Articles by BoingBoing from July 2013

Chris-Rachael Oseland's "Captain America's Breakfast S.H.I.E.L.D." is a quick and delicious recipe that combines refried beans, salsa, a tortilla, shredded cheese, and an egg to recreate the Captain's...

Here is a transcript of today's verdict in the Bradley Manning case, provided by Freedom of the Press Foundation court stenographers: PDF link.    ...

Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn has published an original take on the Bradley Manning prosecution at the EFF's blog.    ...

Brian Krebs is a security expert and investigative journalist who has published numerous ground-breaking stories about the online criminal underground, much to the consternation of the criminal underg...

Right now, San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum is exhibiting "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg," an intimate portrait of the Beat generation in the form of Ginsberg's snapshots,...

I'm always looking for an elegant skull ring and this handcrafted silver-bronze handcrafted specimen from Lost Apostle is a beaut. "Look closely and you'll see each tooth is carved, the jaw bone tucke...

Ryan Singel, at Wired: In a dramatic about-face on a key internet issue yesterday, Google told the FCC that the network neutrality rules Google once championed dont give citizens the right to run serv...

The Mug Marker is a Don McRae's cardboard mug-decorating robot that uses an Eggbot-style EBB controller board and stepper motors to draw precise patterns on your favorite coffee-mug.   ...

Susan Crawford is an eminent telcoms scholar, former government official (who resigned because of corruption in telcoms policy) and the author, recently, of an important book on telcoms corruption and...

Jackomatic's "15 Over-Used Movie Poster Clichs" is a gallery of damning thumnails showing the enormous uniformity of Hollywood's marketing machine, a place where everything looks pretty much like ever...

Unbelievably spiteful behavior, just as you'd expect from the sort of company whose employees leave $0 tips on $170 sandwich orders.    ...

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

Jacqui Cheng spotted this beautiful mistake from the Chicago Tribune today. It's the cat that makes it. The cat is saying, "The person who did this test is younger than the person whose story will rep...

My 10-year-old daughter has been brushing our three cats and saving their hair in a plastic bag. She wanted to be ready when her copy of Crafting With Cat Hair arrived.    ...

Above, one of the exquisite hand-made acoustic/electronic instruments played by the late, great Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson of Coil and Throbbing Gristle.    ...

Pvt. Bradley Manning was found not guilty of aiding the enemy today, but convicted on multiple lesser counts, including violating the Espionage Act.    ...

Pvt. Bradley Manning was found not guilty of aiding the enemy today, but convicted on multiple lesser counts, including violating the Espionage Act.    ...

Den Lennie posted a video to Vimeo that compared the Rotolight Anova to a competing product, the Kino Flo Celeb, and found the Rotolight product inferior.    ...

Andrew Sleigh of MAKE profiled inventor Jane ni Dhulchaointigh (I call her "Jane") about one of my favorite things, Sugru.    ...

"Love You In The Dark" is the gorgeous soulful electro-pop debut LP from Sombear, aka Brad Heal of the Minneapolis band Now, Now.    ...

Photographer Lyle Jansma captured 360 views of dozens of airplane cockpits, from a 747 to a World War II P51 Mustang.    ...

MIT's report on its involvement in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz (PDF) has been published. The report does not apportion any blame to the university for Swartz's prosecution, stating the the univers...

Following the 1939 craze for underwater boxing, a dark new spin on the sweet science took the country by storm: Blindfolded Mens Boxing.    ...

Marcus Daly of Vashon Island, Washington, is a carpenter who specializes in handcrafted wooden coffins. One of his design principles is that the coffin needs to be easily carried.   &n...

One year ago today Notes from DEFCON and DEFCON Kids: I brought my whole family -- wife, daughter, and parents -- and the kid got to do some lockpicking workshops at DEFCON Kids, the astoundingly bad-...

Meet Kyle Kandilian, a 20-year-old University of Michigan-Dearborn student who raises tens of thousands of cockroaches, in his apartment, for fun and profit.    ...

Never Ending Night is a project aimed at making a live feed of the starry night sky available online 24 hours a day.    ...

Rush Holt (D-NJ) has introduced a bill called the "Surveillance State Repeal Act" that repeals the PATRIOT Act and much of FISA (though it leaves some pretty terrible parts of FISA intact).  ...

Drew Daniel on that song from Daft Punk's latest album, Random Access Memories. The song of the summer is, of course, Doin' it Right.    ...

In honor of the UK's Great Firewall of Cameron, the Prime Minister's autocratic decree that ISPs must censor their subscribers' connections by default, I've recorded my 2012 Guardian column There's no...

Last week, Dean told you about the lake at the North Pole, a pool of melted ice captured on camera by the North Pole Environmental Observatory webcams.    ...

A 50-foot wide, doughnut-shaped electromagnet recently completed a journey from New York to Illinois. It went most of the way by barge — down the Eastern seaboard and then up the Mississippi Riv...

At Nautilus, Jonathan Katz applies a systems-level perspective to the problem of food aid. Every year, the United States spends billions (although much less than it used to) sending shipments of food ...

Xeni Jardin reports from Ft. Meade, Md., on the trial of the accused Wikileaks whistleblower    ...

Kill City Blues is the latest in Richard Kadrey's amazing hard-boiled supernatural thriller series Sandman Slim. I've been a Kadrey fan since his landmark debut novel Metrophage, and have read and enj...

His constant presence in pop culture is so pervasive that it's easy to forget he reached a milestone anniversary this year.    ...

They did it in uniform. Amy Lange with Fox 2 News Detroit: A Good Samaritan snapped photos of what appeared to be two men impersonating police officers involved in a pistol-whipping and robbery outsid...

US spy agencies fed "metadata" about a New Zealand journalist's communications to New Zealand's military spies, who were upset that he had reported on human rights abuses against Afghani prisoners of ...

From the Abandoned Geography Tumblr: an overgrown and abandoned rollercoaster in Hubei Province, China. Abandoned roller coaster in Hubei Province, China    ...

Dr. Stacy Makhnevich was a NYC dentist (billing herself as the "Classical Singer Dentist of New York") who made use of a bizarre form provided by a company called "Medical Justice." Her patients were ...

Cakecrumbs, creator of the amazing Earth Cake, has topped that marvel with a Jupiter layer cake whose layers reveal the theoretical makeup of the gas giant.    ...

Insanely cute video by Glenn Naylor of the Alberta Parks dept! Video    ...

IZ Reloaded sez, "Spotted at Singapore Mini Maker Faire 2013! Using discarded plastic bottles, bits of old toys, disassembled computers and other recycled unwanted items, David Liew of the Sleeping I...

1. Serve the public trust 2. Protect the innocent 3. Uphold the law 4. (Classified) Cop Selfies [via Metafilter]    ...

In "Parametric Expression", Mike Pelletier explores quantified emotions in software. [Video Link]    ...

It's watching us, and this is what it sees. Mike Pelletier explores quantified emotions in software. [Video Link]    ...

The body of a four-meter long walrus was discovered while renovating London's enormous St Pancras train station. Both the archaeologist who discovered the bones, Phil Emery, and the zoologist who stud...

Brooklyn's Satanic Temple plans to clean up New York's highways to promote its message of civic pride and social responsibility.    ...

Shea Allen, an investigative reporter at an Alabama ABC affiliate, got fired after posting this little beauty: 1. I've gone bra-less during a live broadcast and no one was the wiser.   ...

One year ago today An investment fund that makes trades based on superstitious beliefs: The Superstitious Fund Project is an investment Fund that is run by a superstitious autonomous Algorithm. &...

Nick Bradbury's story, of confused and incompetent herding by Southwest following last week's crash-landing in New York, is unsettling enough.    ...

New York has the worst subway map in the world. Instead of using London Underground-inspired abstract maps like a normal metropolis, the locals prefer a more geographically-faithful "spaghetti" render...

The white room is bleeding to death. A white vestibule, with white floors and white walls and a lit white ceiling. The only other color is red. A crack in one wall, exposing a raw fistula in the bioel...

Two jurors in England will spend August in jail after one asserted a defendant's guilt on Facebook—"I've always wanted to Fuck up a paedophile & now I'm within the law!   &nb...

Robert Kunzig, at National Geographic, interviews climate scientist and author Robert Hansen on the runaway greenhouse effect and its likelihood to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming. ...

As you doubtless suspected, your ISP wants Google and Netflix to cough up, and bandwidth is their bat. [Ars] Behind the scenes, in negotiations that almost never become public, the world's biggest Int...

Nematode worms glow blue as they die — in fact, scientists can watch the blue glow spread throughout a worm's body in the hours before its death.    ...

Back in January, Pesco shared a great looking, reversible Mark Ecko Chewbacca hoodie. They've also made a stylish X-Wing pilot's jacket.    ...

This photo, taken by astronautics grad student and hobby photographer Ved Chirayath, was meant to be a bit of free promotion for NASA and space exploration.    ...

Bacteria are becoming resistant to one of the last classes of antibiotics available to treat them, writes Maryn McKenna at Nature.    ...

There's a fantastic long read up at Aeon Magazine about the science of child development and the ethics of running scientific experiments on vulnerable populations.    ...

A slope may look stable, but that doesn't mean it will always be stable. The same geologic material can, under certain circumstances, lose its strength and integrity.    ...

Amy Harmon is one of the best long-form, investigative reporters working today. (You might remember her recent stories about adults with autism navigating independent lives and finding love.) Harmon ...

Joe Mozingo of the LA Times reviewed the nonfiction book Pilgrim's Wilderness - A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier.    ...

BRADLEY MANNING trial at Ft. Meade: Verdict tomorrow at 1300 hours, 1pm ET. Judge just announced.— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) July 29, 2013 Presiding judge Col.    ...

A pair of crooks in Oklahoma made more than $400,000 with a whisper-thin gas-pump credit-card skimmer that they installed in Wal-Mart gas stations, using rental cars while they were doing the installa...

Andrews and Arnold is a professional-grade UK ISP, providing extremely high-reliability, high-speed Internet connections. The UK government has mandated that ISPs provide an "active choice" regarding ...

[Ed: An anonymous reader from the publishing industry wrote in with the following. I have every reason to believe it's true -Cory] There's something going on at Penguin (interesting to see if it chang...

Here's a Change.org petition to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, calling on him to withdraw his plan to censor the Internet in the UK, blocking huge numbers of legal sites from "forums" to "circumvent...

A paper in Royal Society Biology Letter by University of Toronto biologist Lucia Kwan describes the strange, adversarial clawed sex-organs of some guppies.    ...

Randall Munroe has finally finished Time, his 3,000+ frame slow-motion animation that began life as wordless, enigmatic single-panel XKCD installment.    ...

"Our Princess is in Another Castle of the Pyrenees!" is a Tumblr devoted to 8-bit, Mario-themed recreations of Magritte paintings, each greater than the last.    ...

The Canadian Conservative Party has sent out direct-mail flyers boasting about the party's track record on initiatives to help people with disabilities.    ...

From Sean Tejaratchi's wonderful [and sometimes NSFW] website: Shameful Dawn, a novel by United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.    ...

Joe sez, "A recruiting ad I stumbled across while browsing copies of my college newspaper. It's from January 1976." This National Security Agency recruiting ad ran in my college's newspaper, January ...

In this video, Nevada Court Marshal Ron Fox is shown arresting a woman who attended a routine family court proceeding, who claimed that he had sexually assaulted her on the way out of the courtroom, ...

Space MMO Eve Online is renowned for its player factions and epic naval battles, where ships with substantial real-world values can be destroyed out en-masse.    ...

Tor.com's posted a long excerpt from Dead Pig Collector, Warren Ellis's forthcoming novella about an assassin who is being hunted.    ...

"But who is going to empty it?" -Jeremy Hardy, The News Quiz    ...

Dr. Joseph Bonneau, an engineer at Google, is the first-ever winner of the NSA's new Science of Security (SoS) Competition, a prize for excellence in cyber-security research.    ...

Redditor Tufflaw has been running a central air-conditioning system "24/7" during the New York heatwave. But the bills were offset by 26 home solar panels by Sharp that took three days to install and ...

Here's a fantastic interview with British animator David Firth, creator of Salad Fingers: "I'd describe [my work] as strange, dark, surreal comedy cartoons.    ...

On Popehat, Ken details the astounding story of Katie Barnett, whose home was burglarized by agents of the First National Bank of Wellston, Ohio, who mistook her house for one that they were foreclosi...

As the UK government, courts and entertainment lobbyists turn the national network connection into a termite-riddled mess of blocked and censored sites to rival Iran's "halal Internet," Britons are qu...

One year ago today Olympics 2012 opening ceremony honors Tim Berners-Lee, but NBC anchors don't know who he is: "Tim being Englishman Tim Berners-Lee...    ...

Flavio Garcia, a security researcher from the University of Birmingham has been ordered not to deliver an important paper at the Usenix Security conference by an English court.    ...

(Chart: Maplight) A detailed analysis on Maplight of the voting in last week's vote on de-funding NSA dragnet spying found that the Congresscritters who voted in favor of more NSA spying received more...

Imagineering Disney has a great gallery of construction shots of the Contemporary Resort, a huge, modernist A-frame structure whose rooms were all prefabbed offsite and crane-lifted into place. &...

A moment of outstanding absurdity from the Manning trial: prosecutors inquiring in tones of menace whether a witness is familiar with "wget" -- a standard Unix command for fetching a file from the Web...

When schools adopt "zero tolerance" policies and treat rule infractions as crimes, they often bring in actual police officers to serve as in-house security, and the entire student body become perps-in...

The Pentagon has classified the list of groups that the USA believes itself to be at war with. They say that releasing a list of the groups that it considers to itself to be fighting could be used by ...

The product: Arkay, which is supposed to "look and taste exactly like traditional whiskey." Your mileage may vary. Tasting notes: On the nose, Arkay has a distinct (and distinctly horrible) aroma, re...

Jaimie Mantzel, creator of the Attacknid hexapod robot toys, is kickstarting a kit version that you build and decorate yourself. It looks like a really fun project, and there's an optional toolkit wit...

Stephanie sent this pic of a tiny pink Stormtrooper cosplayer to Fashionably Geek. They say it was a little girl in there, but that seems to be citing facts not in evidence.    ...

Project X1 makes life size Star Wars props. This video shares the making of Darth Vader's tie fighter.    ...

Badly configured home automation systems are easy to locate using Google, and once you discover them, you can seize control of a stranger's entire home: "lights, hot tubs, fans, televisions, water pum...

Jim from the UK Open Rights Group sez, "It seems Cameron and Perry have ignored official government policy, invented their own policy and forced it onto UK ISPs.    ...

Photo by Benjamin G. Levy, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. BONUS: And don't miss Crafting with Cat Hair today.    ...

One year ago today Eagle Scouts make a Tumblr for protest letters: I am not proud to be affiliated with an organization that excludes people based on their sexuality.    ...

Democratic congressman Alan Grayson is leading a bipartisan group of representatives concerned about "constant misleading information" from the intelligence community. They're holding a hearing Wednes...

George Mitchell, the texas oilman who pioneered the fracking, has died at 94.    ...

Silvia Ruzanka saw yesterday's post about the 1880 novel "Wired Love," about a romance carried on by telegraph; he writes: I've been fascinated by this book for years, and have been using it as an en...

The Free Software Foundation is fundraising for Replicant, its fully free and open version of the Android operating system, in which all the restrictively licensed elements have been replaced with fun...

The University of Pennsylvania's RHex robot is an all-terrain walker that has been in development for a decade. The robot's inventors have been programming obstacle-traversing strategies derived from...

This smashing illo, from a 1950 RCA ad for electron microscopes, is just one of many wonderful images in Man Writing Slash's Vintage Ads post, "E is for Electron." E is for Electron    ...

Jon M. Gibson is the co-founder/co-owner of iam8bit - a production company, creative think tank, art exhibition, and gallery space in Los Angeles.    ...

Charlie writes, "There is a smoke shop in Scotia NY, owned by a young black man. There are many, many smoke shops in the capital region, but the rest are owned by white people.    ...

Carla Sinclair falls under the spell of a hypnotist.    ...

Carla Sinclair falls under the spell of a hypnotist.    ...

Pronunciation Guide, a long-running, not-widely-viewed YouTube channel that provided guidance on English pronunciation, has turned into a weird sort of mystery.    ...

My 10-year-old has been preparing for the day her copy of Crafting with Cat Hair: Cute Handicrafts to Make with Your Cat came in the mail.    ...

Justin Engler and Paul Vines will demo a robot called the Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher (R2B2) at Defcon; it can work its way through every numeric screen-lock Android password in 19 hours.&nb...

I got to join in a great conversation yesterday on NPR's "To the Point" with guest host Madeleine Brand and several people involved in the future of space travel — especially commercial space tr...

I got to join in a great conversation yesterday on KCRW's "To the Point" with guest host Madeleine Brand and several people involved in the future of space travel — especially commercial space t...

Los Angeles magazine is telling the history of LA through 232 objects. I'm learning a lot about my city! For instance: #24: Explorer 1 Spacecraft The first object the United States launched into Earth...

The two members of Russian activist art-collective Pussy Riot who are still in prison were denied parole this week. "On Friday, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was told by a court in Saransk that she had not s...

Matthew says: "Remember Lt. John Pike, the 'pepper spray cop' from UC Davis? He is appealing for worker's compensation, claiming he suffered psychiatric injury from the incident.   &nbs...

In a letter [PDF] to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) this week, the FBI disclosed that it has flown drones inside U.S.    ...

This is an actual poster that UNICEF used to promote Global Handwashing Day in Uzbekistan schools in 2012. I like to think of it as a brilliant example of why images can speak louder than statistics....

Dave Maass from the Electronic Frontier Foundation attended San Diego Comic-Con and wrote this report called "What We Learned at San Diego Comic-Con," with a roundup of the ways that comics geeks and ...

Hopefully, Edward Snowden's sojourn in Russia will go better than most of the historic examples of Americans defecting to that country.    ...

Got that head-nod shit that make you break your neck? Take it to the aquarium. Sea lions can keep a beat, better than many humans I've known, in fact.    ...

Sound it Out # 58: Man Man - Head On (free MP3) Philly band Man Mans fifth record On Oni Pond finds singer (and main songwriter) Honus Honus collaborating with drummer Pow Pow.    ...

If you've paid any attention to the Internet over the last few years you're probably aware that real life ducks are not exactly as friendly and personable as the ones in cartoons.   &n...

Can I interest you in a summer home on COROT-7b? Sure, the estimated surface temperature is 4,580 degrees F, the year is only 20 hours long, and it's probably just lousy with volcanoes.  &nb...

Herring travel in schools billions of fish strong and, thanks the outsized role they've played in North American and European culture, they've been called the most influential fish in history. &n...

One of the first, and most fun science fiction movies I've ever seen is Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars!    ...

We've been offering up free songs this week, and I hope you have a solid summer playlist as a result. If you missed them, you can see all of the featured artists here, and still have plenty of time to...

An 11-year-old girl was sent home from a week-long summer-camp on the Isle of Wight for smuggling in a chocolate bar; a fact that her teachers discovered after they opened a sealed letter addressed to...

Sound it Out # 57: Scout Niblett - Gun (free MP3) Emma Scout Niblett kind of scares me. Her songs are intense and the characters she inhabits in them are so intimately drawn that you wonder whether t...

It's Sysadmin Day! Time to publicly state aloud that which I say in my mind every day: THANK YOU, KEN! The Ken in question is Ken Snider, Boing Boing's intrepid, tireless, magnificent systems administ...

A 15 year old "serial runaway" from Los Angeles was raped and locked inside a metal toolbox, and forced to process marijuana for two men who held her captive, according to a federal criminal complaint...

UK PM David Cameron and Claire Perry say that they plan on forcing Britain's ISPs to have a "default-on" censorship app for every connection in the UK.    ...

This weekend, I'm looking forward to finally seeing The Postal Service live! This year mark's the tenth anniversary of the band's amazing, and only, album "Give Up." Of course, The Postal Service is ...

UC Berkeley researchers demonstrated a new kind of thin, flexible "electronic skin" that lights up when you touch it. Press on it, and it glows brighter.    ...

Last weekend, anti-choice activists at the North Dakota State Fair slipped "Precious Ones" rubber fetuses into kids' candy bags without asking their parents.    ...

Sarina Frauenfelder, an heiress apparent to the Boing Boing fortune, created this custom Barbie complete with pink coffin. I like that her flesh has totally decomposed except for her plastinated face....

Fabio Di Donato made this gorgeous video from photos of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft between 2004 and 2012. "Around Saturn"    ...

When Iain Banks announced in April that he was dying of gall bladder cancer, he said that his forthcoming novel The Quarry would be his last.    ...

Complete with epilesy warning. [emojitracker.com via Matt Buchanan]    ...

UK Prime Minister David Cameron (and his thin-skinned, slandering advisor Claire Perry) have been cynically appealing to the Tory's reactionary base by promising to purge the British Internet of porn ...

Sound it Out # 56: Small Black - Free at Dawn (free MP3) Small Blacks new album Limits of Desire is seemingly at odds with itself.    ...

Photo: Reuters Against the grandiose scale and ambition of the original work, anonymous's superimposition is remarkable in its modernist elegance and efficiency.    ...

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has called on UK geeks to hold a "hackathon" to help him create a British version of Iran's "halal Internet" -- a network where kids can't see porn.   &n...

Musician and entrepreneur Jay Z on child-killing roadside rescuer George Zimmerman: "We all know it was wrong. It was wrong. This guy's not a professional.    ...

Reuters reports that hacker Barnaby Jack, who was headed to DEFCON to present techniques for attacking implanted heart devices that could kill their user from 30 feet away, has died unexpectedly. ...

Reuters reports that hacker Barnaby Jack, who was headed to the Black Hat hacker convention to present techniques for attacking implanted heart devices that could kill their user from 30 feet away, ha...

A ruling in the Bradley Manning court-martial could come as early as this weekend from the military Judge, Col. Denise Lind.    ...

Russia's FSB security agency is in talks with the FBI over over 30-year-old former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, but the Kremlin is not involved, according to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. ...

One year ago today Zynga tanks: Zynga CEO Mark "just copy what they do" Pincus dumped $200m worth of company shares recently, safely in time for its stock to tank.    ...

A ground squirrel recently found in Southern California's Angeles National Forest has tested positive for plague. Authorities have evacuated and shut down an area of the national forest near Los Angel...

Jane Austen will appear on a new issue of the English £10 note, a welcome break in the sausage-fest that presently constitutes our specie.    ...

Huffington Post reporter Matt Sledge read my Boing Boing post earlier today about reports from the Bradley Manning trial of dramatically-increased security measures for press.    ...

A reader writes, "The Mighty Wurlizter at San Francisco's Castro Theatre is in danger of being sold. There is an attempt being made to purchase the Wulitzer and upgrade some needed elements. &nbs...

The Department of Justice announced late Thursday that Halliburton Energy Services has accepted criminal responsibility and will plead guilty to destroying evidence related to the Deepwater Horizon di...

At CNET, Declan McCullagh reports that the U.S. government has demanded that Internet companies provide investigators with users' stored passwords, which are typically encrypted.   &nbs...

At CNET, Declan McCullagh reports that the U.S. government has demanded that large Internet companies provide them with users' stored passwords, which are typically encrypted.    ...

At CNET, Declan McCullagh reports that the U.S. government has demanded that large Internet companies provide them with users' stored passwords.    ...

If you want to have your guts ripped out through your eyeballs, have a look at "Lies I've Told My 3 Year Old Recently," a short, sweet poem by Raul Gutierrez (possibly this Raul Gutierrez, but I'd be ...

There's been much speculation that Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA spying program PRISM have damaged U.S. tech companies' credibility among international clients who were the operation's pr...

Boing Boing: Ingenuity's second day will be a mind-bending theatrical experience of presentations, performances, oddities, and wonder taking place at a opulent former Masonic Lodge. We are thrilled to...

A short film by Mark Tipple about Pascale Honore's adaptation to injury, her love for surfing, and a friend's dedication to helping her fulfill a dream: "18 years ago a slight lapse in concentration ...

The Centers for Disease Control's Vessel Sanitation Program visited the ultra-luxury cruise ship Silver Shadow, unannounced, and gave a failing grade for "one of the plushest cruise ships afloat." The...

Attorney Anatoly Kucherena met with NSA leaker Edward Snowden in the transit zone of Moscows Sheremetyevo airport Wednesday. The Russian lawyer is helping the ex-intel contractor with his Russian asyl...

Writing about yesterday's narrow vote in the House to defeat an amendment that would have reined in the NSA's vast spying of phone communications, Spencer Ackerman at the Guardian says a bipartisan co...

I've gotten a few questions about the Drunk Science video that I posted here yesterday. The two most common: "Will there be another Drunk Science?" And, "Jeezus, didn't science journalist Charles Q.&n...

I've gotten a few questions about the Drunk Science video that I posted here yesterday. The two most common: "Will there be another Drunk Science?" And, "Jeezus, didn't science journalist Charles Q.&...

A short film by Mark Tipple about Pascale Honore's adaptation to injury, her love for surfing, and a friend's dedication to helping her fulfill a dream: "18 years ago a slight lapse in concentration ...

The schedule's just been announced for Outside Lands 2013. Some of your faithful Boing Boing editors will be here, and one lucky reader won VIP tickets by writing a haiku!    ...

Kylaiajmaa made traditional gender rolls! I made traditional gender rolls. (via The Mary Sue)    ...

Jorimoo made this amazing dress out of a book (which book is not stated) and modelled it at a readers and writers festival.    ...

Jalees Rehman has an interesting neuroscience essay on 3Quarksdaily about the three second rule of temporal perception and processing in the human brain.    ...

From The Boston Globe today: "In a mind-control experiment that demonstrates the astonishing power of new neuroscience tools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers planted a false memory i...

At The Tennessean, there's a beautiful video profile of a young Iraq War veteran who was paired up with Skip, a dog rescued from a shelter, to help with PTSD.    ...

One year ago today Humiliating giant head squirrel feeder: If you've decided to surrender to the squirrels that raid your bird-feeder and just set out squirrel chow instead, why not use one of Archie ...

Charlotte Higgins, for The Guardian: "There is simply no other way of putting it, and nor would earthy British wit have it any other way.    ...

Michael Morisy sez, "Back when the National Security Agency still measured data in megabytes rather than by the square mile of servers, the agency took it upon itself to catalogue the output of a news...

If you like what you read, hear, and watch here on Boing Boing the blog, you'll love us on your favorite social media services, too.    ...

Sound it Out # 55: Pond - Xanman (free MP3) It would be easy to hear the music of Perth, Australias Pond and think they are ironic or retro, but youd be wrong.    ...

Back in June, the Independent broke a huge story about a scandal whereby the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency sat on evidence of widespread use of phone-hacking and other dirty tricks by rich people,...

Press line #Manning pic.twitter.com/ftzFBHzLsz— Alexa O'Brien (@carwinb) July 25, 2013 Journalists and bloggers covering closing arguments in the military trial of Wikileaks source Bradley M...

Inside a small courthouse on the Army base in Fort Meade, Maryland, Army prosecutors are presenting closing arguments in their case against Pfc.    ...

Boing Boing: Ingenuity's second day will be a mind-bending theatrical experience of presentations, performances, oddities, and wonder taking place at a opulent former Masonic Lodge. We are thrilled to...

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has announced the inauguration of a new WikiLeaks political party and declared his candidacy for a seat in the Australian Senate in national elections to be h...

David McRaney of You are Not so Smart and You are Now Less Dumb has a piece about why we procrastinate: The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and cant manage your time well. &...

As Xeni wrote, yesterday's vote to de-fund the NSA's warrantless dragnet surveillance came within a whisker of passing. 205 Reps voted in favor of asserting innocent Americans' right not to be spied u...

Today, I had occasion to remember the incredible face-pulling busts of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (February 6, 1736 August 19, 1783), which I first saw in the late 1980s when I saw them at a museum in...

Please read this lovely article interviewing our Xeni about her fight with and recovery from breast cancer. We love you, Xeni!    ...

A coalition of European privacy, free speech and civil liberties groups have started a petition to the leaders of the EU, calling on them to stop governments from carrying out programs of mass, suspic...

When Jesse Vincent's boss stole his beloved keyboard, it set him on a long journey to make his perfect and ideal keyboard from scratch (ish -- he bought the keycaps premade).    ...

Londoners: Some amazing news from Makies, the east London 3D printed custom toy company ("Toys from the future!"). They've just announced a deal with Selfridges to sell a limited-edition run called "M...

On the subject of book-scanning bringing the 19th century to life, Clive Thompson reviews "Wired Love," a novel from 1880 about telegraphic romance that features some amazingly contemporary themes.&nb...

BBS member dexitroboper shares General Zod's latest attempt to control the earth, Zod Kitchens. Read the discussion on the Boing Boing BBS    ...

Some people who think God put them in charge of the United Kingdom just had a baby. Charlie Stross discusses the weird life this potential future monarch will have in a lifelogging, ubiquitous surveil...

Photo credit: NOAA NOAA's Arctic division maintains a couple of webcams at the North Pole, and one of them is showing a pretty impressive meltwater lake forming around it.    ...

We came close (205-217). If just 7 Reps had switched their votes, we would have succeeded. Thank YOU for making a difference.    ...

63-year-old Mary Hvizda, who has been drumming since the age of 15, crushes a drum-solo at Coalition Drum Shop in Lacrosse, WI.    ...

Justin sez, "Tomely.com is a DRM-free eBook seller who bundled some amazing eBooks together. Readers set the price. Part of the proceeds go to charity.    ...

Tony Smith from the StarShipSofa podcast sez, "Just a final reminder... SofaCON is this Sunday and there's time to snag yourself a ticket to the online science fiction convention of 2013 .  ...

My favorite photo from Comic-con. Appears to be this excellent guy.    ...

When I blogged Leslie Arwin's Skeletees in 2007, I had no idea that I'd still be wearing my Skeletee all the time, six years later.    ...

The Paris Review has at long-last run its amazing interview with William Gibson on the Web. I've read a lot of interviews with Gibson and even conducted some, and this is one of the finer ones. &...

The US Patent and Trademark Office is required by law to let the public submit "prior art" for pending patents -- essentially, evidence that the thing the patent-filer is claiming to have invented alr...

Sound it Out # 54: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Nightwater Girlfriend (free MP3) Naming your band after a Russian political leader does not necessarily get you noticed in his home country,...

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanford history prof Paula Findlen discusses the renaissance of 19th century scholarship occasioned by the mass-digitization of 19th century literature.&...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • Street Fighter televangelist edition • Drunk (hic!) Science • The dildo is extinct, says CNN •...

"Doug Engelbart knew that his obituaries would laud him as 'Inventor of the Mouse,' writes Howard Rheingold. "I can see him smiling wistfully, ironically, at the thought.    ...

Ardent Industries, the crazy people behind such large art installations as Dance Dance Immolation and SYZYGRYD, are building a giant 3D Mario cloud stuck to the top of a forklift so they can rain o...

There are a lot of hi-rez bitmaps of the blueprints and schematics for various Disney rides and effects floating around on the Web.    ...

25-year old Rachel Wolf isn't married, but hopes to be one day, when she finds the right guy. Her father, Dr.    ...

Via our pals at Dangerous Minds, the Lord's smackdown. Mr. Hinn is a real piece of work. [Video Link]    ...

Handsome Pixels' "atmosplat" masterpiece immortalizes the righteous outrage of a AppleCare-stiffed shopper, in the form of an aural nightmare to send to your enemies.    ...

Do you like music and/or free stuff? ThenFree Song Week is for you!    ...

A video of an 11 year old Yemeni girl protesting the practice of child marriage has skyrocketed to viral status, via YouTube, Reddit and other aggregator sites.    ...

M Otis Beard sez, "Today the Bureau of Land Management issued a multi-year permit good through 2016 for Burning Man, increasing the population cap to 68,000." This is a big deal -- in recent years, th...

"Part of hip-hops allure is its expression of extremes of human emotions, balls out, with no thought of consequences or social appropriateness," writes Kimberly Bright at Dangerous Minds.  &...

I'm trying something new on my upcoming yearly dive trip to Catalina with the amazing, bay area dive shop Bamboo Reef.    ...

I've known the cartoonist Caitlin Boyle for a few years and she has sketchbook pages filled with this unnamed robot who had detachable limbs.    ...

The Sharkini from Bad Aby Designs: made to order for $100, 2-3 week production lag (expedited service available). The teeth are leatherette.    ...

Sound it Out # 53: Dr. OctoTron - Spaz (free MP3) Keith Thornton has appeared under many personas in his twisted hip-hop career, but my favorite was always Dr.    ...

HEY, YOU JERK! Join Tom the Dancing Bug's INNER HIVE, and get the comic emailed to you at least a day before publication -- and much MORE!    ...

I'll admit it, as a kid Killer Klowns from Outer Space scared the heck out of me. Long before ICP comes to earth, this bunch of goofy clowns, with a really great toy-based arsenal, land their space-g...

This is not the story you're expecting. Instead, Tulsa TV news channel 6 is reporting on a group of 200 Oklahoman evangelical Christian scientists who have banded together to urge Congress to both acc...

One year ago today Uninsured Aurora shooting victims face financial devastation: He is currently in intensive care in an induced coma.    ...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. This episode of Gweek is brought to you by Igloo, an intranet you'll actually like.    ...

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a basic part of game theory. Two prisoners are given the choice between informing on the other, or staying silent.    ...

Leafcutter ants are fascinating tropical creatures that farm fungus gardens, require access to certain resources in order to survive and grow, and are constantly splitting off from the pack to form ne...

Matthew Butterick offers Practical Typography, a splendid introduction to practical typography. If you enjoy it, he suggests buying one of his fonts.    ...

Liz Ohanesian, a writer who covers fan subcultures and comics, anime, and music conventions, has a thoughtful essay about Comic-Con in this week's LA Weekly.    ...

Fast, Accurate Detection of 100,000 Object Classes on a Single Machine a prizewinning paper by Google Research scientists, describes a breakthrough in machine vision that can distinguish between a hug...

What is a species? That's not as simple question as it sounds. And it's even harder to answer after you've had a few.    ...

U.S. Reps. Mike Thompson (CA-05) and Gene Green (TX-29) today introduced H.R. 2791, "The Responsible Electronics Recycling Act (RERA) of 2013," with the promise of stimulating the US recycling industr...

[Video Link] Poor CNN anchor Jon Mann. During a segment about global warming, climate change, and how shifting temperatures were placing various species at risk for extinction, a most regrettable blo...

Claire Perry is the UK Tory MP who architected David Cameron's idiotic national porno firewall plan. Her website was hacked and defaced with pornographic gross-out/shock images.    ...

Claire Perry is the UK Tory MP who architected David Cameron's idiotic national porno firewall plan. Her website was hacked and defaced with pornographic gross-out/shock images.    ...

PM Press's Outspoken Authors series is a wonderful line of chapbooks introducing the work of radical science fiction authors; each book is a short mix of essays, interviews and novellas and short-stor...

Hey, Londoners! I'm the speaker at tonight's British Science Fiction Association meeting in the Cellar Bar at the Argyle Public House (1 Greville Street EC1N 8PQ).    ...

Tuesday Cain is the 14-year-old Texas girl who designed the "Jesus isn't a dick so keep him out of my vagina" sign that went viral in a photo that showed her friend holding it up in front of the Texas...

Mark Bryan's "Flying Saucer" combines one or more pastoral or traditional fine art images with images of relentless, cool, vast intelligences from beyond our solar system making mischief of one kind o...

Pretty great throughout, excepting the too dark enclosed space with a swim fin that seems to insist on clouding the water, the frantic pace swimmer-operator-editor Nik Vatin maintains is mind blowing...

"Baader-Meinhof phenomenon": That's the colloquial name for a funny thing that happens when your brain collides with popular culture. You know how sometimes you'll hear about something for the first t...

Middle-class Kenyan teens are inventing a local version of goth subculture, and are at the center of a moral panic about kids-gone-wild -- according to an article in Think Africa Press.  &nb...

Heard is a useful app for settling those "but *I* said and then *you* said" arguments with your kids. When you activate the app, it begins recording everything around you on a 12-second buffer (extend...

Maybe she thought she was in Florida. Times News shares the story: "'We got out of there pretty well as fast as we could.    ...

Maybe she thought she was in Florida. Times News shares the story: "'We got out of there pretty well as fast as we could.    ...

Maybe she thought she was in Florida. Times-News shares the story: "'We got out of there pretty well as fast as we could.    ...

The 3-Bee printing project was a collaboration between a bee-keeper and an artist who created sculptural hives designed to encourage bees to deposit their wax in a specific way, producing a gorgeous ...

"The Fifth Estate," a film about Wikileaks starring actor Benedict Cumberbatch as WikiLeaks editor and founder Julian Assange, will open the 38th Toronto International Film Festival this week. &n...

[Video: book trailer.] Clark Stoeckley, the artist who has driven the "Wikileaks Truck" on to the Fort Meade Army base for nearly every day of the United States vs.    ...

My daughter Jane and I are fanatics for the cartoon series Adventure Time. The folks at Poketo are, too, and they've released a line of Adventure Time wallets.    ...

Clark Baker, an "AIDS denialist" who plays hardball with his critics -- for example, calling a critic's elderly mother and saying that, as an ex-police-officer, it is his opinion that her son was a vi...

KTVU, the San Francisco TV station that displayed a bunch of jokey, racist pilot names on a newscast about the Asiana crash at SFO, is now misusing copyright law to censor clips that record its mistak...

Popehat writes: "Today I light the signal to ask for help for a blogger who is being sued in federal court in Fort Worth for writing about and criticizing a thoroughly creepy AIDS denialist. &nbs...

Nerd chef Chris-Rachael Oseland has created a new recipe: mushroom stuffed 1-Ups, from Super Mario, which make great snacks for "kart racing, intergalactic exploration, or smashing your brother in a b...

My friend Clayton Cubitt, a photographer based in Brooklyn, snapped a series of photos of neighborhood kids cooling off NYC-style.    ...

Jesse Thorn says: "Me and Jordan want to buy a thousand strangers an ice cream cone, so we started a Kickstarter."    ...

Artist Alexis Diaz painted this beautiful elephant-headed octopus mural near my flat in East London; I've just got back from Comic-Con and I'm going to make a special detour tomorrow to see it in pers...

On Saturday August 17, several dozen of our favorite hackers, designers, and developers will gather at TechShop San Francisco for the Boing Boing: Ingenuity hack day. The theme of the hack day is Inge...

Sound it Out # 52: Big Star Thirteen" (Alternate mix, 1972) (free MP3) Ive never been fond of the Beatles. Maybe it had something to do with my dad singing along with the especially dopey early-era s...

[Video Link] Here's the trailer for David McRaney's upcoming book about the psychology of self-delusion, You Are Now Less Dumb.    ...

Jonathan Mann sez, "The internet abounds with people misusing Your and You're. I wanted to write a simple catchy tune to help them remember which is which!" Your doing important work, sir.  ...

With her rhythmic slapping for emphasis, a dance remix is not necessary. The real star is the little girl emerging from the crowd in the top left.    ...

Though I've never played a pen-and-paper RPG in my life, I'm completely in love with the dice. At Comic-Con, a company called Chessex had more on offer, in more shapes, sizes and geometries, than I'd ...

Road Wars is a Star Wars/Road Warrior action-figure mashup. (Thanks, Matthew!)    ...

The NSA turned down a ProPublica Freedom of Information Act request because it says it lacks the ability to search all the email within its internal network, so it can't answer a question like "What c...

Lego announced two new Minecraft micro-worlds. The Village and The Nether measure 3”x3”x3” , and will be available September 1. If you can't wait, you get the 480-piece Lego Minecraf...

The Oxgut Hose Company of Oakland, CA is running a Kickstarter to fund a production run of its doormats woven from old firehoses.    ...

A reader writes, "It's a 4-minute music video with geek girls holding up signs talking about the ;fake geek girl' thing and bullies." This reduced me to tears.    ...

Bill Porter modded an open source hardware design for an LED tie and in one day created the LED Tetris Tie, grabbing pieces of free/open code and designs from around the Web to make his vision a real...

Meet Cochliomyia hominivorax — a delightful insect that manages to me more horrifying that even Mark's favorite Central American friend, the botfly.    ...

Theoretical cosmologist Richard Easther has an interesting essay on the theoretical physics of warp drive technologies and why — despite the fact that they could work quite reasonably alongside ...

American news outlets struggling to understand why Brits aren't excited about the royal baby. Made them a flowchart. pic.twitter.com/HRLU6XRLHH— Angry Flat Cap (@angryflatcap) July 20, 2013 ...

A smurf in the Andalusian village of Juzcar, near Malaga, southern Spain. Photo: REUTERS/Jon Nazca In 2011, painters coated the picturesque Spanish village of Juzcar in the smurfiest blue they had, al...

The beauty of bullets fired through water in superrrrr slowwwwwwww motioooonnnnnnn. [video link]    ...

NoDeg sez, "Here's a video of children who live in a slum in Paraguay playing instruments made from recycled material." They call themselves the Landfillharmonic Orchestra.    ...

An enticing ad spotted by my IFTF colleague Jake Dunagan. Click to see larger.    ...

Functional weapons are forbidden on the San Diego Comic-Con show floor. Most attendees, however, are sensible enough not to bring them: this dagger was the only item currently being held at Weapons Ch...

Mr. Homegrown read an editorial written by designer Syd Mead (Blade Runner, Tron) in which Mead badmouthed bicycles: Mead: While the bicycle has many virtues, it also prompts people to go overboard.&n...

Mark Dery on his essay about the death of Trayvon Martin: "Its a polemic, its cultural criticism, its Southern Gothic in the greasy faced, lynching-postcard mode, its the muck that came up when I dred...

Tonight, I shall watch Peter Murphy sing the songs of Bauhaus live on his Mr. Moonlight Tour. Please enjoy Bauhaus covering David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" from 1982.    ...

Get your free recommended songs all week! You can see all of the posts and download the music here.    ...

On Saturday August 17, several dozen of our favorite hackers, designers, and developers will gather at TechShop San Francisco for the Boing Boing: Ingenuity hack day. The theme of the hack day is Inge...

Thingiverse has announced the winners in its Birdhouse Challenge, which asked makers to come up with designs for 3D printable birdhouses.    ...

Rama from Autodesk sez, "Autodesk, the design software company you probably know from AutoCAD also makes entertainment software used to make movies, TV shows and video games -- stuff like the Iron Man...

Rebecca Morelle: "Research has revealed that the marine mammals use a unique whistle to identify each other. A team from the University of St Andrews in Scotland found that when the animals hear their...

NASA has released new color and black-and-white photographs of Earth captured by two interplanetary spacecraft on July 19. The images show our home planet and moon as bright beacons seen from millions...

After a reign of terror lasting nearly two decades, the patent troll Eolas has been brought low. It's bullshit patent on "interactive features" of the Web -- which was filed six years after Tim Berner...

Norman Chan took 865 photos at Comic-Con. Whatever your flavor of character, chances are that he, she or it is there.    ...

Hine Mizushima, a Vancouver, Canada-based illustrator, "slow-crafter," puppet maker and stop-motion animation artist, shared some images of her latest work in the Boing Boing Flickr pool: textile-base...

One year ago today The Harvey Girls - 480 pages of comics featuring Little Audrey, Little Dot, and Little Lotta: All three fiercely independent girls had their very own comic books in the 1950s and 19...

Sound it Out # 51: Kid Karate - Heart (free MP3) Kid Karate is the rock band Ive been looking for all summer.    ...

Here's some fodder for concern trolls! (Via Uproxx)    ...

A cosplayer at San Diego Comic-Con, after taking a break in the crowded event hall, re-enters her Sonic the Hedgehog costume.    ...

Not all vitamins are created equal. Especially troubling, gummi "prenatal" vitamins that don't contain any calcium, thiamin, riboflavin, or iron. As Joss Fong points out at Double X Science, not only ...

Researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have been following and studying the brains and lives of so-called "crack babies" for more than 20 years.    ...

Congress is voting tomorrow on a bill that would defund the NSA's program of warrantless, mass, illegal spying on innocent Americans.    ...

Flipboard is now offering its user-created magazines via the web (rather restricting them to mobile devices). Take at look at Flipboard's magazine picks here.    ...

The 30th edition of Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction has been published today. This is consistently the best of the year's-best anthologies in the field -- absolutely indispensable. &...

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

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to make pornography filters standard on British Internet connections. This is a remarkably stupid policy, and despite that, it is a recurring silliness in ...

Shane Nickerson's "11 things it took me 42 years to learn" is damned good advice: 5. Stop comparing your life to others.    ...

Speaking of the Hatbox Ghost, Disney will release this great Haunted Mansion tee on August 8. It will only be available for one week.    ...

Mat Ricardo sez, "Here's the Web TV version of show 5 of the London Varieties. Want to see a man play classical music while juggling ping pong balls with his mouth?    ...

One year ago today $21 trillion has been stashed in tax havens by 0.001% of the world's population: $21 trillion has been squirrelled away in offshore tax-havens by 90,000 super-rich tax-cheats (0.001...

Canonical, the company that leads and maintains Ubuntu (the free operating system I use for everything), is looking to raise $32M on Ind-yGoGo in order to build a phone called the Ubuntu Edge, which ...

The Distributed Flight Array is an experimental project from ETH Zurich; it's a set of 3D-printed hexagonal rotors with magnets on their edges; they automatically join up with one another, sense and ...

Today's jam is "Beep Beep," by the Playmates, which charted in 1958 with the tragic tale of a Nash Rambler and a Cadillac locked in competition.    ...

I ran into ComicMix's Glenn Haumann yesterday at Comic-Con and he told me about ComicMix Pro: a set of professional services for indie comics creators who want to focus on making comics.  &n...

Sound it Out # 50: Caitlin Rose - Only a Clown (free MP3) Caitlin Roses second record The Stand-In finds the Nashville native straying a bit from her roots in the country music world (her mother has ...

The Cuttlebug is a non-electronic die-cutting and embossing tool for paper crafts. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and able to use embossing folders and dies from most manufacturers.  &...

Yanko Design features the work of Tony Grigorian, who has produced a set of instructions for recycling the varied and fascinating components in washing machines into intriguing and sometimes beautiful...

The Whitehorse City Council meeting will be the most dramatic, tension-filled television you'll experience all week. It airs every Monday evening on Whitehorse Community Cable in Yukon, Canada. ...

Here is Michael Jackson, age 14, singing "Ben" at the Oscars in 1973. Of course, "Ben" was the theme song of a horror film with the same name.    ...

Sound it Out # 49: Maps - A.M.A (free MP3) James Chapman makes music under the name Maps in his basement in Northampton, England.    ...

The key patents covering a 3D printing technique called "laser sintering" are set to expire in the next year or two -- there are a bunch of them, so they'll trickle out -- and this will radically redu...

This is day one of Free Song Week on Boing Boing. Every day this week, Ill post at least one free song that I think deserves a place on your summer playlist.    ...

The first episode of the final season of the AMC television series Breaking Bad premieres on Sunday, August 11 at 7pm.    ...

Best part of Comic-Con is checking in with my favorite artists and seeing what they've been up to. Jason Edmiston is a regular on Boing Boing -- a virtuoso of the grotesque monster illustration, who ...

Bryce says: "Teen pregnancy is more prevalent in the states, but this school girl looks like she’s well past her third trimester."    ...

Artist David Jablow took these cheesy notepad and created over 30 great illustrations from it. He's selling a book of them, and you can see 15 examples at Twisted Sifter.    ...

Boing Boing reader Michael Hacker [website] shares his illustration work in the Boing Boing Flickr pool and says, Chicagos Galerie F invited eighteen artists to interpret eighteen stories of famous Br...

Experts have long suspected that the Fukushima nuclear power plant site is leaking contaminated water into the nearby ocean. Today, TEPCO, the Japanese energy company that owns the site, admitted this...

Water filters light. The more water that's above you, the more light is filtered out before it can reach your eyes.    ...

In the 1870s, a French geographer proposed digging a canal from the Mediterranean to flood a low-lying part of the Sahara Desert.    ...

MelaFind is a new device that helps doctors identify melanoma skin cancers. In many places, it's being reported as the greatest breakthrough in skin cancer prevention to come along in decades. &n...

Long one of my favorite places to see some of the funniest people around, the Fanatic Salon has made LAist's Best Open Mics in Los Angeles.    ...

The official LEGO DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future goes on sale August 1. The kit, containing Minifigs of Marty McFly and Dr.    ...

Sometimes, allergies show up almost immediately. Other times, they form over long periods of close exposure to the allergens. It's this later issue that can be a big problem for scientists and their a...

In "The anti-virus age is over," Graham Sutherland argues that the targeted, hard-to-stop attacks used by government-level hackers and other "advanced persistent threats" are now so automatable that t...

My brother Carl Hamm is a club and radio DJ who also sometimes presides over South Asian weddings along the Eastern US, and whipped up this "specially requested remix" for one such fete. It was used i...

Lovely and informative video about the Making of a Steinway Piano. This bit of background adds to the magic: Many parts of the process in building a Steinway have remained essentially unchanged for g...

$0.99 buys you "beautiful 360-degree high-resolution rotations of over 300 animal skulls." Here's a chameleon skull. Don't miss the two-headed cow skull.    ...

Shangobrand produces "desirable non-essentials for homesteading enthusiasts," including a very funny The Waltons-themed tshirt, above. Their shirts are for those of you into "Heirloom Seeds, Kombucha...

Security researcher Karsten Nohl has shown that if you send some mobile phones an SMS that appears to originate with the phone company, the phone will SMS back an error message containing sensitive in...

Medical photographer Norman Barker captures the biological beauty of human disease -- microbes, cysts, diseased cells, as they appear out of context and close up.    ...

Let your inner grump shine. Available on Zazzle.    ...

Adeline Records For a punk rock-obsessed teenager growing up in the East Bay in the 90s, Larry Livermores name was inescapable, floating in the ether in those days before Wikipedia existed to retain a...

Astronaut Karen Nyberg has been sharing photos from the International Space Station on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Shown here, "Early morning lightning storms, inland of LA and San Diego. &...

Edward Snowden, the former US spy agency contractor who leaked details of the NSA's surveillance programs, "hopes to be granted papers by Wednesday" that would allow him to move from Moscow's Sheremet...

Spotted at Comic-Con: EvaVanecek's wonderful handmade Star Trek men's waistcoats, which are a steal at $80, and are nicely tailored too (I tried one on).    ...

Authors Jasmina Tesanovic and Bruce Sterling attended Republika, a three-day seaside meeting of futurists and forward-thinkers, organized in part by Share Cyberpunk Academy. About a hundred activists,...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • Hip Hop Hooray! • Star Wars Disco, 1977 • Official Thrones death supercut • Man shoots one se...

Wales is in the grip of a measles epidemic, thanks to the anti-vaccine scare more than a decade ago. Once the critical mass of herd immunity dropped below a certain threshold, in came the old, deadly ...

When Joe Sabia, who collaborates with Boing Boing on our in-flight Virgin America TV channel, told me about an idea he had for a web video series in which Juilliard-trained virtuosos would perform ex...

Thomas Willeford's Steampunk Gear, Gadgets and Gizmos is a guide to making your own toys and artifacts! I was drawn to it by the instructions for making a great set of brass goggles but rather found m...

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has released a set of templates for letters to send to harassing debt collectors. These letters contain the binding language required by fair debt collection law...

I ran into Kelly Link yesterday at San Diego Comic-Con and she was carrying this amazing rubber-chicken purse. It was beautifully painted, beautifully made, and looked almost exactly like she was keep...

A beautiful LEGO build of Alice in Wonderland and the White Rabbit, from LEGO DOU Moko's Flickr stream.    ...

Spotted at Comic-Con: Ben Von Strawn's "The Creatcha" tees, which sport a version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon in biker drag and a coal-scuttle helmet.    ...

The Trekkie Has the Phone Box has analyzed the way women are presented in the second of the Star Trek reboot movies; and compared it to Gene Rodenberry's original show, which went to great lengths to ...

The Hatbox Ghost is the Great White Whale of Disney Haunted Mansion fandom, a remarkable spook-house effect (a ghost holding a hatbox has his head disappear and reappear in the box) that didn't work ...

Here's Rob Arthur's latest comic. He says, "To read about the terrorism threat that is being used to justify blanket surveillance go to, The Bathtub Threat: Terrorists and Danger.” To read about...

By far the most uncanny and arresting cosplayer I've seen at any Comic-Con was this young woman in an incredibly realistic latex Ron Jeremy mask, from Hyperflesh.    ...

One of Schindler's Lists is up for auction on eBay. The starting bid for the document, 14 pages typed c.1945 on onion skin paper by Itzhak Stern (played By Ken Kingsley in the film), is $3 million.&nb...

I could not be happier to announce that my novel Pirate Cinema has won the Libertarian Science Fiction Society's Prometheus Award, along with Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.    ...

Ben Marks of Collector's Weekly says: "We just published an article and slideshow about Dirk van Erp, an early 20th-century coppersmith whose first decorative vases were made from spent artillery shel...

More great news from the land of podcasting: Tim "Undercover Economist" Harford's radio show Pop-Up Ideas is back in production.    ...

[Video Link] Here's an amazing video from PBS Digital Studios' “Under H2O” series, with micro images of corals. Corals are beautiful when seen through your own eyes in sunlight, but for s...

One year ago today Sink that looks like a gap-toothed jaw: the mustardy tiles, and the ornate, gilt-framed mirror. Five years ago today Buy a full-size T.    ...

Hey. Ho.    ...

Ross sez, "If you loved the Soviet erotic alphabet, you're going to love this. Mind-blowing graphics, and hilarious titles. Interesting historical presentation and contextualization also." My favorit...

"I was 11 when Star Wars came out. While the movie as a whole (and the resulting maturation of special effects through the 80's) shaped me as a person, a nerd, and movie fanatic, I think that not enou...

Meco's space disco "Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band" on Dutch TV music program TopPop, May 11, 1977. (Thanks, FP!)    ...

Rick sez, "Austin Grossman goes recursive to talk about writing about writing video games during the Golden Age of the Rise of the Video Game in his novel You.    ...

Recently recommended to me by a good friend, I'd never heard of David L. Hough's well-regarded guide to safer riding, Proficient Motorcycling.    ...

Dave sez, "Yarrly is an anonymous, remixable two-panel meme generator for Android. Users can make a Yarrly, and then it becomes as public as they make it by where they chose to share it.  &...

The Amazings reminds me a bit of the great series of Foxfire books -- people who have been around the planet for several decades sharing their know-how with younger people.    ...

Spotted at Comic-Con: Captainyolk's Big-Daddy-Roth-alike Frankstein-in-a-rat-racer tee. Glows in the dark! $25 on Etsy. Frankenstein Hot Rod Glow in the Dark Tee Shirt    ...

Julian says: "We all have to deal with call centers and they are alas today's dark Satanic mills. A place where you can get low pay, high stress and no recognition.    ...

Spotted at Comic-Con: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal's "Texas: The America of America" tee. Don't mess with it. $19, designed by Shawn Coss.    ...

From Mind Hacks: The Groupies is a remarkable record. The 1969 LP features nothing but interviews with "super groupies" who discuss the culture of sleeping around the '60s rock n’ roll scene.&nb...

John Young (who made this head-mounted water cannon I posted about in 2005) says: Like most of the country, West Chester, PA is INSANELY hot and muggy right now.    ...

Spotted at Comic-Con: Arkham Bazaar's do-rags for great-old-one cultists. They look great in person, a real double-take on the classic elaborated bandanna design.    ...

Galactus, AKA Edward, competes with street preacher Ruben Israel for the love and forebearance of mankind at San Diego Comic Con.    ...

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[Video Link] Harrison Ford offers his best bedtime story voice for Ender's Game. The other flicks' San Diego exclusives are after the jump.    ...

https://screenrant.com/game-thrones-comic-con-2013-clip-season-4-premiere-date/ A death compilation from character slaughterhouse Game of Thrones was unveiled at Comic-Con to whet fans' appetites for ...

[Video Link] Released at San Diego Comic-Con, a sneak peek of the forthcoming Veronica Mars movie--kickstarted by fans to the tune of $5m--offers footage teasers and interviews with the cast. &n...

San Diego Comic-Con saw the debut of WIRED Magazine's 10-foot, 400-pound cosplay mecha. [Adam Rogers / Wired] io9 rounds up the best toys of Comic-Con 2013.    ...

Michael Shainblum describes this video, which he directed and edited: When I first started Mirror City, I wanted to create a video that was completely out of the norm.    ...

Photo: A cat stares down a vegetable vendor in Singapore. Photo: Jon Siegel, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.    ...

One year ago today Vintage and slightly unsettling clip art gallery: Flickr gallery of 89 scans of old and and often eldritch clip art.    ...

And that's true even if the savings account doesn't have enough money in it to cover a full degree — or even a semester.    ...

Yuka died 39,000 years ago, and is so well-preserved that we can tell she was a ginger.    ...

Researchers at Imperial College London have invented an electric surgical knife that comes equipped with a built-in mass spectrometer. Electric knives cauterize wounds as they cut, which produces smok...

Spotted at Comic-Con: Spectra, a series of well-done, smart comics about physics from the nonprofit American Physical Society. The art is great, the content is great, and leads to good, illuminating e...

I've just finished teaching week four of the amazing Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop at UC San Diego; in addition to spending a week working closely to help some very talented writers, I cam...

British ISS astronaut Tim Peake has a Flickr gallery of pics of the drawes on an ISS toolchest, each an obsessive, knolled marvel of foam cutouts and the everyday life of a spaceperson.  &nb...

In this video, krissychula explains how hot it is in much of the United States right now. "I am not tropical.    ...

Photographer Chris Arnade, who does beautiful photographic work documenting the lives prostitutes and addicts in the Hunts Point area of the Bronx, shares this photo and writes: I have forgotten how ...

Captain Buxton the sailing cat has been found "after almost a week of being absent without leave." (thanks, Tara McGinley!)     ...

Tyrone Stoddart's "Boxed" is a design for a desk, chair and desklamp that collapse down into a small briefcase. What appears, at first, to be a case-worth of sticks and assorted oddments transforms i...

"I was fighting a fire in Alaska, putting out hot spots with my friend E.J. and a squad of Indians. I remember that we were in a clearing, and I mentioned that I had some blisters on my hands." From R...

Enjoy this excerpt from the new novel, Turbulence, by Samit Basu. Aman Sen is smart, young, ambitious and going nowhere.    ...

Aireal is a Disney Research/University of Illinois project that can generate the sensation of interacting with physical objects in thin air, by acoustically firing precisely aimed puffs of air: In p...

The highlight of my podcast week is the Friday nights when the BBC Friday Night Comedy podcast includes an episode of The News Quiz (as it does this week: MP3), and the highlight of the News Quiz is ...

What happens in San Diego...    ...

This morning dawned with two exciting announcements from the world of libraries and makerspaces: first, the Chicago Public Library has opened a popup makerlab in the main downtown branch (this is mere...

In Los Angeles, the quest for the perfect plot never ends. Another decade, another Joseph Campbell-esque guru--and another how-to book to help Hollywood create its formulaic, lifeless stories. &n...

As any attendee will tell you, that map won't help her find whatever she's looking for.    ...

Chorebot, one of my favorite RFF submissions Boing Boing is proud to be a media sponsor of the Robot Film Festival's premier in San Francisco this weekend.    ...

Red Sonja 2013, AKA Hayley Kaahn, meets Wendy Pini, OG Red Sonja of the seventies.    ...

The major check against the unreasonable, horrible practices on the part of the TSA is that people who fly are wealthier, on average than people who don't -- and people who fly a lot are wealthier sti...

Batgirl (Christina Johnson) and Wonder Woman (secret identity protected) bemusedly admire a "boys make the best heroes" tee shirt at San Diego Comic-Con.    ...

At Comic-Con, no-one knows you are Ray Park.    ...

I'm pretty sure she can handle that old rogue.    ...

r00tz is the amazing kid-track of programming at DEFCON, the giant hacker conference held annually in Las Vegas. The organizers have created a "code of conduct" for young hackers that is good advice f...

Gigaom reviews Plague Inc (for iOS ($0.99) and Android (free)). Plague Inc is not just a game, it is a threat to all life forms on earth and must be taken seriously.    ...

Spotted today at Comic-Con, the amazing polymer clay tentacle necklaces of Killer Tentacle Octopus, whose Etsy shop is temporarily shut. What a piece!    ...

Spotted today at San Diego Comic-Con, the amazing line of t-shirts inspired by covers of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Took every ounce of willpower not to walk out with a double-armload of th...

Ed Felten comments on the news that MIT has moved to delay the release of the Secret Service files on Aaron Swartz: It seems unlikely that MIT will find information redactable under FOIA that hasnt a...

David turned me on to Comedians Getting Coffee last year, and I've been enjoying every episode since. Here's the format: Jerry Seinfeld drives a different cool vintage car to a fellow comedian's house...

In 1977, the band X lit the fire that birthed the Los Angeles punk scene. Their impact on underground culture and music in California, and beyond, can't be overstated.    ...

One of these years I will go to Comic-Con, just so I can buy the artist sketchbooks. I love the Jack Davis tribute that William Stout drew for the cover of his Monsters Sketchbook!   &n...

Cory and I have both raved about MAD: Artist's Edition, a massive hardcover book of high-fidelity scans of original MAD comic book art pages from the 1950s, complete with pencil lines, rubber stamps, ...

Cartoonist Matt Bors got a spot on CNN for his great, scathing critique of the narrative of the lazy, narcissistic "Millennials," which has gone well beyond "get off my lawn" territory and into the re...

New York Magazine reports on two recent incidents where a police cruiser was heard (and seen) blaring the Star Wars "Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)" as it cruised down the street.  &n...

The family of a four-year-old boy were surprised when they ordered a Kids Meal from a Dundee, Michigan Burger King and found a very special prize inside: a pot pipe packed with weed.   ...

The crowds at San Diego Comic-Con, with more than 100,000 attendees, represent only a portion of those who would attend if they could: tickets were sold out in an hour or two in 2012, and within minut...

"44 years ago tomorrow Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, and now we have recovered a critical technological marvel that made it all possible," says Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.   ...

On Thursday at the court-martial of Wikileaks source Bradley Manning, military judge Col. Denise Lind refused to toss out aiding the enemy and other weakly substantiated charges by the government agai...

Earlier this year, I posted video of Hollywood's master blacksmith Tony Swatton forging Jaime Lannister's sword for "Games of Thrones." Above, he replicates Wolverine's claws.    ...

This blindfolded fellow is told he's about to bungee jump off a bridge. He gets quite a surprise.    ...

I remember the first time I saw Krull. I found this movie amazing. Terrible effect piled on top of terrible effect, crazy invented accents, but a story that still captures my attention 30 years later...

One year ago today Shadows in the Woods: candlelit board-game for kids and adults: The adult plays using a burning tea-light as his token.    ...

Down's syndrome happens when a human being ends up with an extra copy of chromosome 21 — three copies, instead of the normal two.    ...

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Really interesting little bit of social science at Slate where Lisa Wade looks at the "OMG COLLEGE STUDENTS ARE JUST INDISCRIMINATELY BANGING EACH OTHER WHILE DRUNK ALL THE TIME" scare story, and find...

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a $900 million writedown triggered by the failure of their Surface tablets. According to David Gilbert at the International Business Times, this means there are about si...

The Smushion, available from Skymall, offers unparalleled protection for your delicate and valuable remote control. [Amazon via Skymall]    ...

Walking Dead illustrator and international zombie virtuoso Tony Moore created these insane flocked black-light zombie posters, which sell for a mere $10.80.    ...

JahFurry sez, "Carrie & Avi went on a service trip to Haiti with JDC Entwine and wound up part of an unexpected jam session: Avi was entertaining kids with his ukulele when an 11-year-old came u...

JahFurry sez, "Carrie & Avi went on a service trip to Haiti with JDC Entwine and wound up part of an unexpected jam session: Avi was entertaining kids with his ukulele when an 11-year-old came u...

My friend Aaron Swartz's suicide, just over six months ago, brought attention to MIT's role in his prosecution over downloading scholarly articles from their network.    ...

My novel Pirate Cinema has been shortlisted for this year's Sunburst Award, a juried prize for the best in Canadian science fiction.    ...

A woman who valet-parked her car at Rochester airport returned to find a notice informing her that the valet had searched her car, on orders from the TSA.    ...

When Osama bin Laden and and Mohammed Atef played volleyball, the other al-Queda members insisted that they play on opposite sides, because they were both tall, good players.    ...

[Video Link] Lisa says: "'The Beauty of Space Photography" features astrophysicists, astronomers, and Zolt Levay from Hubble Space Telescope, the brilliant guy who creates the beautiful images! ...

[Video Link] (Via Doobybrain)    ...

Gareth Branwyn, my old friend and the senior editor of the bOING bOING zine, has a Kickstarter going for a book of his collected writings, called Borg Like Me.    ...

https://youtu.be/ [Video Link] Keep OSHA away from this amazing 115-year-old box factory that runs on steam power. Lots of pulleys, belts, gears, and other fast-moving machinery that look hungry for t...

The two-day extravaganza begins with a marathon hack day at TechShop San Francisco and continues the following day with fascinating presentations, astounding performances, and living curiosities on th...

See what goes on behind the scenes of Felicia Day's comedy web series, The Guild, in this gallery of exclusive behind-the-scenes photos of Felicia the cast on the set.    ...

This smashing, insect-embroidered coat is part of the Valentino Fall 2013 couture line. Valentino fall 2013 couture details (via Crazy Abalone)    ...

The next installment of the San Francisco Science Fiction reading series promises to be an especially great one, given the guests.    ...

I must have read Space Viking over a 100 times. Since my youth H. Beam Piper's Terro-Human histories, as well as his Paratime novels, have thrilled me.    ...

After 69 years, scientists at Dublin's Trinity College have finally captured footage of a drop of pitch separating and falling. Pitch is a highly viscous fluid -- "2 million times more viscous than h...

My Vintage Bool collection has a nice gallery of kids' outer space book illustrations.    ...

If you seem to be the target of bloodsucking attention, there are two biological systems you can blame — your microbial flora, and/or your immune system.    ...

Please enjoy this dispatch from a beautiful summer day in central Alabama — where babbling brooks are home to both poisonous cottonmouth snakes and metric crap-tons of leeches.   ...

The two-day extravaganza begins with a marathon hack day at TechShop San Francisco and continues the following day with fascinating presentations, astounding performances, and living curiosities on th...

It probably won't hurt, and it could help, says Scott Gavura at Science Based Medicine. But it's also worth taking a closer look at the nuance behind probiotics, too.    ...

"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles.  &nb...

"Deer Trail, Colorado's town board will vote Aug. 6 on an ordinance that would create drone-hunting licenses and offer $100 bounties for unmanned aerial vehicles.    ...

One year ago today Portland's "Naked American Hero" not guilty! John was found not guilty -- hurray! Five years ago today Nude, crazed airplane passenger: "stripped naked, got dressed again, and then ...

The entire country is in the red (and orange) today. At 10:20 am, it was hotter in Minneapolis than southern Florida and the only places that looked remotely comfortable were all on the Pacific coast....

The two-day extravaganza begins with a marathon hack day at TechShop San Francisco and continues the following day with fascinating presentations, astounding performances, and living curiosities on th...

Begun in 1927 at The University of Queensland, Australia, the pitch-drop experiment is an attempt to prove that pitch (a sticky, black, seemingly solid form of petroleum) is actually just a particular...

Eric Robbins has been down to his local library to play with their Replicator 2 3D printer; he whipped up this gorgeous 3D model of our mascot, the magnificent Jackhammer Jill.    ...

Margaret Pabst Battin is a philosopher and right-to-die activist who firmly believes that the concepts of autonomy and mercy demand that we, as a society, allow the sick, the old, and the infirm to de...

The nice people at McSweeney's recently sent me a care-package with some of their children's picture-books to try out on my daughter.    ...

Leszek sez, "The Berkeley-based Center For Investigative Reporting is running a Kickstarter to create the FOIA Machine, an automated online system to allow easy submission and tracking of FOIA (Freedo...

Jesse Thorn Toward the end of my college career, I had one of those life defining moments, standing in the parking lot of a local alternative rock station.    ...

John sez, "Honest Ed's, the iconic Toronto discount store ('There's no place like this place. Anyplace') is up for sale and will be closing.    ...

Shannon Wheeler If someones going to make you late for a flight, it might as well be Shannon Wheeler, at some Jimmy Buffett-style margarita bar at the Portland Airport.    ...

"Bill? Listen, I want to interview Hunter Thompson. Can you help me set it up?" From Real Stuff #3 (Fantagraphics, May 1991).    ...

Anil Dash's "10 Rules of Internet" veers from the funny ("Given enough time, any object which can generate musical notes will be used to play the Super Mario Brothers theme on YouTube") to the serious...

This talented Japanese robot is able to do a multiple backflip off a wire with a completely amazing landing. I am increasingly convinced that humans are grossly inferior to machines in nearly every w...

Enjoy the first issue of the Plants Vs. Zombies digital comic book (in a variety of formats). In this issue, "young adventurers Patrice Blazing and Nate Timely fend off a 'fun-dead' neighborhood invas...

Via Shorpy: "Washington, D.C., 1927. No caption on this Harris & Ewing glass plate of what seems to be facsimile equipment.    ...

My newest column for The New York Times Magazine is about the risks associated with boredom on long-distance space journeys, like the one astronauts might someday take to Mars.    ...

Deer Trail, a small town near Denver, is contemplating issuing $25/year hunting licenses for Federal drones. No drones are reported to have ever flown over Deer Trail, and it would likely be a federal...

As a youngster, my dream was to live in a Futuro House, the UFO-like prefab homes designed by Matti Surronen and available for purchase new in the late 1960s and early 1970s.    ...

Two months ago, news outlets reported that an Oregon farmer had found Roundup herbicide-resistant wheat growing in his field. He hadn't planted it.    ...

I'm not a big fan of AC. It's not an ideological thing for me (although it's hard for me to not be aware of how much energy those systems draw).    ...

OpenCorporates has a data-visualization tool for peering into the corporate tax-evasion structures of big corporations -- subsidiaries nested like Russian dolls made from Klein bottles: In Hong Kong,...

Astronaut Luca Parmitano had to cut short his spacewalk yesterday, after his helmet flooded with more than a liter of water.    ...

Twenty-one children died in India yesterday after eating school lunch food that had been contaminated with insecticide. Authorities are still investigating what happened there, but the Generation Anth...

Behind the unveiling of J.K. Rowling as the author of a pseudonymously published detective novel lies a messy and not-terribly-precise science called "forensic stylistics".    ...

[Video Link] Ted Balaker says: A Sheriff's sergeant from Snohomish County, Washington was busted for allegedly demanding sex (even while in uniform) in exchange for tipping off bikini baristas--who w...

CNet's Declan McCullagh reports on a rumor that Google is testing a system for encrypting its users' files on Google Drive; they are reportedly considering the move as a means of making it harder for ...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. This episode of Gweek is brought to you by Squarespace -- the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to create your own website.    ...

Germany's Sinners Domino Entertainment created this Guinness World Record domino fall of 275,000 tiles.    ...

Here we go again! I bought another super light/small Apple product, to sleeve in a big leather case! I love the style and I like the protection it provides for my device.    ...

Romanian prosecutors suspect that the paintings stolen from Rotterdam's Kunsthal gallery in the biggest Netherlands art-theft in a decade were incinerated.    ...

(photo by Matt Biddulph) Alan Moore, mage and comic master, recently talked to Salon's Scott Thill about crowd unding and other matters.    ...

Long Now Foundation is building out a new Salon in San Francisco as a library/cafe/bar/event space for ruminating on "deep time." It's just been announced that Brian Eno is doing the sound design for ...

Wondrous young maker Super Awesome Sylvia and our friends at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories are hoping to release their amazing WaterColorBot as a kit.    ...

The Daily Beast investigated the autocomplete on Apple Ios devices (Iphones, Ipads, etc), and discovered that there was a long list of "sensitive" words that the devices have in their dictionary but w...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Gavin Smythe of Chagrin Falls travels to the land of opportunity to realize his hopes and dreams.    ...

We've had the first four volumes of Sardine in Space on our bookshelf since Poesy was born, five years ago, but we've only just started reading them at bed-time (it's great to have wonderful books on ...

One year ago today Eggs dismayed at own fate Five years ago today Homophobic politician sends self-published comic book to voters: scans of a funny comic book from a homophobic politician who's under ...

Last night, Prince Charming returned to American shores. [Dangerous Minds] Previously    ...

Police in Detroit detained a photographer who shot iPhone footage of a street arrest, held her in an interrogation room with the suspect, and did not release her for seven hours.   &nbs...

Declan McCullach: "A strongly worded letter from Microsoft's general counsel to Attorney General Eric Holder says secrecy about National Security Agency surveillance is harming fundamental 'constituti...

Following an earlier vote by British legislators to allow same-sex marriage, the plans cleared both houses of Parliament this week. USA Today: Now, all the bill needs is official assent from Queen Eli...

The Anti-Vaccine Body Count site reminds us that since celebrities like Jenny McCarthy took the cause of scaring parents into avoiding life-saving vaccines, thousands of preventable illnesses and deat...

Artist Amanda Visell has an art show taking place on Friday in San Diego at MRKT (walking distance from Comic-Con). She says, "The show will be original paintings, around 20 wood idols, a pop-up shop ...

Eric William Carrol's art show, G.U.T. Feeling, is on exhibit at Highlight Gallery in San Francisco. A kind of unattainable ideal, various G.U.T.s have been developed by establishment and fringe physi...

Eric William Carrol's art show, G.U.T. Feeling, is on exhibit at Highlight Gallery in San Francisco. A kind of unattainable ideal, various G.U.T.s have been developed by establishment and fringe physi...

Bruce Schneier has a great essay about the fact that NSA spying apologists say that dragnet surveillance is limited to cases of terrorism: but "terrorism" is now synonymous with "whatever it is people...

In a 2010 interview with The Book Page, Neil Gaiman neatly set out the case for libraries and librarians in the 21st century; the remarks are even more relevant today, as libraries fight for a fair de...

Stephanie writes, "I found this absurd 60s adolescent psychology record in a thrift store years ago and finally digitized it - the world needs to hear it.    ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against the NSA for its surveillance program on behalf of a wide, diverse set of actors, from the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles to the Bill of...

Afrika Bambaataa donated his vinyl to Cornell University Library's Hip Hop Collection. (Professor Bambaataa is a Visiting Scholar there.) But before the wax goes on its way, you can watch it being sor...

Sean Ragan says: "Ive rounded up a pseudorandom smattering of some of my favorite secret-hiding-place posts from MAKE's online archives." Seventeen Sneaky Secret Hides    ...

The campaign to rename West 121st St in NYC for George Carlin has nearly succeeded, but is being blocked by a single vote -- and faces opposition from his boyhood Catholic church and school. &nbs...

I like Catherine Rosselle's embroidered bugs. See more at CRAFT.    ...

[Video Link] Collin Cunningham makes excellent educational videos about electronics. Here's his latest one, about capacitors. (Via Make)    ...

From The Telegraph: "The juror, who appeared on CNN in silhouette to maintain her anonymity, disclosed how the three were talked out of convicting Mr Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed b...

Talia Joy Castellano, a 13 year old cancer patient who became internet-famous for YouTube makeup tutorial videos that captured a radiant enthusiasm for sharing, died Tuesday.    ...

Talia Joy Castellano, a cancer patient who became internet-famous for YouTube makeup tutorial videos that captured a radiant enthusiasm for sharing and a sober awareness of her disease, died Tuesday....

Talia Joy Castellano, a cancer patient who became internet-famous for YouTube beauty tutorial videos that captured a radiant enthusiasm for sharing and a sober awareness of her disease, died Tuesday....

Polish tradition dictates that, in order to prevent a corpse from rising as a vampire, you must bury it with the head lopped off the body and positioned between the legs.    ...

This fall, a team of scientists (backed up by a crew of documentary filmmakers) will head out to the Pacific in search of "The Loneliest Whale in the World", aka "The 52 Hz Whale", in honor of the uni...

Neuromarketing is one of those ideas that might best be classified as "important and creepy, if true," writes Matt Wall at Slate.    ...

Scientists found a Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth embedded in the tailbone of a duckbilled dinosaur. Now, everybody wants to know: Does this mean T.Rex really was a predator, rather than a scavenger, as has ...

The US Department of Homeland Security is warning its employees that they can be punished for opening up this Washington Post article, which includes a classified slide (above) illustrating how the Na...

Kristian Vikernes, a Norwegian neo-Nazi black metal musician and convicted killer who goes by the name of "Varg," has been arrested in France over suspicions that he was planning a "major terrorist ac...

Slow Walkers is the first release from the hypertalented Portland musician Liz Harris, better known as Grouper, and Australian composer/media artist Lawrence English.    ...

The Hyperloop, a hybrid new form of transportation proposed by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, would shrink the duration of a trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles to 30 minutes, at a speed of al...

At InSight Crime, a blog that follows organized crime in the Americas, an analysis of the news that Zetas cartel leader Miguel Trevio has been captured by authorities.    ...

Princess R2D2 is one of the many cosplayers who turned out for a charity lightsaber relay race on the Pacific Coast Highway, but she is surely the cutest of them all.    ...

I lovelovelovelovelove this Grist series on the nuances, contradictions, and confusions surrounding the public debate over genetically modified foods. Nathaniel Johnson has done some really fantastic ...

I wasnt too chuffed about the weird changes I saw in my favorite start-up guy. Crawferd was a techie I knew from my circuit: GE Industrial Internet, IBM Smart Cities, the Internet-of-Things in Hackney...

Seventy percent of all the food you eat passes through an oft-overlooked system of refrigerated warehouses, factories, and trucks, writes Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic.    ...

A delightfully trippy new video for "Rollercoasting," by Cross My Heart Hope To Die ("CMHxHTD") from the group's self-titled EP. Shot/edited/produced by Adrian Storey and Uchujin Films in Tokyo. ...

For the past year and a half, Alexa O'Brien has been covering the largely secret court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who leaked government documents to Wikileaks after being rebuffed by US newspape...

[SPOILERS IN THESE VIDEOS!] The AMC dramatic series Breaking Bad returns on August 11 for its final episodes, and Boing Boing video collaborator Joe Sabia has built a very cool project for trufans to...

Poizen Industries' umbrella that looks like a rifle is probably a bad idea. But if you must. (Thanks, Sylvia Thompson!)    ...

David Malki ! writes, "After poring over 2,000 story submissions, commissioning dozens of illustrations, and waiting ever-so-eagerly, we're so pleased that the sequel to Machine of Death is out now!&...

I lost my homeland in the fall of Yugoslavia. My passport changed five times even though I never changed my home address.    ...

Tim Leong, author of the new book, Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe, created this infographic exclusively for Boing Boing.    ...

If you're headed to San Diego Comic-Con this week, I'll be on the panel for ElfQuest: 35 Years of Pointed Ears on Friday, 6:30 p.m.-7:45 p.m., Room 8.    ...

Adam Liptak in the New York Times writes about something US Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. made to the Supreme Court, about seven months before NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed new evi...

Hey, codemonkeys! MakieLab, the venture-backed 3D printed toy company my wife founded in London, is hiring! They've got two jobs open, one for a senior dev, the other for a front-end dev.  &...

[Click for large view.] Author and blogger Matt Alt writes from Japan: Ah, Seventies Japan! A Sharp Abacus-Calculator. Owned by Frederik Schodt, Japanese manga expert and all around great guy. &...

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, chief of London's Metropolitan Police, has officially apologised for the Met's systematic, ongoing theft of the identities of dead children to create cover identities for its s...

Asiana Airlines of Korea, whose plane crash-landed last week at San Francisco airport, is suing the TV station which was tricked into announcing the pilots names as "Sum Ting Wong" and "Ho Lee Fuk".&n...

$5 for 2000 Facebook shares or 500 retweets. $2 for a few thousand page views. "Money can't buy me love?" asks Wired's Mat Honan.    ...

One year ago today Official McDonalds three-piece suit: , a deadstock McDonalds management uniform from 1976, could be yours for $999.95.    ...

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

Bradley Hall (editor of the Pirate Party's No Safe Harbor book) says, I've been translating old public domain German-language books that I have been finding on Gutenberg.org.    ...

What could be more terrifying than facing down one of the West's most legendary gunmen? Having him as your dentist. His uncomfortable looking chair and an assortment of his equipment are up for auctio...

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund -- tireless free speech crusaders who fight for comics' legitimacy -- commissioned a great educational resource about comics' role in literacy called Raising a Reader...

Tor.com, the electronic arm of Tor Books, has published a free-to-members ebook called The Stores: Five Years of Original Fiction From Tor.com, collecting stories originally published on the site by J...

Headed to San Diego? The EFF Guide to San Diego Comic-Con is a thorough guide to where to go to hear about comics and free expression, meet friends of the EFF, learn about surveillance and privacy, an...

Household Hacker presents a simple way to make a gorgeous slime from borax and polyvinyl alcohol (buy 'em): "This links the atoms and molecules together forming a molecular net that will trap all the...

Frixion erasable pens are hugely popular in Japan, but relatively unknown in the States. I didn’t even hear about them myself until 2012, though the product has existed for 5+ years.  ...

LA to Z is a fantastic site dedicated to "uncovering LA's secret treasures and elusive past, one letter at a time." Above: "I… is for LA's Nazi Compound." This LA to Z post is devoted to the dar...

Ryan Heshka's work is on exhibit in the group show, "Northern Lights," at the Rotofugi Gallery (Chicago, IL) until August 4th.    ...

Cuppow is a a reusable lid that turns a glass canning jar into a travel mug. They have versions for regular and wide mouth glass jars.    ...

Etsy's TRoweDesigns makes gorgeous lamps out of metal plumbing fixtures and whimsical extras. I love his (sold out!) Mario lamp, but there's plenty here to like.    ...

[Video Link] Alex Cox (Repo Man and Sid & Nancy director), says "[Here's] my response to Errol Morris' documentary for the New York Times website, "The Umbrella Man" - and the first of several s...

Researching are using sound waves to levitate and move hovering cells, DNA, toothpicks, water droplets, and other small bits of material in different directions.    ...

[Video Link]Stett Holbrook of Make says: "In each episode of DiResta (every other Wednesday at 2pm PT), artist and master builder Jimmy DiResta (Dirty Money, Hammered, Against the Grain, Trash for Ca...

Artist John Stezaker collected, cut up, and collaged vintage publicity photos of classic Hollywood film stars into provocative portraits of unreal celebrities in juxtaposed elegance.   ...

Tox is Dan Hipp's (Teen Titans Go!, Amazing Joy Buzzards, etc.) first vinyl figurine. It's a limited edition of 199, and comes with a collector’s box and signed print.    ...

Tox is Dan Hipp's (Teen Titans Go!, Amazing Joy Buzzards, etc.) first vinyl figurine. It's a limited edition of 199, and comes with a collector’s box and signed print.    ...

At The New Yorker, Jon Michaud looks at why Frank Herbert's space opera, Dune, endures despite failing to ender the public consciousness the way Lord of the Rings and Star Wars have.   ...

Hey, San Diego! I'm in town, teaching the Clarion Writing Workshop, and tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 7PM, I'll be appearing at Mysterious Galaxy as part of Clarion's speaker series.   &n...

Uncle Acid and the deadbeats are an excellent retro psychedelic metal band from the UK. (Peter Bebergal talked about them on last week's episode of GWeek.) This video is for "I'll Cut You Down" from ...

The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a previously unnoticed moon orbiting the planet Neptune. Given the poetic name S/2004 N 1, it is apparently a mere 12 miles across.    ...

The court-martial of PFC Bradley Manning, who leaked government documents to Wikileaks and is being charged by the government with "aiding the enemy," enters its final phase today.   &n...

Video Link. We have been observing this phenomenon, and the yearly informercials, for quite some time now. God help us all.    ...

At long last, Tokyo Disneyland is getting its own Jungle Boat Cruise, a first for a non-US Disney park. It will run night and day, and will sport a soundtrack and special effects.   &nb...

I'm reading a ton of baby and pregnancy books right now, preparing both for the October birth of my daughter and an upcoming BoingBoing feature about evidence-based books for science-minded soon-to-be...

Our friends at Thought Catalog (which published Mark Dery's terrific long read, England My England: Anglophilia Explained, has a new eBook title called Girls?    ...

If you're in New York between now and the 21st of July, you should stop by 266 W. 37th Street — home of The Intergalactic Travel Bureau.    ...

Among the most recent video posts you can watch on our video archive page: • Disgustingly beautiful housefly art • Am I suspicious?    ...

Seriously now. Why don't people in central Oklahoma have basements to protect them from tornadoes? The answer, according to the engineers and geologists I spoke with for a column at Ensia magazine, is...

At The Conversation, neuroscientist Melissa Hines talks about what little biological basis there is behind the idea of heavily gender-coded toys for children.    ...

The Outside Lands music festival is happening in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on August 9-11! Headliners are Paul McCartney, Nine Inch Nails, and Red Hot Chili Peppers with more than 75 other per...

At deviantART, Schroeder Jones has published a clever and spot-on "How to Live with Introverts" graphic explainer. The artist explains, I thought a lot of folks out there could benefit from learning h...

Behold, the common housefly — Musca domestica. You know it as a connoisseur of both sugar water and disgusting crap (literally), but this animal is also, deep inside, a sensitive arteest. ...

The 3rd annual Robot Film Festival is coming to San Francisco this weekend and Boing Boing is proud to be a media sponsor!    ...

If I met you a few years ago, I wouldve killed you.Killing [was] the first option, because we were really angry with the foreigners.    ...

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports on the story of Jeremy Richman and Jennifer Hensel, scientists whose 6-year-old daughter was among the children killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting....

Today, Asiana Airlines confirmed that it intends to sue KTVU-TV over an incident Friday in which the station aired racist joke names were given for pilots in a plane crash that killed three people and...

One year ago today Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin: I've always admired Steve Martin. He's smart, funny, and avoids engaging in the kind of behavior that ends up in celebrity tabloids.  &n...

Via Romenesko, a particularly excellent moment in the new Comedy Central series "Drunk History," and the drunk part is no joke.    ...

Security researcher Bruce Schneier writes in the latest edition of his Crypto-Gram newsletter: Today, the United States is conducting offensive cyberwar actions around the world.   &nbs...

A video featuring young men from Howard University speaking about racial profiling and the killing of Trayvon Martin. The school is located in Washington, DC, and is one of America's oldest historica...

"APRIL 4TH, 1968," by Nikkolas Smith for "The Gun Show." You can purchase prints here.    ...

Maggie Koerth-Baker interviews OB/GYN Dr. Jen Gunter, who has personal experience of treating patients forced to seek out distant or questionable abortion providers, and the complications they suffer ...

Since moving to Fast Company's, John Brownlee's been on a roll: everything he's written for them is ace. The latest is Quimps, Plewds and Grawlixes: The Secret Language of Comic Strips, a review of Mo...

Allie Brosh, creator of the hilariously-illustrated blog Hyperbole and Half, is to bring her tales of neurotic dogs, internet grammar and depression out in book form this October.   &nb...

Brian K Vaughan is best known for creating the wonderful apocalyptic adventure-comic Y: The Last Man. His new project, Saga, is a significant departure from Y in setting and tone, but it is every bit ...

Rick Lax developed a new magic trick, only to see his performance, right down to the mood and meter, knocked off within weeks.    ...

Earlier this year, debut author Robert Galbraith earned "fawning praise" for his crime novel, The Cuckoo's Calling. Despite the rave reviews, it didn't do very well, shifting only 1,500 copies. &...

GIF: Maps On The Web Vince Miklos collects GIFs of Empires, from the Roman to Soviet. [io9]    ...

A cat observing birds on an HDTV display. Photo by pixelwhip (mark burban), shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.    ...

A reader writes, "Someone was nice enough to scan the pages of a Cyrillic alphabet book from the 1930's. The book encouraged adult literacy through erotic drawings of figures in various acts of copula...

Here's an Xtranormal Obama explaining the difference between his NSA spying and Bush's NSA spying: Another important difference between my administration and the Bush administration is that when the...

Congrats to Heather and Jason, who took Swiffer to task earlier this month over its use of of J. Howard Miller's "We can do it!" iconography to sell cleaning products to women.    ...

This trailer for Raise the dust, a roadbook rally aired by Red Bull's Servus TV, features four guys going all out on four Triumph Scramblers.    ...

One year ago today Apple rejects "Angry Syrians" It was intended to raise awareness of the ongoing bloodbath in Syria. Apple rejected it.    ...

https://vimeo.com/66031052 [Video Link]Seth used his iPhone to shoot one second of video every day for a year. (Kevin Kelly did this went he went to Asia last year, but he used the ambient sound, whic...

gamelogos.tumblr.com offers a surprisingly focused collection, as useful to artists as it is nostalgic to browse through. It could use filtering tools: say, if one wanted to show just those from Pysgn...

Here's a gallery of photos showing an enormous tanker ship breaking in two at the middle, and then the stern section sinking.    ...

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who was first to publish the documents that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked about the US government's surveillance programs, gave an interview to t...

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who was first to publish the documents that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked about the US government's surveillance programs, gave an interview to t...

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who was first to publish the documents that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked about the US government's surveillance programs, gave an interview to t...

The NYT's John Schwartz, who is himself from Texas, live-tweeted the dramatic proceedings yesterday in the Texas Senate surrounding one of the strictest anti-abortion measures in the country. &nb...

Neat piece by Adam Platt in New York Magazine's Grub Street blog: restaurants in New York City are louder than ever because of the trend towards bigger and bouncier bars; but in part, because that tr...

Philip Chapman-Bell posts this fabulous photo in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, and explains: "A stereographic projection of the Catalan solid, the rhombic triacontahedron.    ...

Emptywheel nails what's so concerning about the new "news media" guidelines released late Friday by US Attorney General Eric Holder: The First Amendment was written, in part, to eliminate the kind of ...

Philip Chapman-Bell posts this fabulous photo in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, and explains: "A stereographic projection of the Catalan solid, the rhombic triacontahedron.    ...

Photo: Sarah Harrison of Wikileaks, next to NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Photo by Polona Frelih, of Delo.si, who attended the closed-door meeting held by Snowden with human rights NGOs at Moscow's Sher...

Somini Sengupta in the NYT reports on Twitter's agreement this week, after months of legal battling, to ID several users who posted anti-Semitic comments on its service, whom French authorities want t...

Randy Barnett at the WSJ: "The NSA's Surveillance Is Unconstitutional." When you've lost the WSJ on issues thought to be of concern only to privacy-freak-lefties, guys: you've lost the battle. &n...

"I liked the movieFull Metal Jacket. I think thats my topic sentence."—Hodgman at The Dissolve.    ...

Enjoy this 28-page preview of Jordan Mechner's new massive graphic novel about the Knights Templar, called Templar. Read Cory's review here.    ...

[Click for larger size.] At Shorpy Historical Photos, which is a wonderful thing on the internet: 1914. "Kittens in costume as bride and groom, being married by third kitten in ecclesiastical garb." H...

Kevin Fogarty at Slashdot: "For the second time in a month, Hewlett-Packard has been forced to admit it built secret backdoors into its enterprise storage products."    ...

"The Plaintiff became totally out of synch in his romantic relationship with his wife, which was a consequence of his use of his Apple product.    ...

The word "Twink" used to mean something. Now it's just another term of abuse for queer men, an "easy shorthand for vicious stereotypes." [The Awl via Metafilter]    ...

The Financial Times's Tim Harford has a regular feature called Lunch with the FT in which he takes someone out for lunch and a long chat, and then reports on both the lunch and the talk.  &n...

One year ago today Chronicle of a craphound's house: "We're renovating this really crappy bungalow from 1916 (1914?) that the owner left a TON of stuff in." Five years ago today Post-apocalypse withou...

By Tao Tajima: "I shot the video near my home and tracked it with 3DCG software. I then added motion graphics and particle reflections by CGs and GI." [Video Link]    ...

Deanne Smith recorded this lovely little nerdy and rude and sexy lovesong, accompanied by her kitten, who adds rather a lot.    ...

This $14,000 armchair, designed by CTRL ZAK and Davide Barzaghi uses a beechwood lattice and upholstered, giant geometric shapes that resemble quartz crystals.    ...

About that phone call between the presidents of the US and Russia, held just hours after fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden met with NGO reps and a Wikileaks spokesperson in a Moscow airport to ann...

Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay will withdraw their ambassadors from European countries involved in last week's grounding of the Bolivian presidents plane.    ...

"By wielding a potent legal threat, the U.S. government is often able to force Internet companies to aid its surveillance demands.    ...

Charlie Savage at the NY Times writes about Friday's announcement by US Attorney General Eric Holder of "new guidelines that would significantly narrow the circumstances under which journalists record...

"Albert Hibpshman is a United States Air Force (USAF) pilot of manned and unmanned aircrafts. During his recent deployment to Afghanistan, Hibpshman was a Mission Commander flying MC-12Ws [intelligenc...

Jon Negroni's Pixar Theory: "Every movie is connected and implies major events that influence every single movie." [HT: Rob Sheridan]    ...

About that phone call between the presidents of the US and Russia, held just hours after fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden met with NGO reps and a Wikileaks spokesperson in a Moscow airport to ann...

Congressman Mark Takano (D-Riverside) is a former high-school teacher, and he put his paper-marking skills to good use redlining GOP Speaker Boehner's letter trying to scare legislators off of the com...

Congressman Mark Takano (D-Riverside) is a former high-school teacher, and he put his paper-marking skills to good use redlining a letter to GOP Speaker Boehner's trying to scare legislators off of th...

At YouTube, Cryptome has published a 30-second video of the press conference Edward Snowden held in Moscow today. The video first surfaced on Russia's Life News website, which did not name the source...

At YouTube, Cryptome has published a 30-second video of the conference Edward Snowden held in Moscow today. The video first surfaced on Russia's Life News website, which did not name the source for t...

Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 – 5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian and Irish descent.    ...

Today, San Francisco's KTVU reported that these were the names of the pilots of Asiana Flight 214 that crashed on Sunday.    ...

This 1954 Mercedes W196R Formula 1 race car sold for $30 million today. It's the highest price ever for a car sold at a public auction.    ...

[Video Link] "Hi friends! See this! This is an Ubbi Dubbi magic kite." -- Edith, from the greatest kids' show ever, Zoom (1972 - 1978).    ...

Gift Couture's Sarah Fay and Justin Colt, creators of the delightful cheeseburger wrapping paper, seen at right, have now designed a steak and cutting board gift wrap set.    ...

Lightning Dust's new album "Fantasy" put a 1980s melancholy spell on me. Lightning Dust is the long-running side project of Black Mountain's Amber Webber and Joshua Wells.    ...

At LA Weekly, Henry Rollins listed his top 20 punk albums: The Clash – The Clash Generation X – Generation X The Adverts – Crossing the Red Sea X-Ray Spex – Germ Free Adolescen...

At LA Weekly, Henry Rollins listed his top 20 punk albums: The Clash – The Clash Generation X – Generation X The Adverts – Crossing the Red Sea X-Ray Spex – Germ Free Adolescen...

It's nice to know that the 4- to 8-year-old zombie aficionado market is being served! In this colorful storybook with stickers, Plants vs.    ...

Last February, Chevalier von Windsor posted a bunch of gorgeous, amazing photos from the UK's phone booth graveyard, near the village of Carlton Miniott (scroll right to the bottom).   ...

Latvian designer Kaspars Jursons designed the Stand, a combination sink/urinal, to address water shortages. The water flowing from the tap as you wash your hands also flushes the toilet.  &n...

"Mr. Snowden is not a human rights activist or dissident," White House spokesman Jay Carney said today, adding that "providing a propaganda platform" for the National Security Agency leaker was "count...

"Mr. Snowden is not a human rights activist or dissident," White House spokesman Jay Carney said today, adding that "providing a propaganda platform" for the National Security Agency leaker was "count...

A footnote from this morning's dramatic airport conference convened by whistleblower-on-the-run Edward Snowden: if what Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch said is accurate, the former NSA contractor...

Here's the second part of my interview with TVOntario's "The Agenda" (part one was posted earlier this week) in which we talk about hacktivism and Aaron Swartz.    ...

"ewerwe ertertert" created this NSA themed Pixar ID video spoof. And a dude on Reddit created this brilliant animated GIF version, along the same lines.    ...

Here's the story behind the (overdubbed) video currently making the rounds of Nirvana playing at a Radio Shack in Aberdeen, Washington on January 24, 1988.    ...

In the latest episode of Gweek, we talked about Peter Begbergal's upcoming book, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock ‘n’ Roll.    ...

Below, an idle 'shoop by yours truly. Above, a far superior version sent in response, by Rob Beschizza.     ...

The Sikorsky prize for human-powered helicopters has been claimed by a Kickstarter-funded startup called Aerovelo. Aerovelo's founders, Canadians Todd Reichert and Cameron Robertson, won the $250,000...

Some of the same Latin American nations whose presidents are shocked and outraged over electronic surveillance programs are conducting versions of the same within their own borders.   &...

One year ago today Crummy passwords from Yahoo users: The dump of 450,000 Yahoo passwords by a group calling itself "D33ds Company" has been analyzed.    ...

Snip from a report by Voice of America's Steve Herman in Tokyo: "Fresh revelations about radiation contamination from the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant and a government regula...

Photo: Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch. Earlier today, NSA leaker Edward Snowden met with human rights groups and other supporters at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, where he has been holed up for...

These $80, videogame-themed door stickers feature battered, CGI-like artwork for your bedroom door, to give it the look of something that's been assaulted by zombies and/or space marines.  &...

Kyle from Bumperactive sez, "Support the thousands of Texans standing for Women's Reproductive Freedom at the State Capitol this morning with a 'Come And Take It' Uterus tee, printed by Austin printsh...

Video: RT's live feed of media scrum at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden invited human rights groups to meet him at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport to discuss his option...

Video: RT's live feed of media scrum at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden invited human rights groups to meet him there to discuss his options for seeking asylum from th...

Rock Paper Shotgun's Craig Pearson gives Robot Vacuum Simulator 2013 a whirl around the parquet, and finds it oddly agreeable.    ...

Brian Ashcraft's report at Kotaku begins with the sentence "In Japanese supermarkets, it's not uncommon to see Pokmon branded food." But the Pokmon-branded Nattou () is something else entirely. &...

Logo redesigns, and the rebranding efforts around them, often go horribly wrong. But sometimes, the right designer and the right attitude gets results.    ...

I've been reviewing Jeff Lemire's gorgeous, bizarre adventure comic Sweet Tooth since volume one came out in 2010 and I've loved each volume (two, three, four, five).    ...

Good news, everybody! Hada Messia, for CNN: Pope Francis has laid down a law making it a crime to abuse children sexually or physically on Vatican grounds, the Holy See announced Thursday.  ...

Tom sez, "I have been thinking for some time how it would be nice to produce a 3D printed book of textures and reliefs.    ...

Here's good news! There's a sequel coming for Kathe Koja's dark, erotic, weird and wonderful novel Under the Poppy. It's called "The Mercury Waltz," and it'll be out later this year -- the book-trail...

Thingiverse's Cookie Cutter Customizer is a tool for taking doodles and sketches and turning them into 3D-printable cookie-cutters. Thingiverse | Draw and Print Custom Cookie Cutters  ...

MCM sez, "It's been 7 years since I released The Pig and the Box, a CC-licensed anti-DRM fable for kids. It was a fun experiment back then, and the experiment continues today: the whole book (and sour...

Avi sez, "Here is Ted Chiang interpreting the short story 'The Guy Who Worked for Money' by Benjamin Rosenbaum and presenting his take on the future.    ...

Avi sez, "Here is Ted Chiang presenting his take on the future. Enjoy!" Talk about two great tastes that taste great together!    ...

But does he lift? [TMZ via Heather]    ...

Microsoft works closely with U.S. Intelligence services, reports The Guardian, allowing interception of users' communications, email, and cloud storage.    ...

Defcon is an astounding hacker convention held annually in Las Vegas, and is known as an extraordinary environment in which spooks and hackers mix freely -- last year, the head of the NSA gave a keyno...

On August 9-11, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park erupts with the Outside Lands music festival, featuring more than 75 performances by an insanely-eclectic lineup of artists.    ...

Here's a delicious potted history of the Euphonia, a mid-19th century gadget that could simulate human speech by pumping bellows-fed air over an artificial tongue set in a chamber of weird plates and ...

Residents of Spalding, Lincolnshire, England were upset to see what appeared to be a crime scene investigation outside of the local Punchbowl pub.    ...

During a recent soccer match in Maranhao, Brazil, a referee stabbed and killed a player during a fight after the player refused to leave the field.    ...

Beatboxer extraordinaire Tom Thum performs at TEDxSydney. I'd love to see a duet of Thum and Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame, seen in the video below.    ...

When some choirs sing, the individuals' heart rates quickly synchronize. Researchers from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden monitored the pulse of high school choir singers and also found that w...

This insightful essay comparing Tolkien's Middle Earth to Beowulf was written by my friend's seven-year-old daughter. Dad notes, "she came up with the contrasts on her own;" Mom adds, "Using the Seamu...

Hey there! I'm doing a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) right now with Peter Beagle, Connor Cochran, and Lois Bujold from the current Humble Ebook Bundle.    ...

Just when you thought netbooks were dead, Google's Chromebook has become the "fastest-growing part of the PC industry" in its price range, reports Bloomberg News, quoting market research firm NPD.&nbs...

Edwin Charles Tobergta, of Hamilton, Ohio, has once again been arrested after making love to a pool float. Tobergta reportedly fled with his lover after being discovered in flagrante delicto by its ow...

[Click to Embiggen] The Associated Press published a bizarre exclusive today about a newly-revealed detail on the imprisonment of senior Al Qaeda boss Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the CIA waterboarde...

The classic is back. [anagramtubemap via Kottke] Previously.    ...

One year ago today Ice-cream that looks like spaghetti: spaghettieis: "A German ice-cream dish that looks like spaghetti Bolognese. The noodles are extruded white ice-cream." Five years ago today Are ...

Charlie Savage at the New York Times covers proceedings in the court-martial of PFC Bradley Manning at Ft. Meade, on the day the defense rested its case.    ...

Kerry Callen began to suspect that Detective Comics-era Batman was a hoarder -- how else to explain that cave full of pointless batarang prototypes and other tchotchkes?    ...

Air pollution, most notably from traffic exhaust fumes in urban areas, is correlated with an increased risk of lung cancer and heart failure, according to two new studies.    ...

A Washington Post editorial out today details one of the more bizarre attacks by Venezuela against reporters and truth-exposers within its own borders: the trumped-up charges against one of Venezuela'...

Scott Shane in the New York Times: "It is still unclear whether Mr. Snowden, the 30-year-old former N.S.A. contractor now holed up at a Moscow airport, will escape punishment.    ...

Artist Faig Ahmed creates amazing handmade rugs that appear to have been melted, stretched, or otherwise distorted. They're a blend of digital glitch-aesthetic and analog, hand-crafted beauty. &n...

Video: a burlesque tribute to "The Big Lebowski" by Corvette LeFace (potentially NSFW). She'll be among the performers at a nerdy stage show taking place tomorrow, Fri.    ...

Lying's not a crime in America, but leaking the truth is: "A pattern of misleading testimony by senior Obama administration officials has weakened Congresss ability to rein in government surveillance....

The Littlest Pirate King is David B and Pierre Mac Orlan's 2008 kids' comic about a living child who is adopted by the damned pirate crew of the Flying Dutchman, who sink to the bottom of the sea eve...

Mat Ricardo's about to host the last ever London Varieties show, and he's issued a challenge with potentially humiliating consequences.    ...

Douglas sez, "Artist support agency, SPACE, is using Kickstarter to set up a FabLab, bringing affordable 3D printing, laser cutting and more to artists and creatives in Hackney, London.  &nb...

A reader writes, "Picture Disneyland not between Ball, Katella, Harbor and whatever they call West Street in Anaheim these days but in La Mirada, Whittier Narrows or on Willowick Country Club in Santa...

Dance In a Year documents Karen's year-long dance training (see the accompanying and inspiring timelapse video). Basically, she danced all the time, wherever she was, until she got really, really goo...

    ...

Florida tried to ban Internet Cafes that were functioning as unlicensed casinos, but may have banned smartphones and computers instead, due to language that defines slot machines as "any machine or de...

I can't wait to go to Twentywonder on Saturday. I hope to see you there! Jim Hodgson says: The 4th annual fundraising event Twentywonder, A Carnival of the Mind, presented by Down Syndrome Association...

I traveled to Ft. Meade, Maryland today to observe the trial of Army PFC. Bradley Manning. The 25-year-old Oklahoma native has admitted to providing Wikileaks with hundreds of thousands of battle repo...

I traveled to Ft. Meade, Maryland today to observe the trial of Army PFC. Bradley Manning. The 25-year-old Oklahoma native has admitted to providing Wikileaks with hundreds of thousands of battle repo...

I sat down in Toronto with Steve Paikin and The Agenda, a great TVOntario programme, and talked about liberty, technology, kids, and surveillance.    ...

Ben Mark's of Collectors Weekly says: Our own Lisa Hix has written a terrific article about how Bessie Smith and other blues divas of the 1920s led not-entirely secret double lives as lesbians, occasi...

Artist Hine Mizushima makes cute things out of felt. Lately, she has been making insects. I love this ant! (check out her beetle, too.) Here's the "Insect Hospital" video Hine directed for They Might ...

Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Remember that time an air-conditioning association tried to bully Carl Malamud into taking down safety standards from Public.Resource.Org, claiming t...

Daniel Pinkwater, the writer who made me the weirdo I am today, has a fantastic podcast wherein he reads his books in (all-too-short) weekly excerpts.    ...

Andy sez, "Why should all world protesters have to wear the mask of a white guy? We made wearable Guy Fawkes masks of men and women of all skin tones." Download them all.    ...

The Humble Ebook Bundle -- a two-week, pay-what-you-like, DRM-free ebook sale -- has just revealed the four bonus books in week two: XKCD Volume 0 by Randall Munrow; Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and...

High drama from the world of Eve Online, where a week ago, a spy stole 400 billion ISK, and this week, a trusted player who was secretly a spy masterminded the destruction of a rare ship worth 390 bil...

NASA has a great collection of ebooks about space, science, aeronautics, and the history of science. All DRM-free PDFs. Your tax dollars, at (good) work!    ...

[Video Link] This is a good six-minute video that explains how transistors work. I liked the description of N- and P-type doping.    ...

Well isn't that just lovely. [BBC]    ...

Kim Zetter: "It took more than eight years for a CIA analyst and a California computer scientist to crack three of the four coded messages on the CIAs famed Kryptos sculpture in the late 90s. &nb...

Adventure Time is probably the best cartoon currently running on TV. Here's a sneak peek at the forthcoming book, Adventure Time Encyclopaedia: Inhabitants, Lore, Spells, and Ancient Crypt Warnings of...

Britain's constitutional monarchy, as popularly imagined, requires that its hereditary royals not participate in government. The truth is not only that Prince Charles makes secretive efforts to influe...

In 1940, my grandmother graduated from the Central High School of Commerce in Toronto. As a condition of graduating, she had to write a book-length thesis project, and hers was called "RADIO," and was...

As the world burns—massacres in Egypt, civil war in Syria, a train disaster in Canada—CNN occupies itself with inane human interest fluff and wall-to-wall trial coverage delivered by the m...

Here's a excerpt of Alissa Nutting's new novel, Tampa. In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elabo...

Anorak has a gallery of creepy "20th Century contraptions designed to make you the belle of the ball."    ...

From the BBC: Apple conspired with publishers to fix the price of electronic books, a US judge has ruled. Manhattan Judge Denise Cote said the iPad maker "conspired to restrain trade".  &nbs...

Our friends at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories recently made a high quality reproduction of the Digi-Comp II, a binary digital rolling-ball mechanical computer from the 1960s.    ...

The curator puts it a little more succinctly: Shit for making websites. [shitformakingwebsites.com]    ...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. This episode of Gweek is brought to you by Squarespace -- the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to create your own website.    ...

One year ago today Skull hands: A body-modified memento mori from Jason Traeger. Five years ago today Vending machine sells ideas for things to do: Spotted this en route to work this morning at the bo...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH a Super-Fun-Pak Comic features Percival Dunwoody traveling in time TO KILL HITLER!    ...

My favorite entry from last year's National Wildlife Federation photo contest is this entry by Jamie Scarrow. That bear cub is clearly in a little too deep!    ...

To reiterate, there is no audio for meeting and the bill was NOT on the committee calendar. #sneakattack #hb695 #ncpol #standwithNCwomen— Planned Parenthood (@PPHSNC) July 10, 2013 North Carolin...

I recently recorded an interview with NRP's "Here and Now" about surveillance, kids, activism, and my novel Homeland. (MP3)    ...

Juha sez, "Wyndham council in the Australian state of Victoria has been spying on residents for three years to find not terrorists, but people who litter and keep unregistered pets, and advertise with...

Simon Parkin on Desert Bus, Penn and Teller's contribution to the small but magical universe of deliberately-bad video games.    ...

Templar is a beautifully executed historical thriller written by famed game designer Jordan Mechner (who created Prince of Persia) and drawn by Leuyen Pham and Alex Puvilland.    ...

Human papillomavirus is a well-known and widely researched threat to womens' health. But it's men, writes Maggie Koerth-Baker, who are among those most at risk—and for whom the scientific outloo...

Tim Heffernan has done some fantastic guest blogging here at BoingBoing. Now, at Pacific Standard, he's got a story about copper — a natural resource that will affect the future of everything.&n...

Dan Herbeck of The Buffalo News has a story about how researchers are using historic archives and forensic data to solve (maybe) a nearly 100-year-old string of murders in upstate New York.  ...

My journalism school classmate Clay Wirestone has a fantastic series at the Concord Monitor, describing the stories and struggles of gay and lesbian parents as they adopt and raise children. &nbs...

Reuters has a travel guide to how to spend a weekend in Minneapolis and St. Paul. It's supposed to be an enjoyable weekend, I think, but that's not entirely clear.    ...

The modern scholarly funding imperative is "fund only that which produces American wealth," and this has been devastating to the humanities.    ...

Back in February, a Texas forensic scientist announced that she'd identified a DNA sample from Bigfoot and had sequenced the creature's genome.    ...

The Optimist is a new alternate reality game from Walt Disney Imagineering R&D. It's a six-week story that plays out across social media and across the LA area, culminating with the D23 Fan Expo ...

Ramin Shokrizade's "Top F2P Monetization Tricks" shows how the free-to-play world deploys practical behavioral economics to convince players to spend more than they intend to, adapting to players to h...

Mark Allen of Machine Project in LA says: "We are working on an event this weekend trying to get 100 people together to play Stylophones (cool+cheap synths).    ...

My friend Marc Weingarten co-edited a book with Tyson Cornell called Yes Is The Answer (and Other Prog Rock Tales).    ...

Wired reporter Kevin Pouslsen has had a major victory in his legal battle against the US Secret Service over Aaron Swartz's files.    ...

The Hy-Rel 3D is a 3D printer with four extruder heads that prints with play-doh, Sugru, plasticine, and other pasty substances.    ...

Heritage Auctions is having another one of its fabulous illustration art auctions. In addition to work by great artists like Gil Elvgren, Norman Rockwell, Alberto Vargas, and Frank Kelly Freas, there ...

Matthew says: "A Detroit man was arrested for driving an armor-plated military vehicle equipped with a World War II .50-caliber machine gun that had been converted to fire compressed gas."  ...

Zack sez, "For a starting bid of a mere $40,000, you can own the adorable Roddy McDowell-voiced robot from the eerie, somewhat incomprehensible 1979 Disney SF flick THE BLACK HOLE.   &n...

Restoration Hardware's "1920s German Light Bulb Voltage Tester Bar" sells for $2000. It's a replica of a century-old refitted German lightbulb voltage tester salvaged from a German factory, and it ooz...

Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Remember that time an air-conditioning association tried to bully Carl Malamud into taking down safety standards from Public.Resource.Org, claiming t...

Tracy Miller, New York Daily News: "Toxoplasma gondii, the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis, can cause health problems in anyone, not just pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems, r...

Norman sez, "When the space race raged in the 1950s, fantastical visions of the future of travel were everywhere. Magazines like Popular Mechanics ran speculative articles about the rockets and space ...

[Video Link] I ordered and received my Bug-A-Salt gun late last fall, pretty late in the fly season to really get to put it to serious use.    ...

Here an excerpt from Peter Stenson's new zombie novel, Fiend, which was selected as an Amazon Best Book of the Month, for July.    ...

Maximum Fun, the outfit that produces two of my favorite podcasts (Bullseye and Judge John Hodgman) has announced a new show.    ...

(Click to embiggen) Jim sez, "My sister and I helped my mom start cleaning out her basement yesterday, and this 1978 Tony Graham Graphics 'United States of New York' poster was one of the things we f...

In "Dungeons and Dragons, Satan's Game," we learn that D&D is a gateway to Satanism and human sacrifice. I remember being a young gamer in the early 1980s and meeting people who'd warn me about ...

Marie Myung-Ok-Lee in the New York Times: "I delivered my first donation, in Tupperware, and Gene took it into the privacy of his bathroom.    ...

The International Campaign for Tibet reports that "Two Tibetan monks were shot in the head and several others seriously injured after Chinese police opened fire at a crowd gathered to peacefully celeb...

My cousin Katherine Leipper is part of a crew that's building a 15-foot-tall head and brain with interactive light and flame effects that will be controlled by a participant's brain waves.  ...

"I think whistleblowers are also a critical element of a functioning democracy." —FBI director nominee James Comey, during his confirmation hearing today.    ...

Writing at GRIST, Susie Cagle points to a new study publishedin the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, which finds that "not all neighborhoods and racial groups are faring equally" as climate ...

"In the field of magic, theft is rampant. Close-up magic wholesalers steal from close-up magic wholesalers. Parlor manipulators steal from parlor manipulators.    ...

A letter from jail: John Kiriakou describes breaking a finger in prison, and being denied medical treatment. [The Dissenter]    ...

My cousin Katherine Leipper is building a 15 foot tall head and brain with interactive light and flame effects that will be controlled by a participant's brain waves.    ...

Bozardeux, a recent French graduate and Instructables user, has undertaken a project to make an open, 3D printed DSLR camera. All the parts and designs are licensed CC Attibution-ShareAlike. &nbs...

Bozardeux, a recent French graduate and Instructables user, has undertaken a project to make an open, 3D printed DSLR camera. All the parts and designs are licensed CC Attibution-ShareAlike. &nbs...

Author, proto-warblogger and former CNN and NBC correspondent Kevin Sites, with whom I worked to create what may have been the first war blog, is back in Afghanistan reporting for VICE.  &nb...

If you like what you read, hear, and view on Boing Boing, you'll love us on your favorite social media services, too.    ...

FaceMashups is a video project by someone named Chase who blends together two celebrities into a surreal amalgam of horror, beauty, and celebrity.    ...

Caroline Capute says: In a shocking 1994 interview, TV Guide writer Larry Grobel captured American heartthrob Farrah Fawcett describing how she fended off a near-mugging on a rainy day in New York Ci...

Tom writes, "Arizona is poor in natural gas, so you'd think it would escape the fracking controversy. Maybe not. The Copper State is one of the best places in the world to find helium, which has been ...

Intimidation, abuse, deception: everyone knows what debt collectors will do to get paid. But Expert Global Solutions, the world's largest debt collection outfit, somehow managed to earn the biggest fi...

Among the most recent video posts you can watch on our video archive page: • Kirk, Spock, Tweedledum, and Tweedledee • The Chandelier Tree of Silver Lake, Los Angeles • Underground f...

Friday Night Hack is a hackathon taking place July 19 and July 20 simultaneously in San Francisco and Tel Aviv. The aim is to develop apps to increase government transparency in Israel or improve Jewi...

Earlier today, Mark wrote about a boycott of the Ender's Game movie; called for on the basis of Orson Scott Card's public statements opposing gay marriage.    ...

[Video Link] "My daugh-ter!" (Via Digg)    ...

[Video Link] "My daugh-ter!" (Via Digg)    ...

Im Tweedledee, hes Tweedledum. Two spacemen marching to a drum. We slith among the mimsey toves. And gyre among the borogoves. -- Star Trek, "Plato's Stepchildren" (1968)    ...

I can relate Doghouse Diaries' comic about forgetting the names of people as soon as you meet them. Read the rest    ...

Omni Magazine was the single greatest publication of all time. I dare you to refute that. As a kid, it drove my conception of what the future would be, between its nonfiction articles (sometimes a lit...

For some reason, this delightful chicanery in Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand underwent an image makeover in recent years. Its now called "H-ler." (Time)    ...

I read Ender's Game and hated it, so I wouldn't watch the upcoming movie adaptation even if Orson Scott Card wasn't a blowhard homophobe.    ...

Thanks to our delightful sponsor ShanaLogic, sellers of handmade and independently-designed jewelry, apparel, gifts, and other curious creations. Do you dig giant squids?    ...

We've already played with Oculus Rift, the unexpectedly brilliant revival of consumer virtual reality. The New Yorker profiles an experience that has gone from flickering headache to something oddly a...

One year ago today Vacuum tube skulls: "Most of the ones I own have this extra bump at the top so I decided to try leaving it unpainted giving you a peek inside and making them have a bit of an alien/...

John Brownlee on how the U.S. military's epic journey into religious tolerance reached Odinism. Mjlnir is a weapon of honor and virtue, and a fitting symbol for any noble warrior.   &nb...

Here's a shoe I've been waiting to drop: a US federal court in San Francisco has granted the Electronic Frontier Foundation leave to go ahead in suing the US government over the NSA's bulk surveillanc...

Alexei Pushkov, a senior Russian politician close to the Kremlin, tweeted—then deleted—that Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked details of the US spy agency's surveillanc...

Video Link. Colin Kennedy explains: After living just down the street from this amazing tree for over 6 years and enjoying it almost daily on walks through the neighborhood, I finally decided to get ...

This Thursday, I'll be doing a Reddit AMA with a bunch of authors from the current Humble Ebook Bundle, at 1230h Eastern/0930h Pacific/1730h UK.    ...

Genius is a new graphic novel written by Steven T Seagle and drawn by Teddy Kristiansen and it's not really like any other graphic novels I've read.    ...

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

After years of controversy, millions spent, and nothing to show for it, the French government has backtracked on HADOPI, the "three strikes" law that made it possible for entertainment companies to de...

@CP24 GO Train nearly floating #flood24 pic.twitter.com/kvtZiOe4TS— Devin Jay (@devjay) July 8, 2013 Toronto experienced 100mm of rain yesterday, resulting in widespread flooding.  &nb...

(Click to embiggen) Greg sez, "I generated a panoramic photo out of the video of 1955 Disneyland posted yesterday. I pulled the frames from the video from about 0:50-1:15, cleaned the frames, and the...

DragonCon has separated from its founder, Ed Kramer, who has been awaiting trial for sex crimes involving minors, and who received a large annual payout from the event.    ...

Clayton Seymour, a Navy vet, was outraged to discover that his Freedom of Information Act request to the NSA to see his file was rejected because telling him what information they'd gathered in secret...

Wolfie sez, A few days before the NSA/Snowden fiasco, we released the first English version of Data Dealer, a game to provoke conversation about surveillance, personal data & online privacy in ...

Here's a read-aloud of my recent Guardian column, "The NSA's Prism: why we should care," which sets out the reasons for caring about the recent revelations of bulk, warrantless, suspicionless, indiscr...

Etsy seller ConcaveOblivion makes lovely, grotesque jewelry out of dentures; including hair-combs and bracelets. ConcaveOblivion (via JWZ)    ...

Privacy International has filed a lawsuit in the UK against the government, claiming that the GCHQ spy-agency's Tempora programme violates UK spying regulations.    ...

The handle on Superstaar's portafilter cracked, and he couldn't get a replacement: "Luckily, my son keeps a good collection of sticks.    ...

"Shitstorm" has been inducted into Duden, the official German dictionary. It was a favorite among linguists, who admired its applicability to the plagiarism scandal that led to the resignation of Defe...

Space fans around the world today mark a bittersweet milestone: two years since the final Space Shuttle launch, STS-135, on July 8, 2011.    ...

Photo: Fast Co Design The Duo is a two-part, rearrangeable camera to make it easy to shoot in weird directions at once.    ...

A sculpture depicting a gorilla wearing a Freddy Mercury-style jacket was removed from Norwich City Center following a legal threat from the Mercury Phoenix Trust.    ...

Murder ballads are the true crime novels of the 16th-19th centuries. The lyrics that tell the story of the murder were written, printed on broadsheets, and sold within days of the crime.  &...

The Pipe Organ Desk is quite a marvel of woodwork: the drawers operate an octave's worth of organ pipes, and a "pneumatic logic board" that accepts a secret code in the form of a specific tune that op...

This was the front page of the Roswell Daily Record sixty-six years ago today. You can read the full story here.    ...

The image above left is a photo backdrop in the visiting room at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in New York. It's one of many unusual paintings found in prison visiting rooms around the United State...

Chewbacca's growl, on guitar.    ...

The Big Boppa says: I came across this book going through a box of old stuff while getting my parent's house ready to sell and thought it was just the sort of thing that it would be of interest to my ...

Patrick O'Brien is an underground filmmaker suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, AKA Lou Gehrig's Disease. As I've posted before, Patrick is making a 35mm feature documentary about his exper...

Emmaneul Goldstein from 2600 Magazine sez, "The 2600 hacker video archiving project continues with 67 hours of talks from HOPE Number Six being put online for public consumption.   &nbs...

In 2009, a private call placed from the US by Isabel Lara to her mother was broadcast on Venezuelan state TV. Secretly taped calls are routinely used there to disgrace political enemies—or worse...

"Louis Freeh, the tech-hostile FBI chief who removed computers from his desk, is now a cybersecurity expert," tweets defense technology journalist Noah Shachtman.    ...

Sunscreen can help prevent sunburns that are a major risk factor for skin cancer, when used correctly. But not all sunscreens are created equal: some offer more or less protection from different kinds...

[Video Link]Dale Dougherty, founder and publisher of MAKE announced the second online Maker Camp, which launches on Google+ today.    ...

One year ago today Outfits inspired by game characters: Console to Closet offers tasteful and subtle fashion homages to your most beloved video game characters.    ...

(Click to embiggen) Ferag NicBhrde has provided us with a vital cartographic reference: a map of Europe showing the word for "beer" in each country.    ...

The DC Metro transit system is known as a vortex of epic fail; trains don't run on time, air conditioning doesn't work, escalators and elevators are out, the list of suck is so long there's a Twitter ...

A depressed woman who overdosed on drugs was mistakenly pronounced dead and placed on the operating table for organ removal, because she was marked as an organ donor.    ...

[Video Link] HT: @anamariecox    ...

Before everyone knew his name, whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke with filmmaker Laura Poitras and security researcher Jacob Appelbaum via encrypted email, answering their questions about the power an...

[Video Link]. The rap artist and actor formerly known as Mos Def agreed to participate in a video demonstrating and explaining the procedure of force-feeding as it is applied to Guantanamo detainees.&...

Remember when rogue archivist Carl Malamud asked the IRS for data on $1.5 trillion worth of data from nonprofit organizations?    ...

https://youtu.be/CR67XIUBvMg An Asiana Airlines spokesman, speaking to the Wall Street Journal, identified the co-pilot of a plane that crashed in San Francisco Saturday as Lee Kang-guk.  &n...

"Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did.    ...

"With primatology, science has refused to see that females are the aggressors, the rulers, the initiators of sex. For so long, almost to a humorous extent, we have looked right past the truth; which i...

Back in 2012, I reviewed the first collected edition of Witch Doctor, a delightfully demented comic about a metaphysician who fights incipient Cthulhuism with a cadre of weird assistants and an arsena...

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has asked the Supreme Court to allow it to sue the US government over NSA spying; EPIC argues that only the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over the sec...

Emily Hughes's Wild is the latest children's picture book from Flying Eye Books, the kids' imprint of London's NoBrow, who are fast becoming my favorite kids' publisher, and are seemingly incapable of...

This 1978 preview video for Epcot Center features Card Walker, unquestionably the worst chief executive the Disney company ever had at the helm.    ...

Members of the decadent nouveau riche of Shenzhen in South China have provoked online outrage by taking up breast-milk consumption as a high-status health treatment.    ...

"Jason Urbanski, 37, of San Francisco, was charged with a Class A misdemeanor for resisting law enforcement, and a Class B misdemeanor for disorderly conduct after refusing to leave the parade route i...

"Lost in Translation," my latest Publishers Weekly column, looks at SiDiM, a new DRM scheme developed by the German Booksellers Association and the Fraunhofer Institute (with funding from the German g...

America's 11-judge Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has made more than a dozen classified rulings that vastly expanded the powers of America's spy agencies, operating under an obscure le...

Team Telecom is a group of lawyers from the FBI, DoJ, DHS, and DoD who were empowered to enter any US network operations center of companies like Global Crossing on 30 minutes' notice, allowing them t...

One year ago today Zombie T-Rex tattoo: inked by Jeff Addz at Generation X in Daytona Beach, Florida. Five years ago today Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now nationwide: Cory Doctorow's Futuristic T...

DisneyHistory has edited together scraps of found home movies from Disneyland in 1955, its opening year, harvesting only the sharpest, clearest shots highlighting the rarest and least-seen elements.&...

I just crash landed at SFO. Tail ripped off. Most everyone seems fine. I'm ok. Surreal... (at @flySFO) [pic] https://t.co/E6Ur1XEfa4— David Eun (@Eunner) July 6, 2013 An Asiana Airlines 777...

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has been offered asylum in three latinamerican nations: Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Bolivian president Eva Morales made it clear that his country's offer was dir...

George Orwell's 1946 essay A Nice Cup of Tea is a rationing-era masterpiece of beverage geekery. Orwell sets out 11 iron-clad principles of tea-brewing (four of which he considers ""acutely controvers...

"The DIY (Drone It Yourself) v1.0 kit offers you the opportunity to turn any object into a drone*, simply by attaching four motors and a control unit -- no technical know-how needed.   ...

One year ago today Jackhammer Jill, the animated GIF automata: Ernie made us a Jackhammer Jill automata from pinewood and paint.    ...

When eight-year-old Grady Hoffman went into the hospital for a bone-marrow transplant and a two month recovery, he stayed in touch with his family by means of a telepresence robot that rolled around t...

Kottke rounds up a series of illustrations by Argentine artist Diego Mazzeo from all over the Web -- a gorgeous menagerie of collaged clockwork beasts, including this amazing griffin.   ...

Peter Biddle, who helped invent trusted computing when he was at Microsoft, discusses the serious Android security bug that was just reported.    ...

I'm looking forward to attending and participating in Intervention2013, a showcase of online creativity, featuring sessions and panels by and for cartoonists, bloggers, podcasters, and makers. &n...

The Centipede Sawhorse is a foldable worktable that looks like a great traditional sawhorse replacement. It's an indiegogo project. The Centipede Sawhorse is a heavy duty job site work support system ...

"I looked around the deserted tavern, which reeked of stale beer and cigarette smoke. The pot of Hungarian goulash bubbled on the stove. I thought of Roy, somewhere in the sewers of Seattle." From Rea...

Some bookish jewelry and accessories from Etsy make good use of Dewey Decimal classifications, such as thependantemporium's I still believe in 398.2 (fairy tales) pendants (see also).   ...

Dan Nadel is the publisher of PictureBox - primarily known for their art and comics work. He wrote Art Out of Time: Unknown Visionary Cartoonists 1900-1969 and Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Advent...

A new study published at Plos One reveals that cockatoos can pick complicated locks, with one bird unraveling the five interlocking components without being given a demonstration beforehand. &nbs...

Handibot is a novel design for a CNC device that you can pick up and carry to the job, allowing you to mill materials in situ.    ...

Jill sez, "Exciting study samples new books for sale by Amazon and asks: Why are there three times more books initially published in the 1850's than books from the 1950's?    ...

From the inbox: BoingBoing is Helping Incite Civil Unrest. Mass protests are dangerous with foreign troops on US soil, waiting for an excuse to clamp down.    ...

The Seattle Parks Department wants to know what to name a new park, and one of the choices is science fiction hero Octavia Butler.    ...

NSA leaker Edward Snowden asked the government of Iceland for citizenship; that bid failed when the country's parliament today "voted not to debate it before the summer recess." [Reuters]  &...

Paul Mathis, an Australian entrepreneur, proposes that the symbol become a logogram for the word 'the', just like the ampersand for "and".    ...

Astronomers in the UK are planning to explore the skies for signs of alien life, using a network of telescopes that can detect signals from other planets.    ...

After listening to a conversation on government spying and the use of drones for all sorts of dodgy stuff, my six-year-old offered up this simple solution: the sling shot.    ...

Vietnam War veteran and photographer James Speed Hensinger has shared a never-before-published collection of night photographs he shot in Vietnam in 1970.    ...

One year ago today Sewer hunters of Victorian London: who traveled the tunnels and sieved the waste for bones, metal, coins, cutlery, or other valuable goods, all the while avoiding the supernatural "...

Karen Nyberg, a US astronaut, on Parenting From Earth's Orbit: Its a challenge because my son is 3. He will do a lot of growing in six months.    ...

Buttery bigot Paula Deen may have lost millions in sponsorship deals after racist remarks, but Pure Mature has offered her a six-figure payday to star in one of its productions.    ...

The Stasi versus the NSA: "How much space would the filing cabinets of the Stasi and the NSA consume if the NSA would print their 5 zettabytes?" [in German, via @ioerror]    ...

Space Florida, the aerospace economic development agency for the state of Florida, plans to construct a commercial spaceport next to Kennedy Space Center.    ...

Archaeologist Dot Moore, right, and historian Roz Foster, in hat, excavate the Elliott Plantation site. Photo: National Park Service Space Florida, the aerospace economic development agency for the s...

Jon Ronson's late-2012 GQ piece on competitive eating contests is worth revisiting, given yesterday's Coney Island July Fourth hot dog homage to gluttony, that holiest of American attributes. &nb...

"The BBC is to suspend 3D programming for an indefinite period due to a 'lack of public appetite' for the technology." [BBC]    ...

I haven't made a formal study of the genre, but Toast's "The Comment Section for Every Article Ever Written About Intimate Grooming" has the ring of eternal truth.    ...

[Warning: video may be disturbing to watch] 28 or more people received minor to severe injuries on Fourth of July night when fireworks exploded sideways, shooting into the crowd at an Independence Da...

This episode of Apps for Kids 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 p...

"If Jay-Z wants to know about my phone calls and e-mail accounts, why doesnt he join the National Security Agency?" Jon Pareles at The New York Times writes about the ber-rapper's mobile application, ...

The Spanish foreign minister says Spain and other European countries were told that US whistleblower Edward Snowden was on board the Bolivian president's plane earlier this week.   &nbs...

"The wages offered on Mechanical Turk do not seem very enticing. Three cents for copying the product codes and prices from a digital receipt.    ...

A coloring book featuring gruesome line-art scenes from movies such as Hellraiser, Silence of the Lambs and Jaws was recently withdrawn from sale at Britain's Tesco supermarkets, writes Matthew Champ...

A shopper fled from an Asda supermarket in Edinburgh, Scotland, after being confronted by a "dragon" in the toilet—a creature that turned out to be a harmless monitor lizard.   &n...

"An Englishman who mysteriously vanished on holiday more than a decade ago has been reunited with his family after he was discovered allegedly working as a slave on a Welsh farm for the last 13 years....

I've been reading and admiring Nathan Ballingrud's short fiction since 1992, when we were both students at the Clarion workshop. Now, some of his very best work has been collected in a moving, sorrowf...

During a community trash-gathering exercise on England's Scafell Pike, a volunteer found the remains of an octopus near the peak, the BBC reports.    ...

Richard Eisenbeis reports on The Bacon Lettuce Biographies, a homoerotic game where one literally dates meat. "The most popular boy in the school is literally named Beef while the childhood best frien...

My latest Guardian column is a one-act historical drama about metadata, starring Winston Churchill, Alan Turing and UK Home Secretary Theresa May: May: Mr Turing and his colleagues have laboured hard...

Another bit of unidentified net-weird: sausage meat mixed with gummi bears. Shooped? Real? Only the shadow knows.    ...

The original Ronald McDonald was pure nightmare fuel (click through for video of him in action). Fun fact: he was played by Willard Scott, who went on to be the weatherman on the Today Show. &nbs...

Behold, the magnificent coffeebot! Sounds like this was a timer-percolator with a thermos bottle or a hotplate, but man, what an illustration!    ...

This was once the entire expanse of the Internet. I was six then, and connected to a Vax (PDP11? PDP8?) at the University of Toronto by teletype terminal, but it seems that it wasn't yet networked.&nb...

On June 2, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller declared on Twitter that fat Ph.D. students who didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs wouldn't have the willpower to finish a dissertation...

A secretly made recording of Rupert Murdoch talking to his staff at the height of the Leveson inquiry into his newspapers' extensive, illegal hacking of crime victims' and celebrities' phones, and bri...

Tokyo Fashion Diaries reports on "tattoo stockings" that are apparently hot items this summer. They make their wearers appear to have elaborate tattoos up and down their legs -- a lower-limb twist on ...

A nightmarish vision straight out of The Space Merchants: a gadget that purportedly vibrates train windows at the right frequency to beam advertisements straight into your head by means of bone-condu...

The Smithsonian Folkways festival is under way here in Washington, DC, and will continue through the weekend. Well worth experiencing, and I plan to do so myself. If you can't get here, however, Indep...

Among the most recent video posts you can watch on our video archive page: • Xeni follows a group of Tibetan activists to Capitol Hill • Snake eats snake • A Dog Goldberg machine ...

"As we Americans watch our parades and fire up our grills this 4 July, the 237th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence the seminal document of the United States we should take the time to a...

America, fuck yeah: "The U.S. prison at Guantnamo has sufficient military medical staff to synchronize forced-feedings to the Ramadan fast and will only feed hunger strikers after sunset and before da...

My latest Locus column is Teaching Computers Shows Us How Little We Understand About Ourselves, an essay about how ideas we think of as simple and well-understood -- names, families, fairness in games...

The USB Hub Plus Smartphone Stand is a phone-stand that connects to Android or iPhones and then (somehow) allows them to access files stored on other USB drives connected to the hub.   ...

Here's a quick overview of the technologies used (so well) by the #OccupyGezi protesters in Turkey. There's no question that the right tools helped organizers mobilize non-activists in huge numbers, d...

The facts are clear: the NSA has turned the Internet into a massive surveillance system. They're using the websites we love to track our every move.    ...

[Video Link]    ...

The next time you're patted down and pornoscanned, remember that there was a time in American history that skyjacking was so common it was almost comical.    ...

One year ago today Reagan on a Velociraptor: by *SharpWriter on DeviantArt. Five years ago today Documentary on Showbiz animatronic band: For eleven years, the Rock-afire Explosion was the animatronic...

"Fireworks," a classic from 2009 by PES. Happy Independence Day!    ...

Scott Smith's presentation "Beware of Flat-Pack Futures" is a stinging critique of the thoughtless corporate futurism that delivered at Media Future Week in Almere, Netherlands.   &nbs...

Now that she's stepped down from the board of the Science Fiction Writers of America after yeoman service, Mary Robinette Kowal is free to speak her mind about SFWA's small clutch of absolutely horrif...

Ben Lincoln discovered that his Motorola Droid X2 was silently sending an enormous amount of private, sensitive information to Motorola, without permission -- much of it without any encryption. ...

Collectors Weekly has an article about the rise of Angela Davis posters. On August 18, 1970, Angela Yvonne Daviss name was added to the FBIs Ten Most Wanted List for kidnapping, murder, and interstate...

[Video Link] I'm looking forward to the arrest and prosecution of these jackasses. One of the men loudly threatened to rape a gay man, and another physically assaulted the woman filming.  &...

Dopamine — the most talked-about human neurotransmitter — isn't a "love drug", or a "lust drug", or an "addiction drug", writes Bethany Brookshire in a smarter-than-average neuroscience st...

Dopamine — the most talked-about human neurotransmitter — isn't a "love drug", or a "lust drug", or an "addiction drug", writes Bethany Brookshire in a smarter-than-average neuroscience st...

When the NSA came recruiting at a University of Wisconsin language program, the students and teachers pushed back, hard. The transcribed recording of their discussion is a model for the dialog that we...

The American founding fathers weren't just presidents, they were also members — of the science fan club, that is. In fact, we owe a lot to 17th and 18th-century pop science, and how it shaped th...

Brandon Keim has an amazing feature up at Aeon Magazine, about the idea of animal consciousness — i.e., how animals think and feel and experience their own lives.    ...

A great Reddit thread asked readers for their favorite "intellectual" joke -- some of the high-ranked ones are really good! Q: What does the "B" in Benoit B.    ...

What exactly happened last night with the plane carrying Bolivian president Evo Morales? We're not sure, and there is dispute.    ...

Leo Kellon for the BBC: "The South Korean electronics giant said it had "acquired key talent and assets" from the company."    ...

Justine Cullen, editor-in-chief of fashion magazine Elle, has reportedly dealt with the revived publication's demons in literal fashion. [Daily Life]    ...

Mark Malloy, for London newspaper Metro: "A Shropshire man has been told by the Royal Mail he will not receive any post unless he cuts back his aggressive raspberry bush."    ...

At Gawker, Max Read gathers accounts from Twitter and elswhere about the unfurling chaos in Cairo: "The Army is said to have placed a travel ban on Morsi and other members of the Muslim Brotherhood.&n...

The operator of an ice-cream van in south London was removed from his sweet beat after being charged with driving drunk.    ...

Stephen Totilo: "The lack of polish and tolerance of sloppiness on Ouya are the things that most make the console feel cheap.    ...

Marco Arment: RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: its completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself.    ...

Charlie sez, "Ed Sullivan didn't want Buddy Holly to perform Oh Boy! on his show. He wanted a ballad. Holly refused to obey.    ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY In memory of computing pioneer Douglas Engelbart, who died last night, please watch this 1968 video of his "Mother of All Demos."    ...

Alan sez, "Ann Makosinski, a Canadian girl scientist, describes her Google Science Fair submission: an LED flashlight that runs solely on the heat of the human hand.    ...

I’ve used this tool for about 10 years and it’s still going strong. It’s probably the best garlic press in the world.    ...

He was one of the most influential, important and visionary computer scientists of all time. He died peacefully at home, in his sleep.    ...

Twitter announced today that it will now allow advertisers to tailor ads for you based on your activities off of Twitter (for instance, browsing third-party websites), and will also use personal infor...

"In the last 10 days, I’ve spent $21, repeatedly drained my phone battery, and blown a deadline for the first time in years—all so I could play a game for which I have absolutely no aptitu...

Prior art to combat 3D printer patent trolls!    ...

Say it over at the Boing Boing BBS, our new forums running on the Discourse platform! That's where you'll find threads for every post on Boing Boing and, for even more fun, you can start your own dis...

[Video Link] Sharla is a Canadian college student living in Japan. Here's a video she took that goes through the process of ordering a pizza to be delivered.    ...

It's time for another Humble Ebook Bundle! Once again, I was honored to serve as volunteer curator of the Humble Ebook Bundle, a project from the Humble Indie Bundle people who've made Internet histo...

Here's Talking Heads performing at CBGB in 1975. At this stage, the band was a three-piece consisting of David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth.    ...

Visa and PayPal are still blocking payments, but this seems like reasonably big news. What matters isn't just whether or not Wikileaks supporters can donate to Wikileaks, but the precedent such a bloc...

Tony Matelli creates art in various media but his hyper-realistic sculptures depicting people and animals in moments of panic, despair, and horror are unsettling in the best possible way.  &...

"Thomas Paine, the voice of the American Revolution, trumpeted that a patriot saves his country from his government. What you have done and are doing has awakened congressional oversight of the intell...

The secretary general of the United Nations today personally condemned the actions of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, during a gathering of the foreign affairs committee of the Icelandic parliament ...

I've posted before about Death Waltz Recording Co., the fantastic reissue label that deals in exquisitely-curated horror/cult vinyl soundtracks in gorgeous packaging.    ...

Etsy seller DanOFlorez sells magnificent, handpainted Disneyland-themed Toms, including several Haunted Mansion (1, 2, 3, 4) items (he also deals in non-Disney handpainted shoes).   &nb...

[Video Link] Tibetans around the world this week celebrate the 78th birthday of the 14th Dalai Lama, their exiled spiritual leader.    ...

A baby king cobra dines on a water snake. (via National Geographic)    ...

The New York Times has a story out today on another kind of surveillance the government sometimes uses to snoop on people who may or may not have done anything wrong: postal mail.   &nb...

Beer, barbecue, and pyrotechnics are one way to enjoy the Fourth of July holiday in the US. Another is participating in "Restore the Fourth" rallies to restore the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution...

[Video Link] Mark Hurst, founder of the Gel conference, says. "Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg gave a great talk (about his search engine, and Google's practices that people may not know about)...

Spotted on @dangillmor's feed, via Rick Falkvinge, photoshopper unknown.    ...

A live stream of dramatic events unfolding in Egypt today. The NYT Lede blog is a reliable and constantly-refreshing source of updates.    ...

Lost in the plane-chasing, Moscow-airport-limbo-ing dramatic Snowden headlines today is a bombshell revelation: America's most senior intelligence official lied to a Senate intelligence committee.&nb...

One year ago today Andy Griffith: Before Mayberry, A Movie Monster: The facts that Griffith played a bad guy in his first film role, and that both the performance and the movie, Elia Kazans 1957 A Fac...

Lost in the plane-chasing, Moscow-airport-prison dramatic Snowden headlines is the bombshell revelation America's most senior intelligence official lied to a Senate intelligence committee.  ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Rick Perry, Texas' Lonely Ranger, finally finds a regulation he kin cotton to.    ...

MERS — the deadly coronavirus related to SARS — has infected 77 people in the Middle East (that we're aware of) and killed half of them (as far as we know).    ...

[Video Link] I enjoyed this trailer for Gabriel Roth's new novel, The Unknowns. I haven't read the book, but it sounds interesting!    ...

Syracuse University makes its own lava by melting down hunks of basalt. Then, they give school kids the opportunity to toast marshmallows over the top of the fiery goo.    ...

The TSA has launched an Instagram account, showing all the "dangerous items" they steal confiscate from air travellers. The message is clear: we are keeping you safe from in-flight danger.  ...

Want to know how 19 fire fighters can be killed in an instant? Read Norman Maclean's account of the 1949 Mann Gulch tragedy in Montana.    ...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. This episode of Gweek is brought to you by MailRoute email protection services.    ...

Investigators are still trying to understand what happened to the 19 firefighters who were killed last weekend in Arizona, while battling a wildfire.    ...

So cute!    ...

The biggest leak of all this week: a document from a television news consultancy that lists words and phrases reporters should use to add a sense of (OMG!) urgency to TV news reports.   ...

Representatives of the government of Ecuador in London claim to have discovered a hidden microphone inside its London embassy where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is living.    ...

John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer serving a thirty-month sentence in prison for leaking the name of an officer involved in the USA's torture program has written an open letter to Edward Snowden.&n...

Taking its title from one of the spookiest quotes in all of Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes is a true classic.    ...

L: Bolivian President Evo Morales. R: NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Bolivian President Evo Morales' private plane was rerouted to Vienna, Austria last night after France and Portugal refused to allow it ...

In Egypt today, a dramatic series of fast-moving events, as protesters demand that President Mohamed Morsi step down . Overnight, there were deadly clashes between supporters of the regime and those w...

Fcbarcelona101 offers this fantastic study on the value of Lego Ultimate Collector Series kits. What I did in this particular case is select a popular theme that had a manageable amount of retired se...

The Cartoon Introduction to Statistics is a new book by Grady Klein and Alan Dabney that is a top-notch introductory grounding in statistical concepts told through a series of witty, funny cartoons th...

L: Bolivian President Evo Morales. R: NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Officials in Bolivia say a plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was rerouted to Austria when France and Portugal refused to al...

1995 saw the launch of the now-classic Disneyland ride Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye; to promote it, they arranged to have Patti LaBelle headline a (pretty terrible) Indiana Jones...

Here's a downright inspirational video from Goldie Blox, who make "engineering toys for girls" and depicts young girls taking over the horrible girl-toy pink-aisle at a big toy-store.  &nbs...

Someone sent this dollar bill to my attention at Make magazine. The front of the bill had a URL for a video.    ...

One of AmputeeOT's followers challenged her to make a prosthetic leg out of Lego. In terms of practicality, it's a bit of a chocolate teapot.    ...

[Video Link] Filmmaker Kevin Gordon says: The wrestler Blue Demon Jr. carries the mantle of the legendary luchador Blue Demon (who he says is his adoptive father).    ...

J Gallone says: One of the more interesting items found on the Skokomish Indian Reservation in Washington State are creatively named and festively painted firework stands.    ...

Indispensable wisdom from the XKCDverse: "After falling from seven stories, the mass of bouncy balls would be moving at about 20 meters per second....    ...

Guy Fawkes mask factory, photographer unknown (please comment if you can identify her or him). (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)    ...

Raphael Brion: "the website Vegan Sellout List ... is a refined mix of unchecked self-righteousness and threats of actual physical violence." [Eater]    ...

The amazing and iconoclastic Image Comics (already famous for its creator-friendly, author-owned posture) is launching a DRM-free online comics store to challenge Marvel's super-DRMed, you-don't-reall...

[Video Link] Yesterday, Drug Policy Alliance's executive director Ethan Nadelmann debated former DEA Chief Asa Hutchinson about marijuana legalization at the Aspen Institute.    ...

David Gerrold carefully documented the story, from first draft through airing, of his fan-favorite Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles.    ...

When Jeff Olson used chalk to draw an octopus whose tentacles were full of money, and to write "No thanks, big banks," and "Shame on Bank of America," on a San Diego sidewalk, Bank of America complain...

The "Diseased Switch Plate" was created by sculptor dogzillalives. (Via Neatorama)    ...

Anton Walln created GeoGuessr, a fun game where you have to guess at the location of Google Maps Street View images.    ...

Kate Clancy blogs on SciAm about a paper in PLoS Computational Biology that supposes that menopause evolved because dudes like their chicks young: "I cant believe my feminism blinded me to such a raw,...

Another reason to switch to DuckDuckGo (the other being DuckDuckGo has a cute duck logo). How Google is Killing Organic Search (Via Nat Torkington)    ...

"5 fake tampons to smuggle your booze and 5 wrappers." One way to smuggle booze    ...

[Insert Ruskie joke here] (Via Geekolgie)    ...

Agence France-Presse posted this amazing photo (just a thumbnail shown here, click through for the full image) of protesters in Cairo zapping a military helicopter with lasers of varying power and co...

Mutahhir Ali Hayat wrote on his blog: I probably have ADHD, but I don’t want to get checked. I’m afraid the doctor will confirm that I’m a serial procrastinator.   &nb...

William Shatner takes us into the Microworld for this 1980 promotional film from the AT&T Archives. Ah, the history of the future.    ...

I've long been an admirer of the clean-lined work of the artist-designer Ragnar. He's uses an interesting color palette that cleverly hides and reveals details.    ...

Quora has a great thread happening that encourages people to point out the contradictory, surprising, and downright strange tendencies within their own cultures.    ...

Colour Me Good ARRGGGHHHH!! is a coloring book of scenes from classic horror films. It's in the news today after Tesco shoppers were upset to find it on the UK retailer's Web site where it was being m...

The Newsstand is a subway shop inside Brookly's Lorimer/Metropolitan station that specializes in zines. Great idea! (And yes, it's already been nicknamed the "hipster newsstand.") Paper magazine inter...

    ...

Ben sez, "I was doing research in the October 1982 issue of BYTE Magazine and spotted this amazing comic-book illustration-style ad to recruit tech people to work at the NSA.    ...

Here is the first "screen test" of Boba Fett for George Lucas that took place on June 28, 2013. At this point, Boba Fett's armor was all white, based on concept art by Joe Johnston with Ralph McQuarr...

For 40 years, high school gym teacher Dale Irby of Dallas, Texas wore the same shirt and sweater for his yearbook photo.    ...

On Long John Silver's "Big Catch" meal: "This company is taking perfectly healthy fish and entombing it in a thick crust of batter and partially hydrogenated oil." -Center for Science in the Public In...

Five years ago today Array of medical manikins: The whole lot of them together is wonderfully strange.    ...

Simon sez, "I'm a 19 year old Computer Science student and increasingly got neck ache from sitting at my computer. I read blog posts on the benefits of standing desks so tried a plank rested on CD dri...

Video Link. "It's gross when cats puke up hairballs but its cool when they do it to some techno music." (thanks, Joe Sabia)    ...

Reuters reports that Apple will build a new solar farm with NV Energy Inc, to power the computing giant's new data center in Reno, Nevada.    ...

There's a Samuel Pepys connection in this NSFW, illustrated review of a prurient but instructive sex book from 1680, titled "This Misterie of Fucking." The funniest part of this blog post: when Pepys ...

Shaun Usher (Letters of Note) found this amazing gem: Morrissey wrote this "epistle" to NME's editors on June 19, 1976 to complain about the Sex Pistol's lack of fashion sense.    ...

Video Link. "It's gross when cats puke up hairballs but its cool when they do it to some techno music." (thanks, Joe Sabia)    ...

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

Image: The Guardian Wikileaks and various news agencies report that NSA leaker Edward Snowden has prepared asylum requests for (at least) 21 nations, including Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, F...

Still from an important 1964 documentary on nuclear one-upsmanship. Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News writes, "In May 2010, the Department of Defense disclosed that the U.S.    ...

Spocko sez, "What are the current rules for filming police in the state of California? This man seems to believes that he should be arrested for filming the police and offers himself up for arrest af...

Image: The Guardian Wikileaks and various news agencies report that NSA leaker Edward Snowden has prepared asylum requests for (at least) 21 nations, including Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, F...

In Ancient Egypt, doctors applied electric eels to patients with migraines. In the medieval times dentists burned candles into patients mouths to kill off those pesky invisible worms gnawing at their ...

Image: Orange smoke in Kazakhstan, resulting from today's rocket crash. kloop.kg. [AP Video Link] At the Baikonur Cosmodrome today, the most notable spaceflight accident in some time: a Russian Proto...

Spencer Ackerman, formerly of Wired News and now with the Guardian, reports today: "A study conducted by a US military adviser has found that drone strikes in Afghanistan during a year of the protract...

Neptune's Brood is Charlie Stross's newest, weirdest and most thought-provoking book. It's technically something of a followup to Saturn's Children, a funny, sexy late-Heinlein robosexual pastiche, bu...

William Shakespeare's Star Wars, by Ian Doescher, is a retelling of the movie as presented by the Bard of Avon.    ...

The founder of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom, will meet arch-nemesis New Zealand Prime Minister John Key for the first time Wednesday, when lawmakers "examine a controversial proposal allowing intelligence a...

The UK's Observer ran a story Sunday that reported the US working with the UK and EU nations to gather personal communications data, based on one source: conspiracy theorist and noted nutball Wayne Ma...

Laser Bat! Subscribe for more of Vi Hart's genius musical experiments with stop-motion animation and math.    ...

Steinway Musical Instruments, the famed manufacturer of pianos that double as status symbols, has agreed to be bought by private equity firm Kohlberg & Co.    ...

Strangely mesmerizing.    ...

Image: The Guardian The Interfax news agency today reported that a Russian consular official confirms Edward Snowden has asked for political asylum in Russia.    ...

Image: The Guardian The Interfax news agency today reported that a Russian consular official confirms Edward Snowden has asked for political asylum in Russia.    ...

The idea that companies exist solely to produce shareholder value can be traced to a 1970 editorial by Milton Friedman. Writing in Forbes, Steve Denning calls this The World's Dumbest Idea, and gives ...

Matthew sez, "Fantastic Fiction at KGB is a monthly reading series held on the third Wednesday of every month at the famous KGB Bar in New York City.    ...

Cool karate man Jim Kelly who starred in such films as "Enter the Dragon" and "Blackbelt Jones" died his weekend. He was 67.    ...

A team led by led by Joseph Ford of UCSD and Eric Tremblay of EPFL have developed a contact lens granting the wearer variable zoom of up-to 3x.    ...

Ted Michaels is looking for help getting his absurdist comedy Tangoborn Menclenty made. Tangoborn is an artificially engineered man designed to save humanity from itself.    ...

My kids (7 and 4) love to make things out of recycled cardboard, from curious Rube Goldberg-ian contraptions to palaces for stuffed animals.    ...

Janet says, "Despite what the official statistics say, metastatic (stage IV) lung cancer is NOT an automatic death sentence. Newer therapies and personalized medicine now offer such patients months or...

Alan Myers, longtime drummer for DEVO, died last week of stomach cancer. He was 58. Myers played on DEVO's seminal albums Q: Are We Not Men?    ...

NSA spying is big news in the US, but huge news in Europe, too. This week, the cover story of German weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel is all about the "Top secret documents that detail the mass scope o...

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is under intense diplomatic pressure from the US over the Edward Snowden affair, says the former national security staffer accused of espionage won't receive poli...

Photo by _AK_, shared in the BB Flickr Pool. We're up in all the social mediaholes, and we want you to follow us there.    ...

This handsome devil is Bunostegos akokanensis, a large reptile that lived in northern Niger 266-252 million years ago. Imagine a cow-sized, plant-eating reptile with a knobby skull and bony armor down...

Bots High is a fun 2010 documentary about high school students who building combat robots and enter them in competitions. You can watch it for free on Hulu.    ...

Buttercup is a duck who was born with a deformed foot. So the Feathered Angels Waterfowl Sanctuary and NovaCopy scanned and printed a copy of Buttercup's sister Minnie's foot!    ...

Space educator Sawyer "@thenasaman" Rosenstein, 19, is a hardcore space fan. His enthusiasm for space flight was captured in a 2011 Boing Boing special feature, and shines weekly in his "Talking Space...

Thao & The Get Down Stay Down took their killer alt.folk track "We The Common (For Valerie Bolden)" and re-envisioned it for Moog wizardry, while still keeping the banjo magic.   ...

Just over 30 years ago this month, E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial hit the big screen and made everyone feel warm and fuzzy about aliens with E.T.s sweetly urgent message about wanting to phone home. This...

Mark Dery has a new essay -- "equal parts philosophical investigation (of memory, time, and museum vitrines) and memoir (mem-noir?)" -- up at the Thought Catalog.    ...

Scientists are trying to understand "cuteness agression" — aka, the urge we have all felt, at one point in time or another, to take something adorable and squeeze it until it pops.  &n...

Click to view the complete image. AMC today released the poster for the final 8 episodes of Breaking Bad. Walter White (Bryan Cranston) stands in the Albuquerque desert with the tagline "Remember M...

[Video Link] Christine Reilly and Michael Boczon designed this motorized handheld stabilizer for GoPro, called the STABiLGO. It looks good!    ...

Drew Friedman illustrated the cover for his brother Kipp's upcoming memoir, Barracuda In the Attic. Cartoonist Daniel Clowes calls it "A detail-rich account of an unfathomably awesome childhood in th...

Forget India's semi-shuttered telegram service. Marko Rakar says, "Croatian post (btw. we are part of EU since last night) is still accepting and sending telegrams.    ...

Among the most recent video posts you can watch on our video archive page: • Behind the scenes with "gypsy-punk" band Gogol Bordello • Amateur scientists vs.    ...

I was searching for a faux polar bear rug to complete my bachelor pad. This plush Wampa throw will do me far, far better...    ...

Last month, Wisconsin legislators tried to kick the independently funded Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism off of the University of Wisconsin - Madison campus and prevent UW professors fro...

[video link] Here's a behind-the-scenes video with New York-based Gogol Bordello. Their new record, Pura Vida Conspiracy, will be out on July 23, 2013.    ...

https://youtu.be/HXSgp755DSA This is video of a talk given last year by David Dixon, assistant professor of math, science and engineering at Saddleback College in California.    ...

The Hartford-Courant has found (but not revealed the name of) an online account believed to have belonged to Newtown school shooting gunman Adam Lanza.    ...

Via Laughing Squid: "Comedians Dave Waite and Grant Lyon have created the It Gets Worse Project as a way 'to communicate why being a stand up comedian is simultaneously the best and worst job in the ...

"For the first time, encryption is thwarting government surveillance efforts through court-approved wiretaps," reports David Kravetz at Wired.com, citing a report by the U.S.    ...

A bipartisan group of 26 senators signed a letter to US intel director James Clapper, complaining that the Obama administration is relying on a 'body of secret law' to collect massive amounts of data ...

One year ago today Knitted monster masks: Etsy seller Tracy Widdess's "Brutal Knitting" project features a number of truly remarkable soft, knitted monster masks.    ...

Dissidents Vaclav Havel and Timothy Leary "The case of Dr. Leary is outright a case of persecution of ideas and texts--the persecution of his philosophy.    ...

Alec Baldwin is so easily pissed off, there's a chart for it. [Chartgirl]    ...

"You not only shouldn't be afraid, but do not be afraid." Glenn Greenwald conferenced in to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago, to speak about Edward Snowden's leaks about the NSA's surveillanc...

NSA leaker Edward Snowden, whom the US would very much like in court, is "under the care of the Russian authorities" and can't leave Moscow's international airport without their consent, Ecuadorean Pr...

Well that's terrifying. A democratic senator says "Its long past time for Congress to create a federal law that defines" who is a journalist.    ...

In an effort to streamline the company and reduce costs, Yahoo is killing things. One of the products on the chopping block carries a ring of nostalgia for internet users of a certain age: Alta Vista,...

The Haunted Mansion Backstage tumblr has outdone itself with a set of photos from about 2002 showing the control-room at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.    ...

Litographs takes public domain (and otherwise shareable) books and turns them into word-art posters that both illustrate the text and are comprised of it.    ...

LibraryBox is a library-oriented version of the PirateBox project -- a little, self-contained wireless router with on-board storage that you fill up with freely usable library materials and bring with...

Andy Deemer discovered that India was about to decommission its telegram service on July 15, so he ran around Bangalore until he located the telegram office and sent one to a friend, just to document ...

The smallest shop in London - a shoe salesman with a 1.2 square meter shoe store, 1900. (via Kadrey)    ...

Jake Evill is hoping that someday 3D printed casts will replace the bulky, stinky plaster casts we are all familiar with.    ...

Pork Shop's EAT ME shirt features "the grossest burger ever." It's a cookbook illustration from a Wolvertonian alternate universe. $18. "EAT ME!" T-SHIRT     ...

An article in Der Speigel expands on the descriptions we've had of the Snowden/NSA leaks, and claims that the US planted bugs in the EU's Washington offices and took over their internal computer netwo...

One year ago today You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations, by Michael Ian Black: Ruben and I are both fans of Little Lulu and Uncle Scrooge, so I figured if h...

I don't think I ever saw a Paul Bunyan pinball table in the wild, but it's a beaut. June 28~Paul Bunyan Day     ...