece in the NYT by Isabel Kershner on Tikkun Olam, a commercial medical marijuana plantation in Israel. The name is "a reference to the Jewish concept of repairing or healing the world," and ...

Today kicks off a year long celebration honoring 50 years of magic at Los Angeles' Magic Castle. You may occasionally find a Happy Mutant hanging out with Irma....

In case of spoilers, insert fingers in ears and sing loudly! ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Counter-Earth's NRA pushes an extremist and destructive view of the First Amendment....

Anyone who tries to google skincare products hits a brick wall of fake reviews, SEO spam and hysterical pseudoscientific terror. Vogue's Christina Mueller writes that the blind-studied, peer-reviewed ...

Photographer François Brunelle found pairs people from around the world who resemble one another and took their picture. He calls the series, "I’m Not a Look-Alike!"...

Jeremy sends us the Pop Up DIY Workshop Bicycle Trailer....

"2013 is the first year since 1987 where all four digits are different from one another." - TIH...

David Kravets, at Wired: "An Ohio man who found his police booking photo on several privately run mugshot websites is suing those sites under a novel legal theory: that the mugshot publishing industry...

Folkstreams is an incredible online archive of documentary films about American folk and roots music and culture including "Born From Hard Luck," excerpted above. ...

Police in Norwich, England are seeking two Oompa Loompas who reportedly attacked a man as he was leaving a kebab house last week. The Oompa Loompas were reportedly accompanied by another man and woman...

From NASA's Image of the Day blog: "This face-on galaxy, lying 45 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), is particularly attractive for astronomers....

Avis bought Zipcar for $500 million. Hertz, don't it? (Washington Post)...

Salman Masood: "A ban on YouTube, which Pakistan imposed after an anti-Islam video caused riots in much of the Muslim world, was lifted Saturday, only to be reinstated after three minutes when it wa...

Trevor Alyn demonstrates the surreality of slit-scan video as created with his Slit-Scan Movie Maker app....

Trevor Alyn demonstrates the surreality of slit-scan video as created with his Slit-Scan Movie Maker app....

Remember the Chewbacca Messenger Bag that Jason posted about a few weeks ago? Check out the Marc Ecko Star Wars reversible furry Chewie hoodie!...

Here's a video of Samuel Delany reading from his latest, 2012's Through The Valley of the Nest of Spiders....

McGarr Solicitors of Dublin reports on local newspapers' bizarre demand to be paid if you direct people to read their websites. To be completely clear about it, is isn't about fair use, fair dealing, ...

Geoffrey Cole of Prism Magazine has posted the first part of a three-part interview we conducted in Vancouver, back when I was touring with Pirate Cinema. In this part, we talk about many subjects, no...

NASA offers these fine tips for viewing the first meteor shower of the year, January 3rd....

2012 was a terrifying year for Russian dashcam videos, but the badness reaches its peak on Dec 29, with this footage of a plane disintegrating crosswise to busy highway traffic....

Science writer and poisons specialist Deborah Blum rounds up the year's news stories regarding malicious poisoners and expresses her disappointment that poisoners are often incredibly stupid about how...

obbins is a self-trained virtuoso pickpocket who once managed to lift a pen out of Penn Jillette's pocket, steal the ink cartridge, and return the pen, all while he was demurely insisting to Jillette ...

Today's XKCD is holds wise advice for those of us contemplating New Year's resolutions. Be sure to click through for the tool-tip bonus punchline. Resolution...

Back in November, I blogged the Tsarina of Tsock's wonderful shark socks, noting that they were not yet articles of commerce and hoping that they would become such soon. Now, Tsarina writes and says, ...

In 1976, the US Congress decided to extend the copyright on works that had been created with the understanding that they would enter the public domain after about 56 years (depending on whether the co...

Violent crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street in cities around the US may have been methodically coordinated between local law enforcement, the federal government, and banks, even before protests began, ac...

Update: I missed this NYT front-section story on the PCJF's document trove, in the Christmas Day edition of the paper. The tl;dr: The FBI used counterterrorism agents to investigate Occupy Wall Street...

Noted. Snapped and shared by Cliff Pickover....

PSY's viral hit remade in Mongolian style....

Just look at it. How to Peel a Banana/Alan_sailer (Thanks, Philip!)...

Two striking articles on the roboticization of the workforce: first is Kevin Kelly in Wired, with "Better Than Human", an optimistic and practical-minded look at the way that robots change the jobs la...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!...

Redditor Jasonp55 has a neat demonstration of the perils of confusing correlation with causation, and his well-chosen example makes this a potentially useful chart for discussing this issue with frien...

Happy New Year! Warren Ellis's second novel, Gun Machine, ships today, and it's the kind of grim, mean hard-boiled fiction that is just the right tonic for your hangover from 2012: the booze, the Maya...

Happy New Year! Warren Ellis's second novel, Gun Machine, ships today, and it's the kind of grim, mean hard-boiled fiction that is just the right tonic for your hangover from 2012: the booze, the Maya...

Windowpane is the graphic novel debut from Joe Kessler, one of the friendly fellows working behind the cash-register at London's wonderful NOBROW (about whom we've written lots). It's a collection of ...

The spectacular DJ Earworm has published his annual mashup of the year's top-40 hits, combining them into a single, synthesized earworm, with visual accompaniment. DJ Earworm Mashup - United State of ...

I sat down with the fascinating crew at the Titanium Physicists podcast to serve as their special physics-ignoramus guest in an episode about entropy (MP3)...

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, by Kevin Dutton, has this side-by-side list of professions with the highest percentage of psychopaths (CEO...

Move over, Edward Tufte: here's Jerry Seinfeld's first appearance on The Tonight Show in 1981. He was 27 years old. During his bit, he makes a good point about weather forecasts. He says that typical ...

In case you weren't already excited about Star Trek Into Darkness, maybe the Pony-fied trailer will finally sway you. ...

We all know about the time-honored tradition of Syfy's Twilight Zone New Year's marathon. But in case you're not into a 24-hour trip into another dimension and still want to watch a buttload of TV tod...

The next issue of Theatre Bay Area will feature the full text of Josh Costello's theatrical adaptation of my novel Little Brother, which was incredibly well-received on stage in San Francisco last yea...

I hardly listen to the radio anymore, because I listen to audiobooks and podcasts instead. My car has a cassette player in it so I use one of those cassette adapters to connect my iPhone to the car's ...

Let's end 2012 with some truthiness: gossip site Oh No They Didn't got wind of some new details concerning the fourth season of Arrested Development and its upcoming premiere on Netflix. Apparently, a...

"GIF has been named the Oxford American Dictionarys word of the year," reports the NY Daily News in an article that Rich Kyanka points out is illustrated by JPGs of popular GIFs. Here I present you wi...

Just look at it. photo...

The precautionary principle comes up a lot when you're talking about the side effects of technology in the real world. When you don't have evidence that something is dangerous — but you suspect ...

Is this grenade-shaped coin purse cartoonish enough to avoid the attention of TSA officers? Grenade-shaped key and coin case...

You will be pleased to note that multiple physicists are at work on the problem of why a piece of falling toast tends to land with the butter side down....

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has released a set of internal discussions about "pink slime", shedding light on early efforts to respond to public outcry over its presence in processed food. It is...

On Christmas Day, I watched a documentary about the terra cotta warriors — thousands of clay soldiers built as funerary objects for the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor. One crazy fa...

This guy trains his pet mice to collect coins, fetch a tossed bead, play basketball, ride a tiny skateboard, and more. (Via Doobybrain)...

This interview with "author, photographer, and ossuary expert" Paul Koudounaris is a trove of weird stories about the things people get up to with their local mummies, haunted skulls, and other "mirac...

13 unusually-shaped skulls were recently unearthed in Mexico when workers were digging an irrigation system. They are about 1,000 years old. Time reported that researcher Cristina Garcia Moreno of Ari...

Chicago's Field Museum isn't just a science museum. It's also a research center, especially for archaeologists and anthropologists who come to the museum to make use of its extensive collections of ar...

Something I didn't know about world history: During World War II, the British government rounded up thousands of its own citizens — people of German, Austrian, or Italian ancestry. Some were put...

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Silly question. But if you're talking about chicken as we know it today — barbecued, boneless and skinless, served as sausages, bologna, nuggets, and bu...

"Let there be an end to this epidemic of violence, this culture where if we cant kill off our girls before they are born, we ensure that they live these lives of constant fear. Like many women in Indi...

A Gangnam Style video from the students of Nunavut Sivuniksavut, a college for Inuit youth....

A Gangnam Style video from the students of Nunavut Sivuniksavut, a college for Inuit youth....

The Italian neurologist and "senator for life" Rita Levi Montalcini, who won the Nobel Prize winner for Medicine in 1986, died in Rome. She was 103. Rome's mayor says the biologist, who conducted unde...

'You look good,' they say. This a compliment. Sometimes they say, You dont look sick at all. Youd never know.' That is shorthand for, 'You dont look like youre dying but we know you are.' Lisa Bonchek...

Enjoy the latest page of Elfquest. First time reader? Catch up at the comic's official homepage....

The Couriers: The Complete Series collects four short stories from early in Brian "DMZ" Wood's career, involving a pair of courier/ninjas who run parcels for crime syndicates, shady characters, and ot...

This magnificent raw turkey cake (orange and rum spice cake) was created by London's Sarah Hardy. Yum! Raw Turkey Christmas Cake...