Articles by BoingBoing from June 2013

A six-year-old girl named Aaralyn and her nine-year-old brother performed their original song "Zombie Skin" on America's Got Talent. As you may have inferred from the song-title, the gag here is that...

Zack sez, "Why is Jack Kirby so often called 'The King' of comics? This Flickr page, compiling dozens and dozens of his double-page splashes from the 1970s, including sequences from 2001, the New Gods...

His current read is my novel Homeland: "Its a starkly honest view of what happens in a surveillance state. The main character is the leader of this band of technologically clued-in teenagers fighting ...

Illustrator Al Feldstein was divinely inspired to paint this piece of pastafarian religious artwork for the cover of the July, 1951 issue of Weird Tales, decades before the Flying Spaghetti Monster wa...

Here's a mouth-watering set of photos from La caverne aux livres, a bookshop in Auvers-Sur-Oise, north of Paris. The store is in a converted train-car, and appears to be a magical wonderland. &nb...

Bruce Schneier's latest Google talk expands -- very productively -- on his recent theme of "security feudalism" (roughly, the idea that we end up trusting companies like Facebook, Apple and Google to...

Andy from the Royal Institution made a large, suspended Mbius strip out of rare-earth magnets, then cooled down another magnet until it became a superconductor, and set it levitating and running arou...

This video by Ernie "EDUB" Vigil sold me a motorcycle. The action starts around 0:58.    ...

The awesome library ninjas at the Seattle Public Library kicked off its Summer Reading Program by smashing the world record for a book domino chain.    ...

Space educator Sawyer Rosenstein, 19, might also be described as a space fan. His enthusiasm for space flight was captured in this Boing Boing feature, and shines weekly in his "Talking Space" podcast...

One year ago today 3D printed, fully assembled, teeny-weeny little cars: This teeny weeny little car is 3D printed, fully assembled, with all its mechanisms in place.    ...

Earlier this month, I posted about Nine Inch Nails' new single "Came Back Haunted." Here is the new video directed by none other than David Lynch.    ...

I posted in 2011 about the Digi-Comp I, a 1963 mechanical digital computer made of polystyrene and used to teach the fundamentals of boolean logic, binary, and computer programming.   &...

Peacelove sez, "The good folks at SaveCannabis.org need your help naming the 2014 Cannabis Legalization Act. The Act itself has been open source written (the full text can be seen and modified) and is...

The July 27 episode of the WTF podcast has an excellent hour-and-a-half interview with Cheech and Chong. It turns out they had very interesting lives before they got together to form the incredibly su...

Only last week, The Pixies announced that bassist Kim Deal had left the band. Now they have a new single that seems to be about bad breath, with some backing vocals that sound a lot like Kim, but app...

Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me is the new documentary about the mythic, incredible, and commercially unsuccessful rock band formed in the early 1970s in Memphis by Alex Chilton, Jody Stephens, Chris B...

Earlier this week, Mark posted a fancy Useless Machine that had all sorts of exciting behaviors when you turned it on.    ...

If you missed the greatThis American Life's episode from 2009 about Daryl Watson's short-lived but laudable attempt to "walk across the country in order to promote world peace and bring harmony to all...

It's summertime! Go outside and read a comic! Or stay inside and read a comic. Personally, I like to read comics inside door jams -- it splits the difference and is the safest place to be during an ea...

I feel bad for him, because he is obviously in great emotional distress. And yet, I cannot stop watching or laughing.    ...

    ...

If Xeni's post sold you, there is a lovely looking pair on Ebay.    ...

"Chinas surveillance system is extremely wild, there are no rules governing it that are worth speaking of, says a Beijing lawyer named Xie Yanyi, who filed a public information request with the police...

Ronan Farrow, who was an official in the first Obama administration, says leakers aren't the US government's greatest security problem.    ...

Jack Shafer wins the day with this headline for his critique of media attacks following the Snowden leaks: "What an NSA charm offensive looks like."    ...

"The shrouded U.S. no-fly list continues to maroon U.S. citizens overseas who are trying to get home," according to this Los Angeles times report.    ...

On the Vintage Ads LJ group, NoLuck_Boston posts a pair of ads for "bold spaces," the first from 1948, the second from 1935, a two-frame timelapse.    ...

Joshua Stearns, who wrote a feature published earlier today on Boing Boing about journalism, leaks, Snowden, and Espionage Act charges, writes: Today, Free Press is filing a letter with the DOJ callin...

SoundWorks Collection interviews Skywalker Sound sound designer Tom Myers about the Sound of Monsters Univeristy.    ...

Justin Carter was an 18-year-old who made a joke about shooting kids while playing the MMO "League of Legends" (he followed that with "lol" and "jk").    ...

Maria Bustillos in The New Yorker: "Brewster Kahle, the founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive, perhaps the greatest of our digital libraries, and of the Wayback Machine, which allows you to browse...

AP reports: "A mother of three from a ritzy New York City suburb pleaded not guilty on Friday to charges she operated a secret, sophisticated pot-growing operation worth millions." She has (well, had)...

There was big news on Boing Boing this week! Community and conversation, not just comments. We've just launched our new Boing Boing forums.    ...

Brain-eating amoebas? In my local waterways? It's more likely than you think.    ...

Will.i.am is going after Pharrell Williams, claiming that Pharrell's application to register the name of his new company "I am OTHER" infringes on Will.i.am's trademarks which apparently include the w...

Texas Sen. Wendy Davis did something amazing when she filibustered for 13 hours solid to kill the state's omnibus abortion bill: standing, without help, food, water, or bathroom breaks, for 13 straigh...

Just before the US-led Iraq war began 10 years ago, an internet friend began forwarding emails from a CNN correspondent; emails this war reporter was sending home to friends and family as he tried to ...

This story from Alternet really upsets me. I hope the courts get to the bottom of it. Citing an "Expert Report," Green claims that "video surveillance footage from the Green family residence revealed ...

I want my own office, Lena said. My own space to work from. Social Services paused for a while to think. Lena knew that it was thinking, because the woman in the magic mirror kept animating her eyes t...

US securities regulators have started an inquiry into the media company Thomson Reuters, "and how it releases closely watched manufacturing data to its trading clients, a move that highlights the gove...

By indicating to farmers who are operating heavy equipment where deer might be hiding and resting in their fields. Many deer are killed instantly or lose limbs when they're run over by farming equipme...

The most dangerous time to be a woman in need of a life-saving abortion at a Catholic hospital is right after that hospital has been consolidated into a Catholic system, according the medical demograp...

There is something perverse and voyeuristic about visiting the private homes of famous people. Yet, as time goes by, I find the grand fame of public figures less interesting than their personal doings...

The Atlantic has a fantastic piece on the work on space artist Ron Miller, showing pictures of the night sky on Earth with other planets swapped in where the Moon should be.    ...

Lest its personnel find out about the ways in which the NSA has gone on a campaign of lawlessness, the US Army has begun to censor The Guardian's website on its networks.    ...

A lovely entry in Smithsonian's ongoing 2013 Photo Contest, Emma Stephenson's "Perfect Tree in a Farmer's Field" photographed in the North Yorkshire countryside, England.    ...

Good news for humanity's sense of shiny special uniqueness! Sure, other animals use tools. Chimpanzees and bonobos might even have behaviors that can be classified as cultural.    ...

This is an older piece, but given that we're into hurricane season, I expect it will come up again. How do you tell if the photo you've been forwarded, showing sharks swimming through flooded urban l...

Edge Magazine's Jason Killingsworth interviewed me at some length about my history with videogames, from Apple ][+ to Atari to arcades, with notes on Zynga, DRM, piracy and the Humble Bundles. &n...

Earlier this month, federal prosecutorsfiled a formal criminal complaint against Edward Snowden charging him with three felonies for leaking information about the National Security Agencys surveillanc...

Scientists at the University of Copenhagen sequenced the oldest genome yet — 700,000-year-old DNA from an ancient ancestor of the horse.    ...

This week, scientists cloned a mouse from cells found in a drop of mouse blood. That's different from other cloned mice, whose creation relied on more invasive sampling from the liver, bone marrow, an...

Via hullabaloo blog, a pointer to Chris Hayes' epic rant about "unequal leaks" last night on MSNBC. Blogger Digby writes, "Barbara Starr and David Gregory can spout all the classified information they...

Trevor Timm, Freedom of the Press Foundation: "In the month since the Guardian first started reporting on the surveillance documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the government has ta...

(Click to embiggen) Illustrator Brian J. Smith did me the tremendous honor of creating this fabulous, detailed illustration inspired by my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which turned ten th...

Isn't this the traditional song?    ...

As a kid I loved Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. What an incredible TV series! TWIKI, Buck, Wilma, Doctor Theopolis and some incredible dance moves (that NBC appears to have taken down from YouTube)...

One year ago today Derelict farmhouse turned into massive doll's house: A Canadian artist called Heather Benning converted a derelict farmhouse into a giant doll's house, open on one side.  ...

Today, wealthy fellow Sean Parker wrote an enormous response to critics of his idyllic Tolkienesque wedding, which was held recently amid the giant redwoods of Califonia.    ...

Here's a good summer project for the Internet. The woman pictured above (on the left in the early 2000s, on the right in a 1990 passport photo) committed suicide in 2010.    ...

Have you heard a lot of Internetular argle-bargle about Pandora's crazy-low royalty rates? How they compare unfavorably to satellite rates, and how the company's trying to cut them?   &...

This morning we announced that we were saying "goodbye" to Disqus comments and "hello" to Discourse, a fantastic new forum system from Jeff Atwood and company.    ...

Last night at dinner with a couple of friends who are civil liberties lawyers, I asked why they thought Obama had changed his tune on surveillance; from campaigning for limited, closely overseen, tran...

Johnny Mathis sings "Wonderful! Wonderful!" (1956).    ...

Jaroslaw sez, "Future of Copyright 2.0 is a crowdfunded contest, in which people are asked to send their works regarding how the copyright system should, could or would look like.   &nb...

Steve Mould, Britain's Brightest's "science guy," showed that if you put coil a 50' chain of magnets in a jar and then casually toss out one end, the whole chain goes berzerk leaps and cavorts like a...

"John Hess traces the evolution of the screen shape from the silent film days through the widescreen explosion of the 50s, to the aspect ratio of modern digital cameras."    ...

[Video Link] Ben West and Felix Heyes used Google to search every word in the dictionary, grabbed the top Image result for each, and assembled a 1,240-page book (titled “Google”) of the r...

Artist Amy Crehore has two new excellent surrealistic paintings on her website. This one is called "A Gymnast's Memory of Fall."    ...

Apple's new wearable device is called a "Beeper" and the hospital where my cousin works is beta testing them! She just started her medical residency and they issued her one.    ...

You know what I like to read? I like to read Ken at Popehat sending insanely awesome, terrifying letters to bullies who use legal threats to try and shut up their critics online.   &nbs...

We've featured doodling, fast-talking YouTube mathematician Vi Hart a lot here, but her latest, a 30-minute extended mix, is absolutely remarkable, even by her high standards.    ...

After US powerful US members of Congress started to threaten Ecuador with trade sanctions should it offer asylum to the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Ecuador pre-emptively canceled its trade agree...

[Video Link]Where is the original Galileo shuttlecraft that was on the U.S.S. Enterprise? It's being restored by a guy in Las Vegas!    ...

Video Link. His name is The Badpiper. Via Disinformation.    ...

Among the most recent video posts you and the NSA will find on our video archive page: • Hitler finds out about Boing Boing killing comments • Space aliens exploited for the promotion of c...

One of my favorite prankster artists Mark Jenkins has a new solo show running at Paris's Galerie Patricia Dorfmann. You can see some of the provocative, witty, and moving works here: "The Studio" by M...

You've likely read on Boing Boing about Ariel Waldman, creator of Spacehack and lead instigator of Science Hack Day, and Eri Gentry, co-founder of BioCurious.    ...

Sabine Pearlman made cross sectional photographs of 900 specimens of ammunition inside a World War II bunker in Switzerland. "The cross-sections reveal a hidden complexity and beautify of form, which ...

Architects Specht Harpman converted a 425sqft Manhattan micro-apartment into an amazing, multi-tiered living space by building up into the apartment's 25' (!) ceilings.    ...

Robbo sez, "Charles Dellschau, a retired butcher in Texas in the late 1800's created a series of scrapbooks: '2,500 intricate drawings of flying machines alongside cryptic newspaper clippings filled t...

Robbo sez, "Charles Dellschau, a retired butcher in Texas in the late 1800's created a series of scrapbooks: '2,500 intricate drawings of flying machines alongside cryptic newspaper clippings filled t...

An 11-hour filibuster by Sen. Wendy Davis (and a heady late-night mixture of parliamentary confusion and public protest) prevented the Texas Senate from voting on a restrictive abortion bill that woul...

Kirobo the Japanese astronaut robot is being sent into space on the Kounotori 4 spacecraft, launched from the Tanegashima space center and destined to connect with the International Space Station on A...

At Sciencezest, Annelie Wendeberg discusses the strange history of using dead bodies — both human and equine — as particularly messy projectiles during times of war.    ...

MAKE has published a cool new book, called Make: Analog Synthesizers by Ray Wilson. It's a deep dive into DIY synthesized music, with lots of circuits and information on using electronic components, ...

From Retraction Watch: The Indian Journal of Surgery has retracted a 2011 paper entitled "Penile Strangulation by Metallic Rings". The reason: The authors apparently self-plagiarized the report from a...

[Video Link] Created by Xeni and Dean with the "Hitler Finds Out" video generator. Roll your own Hitler video at downfall.jfedor.org.    ...

New research shows that male sea lampreys (that's a sea lamprey mouth pictured above) entice females into reproduction with the help of a special bump of tissue.    ...

"Read a piece of scholarship from the mid-twentieth century, and you are likely reading the work of a male scholar and his wife," writes Ronit Y.    ...

David Freedman has a piece at The Atlantic about healthy foods, unhealthy foods — and the "healthy" foods that are actually probably not that healthy, despite coming to you all natural and un-pr...

There are a number of these TV ads. Each seemingly weirder than the last. Here's a playlist. (thanks, Carl Hamm!)    ...

My new column for The New York Times Magazine involved some of the most emotionally intense reporting I've done in a while.    ...

Hello again, Happy Mutants! Please take a moment to read our new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws!  &nb...

In a field of horrible, amoral scumbags, patent troll ArrivalStar is an exceptionally awful enterprise. They have a huge portfolio of ridiculous patents for obvious ways of tracking where public trans...

Good day, Happy Mutants. This evening, we're going to be saying goodbye to Disqus, our current comment system here at Boing Boing.    ...

In this weekend's edition of The New York Times Magazine, a profile of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who, we are informed, "Is Not an Internet Billionaire."    ...

[Video Link]. Rocketboom created this inevitable video with a very handy generator provided by downfall.jfedor.org. (thanks, Antinous!)    ...

At Wired's Danger Room blog, Spencer Ackerman writes about a new Darpa project with an unspecified budget called CINDER: Cyber Insider Threat.    ...

My daughter and I were poking around an antique shop yesterday and found this stadimeter. Bradley Alan Fiske, an officer in the U.S.    ...

One year ago today Terrorist watch now available in chartreuse, magenta, ginger and more: The F91W is offered in magenta, birch, ginger spice, butterscotch tempest, and, of course, cornflower blue.&nb...

Ian sez, "Makers, hackers and crafters in Barcelona are in for a treat this weekend as the first ever Maker Faire event in Spain takes place at the MOB (Makers of Barcelona) workspace in the Eixample ...

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, One of the most important books in the U.S. legal profession is known as the Bluebook®: A Uniform System of Legal Citation®.    ...

Want to play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe that's genuinely challenging and hard? Try "Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe," in which each square is made up of another, smaller Tic-Tac-Toe board, and to win the square you h...

Things seem to be going well at the ACLU's day in court over the no-fly list. The judge is pretty skeptical at the idea that using secret criteria to secretly limit the ability of Americans to fly (or...

The Internet Hall of Fame inducted its 2013 cohort today, including Aaron Swartz, Anne-Marie Eklund Lwinder, John Perry Barlow, Karen Banks, Richard Stallman, Kanchana Kanchanasut, Jimmy Wales -- 32 i...

Michael Colombo says: In today’s New York Times article by Heather Murphy, a story was related where a group of lawyers were ordered by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to put their cell phones...

Former Icelandic interior minister Ogmundur Jonasson says he asked "8 or 9" FBI agents to leave the country when he found out that they'd lied about their visit; they claimed they'd come to help preve...

Yesterday was George Orwell's birthday, and to celebrate, people in Utrecht perched little party hats atop CCTV cameras in public places.    ...

Gunslinger posted this photo of Prince Monolulu today as part of its "Great Con Artists of the 21st Century" series. I'd never heard of him, so I read his entry in Wikipedia.    ...

Gunslinger posted this photo of Prince Monolulu today as part of its "Great Con Artists of the 20th Century" series. I'd never heard of him, so I read his entry in Wikipedia.    ...

Activists from around the world have signed onto the Washington Statement, in which they call upon the EU to pass strong, meaningful privacy legislation, pushing back against aggressive corporate lobb...

When Hong Kong let Edward Snowden leave the country instead of arresting him in accord with the official US request on the grounds that the request was incomplete and invalid, many of us (myself inclu...

Huh, here's something cool I didn't know: DIY workspace TechShop offers US military veterans of all eras and all branches of service free one-year memberships, good at any and all TechShop locations a...

Did you know that we publish original feature articles regularly on Boing Boing? We're more than the old-school linkblog this website began as, way back in the year 2000 (we were a zine before that, b...

Tom Van Deusen says: "I officially launched the Kickstarter for Dennis P. Eichhorn's Real Good Stuff a few minutes ago. These two new issues will include new stories by Eichhorn and original artwork b...

A wonderful and trippy "A is for" animation by Laura Sicouri and Kadavre Exquis with music by Kadavre Exquis. The music is available on a vinyl pack that includes the digital download and postcards f...

Geek cook Chris-Rachael Oseland of kitchenoverlord.com has come up with another awesome nerd-themed recipe: bread that displays the Superman "S" symbol, just like Clark Kent would eat for his hero san...

The squishiness of the cork is what makes this work so well. Quick fix for uneven table legs: cork slices    ...

[Video Link] Here's a useless machine that puts on a great show.    ...

AirShowFan sez, "Insightful article about the protests in Brazil, which make clear that it's absurd for a government to spend billions in public funds for sports tournaments that (a) bring no clear be...

1. Denial “Marriage was created by the hand of God. No man, not even a Supreme Court, can undo what a holy God has instituted,” Michele Bachmann said in a statement to the press. &nbs...

Today, our friends at Last Gasp are having a huge underground comix megasale at Fab.com of fantastic funny book bundles filled with works by Robert Crumb, Dan Clowes, Spain Rodriguez, Dori Seda, Lynda...

thumbsandammo.blogspot.com: Guns in promotional posters or stills from popular movies are replaced with thumbs.    ...

My cats have picked up the habit of chewing on laptop power cords. They’ve bitten clean through them at least ten times.    ...

"Eltvozott nap" (The Girl) is a 1968 Hungarian film starring rock singer Kati Kovcs. I haven't yet seen the film, about a working class girl's search for her biological mother, but the opening freakb...

Some kinds of antidepressants might pose a risk to embryos and fetuses at certain stages in their development. But depression in the mother also puts fetuses at risk, so whether or not a pregnant woma...

In this not-exactly-safe-for-work video, two tapirs (a jungle-dwelling mammal, related to the rhinoceros) go at it with verve, while a nice family watches and makes what I assume to be amusing commen...

In this terrific video, Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey talks about how his interests in the arcane, magic, and showmanship were inspired by the mentalists at old time carnival midways. &nbs...

In 2003, the excellent documentary film Capturing the Friedmans told the story of a family falling apart under a 1980s investigation and subsequent trial of the father, Arnold Friedman, and his son, J...

The Last of Us is a new video game about the zombie apocalypse. But not just any zombie apocalypse. The Last of Us zombies are based heavily, and accurately, on a genus of parasitic fungus that really...

"At the time, Max Hall and I owned a little hat store on High Street -- and on Sunday we liked to sleep late and relax in the apartment we shared.    ...

Other senses besides taste matter in determining what your food tastes like and whether you like it. And we're not just talking about scent here.    ...

Max Hawkins's "Call in the Night" is an "experimental radio show" presenting recordings of people who volunteered to be woken up by a phone call to discuss their dreams, worries, emotions, and experie...

Two and a half years after the TSA rolled out the nation's pornoscanners, they finally got around to fulfilling their legal obligation to ask Americans how they felt about them.    ...

Cell culture lines are cells, taken from donor tissue, that have been divided and separated over and over and over — providing researchers with reliably identical "families" of cells that can be...

The Barbican commissioned artist Leandro Erlich to design an illusion that uses a giant, tilted mirror and a building facade that lays flat on the ground to make it look like its participants are defy...

If Congress fails to create a new system for deciding which parts of the country require pre-approval of voting changes, then one of the most powerful parts of the Voting Rights Act will essentially b...

Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's is riding around the country in a rainbow colored van, stamping $1 bills with messages like "not to be used for bribing politicians," as a way of raising consciousness...

"The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dign...

One year ago today Anti-cheating ring brands I'M MARRIED into the flesh of your finger: After wearing it for a sufficient time, your finger will bear the indelible mark of those words, advertising you...

Texas Senator Wendy Davis spoke for more than 11 hours straight today, attempting to filibuster a restrictive abortion bill that would, among other things, drastically reduce the number of legal abort...

Update at 7:46 AM: As of about 3:00 AM Central time, Texas' Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst officially declared the bill dead — the voting did happen after the midnight deadline on the Senate special s...

Assemblage sculptor Jeremy Meyer's tumblr has been full of fascinating glimpses of a new piece in progress, a swallow made from typewriter pieces.    ...

Need some filler text for a design? Screw Lorem Ipsum, go Lorem Gibson, "Website filler text based on the works of William Gibson." ::: smart- computer fluidity knife marketing modem apophenia faded c...

Ukrainian leather mask-maker Bob Basset's latest piece, the "Seven horned Art Leather Mask" is freakishly wonderful -- something from the bottom of a sunless sea.    ...

Harry McCracken from Time Magazine sez, "Back in the 1980s, TIME magazine sold subscriptions via TV ads--'Hi, I'm Judy, an operator here at TIME'--and sealed the deal by offering free tech gadgets suc...

The World Intellectual Property Organization's Treaty to Faciiitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired. Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities (the "Treaty for the Blind") has finally...

What a treat! The BBC Radio 4 science show The Infinite Monkey Cage has started its new season, and the first episode is a corker, asking whether a strawberry is dead, and what is death, anyway? ...

"You're not supposed to be here. This is a women's event; no men are welcome." From Real Stuff #2 (Fantagraphics, March 1991).    ...

We know that people have gotten fatter over the course of the last 60 years. We don't yet know exactly why, writes David Berreby in a fascinating long read at Aeon Magazine.    ...

NSA leaker Edward Snowden asked journalists who visited him in Hong Kong to put their phones in his room's refrigerator, relying on the fridge's material properties to serve as an inadvertent radio-wa...

@stealthmountain has alerted 313,262 people that they wrote "sneak peak" instead of "sneak peek." But Dean Putney wants to know who is running the feed for people like me, who write "sneek peek?" ...

David Hunter sez, "I'm a public school teacher and last year I created Zombie-Based Learning, a standards-based curriculum that uses a zombie apocalypse to get kids into learning geography.  ...

Who will win the $250,000 Sikorsky human-powered helicopter competition: Gamera II, Upturn II, or Atlas? The prize has gone unclaimed since it was first offered in 1980.    ...

Last year, I reviewed Madeline Ashby's smashing debut novel vN, a novel about robots, perverts and power. Now I'm delighted to see that Madeline has a sequel out, iD.    ...

According to Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden has an encrypted insurance file stashed with several trusted people that will be decrypted and released "if anything happens" to him.   &nbs...

On this episode of The Engadget Show Tim Stevens and Brian Heater look at child education. We kick things off in Chicago, where Jackie Moore, a former systems programmer, is teaching inner city studen...

This guy sure knows how to have fun with Goldberg polyhedra!    ...

Cartoon Books is publishing a full-color collection of Jeff Smith's RASL comic book series as a 472 page hardcover graphic novel this fall.    ...

Sculptor Justin Gershenson-Gates produces the most amazing and beautiful clockwork insects and arthropods, which he sells in his Mechanical Mind Etsy shop.    ...

For a mere $16, you can own this "CREDIBLE HULK ALWAYS CITES HIS SOURCES" tee. Goes well with the (as-yet-nonexistent) [CITATION NEEDED] shoelaces.    ...

[Video Link] Matt Richardson from MAKE says: "As a newly-inducted member of the Google Glass Explorer Program, I was very concerned about the privacy implications of Google’s new wearable compu...

[Video Link] In 1964, Michael Aisner and James R. Stein, two teenagers (15 and 14 years old) from Winnetka Illinois interviewed Louis Armstrong for their high school radio station.   &...

Dogs in Elk is one of the canonical Funny Internet Message Board Threads, up there with the Mall Ninja, but you yungguns may not be familiar with it.    ...

[Video Link] A couple of weeks ago David wrote about this exciting new video series on the art of punk from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.    ...

Stay Mayor is a free Android game based on the horrifying, hilarious misadventures of Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford. In order to win, you play the mayor "as he flees from reporters, av...

One year ago today How to: Use a squat toilet: Most important: Cultivate the right mindset. Relax, pretend like youve been doing this for years.    ...

"The group, Michigan Compassion, says they will use the grant to promote medical marijuana awareness based on their philosophy of 'We must increase awareness to increase acceptance.'"   ...

Over 700 Texans have gathered in their legislature to testify before the state government about the impact of Texas's pending omnibus abortion bill.    ...

Dead drops are small containers that are hidden in public places, which spies and other people can use to drop information (stored on microdots, rolled up handwritten notes, 35mm photo negatives) so ...

"By exposing NSA programs like PRISM and Boundless Informant, Edward Snowden has revealed that we are not moving toward a surveillance state: we live in the heart of one," photographer and artist Trev...

NYT's Martin Fackler: "The operator of Japans damaged Fukushima nuclear plant said Monday that it had detected a rise in levels of radioactive tritium in seawater near the plant, a sign that contamina...

Mr Jalopy tried out one of these anti-freeze ice-cream scoops and he swears it works great. Jalopy has never, ever given me a bum steer, and boy-howdy am I glad to see he's blogging again!  ...

Emi McLean at the Open Society Justice Initiative's Rios Montt trial blog: With the events of recent weeks the May 20 Constitutional Court decision to undo the guilty verdict in the Rios Montt trial ...

[Video Link] (Via Laughing Squid)    ...

Another fantastic old track. Video Link    ...

Among the most recent video posts you and the NSA will find on our video archive page: • Egyptian statue filmed inexplicably rotating • Bigfoot by K-tel • The psychedelic sounds of g...

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, Germany's justice minister, has written to UK officials asking about allegations of mass surveillance by British intelligence, and if Germans were targeted by GCHQ....

Even though Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Edward Snowden isn't in Russia, Putin says he is: "Putin announced that Snowden is in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, and he ...

Tim O'Reilly says: I just signed this White House petition, along with 110,000 other people (so far). Whistleblowers who alert the American people to possible crimes by their own government should not...

"I am deeply disappointed with the Supreme Courts decision today," says Obama in a statement issued Tuesday. "I am calling on Congress to pass legislation to ensure every American has equal access to ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Gavin Smythe of Chagrin Falls has nothing to hide from the NSA.    ...

On Tom Scharpling's The Best Show on WFMU, Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster plays a character named Ronald Thomas Clontle promoting his book Rock, Rot & Rule: The Ultimate Argument Settler on Schar...

"How can ride-app outfits like Lyft, Uber and Sidecar operate in a town with strict rules about how and where taxis can do business?," asks Dennis Romero at the LA Weekly.    ...

Toronto mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford -- the man accused of smoking crack with gang-members, and whose family are alleged to have ties to the KKK and organized crime -- has made a career out o...

Toronto mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford -- the man accused of smoking crack with gang-members, and whose family are alleged to have ties to the KKK and organized crime -- has made a career out o...

On his Sunday politics/media talk show Meet the Press, host David Gregory asked Glenn Greenwald, To the extent that you have aided and abetted [Edward] Snowden, even in this current movement, why shou...

Alexa O'Brien, the independent journalist who has been doggedly covering the Bradley Manning case and has been in court every day at Ft.    ...

Despite what you may have gathered from some of the overwrought headlines I've seen on social media, the Supreme Court did not invalidate the Voting Rights Act today.    ...

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

Between 1980 and 2000, a complicated war raged in Peru, pitting the countrys government against at least two political guerilla organizations, and forcing average people to band together into armed se...

The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erds is a beautifully written, beautifully illustrated kids' biography of Paul Erds, the fantastically prolific itinerant mathematician who publish...

The BBC reports that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says that Edward Snowden has not entered Russia at all -- but he and the rest of the country are mighty resentful of all the US officials wh...

In what reads to be an astounding example of wrong, Texas is set to execute its 500th death-row inmate this Wednesday.    ...

Super-natural effects are always caught with the worst cameras. It is very clear this statue is moving, inside its locked case, but why?    ...

Rick Kleffel sez, "We'll miss Richard Matheson... he introduced me to the sort of stories he wrote when I was arguably too young to read them.    ...

Silvio Berlusconi, the disgraced former prime minister of Italy and billionaire media baron, has been sentenced to seven years in jail for having sex with an underaged prostitute.   &nb...

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Heathrow Express train service from Paddington to the airport in London, a PR firm built a 4m-long cake shaped like a train on the platform, guarded by birds o...

John sez, "Pirate3D have a Kickstarter project for The Buccaneer. It's a 3D printer, designed to be used as an appliance.    ...

Here's Fred von Lohmann, one of the senior copyright attorneys at Google -- and formerly head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's copyright practice -- describing how YouTube takedowns and fair u...

Wired has a gorgeous gallery of photos from Conflict and Costume, a new book by Jim Naughten documenting the Herero tribe of Namibia, who fought an early 20th-century action with German colonizers, an...

The Windsor Hum is a weird thing — a low-frequency buzzing that drives some people in Windsor, Ontario crazy and, yet, doesn't seem to be heard by the Americans who live closest to its source, a...

Three weeks ago, humans set Rusty the Red Panda up on a blind date of indeterminate length with a female red panda named Shama at the Smithsonian National Zoo.    ...

The reason you really know this was a seventies TV commercial? Children playing outside.    ...

For years, Robin Nagle was anthropologist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation. She's just published a book about trash and how we deal with it, or don't.    ...

Writer and director Ted Michaels is looking to fund his absurist comedy Tangoborn Menclenty via Indiegogo. Ted has long been one of my favorite improvisational comedians.    ...

SpaceFlight Now: "Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin staged a successful six-hour 34-minute spacewalk Monday, installing cable clamps, attaching handrails and testing rendezvous equip...

The Arduino is a low cost microcontroller that was made for artists and designers to add interactivity to their projects. If you are interested the Arduino microcontroller but have no experience with...

I'm sorry to have to report that Richard Matheson, author of such horror and science fiction classics as I Am Legend and What Dreams My Come, has died at the age of 87.    ...

A trend towards drier, hotter summers in the forests around the abandoned nuclear power plant at Chernobyl has increased the riks of forest fires in the region — which is a big deal, considering...

A few nights ago, I had the great pleasure of seeing earthy psych-rock songwriter/musician/producer Jonathan Wilson perform live in Los Angeles. Richard Metzger of Dangerous Minds turned me on to Wils...

"Cleanup crews continued to work Monday to remove the mounds of trash left behind by Kenny Chesney concert tailgaters. North Shore parking lots and the area around the concert venue, Heinz Field, were...

A "US Government official" has told the Associated Press's Matthew V. Lee that the State Department has revoked NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's passport.    ...

One year ago today TRUCKCAR!: Are you in Knoxville? Do you want to own a hybrid vehicle? Craigslist's pjbxr-3091802234 has the answer.    ...

One of my favorite science fiction writers Rudy Rucker has a new short story posted at Institute for the Future's Web site.    ...

A group of Idaho "gun enthusiasts" have created a line of ammunition meant to fight Islamic extremists. The bullets are coated in pork-infused paint.    ...

KPCC radio in LA talks to Lt. Steven Cole, who serves as one of the US Army's liasons to Hollywood.    ...

Brian Lam and his team at Wirecutter have come up with a list of the best electronics for maximizing summertime fun.    ...

Brian Lam and his team at Wirecutter have come up with a list of the best electronics for maximizing summertime fun.    ...

Rich Lee, a "grinder" (someone who has surgical enhancements and/or modifications conducted upon their person), implanted a magnet in his ear that he can use as a speaker; he wears a coil on a necklac...

John Brownlee investigates why Stinkor, a 30-year old action figure from Mattel's He-Man lineup, still smells terrible. Surely such an ancient toy would have gone inert?    ...

"[T]here are some interesting differences in the psychologies of making vs. fixing. Ive found its easier to be daring with fixer projects, because the emotional cost of failure is lower.  &n...

White House spokesman Jay Carney told Reuters that he thinks that Hong Kong let NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden go as a giant screw-you to America (duh), and says that Snowden is being hidden by the ...

This is photographer Bela Borsodi's cover for VLP's album Terrain. It's a single image of very carefully positioned objects seen at a very specific angle.    ...

Back in May, Mark wrote about a Kickstarter project to fund a mobile app that will help you locate the hidden entrances to Malibu's public beaches, which the local rich and famous people have done eve...

Redditor Txmaluda works at a Whataburger and used their little ketchup-tubs to construct an AT-AT Walker during a slow shift. Bravo!    ...

Tim Marczenko of Toronto claims that Durham County police harassed and falsely arrested him for possession of a controlled substance. Marczenko was trudging through the brush and apparently police sus...

Oh the humanity! "Twinkies are set for an official comeback July 15. So junk food aficionados and loyal Twinkie fans can breathe a sigh of relief (and you can finally stop rationing your secret stash)...

"A transgender first-grader who was born a boy but identifies as a girl has won the right to use the girls' restroom at her Colorado school." (via CNN)    ...

After a seven-year career leading hundreds of search and rescue operations, 10-year old collie Mij—personally responsible for saving 14 lives, according to the Daily Mail—is retiring. ...

Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds: "There are some things in life that are best left unsaid. For everything else, theres cake!    ...

A bicycle owner, sick of his ride being molested by a mystery masturbator, set up a video camera to catch the villain in the act.    ...

Gawker's Garielle Bluestone on the flight from hell: "Traveling means inevitably forgetting something at home, but America's most hated airline, United, took it to another level this week."  ...

Icelandic Pirate Party MP Birgitta Jnsdttir has released a statement on the possibility of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden being granted asylum in Iceland: "Snowden should not come to Iceland unless ...

Back in 2005, I wrote about the Sonic Impact T-Amp, a $30 toy amp that stereophiles had figured out how to mod into a brilliant, high-quality amplifier.    ...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. This episode of Gweek is brought to you by MailRoute. Visit mailroute.net/gweek to start your free 15-day trial -- No credit card required.  &n...

Elida sez, "#withme is the hashtag for the protests in Bulgaria that have been going on for 10 days now. The spark was the choice of the head of the State Agency for National Security, or DANS (hence...

A pastebin dump, purportedly from the Twitter "firehose" feed (the feed of all public tweets), shows a remarkable amount of traffic mentioning NSA whistelblower Edward Snowden.    ...

Edward Snowden has disappeared. The NSA whistleblower, who was presumed to be on a flight from Hong Kong to Moscow and thence to Havana did not board the flight to Havana.    ...

Buzzfeed's Hunter Schwarz revisits 1998's "Scholastic Beanie Baby Handbook," which predicted values of Beanie Babies in 2008, and compares them to the current-day eBay clearing price for these same sp...

Last weekend, I took part in a panel at Yoko Ono's Meltdown festival at Southbank in London, on "Technology and Activism," along with Jamie Bartlett (Director for the Analysis of Social Media at DEMO...

Here's time-lapse footage from the front of a Tokyo Yurikamome automated train, shot and post-processed by DarwinFish105. It's a properly Gibsonian bit of video:     ...

Many years ago, I finally got sick of failing disks and the panic that follows them, so I decided to buy a NAS (Network Attached Storage).    ...

Jeffrey sez, "A fascinating article about what causes traffic jams, and how to drive differently to help ease 'stop and go' traffic.    ...

Ecuador's foreign ministry has confirmed that Edward Snowden has officially applied for asylum in Ecuador. He left Hong Kong this morning, landed in Moscow, and is said to be heading for Cuba next.&nb...

Joly sez, These print-resolution stills were created for the cover of the February 8, 2013 issue of Science. They show the free-air gravity map developed by the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laborato...

Writing in a Time cover story, Joe Klein took a religious detour: in the relief army helping Oklahoma recover from a barrage of tornadoes, he wrote, "you dont see organized groups of secular humanists...

With a new trailer out to promote Kutcher-starring biopic Jobs, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has new thoughts on the movie—not all of them negative.    ...

(A protester in Sao Paulo kisses a Turkish flag. Brazilians say they were, to a large extent, influenced by #occupygezi) Yup, they're still in the streets in Turkey.    ...

Mark Wilson at FastCoDesign: I should feel safe in this moment of stillness, but I cant let my guard down. Because with every safe step I take, I know that I can only be one step closer to my unseen ...

The Guardian and South China Morning Post report that NSA leaker Edward Snowden has left Hong Kong on an Aeroflot jet heading for Moscow, aiming for Havana, and then, eventually, either Quito, Ecuador...

Here's a great video pondering the objective reality of mathematics, and running down all the different schools of thought on where mathematical truth comes from -- does it exist outside of systems o...

The Independent reports that the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency supplied secret evidence to the Leveson Inquiry (on phone-hacking by newspapers) saying that many other groups in the UK routinely en...

Two members of Pussy Riot have travelled to London under a cloak of secrecy to speak to the press about the plight of their bandmates in Russian labor camps.    ...

The 16mm short film "Mickey Mouse In Vietnam" is an anti-war movie by Lee Savage and Milton Glaser, produced for The Angry Arts Festival in 1968.    ...

From the Imagineering Disney blog, a wonderful gallery of photos from the construction of Space Mountain at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World.    ...

Over at the Internet K-Hole, Babs posted another glorious collection of personal and found vintage snapshots, mostly from the 1980s and some NSFW.    ...

Here's Obama the Presidential Candidate debating Obama the Second Term President on surveillance; note how Obama the younger smashes through the cheap "privacy vs security" rhetoric of Obama the elde...

Bulgarian composer and keyboardist Simo Lazarov (Simon Lazar), performing his composition "UFO" in 1981.    ...

If you're in driving distance of North Adams, Massachussets, Wilco's annual Solid Sound Festival is under way, and a fabulous collission of music, art, food, comedy, beer, and beards.   ...

"My Little Droney" by Christopher F. Smith, via Murmuration Festival.    ...

A Reddit thread of greatness. (Thanks, Tara)    ...

Business Insider's Walter Hickey did the math on Monopoly, calculating the most frequently landed-up squares (taking into account dice probability, Go To Jail events, and Community Chest/Chance cards)...

Pick-up artists are, sadly, a community. It even has a handy three-letter abbreviation: PUA. It dates back to the 1970s and has been enabled and expanded, like all affinity groups, by the Internet's n...

Two months of life with Nemo. I can barely remember what it was like before. Living with a Great Pyrenees is a wonderful thing.    ...

Above, footage of a protester's quadcopter in Gezi Park getting shot down by the Turkish Police. Below, the footage of police violence the drone had been capturing (complete with music that sounds li...

At last, London is getting a Maker Faire -- albeit a "mini-Faire." The Elephant and Castle Mini Maker Faire will take place on July 6, and I'm pleased to say that I'll be one of the keynote speakers.&...

Digital Grotesque is an ambitious architectural project using 3D printers and game-of-life-style algorithms to produce a room whose walls, baseboards, ceiling and moldings are all a-crawl with the mos...

Two legislators have introduced legislation that would require the President to disclose his secret interpretation of America's spying laws. This is especially relevant in the wake of yesterday's Snow...

One of my favorite tracks. They keep it hardcore, like you've never seen. Video link    ...

#1: There is so much fatty food here, they should pay for gym memberships. #2: They do #1: Ugh, whatever.— Lawrence T. Bird (@twentitled) February 23, 2013 The @twentitled Twitter accoun...

For the past few years I’ve been using an Apple Time Capsule as my WiFi router. The range was awful but I kept trying to boost it with Airport Express devices.    ...

Wired's kicked off a new animated webcomedy starring John Hodgman as a crusty old NSA agent and Nicole Winters as his young protege.    ...

This episode of Gweek is brought to you by Audible. For a free audiobook, visit Audibletrial.com/appsforkids Apps for Kids is Boing Boing's podcast about cool smartphone apps for kids and parents.&...

The wonderful and gracious award-winning sf and fantasy author Parke Godwin has died at the age of 84, due to natural causes.    ...

Image: The GuardianIn a sealed criminal complaint announced late Friday, federal prosecutors have charged Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a documents about the ...

Ex-Enron C.E.O. Jeff Skilling, the sociopathic swindler who wiped out the life savings of thousands of people, just had his prison sentence reduced.    ...

I cant, myself, determine what offends another person, said Deen. Well, the rest of us have a reasonably good idea.    ...

In a sealed criminal complaint announced late Friday, federal prosecutors have charged Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a documents about the top-secret Prism su...

Etsy seller KineticGifts has replicated "The Internet," a prop from a classic episode of The IT Crowd (wherein the boys convince their clueless boss that Steven Hawking has given them permission to ge...

Here's a mean sticker from girls' clothing store, Brandy Melville. I thought it meant its clothes are too tight, but my wife explained it's about mean girls not letting unpopular girls sit with them a...

Andrew Albanese, my editor at Publishers Weekly, has been tracking the antitrust action the DoJ brought against the big six publishers and Apple over price-fixing very carefully, and he's written a gr...

"The Source Family" a documentary by Boing Boing pal Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos, tells the story of Father Yod and his Source Family, a radical, utopian social experiment that emerged from the L...

The Guardian has published information from another Edward Snowden leak, this one detailing a British wiretapping program by the UK spy agency GCHQ that puts Prism to shame.    ...

Doctors know he died of a heart attack, right? And he's not actually Tony Soprano, so the chances of someone secretly killing him and making it look like a heart attack are small.   &nb...

Kate Green is on a mission to Hawaii. For the last 65 days, she has lived in a mostly windowless dome on the slopes of Mauna Kea volcano, only venturing outside occasionally — and then through ...

Mobile pet photographer Ren Netherland has a category of portraits on his site titled "Extreme Pets." These are two of them.    ...

Last night, I saw the Bling Ring. My favorite part was the logo motion graphic for A24 Films, the distributor and production company that released the movie.    ...

"They say London swings. It doesn't." A look at late sixties fashion in London. [via puttinonthesmile.blogspot.com]    ...

Michael from Public Knowledge sez, "Members of the New York City Council seem to have read a few articles about 3D printed guns and decided to hop on the bandwagon.    ...

An actual chemist looks at claims made about "toxic foods" in a recent Buzzfeed linkbait post and calmly explains why the whole thing is ridiculous.    ...

As a woman, you do become less fertile as you get older, eventually culminating in menopause and the end of your potential babymaking years.    ...

Marc Freilich made an R2-D2 birthday can for his son's sixth birthday. He integrated a pico projector into R2's dome to project the Leia "hologram" and a special birthday message.   &...

I know what I'll be downloading for the weekend: "A Reference Of Female-Fronted Punk Rock: 1977-89 (Part 1/3)," an epic homemade compilation via KNGNVE. (HT: Jeff Simmermon)    ...

Houston, Texas-based artists Chadwick Gray and Laura Spector painted iconic artworks from museum collections directly onto human bodies and photographed them.    ...

IO9's Vincze Mikls has collected a marvellous gallery of photos from abandoned and rotting themeparks around the world. Several of these have been featured here before, while others are entirely new t...

Filmmaker and discoverer-of-cool-stuff Aaron Stewart-Ahn shares word of this awesome video, above: Shynola, one of my favorite little gangs of British filmmakers, are planning to adapt scifi novel Th...

A map of mobile devices and Twitter use: "More than 280 million Tweets posted from mobile phones reveal geographic usage patterns in unprecedented detail."    ...

The correct answer is that Brian and Angela just need to break up, already. From Thanks, Textbooks — a fantastic Tumblr of supremely weird and hilarious textbook examples and questions. &n...

Bill Scannell says: "I have a friend of mine who's put together a project to put an AI brain into a lifelike robot, the goal being to make it as smart as a stupid three-year-old, from which point it ...

Josh Kaufman is the author of the new book, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything... Fast. I interviewed him about the art of rapid skill acquisition.    ...

Longtime friend and Boing Boing contributor Andrea James has just completed a Kickstartered short film for children from LGBT families. I saw it this week, and was blown away by how funny and sweet it...

Remember The Beastles, the amazing Beastie Boys/Beatles mashup? Hope you got a copy on your hard-drive because the RIAA's gone on a totally predictable jihad against a piece of delightful, noncommerci...

Back in April, I wrote about the impending demolition of the Book House in St Louis, MO, and the problems they were having with their fight to stay put.    ...

Alaa Wardi (Twitter, instagram) is an Iranian-born singer based in Saudia Arabia whose vocal harmonies and viral videos have become big hits throughout the world. Much of his music is sung in Arabic, ...

A preggo info site that contains links to Cochrane Reviews, an evidence-based maternity care report, and evidence-based resource links for you and your doctor?    ...

What you will hear, should you click "Play" above, is the sound of frequency-shifted bats singing the Batman theme, by means of a sampler and keyboard: Bats produce sounds that are not audible to hu...

Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schnberger, co-authors of the excellent book Big Data write in the MIT Tech Review with a good, skeptical look at the risks of relying on data to the exclusion of other...

The street protests in Brazil have gained momentum, with huge crowds in the streets. At issue is a kind of corporatist corruption symbolized by two upcoming football tournaments that are to be held at...

Mat Ricardo writes in with news of his next London Varieties show: It's the latest episode of Mat Ricardo's London Varieties featuring Eddie Izzard, Piff the Magic Dragon, Original Street Dance and...

An Icelandic businessman and Wikileaks supporter named Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson has offered to fly Edward Snowden to Iceland by private jet, pending Icelandic Interior Ministry approval of asylum-se...

The Guardian has published two more top-secret NSA memos, courtesy of whistleblower Edward Snowden. The memos are appendices to "Procedures used by NSA to target non-US persons" (1, 2), and they detai...

Next on San Francisco's excellent "SF in SF" science fiction reading series: Cliff Winnig, Heather McDougal, and Cassie Alexander will present their work in an evening emceed by Terry Bisson. &nb...

By Crom, what sorcery is this? These women with their motley tights have backdoored my brain's habitual human-recognition heuristics and keep fooling my eye into seeing impossible acrobatic half-huma...

Rep Alan Grayson (D-FL) is the first Congresscritter to get a look at the text of the super-secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership, currently being negotiated by Obama's US Trade Representative (the Obam...

The latest release from Chuck D and Public Enemy is the Public Enemy BitTorrent Bundle, where you trade your email address for access to a torrent of "Get Up Stand Up," featuring Brother Ali, as well ...

The XploreAir Paravelo is a flying bicycle. The front is a collapsible bike that docks with a trailer containing a flexible wing and a biofuel-powered fan with an electric starter motor.  &n...

This book is radical. It tries to persuade teenagers to drop out of high school — in order to “get a real life and education” as its subtitle says.    ...

Ogilvy Colombia did a promotion for Coca-Cola wherein they dispensed The Black Waters of American Imperialism in rather appealing little bottles made of ice.    ...

Make Magazine profiled the incomparable steampunk maker Jake von Slatt; he's got all kinds of great stuff to relate: Two past mistakes youve learned the most from: 1.    ...

The Genera Project was started last summer to create an easily-searchable catalog of peer-reviewed scientific studies dealing with the risk, benefits, and safety analysis of genetically modified plant...

Here are some outtakes from Eric Boman's shoot for the classic Roxy Music album Country Life, and the shoots for the covers of such albums as Stranded and For Your Pleasure.    ...

Among the most recent video posts you will find on our video archive page: • Cicada Mania! • Postal Service: new video and Colbert Report interview • Escaping python • HOWTO: D...

General Keith Alexander, who is in charge of the NSA, has asked Congress to pass legislation immunizing companies from liability if they break the law following NSA spying orders.   &nb...

In a public statement, Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus Ministries, apologized for his group's practice of offering cruel "gay cure" camps.    ...

Rudy Rucker is one of my all-time greatest science fiction authors. I just kicked in to fund his upcoming novel, The Big Aha.    ...

"Aaron Swartz was not the first or the last victim of overzealous prosecution under the CFAA," write Democratic Representative from California Zoe Lofgren and Ron Wyden, a Democratic Senator from Oreg...

As rumored, Facebook's press conference included the announcement that Instagram will now feature short video clips, pretty much like what Twitter's Vine does.    ...

So, here's a new writing nightmare. What do you do if, after your book is published, and the reviews start to come in, it slowly dawns on you that you've accidentally written the wrong book ... ...

PBS NewsHour has a wonderful feature on cicadas, the mysterious insects overwhelming large swaths of the Eastern United States this summer.    ...

Well, the brewing takes a lot longer, but that's some admirably compact instructional video right there. They skip the filtering step, which can be messy.    ...

Irrational Games co-founder Ken Levine, one of the main minds behind the BioShock series, is writing the script for a remake of the classic 1976 science fiction film Logan's Run (based on the 1969 no...

Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds: "Heres something you dont see everyday, footage of Rev. Jim Jones and a few hundred members of his Peoples Temple.    ...

I'm pretty taken with these Lightahead animal-headed coathooks, which come in everything from polar bear to camel, and cost $20 each.    ...

This gentleman is Jeffrey Allen Jones, 56, who was arrested in Sacramento this week for assault with a deadly weapon. He allegedly thew a spear at a passing car.    ...

Excellent hand-painted "Raiders of the Lost Ark" movie poster from Ghana. Click to see it larger. This style of poster was frequently an advertisement for mobile "cinemas" where the operator traveled...

Federal officials say two men in New York state are charged in a bizarre plot to develop a mobile X-ray "death ray" machine to silently and remotely kill people flagged as "undesirable." Glendon Scott...

Here's the brand new video for The Postal Service's "A Tattered Line of String," one of the fresh bonus tracks on the deluxe 10th anniversary edition of their classic LP "Give Up." This was the song ...

Accidental Mysteries posted an excellent collection of "then and now" photos of Normandy in 1944 and 2009. (Color image by Patrick Elie).    ...

China held its first classroom lecture from its orbiting space module as part of efforts to promote an interest in science and space flight to young people.    ...

After a two-week trial, The Stockholm District Court has issued a sentence in the Gottfrid Svartholm hacking case. "The 28-year-old was found guilty of hacking into Logica, a company carrying out work...

The Internal Revenue Service is planning to pay out about $70 million in employee bonuses, according to Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which has juri...

These grave markers -- pressed up against either side of an imposing wall, with a pair of clasped hands reaching over the wall's top -- date to a time in Dutch history when Catholic and Protestant gra...

Earth experienced its 8th warmest spring on record, and the third warmest May, with average global temperature in May 1.19 degrees F.    ...

Ever wanted to own a beanie like Archie Comics's Jughead Jones? Now you can, thanks to the folks at Pork Shop: MADE OF 100% WOOL FELT IN AMERICA, HIGHEST QUALITY WOOL CONSTRUCTION.   &...

Special thanks to our sponsor MakerBot, creators of the world's best desktop 3D printers. MakerBot says: MakerBot and its MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer proudly support Robohand. &nbs...

At the Sonic Bloom Colorado music festival, a naked guy was tasered by police. Onlookers charge that the police used excessive force.    ...

Image: Foreign Policy "You are correct that Cap'n Crunch appears to be wearing the rank of a U.S. Navy commander," Lt.    ...

* Ripped from Gareth Branwyn's Facebook feed.    ...

Holsten's last night. Place packed. But the owner reserved "Tony's" table. Sweet. #gandolfini #thesopranos. pic.twitter.com/x3Z7vohkZm— John Klekamp (@JKlekamp) June 20, 2013 Thi...

So I just read this press release from Amazon and thought they are up to something pretty neat. Licensing worlds from their creators and allowing fan fiction writers to monetize them, with everyone ma...

Alan sez, "Evie Sobczak, who is presently 16, appears to have invented a completely chemical-free process for turning algae into a biofuel.    ...

It wouldn't be a sexy subject were it not for the imminent demise of "market" leader Google Reader, but Mat Honan's article about Digg's replacement service is a must-read.    ...

During the turbulent Song dynasty (960 — 1279), a young man without resources somehow managed to become the first forensic scientist in history.    ...

Chris sez, "I am completely obsessed with the Katamari games, so I rounded up a team to throw a Katamari party featuring a 36" Katamari controller controlling the game projected up on a wall. &n...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. John Hodgman's comedy special is airing tonight (June 20th) on Netflix. It's called John Hodgman: Ragnarok.    ...

As the specifications for Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One have emerged, more and more gamers have expressed, forcefully, their dismay at the developing picture of a console that is totally built around ...

As the specifications for Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One have emerged, more and more gamers have expressed, forcefully, their dismay at the developing picture of a console that is totally built around ...

John Brownlee at Fast Company: There are two reasons. One is practical; the other spiritual, about the way we look at what technology represents to the future.    ...

From the Occupy Gezi Pics tumblr: "A young girl in a Burger King restaurant on Sunday, after she managed to escape the tear gas outside.    ...

This is episode 9 of Boing Boing's Tell Me Something I Don't Know podcast. It's an interview show featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and th...

Bruce Schneier points out that the leaked top-secret list of electronic attack targets picked by the Obama administration is tantamount to a declaration of Internet War on foreign powers, and shows th...

The Art of Manliness has reprinted "37 Conversation Rules for Gentlemen" from a 1875 book entitled, A Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette by Cecil B.    ...

Actor James Gandolfini, 51, has died of what early reports say was a massive heart attack. He was in Italy at the time.    ...

Actor James Gandolfini, 51, has died of what early reports say was a massive heart attack. He was in Italy at the time.    ...

I've always loathed her. Now you can too, based on what the press has dug up in a court deposition which may soon be made public.    ...

Alyssa Rosenberg at Slate's XX blog explores the ethics dilemma surrounding a Kickstarter for a "how to get chicks" guide for men that included what sounded to her, and me, and a lot of other women an...

Makerbot Replicator 2 3D printer. Image: Makerbot.com. Bre Pettis' Brooklyn-based privately-held 3D printing firm Makerbot will be acquired by publicly-traded Stratasys Ltd.    ...

I'm delighted by this video of a pet python, titled "Julius Escaping." This lovely creature passed on last year.    ...

Form and Landscape is a stupendous collection of photos documenting the electrification of Los Angeles, culled from ConEd's archives (Edison International underwrote the exhibition).   ...

"Follow your passion" is the dogmatic advice for building a career. But it is woefully incomplete and even misleading for some people.    ...

Illo by Daniel Clowes Very sad news: Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson died at 6:30 this morning, June 19. "He was my partner and close friend for 36 years," said Gary Groth.   &n...

Just a reminder: Vitamins aren't inert. They actually do things in your body and we don't totally understand yet what all they do, how they do it, and how much extra vitamin supplementation is too muc...

This is Uraba lugens, a caterpillar that wears a bunch of its old heads on top of its current head like the world's most ridiculously macabre hat.    ...

Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the hosts of NPR's fantastic science story show, Radiolab, are doing a Reddit Ask Me Anything today.    ...

Hillary Rosner is a fantastic environmental reporter — the sort that digs facts and stories more than outrage-bait and blind activism.    ...

Among the most recent video posts you will find on our video archive page: • HOWTO: DIY bike helmet LED nav to Citi Bike stations • Wireless restoration of sight to the blind (rats) •...

Dangerous Minds has the video. But what some really want to know is, how might we uninstall John McAfee?    ...

You know what you missed? You missed the chance to buy this amazing set of vintage derpface choppers ("Authentic original used dental school teaching device."), which sold on eBay for $400.  ...

Inspired by NYC's newly-launched Citi Bike sharing program, Becky Stern tricked out a bike helmet with LED strips linked to Adafruit Industries' wearable electronics platform and GPS unit to guide yo...

Inspired by NYC's newly-launched Citi Bike sharing program, Becky Stern tricked out a bike helmet with LED strips linked to Adafruit Industries' wearable electronics platform and GPS unit to guide yo...

In an Al Jazeera report, in vivid detail, Jason Leopold describes daily life for both the detainees and guards at the Guantnamo detention facility in Cuba.    ...

In an Al Jazeera report, in vivid detail, Jason Leopold describes daily life for both the detainees and guards at the Guantnamo detention facility in Cuba.    ...

Michael Hastings. Courtesy of Blue Rider Press/Penguin, via Rolling Stone. Michael Hastings, a contributor to Rolling Stone and to Buzzfeed, died Tuesday in a car crash in Los Angeles.  &nbs...

Boing Boing readers in Los Angeles, save the date: On June 22 at La Luz de Jesus gallery, John Law will be speaking and signing copies of "Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society." It's a wonder...

Today's XKCD, "The Pace of Modern Life," is a lovely collection of 19th century and early 20th century quotations about the hurried pace of modern life, the atomisation and trivialisation of knowledge...

Reduced version of panorama from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity with 1.3 billion pixels in the full-resolution version. Image shows Curiosity at the "Rocknest" site where the rover scooped up samples of...

Eyeglass frames designer Mykita recently launched a line of 3D polyamide printed sports frames, Mykita Mylon, which includes the "Daisuke" visor style frame shown here.    ...

Stanford researchers developed a retinal prosthesis that wirelessly transmits images from a video camera in a pair of glasses directly to a chip implanted inside the retina tissue.   &...

This jacket is a wonderful mystery to me; found upon the tumblrs, and seemingly sprung from the ether. Do you know where it came from?    ...

"Daft Pianists (cover of Get Lucky)," the latest musical experiment by Joe Sabia's wonderful CDZA (Collective Cadenza) YouTube project.    ...

This New York Times WELL column should do the trick. Probably why it's currently the most-shared item on nytimes.com. It's about a thousand words of sciencey science stuff, but the tl;dr is: go the fu...

Eric Steuer shares this wonderful videogame-themed rap video, made for Music Video Race, a project in which 20 Bay Area musical acts were randomly paired up with 20 filmmakers, and each pair was given...

Underground power-boxes nestled beneath the pavements* of London keep blowing the hell up. In its defense, UK Power Networks reminds us that there's a lot of these boxes, and only a few of them explo...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH many Fun Facts about NYC, the Biggest City In The World*, are crudely illustrated!    ...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. This episode of Gweek is brought to you by 23andMe, the leading health and ancestry DNA service.    ...

Jeffrey from 360 Cities sez, "My latest 'gigantic panorama' is of my adopted home city, Prague. (previously: 1 2) This time I'm trying something new: download, share, remix this one yourself! &nb...

Max Barry's new technothriller Lexicon is a gripping conspiracy novel about a cabal of "poets" who have mastered the deep language of the human brain and can use it to boss the rest of us around. ...

The "other shoe" in the Edward Snowden NSA leaks has been the potential effect of all these disclosures on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's efforts to force the government to account for itself in...

"I was working in a small tavern in Moscow, Idaho, when I got the call... I took the next pickup truck to California." From Real Stuff #2 (Fantagraphics, March 1991).    ...

Slowing down the Seinfeld theme by 1200% turns it into a David Lynch soundtrack, full of nightmares and menace, as Gorge Catanda demonstrates with this 8 minutes youtube.    ...

Composed by Edward Elgar between 1898 and '99, Variations on an Original Theme for Orchestra ("Engima"), Op. 36, has long been my favorite piece of classical music.    ...

Molly sez, "I wrote this short essay over at iO9 on what the future of civil disobedience could look like. Though in the past civil disobedience was enacted in the streets, with people placing their b...

Sierra Club magazine discusses "4 Ordinary Animals with Superhero Abilities." (Flight is not included.) My favorite tidbit is about a tiger's whiskers: They are filled with sensitive nerve endings, wh...

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, On November 1, Public.Resource.Org released a new service which put 6,461,326 US nonprofit tax returns on the net for bulk download, developers, and search engines t...

Did you know that we publish several original feature articles each week on Boing Boing? We're more than the old-school linkblog this website began as, way back in the year 2000 (we were a zine befor...

At long last, here's video of the Cambodian bamboo railroad I wrote about in 2006; this being a homebrew railroad running at 40km/h off an electric motor, along decrepit and degenerating rails that o...

Fine artist Angela Palmer takes CT/MRI scanner of people and animals, engraves the data onto thin glass sheets that are then combined into 3D sculptures.    ...

[Editor's note: I mentioned the arrest of technology editor David Mery in my recent Guardian column on Prism; he wrote in to correct some details and explain the astounding circumstances of how Britai...

Click to view large. Photo: Jeff Simmermon. Boing Boing pal Jeff Simmermon sends us some wonderful snapshots of a local Jamaican artist who lives and works in Treasure Beach, "a very sparsely populat...

Click to view large. Photo: Jeff Simmermon. Boing Boing pal Jeff Simmermon sends us some wonderful snapshots of a local Jamaican artist who lives and works in Treasure Beach, "a very sparsely populat...

A woman who placed a big computer order at Amazon had her account frozen while they tried to verify her credit-card, a process that went horribly awry (they demanded that she fax them her bank-stateme...

Over at National Geographic, Carl Zimmer reveals the wonder of vampire bats. "Of the 1200 or so species of bats, vampire bats are among the very few that can move quickly on the ground." Watch one ru...

Trevor Timm wrote a piece for Freedom of the Press Foundation about how much more we're learning not just from the NSA leaks themselves, but from the response to those leaks.    ...

Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (the movie) on speed. Er, even more speed. From 1A4 Studio who have done this with a number of movies, including Star Wars, Back to the Future, a...

"Kristjan Loftsson, CEO of the the company Hvalur hf." Photo: News of Iceland. Icelandic news outlets are reporting that an Icelandic whaling company, Hvalur hf, "caught its first fin whale yesterday...

Wade sez, "Wolfgang Baur, roleplaying game designer and publisher of the late, lamented Kobold Quarterly magazine (successor to Dragon) has launched the Deep Magic Kickstarter bringing 300 new spells ...

More than 6000 people applied, eight were chosen. And, for the first time, NASA has an astronaut class with gender parity — four men, and four women.    ...

How dosing dolphins with LSD (and giving dolphins hand jobs) helped shape our modern pop culture beliefs about dolphins as sources of healing — beliefs that, according to neuroscientist Lori Mar...

There is nothing wrong with adding ice to scotch, writes Kevin Liu at Serious Eats. In fact, a little water can change the flavor profile of the drink for the better.    ...

I snapped this photo of a popular medical marijuana dispensary storefront in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles last week. To me, it represents everything bone-headed about the way LA area pot sh...

It starts with lignin — a compound that makes up the cell walls of plants. Turns out, it's also closely related (chemical-structure-wise) to vanillin, the stuff that makes vanilla smell so vanil...

(GENTE, olha esse reflexo na fachada de um prdio na manifestao do Rio, no centro da cidade! #ProtestoRJ/@brunoernica) Brazil is up in arms.    ...

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

Horror writer David Nickle is a master of the creepy -- the reveal at the end of the horror story that lodges in your brain and revisits you in goosepimply moments of fear.    ...

Horror writer David Nickle is a master of the creepy -- the reveal at the end of the horror story that lodges in your brain and revisits you in goosepimply moments of fear.    ...

The crowdsourced radiation monitoring project Safecast, which was launched in the weeks after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, has reached a big milestone: they have collected and published ov...

John Schwartz has a colorful profile of Bill Nye the Science Guy in the New York Times, exploring his evolution from science-lesson-explainer for kids, to a defender of fact-based reality against pund...

John sez, "Last fall, you guys ran a story about 'Backyard Blockbusters,' my feature documentary on fan films (such as 'Troops', 'Hardware Wars', 'Star Trek: Phase II", or the 'Raiders of the Lost Ark...

The Guardian commemorates the reissue of Isabel Marks's 1901 classic "Fancy Cycling" by publishing a sweet gallery of Edwardian ladies and gents doing bike tricks: "Marvel as these tailored tricksters...

The NSA's first large-scale domestic surveillance project began in 1945 — when the organization began reading American's telegrams.     ...

In general, women outlive men. This is not a new idea. But what you might not know is that the effect can't be explained by some simple hand-waving about risk-taking men, or war, or the allure of the ...

MERS is the SARS-related virus that's killing people in the Middle East — and the government of Saudi Arabia, where most of the outbreak is happening, has been reticent about releasing informati...

Everything a dissection table should be, I suppose. I'm absolutely mesmerized by the utility of this tool, developed by Anatomage and Stanford University's Division of Clinical Anatomy.  &n...

Neuroscientist have attached an electronic "backpack" to dragonflies that jack into the insect's brain and wirelessly transmit the data back to a base station.    ...

It's time again to play Digging for Hoffa! Today, the FBI will dig in a field north of Detroit based on a tip from alleged mobster Tony Zerilli.    ...

Two doctors have written a really fascinating analysis of the history and economics of health insurance that will make our current U.S.    ...

Nine people who have not recently made any sweeping judgements about biotechnology. Last week, I told you about the US Supreme Court ruling that made it illegal to patent naturally occurring DNA.&nb...

Among the most recent video posts you will find on our video archive page: • Miss Utah? Barely coherent • Watch 2013 Obama debate 2006 Biden on NSA surveillance • Watch and listen li...

Johannes from the Austrian art weirdos Monochrom sez, "As we are currently celebrating 20 years of monochrom, we were confronted with the problem of how to (re)present our history.   &...

Writers Jasmina Tesanovic and Bruce Sterling visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope, a large, fully steerable radio telescope currently which was recently completed near San Basilio, in province of Caglia...

Noah sez, "What goes together better than Alice in Wonderland and black-light posters?! I'm excited to be a part of this cool project that just launched on Kickstarter.    ...

About this nifty "Onion Pi" HOWTO just published at Adafruit, Phil Torrone says, "Limor and I cooked up this project for folks.    ...

The Smithsonian's Museums of Asian Art in Washington, DC is preparing the first large exhibition of yoga-related art. Titled "Yoga: The Art of Transformation," the show is really a look at the history...

Papercraft artist Horst Kiechle created an incredible anatomical model, complete with removable organs, and posted all the templates and instructions online for free.    ...

In 1961, Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Barney Rubble, and literally a thousand other cartoon characters (see vide above), was in a terrible car crash that put him in a coma. &nb...

A farmer in eastern China killed an extraterrestrial and put him on ice. After he posted photos online, police reportedly showed up and determined that the ET is fake.    ...

John Cusack, actor, filmmaker, and board member of journalism advocacy group Freedom of the Press Foundation, on the ethics of civil disobedience in whistleblowing.    ...

A company called "Covert Coins" mills hollow coins out of real currency and turns them into hidden, spook-tastic secret compartments. Reviews say that the coins are indistinguishable from undoctored i...

Richard sez, "The Swiss riot police have taken a page out of the Turkish authorities' book. After occupiers ('critics'?) responded to the 'irony' of Tadashi Kawamata's cafe/boutique in the form of a ...

Whatever she said, Miss Teen South Carolina is still our nation's pride.    ...

At the BBC: "New details have emerged about the air crash on 27 March 1968 that killed Yuri Gagarin - the first man in space."    ...

Straight Outta Cape Cod: "an incident involving Police Chief Jeff Jaran and a rap song about police brutality playing at a restaurant he was at on May 7.    ...

Overv cloned Minecraft using x86 assembly. You can boot your computer into it. Crazy: "Starting in assembly right away would be a bit too insane, so I first wrote a reference implementation in C".&nbs...

On the Guardian right now NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is answering live questions from the world at large. 1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately an...

The British Government is determined to be seen to be doing something (anything, really) about pornography online. The current incarnation of "something must be done; there, we did something!" is base...

David sez, "The Restart Project is a London-based social enterprise and charity aiming at changing our relationship with information technologies by empowering people to repair and reuse their electro...

Emmanuel Frémiet (1824 - 1910) “Gorilla Carrying off a Woman” (1887) (Via Suddenly) Where are the other Mean Monkey Monday posts?    ...

Rejoice! For Carl Hiaasen, author of the funniest crime novels in the business, bar none, has a new book out! Bad Monkey has just arrived on shelves and it is every bit as hilarious as you could hope ...

On the eve of the G8 summit (taking place in a specially prepared Potemkin village in N. Ireland), the Guardian has published another Edward Snowden leak, this one describing how the UK spying agency ...

Chris Weston's poster for a notional "Carry On X-Men" has me wanting very badly to inhabit his alternate universe. He says of the film, "Despite the bawdy humour, 'Carry on X-Men' is in many ways mor...

Today Bernard "Bernie" Sahlins, co-founder of the Second City, passed away at age 90. His contributions to the world of comedy and acting are immeasurable.    ...

JanusNode sez, "Janusnode is 'a user-configurable dynamic textual projective surface,' AKA a programmable text generating application. It has released a book entitled 'You can bring an elephant to a B...

JanusNode sez, "Janusnode is 'a user-configurable dynamic textual projective surface,' AKA a programmable text generating application. It has released a book entitled 'You can bring an elephant to a B...

This morning, a TSA officer at LAX humiliated and shamed my 15-year-old daughter. She is traveling with a group of high school students on a college tour and we were not with her when he verbally abus...

The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle has done the math on building a data-center that could hold all of America's voice-calls, and concluded that this it wouldn't quite fit within the $20M price-tag ...

Toronto police carried out a series of dramatic raids on alleged gang-members across the city in Friday. They raided 15 Windsor Rd, a run-down and notorious bungalow that is also noteworthy for provid...

It's a pity that so many senators skipped the NSA's classified briefing on its secret spying program, because if they'd attended, they'd have heard something shocking: the NSA can and does access the ...

It's a pity that so many senators skipped the NSA's classified briefing on its secret spying program, because if they'd attended, they'd have heard something shocking: the NSA can and does access the ...

Between Syria, Turkey and the G8, it's hard to keep track of popular resistance to oligarchy and corruption, but please don't forget So Paulo, where the police are treating public anti-corruption dem...

Barricades at Nisantasi, at 4:50AM Sunday Poiu is in Turkey; he writes: " Since yesterday evening, everything has worsened. Unfortunately it is not really covered by local media, the consequence of ...

I've been attending the Gezi Park protests since arriving in Turkey on June 6. Thousands of people have camped at the park in Taksim Square, traditionally a gathering place for all kinds of meetings ...

Here's a photo from Jacob Riis's 1890 classic "How the Other Half Lives," "an early publication... documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s." It shows "Bandits Roost, ...

Turkish police used extreme force to eject the protesters from Taksim Square yesterday. Egemen Ba, Turkey's representative in the EU, gave a televised address in which he said, "[The police] will inte...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV9Rh4ynBf4 It's Father's Day and time for my annual re-posting of Groucho Marx singing the greatest song dedicated to that occasion of all time.    ...

While I'm waiting here at Narita airport for my flight home, I thought I'd share this photo I took last night in Shinjuku.    ...

Walking Dead artist Tony Moore says: "Knowing how long it took me to draw this damn thing in pen and ink, I'm particularly honored and impressed by this painstaking Walking Dead cross-stitch!" ion: A ...

Unlocking the Truth is an an awesome heavy metal band made up of 12-year-old schoolkids who've been playing together since they were five.    ...

"This is the rehearsal, right?" Thom Yorke teased the audience last night inside Club Fais Do Do, renamed for the evening "Club Amok" for a surprise/secret Atoms For Peace performance. "You were the l...

"This is the rehearsal, right?" Thom Yorke teased the audience last night inside Club Fais Do Do, renamed for the evening "Club Amok" for a surprise/secret Atoms For Peace performance. "You were the l...

Microsoft's new XBox One will ship with region-locks that divide the world; yours will only work if it connects to the DRM server from one of 21 selected countries.    ...

Parody, obviously. 'shoop: XJ    ...

Facebook and Microsoft have reached a agreements with the U.S. government "to release limited information about the number of surveillance requests they receive," which Reuters' Joe Menn and Gerry Shi...

In the one unencrypted line of this publication, Kevin Poulsen of Wired News writes, "Dont read this if you arent him.    ...

A lengthy profile in the New York Times of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who recently leaked information about the agency's secret domestic spying program, paints the young man as an self-driv...

A briefing offered to US senators by senior intelligence officials on the NSA surveillance programs "failed to attract even half of the Senate, showing the lack of enthusiasm in Congress for learning ...

The US Patent and Trademark office has awarded Microsoft a patent on a wearable electrical device that uses your arm or finger as transmission channel to "transfer data through direct physical contact...

As @pourmecoffee tweeted, it's unfair that there's no video to accompany this all-too-brief story of a gentleman in Iowa "who says he was using his lawn mower to chase a gopher." The man has been told...

Amy Fiscus of the AP tweets, "Worried by Prism? It's actually part of a bigger effort. Not worried by Prism?    ...

Amy Fiscus of the AP tweets, "Worried by Prism? It's actually part of a bigger effort. Not worried by Prism?    ...

Did you know that ambient electronic music pioneer Brian Eno starred in an ad for Purina brand cat food, in an alternate universe?    ...

Wired has a neat story out today from Steven Levy, reporting from New Zealand, on how google plan to use hundreds of high-pressure balloons circling the earth to "provide Internet to a significant chu...

Wired has a neat story out today from Steven Levy, reporting from New Zealand, on how google plan to use hundreds of high-pressure balloons circling the earth to "provide Internet to a significant chu...

Given the recent news about the NSA's domestic surveillance programs, this PBS FRONTLINE documentary hour from 2007 is worth revisiting: "Spying On The Home Front.    ...

I got tired of people savvying me about the revelations of NSA surveillance and asking why anyone would care about secret, intrusive spying, so I wrote a new Guardian column about it, "The NSA's Prism...

Spocko sez, "In this commercial for a cell phone screen protector product, a quadcopter flies up to some fruit, sodas and a cell phones and shoots them with a remote controlled handgun.  &n...

Back in 2006, Joe Biden explained why the Bush program of warrantless wiretapping was a bad idea, destroying GWB's arguments in favor of unconstitutional, sweeping blanket surveillance.  &n...

Joly sez, "On March 4-5 2013 the Internet Society's North America Bureau webcast the Freedom to Connect 2013 conference in Washington DC.    ...

McDonald's Singapore is selling a "Durain Crunch McFlurry" that combines soft-serve ice-cream with everyone's favorite stinkily delicious T-Rex-testical-looking fruit. It sells for S$2.80 or about USD...

Watch then-Senator Joe Biden from 2006 directly refute each point made by his now-boss, President Barack Obama, about the NSA surveillance program at a news conference last week.   &nb...

This wonderful porthole-made-of-books is part of the design for the John W. Doull Bookseller store in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and warrants a side-trip all on its own.    ...

Neile Miller, the Obama administration official who heads the agency responsible for maintaining America's nuclear stockpile and for tracking down loose nukes worldwide is the latest victim of Guccife...

Just in time for Father's Day: mydadwasinaband.com. At Dangerous Minds, Richard Metzger explains the insane story that led to the blog's launch.    ...

If you're too old, broke, tied to your job, or crowd-phobic to have made it to Bonnaroo in person but still want to hear all the bands, no sweat bro! Just tune in on Ustream.    ...

If you're too old, broke, tied to your job, or crowd-phobic to have made it to Bonnaroo in person but still want to hear all the bands, no sweat bro! Just tune in on Ustream.    ...

Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Administration. Illustration for WIRED by Mark Weaver Journalist James Bamford did a Reddit AMA today.    ...

Thiswasafirst collects the first postings ever published at some of the web's most well-known sites. Behold Jack Dorsey's first tweet, Yakov Lapitsky's first YouTube upload, and Brad Fitzpatrick's fir...

About their wonderful publication launched just about a year ago, Michele Outland and Fiorella Valdesolo say: "We started Gather because of a shared love of food and cooking, and a desire to create a...

KayLynn-Syrin's Tank Girl cosplay is just about the greatest bringing-to-life of one of my fave comic characters I've ever seen. Tank Girl!    ...

A mysterious and magnificent book-lined staircase, provenance unknown. Do you know where this is? 29 October, 2012 (via That Book Smell)    ...

Among the most recent video posts you will find on our video archive page: • Superheroes help kids fight cancer • Neil Young loves model trains • Art of Punk videos • Faces de...

A leaked memo apparently sets out the NSA's "talking points" to its defenders in government who are discussing the situation with the press and critics.    ...

Top lawyers for Yahoo argued in a secret court in Washington that the company should not be forced to assist the government in spying on "certain foreign users, without a warrant," which Yahoo had ref...

Ad agency JWT Brazil created a "Superformula" to fight cancer. They worked with the A.C. Camargo Cancer Center in Brazil and another agency client, Warner Bros., to transform chemotherapy into "super...

According to Buzz Aldrin though, "Tang sucks." (NBC News)    ...

Benjamin Manuel Geronimo, massacre survivor, and representative of Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR), speaking in the genocide trial in Guatemala City on May 9, 2010.   ...

Neil Young talks model trains with David Letterman. Young isn't just a model train enthusiast, he's also an inventor. From Dangerous Minds: Young first created a research and development company, Lio...

The UK Home Office has sent letters to the world's airlines, warning them not to let NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden board a plane for the UK, because "the individual is highly likely to be refused e...

The biology behind the green glow of Japanese freshwater eels could lead to new tests for jaundice and liver problems. RIKEN research institute scientists determined that the protein bilirubin is what...

I had the great pleasure of visiting with Giant Robot's Eric Nakamura and collaborators last night at the GR2 space on Sawtelle in Los Angeles.    ...

A doe-eyed look would not have won over judges at a contest in Germany this week: it was for cows only.    ...

From Sao Paolo, where the the cops are violently attacking protesters, a video of a cop smashing his own police-car window, presumably to blame it on the protesters later.    ...

From Sao Paulo, where the the cops are violently attacking protesters, a video of a cop smashing his own police-car window, presumably to blame it on the protesters later.    ...

A parking inspector in Britain pretended to have been struck by a disobedient motorist, thereby earning 4 months in jail when CCTV footage exposed his lies.    ...

Nelson Minar created a massive map of the United States' rivers. [via Kottke]    ...

I am overjoyed about the new video series, "The Art of Punk," from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.    ...

Glenn Fleishman at Tidbits: "Apples implementation is technically capable of 1.3 Gbps. But as Apple notes at the bottom of the page, Actual speeds will be lower. Ill say.    ...

Announced at gaming trade show E3, Thief 4 looks like a great stealth game—better than the overweight third entry, in any case.    ...

Is this the elusive Jersey Devil as some Redditors have speculated? Perhaps it's the dreaded Chupacabras? Or a bastard cousin of the Montauk Monster?    ...

John Walker argues, irrefutably, that games are a great place to tell stories: "There are some who have argued that games just arent the right medium for telling stories.    ...

Tony Smith sez, Hugo Award winning science fiction podcast StarShipSofa presents SofaCON: An Online International Science Fiction Convention Guest include Peter Watts as GoH, plus Special Guest Lois ...

The supremely creative design/data experimentalists at Stamen launched Map Stack, a fascinating and super-simple tool to design your own maps and cartographical mash-ups: You can use it to combine cus...

Liz Stinson: "Swedish artist Jonas Lund ... built a browser that allows people around the world to surf the internet together in one window.    ...

Michael Karkoc — a 94-year-old Ukranian immigrant who lives in a neighborhood of Minneapolis known for housing populations of both Eastern Europeans and artists — has turned out to be a fo...

The Encyclopedia of Life announces the winners of the Armchair Taxonomist competition featured here at Boing Boing. Everyone gets a warm thanks for helping to fill an open-source database with informa...

Charles Darwin, Linus Pauling, and Albert Einstein made great contributions to science. They also made large blunders. In this original essay Mario Livio, astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science...

Laina, AKA "Overly Attached Girlfriend" (a YouTube comedian and memestar who trades on her ability to stare intensely while monologuing hilariously about her terrifying romantic attachment) has outdo...

The UK edition of my novel Pirate Cinema hits stores officially today! Tell your friends! When Trent McCauley's obsession for making movies by reassembling footage from popular films causes his home ...

Earlier today, we published my story "By His Things Will You Know Him," which is from the forthcoming Institute for the Future anthology "An Aura of Familiarity: Visions from the Coming Age of Networ...

Michael sez, "In response to a breaking scandal the head of the Australian Army gives a textbook example on how to respond to sexual abuse in the military, hell, misogyny in any organisation: blunt, ...

Senator Elizabeth Warren has written an open letter to Michael Froma, the nominee to run the US Trade Representative's office, calling on him to release the text and negotiating documents for the secr...

Copyright scholars have long been pretty certain that "Happy Birthday to You" is in the public domain, despite the fact that Warner/Chappell claims copyright on it and charges impressive licensing fee...

As the Prism/NSA leaks story unfolds, many Americans are left with a cynical "are you surprised?" response that rather misses the point.    ...

TRAQ is a senior project from a group of Northeastern University engineering students; it's a quadcopter that seeks out and homes in on radio signals.    ...

A very large and very gay sculpture of a pink bulldog by Belgian artist William Sweetlove went missing after the gay pride parade in West Hollywood.    ...

"The U.S. House of Representatives voted again Thursday to allow the indefinite military detention of Americans, blocking an amendment that would have barred the possibility." [HuffPo]  &nbs...

Michael Isikoff at NBC News reports that the FBI has "dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. &n...

Danielle Powell had nearly finished her Bachelor's Degree at Omaha's Grace University when the school administration found out that she was a lesbian.    ...

Photographer Wes Naman who famously wrapped his subjects' faces in scotch tape has now twisted people's mugs into grotesquery with rubber bands.    ...

In the fog of war, it's not easy to figure out how many people die. Even in the cleanest combat, accurate records are not really a common military priority.    ...

It's not good to let someone lick your eyeballs. Y'know, conjunctivitis, corneal abrasions, that kind of thing. That said, "worming" or "oculolinctus" is not only a sexual fetish as you might expect,...

Coop snapped this shot of the gorgeous "Iron Orchid," a masterfully decorated 1935 Ford 5 Window Coupe, built by Dave Shuten of Galpin Auto Sports.    ...

Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Click to enlarge. In Washington today, US officials and U.S.    ...

Photo: ICE HSI. Click to enlarge. In Washington today, US officials and U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum representatives announced the seizure of a long-lost diary maintained by a close confidant of A...

Over at the Information Daily, my Institute for the Future (IFTF) colleague Jason Tester wrote about "Maker Cities," a concept that IFTF is currently exploring through on-the ground ethnography and a ...

In his book, The Science Delusion, Curtis White criticizes scientists for throwing around the term "beautiful" without really asking what, exactly, makes science beautiful ...    ...

Charlie Savage writes in the New York Times of the books on offer to prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, which include a set of Indiana Jones novelizations, some Star Trek: TNG novels, Ender's Game, Arabic e...

GE isn't the only one getting into the 3D-printed airplane part game. But, instead of little fuel injectors for turbines, the Chinese company AVIC Heavy Machinery and China's Northwestern Polytechnica...

In 1989, a bank-teller at the Old National Bank in Spokane, WA refused to validate the $0.50 parking stub of a shabbily dressed man who'd come in to cash a check.    ...

We just released Boing Boing's first short ebook, Mark Dery's "All The Young Dudes: Why Glam Matters," and the feedback has been terrific.    ...

Ars Technica's Joe Mullin reveals that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was likely a frequent commenter on Ars, posting under the name TheTrueHOOHA, since he was 17 years old in 2001.   ...

A post on Washington's Blog summarizes numerous critiques of Big Data, with reference to its efficacy in finding signs of terrorism amidst gigantic databases of surveillance information.  &n...

Jordan Weissman: "The unpaid intern, that lowly, coffee-scalded creature of the modern office, might be about to become a thing of the past." [The Atlantic]    ...

My father kept things. I mean, he didnt like to throw things away. Nothing. I looked into his eyes as I said these words. Id said them before, to explain my spotless desk, my habit of opening the mail...

I recently posted about Pravic, an excellent new science fiction 'zine edited by David "Total Dick-Head" Gill and Nathaniel K. Miller.    ...

Defense lawyers for Terrance Brown, a south Florida man facing bank robbery charges, have asked for NSA mobile phone surveillance records to be supplied in order to support his claim that he was not i...

It took photographer Mike Oblinski four years of traveling to Plains States to capture this fantastic time lapse footage of a supercell thunderstorm near Booker, Texas.    ...

Mathew sez, 19th Century technology meets 21st Century music over a bottle of beer in the latest extension to the Beck's Record Label project.    ...

Courtesy Photo Jesse Thorns tenacity may well be his defining characteristic. He graduated the same college the same year as me and kept right on doing what he had done all along.   &nb...

In an unanimous decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled today that companies can't patent genes, or parts of genes — at least, so long as that genetic material is identical to what occur...

A new tumblr, Haunted Mansion Backstage, consists of rare photos of the backstage areas of the Disney parks' Haunted Mansion rides not normally visible from the "Doom Buggy" ride vehicles.  ...

Diego sez, "Protestors - mainly students - are taking the streets of Sao Paulo. The problem: the government just raised the bus fare from R$3 to R$3,20.    ...

Boys from Brett Wierzbicki's Sophmore Honors English class at Cathedral Preparatory Seminary in Queens, NY have been reading my novel Little Brother and Brett gave them the option of doing a book-remi...

I don't know if I can fully define human nature, but I'm pretty sure it includes a prurient and/or practical interest in how one uses the bathroom under strange circumstances.    ...

Last weekend, I let you know that a new Beastles album was forthcoming from djBC, who was reprising his mid-2000s project to mash up the Beatles and the Beastie Boys, which disappeared thanks to legal...

Here's a WWI-era advert for whale steaks. As Bruce Sterling notes, "Theres heaps of whale meat here in the First World War.    ...

"An odd thing is happening in the worlds self-declared pinnacle of democracy," writes David Rohde at Reuters. "No one except a handful of elected officials and an army of contractors is allowed to k...

A leak in Northern Alberta involving at least 9.5 million liters of toxic waste from an oil and gas operation is the third major leak in a region where "residents are now questioning whether enough is...

Mother Jones features three slides from Catherine Bracy's recent talk at the Personal Democracy Forum tech conference. Bracy ran Team Obama's technology field office in the 2012 campaign.  &...

Mother Jones features three slides from Catherine Bracy's recent talk at the Personal Democracy Forum tech conference. Bracy ran Team Obama's technology field office in the 2012 campaign.  &...

"The former host of 'Erotica Night' at a Baltimore bookstore will be the first-ever female number two official at the CIA." Perhaps the Daily Beast is trying to make us like Avril Haines less, but the...

About this video: "A collection of clips of David Letterman asking drummers if their drums are rented. Also some guitars and French horns for good measure." [Thanks, Joe Sabia]    ...

Back in May, I reviewed Topsy Turvy World, a beautiful, wordless surreal picture book from London's Flying Eye. At the time, it was only available in the UK, but it's out in the USA as of today! ...

Here's a preview of Good Dog, Graham Chaffee's beautifully told and illustrated story of a stray dog's life. Graham Chaffee returns to comics and uses a simple, charming story about a stray dog to exa...

Everyone's going bananas for the "Get Lucky cover for every decade" medley, but nothing in it matches the languid splendor of Deep Lounge.    ...

Illustration for WIRED by Mark Weaver"Infiltration. Sabotage. Mayhem. For years four-star general Keith Alexander has been building a secret Army capable of launching devastating cyberattacks. &n...

"The willingness of the government to punish leakers is inversely proportional to the leakers rank and status, which is bad news for someone so lacking in those attributes as Edward Snowden," writes m...

This 3D printed bowtie ain't cheap ($115), but it's got a clever little fitting (it buttons straight onto your collar-button), and it also looks like a fun project to recreate with your local hackspac...

In the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, reader JMV shares this wonderful scan of a 1952 feature from the Vancouver Sun's "Weekend Picture Magazine" on the coming age of travel to Mars.    ...

Photo: Doc Pop Doctor Popular, iphoneography master extraordinaire and jack of many wonderful creative trades, says: This week, I'm teaming up with the awesome folks at Photojojo to share some of my ...

Photo: Verizon Can Hear You Now, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 60976844@N00's photostream, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.    ...

Prosecutors in Mexico have arrested 12 drug dealers, pimps, and small store owners for the murders of 11 women who disappeared when they were as young as 15, forced into sexual slavery in Ciudad Juare...

In Indiana, a 13-year-old girl was raped by a 17-year-old boy who is accused of having molested other girls. This victim, who is now 14, is from a conservative Christian family and chose not to have a...

Richard Satran at US News has a scary little piece out about how The Internal Revenue Service collects more than your taxes: "It's also acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers' di...

Edward Snowden was a technology contractor, not a trained operative. AND Magazine talked to a few former CIA operatives about the tradecraft they'd use if they were in his much-sought shoes, and wante...

Lawrence Lessig writes in the Daily Beast today about the relationship between the internet and civil liberties principles, in the wake of Edward Snowden's NSA surveillance leak. "We dont know yet whe...

Ouya, the Android-based, kickstarted games console, rented a storefront across from the E3 games conference, hoping to catch the eye of the conference goers. E3's management rented the parking spots i...

On the CNN program "AC 360" Tuesday night, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said reporters who publish stories that reference leaked classified information should be prosecuted by the state. That same day, Ki...

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who introduced the PATRIOT Act on the floor of the House in 2001, says excuses from lawmakers and the Obama administration about recent NSA domestic spying revelations a...

Here's a beautiful, super-hi-rez, freely usable photo of a 1969 Russian Polar Expedition watch -- an absolutely droolworthy bit of horological sweetness. (Click to embiggen) Russian Polar Expedition ...

"If the federal government had access to every email youve ever written and every phone call youve ever made, its almost certain that they could find something youve done which violates a provision in...

Buried in this bummer of a piece in the Wall Street Journal about how our spineless US lawmakers aren't likely to fight for the privacy rights of Americans in the wake of the NSA spying scandal, this ...

Oh, if only we'd listened to Shia LaBeouf. CBC News reports that back in 2008, while the actor was promoting his film Eagle Eye, (about a mysterious stranger who spies on other people's phone calls), ...

Photo: kitchenoverlord.com On Chris-Rachael Oseland's kitchenoverlord.com food blog, there are some wonderful geeky recipes. Two of the more recent posts are breads with science fiction themes, and bo...

Yesterday, the Greek government forcibly shut down the state broadcaster, ERT, sending in the police to drag journalists away from their microphones. The government claimed that the shutdown was the r...

Five years after her three year old daughter died from malnutrition and dehydration, a woman who played World of Warcraft obsessively every day is now in prison. Rebecca Colleen Christie of Las Cruces...

The delightful film Frances Ha has a wonderfully-eclectic soundtrack including tracks by David Bowie, Paul McCartney, T. Rex, Dean & Britta, and Harry Nilsson. I especially enjoyed the use of Ho...

Here's a spectacular Monotribe synthesizer cake, apparently last year's birthday cake for Moonbuz. Happy Birthday with Monotribe Cake (via Crazy Abalone)    ...

Among the most recent video posts you will find on our video archive page: • Alert guide dog buys couple enough time to escape • What the math of music looks like • Man does "karate ...

At Scientific American, Beth Mole has a longer story about the FDA's recent decision to exert more control over the use of fecal transplants — procedures that attempt to cure disorders related t...

Former UK drug czar David Nutt (and author of the amazing and indispensable Drugs Without the Hot Air) has published a paper in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience called "Effects of Schedule I ...

The Tampa Bay Times has done some excellent investigative reporting on the 50 worst charities in America — organizations that took in more than $1 billion over the past 10 years, and gave almost...

A new study finds that out-of-network medical bills aren't just high, they're often illegally high — with hospitals ignoring regulations meant to keep you out of debt when you get sick out of st...

This fantastic video by Vi Hart shows you what the math of music looks like in a visual representation — or, should that be "what visual frieze patterns sound like when turned into music"? Frie...

Later this month, scientists will start sending the first continuous mass hailing beacon into outer space — a sort of "Hey, you! Yeah, you! Here we are!" message that researchers hope will attra...

In 1971, this ferret played a key role in the construction of particle accelerators at Fermilab's Meson Laboratory. As sections of vacuum chamber were connected together, Felicia would run through th...

As part of their "Little Children, Big Challenges" project, the Sesame Street people have produced an excellent module for helping kids cope with having a parent in jail (available in English and Span...

Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish-American Princeton/UNC sociologist who studies social movements and the Internet is presently in Istanbul's Gezi Park at the protests. She follows up on her earlier piece on ...

Watch as O'Neil, an 18 month old labrador retriever, warns his companions of impending doom. Quick thinking by O'Neil's trainer, Todd Jurek spares he, O'Neil and a blindfolded Danielle Alvarado from w...

Make Magazine interviews Werner Strama, who built his own teardrop camping trailer (here's a detailed HOWTO if you want to try it yourself). Strama talks about how he approached the project and the le...

Meltdown, my favorite Los Angeles comix shop, is currently exhibiting "Damn Fine Coffee: An Artistic Tribute to Twin Peaks." The show of work by several dozen talented artists runs through June 21. Ab...

A German bank employee dozed off at his keyboard and accidentally triggered a 222 million euro ($293 million) funds transfer. Of course, the order didn't go through, but the man's colleague was fired ...

Here's an important consideration for Europeans in light of the NSA dragnet surveillance revealed by the recent leaks: some of the amendments to the controversial new EU Data Protection Regulation wou...

"Karate Dancing To Offspring" (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)    ...

Over at our sponsor Intel's LifeScoop site, I wrote about playing classic, free text adventure games on your smartphone. From "Adventures in Text Adventures": When I was a youngster, I devoured a seri...

The Star Trek actor George Takei, writes about being interned in Arkansas and California internment camps along with his Japanese-American family during WWII, a particularly important rememberance in ...

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has given an interview to the South China Morning Post, which the paper is dribbling out in a series (1, 2) of articles. Thus far, we know: * He intends to release mor...

The Hubsan X4 quadcopter is a tiny, cheap copter with enough power to do flips, enough smarts to stay level and pointing right, and enough tough to drop from 50 foot onto grass without damage. It flie...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH disaster hits the data mines, and the hard-workin' miners barely escape with their careers.    ...

Apps for Kids is Boing Boing's podcast about cool smartphone apps for kids and parents. My co-host is my 10-year-old daughter, Jane. In this episode of Apps for Kids, we talk about Knights & D...

Everyone's all worked up at the fact that Emily Harris, 9, was able to proceed through through customs with a passport that identified her as a unicorn. What do these tabloids have against unicorns? [...

Scott Bedford is creative director at an ad agency in London and for the past several years has been writing and illustrating a how-to column of kid-friendly projects for MAKE. His sense of humor and ...

In the Guardian, an excellent roundup of the US and EU responses to the revelations from Edward Snowden's leaks about the extent of NSA dragnet spying on the Internet and phone networks: The congress...

On May 27, Jiroemon Kimura became the last living man to have been born in the 19th century. On Wednesday, he died at 116, the oldest man who ever lived.    ...

A raid on a pet shop owner's house near Bangkok turned up 14 albino lions and other rarities, landing the owner in jail on charges of illegally possessing wildlife. "We received a complaint about the ...

In case you've forgotten it amidst the Prism and Greek broadcaster shut-down stories, here's a reminder that the police are still engaged in a brutal crackdown on protesters across Turkey, courtesy of...

Chemical analysis of Archaeopteryx remains show that the creature was patterned "light in colour, with a dark edge and tip to the feather", say researchers from the University of Manchester. &n...

"What started out as a casual sightseeing trip to a historic castle in the Netherlands took a bizarre turn for one Dutch woman, who claims she may have spotted some kind of UFO." [Fox]  &nbs...

Back in April, I reviewed Monsters and Legends, a wonderful illustrated kids' reference book from London's Flying Eye Books. At the time, it was only available in the UK, but now Americans can get it ...

Michael sez, "The Greek government forcibly shut down transmissions of all TV and radio stations operated by the state-owned broadcaster ERT, with police ejecting journalists and other employees who w...

Video Link #publooshocker indeed! Previously.    ...

Alan sez, "Who wouldn't want their very own cyborg roach? And who wouldn't want to be able to control that cyborg from their mobile? Fund this Kickstarter and maybe you can. The robo-roach - manufactu...

Michael from MuckRock sez, It's difficult, but not impossible, to get info the old fashioned way from the NSA, using the Freedom of Information Act. Here's MuckRock's guide to getting as much as you ...

"We destroyed Glass entirely, for you," says Star Simpson. Check out her Google Glass Teardown with Scott Torborg. We eagerly brought Glass back to the lab to begin the dissection. Speculation reigned...

Jonathan Kaulay collects ten of the best. [via Alan White] In 2005, an unopened copy of the self-deleting game surfaced on Ebay where it was promptly bought for $733,000 by a man from Japan named Yama...

In the New York Times, Charlie Savage and Mark Mazzetti explain how Edward J. Snowden instructed three journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian and documentary filmmaker Laura P...

CBC radio's excellent magazine show As It Happens conducted a short, lovely interview with Scottish sf writer Ken Macleod about Iain Banks, who had been his friend since high school. It's a beautiful ...

"Hi, and welcome to Game of Drones, the new show where we design, build, and fight unmanned aerial vehicles." A fun show with a lot of good info for budding drone enthusiasts.    ...

Deanna of Kitsch-Slapped takes us on a tour of vintage plaster and chalk nude statuettes. [Some] vintage plaster or chalkware figurines have little fabric skirts or loincloths, which may come on as m...

In the latest episode of Bullseye with Jesse Thorn I talked about the graphic novel Good Dog and the iPhone version of the Russian card game Durak, called Super Durak. (Durak means idiot in Russian. T...

Today's XKCD What If? explores many of the benefits that would accrue to the human race if the Sun were suddenly extinguished. Reduced risk of solar flares: In 1859, a massive solar flare and geomagn...

This 12-minute documentary about Charles Addams reveals that he had a lifelong fascination with decrepit mansions and cemeteries. Who knew! (Via Jim Gurney)    ...

Michael Rigley created this beautiful animation, titled "Network," for his BFA design thesis project at the California College of Art. It's about personal data captured by cell phone providers and is...

Who needs Man of Steel when you can wax nostalgic for "It's A Bird, It's a Plane, It's SUPERMAN," the 1966 Broadway musical! Drew Friedman: The TV series starring George Reeves had been off the air fo...

Hugh Howey, author of the runaway self-published best-seller Wool, has a very well-argued, thoughtful, and fascinating look at the relative merits of self-publishing for a median kind of writer, who i...

Google has sent the US Attorney General a letter asking for permission to publish aggregate statistics on the number of gag-ordered-FISA requests it gets. These requests are secret and not included in...

Video Link Expert troll Esteban Winsmore invades private residences in Second Life, the virtual world you haven't been thinking about lately, but which has finally achieved an uncanny and thoroughly ...

From the 2011 D23 expo, here's a one-hour presentation by Imagineer Tony Baxter of a trove of vintage, rarely/never seen footage documenting the construction and renovation of Disneyland. The present...

Video Link At last, a sequel to Dragonslayer.    ...

Carl sez, "Remember Digger, Ursula Vernon's Eisner award nominated/Hugo Award winning webcomic about a wombat searching for a way home? Publisher Sofa Wolf has launched a Kickstarter for an all-in-one...

In The New Republic, Molly Redden writes about how energy companies are exploiting the fact that the Amish religion and culture rely on a strict interpretation of the Christian bible to prohibit the u...

"Dissent," an anonymous-pseudonymous blogger who is a mental health care practitioner, has an interesting post about one tangential consequence of the announcement that Verizon and other communication...

Ai Wei Wei, the renowned Chinese dissident who has been relentlessly persecuted by his own government, has written an op-ed for the Guardian comparing Chinese totalitarian surveillance with Prism and ...

I’m tempted to say that this tool is a life changer, but I’m prone to exaggeration, so I’ll just say it’s a game changer. The game being that by mid-day I’m usually rolli...

At The Price Hike, Bloomberg News food critic Ryan Sutton writes about Sushi Yasuda, a high-end restaurant in New York which recently eliminated tipping. You cannot tip your waiters, but you can eat t...

"Controlled flight into terrain" is a term that refers to an airplane crash where a pilot accidentally directs an airplane right into the ground (or a hill, or the water, or anything else, really). CF...

Hardware hacking superhero Ladyada explains how batteries work and how to make one from a lemon! "Circuit Playground: B is for Battery"    ...

The photo above, by Kyle McBurnie, won the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science's 2013 Underwater Photography Contest that's open only to amateurs, defined as "pho...

Video Link On May 10th, a completely naked man entered the 16th street BART station in San Francisco and began attacking people, spitting, urinating and doing gymnastics moves on railings and turnsti...

This stunning lake at Harpur Hill in the East Midlands of England is just begging you to dive in, no? Problem is, the quarry pool, known as the Blue Lagoon, has a pH level comparable to bleach and is ...

This stunning lake at Harpur Hill in the East Midlands of England is just begging you to dive in, no? Problem is, the quarry pool, known as the Blue Lagoon, has a pH level comparable to bleach and is ...

Maker culture is being remade in China. Along with pioneers like Bunnie Huang and David Li, of Shanghai hackerspace Xinchejian, Eric Pan and his open hardware facilitator, Seeed Studio are acceleratin...

The new DSM 5 (and the old DSM-IV, for that matter) includes caffeine intoxication as a valid mental health diagnosis. The new version has also upped the ante, adding "caffeine withdrawal" and "caffei...

Turns out, math fans dig set theory for almost exactly the same reason that some Christian fundamentalists absolutely hate it — all that messy uncertainty, which is either an affront to the idea...

Google announces they have acquired the Israeli startup Waze, which produces a social-driven drive-route-mapping technology that has transformed the way I get from point A to B here in Los Angeles. Ru...

After reading this post on Boing Boing about a cat for mayor in one Mexican town, my friend Ejival from glamorous Tijuana writes, Your Morris the Candigato post reminded me of CANDIDATO FIDEL (candi...

Gawker's Hamilton Nolan ridicules the halfwitted psychoanalysis and smearing aimed by sneering pundits at Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed the agency's expansive surveillance of ever...

In this Sky News television interview with EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange of Wikileaks describes Prism Leaker Edward Snowden as "a Hero."    ...

In this Sky News television interview with EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange of Wikileaks describes Prism Leaker Edward Snowden as "a Hero."    ...

"Dear NSA, let me take care of your slides," writes Emiland, in a redesigned version of the Prism leak. "Do whatever with my data. But not with my eyes. Those slides are hideous." Related: What's in t...

Yesterday, we posted a tech memoir by Steven Ashley about the slow rise of 3D printing — from sci-fi fantasy, to toy, to creator of real tools. Towards the end of the piece, Ashley mentions how...

Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space, launch date June 16, 1963. A wonderful website: fuckyeahfemaleastronauts.tumblr.com. Only 10% of people in space have been women, and on tumblr that seemed ...

Charlie made a disturbing video backed by Kurtz's "Everything Burns Alike," featuring footage from Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, a 1940 documentary on the horrific experiments of Dr. S.S. ...

From the BBC: The severed head of a deer was left on a self-service supermarket checkout, prompting a police investigation. The innards of the animal were found in one of the aisles of the Tesco shop ...

Photo: Bradley Manning, via standwithbrad.org Huge news from the Freedom of the Press Foundation's Trevor Timm: Bradley Mannings defense lawyer David Coombs brought up our crowd-funded stenographers i...

A coalition of Internet companies and civil liberties groups have signed on to an open letter to the Obama administration calling for increased transparency and sensible checks on the power of the Ame...

Back in April, I reviewed Akissi, a delightful kids' comic about a mischievous little girl in Cote D'Ivoire, translated from the original French. Back then, it was only available in the UK, but as of ...

    ...

A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting is a funny and truthful book about being a parent, and as a bonus, it's told in cartoons. Guy Delisle, a French Canadian cartoonist and animator, is best known f...

Boing Boing reader Tom Fassbender says: "On June 10, 2012 (one year ago) I embarked on a 13-day solo hike of the 212-mile John Muir Trail. My memories of those days are still very vivid. To commemorat...

Edward Snowden has reportedly checked out of the hotel in Hong Kong where he had holed up to leak a series of NSA documents to the Guardian and the Washington Post. The US will not say if it is seekin...

Here's Bruce Sterling's snappy, excellent keynote for Augmented World Expo. This is definitely AR beyond mere Google Glass. Bruce Sterling - Keynote at AWE 2013     ...

ADVERTISEMENT SPONSORED: This post is presented by the Toyota RAV4 EV. Because innovation can be measured in miles, kilowatts and cubic feet. Learn more at toyota.com/rav4ev. Last week our sponsor T...

"In Walla Walla, the most popular pastime for the town toughs was 'Whitty bashing.' A carload of young drunks would pull up alongside the campus, and a crew would hop out and beat up some unlucky Whit...

Hugh from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Edward Snowden's computer sported stickers for EFF and Tor. You can buy the EFF sticker here."    ...

Sophie Madeleine says: "I'm very pleased to announce that you can now pre-order my Official Limited Edition Ukulele Tab Book. This is the first edition, limited to only 200 copies. Each one is number...

Iain Banks died yesterday. The Guardian's John Mullan does justice to the long and important career of one of the best writers in two fields: In 2010 he gave an interview to BBC Radio Scotland in whi...

Louisiana pays $5 a tail to encourage people to hunt the nutria. I'm glad to see that my friend Chris Metzler's documentary about 20-lb nutrias (swamp rats) was fully funded on Kickstarter. (If you mi...

Todd Krainin of Reason TV produced this mini-documentary about how "audio-visual recording technologies are fundamentally changing the privacy-versus-security debate in cities all across America." It...

Apple WWDC is under way. Announcements from the keynote include a new version of IOS, a refreshed MacBook Air, a streaming radio service, small and powerful Mac Pros, and more. Event hub sites and liv...

Image: juancarlosvazquez.com A wonderful meme is spreading throughout the Spanish-speaking internets: El Candigato Morris, a cat politician who originated in the Mexican city of Xalapa. His campaign s...

Mark Blyth, a delightfully sweary Scottish economist, talks for about an hour to Googlers about the stupidity of austerity as a means of recovering from recession, describing it in colorful, easy-to-...

Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot sends word that Uglycon, a gathering for ultrafans of all things Uglydoll, is happening Saturday, June 15 in Los Angeles. "Costumes. Bingo. Art by guests and the creators...

Dangerous Minds has a good collection of street art photos from the ongoing uprising in Turkey.    ...

Photo: Jasmina Tesanovic The Golden Quadrilateral in today's Milan is composed of haute couture shops, jewelry emporia, and nouveau riche tourists. It's the geographic square that once sheltered the n...

If you have been searching for a hand-sculpted vagina necklace, you are in luck. There is currently one for auction on eBay. According to the listing, "This truly is a one-of-a-kind piece of artwork!!...

Chris Kirk/Mindbomb Films' mind-bending minimalist music video for Brian Grainger's "Swamp Bike." Watch it full screen. Try not to look away. (Thanks, Syd Garon!)    ...

Dresden, Germany-based photographer Matthias Haker created an absolutely stunning photo series of abandoned buildings' lavish interiors in all their deteriorating hyperreal beauty. It's called Decay. ...

ADVERTISEMENT SPONSORED: This post is presented by the Toyota RAV4 EV. Because innovation can be measured in miles, kilowatts and cubic feet. Learn more at toyota.com/rav4ev. Last week our sponsor T...

Japanese animator Asami Ike's animated video for Metome's "Paper Moon." It's from the album "Phreatic Surface" out now on the King Deluxe label.    ...

During the brief moment that I majored in anthropology in college, I was fascinated by the work of Napoleon A. Chagnon and his seminal 1968 text Yanomamo: The Fierce People. Chagnon's time as a field ...

You don't need to know an ancient language to help scientists read ancient literature. Researchers are looking for volunteers for a crowdsource project aimed at transcribing (and, later, translating) ...

ADVERTISEMENT SPONSORED: This post is presented by the Toyota RAV4 EV. Because innovation can be measured in miles, kilowatts and cubic feet. Learn more at toyota.com/rav4ev. Last week our sponsor T...

In July, millions of people will travel to Saudi Arabia to celebrate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. When they do that, they might be at risk of contracting MERS — Middle Eastern respiratory s...

Holmes from Fight for the Future writes, "We just posted this to "We the People," the Obama administration's petition site. 100,000 signatures gets us a response:" President Obama, you have said that...

I'm going to be hosting a Q&A on Wednesday with Curtis White, essayist, novelist, and professional curmudgeon. He's got a new book out called "The Science Delusion", which ties together critiques...

Robin sez, I'm one of the campaigns managers at 38 Degrees (the UK's largest online campaign organisation). One of our members has recently started a petition calling on the UK government to update t...

Culture Japan Network TV shows us the underground bicycle-parking robots of Shinigawa, Tokyo. These machines ingest RFID-tagged bicycles and whisk them into their bowels and set them lovingly into h...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. In this episode of Gweek, I talked to Ramez Naam and Jason Snell. Ramez Naam is a computer scientist and the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of three boo...

As we all know by now, ducks have penises. Rather epic penises, in fact. Chickens, though, are penis-less. In fact, most birds don't have them. In an important update in duck sex news, Ed Yong follows...

A 3D model of a complex anaplastology case, created in collaboration with the anaplastologist Jan De Cubber, is seen at the Belgian company Materialise. 3D printing has already changed the game for ma...

South African mango farms that added patches of native, flowering plants not only attracted more pollinators than traditional, monoculture mango farms — they also produced more mangoes. Image: ...

Twitter user Darth polled followers for satirical, surveillance-oriented kids' book parodies, and created illustrations for the best. They're collected by the Guardian. NSA surveillance as told throug...

When the 17th Walking Dead collection came out last December, I called it "grim," and mentioned that Kirkman and co had introduced some new bad guys that made the Governor seem like a Smurf. Well, now...

Sociologist Kieran Healy does a nice job of explaining how even a data system that doesn't contain the actual content of conversations can be part of a very powerful surveillance state. Part parody an...

Magic words to TSA are not "please" or "thank you".. It's "Twitter".. cane released to go home.. twitter.com/TheWookieeRoar— Peter Mayhew (@TheWookieeRoars) June 3, 2013 Peter Mayhew, the seven-...

ADVERTISEMENT SPONSORED: This post is presented by the Toyota RAV4 EV. Because innovation can be measured in miles, kilowatts and cubic feet. Learn more at toyota.com/rav4ev. Last week our sponsor T...

(Via X-Ray Delta One) Where are the other Mean Monkey Monday posts? Here!    ...

Gawker's Max Read tried to set up a Zazzle store to sell t-shirts with the logo of the NSA Prism program, recently outed in a set of spectacular leaks in the Guardian and Washington Post. His store wa...

Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old NSA contractor and ex-CIA employee, has revealed that he is behind the series of leaks that have appeared in the Guardian and Washington Post this weekend, which detailed...

Shintaro Hayashi, a Tokyo prosthetics maker, spent most of this life making medical prostheses for people who'd lost breasts, limbs, etc, but now does a booming trade in fake pinkie fingers for ex-yak...

The Celestron FirstScope is the best pick for an absolute beginner level telescope. Most entry-level scopes are crap, and most useable scopes start at $300. Since the FirstScope costs only $42, you mi...

Alex Jones, American radio host and conspiracy theorist, was invited to the BBC's Sunday Politics. It is not to be missed.    ...

A Spanish town called Brunete used volunteers to covertly identify people who had left their dog's shit on the public sidewalk (the volunteers chatted up the dog owners' about their dogs' breeds, thi...

Iain Banks, author of bizarre literary novels and visionary science fiction, is dead at 59. Barely weeks ago, Banks announced that he was a cancer patient and that his latest book would be his last. Y...

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick has further thoughts on the NYT piece on Prism, in which they try to resolve the contradiction between the NSA and Obama's admission that Prism exists and the leaked NSA slid...

In the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill leak a description of another NSA top-secret program, this one codenamed "BOUNDLESSINFORMANT." This is apparently a tool that helps spies keep track...

Raging Heroes is a spectacularly successful new Kickstarter to produce 150 female warrior miniatures divided into three armies. They were looking for $12,000 and hit that in 30 seconds. Now they're ov...

Here's some wonderful musical news: djBC has revived the Beastles, the inspired Beastie Boys/Beatles mashups that resulted in two spectacular albums, ultimately censored off the Internet thanks to le...

Michael Geist sez, "Privacy and surveillance have taken centre stage this week with the revelations that U.S. agencies have been engaged in massive, secret surveillance programs that include years of ...

Jonathan Zittrain writes, "Ad hoc mesh networking has been developed to enable free and censorship-resistant communications in places like Egypt and Syria. (The New America Foundation's Commotion proj...

Among the most recent video posts you will find on our video archive page: • Elderly couple sing together as husband lies in hospital bed • She & Him on the Tonight Show • Tinty...

"We made a cute yo-yo video with some extreme slow-motion capturing," says Boing Boing pal and yo-yo master Doctor Popular. Produced for the web video series Distort.    ...

Matt Alt shot this fun video and wrote this blog post about how you can buy Rhinoceros Beetle larvae for only 98 yen each in Japanese shops. The roughly thumb-sized larva grow into big beetles that a...

SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 7, 2013: Police officers secure a scene at Cloverfield and Olympic after a gunman opened fire on a Santa Monica city bus during a rampage that covered more than a mile...

This video made the rounds on viral video site Liveleak with a misleading headline that stated the man died. "He is still here," his daughter Linda corrected. "At the time with a broken hip and a bloo...

Todd sez, "Check out this awesome LED strip lights controlled by a simple controller board. Matt Mets went through the Haxlr8r program and came out with this project, with the help of Marty McGuire an...

I've just signed up for the Clarion Write-a-Thon, an annual fundraiser that brings in money to run the non-profit Clarion Writers Workshop, a kind of bootcamp for science fiction writers held every ye...

On Engadget, Richard Lawler paraphrases a NYT theory on how the companies identified as participating in the NSA's PRISM program are able to deny participation without technically lying; this is follo...

Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian have published details of another Top Secret US surveillance/security document. This one is a presidential order from Obama to his top spies directing them to draw up ...

Mid-century AM radio-inspired joy from Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward (aka She & Him) on The Tonight Show last evening. The track, "I've Got Your Number, Son," is from their fabulous new LP titled ...

San Onofre. Photo: Xeni Jardin. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (known to locals as The Giant Nuclear Boobies), which once supplied power to nearly 1.5 million homes in Southern California,...

If convicted of the hacking-related charges brought against him after an FBI raid, Deric Lostutter could get more jail time than the rapists he went after. Read more in Mother Jones.   ...

There are wounded victims from SMC shooting twitter.com/The_Corsair/st— The Corsair (@The_Corsair) June 7, 2013 At least 7 people, including a gunman, were killed in a rampage shooting and arson...

KALQ is a keyboard layout designed to replace QWERTY for thumb typing on a tablet. The creators of KALQ say that eight hour's use will train you to be able to enter text faster than you would be able ...

For $75, Burner Phone will ship you a "completely anonymous" phone set up for 30 days use. The only caveat: you then have to eat it.    ...

"Under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and "wiretaps without warrants," he said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout ove...

Larry Page: "Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users data are false, period." (Previously)    ...

Vesper is a simple note-taking iOS app named after a Bond cocktail. Unlike most such apps, it's well-designed and pleasing to look at, though you do have to cough up a fiver for the privilege. Moreove...

Serial killer and self-professed "satanist" Richard Ramirez is dead at 53, reports the California Department of Corrections.    ...

Weird Wheels was a Topps trading card series issued in 1980, with art by Norm Saunders (of Mars Attacks! fame) and Gary Hallgren. The delightful Karswell has scans of the entire series. Weird Wheels&n...

LEGO announced its Ewok Village, due out September 1. It consists of 1990 pieces including R2-D2 and 16 minifigures: Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO, 2 Rebel soldiers, 5 Ewok...

Warner Bros. announced production of a live-action Archie film. "Glee" writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is working on the script that Jason Moore ("Pitch Perfect") will direct. (via Washington Post) ...

It's 185 feet below the surface of Lewis NY, and comes with "Strangelove-ian clocks that show the time in cities around the world and gun-metal gray consoles covered with analog switches and dials for...

Above, Nine Inch Nails' new track "Came Back Haunted," from their forthcoming release Hesitation Marks to be released September 3. Below, listen to all of Nine Inch Nails' singles in order, starting ...

PBS Digital Studios has launched a biweekly series called Under H2O, and the first episode is called "The Intertidal." It's only five minutes long, and well worth watching. The Intertidal features ra...

Fine art photographer Antonio Martinez combined more than 800 dryplate tintype photographs of a circus into this mesmerizing stop motion animation "Near the Egress." Absolutely stunning work. (Thanks...

A gimmick lens from my favorite purveyors of craptastic plastic, Brando. It attaches to a smartphone camera lens so you can take photos at a 90-degree angle just like Weegee did! (Image from photo.net...

Tugboat Printshop hand-carved this lovely drawing of "The Moon" in 3/4" birch plywood and then pulled 200 limited edition 33.5" x 30.5" prints. You can read more about the intricate process at their s...

Here's a cool installation: "The project is presented as a monitoring room, which shows Peer-to-Peer transfers happening in real time on networks using the BitTorrent protocol. The installation produ...

Jonah Lehrer got caught. Jonah Lehrer got a new book deal anyway. Then, Jonah Lehrer got caught again, according to Slate's Daniel Engber: "Hell recycle and repeat, hell puke his gritty guts out."&nbs...

Snippet from a book proposal by fraudulent journalist Jonah Lehrer: "I feel the shiver of a voice mail message. I listen to the message. I have been found out. I puke into a recycling bin. And then I ...

Snippet from a book proposal by fraudulent journalist Jonah Lehrer: "I feel the shiver of a voice mail message. I listen to the message. I have been found out. I puke into a recycling bin. And then I ...

A report by Nick Hopkins in the Guardian accuses the UK spy agency GCHQ of making use of the American NSA's Prism program, which was revealed in leaked documents earlier today -- a slide presentation ...

This is wonderful news all around: our brilliant sysadmin, Ken Snider, has been made head of tech operations for Wikimedia, and will be keeping Wikipedia humming henceforth! Congrats Ken, and congrats...

The Guardian and The Washington Post have both been leaked a 41-slide NSA presentation on a program called PRISM, which -- according to the slides -- gives the spy agency (part of the US military) "di...

Here's a handy new NSA logo from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Hugh D'Andrade for your trenchant pleasure.    ...

Bruce Schneier writes in The Atlantic to comment on the leaked court order showing that the NSA has been secretly engaged in bulk domestic surveillance, recording who everyone is talking to, when, for...

Quebecois convenience store chain Couche-Tard has rolled out a new drink: the Pizzaghetti Sloche, a shave-ice drink that comes in both pizza and spaghetti flavors, which can be combined to customer sp...

The TSA has backed down from its moment of sanity in which it decided to allow golf-clubs, small knives and other items that pose no threat to airplanes back in the sky. The TSA's move had been a welc...

Everything I hear about Mystic Manor, the new Haunted Mansion at Hong Kong Disneyland, makes me insane with desire to ride this thing. It's like something that sprang full-blown out of my fevered ima...

CCTV footage from Long Beach, CA shows crooks robbing cars after opening them with some kind of keyless entry fob that appears to defeat the cars' built-in cryptographic security. The fobs evidently d...

Here again is a clip of the amazing Ross Sisters performing a wonderful song about potato salad while performing the most amazing contortions and acrobatics -- like Cirque du Soliel crossed with Hee-...

Because "Your choices at 30,000 feet are pretty limited."    ...

Apps for Kids is Boing Boing's podcast about cool smartphone apps for kids and parents. My co-host is my 10-year-old daughter, Jane. In this episode of Apps for Kids, we talk about Kingdom Rush Front...

Video Link    ...

The New York Senate has passed a bill making it illegal to "harass" a police officer by "any type of physical action" -- even action that does not otherwise constitute interference, obstruction or ass...

“Police officers who risk their lives every day in our cities and on our highways deserve every possible protection, and those who treat them with disrespect, harass them and create situations t...

Brian Krebs reports on the Russian arrest of Pavel Vrublevsky, owner of the ChronoPay service (about whom Krebs has written an upcoming book) for witness intimidation. Vrublevsky is on trial for hirin...

Dave Groff sez, "TONIGHT city planners will be holding a community consultation on the re-zoning applications, this will be one of the few opportunities at which the public can give input to the plann...

Alex Ross, the artist who collaborated with Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson on Astro City gave CBR an interview about the refreshed series. Astro City has long been one of my favorite comic collection...

I missed this back in March 2012, but it bears re-visiting. Here's a series of Doonesbury strips that some newspapers refused to run in spring 2012. The strips criticize Republican state legislatures'...

Brian Eno has released a limited-edition deck of his "Oblique Strategies" cards, for £60. Oblique Strategies is a legendary deck of creative aphorisms and provocations that will make you revisit ...

This horrifying clown mannekin was reportedly placed on a hiking trail deep in the Oleta River in Aventura, Florida by a park employee who got it from the Enchanted Forest Elaine Gordon Park in North ...

I've written before here about the move to get the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) to cram digital rights management (DRM) into the next version of HTML, called HTML5. This week, EFF filed a formal ob...

Brad sez, "Fifteen high school students from the Bronx. Five dedicated teachers. A summer of learning that could change their lives -- and change the way kids learn all across America. This summer Pau...

Four billion tons of food are grown and raised worldwide every year. About 25% of that goes to waste.     ...

"Born in the caul" is a phrase that's connected with a lot of cross-cultural myths and superstitions — babies born in the caul are supposed to be destined for lives of fame and fortune (or, poss...

Apropos of yesterday's post about punks in Myanmar, Rene from Nerdcore sez, " German Journalist Alexander Dluzak did a documentary about the Burma punk scene a few months ago, here's the trailer (wit...

Freedom of the Press Foundation has begun publishing transcripts from the trial of accused Wikileaks source Bradley Manning. The US military has refused to release transcripts of Bradley Manning's tr...

Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, writing about all who brought this news to light: "I hope and trust we'll one day celebrate the War on Terror leakers who kept reminding Americans that their nation...

The DHS has responded to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU asking when and how it decides whose laptop to search at the border. It explained its legal rationale for conducting the...

Guidebook for the Scientific Traveler, published in 2010 and written by Duane Nickel, promises to be a tour guide to chemistry and physics points of interest all across the United States. (Thanks Tim ...

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism is a non-profit that gets its funding from private donors, foundations, and news organizations. But it's also operated out of offices on the campus of...

Two legends sing and dance. One more successfully than the other.    ...

Jamie King from VODO (a film company that raises money through crowdfunding and releases the results over BitTorrent with CC licenses) sez, "BritDoc and VODO have come together for this Free-To-Share ...

Picture Day is one of the best movies I saw last year. It's Kate Melville's directorial film debut, but for those of us who've followed her career since she was the youngest-ever playwright-in-reside...

In an explosive investigative piece published in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald details a top-secret US court order that gave the NSA the ability to gather call records for every phone call completed o...

No, it's not a lost Escher print, it's a photo of Saarinen's long-lost TWA lounge at Idlewild, and you can buy it as a print: Circa 1964. "Trans World Airlines Terminal. Idlewild Airport, Queens, New...

Writing in The New Yorker, Tim Wu calls for "total war on patent trolls" and lays out a roadmap for attacking the extortionists who are costing the US economy a reported $30B/year by extorting license...

Frank La Rue, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion, has tabled a report (PDF) to the UN Human Rights Council that makes a connection between surveillance and free...

Last October, IGN's Brian Altano announced a bold design fiction: an imaginary line of "Han Solo in Carbonite" Pop-Tarts. Several months have gone by and this is still not a thing. The world is broken...

The Grey Lady at her best: regurgitating Harry Anslinger's press releases in 1927. (Via the World's Best Ever)    ...

Only 7 percent of couples who met online and subsequently married have so far separated or divorced, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The ...

The Brazilian website "Arte do Medo" identifies this amazing eyeball face horror makeup as originating in Japan, though no other details are forthcoming. ARTE DO MEDO #5 (via Super Punch)  ...

A 13-minute publicity featurette about the making of Man Of Steel.    ...

Artist James Dive's "Once" consists of a 4 x 4 meter cube of demolished and compacted amusement park. A closer look reveals midway prizes, lights, tickets, garishly-painted metal scraps, and other mem...

I have never killed anyone, but I have certainly wanted to. I may have a disorder, but I am not crazy. In a world filled with gloomy, mediocre nothings populating a go-nowhere rat race, people are att...

Two years ago at the Treasure Island Music Festival, I was dazzled by the sight of glowing, otherworldly jellyfish floating above the crowd during the evening performances. I recently learned that tho...

Mark Dery's new ebook, All The Young Dudes: Why Glam Matters (the debut publication from Boing Boing's digital imprint) is a delightfully Derynian cultural excavation of the deeper definition of mascu...

At The New York Times, John Leland has a moving portrait of people who accepted their own inevitable deaths two decades ago ... and then those deaths didn't happen. Kept alive by HIV-fighting medicati...

Three photos picked from the OccupyGeziPics Tumblr, chosen for their vivid incongruities, and also to remind us all that Turkey still fights for the right to protest: Another photo of the woman in re...

The latest episode of Game of Thrones was pretty much business as usual. It turned out Walder Frey was ready to let bygones be bygones, and a lovely wedding feast was held for Edmure and Roslin. Wine...

Quarterly.co is a subscription service for wonderful things. People can subscribe to a curator (such as me, Joel Johnson, Veronica Belmont, Tim Ferriss, Joshua Foer, Gretchen Rubin, and others) to rec...

For a mosquito, every summer storm is like a million Volkswagen Beetles falling from the sky. How do they survive the deadly deluge? Meghan Cetera explains at Popular Science.    ...

John Brownlee on the unlikely evolution of the @ symbol: "Rejuvenated by its insertion before every Twitter handle, the @ symbol today is almost a pronoun. It has a very personal meaning for billions ...

An example of fantastic, whimsical bio-tableware from sculptor Etienne Meneau. Holds a full bottle. If it looks difficult to pour from or clean, Meneau has an FAQ for that. Via the good folks at The ...

Megan Garber at The Atlantic: "An extensive coronal hole rotated toward Earth last week--and astronomers were there to capture it."    ...

The New Yorker points out the obvious implication if leaking to the press is taken as aiding the enemy: Wikileaks released to the public, and in coperation with other media outlets, not at some Al Qae...

I love this photo of a punk in Yangon, Myanmar (shown here, a downsized thumbnail -- click through to see the whole pic from EPA in the Telegraph). A teenager dressed as a punk takes part in the water...

I don't know anything about wine, but I like the looks of Vinport's limited-edition Star Trek wine featuring label art by Juan Ortiz. The labels represent classic ST episodes: "The City on the Edge of...

The backstory: the British government is imposing an unpopular badger cull for questionable reasons.    ...

The Writers Guild of America has released its list of "101 Best Written TV Series." I'm thrilled that four of my favorite TV shows ever are in the top 5. Here's the top 10: 1. The Sopranos 2. Seinfel...

My latest Guardian column is "Data protection in the EU: the certainty of uncertainty," a look at the absurdity of having privacy rules that describes some data-sets as "anonymous" and others as "pseu...

Do you have ideas about the future of humans in space? The US National Academies' Committee on Human Spaceflight is seeking short papers from individual and groups with a vision for the future of huma...

Here's a rare look at the robots used to create the reflective "Pepper's Ghost" effect in the ballroom of Disney's Haunted Mansion. They're never directly visible during the ride, and can normally onl...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH so-called "journalists" are ordered to Re-education Centers for direction on how to best serve the State.    ...

Gawker's John Cook has finally gotten in touch with the guy who offered to sell him a video of Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford smoking crack. Bad news: the guy says the video is "gone": ...

Beast Academy is a set of grade three math textbooks and practice books structured as comic books about monsters. The books are "aligned to the common core state standards for grade three," if that ma...

The Han Solo in Carbonite light-switch cover combines the 1980s-era Empire Strikes Back kitsch with 1960s era novelty "boner" decor -- yours for $40 from Etsy seller Wicked Studio. Star Wars Han Solo ...

Here's a sweet little cookery show that will tell you how to make a facsimile egg from Aliens and a chestburster cake. The former is something you could actually serve at a dinner party (it sounds de...

When I was editor of Craft magazine, I always looked forward to Wendy Jehanara Tremayne’s next “Re-Fitted” column, which profiled a waste-conscious maker and included a how-to projec...

This post is brought to you by Jaguar. Experience F-TYPE. I remember the first time I controlled a computer with my brain. It was in 2008 at Institute for the Future and Neurosky's CEO Stanley Yan...

WiSee is a reasearch project at the University of Washington; as described in this paper, it uses standard WiFi hardware to sense the location and movements of people within range of the signal. Usin...

Here's some great news! It's the 25th anniversary of Barenaked Ladies' first album, Gordon, and they're celebrating with a new record: Grinning Streak , which comes out today. They did a Reddit AMA ...

"One day I got a letter from Charles Bukowski..." From Real Stuff #1 (Fantagraphics, December 1990).    ...

Bruce Schneier's editorial on CALEA-II is right on. In case you missed it, CALEA II is the FBI's proposal to require all American computers, mobile devices, operating systems, email programs, browsers...

I enjoyed Dark Rye's video about I3's Nicholas Britsky and the maker movement in Detroit. Dark Rye's entire Detroit issue is excellent.    ...

Our friend Paul Krassner has coined quite a few terms that have made their way into common use. In this essay he shares a few stories about the words and terms he's invented. The stories include the t...

“All the Young Dudes,” glam rock’s rallying cry, turned 40 last year. David Bowie wrote it, but Mott the Hoople owned it: their version was, and will ever remain, glam’s anthe...

Here's wallpaper that looks like a collage of Penguin Classics covers, from Osborne and Little. Lots of retailers carry it -- the John Lewis site lists it at £65 for a 10m x 52cm roll. The PENGU...

Here's wallpaper that looks like a collage of classic Penguin covers, from Osborne and Little. Lots of retailers carry it -- the John Lewis site lists it at £65 for a 10m x 52cm roll. The PENGUI...

During World War II, the US Army deployed a "tactical deception unit" to Europe. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, aka the "Ghost Army," consisted of artists, ad directors, actors, and other crea...

I’m slightly ashamed to admit that, as of mid-2013, my print reading has, on a whole, falls into two categories. The first is comics. I’ll stubbornly argue the superiority of the physical ...

The folks at Dollar Shave Club have a new product out: One Wipe Charlies, a peppermint-scented toilet wipe they claim is better than normal toilet tissue. Their video sure is flashy, but how much mor...

I wish Plants vs Zombies 2 really looked like this! It's coming our exclusively on iOS in July.    ...

Yesterday, I wrote about an expert witness's report on Prenda Law (previously), the notorious porno copyright trolls (they send you letters accusing you of downloading porn and demand money on pain of...

This post is brought to you by Jaguar. Experience F-TYPE. I remember the first time I controlled a computer with my brain. It was in 2008 at Institute for the Future and Neurosky's CEO Stanley Yan...

The State of California is considering legislation that would fine businesses $6,000 per employee who has to turn to Medical, the state's version of Medicaid. The bill is especially targeted at WalMar...

A few years ago, we shared the incomparable jazz master Fred Kaz' website and some tracks he'd made available there, free. Fred's music, his wit and his wisdom have made this world a better place. Fo...

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, Public.Resource.Org has always been a strong supporter of British-American cooperation. In order to further what Winston Churchill so aptly dubbed our “Special...

On a train from Portland to Oakland last week, my husband and I were startled to pass the rotting carcasses of dozens of battleships, moored together in clusters in a still, reedy bay north of San Fr...

Joel sez, "TRIPWIRE is a magazine that for over two decades has covered comics, genre and related fields. Described by Guillermo Del Toro as 'the touchstone of comic book culture in the UK and one of ...

Video Link In 2011 I set off with a camera to explore a mental asylum in Mexico run by its own patients. The place is just beyond the last junkyard on the curdled fringe of Jurez, the worlds most vio...

During a visit to the (incredible) new Exploratorium in San Francisco, I was captivated by Carson "Kit" Davidson's "One Hundred Watts 120 Volts," a 1972 short film where the manufacturing of Duro-Tes...

The Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine has a really interesting essay they've published in full online. It's written by Anna Petroni, a 77-year-old California woman who rec...

This post is brought to you by Jaguar. Experience F-TYPE. I remember the first time I controlled a computer with my brain. It was in 2008 at Institute for the Future and Neurosky's CEO Stanley Yan...

Sure, you've got those great opposable thumbs, complex culture, and the ability to walk on two legs. But don't let those facts lull you into thinking that evolution is on your side. It's not. It's not...

Here's a video showing off a publicity stunt in which Domino's delivers one of its "pizzas" using a drone (and, it appears, two or three cameradrones to document the event). The "pizza" is packed in ...

Drowning, in real life, doesn't look or sound the way it does on TV. It's not loud. It's not thrashy. And it can happen just a few feet away from you without you even noticing. At Slate, Mario Vittone...

I'm very fond of Gypsophilia's brand of klezmer-infused jazz, and so I'm very excited to learn that they've got a new release. Ross from Gypsophilia sez: "Horska" is our newest release and is many t...

Miss Cakehead writes, "The Depressed Cake Shop will be like nothing ever seen before as it will sell ONLY grey coloured cakes. Raising money for mental health charities, it will also provide a platfor...

This post is brought to you by Jaguar. Experience F-TYPE. I remember the first time I controlled a computer with my brain. It was in 2008 at Institute for the Future and Neurosky's CEO Stanley Yan...

GQ magazine sent Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson to meet a "humble sushi chef from Japanwho infiltrated the inner sanctum, becoming the Dear Leader's cook, confidant, and court jester," K...

Over the past month, Freedom of the Press Foundation (I'm on the board) has been crowdfunding money to hire a professional stenographer to provide daily transcripts of the court martial of accused Wik...

"Fat Tone" at California's Calipatria prison, December 1993. Courtesy The Atavist. Mother Jones today published an excerpt/adaptation from a new Atavist piece by Gary Rivlin titled "Stray Bullet." Mi...

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

At the PsySociety blog, Melanie Tannenbaum looks at the meta-analysis cited by Erik Erikson of Redstate.com as proof that low-income families fare worse when mom works outside the home — and fin...

I reviewed Lauren Beukes's time-travelling serial killer novel The Shining Girls back in May, and mentioned at the time that the US release was today. And here we are! Here's some of that review: Shi...

Ruth from the Open Rights Group writes, There are still some tickets left for ORGCon2013! Don't miss out on a rare opportunity to hear John Perry Barlow speak in London, this Saturday June 8th! John ...

The State of California is considering legislation that would fine businesses $6,000 per employee who has to turn to Medical, the state's version of Medicaid. The bill is especially targeted at WalMar...

The saga of porno-copyright-trolls Prenda Law (previously) just keeps getting more tawdry. Prenda is a mysterious extortionate lawsuit-threat-factory that claimed to represent pornographers when it se...

Holy. Crap. Michael Birken lays out, in detail, a method for teaching a computer to draw arbitrary 8-bit images by playing Tetris, strategically deploying blocks of various colors to cause exactly th...

It's been just over a year since Anno NTK launched, a kind of Wayback Machine for the wonderful old-school UK tech newsletter Need to Know. Each week, Danny O'Brien will send you a fifteen-year-old ed...

This week, This American Life revisits the question of patents (a subject they did a very good job with in 2011), a move sparked by the attempt to shake down podcasters for patent royalties for a ridi...

Michael Douglas offers us all a good reason to a) get vaccinated against the two most cancer-causing strains of human papillomavirus (even if you're a dude) and b) embrace dental dams (even if you're ...

I am as pleased as is humanly possible to announce that the San Francisco Public Library system has chosen my novel Little Brother for its "One City/One Book" program, the first ever young adult novel...

Photographer James D Morgan chronicled the annual migration of the red crabs across Christmas Island for Australian Geographic, documenting the amazing swarms of adorable scuttlers as they rush to th...

Rene from the German site Nerdcore sez, "A friend of mine who is staying in Istanbul right now contacted me this morning and I had the opportunity to interview a girl who is occupying Gezi Park in Tur...

Photo: ReutersToday, a coalition of more than twenty media organizationsincluding Boing Boing, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Fox News, the New Yorker, Bloomberg News, Newsweek, New York Magazine, and Report...

Houston, Texas-based doctor Stanislaw Burzynski sells "hope," not actual scientifically proven treatment for cancer. When people say they are selling hope, I always assume that means they "hope" to ge...

"He comes complete with a fifty-five gallon chemical drum and a trio of lab bottles. Mug is not included, it is shown to give a sense of scale." Ships last week of July, 2013. $35. Order: Mezco Toyz p...

My brother Carl shares the YouTube channel of Jus Reign, whose bio reads, "Im brown. I wear a turban. Old white ladies are scared of me." As Carl rightly explains, the video above is "basically a tak...

If you liked Al Jaffee's Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions from MAD Magazine (and if you didn't, boy are you in the wrong place!), I think you'll enjoy this Reddit thread: "What was your best "comeba...

This coming Saturday, the SF in SF reading series is presenting the movie SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED, followed by special guest Prof. Ken Wharton talking about "the logic - and illogic - of time travel." T...

Last Friday, a tornado near El Reno, Oklahoma killed scientist Tim Samaras, as well as his son and a colleague. The three were tracking the storm in a vehicle — storm chasing, if you will ̵...

Mathilda sez, "In this photo by Twitter user @joeman24, a gas-mask wearing Dervish dances in front of protesters in Turkey." A gas-mask wearing Whirling Dervish shows support for protesters in #Turke...

First you pray. Then, when you're in the air, you pray some more. If you land, you get a chance to pray again. Journalist Hamza Mohamed describes a recent flight to Kismayu, Somalia that begins with 1...

Brian Krebs offers an in-depth look at a "cashout" service used by ransomware crooks to get money from their victims. Ransomware is malicious software that encrypts your personal files and demands tha...

Dead Duck Day — the annual memorial celebration honoring the first recorded case of male homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck — happens this Wednesday in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. ...

Heather spotted this remarkably sad ad from Swiffer, aping Westinghouse Electric's classic wartime poster, We Can Do It! Adds Jason: "I love the clear tribute to an important historical image done in ...

There doesn't have to be a pre-ordained meaning to the universe in order for it to mean something. That's one of the fun things about being human — we get to make meaning for ourselves. With tha...

Libraries in New York City are facing a potential $106 million cut to their budgets. Should these cuts go through, more than 60 neighborhood libraries will close. More than a thousand librarians and l...

This image shows fewer than 400 of the 1600+ dire wolf skulls found in the La Brea Tar Pits — natural seepages of asphalt that trapped thousands upon thousands of animals over centuries. Like m...

Discovered in 1957 and hailed as the earliest map of the New World, the Vinland Map charted Norse exploration of the Americas long before Christopher Columbus. After decades of controversy, however, ...

(click to embiggen) Zack sez, "Photographer Allan Rosen-Ducat is reproducing 'The Land of Make Believe,' a popular illustrated map by Jaro Hess that combines more than 50 classic fairy tales, nursery...

Two photos from the OccupyGeziPics Tumblr show the "people's bulldozer" in action -- apparently a mechanical digger commandeered off a building site by protesters in Besiktas (one of my Twitter foll...

Actor John Simm sounds fed up with the fans: "I'm not the Master, I'm not that evil Time Lord who rules the galaxy, I'm just in Tesco with my kids. Leave me alone!" [Guardian]    ...

Actor John Simm sounds fed up with the fans: "I'm not the Master, I'm not that evil Time Lord who rules the galaxy, I'm just in Tesco with my kids. Leave me alone!" [Guardian] UPDATE: On Twitter, Simm...

Two and a half years ago, I moved to London for a new job; in two weeks time, Ill be moving out to a small town in the country, defeated. I love London, and Im not tired of it yet, but I am tired of t...

The death of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen raises questions about the future of special effects.    ...

The new Deluxe Edition of Watchmen landed in my post-box today. It's a very well-made hardcover edition of one of the canonical modern graphic novels. Everyone should have at least one edition of Watc...

In this episode of Gweek, I talked to Dave Finkel and Kevin Mack. Kevin Mack is a pioneering digital artist and Academy Award winning visual effects designer. Kevin also uses science and technology to...

Mathilda writes, Throughout the weekend, protests have erupted in Turkey in response to the brutal pacification of a peaceful sit-in in Istanbul. Over 1,700 people have been arested and there are mul...

For last summer's sock-hop, PJ and her daughter K made a Doctor Who themed poodle skirt, sporting K-9: Now, K is a fan girl and not a girly girl at all, so though she wanted to wear a poodle skirt, s...

Britain's harsh austerity measures have produced a sharp decline in real income and quality of life for the majority of the country; but the number of people earning £1M+ has doubled and is at an...

Here's a press-release describing a paywalled paper in Science magazine, written by a pair of University of Bonn Economists. They conducted an experiment that showed how markets diffused responsibilit...

Neil Emmett writes about fake computer graphics, as so often found in 1980s sci-fi movies and TV productions that were as inexpensive as they were ahead of their time. Primitive digital imagery has h...

Right-wing extremists, vastly outnumbered by opposing marchers on the streets of London, gathered Friday to whip up support. Both groups, however, were upstaged by campaigners fighting for a third cau...

Andrew sez, "Sometimes I write silly emails to companies when I actually have a mundane request. Usually, they either ignore me or reply with boring customer-service talk (We apologize for... Thank yo...

AP News reports: "Google must comply with the FBI's demand for data on certain customers as part of a national security investigation, according to a ruling by a federal judge who earlier this year de...

Some 2,000 protesters gathered this weekend outside of Fort Meade, where the court martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning is scheduled to begin tomorrow, Monday, June 3, 2013. He was arrested on May 26, 2010...

Jason Mecier, a "pop impressionistic artist" based in San Francisco who works in mosaic, sends word that he has just completed this candy portrait of Michael Douglas as Liberace. The medium: Mike �...

Because most psychedelic drugs are illegal, reliable consumer information about them is rare. For many years I have been looking for a comparative survey of available “head drugs” that wou...

Freedom of the Press Foundation recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for hiring a court stenographer to provide transcripts of the unclassified portions of the Bradley Manning cour...

In a New York Times op-ed, Julian Assange of Wikileaks argues that "the advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward ...

Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp, two sociologists (who also work on the excellent Sociological Images blog) have advice for this year's college grads that goes beyond "find your passion, follow your dreams" ...

  This is it, folks. Today at 6PM the SFMOMA closes to begin its three year long expansion. It'll be reborn sometime in 2016 clad in shining armor, engulfing the rest of its current city block. ...

Boodi Blu is a London jeweler who makes beautiful, clever pieces out of broken pieces of vintage and antique china, puzzled together with small metal fittings. I just saw them in person at a flea mark...

This list of the components of Satan's Spiritual Structure appears on handouts given to attendees at San Diego Comic-Con by evangelical picketers. It seems to originate with a Jack Chick Tract, though...

A brawl erupted at a kindergarten graduation in Cleveland on Friday, leading to eight arrests. It seems that two teens started the fisticuffs, and then some adults joined the fray. According to the Cl...

From OccupyGeziPics: an uncredited photo of a woman in at the Turkish anti-government/pro-democracy protests kicking away a tear-gas cannister. It's an amazing shot -- like something out of a Banksy s...

In Moscow, people rushed to try out the Russian capital's first bicycle sharing program today. The program launched with hopes to cut the number of cars clogging streets in epically awful Moscow traff...

Nearly 20,000 responses to the question, "If companies had realistic slogans what would they be?"—and many of them quite funny. (via @pesce)    ...

Jean Stapleton, who most famously played Edith Bunker on "All in the Family," has died. She was 90. (via CNN)     ...

1. "Almost," by John Gale. It's Caturday, folks. A great reason to dip into the Boing Boing Flickr pool and check out some of the best cat photos shared by Boing Boing readers. We do this semi-regula...

The Long Forgotten blog hits another one out of the park (Disneyland park, that is), with a thought-provoking post on the history of the color scheme for the Haunted Mansion, and the way that color is...

Andrew Scott Reisse, one of the founding developers behind the incredible Oculus Rift virtual reality headset was hit by a car while walking yesterday. The car was being pursued by police, and struck ...

CTD, or "Conductivity, temperature, and depth," are the three measurements with which marine scientists "unlock ocean patterns hidden beneath the waves." A group of scientists who believe in accessib...

Zeynep Tufekci's essay analyzing the role that social media played in both the #OccupyGezi and the Arab Spring explores the differences and similarities between different uprisings, and has some very ...

After producing too many copies of its infamously terrible E.T. game, Atari dumped the unsold inventory in a remote New Mexico landfill. Thirty years on, the local authorities have greenlighted an exc...

John sez, "The Falvey Library at Villanova University has just digitized a turn of the century guide to mechanical toys and small automata. They've been digitizing a lot of very interesting material--...

(Estimated 40,000 people cross the Bosphorous Bridge to join the protests/OccupyGeziPics) Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul is alive with protest at this moment. The action began on May 28, when environmen...

Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot's "Bonnie and Clyde" from 1968. The lyrics (in French) are based on Bonnie Parker's poem "The Trail's End" that she wrote several weeks before she was killed. You...

Watching the video about Luiz, the adorable boy who explained why he didn't want to eat octopus, gave me the same feeling as the beautiful ending of Black Orpheus, which is one of the best movie endi...

This terrifying Ronald McDonald/Joker mashup cosplayer was snapped at San Jose's FanimeCon 2013 by David Ngo. Ronald McDonald (via Neatorama)    ...

Swedish artist Johanna Mrtensson created this installation depicting a cityscape made of bread in 2009, and photographed it as it decayed, creating a series of pictures representing the destiny of all...

A 50-year-old man was upset that the sign in front of the Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission read "Oregon Teacher Standards an Practices Commission" (the D had fallen off the sign or be...

"Because the bartender is always on TV, I got laid a lot. There were plenty of free drugs and drinks. I lived out all my middle-class Idaho fantasies as quickly as possible." From Real Stuff #1 (Fanta...

More on the dry-ice explosion that triggered an evacuation of Toontown in Disneyland: it appears that the employee who put dry-ice in a sealed bottle in order to cause a loud bang and some water vapor...

Local People, Arms Crossed: exactly what it sounds like. A Tumblr full of hometown heroes, posed by unimaginative newsies with their arms crossed for extra competence. (via Waxy)   &nbs...

Delightful! (Via Reddit)    ...

I had a great time interviewing Sean Riley at Maker Faire this year. Watch our conversation, here. (Fora.tv)    ...

Watch ManhuntBoston Bombers on PBS. See more from NOVA. Above, "Manhunt—Boston Bombers," a documentary for the PBS science program NOVA reported and directed by Miles O'Brien. The hour focuses o...

A sonar image taken hundreds of feet below the surface of the Pacific may help solve one of the greatest mysteries in the history of aviation: What happened to Amelia Earhart, and where is her plane? ...

The G8 Summit is coming to Fermanagh, a county in Northern Ireland that has been devastated by austerity. To spruce things up and maintain the fiction that austerity will get us out of the global econ...

About this groundbreaking photo from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley: "Almost as clearly as a textbook diagram, this image made by a noncontact atomic force microscope reveals th...

Get ready for the Walmart of weed. Even Mexican President Vicente Fox thinks it's a good idea. The Stranger reports on a Seattle entrepreneur's plans to launch a $100 Million chain of marijuana stores...

Verizon won't tell Charlie Savage and the New York Times if it gave the Feds phone records for Times reporters. "We regret... that we cannot indicate whether we have previously received legal process ...

"What Happens When Google's Biggest Fans Get Drinks," Huffpo asks, about a meetup of the Google+ (duh) group known as "The Society Of Glass Enthusiasts," who do not actually own Google Glass units? We...

James Harbeck created this video to demonstrate various vocalizations that young adults make, to express emotions that are endemic to teens. From an accompanying article at The Week: The next time yo...

The Polynesian Voyaging Society famed traditional Hawaiian sea vessel Hklea began the first portion of a planned worldwide voyage this week with a "Malama Hawai'i" sail around the islands of Hawai'i. ...

Over at Tenth Letter of the Alphabet, a fascinating history of the Star Wars logo. Above left, a decal created during the film's pre-production, to be used on film cans and other early materials. "Thi...

Tony sez, "In 2012, under threat from fundamentalist rebels, a team of archivists, librarians, and couriers evacuated an irreplaceable trove of manuscripts from Timbuktu at great personal risk. The m...

Synthetic biology researchers at MIT are creating simple analog computers in living cells, complete with fluorescent "displays." Rahul Sarpeshkar and Timothy K. Lu engineered genetic circuits in E. co...

"It's funny cause it's true," says my pal Jason Tester who posted the photo to his Instagram feed @guerrillafutures.    ...

Matthew says: "A Vallejo man wanted to easily cross the street in front of his house, so he painted his own crosswalk. He was arrested for felony vandalism Thursday morning."    ...

MIT is rightfully proud of alumna Limor Fried, the superhero hardware hacker behind AdaFruit Industries, creators of fantastic DIY, open source electronics components and kits. We're proud of Limor to...

This thoughtful, articulate young fellow explains why he doesn't want to eat octopus. (Thanks, Sean Ness!)    ...

Alex sez, "You recently did a blog post of a 3D printed cube with 28 gears which was 3d printed fully assembled -- which I designed. However since this post, the cube has improved greatly, lubricated...

The creators of ElfQuest liked my artwork for our interview with them so much, they put it on a T-shirt! You should buy this t-shirt now: secrets from the lost decade will be conferred upon anyone I ...

Asus is readying a 31.5-inch display with 3840x2160 pixels, four times the pixel count of a standard HD display. The panel uses Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide ("IGZO") instead of silicon, which allows for ...

Kirtsy Johnson: A judge has ordered the police to sift through all digital material taken illegally from Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and to return anything irrelevant to their investigation- at thei...

MAKE projects editor Sean Ragan wrote about the making of the cover of our special issue of MAKE. After many hours of prep work, the lights were ready, the cameras were ready, the coil was ready, an...

A UK Parliamentary committee blasted the Office of Fair Trading -- a consumer watchdog agency that is supposed to regulate moneylenders -- for doing effectively nothing to curb the growth of usurious,...

George Barnetts' on top, then San Cisco. And there are so many more at Soundcloud. Great stuff!    ...

From Shorpy: "Anne Anderson in Whirlpool 'Miracle Kitchen of the Future,' a display at the American National Exhibition in Moscow." Kodachrome by Bob Lerner for the Look magazine article "What the Rus...

Mars' landscape was formed by flowing water, and the proof is in the pebbles. [BBC]    ...

Britain's largest ISP, British Telecom, has ragequit Yahoo! after learning that the internet giant had bought beloved microblogging site Tumblr. Just kidding! It's actually sick of its customers' Yaho...

A federal judge has ordered Google to comply with the FBI's warrantless requests for user data, rejecting its claim that the demands are illegal. Google had requested that the court modify or discharg...

Paul sez, MLE is a wonderful 'spy film with heart' an simultaneously an undercover tribute to the videogame Portal, based on a true story. It's about the unfortunately-named actor Julie Robert, stran...

Elaine Wherry took a break from working in San Francisco high-tech startups to work at Dandelion Chocolate, the chocolate maker/cafe that her husband co-founded. She calls her tenure at the chocolate ...

I’d like to use this intro to personally thank comics for helping me get through the last several plane rides, spending the sub-10,000 feet portion reading books like Victor Kerlow’s Every...

Remember the New York Post story about disabled people renting themselves out to rich New York families in order to skip the lines at Walt Disney World? The Today Show followed up on this, investigati...

ADVERTISEMENT SPONSORED: This post is presented by the Toyota RAV4 EV. Because innovation can be measured in miles, kilowatts and cubic feet. Learn more at toyota.com/rav4ev Maker Faire launched in ...

Here's a great Instructables for hiding a stash-box behind a wall of cut-away books. In some ways, it's a lot less fiddly than creating a single hollow book, though it does require you to use a scroll...

Nicole sez, "Fans of Adventure Time so look forward to seeing the gorgeous and imaginative artwork that appears at the top of each new episode in the title cards. Now, these beautiful designs featurin...

The 1611 treatise "A Nevv Booke, containing all sorts of hands vsvally written at this day in Christendome, as the English and French Secretary, the Roman, Italian, French, Spanish, high and low Dutch...

ADVERTISEMENT SPONSORED: This post is presented by the Toyota RAV4 EV. Because innovation can be measured in miles, kilowatts and cubic feet. Learn more at toyota.com/rav4ev Maker Faire launched in ...

Here's an excerpt from Judge Alex Kozinski's opinion in US v Xavier Alvarez (PDF), in which the judge describes some of the reasons that people lie: Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals ...