Articles by BoingBoing from January 2019

Google announced last fall it's killing off Google+ because of the social network's laughably low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers expectations, ...

The power of fuckbonnet, shitsquib, fuckstumbling, douchenozzle, Fuckface von Clownstick, shitwhistle, cockbucket, can be captured through a simple formula: the "pyrrhic foot" of a "familiar profanity...

Reality packed its bags, cancelled the mail, put its dog in a kennel and boarded a plane to take a long flight as far away as possible from this weeks tabloids.Former FBI chief "Hoover Ordered Kennedy...

Former NSA spies have been working for the government of the United Arab Emirates as hacker mercenaries, helping the UAE attack journalists, dissidents, and human rights activists. This is a great rea...

A tourist in Australia picked up a beautiful tiny octopus and originally posted it on TikTok with "What a pretty octopus" written in Mandarin. But what the tourist didn't seem to know is that he was h...

In early December Tod Kurt of ThingM recommended these reversible Micro USB cables. I bought a 3-pack on Amazon. They really work and have held up for the nearly two months I've had them. Both the USB...

We've written about various color-wheel and pallette-generating widgets over the years, but colorsupplyyy is the best I've seen. It's extremely straightforward, doesn't get bogged down in "science" or...

A wanna-be bank robber without a solid plan got as far as the teller, but cold feet got the best of her.The woman, wearing a black fleece jacket, black knit hat, and black glasses headed straight for ...

Here's a gallery of notes found on the windshields of problem parkers. It's interesting to note that some of the notes are printed on a computer, as if the person who left the note has a stack of them...

Kottke spotted Olivia de Recat's curiously affecting illustrations of how relationships change over time and I can't help but signal boost. Hopefully she'll be taking orders for prints again soon: "In...

Author and science fiction fan Jared Gray needed a CPAP machine to treat his sleep apnea so he decided to have some maker fun with the machine. So he carved out a foam replica Aliens Facehugger to int...

American prisoners are being forced -- on pain of losing access to the prison phone system -- to provide training data for a voice-print recognition algorithm that private contractors are building for...

I spotted this charming 1.5"-wide unicorn pin at Amazon Handmade, crafted by Cynical Redhead in Illinois and sporting a delightful and timely message for the new year. Read the rest...

Last month, Matt Crull, 29, of Martin County, Florida, was sleeping in his van when police came to investigate what they described as a suspicious van." Martin County Sheriffs deputy Steven OLeary fou...

James Verdesoto is the movie poster designer responsible for some of the more memorable posters of recent decades, including Pulp Fiction, Girl, Interrupted, and Training Day. In this short video, he ...

A magazine named after something kids shouldn't eat REALLY hates on a sandwich.Paste:And then you see something like KFCs new Cheeto Sandwich, and you remember how it feels to take one look at a promo...

Warren Craghead writes, "I wanted to let you know about my TRUMPTRUMP drawing project and the new collection that Retrofit Comics that was just published. Since Trump got the nomination for president ...

It's been a while, Hubert Cumberdale. The year two thousand and thirteen marked our last adventure. Before the war. (Previously)Animator David Firth:Salad Fingers is back for the first time in 5 years...

When GOP darling Scott Walker offered to hand billions in subsidies to Chinese manufacturing giant Foxconn, he was warned: the Foxconn MO is to suck up billions in public money for ambitious megafacto...

"Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now? John Lennon Read the rest...

You may have heard that artist Anish Kapoor has an exclusive license to produce art using Vantablack, a pigment made from carbon nanotubes that absorbs up to 99.96% of visible light. Covering an objec...

We have a president who has a hard time understanding the difference between weather and climate. Science is a tough subject for the man. On Monday he proved once again just how ignorant he is with th...

Yesterday, Techcruch published a deeply reported account of Facebook's "Project Atlas,", a "research" app whose users were paid up to $20/month (plus affiliate fees) to install on Ios devices, which e...

"We find that LEGO investments outperform large stocks, bonds, gold and other alternative investments, yielding the average return of at least 11% (8% in real terms) in the sample period 1987-2015," w...

Youtube's ContentID system allows rightsholders to upload video and audio and block videos that contain their works (or put ads on those videos and take the revenue they generate), and to have the acc...

Remember when drug kingpin Joaqun Guzmn Loera, aka El Chapo, escaped from prison through a tunnel below his cell that was outfitted with lighting, rails, and a motorcycle? In fact, El Chapo built his ...

On January 30th, 1969 The Beatles played their last gig.It can be hard to keep the band together. Read the rest...

Ancient Roman texts and sculptures describe a Celtic practice of severing your defeated enemies' heads, embalming them with resin and plant oils, and displaying them as war trophies: now, archaeologis...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH you are asked to spot the criminal danger in various scenarios....

The next CHI (computer-human interaction) conference is being held on May 5 in Glasgow, and will include a workshop called CHI4Evil, "Creative Speculation on the Negative Effects of HCI Research," in ...

Brian Ashcraft: Grande posted a photo of her tattoo. In Japanese, it reads, (shichirin). You can see the pic photo (via Grandes official Japanese Twitter), which has since been deleted from her Insta...

SeaTube [via Metafilter] is a YouTube channel dedicated to time-lapse videos of ports. Enjoy the view from the boats themselves, gliding past landmarks and other vessels, while listening to relaxing y...

Aberdeenshire Council said that a stone circle thought to be of ancient vintage was in fact built in the 1990s. Neil Ackerman, Historic Environment Record Assistant at Aberdeenshire Council, said: It ...

Tyson Foods has recalled 36,000 pounds of chicken nuggets due to the presence of "rubber" in them.The Food Safety and Inspection Service was alerted to the issue Tuesday after Tyson received consumer ...

The three wishespart is where I lost it. This is an extremely well done GIF that remixes Love, Actually with Donald Trump's racist wet dream of a Wall.The Wall[via] Read the rest...

Go get a developer account and send us a formal bug report, Apple reportedly told them....

Chicago Police spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi tweeted a case update tonight on the attack reported against 'EMPIRE' actor Jussie Smollett. Tonight Chicago Police detectives expanded the search area fo...

This bodes well for WhatsApp users.Attorney Nate Cardozo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (for the last 6 years!) and Robyn Greene from the Open Technology Institute are among new privacy team h...

Your internet-of-shit smart lightbulb is probably storing your wifi password in the clear, ready to be recovered by wily dumpster-divers; Limited Results discovered the security worst-practice during ...

The "Facebook Research" VPN is an app that circumvents Apple's ban on certain kinds of surveillance by cloaking itself as a beta app and distributing through the Applause, Betabound and Utest services...

Unauthorized Bread is the first of four audiobooks that make up my forthcoming book Radicalized, read by the talented actor Lameece Issaq. The book, published by Macmillan Audio, is a Google Play excl...

John Cog writes, "Inventor extraordinaire Simone Giertz (YouTube's 'Queen of Shitty Robots') (previously) is already planning funny new experiments for that 'weird radiation mask' that 'looks like som...

[Editor's note: I'm a volunteer advisor to Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination, and Joey Eschrich is a colleague of mine there; I invited him to write up his latest proje...

Stingrays (AKA IMSI catchers) are a widespread class of surveillance devices that target cellular phones by impersonating cellular towers to them (they're also called "cell-site simulators").IMSI cat...

Bangkok, Thailand is now considered one of the top 10 polluted cities in the world, according to Global News. And to combat the problem, Bangkok is attacking the smog with water cannons. Thai authorit...

Last week, Citizen Lab and the AP published a blockbuster story revealing that Citizen Lab had been targeted by undercover operatives who pumped Lab employees for information on the group's work uncov...

This clipper was designed to cleanly cut off a hangnail. The angled blades make it easy to see what you're doing. It gets right to the nub of the hangnail, preventing it from spontaneously regeneratin...

Casey Hathaway, age 3, was lost for three days in the woods of Craven County, North Carolina before police found him alive and well. He had survived pouring rain and near-freezing temperatures. Accord...

Washington Governor Jay Inslee has declared an emergency as measles spreads to Seattle's King County.CNN:As of Monday, there are 36 confirmed cases of measles in the state of Washington -- an outbreak...

You can make your own perfectly adorable chibi crocheted AT-AT Walker with this $5.90 pattern from Polish textile artist Kamila Krawczyk, AKA Krawka. (via The Stars My Destination) Read the rest...

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday 1/30) at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, I'll be interviewing longtime BB pal Douglas Rushkoff about his inspiring and (as usual) provocative new book Team Human! I expe...

Propublica is one of many organizations, mainly nonprofits, whose "ad transparency" tools scrape Facebook ads and catalog them, along with the targeting data that exposes who is paying for which messa...

Love, American Style was occasionally on in re-runs, during my younger years. The short stories made no sense, and I didn't really understand why there was no continuity.I sometimes find myself singin...

Stanford folklorist and science historian Adrienne Mayor has a fascinating-sounding new book out, titled "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology." It's a survey of how anci...

Jackie Gartner-Schmidt is a speech-language pathologist at the University of Pittsburgh. She studied why people's voices tremble or even squeak when they get nervous. It's because our vocal cords clos...

South Carolina has a bill in the works to become the 34th state in the nation to legalize medical marijuana, and Attorney General Alan Wilson is freaking out. He went to the Statehouse lobby and stood...

Students at Mackie Academy secondary school in Aberdeenshire, Scotland created a piece of high art on the playing field. While the act occurred last year, its documentation -- which was actually the r...

Extraweg (AKA Oliver Latta: Twitter, Youtube) is a superb and surreal animator whose computer rendered grotesques of human faces and forms writhing, merging, and doing the impossible are spellbindingl...

Why is airplane food so mediocre? The obvious but wrong answer: because it's cheap. Pringles and French fries and Snickers are cheap, and they are delicious. So what gives?According to Patrick Jones i...

Just as the purpose of a tobacco is not to pay for cancer treatment, the purpose of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's wildly popular proposal to tax income over $10m at 70% is to correct inequality and reduc...

Matt Baker, who designs and publishes the posters at UsefulCharts, created this beautiful poster that traces the evolution of the alphabet from 1750 BCE to today's modern Latin script. In some cases, ...

Steganography is the art of hiding things in plain sight: for example, secretly encoding a message in an image by flipping the least-significant bit in each pixel to create a binary string that can be...

Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime....

Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime....

Of the videos like this one showing people drumming along as Siri recites 1 trillion to the tenth power, the particular variation below really reminds me of a minimalist composition by Laurie Anderson...

Oh, sure, the Democratic leadership says it takes climate change seriously, but that same leadership has sidelined the Green New Deal and gutted the climate committee, replacing it with a lame-duck co...

Siri provides the backing vocals for this catchy tune.Image: YouTube/World Viral Videos Read the rest...

Ingo Dwelling designed a Braille D20 die and uploaded the model to Thingiverse. Here's a time-lapse of it being 3D printed by the folks at Adafruit. Read the rest...

aeh5040's kinetic Lego sculpture is a gorgeous and hypnotic piece; you can build one yourself from the plans provided. (via Beyond the Beyond) Read the rest...

After the last-minute collapse of negotiations over the new EU Copyright Directive, things have only gone from bad to worse for the beleaguered (but deadly and far-reaching) internet regulation.Under ...

Adam Becker was invited to write for Inference, a "quarterly review of the sciences" backed by billionaire Peter Thiel. Inference covers all sorts of interesting subjects, but has an alarming tendency...

In 1860 a party of explorers set out to traverse the Australian continent, but bad management and a series of misfortunes sent it spiraling toward tragedy. In this week's episode of the Futility Close...

The immense sense of vicarious satisfaction I feel watching this gives me hope for the machines that will replace us. [via r/perfectfit] Read the rest...

The Dude disappoints, watch this instead.Be disappointed. Read the rest...

Apple iOS users are vulnerable to a bug revealed on Monday that allows malicious third parties to listen in on others' FaceTime video chats. Apple says the issue will be addressed in a software update...

Were aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week. Apple....

They are the pets of a friend of mine and he wanted to give them as a gift to someone who loved them but could not have their own budgies.IMGURian pewdpie made these wonderful crocheted budgies and im...

The Beach Behemoth is a 12-foot beach ball. Perhaps you think that this is a mere toy, one of those ultimately trivial impulse buys of no permanence beyond momentary amusement. This is because you ha...

We have had several officers shot,says Houston TX Police Chief Art Acevedo.Please pray for officers on the way to the scene Houston police union says 5 officers have been shot and have been transporte...

Re-runs of My Favorite Martian were so much fun. I wanted retractable antenna. Read the rest...

Trump's government shutdown fiasco that ended last week without a penny for his primitive wall seems to be taking quite a toll on president he's now lashing out at his friends at Fox a rarity indeed...

Von Erickson Laboratories created this skull microphone, which the press release compares to the Shure 55. It's $375 and made in bright chrome, dark chrome, gunmetal, white and orange, but the chrome ...

Knipex makes high-quality tools, and these 10-inch Universal Jaw-Locking Pliers are no exception. If you've never used jaw-locking pliers, they clamp on to things without you having to keep gripping t...

The Dal Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida has reanimated Salvador Dal as a deepfake video experience. The "Dal Lives" video installation opens in April on screens throughout the galleries. As Dali onc...

"It's like moving a refrigerator," says the woman to the man on the snow-covered roof of the Canyon General Store in Yellowstone National Park. He expertly divides the snow into 7-foot towers, weighin...

Last year saw a massive surge in the right to repair movement, which seeks to limit manufacturers' power to undermine repairs, by mandating certain design decisions to facilitate independent servicing...

Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that a museum visitor walked out of Moscow's Tretyakov gallery with a painting worth $1 million tucked under his arm. As you can see in the video above, ...

A woman in Manhattan got stuck in an elevator Friday evening and wasn't rescued until Monday morning. According to HuffPost, the unidentified woman was cleaning a five-story townhouse in the Upper Ea...

John Kapoor (75), the billionaire founder of Insys Therapeutics, ran a bribery scheme to get doctors to prescribe an addictive fentanyl spray, said Assistant U.S. Attorney David Lazarus in Boston fede...

The Safe Face Pledge launched last month as a "pledge to mitigate abuse of facial analysis technology," with four themes: "Show Value for Human Life, Dignity, and Rights;" "Address Harmful Bias"; "Fac...

Honest Guide is a YouTube channel for people planning to visit Prague (and sometimes other places in Europe). In this video, you are warned to stay away from Euronet ATMs. Apparently, they are located...

When Cambridge, UK resident Eve Paterson got married, she insisted that her dress and those of her bridesmaids would include pockets and belts; her friend Nell Gordon's tweets about it raced around th...

When Cambridge, UK resident Eve Paterson got married, she insisted that her dress and those of her bridesmaids would include pockets and belts; her friend Nell Gordon's tweets about it raced around th...

During the 1960s and 1970s at Bell Labs, the intersection of science and art was rightfully recognized as an extremely fertile ground for creative and technological experimentation. New York City's av...

At least six empty houses owned by the estates of Philadelphians ended up in the hands of William Ernest Johnson III, a violent felon currently on parole; the houses were then sold on to developers wh...

Bruce Sterling's All Things Facebook is a massive linkdump of the latest-and-greatest reasons to delete Facebook (and possibly put Zuck and Sandberg on trial for crimes against humanity). This morning...

People stuck in a 75-car pileup about 20km east of Montreal decided to get creative in passing the time pic.twitter.com/JInUxB9ed7— CBC (@CBC) January 28, 2019Oh, Canada! Thank you for the exam...

Facebook provides a suite of turnkey app-building tools for Android that are widely used among the most popular Google Play apps, with billions of combined installs; naturally, these tools create incr...

In this spectacular example of road rage, a Massachusetts senior clings to the hood of a vehicle as it accelerates to 70 MPH on the state turnpike.The man, Richard Kamrowski, and the driver of the SUV...

This video shows remote-controlled miniature diggers being used to escavate basement. It's taken quite a while, according to one source, though it seems more like a growing hobby than an explicit cons...

Stephen Hiltner trudges miles through beautiful moors and mountains to get to the next bothy [New York Times].But bothy culture, some longtime proponents fear, is imperiled by a generation unaccustome...

Late-evening Twitter poetry from Tom Brokaw after blurting out his opinions concerning hispanic immigrants' "failure" to "assimilate". There's speculation that he's been hacked – "This cannot be...

There is an abandoned McDonnell Douglas MD87 jetliner parked on the tarmac of Adolfo Surez-Madrid Barajas airport in Spain. If this is your jetliner, the airport asks that you please move it immediate...

A man using a magnet to fish for salvageable items in Ocala, Florida was surprised to reel in a hand grenade. So he tossed it into his trunk and made a run for the border. As one does. Upon arriving a...

This weekend, thieves stole the Banksy mural painted on the emergency exit door of the Bataclan concert venue in Paris. The Bataclan is where on November 13, 2015 Islamic State militants launched a te...

On Friday, hundreds of us gathered at the Internet Archive, at the invitation of Creative Commons, to celebrate the Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain, just weeks after the first works entered the ...

In an absolutely epic Twitter thread (unrolled here) author CZ Edwards lays out an incredibly compelling explanation of spiralling real-estate prices: oligarchs need to launder a lot of oil money -- t...

Scooter companies like Bird and Lime do not currently provide helmets for their riders. A recent UCLA study shows riders without helmets suffer the worst injuries.LAist:During a year of study, doctors...

Deepmind presented an AI that could beat human champions at Starcraft II. It claimed the AI was limited to what human players can physically do, putting its achievement in the realm of strategic anal...

Everybody's on Instagram to be seen, but what separates the average selfies-and-food account from the true influencers? Chances are, it's not random chance. Check out our favorite online tools geared ...

No one but the pure at heart may find the Golden Grail.Oh, Flash! Read the rest...

Mark Corbett has settled with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- founded by Elizabeth Warren and then gutted by Trump appointee and awful person Mick Mulvaney, now the White House Chief of St...

All in the form of signature character Richard Sharpe add Ed Stark and we'd be here all weekend. Read the rest...

Regional languages of the British Isles for the win. In Morpheshire we called it Glitchtongue.Previously: Read the rest...

The wheel. The light bulb. Throughout history, the best technology has always been simple and elegant. That's especially true for a good pair of earbuds, which should sound like they're packing an orc...

Tim Wu (previously) is best known for coining the term "Net Neutrality" but the way he got there was through antitrust and competition scholarship: in his latest book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust ...

Chunk was HANDS DOWN the coolest Goonie of them all! Read the rest...

Watch the video below. As a wise man once said, "God bless America!"Fixed it: Wilbur Ross dubbed over Mr. Burns pic.twitter.com/UQn8Hq6WrR— ElElegante101 (@skolanach) January 24, 2019(Thanks, Bo...

Deliberate, coordinated effort by top Trump campaign officials to subvert the will of the American people...

Citizen Lab (previously) is a world-renowned research group that specializes in deep, careful investigations into the nexus of state and private surveillance, outing everything from the Chinese spies ...

ICYMI. Read the rest...

Whether legit or not, plenty of people have reported finding at least a piece of a human finger in their food (from thumb skin in an Arby's sandwich to a finger in Kohl's Frozen Custard, according to ...

Lawrence Lessig (previously) has spent years articulating the case against corruption of the political sphere (and has written a superb book on the subject); now he's helping to design the political f...

From the archives of Germany's public broadcasting institution WDR, this televised concert video of Kraftwerk from 1970, the year of the band's formation. Even then, their post-Krautrock motorik dynam...

I've had nothing but good experiences with Tacklife tools, so I didn't hesitate to order this Cordless Rotary Tool, chargeable via USB. I will review it once I get it, but the reason I'm posting it no...

Man buns, mullets, duckfaces, and spray tans. Enjoy 70 years of douchebag style. Read the rest...

There's plenty of research that provides evidence to support the idea that multitasking is a fool's bargain: instead of getting two things done at once, you go slower on both, and do worse. But there'...

Despite Trump's order to to call 26,000 unpaid IRS workers back to work (still without pay, of course), at least 14,000 of them did not show up at the office as of Tuesday, according to The Washington...

The practice of clothing small adults in velcro and tossing them at velcro targets will be banned in bars and strip clubs, if Senate Bill 5486 passes the Washington State legislature."No holder of a r...

The marvellous Jonathan Coulton (previously) is crowdfunding for his next album, Some Guys, "An album of 70s soft rock covers that sound exactly like the originals" (America, Stephen Bishop, Gilbert O...

Rolling Stone published a lengthy, wide-ranging interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. There aren't any bombshells on the big stuff like Nazis on the platform, harassment, and disinformation, but the...

Last year, Google was rocked by a string of employee uprisings: first over selling AI tools to the Pentagon for use in drone development; then over the clandestine development of a censored Chinese se...

Roger Stone, the former Trump advisor arrested this morning and charged with obstructing justice and witness tampering, was released on a $250,000 bond after his preliminary hearing. Here's a shot of ...

A fellow was recently busted at Toronto Pearson International Airport for allegedly attempting to "import" 5,000 live leeches in his luggage. Apparently an airport security beagles sniffed out the par...

A couple of days ago Teen Vogue published an article about "resistance, rebellion, and revolution" (see Cory's post about it). Today, Teen Vogue has another excellent article along the same lines. It'...

The Tattered Cover is one of the nation's great independent bookstores, ranking with New York's Strand, Portland's Powell's, and Salt Lake City's Weller Books; now in an open letter, the store has "br...

Here's another fine development in sleep science today! A new study shows that young adults, like babies, sleep better when rocked. University of Geneva neuroscientist Laurence Bayer and colleagues bu...

Just days after LA teachers declared victory in their strike for better classroom conditions and limits on charter schools, their colleagues in Denver -- another "blue state" -- have voted to walk off...

Records in a class-action lawsuit uncovered Facebook's "multi-year effort" to bilk money from kids who unwittingly spent hundreds and thousands of dollars on games on Facebook, who refused to refund t...

With 800,000 federal employees either furloughed or expected to work without pay and expected by Trump to simply ask grocery stores for free food during the longest government shutdown in US history...

The Digital Antiquarian offers a potted history of 1990s-era dungeon crawlers: the first-person kind that plays out in real time, but restricts players to movement on a grid to keeps things doable on ...

Northern Illinois University researchers have designed a noise-cancelling pillow for people who sleep near loud snorers. It works using the same principle as noise-cancelling headphones but with an ad...

Two dung beetles engage in a fierce battle over a treasured ball of dung, which is their source of food. Off-camera, an amused human narrator provides colorful commentary. Read the rest...

Katarina Barley, the German Minister of Justice, is set to receive this petition, now signed by more than 4.5 million Europeans, opposing the include of mandatory copyright filters (AKA Article 13) in...

Failure to vaccinate can cause death. Maybe not killing your own child, tho it is not unlikely, the awful decision to not vaccinate puts at risk all the people who for good reasons can not get the sho...

LaGuardia is closed and PHL and Newark are facing major delays because there aren't enough TSA workers willing to work without pay to keep them open. I'm supposed to be flying from Burbank to Oakland ...

The keyboard is one of the most universally loved instruments, and it's relatively easy to learn. So why do so many kids hate their piano lessons? It's likely they weren't being taught Pianoforall, an...

Jeff Lemire can do weird-spooky (see, e.g., his Twilight Zonish graphic novel Underwater Welder) and he can do gripping (see his amazing, post-apocalyptic Sweet Tooth), but in his newest graphic novel...

This funny video lampoons the guy in your circle who always, for some reason, has a knife and a pretext to display it. Read the rest...

Roger Stone Jr., the Republican political trickster and former advisor to Donald Trump, was arrested early this morning in Fort Lauderdale on seven charges related to the Mueller probe.Stone, 66, was ...

Has Trump shopped for groceries ever in his life?...

Sculptor Jud Turner (previously) sez, "My childhood friend recently commissioned me to a pair of traditional Chinese Fu Dogs, which symbolize protection. He's of Chinese descent, recently bought a hou...

US Senator from the state of Colorado Michael Bennet explains why the government shutdown, President Trump and Ted Cruz are all full of shit. Read the rest...

Having served a whopping 16 days in office, Florida's Republican (shocker) Secretary of State Mike Ertel has resigned after the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper obtained photos of Ertel in blackface, dr...

Following recommendations set out in Thomas Piketty's landmark Capital in the 21st Century, would-be Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has proposed a 2% annual tax on household w...

Designers Assia Quetin and Catherine Denoyelle created this ingenious sticky note desk accessory inspired by the beloved abstract artist Piet Mondrian. "Monde Riant" is 13.75 from PA Design.Of course ...

Take that, Petsmart, with your overly expensive cat toys!Watch this very funny cat/DIY video from IMGURian YouWillAllReferToMeByTheNameBetty, a masterpiece.Putting the left over ikea boxes to good use...

With three cats, I was refilling their water bowl a lot, and often forgetting. Years ago I bought a gravity waterer and it is a huge relief, for me and the cats. I have the 1-gallon version (Amazon al...

I don't know what this vet does to incite such excitement, but this dog, Endo, in Fort Collins, Colorado, is jumping really high. Like above-the-counter high, causing the receptionist to break out in ...

As part of its social credit system, China deployed an app that lets you see if a "deadbeat debtor" is within a 500-meter radius of you. From The Standard:The app name translates to map of deadbeat de...

Joei Henney, 65, of Strinestown, Pennsylvania has an alligator as his registered emotional support animal. According to Henney, the 5-foot alligator, named Wally, helps Henney manage his depression. A...

Even though jet travel is a major contributor to global warming, the pluto-kakisto-klepto-cracy coming to the World Economic Forum in Davos will arrive in an estimated 1,500 private jets. One of the t...

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is puzzled as to why 800,000 furloughed federal workers need to visit food banks to keep their families from starving, when they can simply get a loan.From Reuters:...

Pringles are my favorite chip. In this Bon Apptit video, chef Claire Saffitz attempts to make them herself. Even if she nailed the form and the flavor, I don't think her technique would scale in my ho...

On Motherboard, Brian Merchant's (previously) new science fiction story The Convoy poses an eerily plausible future for political deepfake hoaxing -- with James O'Keefe-alikes running the show -- that...

Researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, a United States Department of Defense research facility, developed laser systems that can "transmit various tones, music and recorded speech at a conversationa...

Despite showing its age, John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids continues to be a consuming post-apocalyptic tale.A hit since its 1951 publication, I first read John Wyndham's landmark story of a post-apo...

Jack Berberette's Dots RPG project creates free, CC-licensed shapefiles for RPG dice with Braille faces (you can order readymades from Shapeways); they're part of a larger project to produce accessibl...

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Michael Dell was asked about Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's wildly popular proposal to tax income over $10,000,000 at 70%, but before he could answer ("Im...

Move over Wikileaks. A new leak site, Distributed Denial of Secrets (Tor), co-founded by "transparency activist" Emma Best, says they will leak hundreds of thousands of emails tomorrow, according to T...

Aria Code is WNYC Radio's captivating podcast that deconstructs famous arias. Believe me, even if you don't know anything about opera, or think you "don't like it," Aria Code is a fascinating way in. ...

Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith reviews Joanthan Tepper and Denise Hearn's The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition, in which Tepper (who does research that is sold to asset manag...

Acreage Cannabis produced a one-minute commercial, intending to air it during the Superbowl. The ad consists of testimonials of people who've been helped by medical marijuana. CBS rejected the ad with...

See if you can guess how you would die if you walked up this completely innocuous staircase. Read the rest...

Peak indifference is the moment at which a far-off problem becomes so obvious that the number of people alarmed about it begins to grow of its own accord; a new Yale Program on Climate Change Communic...

The "Amen Break" is a six-second drum sample from a 1969 song called "Amen, Brother" by a band called The Winstons. Over time it became used in over 3,000 songs.From Great Big Story: What do Skrillex,...

This kid is a star in the making. Feng E, from Taiwan, has been strumming ukulele for six years, but that doesn't seem like enough time to reach this level of playing. He's got it all talent, charism...

The latest Secret Service challenge coin (previously) commemorates Trump's shutdown (which has nearly 1,000,000 people going without pay, and has undermined everything from air travel to the ability o...

Scott Alexander continues to delight with his works of short, sharp science fiction (previously): this time, it's "Sort by Controversial," a teachnolovecraftian story of training a machine learning sy...

When your return your unwanted Amazon purchases, they end up with discounters who sell them by the palletload at pennies on the dollar, and millions of "reverse supply chain" specialists bid on these ...

Libertycon is the annual conference of Students for Liberty, a libertarian youth group, held in DC; at this year's conference, Google was the $25,000 platinum sponsor, while Facebook and Microsoft wer...

Though Facebook's lobbying associations spent the whole debate over the EU Copyright Directive arguing (correctly) that algorithmic filters to catch copyright infringement would end up blocking mounta...

In a competitive business landscape, employers need to know that their management hires are going to produce results. And if there's one way to show that, it's with a certification in Lean Six Sigma, ...

[Editor's note: I was utterly taken with the gorgeous photos in the new edition of Core Memory, photographer Mark Richards's lavish survey of the vintage computing hardware in Silicon Valley's gem, th...

Trump:As the Shutdown was going on, Nancy Pelosi asked me to give the State of the Union Address. I agreed. She then changed her mind because of the Shutdown, suggesting a later date. This is her prer...

The finished piece he makes is such a delight, but so is watching it come together from spare scraps of wood. A crappy stopmotion of my woodworkingShared on IMGUR by IMGUrian Basil123, who thought it ...

Bada bing, bada banned. China has blocked Bing, Microsoft's search engine, tonight.Bing.com is not accessible inside China, per reports throughout the country. Microsoft says weve confirmed that Bing ...

There are trace elements of facts in many of this weeks tabloids stories, but that hasnt stopped the rags alchemists from spinning gold out of these barely-detectable sub-atomic particles.George Cloon...

I've really been enjoying the new 'MythBusters Jr', Adam Savage's new science exploration show featuring... kids. Really smart awesome talented kids. Adam Savage will be Tweeting live during tonight's...

When Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai cheated his way to a repeal of Net Neutrality, he justified allowing ISPs to decide to slow down the services you want to use by saying that doing so would encourage i...

Glass screen protectors have saved me $100s of dollars in repairs. I use them on our cellphones, tablets and now on the Nintendo Switch my daughter and I share.Simple to apply, these glass screen prot...

Robert Ray Shafer who played Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration on the US version of The Office apparently posted the below to his Facebook page confirming a documentary in production about the beloved sh...

We have tacos about once a week, and every time I pull out these stainless steel taco holders, I'm glad I bought them. They make it easy to load your taco with cheese, tomatoes, avocado, and salsa, an...

I'm surprised the record company hasn't filed a takedown notice and confiscated the bird for being an illegal recording of "Another One Bites the Dust."Another one bites the dust Read the rest...

At this scale, light moves at a snail's pace.From the YouTube description: "This is the distance between Earth, the Moon and Mars with the correct distances but with Earth, Moon and Mars 20 times bigg...

These Rainbow Unicorn Foil Balloons are 32 inches long, ship uninflated as pairs, and we are promised that the "pretty design is on both sides". Finally. Read the rest...

Continuing the quest to design robots that could travel through our bodies to deliver drugs and cure disease, researchers at EPFL and ETH Zurich demonstrated tiny shape-shifting microrobots that swim ...

These baby aliens, er, emus are hatching at the same time a "simultaneous breakout," as the person behind the camera calls it. I only wish she would have kept the camera rolling until these babies ma...

Susaki is a city in Japan. They have a cute otter named Shinjokun with nearly 500k Twitter followers, and who serves as an honorary tourism ambassador. But then someone created a Twitter account for C...

When Motherboard broke the story of a thriving underground in bounty-hunters and other unsavory sorts buying realtime location data from America's cellular carriers, many were outraged that the carrie...

The BBC posted an amusing graphic that lets you flip between the original photo of Mr. Trump and the photoshopped version. But I've made a gif here that says it all. Here are the two source images. Fi...

An investigation by the health ministry in Guangdong, China determined that scientist He Jiankui broke national laws when he used the CRISPR gene-editing technique to engineer human embryos with resis...

The Free Software Foundation has announced the keynotes for its 2019 Libreplanet conference: Debian pioneer Bdale Garbee; Micky Metts from the MayFirst People Link Leadership Committee, Solidarity Eco...

An alarming story in the Washington Post about US residents going to Mexico for more affordable surgery and then contracting a deadly microbial infection.Tamika Capone thought she was making a smart c...

Trump's multi-trillion-dollar giveaway to the richest Americans and largest US corporations led to a rise in GDP, but it was a short-lived sugar-high: the major effect was a trillion dollars in stock ...

Though firms may worry about profits now that Trump's decision to let the world boil in its own juices rather than offend the hydrocarbon lobby (Coke may run out of water, Disney may run out of themep...

Writer/director Harmony Korine (Kids, Gummo, Spring Breakers) is back at the shore for Beach Bum, a stoner burnout comedy starring Matthew McConaughey with Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Zac Efron, Jimmy Bu...

This month, for the first time in a generation, America's public domain grew, as the 20-year freeze created by the 1998 changes to copyright law finally thawed.The remarkable Parker Higgins (previousl...

While 57,000 TSA employees are expected to work without pay during the government shutdown, Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), a government worker himself, thinks it's just dandy to travel first class. While...

During Monday's super wolf blood moon lunar eclipse, some observers noticed a tiny flash on the surface. Turns out that was a football-sized meteorite smashing into the western surface of the moon. Th...

After six school days on the picket line, more then 30,000 LA public school teachers voted to accept an offer from the nation's second-largest school district that amounted to a near-total capitulatio...

With the World Economic Forum kicking off in Davos, Switzerland -- where the super-rich are already decrying Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's massively popular 70% tax-rate on earning over $10,000,000 -- it...

[This post is sponsored by Glowforge. To get $100 off a Glowforge Basic, $250 off a Glowforge Plus, or $500 off a Glowforge Pro use the link glowforge.com/boingboing.]My 15-year-old daughter and I lov...

Grassroots Analytics is a small, obscure founded by Danny Hogenkamp, a 24-year-old who studied Arabic in college and had not been involved in politics until he joined the 2016 Congressional campaign o...

What Remains of Edith Finch is free this month from the Epic store. I downloaded it last night and couldn't stop playing until I was done. It's a detailed, polished walking simulator that clocks in at...

Get your head checked with the latest from the Floppotron, an electronic music instrument comprising floppy drives and other ingeniously abused computing peripherals. [Previously at BB] Read the rest...

In 1978 two families hatched a daring plan to escape East Germany: They would build a hot-air balloon and sail it by night across the border. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'l...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Tariff Man takes money from Americans and courageously pretends that equals Mexico paying for the wall!...

For the newbie, Python can seem like the most intimidating programming language. After all, it can be used to create everything from simple apps to vast networks of web crawlers. But there are fundame...

Baby Ryan doing manly things. Yes, please.Our son was born premature 9 weeks early weighing just under 3 lbs,says IMGURian bonebowl. I like to joke that he wasn't premature, he's just advanced. So ...

A really bad new law in Australia gives police the right to force companies like Apple to 'backdoor', or create encryption circumvention alternatives, in all their products. The issue has been contro...

'Bobs Burgers' fans and stitching crafters, get ready to flip out. I made the entire Belcher family into embroidery hoops, says IMGURian loveandasandwich, aka Chelsea Bloxsom.All done on 8 inch embroi...

"A single suicide by an Uber investigator who posts that they could not 'take' the job demands any longer will be fodder for the national if not international news media," the memo said....

A new Twitter is coming, tweeted Twitter today.Some of you got an opt-in to try it now. Check out the emoji button, quick keyboard shortcuts, upgraded trends, advanced search, and more. Let us know yo...

The Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday issued an emergency security alert urging federal civilian agencies to secure login credentials for their respective internet domain records. The alert f...

Senator Mark Warner [D-VA] has introduced the Stop STUPIDITY (Shutdowns Transferring Unnecessary Pain and Inflicting Damage In The Coming Years) Act, which would "keep the government running in the c...

Two drones flying near Newark Liberty International Airport led to a full stop on all flights. The airport, also known as EWR, serves the greater New York City area. Federal Aviation Administration of...

Cherry Healey met with a scientist who taught her how to make a superior cup of tea. tl;dr: Don't use a styrofoam mug (it absorbs flavor), do use a red mug (it tricks your brain into making the tea ta...

I appreciate all the work Guy Jones puts into restoring old movies. He replaces the herky-jerky motion with a more natural looking motion and adds sound that matches the action. Here's a short film of...

Recall the days of being a well-adjusted middle-schooler, free of pimples, bullies, authoritarian teachers, and self-doubt, by playing this dirt-cheap Oregon Trail handheld game. Learn about the reali...

I am so sick of the fucking handwringing shit over those racist kids. Read the rest...

All we have to go on here is the YouTube description: "Unpaid contractor destroys travelodge" and some blow-by-blow comments from an excited witness. Read the rest...

Fortnite Battle Royale is constantly adding new items, weapons, vehicles and locations. The latest? The Sneaky Snowman.The winter-themed map has a lot of Snowmen hanging around it. Now you can disguis...

Zandrea Askew (28), a Marine Corps veteran, was detained by an Illinois sheriff's department on charges of driving under the influence and resisting arrest. She is now suing the department for forcibl...

Lady Gaga interrupted her performance during her Enigma show in Las Vegas this weekend to chew out Mike Pence. While singing "Million Reasons," she stops mid-song to say, "If the fucking president of ...

I write a weekly newsletter with Kevin Kelly and Claudia Dawson called Recomendo (subscribe here). Here's the latest issue:Searchable RecomendoWe made a searchable, inexpensive version of our Recomend...

A 35-year-old boy had a temper tantrum over the weekend when he thought his wife had damaged some of his action figures. After she left the house, he rebelled by taking a log-splitting axe and smashin...

I heard former CIA 'clandestine serviceman' Jon Sipher on Renato Mariotti's fantastic podcast On Topic.Sipher describes how Trump and Putin's colliding interests are far more threatening to the future...

Anti-porn troll Chris Sevier (previously) has built his career by convincing grandstanding Republican state lawmakers to introduce doomed, unconstitutional porn-tax laws that would require in-state IS...

Ben Beck has relaunched his 30+ year-old AnarchySF site, with new contributions from Eden Kupermintz and Yanai Sened; it's billed as "an open-source repository of anarchist or anarchy-adjacent science...

On April 29, 1961, Dr. Leonid Rogozov was in Antarctica in a blizzard when his stomach began to hurt. Badly. The only physician on the Soviet Antarctic Expedition, Rogozov realized his appendix needed...

Like Facebook, Livejournal was built in a bright student's dormroom; but unlike Facebook, LJ wasn't built "for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of stolen photos of undergrads," but rather as a c...

A Scoot Airlines plane flying from the Gold Coast in Australia to Singapore had to cut the flight short, landing in Sydney, when a gentleman became "unruly." About 20 minutes after the plane took off,...

Made in 1985 to share the hardships of growing up a werewolf, Rollin Augusts "Rod" Daniel's Teen Wolf serves as a most excellent time capsule.From the graffiti in Michael J. Fox's locker to Michael J....

Denver is a huge airport, and I hate connecting there, but the Illuminati probably have a cooler hideout.How could there be a Harley dealer inside the Illuminati HQ? Read the rest...

Matt Taibbi (previously) is in characteristically fine form here: the average Congressjerk is mythologized as a "brilliant 4-D chess player" but "would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla": they are onl...

Teen Vogue continues its excellent tradition of radical reporting with Lucy Diavolo's explainer on the definitions and relative merits and demerits of "resistance," "rebellion" and "revolution."Diavol...

Aerial photographer and filmmaker Toby Harriman turned his lens on the soaring public housing apartment block towers in Hong Kong. The result is a stunning film and series of stills that convey the be...

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today allowed the enforcement of President Trump's ban on transgender people from the military. The Trump administration was earlier blocked from implementing...

There are an estimated 140,000 miles of footpaths in England and Wales, public rights of way that cut across all manner of private land, and due to various quirks of history they have never been fully...

Bruce Sterling cataloged all the onscreen booze in Casablanca, producing a surprisingly long list (Sterling: "ranted, theyve all got plenty to drink about, but gee whiz.") A French 75 sounds a little ...

The Domain Name Pricing Game is surprisingly addictive and rather surreal. I'm terrible at it though.Martin O'Leary created the game based on an idea by Holly Gramazio. "Please don't buy any of thes...

Fifty years ago, San Francisco's DeYoung Museum exhibited Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones's striking photo essay depicting Oakland's Black Panther Party at the peak of their community activism and...

The video begins in medias res during the annual "Wheels Up, Guns Down" bicycle ride, with a group of teens and an older woman engaged in a heated dispute over the riders' blocking of traffic. As the ...

Building a website on WordPress has always been easy. But if you really want to make your website stand out from the growing crowd, you're going to need some help. For our money, a subscription to Sto...

The New Orleans Saints lost the NFC Championship on Sunday to the Los Angeles Rams in overtime. The Saints were the victims of one of the worst blown pass interference calls in recent memory and ended...

Aerial photographer and filmmaker Toby Harriman turned his lens on the soaring public housing apartment block towers in Hong Kong. The result is a stunning film and series of stills that convey the be...

On Sunday, Ozzy Osbourne launched pre-orders for this darling plushie bat with a detachable head, and it has already sold out. Today is the 37th anniversary of Ozzy's show at Veterans Memorial Auditor...

When Latvia attained independence in 1991, the retreating KGB left behind two sacks and two briefcases containing indexed records of the secret informants who had been paid to turn in their neighbors ...

A sequel to the first two Ghostbusters movies is in the works. Leslie Jones, who played Ghostbuster Patty Toland in the latest Ghostbusters film, a reinvention of the entire franchise, is unhappy with...

Ever since academic Shoshana Zuboff coined the term "Surveillance Capitalism" in 2015, it's become a touchstone for the debate over commercial surveillance (we've cited it hundreds of times). This wee...

This fine sign from Stephen Zunes facebook page. Read the rest...

An EVA airlines flight attendant, supported by her union, complains the airline has failed to curb a routine problem flyer. Her recent experience sounds absolutely dreadful.Folks need different types ...

THIS. IS. GOLD.There's a lot of MLK interviews out there but this is my best.Seriously deep.pic.twitter.com/NcETBCv6bU#MLKDay#MartinLutherKingJrDay— The Hummingbird (@SaysHummingbird) Janua...

The red MAGA hat is the new white hood. Without white boys being able to empathize with other people, humanity will continue to destroy itself. #FirstThoughtsWhenIWakeUp— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_...

Margrethe Vestager (previously) has been the EU antitrust commissioner for five years, and now she is getting ready to step down (her party is unlikely to prevail next year, so she will likely be repl...

Nineteen years ago today, Mark decided to do some research on the new Blogger service for an article in The Industry Standard, and so he created a blog and started posting to it (the Standard spiked t...

"I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started...

From 1989, Fingers Inc.'s beautiful mix of "Can You Feel It" with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech: Read the rest...

If American police were trained to do this sort of thing, how could they experience the joy of lethal escalation? [via]The British police don't use pikes, but they do have ways and means. Read the res...

The nonprofit organization to which I belong recently put the personal data of around 410,000 people on the internet, connected to interactive street maps of where they lived. The data includes their ...

"Horrific" CCTV footage shows a group of Aussie cops savagely beating a teen with autism, and the resulting outrage is drawing attention to the country's worsening reputation for police brutality. In ...

Too bad, conservatives! Fox & Friends apologized on Monday after briefly airing a graphic suggesting that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead.As the show came back from commercials,...

California Senator and former attorney general Kamala Harris is running for President.Kamala Harris announced Monday that she is running for president in 2020, arguing that the time has come to fight ...

Jit Ray Chowdhury attended CES in his capacity as an autonomous vehicle engineer, and while there, snapped a picture of a self-driving car equipped with a LIDAR system from Aeye; he says the LIDAR's l...

The story about an encounter between a group of high schoolers at a March for Life rally and Native Americans at an Indigenous People's March in Washington DC appears to be more complex than what was ...

win98icons.alexmeub.com presents Windows 98's meticulously utilitarian and currently fashionable icons in an easy, no-nonsense way.Why are they so good?Rather than some designers flashy vision of the ...

Slip of the tongue! We just can't help ourselves! Kevin Steincross, a veteran morning anchor on Fox2 St. Louis, was discussing an upcoming tribute to the civil rights leader when he pronounced Dr. Kin...

2019 started off with a rather interesting tweet from Elon Musk. He was showing off the "Starship test flight rocket" from SpaceX. This thing evokes a strong bit of imagery that has been so deeply int...

These days, there isn't much our iPhone camera can't do - except feel like an actual phone. Despite years of steadily increasing resolution and image sensing technology, we're still taking shots awkwa...

Burbank's amazing quarter-century institution Dark Delicacies is a horror book-, memoribilia- and clothing-store that is a community hub for genre creators, hosting a wonderful stream of events, signi...

Kentucky's Covington Catholic High School's Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts are on lockdown this morning after a video was posted that shows a mob of students intimidating a Native American e...

UPDATE 1-20-19: This story appears to be more complex than what was seen in the video above and from news reports in the Washington Post, CNN, New York Times, and other major news media. After watchin...

Neil Gaiman says Edgar Allan Poe should be read aloud, and he's right: he recorded this video of him reading "The Raven" in 2016 as part of Pat Rothfuss's Worldbuilders charity drive. It's Poe's birth...

This Monday, the final "trilogue" (a meeting between the European Parliament, the European Presidency, and the EU member-states) was supposed to convene to wrap up the negotiations on the first update...

It's been three days since C-SPAN posted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's amazing, stirring freshman speech from the floor of Congress, and it has smashed all Congressional C-SPAN records with 3.1m views (a...

After marketing executive Clementine Crawford published an essay about being banned from eating at the bar at her favorite New York restaurant, Nello, because the owner (already notorious for labor ab...

After marketing executive Clementine Crawford published an essay about being banned from eating at the bar at her favorite New York restaurant, Nello (a notorious ripoff joint), because the owner (alr...

Firefox's screenshot tool has a lot going for it, but after two days of trying to use it I gave up and went back to using Ksnapshot (now Spectacle) for the near-constant screenshotting I do, all day l...

Unicorn poop [Amazon] appears to be pastel-colored gourmet marshmallow chunks flavored with strawberry, lime, lemon and orange, guaranteed to be gluten- and nut-free. But don't let that put you off: I...

Still determined to keep those New Year's health resolutions? If you're going to stick with the exercise plan, it's enough of a challenge to budget your time. No need for your financial budget to take...

Two high school students from Minnetonka, Minnesota, photographed themselves performing Nazi salutes and holding a dance invitation full of Hitler-themed puns. While I do not know whether it was an in...

Chinese TV is blurring out the ears of men wearing earrings. From CNN:It's unclear if Chinese regulators have issued a specific directive barring men from being shown wearing earrings, or whether TV s...

Malware authors have a problem: they want their software to run aggressively when no one is looking at it, but to shut down entirely if the device it's running on is actually in some malware researche...

Watch live video from TwitchPresents on www.twitch.tvI stopped watching Doctor Who after the War Doctor episode. I've never watched again, and I wasn't going to -- I completely lost interest. I just h...

I've written about ball-end hex keys before. They are much easier to use when clearance is an issue. They fit into sockets at an angle. Tacklife has a great deal on this dual set of metric and US hex ...

Stop by and charge your phones @shmoocon! Courtesy of @NSAGov pic.twitter.com/yxIL8mohvi— Rob Joyce (@RGB_Lights) January 18, 2019Let me think about that... nope.(h/t Bob Lord) Read the rest...

You've probably played with one of those toy cars that you drag back to wind up and then let go to let it zoom across the floor. In this video, Jared Owen uses 3D animation to clearly show how the mec...

The Drone, currently in post-production, is a real movie about a killer drone. From the trailer description:A serial killer transfers his consciousness into a consumer drone right before he is killed,...

Freedom, published in Harlem during the Cold War and McCarthy years, was Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham's radical black paper that "ppenly challenged racism, imperialism, colonialism, and political re...

A Japanese start-up built a microsatellite that was launched into orbit today. The satellite contains 400 tiny balls that can be released on demand and will burn brightly enough to be seen on Earth as...

Criminals are using stolen credit cards to buy Fortnite V-bucks, then selling the in-game currency for bitcoin at a discount on the dark web as a way to launder money. From The Independent:Discounted ...

Amazon just sent me a text saying The Grand Tour Season 3 is now available. I'll be back in a few hours! Read the rest...

In 2012, Facebook settled a class-action suit with parents who claimed that their kids were being tricked into spending real money on game items, thinking they were spending virtual in-game currency; ...

When teachers from the largest school district in America walked off the job this week, they were not campaigning for wages: rather, they were demanding smaller classes; more librarians, counselors, a...

Watch marine biologist Ocean Ramsey (yes, Ocean is her first name!) swim with a 20-foot great white shark off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii. First spotted off Guadalupe in 2014, this animal, nicknamed "De...

Sascha Baron Cohen put on a funny disguise and went to a small town in the United States to tell the residents of a plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy. The townsfolk...

Holly, a Harvard seminarian and activist, invited Twitter users to DM her the dirty secrets of their industries, which she then anonymized and posted in a megathread with more than 600 parts (as of th...

Launched as a NYC skateshop in 1994, streetwear brand Supreme has become a religion for hypbeasts (and the flippers who serve them). Now, a private collector is auctioning off their collection of ever...

Here's an incredible collection of digitized historical LPs you can listen to online. A lot of them remind me of podcast episodes, like this record about "big-lie-technique" master Senator Joseph R.Mc...

In the early 1990s, the burgeoning black metal scene in Norway was plagued with jealousy, violence, arson, and eventually murder. Lords of Chaos, named after Michael Moynihan and Didrik Sderlind's exc...

We are in serious bad sci-fi movie territory here.Ambrosia is a start-up offering "young blood" to people who are not "young." This blood is supposed to make you all awesome again! Like before your bl...

Until last spring, everyone wanted to see the new European Copyright Directive pass; then German MEP Axel Voss took over as rapporteur and revived the most extreme, controversial versions of two propo...

Yoni Appelbaum's longread in The Atlantic on the case for impeaching Trump draws on heterodox interpretations of the Clinton and Johnson impeachments, as well as the Nixon impeachment, to argue that d...

Unvaccinated children exposed to the measles are catching and spreading the highly contagious disease in Washington's Clark County, JUST LIKE YOU WOULD EXPECT.The Oregonian:A measles outbreak in south...

Perdue has recalled 60,000 pounds of chicken nuggets due to the presence of "wood" in them. The 22 ounce packages of frozen PERDUE SimplySmart ORGANICS BREADED CHICKEN BREAST NUGGETS GLUTEN FREE with...

We got one of these gadgets from The Lakeside Collection and it broke on the first use. It turns out the screw neck is made of the cheapest plastic known to man and is doomed to failure upon contact w...

Want a career in web design? It's true that these days, most anyone can throw up a page or two. But for true workhorse web design, you'll sometimes need to match the platform to the project. Enter the...

Seeing a slight resurgence online this week, perhaps due to issues related to the government shutdown, is the viral term "Yikes!" I humbly propose that this shopworn exclamation be replaced for the du...

Cash Cars in Kansas City will take very little cash for very crappy vehicles. They are sold AS-IS, and yet Desmound Logan here must still explain to customers that when you pay $3,000 for a Tahoe, you...

It's a very expensive wee gadget, the Teenage Engineering OP-1 [Amazon link; a used one from eBay is much cheaper]! Yuri Wong is an expert with its sampling and sequencing tools, and this video he upl...

At last night's "I Am The Highway: A Tribute to Chris Cornell" concert in Los Angeles, Miley Cyrus belted out Temple of the Dog's "Say Hello 2 Heaven" backed up by Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament of Pear...

On Monday, we reported that for the first time, a plant seed had germinated on the moon, an early experiment to test whether food could someday be grown on the moon to feed residents of a lunar base. ...

Lorna Doom, badass bassist of influential Los Angeles punk band the Germs, died yesterday. Formed in 1976, the Germs -- Doom, Darby Crash, Pat Smear, and Don Bolles in the classic line-up -- were at t...

Trump received 10 personal updates from Michael Cohen and encouraged a planned meeting with Vladimir Putin, says reporter Jason Leopold....

Trump received 10 personal updates from Michael Cohen and encouraged a planned meeting with Vladimir Putin. Make it happen, Trump said of the Putin meeting....

Scammers are so petty.In a bizarre statement today, Donald Trump grounds House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from flying on government aircraft for a planned but not publicly disclosed to visit U.S. troops in ...

Once-iconic American retailer Sears (owned by Sears Holdings Corporation) will not die a bankruptcy liquidation death after all. Chairman Eddie Lampert today won a bankruptcy auction to purchase the c...

Starting Sunday evening, Jan. 20, 2019, North and South America will have a chance at seeing 2019's only total lunar eclipse, from start to finish. Our Earth, Moon and Sun line up on Sunday night for...

Two GOP congressmen met with noted white supremacist Chuck Johnson about genetic testing and DNA, then deny knowing he's a white supremacist. Holocaust denier and white supremacy troll Chuck Johnson, ...

Four words in a tiny font at the top of a court filing reveal that former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort kept right on working with Russian intelligence even after he was charged with mul...

The planned delegation included Pompeo and Mnuchin.White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says the Trump administration has canceled a planned trip to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic For...

Mexico's largest airline is trolling Americans and it's the best. h/t @Aeromexico pic.twitter.com/hPvqGnDZeF— Kevin Sieff (@ksieff) January 17, 2019I love visiting Mexico. Baja is amazin...

Anti-Vaxxers magically deny science, cite debunked papers, and threaten all of our well being. Only the smartest people are anti-vaxxers, like President Trump.WHO:Vaccine hesitancy the reluctance or ...

"The truth of this shutdown is that it is not actually about a wall, it is not about the border, and it is certainly not about the well-being of everyday Americans. The truth is, this shutdown is abou...

MORTAL KOMBAAAAAAAAT!I haven't paid attention to Mortal Kombat since the 1995 movie. There was a time it was my go-to coming down off of hallucinogenic drugs film. This game trailer would have made my...

Sho nuff!(via 10NEWS WTSP/facebook) Read the rest...

I bought my Swingline Red Stapler on September 10, 2008 and it still makes me happy every time I look at it. Amazon has it on sale today for great price. Read the rest...

As the about page says, "This website provides a beginners checklist for staying safe on the internet." It shows you how to use a password manager, create a strong device passcode, use two-factor auth...

Do not ever mess with a guy's dog. Read the rest...

Peng Shepherd's The Book of M delivers the confusion and frustration of massive world change by playing on the strings of your heart.Magical realism certainly collides with prepper fantasy novel in Th...

Henry Wu posts beautiful travel photos on Instagram. He and his friend, another Instagrammer named Zory were scammed out of $7500 by a person pretending to be Wendi Murdoch, ex-wife of Rubert Murdoch....

Cartoonist Charis JB's webcomic reveals the deep ties between the "pick-up artist" movement and the alt-right. Read the rest...

The next installment in the SFinSF reading series features Kim Stanley Robinson, Howard Hendrix, and Cecelia Holland; it's this Sunday, Jan 20, doors at 6, event at 6:30, $10 (no one turned away for l...

Trump's base is not happy with their leader. His approval rating is down 18 percentage points among suburban men, down 13 points among white evangelicals, down 10 points among Republicans, and down 7 ...

What professional comic Mike Huckabee lacks in creativity, comedic timing, and material, he more than makes up for in grossly mistaken self-assurance. Watch him force weak laughter and applause out of...

Over the weekend in St, Petersburg, Kentucky, Cody Lutz, his fiancee, and her sister built a beautiful 9-foot snowman in their yard. When Lutz returned home from work this week though, he noticed tire...

If you roll up a copy of this weeks Globe tabloid into the shape of a seashell and hold it to your ear, you can hear the sound of President Trump screaming. Just because theyre packed with fact-challe...

America's major cellular carriers publish maps showing that virtually the entire state is well-covered, with solid signals and 5MB/s internet speeds, but Vermonters know that this is totally untrue.Kn...

From 1961-1963 Richard Feynman -- one of the preeminent physicsts of his day -- taught an undergraduate class in physics at Cal Tech, a gig that was nominally well below his paygrade, and gave such a ...

While it's true that the Pew Center found that most US Facebook users don't understand how they're being tracked and targeted, the more important fact is that the number of Americans who do understand...

Everyday carry? From Atlas Obscura:This CIA-issued tool kit was issued to CIA officers during the height of the Cold War. It was a way for spies to get themselves out of sticky situations: to pick a l...

Pacific Gas and Electric has gone from Wall Street darling to bankruptcy, thanks to the $30 billion in liability from the fires that were started in California by its power-lines.But while any long-ha...

Motherboard's blockbuster story about mobile carriers selling your realtime location data into a marketplace where bounty hunters and other villains can buy it for just a few dollars has triggered an ...

Federal employees missed their first paycheck last week; from here on in, every milestone dramatically exacerbates the pain of the shutdown: a halt to aviation as TSA screeners quit en masse, civil ca...

Things move fast in the world of social media, and they don't slow down for marketers looking to make an impact. Whether you're grabbing eyeballs for a major company or a local business, you'll need t...

Sze lat temu Polacy wyszli na ulice by uratowa Europ przed ACTA midzynarodow umow handlow, negocjowan z inicjatywy Stanw Zjednoczonych, ktra grozia wprowadzeniem szeroko zakrojonej cenzury i nadzoru ...

LUnion europenne est sur le point de donner encore plus de pouvoir une poigne dentreprises gantes tats-uniennes en technologie, en change contre des accords temporaires de partage des bnfices avec un...

nos amis au Luxembourg : ce mois-ci, lUE espre concrtiser la Directive sur le droit dauteur dans le march unique numrique, sans donner aucun signe quils amlioreront ou supprimeront les articles 11 et...

Watched and filmed by the other drivers he has delayed, a man in East London slowly, laboriously, loudly removes and steals the catalytic converter from another vehicle. If you have plans to be in Bri...

Europeiska unionen r nra att ge nnu mer makt till ett ftal stora amerikanska IT-fretag, i utbyte mot tillflliga vinstdelningsarrangemang med en handfull europeiska underhllningsfretag med masscensur ...

An unsere Freunde und Freundinnen in Deutschland. In diesem Monat mchte die EU die Richtlinie ber das Urheberrecht im digitalen Binnenmarkt abschlieen. Es besteht wenig Hoffnung, dass die Artikel 11 u...

The EU plan to mandate censoring filters for online speech to catch copyright infringement could be finalised as early as next week, and our best hope for halting it is to get the national governments...

A man in Ireland repeatedly injected semen into his arm in the hopes that it would cure his back pain. He instead got a subcutaneous abcess and had to get professional help. [via Gizmodo]Drs. Dunne, M...

British political satirist Jonathan Pie (previously) has a pointed question for Tory voters on the eve of the omnishambolic Brexit collapse: "Are you happy with your purchase? "Because this is what yo...

Interviewed by CNN's Chris Cuomo, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani all but admits what everyone assumes: that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government in the 2016 presidential election. Rud...

Editor's Note: Richard Metzger is a connoisseur of cannabis, and recently started growing his own. He's test-driving high-end rig good for small-scale grows from Cloudponics. This is not a sponsored p...

A dump called "Collection #1" has been released by parties unknown, containing email addresses and cracked passwords: in its raw form, it contains 2.7 billion records, which Troy "Have I Been Pwned" H...

As we have written about before, the game crafting (or dungeon crafting) scene has exploded over the past few years. There are dozens of websites and YouTube channels devoted to every aspect of making...

Behold the Brostika! Like the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo, Slack's new brand has a negative-space surprise in store. The bars point the "lucky" left way, at least, rather than, well, to the right.B...

Adam Savage is back with an all-new show, and hell be tweeting live during tonights MythBusters Jr. on The Science Channel. The episode is named "Battery Blast," so we're expecting there will be expl...

Most Facebook users have no idea how the company tracks and profiles everything they do to target ads, a new Pew Research study confirms.Pew reports that three-quarters (74%) of Facebook users surveye...

Chinas Huawei is the subject of a U.S. criminal investigation in which federal prosecutors say the Chinese tech company stole trade secrets from U.S. business partners including technology behind a r...

Federal agents today arrested a man in Georgia who they say was planning an attack with weapons and explosives on the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.T...

You've gotta read, by Douglas Burns, this excellent roundup of a dozen or so of the worst things congressman Steve King (R-IA) has said, dating back decades.Notable that these long, long predate the l...

When it comes to the new Copyright Directive, some in the EU would prefer that Europeans just stop paying attention and let the giant corporations decide the future of the Internet.In a new Q&A ab...

Amy Brooks was born without arms or legs. In a series of wonderful videos, she shows how she goes about everyday activities like folding laundry, cooking, showering, and writing.After being abandoned ...

Say you work at the government agency with the lowest morale of any Fed job and then Cheeto Hitler decides to treat you like a casino contractor and not pay you, for thirty days, and recommends that y...

Noah Rotem got an intriguing error message from El Al's reservation system ("PNR: https://fly.elal.co.il/LOTS-OF-NUMBERS-HERE*) and by tugging at the loose thread it revealed, he was able to view any ...

[PHOTO: Psy Group's headquarters in Israel, via]Former Donald Trump presidential campaign aide Rick Gates is cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Muellers probe, and has provided info on a firm in ...

If you're into the dark fringes of true crime media... The forthcoming documentary "Conversations With A Killer," about serial killer Ted Bundy, is based on 100 hours of two journalists' unheard audio...

Last week, our lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent a reply to Bird, the scooter company, which had sent us an intimidating letter seeking to censor this post on Bird conversion kits, wh...

LA teachers have walked out, striking in torrential rains, protesting the billionaire-backed privatization movement that wants to hand public school funding to charter schools.So it would be noteworth...

Once a month, Delta Air Lines holds a "garage sale" at one of its facilities near their flight museum adjacent to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The New York Times' Jackie Snow visi...

For some reason, Amazon won't ship these super-inexpensive Sylvania LED bulbs to California. I was able to get a box of 24 by having it delivered out of the state and picking it up on a road trip. The...

Political pranksters extrodinaire the Yes Men (previously) have printed a satirical edition of the Washington Post announcing that Donald Trump has abdicated and volunteers have fanned out across DC (...

A new paper in Nature describes the US-Army-funded research of U Penn materials scientists to create a new generation of 3D printed "smart objects" whose geometry and materials enable them to interact...

Swiss freeskier and filmmaker Nico Vuignier of Centriphone fame, delivers "Heatseeker," an exhilarating night skiing adventure illuminated by fiery shots from a flare gun. Edited by Nicolas Vuignier &...

"Become a mystery shopper. Retailers are desperate to check how their in-store customer service is and will employ you to shop and rate their service." This is just one of many suggestions in a tip sh...

People have a little pink band in the inside corner of their eye. "This is the plica semilunaris," says Dorsa Amir, an evolutionary anthropologist. "It used to be a third eyelid that would blink horiz...

Douglas Bader was beginning a promising career as a British fighter pilot when he lost both legs in a crash. But that didn't stop him -- he learned to use artificial legs and went on to become a top f...

Last summer a 3-year-old cow named Betsy (not the one in the photo; that's a stock image I used because our content management system doesn't allow us to post something without an image) somehow escap...

About 800,000 federal workers aren't getting paid because Trump doesn't want to lose the game of chicken he foolishly chose to play. Now he is forcing 50,000 to come back to work, but they won't get p...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH the shocking question is asked: Is it possible Trump isn't fully loyal to Mother Russia?...

During a 60 Minutes interview Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez casually mentioned that she thought that America's super-rich should pay a marginal tax-rate of 70% on annual earnings over $10,000,000 (which is...

Director Fabio Friedli animated 3,000 images to tell the story of humanity "from a seed to war, from meat to love, from indifference to apocalypse."It is such an excessive amount of things, shown in s...

Here's another explainer video from Kurzgesagt In a Nutshell. This time, they're looking at organic food. First, they define organic food as not being GMOs and not treated with artificial fertilizers...

Last October, Bloomberg published what seemed to be the tech story of the year: a claim that Supermicro, the leading supplier of servers to clients from the Pentagon and Congress to Amazon, Apple and ...

On March 19, Tor Books will release my next book, Radicalized, whose four novellas are the angry, hopeful stories I wrote as part of my attempt to make sense of life in our current moment.As with my n...

Some unicorns chase; some are chased down. These splendid and totally real unicorn skulls [Amazon] are sourced from troll and ogre fairtrade collectives, are 8.5" long and 10.75" tall, and individual...

It's a rude awakening for that rookie vacationer abroad when they try to plug in their gear for the night. Veteran jet-setters know that outlet shapes can vary wildly from country to country, which ne...

A quiz from Mental Floss: Who Wrote It: Edgar Allan Poe or an Emo Band? [via MeFi]"I stand amid the roar of a surf-tormented shore" Read the rest...

Nationwide icy weather's coming, reports the Weather Channel, with Winter Storm Harper tumbling over the west coast and up east already covered in bullshit. Read the rest...

Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, just started a new job this week. She's an art teacher at a Christian school that makes job candidates sign a pledge not to engage in homosexual activit...

How much more evidence does America need that Donald Trump isn't working for us, but for Russia?No, seriously. Trump can't stop talking about removing America from NATO.Trump hasn't had an original id...

From the WTF why? files comes this hidden umbrella!Seriously disappoint your friends, who would probably rather have wine! I am wondering what occasion this prank is right for?Playmaker Toys Brella Vi...

Following up on our earlier story about Roku re-platforming Alex Jones and Infowars, it looks like Roku got so much criticism from users, they've reversed course and will remove the Infowars app.After...

Teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (America's largest district) are walking the picket line this week in the pouring rain, demanding an end to the billionaire dark-money backed privat...

Chuck Wendig isn't just a fine novelist, he's also got a discerning sense of what distinguishes good apples from bad, and what elevates apples to true greatness.He ate 15 grocery-store apples and prod...

Yesterday, we paid tribute to the 42nd anniversary of David Bowie's iconic album Low by featuring The Brothers McLeod animation of comedian Adam Buxton's hysterical radio tribute to Bowie from 2013. W...

LISTEN CLOSELY: "I thought it was a joke," says Clemson athlete upon learning the White House was serving him Wendy's.pic.twitter.com/bRNRhLmDBF— ogue US Mint (@RogueUSMint) January...

The California turret spider build tiny towers on the forest floor that extend underground into a burrow. At night, they climb up into the tower and await their dinner -- beetles, moths, and other ins...

Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit plan was not expected to pass, but it was brutally murdered in a far larger margin of defeat than was expected: 432 to 202. This is the largest parliamentary defeat...

A woman in China reportedly suffering from a rare medical condition supposedly can't hear male voices. Most hearing loss occurs at higher frequencies when the delicate hair-like stereocilia of the inn...

Nominee for Attorney General William Barr told the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning that he "can conceive of situations where, as a last resort," journalists could be prosecuted for putting out...

This year I missed the party, but as usual stellar photographer Star Foreman captured an amazing gallery of images!Every year Los Angeles' fantastic circus family, The Flying Morgans, throw the most i...

"Every time you switch your attention from one target to another and then back again, theres a cost," Cal Newport said in a New York Times interview. "This switching creates an effect that psychologis...

With only days to go before the planned conclusion of the new EU Directive on Copyright in the Single Digital Market, Europe's largest and most powerful rightsholder groups -- from the Premier League...

NBC declined to comment.Huffington Post:NBC News standards department sent an email to staffers Tuesday telling them not to directly refer to Rep. Steve Kings recent comments about white supremacy as ...

Hundreds of angry Christians protested at a museum in Haifa, Israel, demanding that the museum remove an exhibit that featured a "McJesus" sculpture. The sculpture Ronald McDonald crucified on a cros...

In a heavy-duty new scientific paper published this week, University of Oxford researchers argue that association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use is tiny. Really tiny. From Sc...

The Cool Tools website focuses on handy, useful, proven tools. But a lot of great stuff that Mark and I come across are not really tools. We created the Recomendo email list for this purpose. Every Su...

Don't rinse food particles from dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. If you do, the detergent won't have anything to cling to and your dishes won't get as clean.From Mental Floss:One of the a...

Joe Ford is a self-described "64-year-old navy veteran of the Vietnam era and houseless in the tundra." He wrote for The Guardian about what its like to live in Alaska without a permanent house. It so...

Keiichi Matsuda created 2016's Hyper-Reality, an amazing, dystopian video about the future of augmented reality; now Matsuda is back with Merger, that plays darkly into the idea that corporations are ...

A cotton seed has germinated on the moon. The sprout is inside a canister on China's Change 4 lander that touched down on the far side of the moon earlier this month. From The Guardian:Plants have bee...

The glasses Applebee's uses to serve large beers and small beers look very different. But in this video you'll see they are almost equally capacious.When asked on Twitter about the revealing video, Ap...

Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars rantathon channel have been turfed out of virtually every major platform due to his love of violent rhetoric, racial hatred and general bigot...

Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars rantathon channel have been turfed out of virtually every major platform due to his love of violent rhetoric, racial hatred and general bigot...

Namibian-German artist Max Siedentopf created "Toto Forever," an installation that plays the song "Africa" on repeat in the middle of southern Africa's Namib Desert. From the BBC News:Mr Siedentopf te...

My most recent essay film, Visual Disturbances, premiered in the open access journal [in]Transition yesterday. This open access journal features peer reviewed academic video essays and showcases a wi...

Looking for a career in music behind the boards, either as a music producer or DJ? It's a good bet that you're going to be working with Ableton Live. Each new iteration of this powerful workstation gi...

Here's a White House photo of Donald Trump with 1000 hamburgers—or "hamberders", as he put it this morning— in the State Dining Room of the White House. God bless America! Read the rest...

A popular mobile game available on the Play store is an "ad fraud platform", say researchers at a media intelligence company. Word Link was approved by Google and had since been downloaded 50m times, ...

I was surprised to learn today that I've never posted the video of a duck being gently vacuumed. Read the rest...

Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal with the European Union finally comes before parliament for a vote today. The deal is expected to fall short, leaving Britain with several more difficult choic...

Clemson's national championship football team went to the White House on Monday where President Donald Trump hosted them for winning the title. Trump had a bunch of burgers ready for them: Wendy's, Mc...

On The View's Monday episode, Women's March co-founder Tamika Mallory refused to condemn anti-semitic comments made by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Controversy about the March's leadership ...

She was living her best life.A Texas Walmart has banned a woman from their store for doing something we've all done at one time or another - riding around the parking lot in a mobility scooter while d...

Noted racist congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) may finally face consequences for being an open white supremacist and anti-Semite. Who knew there would ever be a line this guy could cross? He's gotten a...

Another World: Survival is a low-res adaptation of Eric Chahi's classic 16-bit game. Though it's broken down to the essentials to "fit" on the Pico-8 fantasy console, it so perfectly implements the or...

My dog had some pretty massive surgery. Pet insurance did what it was supposed to do.I will start with the absolute shame I feel: the first thing I said to my veterinarian, as she told me my 125 lb Gr...

Every year, visitors to Rome's famed Trevi Fountain toss in more than $1.7 million in coins. Historically, the Catholic charity Caritas has taken that money to help poor people. Now though, Rome mayor...

The IRS is shut down, along with much of the rest of the federal government, but unattended servers running on autopilot are sensing that no progress has been made on taxpayers' attempts to clarify di...

The Solton Ketron Programmer 24 is a 1985 sample-based synthesizer described as "The Italo Disco machine". They used to be on eBay, but good luck finding one nowawadays for much less than $2,000.Hungr...

Electronic Grenade's "'Computer' Mouse" project fits a fully functional computer into a fully functional, 3D printed mouse; the computer is a Raspberry Pi Zero W, with a teeeny leeetle flip out keybo...

Once I started using self-adjusting wire strippers I never went back to the other kind of wire strippers. These a pleasure to use. One squeeze of the handle the insulation is perfectly stripped from a...

Old Digital Cameras is a collection of, well, old digital cameras. Models go back to 1996; pictured here is Leica's 2006 digital M3, which was obsolete within months and is now worth about a tenth of ...

Although many national parks are still open during the longest government shutdown in US history, there is no one around to clean the increasingly filthy bathrooms. Except, perhaps, for one man, Dan L...

The European Parliament is meeting this week, and the committee that will decide the future of the controversial new Copyright Directive will meet next, and depending on what they do, it might be the ...

Anti-vaxxers are winning the war on life. Measles outbreaks are happening with increasing frequency.US News and World Report:In late December, one person who was sick with the highly contagious viral ...

I don't usually pay much attention to gymnastics, but this routine by 21-year-old UCLA gymnast Katelyn Ohashi is mind blowing. Via Uproxx:Katelyn Ohashi is about to become a household name. The 21-yea...

If you played poker with Steve Albini -- esteemed guitarist for Big Black, Rapeman, and Shellac, recording engineer for Nirvana, Pixies, and PJ Harvey -- he would take all your money. I was surprised ...

Looks like Hulu is going to beat Netflix to market with their Fyre Festival documentary.Two documentaries on a festival that didn't happen. I was not one-documentary interested, but Mark is making pop...

Cryptocurrencies and Tor hidden services ushered in a new golden age for markets in illegal goods, especially banned or circumscribed drugs: Bitcoin was widely (and incorrectly) viewed as intrinsicall...

BREAKING: Donald Trump asked by reporter: "Have you ever worked for Russia?" pic.twitter.com/a2ph4Raduq— Paul Lee Ticks (@PaulLeeTicks) January 14, 2019No sniffles tho. Read the rest...

Today marks the 42nd anniversary of the release of David Bowie's mid-70s masterpiece, Low, the first album of his so-called Berlin Trilogy (later joined by "Heroes" and Lodger). Working with the incre...

Second Chance is a smartphone app developed by University of Washington engineers to detect an opioid overdose. The researchers tested the app at a public supervised injection facility in Vancouver, C...

When outraged googlers walked off the job last year to protest the company's practice of secretly paying off serial sexual assaulters and harassers, while denying employees the right to sue over haras...

A man carrying a firearm in his carry-on luggage got past the TSA screeners at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and flew with it to Narita International Airport on January 3. This occu...

I've just returned home from Star Trek: The Cruise, a truly extraordinary fan event for lovers of Science, Science Fiction, and the future.You really want to be on the next one.Longtime Boing Boing fr...

Following a publicity campaign to make it the most popular photo on Instagram, a photo of an egg became the most popular photo on Instagram.The campaign started off slowly, with under 10,000 likes by ...

"People complain a lot about the space that I take up", says Lutenist Elizabeth Kenny[Kenny] explains how and why the theorbo was developed in the 17th century, what it was used for, and what it's lik...

The "impossible screw" will "drive you nuts." It appears to turn only clockwise -- even when you turn it around. It's a small project you can do in your home shop even if you don't have a milling mach...

Vinod Khosla is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who chose to define his legacy through a spectacular legal battle to block access to the public part of a beach are he owns in California.Alexandria...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Twitter ninja, whose Twitter interactions far outstrip any establishment Democrat (including powerhouses like Kamala Harris and Barack Obama) as well as media outlets fro...

The graveyard of failed startups is littered with concepts that just got lost in translation. At its core, that's what great front-end design is about: Making an app or website usable, translating its...

LA teachers are on strike today, fighting against privatization, standardized tests, giant classes, and clawbacks of in-class teachers' aides.The LA Unified School District -- whose billionaire superi...

On this 1966 LP, British actor Roddy McDowall -- later known for playing Dr. Cornelius and Caesar in the original Planet of the Apes films -- delivers a wonderful reading of HP Lovecraft's classic sho...

Maximum Rocknroll, the seminal punk print 'zine launched in 1982, is ceasing publication of its paper edition. This truly marks the end of an era in punk culture and underground media. According to to...

Bob Einstein will be sorely missed. Read the rest...

Hannu Rajaniemi is the Finnish-Scottish mathematician and science fiction writer whose debut, 2012's Quantum Thief was widely celebrated; now, in Summerland, Rajaniemi delivers new kind of supernatura...

Chinese internet users can't type the numbers "1984" into social media, but Chinese bookstores freely sell copies of Orwell's novels, including Nineteen Eighty-Four, as well as other books whose title...

As EFF's Eva Galperin notes, Nicole Kobie's story about resisting surveillance by taping over your webcam "proves that once more, the best and most straightforward tech reporting is being done by Teen...

Professionalization isn't perfect: historically, professional societies "were structured around hierarchies of gender and race and laypeople were expected to obey expert judgment without even asking q...

In many ways, Richard Grenell was the perfect pick for Trump's ambassador to Germany: a longtime Fox News pundit and John Bolton protege whose vanity and narcissism cause him to lash out constantly (a...

Irene Posch and Ebru Kurbak's Embroidered Computer uses historic gold embroidery materials to create relays ("similar to early computers before the invention of semiconductors") that can do computatio...

The Worlds Richest Man Caught Cheating! screams a National Enquirer special edition devoting 11 lurid pages to Amazon chief Jeff Bezos and his alleged marriage-wrecking affair. You can loathe the tabl...

Libro.fm (previously) is an independent audiobook store that sells all the same audiobooks you can get on other platforms like Audible, Google Play, Apple, Downpour, etc, but unlike the industry leade...

Trump isn't America's most anti-immigrant president; that honor goes to Obama, the great deporter, who also extensively tested border wall technologies while deporting 2MM undocumented people. One of ...

In 2015, Stephen Harper's Tory government began enforcing a 1993 law that stripped expatriate citizens like me of our right to vote in Canada; last month, Justin Trudeau's Liberal government restored ...

A union that represents agents for the U.S. Border Patrol deleted a 2012 page from their website that said building walls or fences along the U.S./Mexico border to stop desperate migrants would be was...

Officials became so concerned by the presidents behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests...

Elon Musk's SpaceX let go 10% of its 6,000 person staff today. In May of last year, the company stated that it has had "many years" of continuing profitability and in recent weeks raised $273 million ...

With around 400,000 federal employees currently furloughed, more than 80 TLS certificates used by .gov websites have so far expired without being renewed....

'Verizon Gaming' is coming soon to Android, and a beta is already running on the Nvidia Shield, per a report from Chris Welch at Verge.The Verge can report that Verizon Gaming is already up and runnin...

'Verizon Gaming' is coming soon to Android, and a beta is already running on the Nvidia Shield, per a report from Chris Welch at Verge.The Verge can report that Verizon Gaming is already up and runnin...

Siouxsie and the Banshees' "The Killing Jar" from Peepshow (1988) is easily one of the band's finest tracks from an incredible body of work that has aged with grace. I consider this isolated recording...

On Friday, GoFundMe said it plans to close Brian Kolfage Jr.'s campaign to pay for Donald Trump's border wall. More than $20,000,000 (sweet Jesus) had been raised by nearly 350,000 donors before GoFu...

This screwdriver set comes in handy when you need to tighten or loosen a screw and a regular long handle screwdriver won't fit. The ratchet mechanism means you can quickly attach or remove a screw wit...

Frazzled American nerves should be calmed by Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathleen L. Arberg's statement that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is cancer free. The beloved justice is recovering and will return...

I wanted to make fudgy brownies.A week or so ago I posted a cry for help. There was so much conflicting information on how to make a fudgy brownie, I didn't know what to do.Tons of comments in our for...

In the wake of this week's Motherboard scoop that the major US carriers sell customers' location data to marketing companies that sell it on to bounty hunters and other unsavory characters, Google has...

Joe Lieberman (76) went on Fox Business News last night to let everyone know that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (29) "is not the future." I wonder how many Democratic Ocasio-Cortez supporters who watch Fo...

Today is the first day federal employees won't see their paycheck, thanks to Trump's government shutdown, and already we can see its effects. Miami International Airport has announced that they will b...

At CES, the Verge's Nilay Patel interviewed Vizio CTO Bill Baxter, who told her that when it comes to the surveillance features of his company's "smart" TVs, "its not just about data collection. Its a...

Pigzbe is a digital "piggy-wallet" for children that uses its own cryptocurrency called Wollo (WLO). It has gotten $100k on Kickstarter, but that's not where the real money is. According to ICO Bench,...

Last month, I published a post discussing the mountains of abandoned Bird Scooters piling up in city impound lots, and the rise of $30 Chinese conversion kits that let you buy a scooter at auction, sw...

I really enjoyed these two interviews on the D&D Beyond channel with actors Deborah Ann Woll (True Blood, Daredevil) and Joe Manganiello (True Blood, Justice League, Magic Mike), both D&D fana...

Here's a tidbit I came across in the excellent Book Curious newsletter:The Lilly Library Twitter account had some excellent words for the New Yorker headline describing the recent publication of a new...

One of the premises of Big Data is that it can be "theory free": rather than starting with a hypothesis ("men at buffets eat more when women are present," "more people will click this button if I move...

"Ag-gag" laws -- which ban the collection of evidence of wrongdoing on farms, from animal cruelty to food-safety violations -- are a sterling example of how monopolism perpetuates itself by taking ove...

Jake the police dog was screening passengers boarding the Norwegian Epic cruise ship for the Holy Ship! EDM festival on the ocean. Jake alerted his police officer companion that he smelled something s...

Last month, he amazing architecture-snark criticism site McMansion Hell (previously) announced gingerbread house contest to create "the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMans...

A bus driver in Milwaukee noticed a small toddler, alone and barefoot, running on a freeway overpass. She stops the bus, runs across the street and rescues the child. A passenger offers up her coat to...

Jonathan "Song A Day" Mann (previously) writes, "On 1/1/19 I hit ten full years of writing a song a day. Part of the idea behind my Song A Day project has always been to find the 'good' songs in that ...

Lisa Rein writes, "there is a big event going on tonight at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco on this Sixth Anniversary of Aarons tragic death; with a Q & A, followed by DJs, history and art till 2...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Sydney Li and Bennett Cyphers explain how to stop people tracking you through email. Read-receipt beacons and other trickery abounds....third-party email tracking ...

The power is in the polygons. Read the rest...

I was surprised to learn today that I've never posted the ad for Big Bill Hell's used cars in Baltimore. The omission is hereby rectified.Previously in Baltimore:Man shouts 'Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!' ...

Polymathic genius Jack Black has a new channel on YouTube, which is great, but what's even better is Finn M-K's piano accompaniment to Black's thanks-for-signing-up announcement. Read the rest...

The Fyre Festival documentary premieres on Netflix on January 18 and I can't wait. If you remember the Fyre Festival, you definitely weren't there... because, y'know, it didn't happen. And I'm glad, b...

Known as a "living fossil," the coelacanth is an order of fish thought to have been extinct for 65 million years until one was caught in 1938 in a fisherman's net off the coast of South Africa and ide...

Known as a "living fossil," the coelacanth is an order of fish thought to have been extinct for 65 million years until one was caught in 1938 in a fisherman's net off the coast of South Africa and ide...

On Fox News tonight, unofficial Trump spokesperson and noted racist Lou Dobbs went full fascist. Lou Dobbs said on tonight's broadcast that President Donald Trump has to "declare a national emergency,...

Investors accuse Alphabet's board of directors of failing their duties....

Yes, it's a soulless, grotesque question. But it's all about money, and investors are wondering if Jeff Bezos getting divorced means they're gonna lose money.Shares in Amazon inc seesawed on Thursday ...

At Jefferson K-8 School in Warren, Ohio, school police officer Adam Chinchik noticed that a car kept parking in the no-parking zone between two disabled spaces in front of the school. Turns out that i...

More than a decade of foot-dragging on fiber rollout has left millions of Americans dependent on taxpayer-funded copper-line infrastructure for landlines and DSL, but it's not like the carriers are pl...

Anna Abraham literally wrote the book on creativity and the brain. The Leeds Beckett University psychology professor is the author of a new textbook titled The Neuroscience of Creativity. From an inte...

Week Eleven for The Bureau has you returning back to the office. The HR Video Terminal has a few exit questions, as this will be your last day. While you're completing that, be sure to plug on a Brain...

A cow born with just one eye and no real nose was recently born in Bardhaman, West Bengal, India. According to, er, The Sun, a local source said that "Ever since the calf was born, the people have cro...

I had this Battleship game as a kid in the early 70s and remember thinking the cover illustration was weird. It showed Dad and Junior having the time of their lives playing the game as Mom and Lil Sis...

Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot was some important TV viewing for younger me.I woke up today with the theme music from Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot in my head. I could not find my set of DVDs, ...

Sources "familiar with Ring's practices" have told The Intercept that the company -- a division of Amazon that makes streaming cameras designed to be mounted inside and outside your home -- stores the...

I have a few different LED headlamps, but after reading the reviews for this one, I decided to add it to my collection. It features a band of LEDs that throw light in a wide area in front of you. It u...

A golden age of blackmail began in 1996, when the US Patent and Trademark Office created extremely generous criteria for when software could be patented, allowing every shitty grifter to register a pa...

There have been several attempts to force the US telcoms industry to respect our privacy: to stop our ISPs from spying on us and selling our usage data to marketers, to stop the mobile carriers from s...

Kent C. Dodds, who works to makes software development more accessible, tweeted: "You it's to your tweets and usernames . But have you to what it with assistive technologies like ?"Listen to wh...

Kevin McMahon of Longmont, Colorado received a year's probation for harassing and threatening a Hispanic family swimming in a pool in their apartment complex, where McMahon also resided. McMahon calle...

If you attended the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose last year, or if you're signed up to attend or support the next Worldcon in Dublin, Ireland, you're eligible to nominate for the Hugo A...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has some stiff competition when it comes to dance videos. Twitter user @katiemgould missed her flight in Atlanta and had to wait four hours for another plane. But rather than ...

Iowa Republican Congressperson Steve King is an ignorant insult to all humanity.The Hill reports:Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is questioning how terms such as "white nationalist" and "white supremacist" b...

Rev. C. John McCloskey III is a famous, beloved Opus Dei priest who is cozy with Washington power players like Newt Gingrich and Sam Brownback, both of whom he converted to Catholicism. In 2002 Rev. M...

On May 8, 1958, art imitated life in 2018. In an episode of a TV show called Trackdown, there was a conman named Trump, who tried to scare the bejeezus out of a town by preaching, "at midnight tonight...

Kids are bigger bullies in counties that voted for the incoherent mobster.NPR reports:After the 2016 presidential election, teachers across the country reported they were seeing increased name-calling...

Its a fresh and shiny New Year filled with hope and possibilities, but the same ol exaggerations, fantasy and fact-challenged nonsense as ever proliferates in this weeks tawdry tabloids. And as ever, ...

Chrome security engineer and EFF alumna Chris Palmer's State of Software Security 2019 is less depressing than you might think: Palmer calls out the spread of encryption of data in transit and better ...

Donnie Romero, founder of the Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth and fan of the gunman who killed dozens at the Pulse nightclub in Florida, is stepping down. Gambling, drugs, prostitution, the lot....

Donnie Romero, founder of the Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth and fan of the gunman who killed dozens at the Pulse nightclub in Florida, is stepping down. Gambling, drugs, prostitution, the lot....

A peer-reviewed study conducted by a trio of Princeton and NYU political scientists and published in Science Advances systematically examined the proliferation of fake news in the 2016 election cycle ...

Here's something to remember come the next Sysadmin Appreciation Day: Colombian drug lord El Chapo was only caught because his systems administrator flipped and started working for the feds, backdoori...

There was something special about the perfectly-dimensioned, shrinkwrapped new VHS tape. Overlarge yet empty, a blank canvas in a new age of copying video. And now, a decade or three later, a perfect ...

Les images de l'explosion d'un drone pendant une parade militaire dans une base loyaliste du sud du #Ymen. Six militaires ont t tus et 12 autres personnes, dont des officiers et des responsabl...

Quantity has a quality of its own. Lexar is the first to get 1TB SD cards to market.As ever, theres a price premium associated with this breakthrough in capacity; youll pay more for a single 1TB card ...

The Tappan Zee will meet its maker on Saturday as New York state contractors plan to blow up what's left of the 63-year-old bridge. Replaced by the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge in 2017, the iconic T...

Uber and Lyft are still waiting for feedback from the U.S. securities regulator on their confidential submissions for IPOs, Bloomberg reports tonight, citing people familiar with the matter who aren't...

Donald Trump's border wall vs. the historic La Lomita church in Texas, which dates back to 1852....

Did you know all those hundreds of thousands of U.S. government workers who aren't getting paid during Trump's 18-days-and-counting shutdown still have to show up for work, even if they are not gettin...

Could this be the eleventh-hour bid that saves Sears from liquidation? Good news for fans of the 126-year-old iconic American retail brand.Sears Holdings Corp Chairman Eddie Lampert today submitted a ...

I have followed the work of the brilliant indie hardware engineer, Sarah Petkus, for years. Her first projects to capture my attention were her delta robot army and NoodleFeet (see her YouTube feed fo...

An Australian woman is in stable condition after a massive freeway sign toppled onto her car near Melbourne. The dashcam video, captured by the driver behind her, is absolutely terrifying.(I wonder if...

In Illinois today, a law firm announced they are filing a lawsuit against Tesla to hold the electric car maker accountable for a teen who died in an accident involving a car they say had a defective b...

Etsy seller Timothy "Cthuluforyou" Kostelnik sells a wide variety of tentacle- and eyeball-themed housewares, but few match his $38 mutantini glass for sheer encrustation with pseudopods, viscera and ...

Bell Canada is the giant, diversified former national monopoly carrier that has been allowed to buy magazines, TV channels, and other users of its infrastructure, violating the cardinal separation of ...

A XVIth Century book held in the National Library of Sweden's collection features a "sixfold dos-a-dos binding," meaning that the book could be opened in six different ways to reveal six different tex...

CNLohr discovered that underclocking the ESP8266 wifi module's Baseband PLL made the wifi channel progressively narrower, until it could not longer be detected by an unmodified wifi receiver -- but a ...

EU privacy rules force European companies to surrender data they hold on anyone, anywhere; and that includes SCL Elections, which owned Cambridge Analytica, the notorious Facebook data-miner and elect...

One distant galaxy, one "very unusual repeating signal." But it's never aliens. ...a very unusual repeating signal, coming from the same source about 1.5 billion light years away. Such an event has on...

Samsung's sleazy deals with Facebook mean that owners of Samsung phones are not able to uninstall the Facebook apps that come pre-installed with their devices. This is true even of flagship phones lik...

Fertility doctors often advise men that wearing boxers instead of briefs lowers scrotal temperature and possibly increase sperm count. The CoolMen device takes that idea to the extreme, instrumenting ...

KARR is my second favorite animated automobile with an attitude. I love how he blew up after flying off a cliff, but was back a few episodes later looking perfect.I remembered KARR as having a differe...

Gambling site Bookmaker took quite a punch last night after losing $276,424 to people who correctly bet that Trump would make at least 3.5 "false statements" (aka lies, or alternative facts) during hi...

A Turkish court has sentenced journalist Pelin nker to 13 months' imprisonment for her participation in reporting the Panama Papers, a massive leak of documents from the tax-evasion enablers Mossack-F...

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a wireless battery powered sensor that can be attached to a bee's back. The sensor logs temperature and humidity as the bee flies, and the ba...

Dr. Ruth Westheimer is a German-born Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States in 1956 and eventually became arguably the world's best known sex therapist. She's hosted multiple rad...

Sinclair Target's long, deeply researched history of the format wars over RSS are an excellent read and a first-rate example of what Charlie Stross has called "the beginning of history": for the first...

Librarian, artist, and bookbinder Sharalee Armitage Howard of Coeur dAlene, Idaho decided that rather than dig up the stump of the 110-year-old cottonwood tree in her yard, she'd transform it into a l...

I just started working on this maze. It looks easy, but you have to proceed by passing colored dots in red, green, yellow order. Is it cheating to work backward? Does it help? Read the rest...

In December, a woman at Hacienda HealthCare in Phoenix, Arizona who has been in a coma for at least a decade gave birth. This week, police served a warrant for DNA samples from the men who work at the...

When top German officials had their emails and social media hacked and dumped, people wondered whether the attack was some kind of well-financed act of political extremism, given that the targets were...

In a freak accident, a 53-year-old woman was driving on a highway in Melbourne, Australia when a huge road sign from above fell and crushed her car. She was rushed to the hospital with neck injuries b...

The video above is an anti-drug PSA from the early 1970s, in which a slick talking magician offers drugs to children on a playground. "Hey kiddies, gather round, the man with the goodies is here!" he ...

The Ferguson uprising was triggered by the police assassination of Michael Brown, but even before that killing, the city was a powder-keg, thanks to the practice of financing the city government by le...

Austrian train workers were clearing tracks that go through the Gesaeuse national park when they noticed a mountain goat that wouldn't move from the sidelines of their path, even after honking the tra...

Luca Stricagnoli has the funk of 40,000 years. Read the rest...

30,000 employees of the LA Unified School District are preparing to go on strike tomorrow, demanding a reversal of the trend to privatizing public education.In response, the nation's largest public sc...

A helicopter pilot pulls off an amazing rescue, with incredible precision flying, in the French Alps.Global News:Nicolas Derely wrote on Facebook that he was skiing on Jan. 2 with his family and his s...

Archaeologists make mistakes. I recently ran across this crown-that-was-actually-a-bucket story as well.The Art Newspaper:In a bit of serendipity, the curators realised during research for the show th...

Do you like the idea of listening to Trump "struggling to breathe"? Splinter's Jon Eiseman has the video for you.Not the normal, everyday breathing that you and I would do. His breathing was labored b...

Mass protests have wracked Serbia after critics of nationalist strongman president Aleksandar Vui were attacked in a series of failed assassination attempts, compounding Vui's own human rights abuses ...

Fatbergs -- vast agglomerations of human waste, toilet paper, sanitary products and general filth held together by fat -- are often found in the sewers of major cities such as London. But a 64-meter m...

Backward Picnic is like a terrifying and fascinating cross between David Lynch and the Coen Brothers. Read the rest...

Entertainment giant Lionsgate is allegedly using contentID, YouTube's internal copyright arbitation process, to remove criticism of its movies. (Note that "Angry Joe", the author of the viral video em...

From @rainmaker1973 on Twitter: "Your visual system constantly adapts to all the external stimuli, and this is why if you stare at this picture, it will slowly disappear"Doesn't work for me!Previously...

In Saudi Arabia, women can only get a divorce after proving abuse in court, but men can simply file -- in secret -- for a divorce from their wives, and sometimes, they don't even tell their wives, con...

Robotics: It's a field that used to exist only as science fiction. Now it's science fact, and it's not just a playground for MIT prodigies. Thanks to the ROS (Robot Operating System) framework, anyone...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH little Donald really, really wants a wall....

Editor's Note: Richard Metzger is a connoisseur of cannabis, and recently started growing his own. He's test-driving high-end rig good for small-scale grows from Cloudponics. This is not a sponsored p...

Cannon Harrison, 24, was on dating app Bumble when he connected with a woman in his area who quickly bragged to him that she had just shot a "bigo buck," a large deer, in the darkness. She even sent H...

Mind metaphysics, or positive thinking, is a fascinating and mysterious field of personal exploration and inquiry. The guiding principle and basic tenet of mind metaphysics is that thoughts are causat...

Salinas, California police nabbed Roberto Daniel Arroyo, 33, after homeowners the Dungan family captured video of the gentleman licking their doorbell, many times, in the middle of the night Saturday....

Brutus Patutus is described by his human as a goofy, loving, American Bully .He lives his best life in Orange County, enjoys opening things, and really likes it when mom gives him a pig ear for a trea...

Today is R. Kelly's birthday. Today, news is breaking that the singer is under investigation in Georgia. R. Kelly has been accused of abuse, predatory behavior, and pedophilia for decades. A new inves...

Trump's government shutdown, now on day 17 and counting, has led to the closure of Joshua Tree National Park. The park announced today, Tuesday January 8, that it will temporarily close effective 8 am...

As Donald Trump prepares for his 8-minute The Wall remarks, which will be televised live by all major U.S. networks, read Nicholas Rasmussen's take in Just Security on the so-called terrorism crisis a...

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort provided an individual identified as a Kremlin agent with internal campaign polling data, while Russia's military was executing a political attack on the United S...

For more than 100 years, New York City's Tony-award-winning Drama Book Shop has been a stalwart of the city's thronging theater community; but like so many independent bookstores, it has struggled (it...

The same year that Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai killed broadband privacy and cheated Network Neutrality to death, the Trump tax plan delivered a $20B windfall to AT&T -- both Trump and Pai claim...

News alert from Promobot: "A self-driving Tesla Model S hit and destroyed an autonomous Promobot the robot model v4 in Las Vegas in a car accident. The incident took place at 3000 Paradise Rd, Las Veg...

What an excellent choice! Dr William Gibson, Grand Master of Science Fiction has such a nice ring to it. Go Bill! You can watch him get his award at the next Nebula Awards weekend, May 16-19, at the W...

A gentleman thought he could threaten a woman waiting for an Uber outside of her home in Rio de Janiero by demanding that she hand over her phone and that he was armed. What he didn't know is that the...

There are more houses for sale in San Mateo County, Santa Clara County and San Francisco County than at any time since 2013; inventory in December was up 113% year-on-year, and asking prices have fall...

If you want to follow someone in realtime, you don't need to shell out to shady data-brokers like Securus (which use a marketing company that exploits a privacy law loophole to obtain phone location d...

After 126 years in business, reports CNBC, Sears is shutting shop.Sears Holdings has rejected Chairman Eddie Lamperts bid to save the 126-year-old company, setting the storied retailer with more than ...

The Ethereum Classic (ETC) blockchain was recently compromised by a hacker who spent 88,500 tokens (worth $500,000) then used a lot of computing power to roll back the blockchain so they could get the...

In 1917, a munitions ship exploded in Halifax, Nova Scotia, devastating the city and shattering the lives of its citizens. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the events...

It's been ten years since the people of Juneau, Alaska succumbed to conspiracy theories and voted to ruin their kids' teeth by removing fluoride from the drinking water, and it shows.A BMC Oral Health...

Love Hultn makes beautiful game devices based on the Raspberry Pi and RertroPie. His latest design, which has a speckly textured finish, is called the Geoboi. Read the rest...

My favorite part of Bewitched was always Bernard Fox's character Doctor Bombay. Read the rest...

The Computer Entertainment Show gave a digital sex toy an award. Then it rescinded the award because sex toys are "immoral, obscene, indecent [or] profane" and banned it from the trade show floor. Kat...

First Gatwick, now Heathrow. Departures at Londons Heathrow airport were stopped for some time on Tuesday after a drone sighting was reported to authorities.Metropolitan Police reported a drone sighti...

Last month, London's Gatwick airport (the second busiest airport in the UK) was closed for several days after drones were sighted in its airspace.The Gatwick drones are still a mystery (it's even poss...

AT&T has added a "5Ge" symbol to several phones from Samsung and LG, misleading customers into thinking they have something special. There is no 5Ge network, it is LTE.The Verge reports:AT&T...

In the 1930s, the Works Public Administration commissioned a 1":100' wooden model of San Francisco; the final model is 38' x 42', with 6,000 removable city blocks spanning 158 pieces.After being exhib...

Every ten years, the US government is constitutionally mandated to carry out a census: the first census, in 1790, only counted "the head of household and the number of free white males, other free per...

What do you do if you're walking alone on a lonely dark street and a car starts chasing you? This man is minding his own business when a car stops alongside him. It's not clear what the passenger of t...

The 2018 election included a Florida ballot initiative to restore felons' voting rights (with the exception of convicted murderers and sexual offenders): the 1.4 million Americans who will get their v...

If you require Nutella on demand, these 25-gram jars pocketable glass jars of the spreadable wonder substance will fit the bill. Amazon sells them in lots of 16 and 32. Read the rest...

This lovely documentary shares a bit of the magic that stuntman and comedian Gary Morgan calls life.The Flying Morgans are Los Angeles' honest-to-goodness circus family. I was lucky enough to have lun...

The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive has been cloning giant redwoods from genetic material still living in their stumps, and planting them around the world.e360@Yale reports:Today, giant stumps of ancie...

Go fuck yourself, Rochester.A TV meteorologist at an NBC affiliate in Rochester, New York was fired after being accused of using an on-air racial slur in reference to Martin Luther King Jr. However, W...

Composer and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and three of his collaborators on the massively successful musical have saved a famed 100-year-old specialty theater bookstore in New York City from go...

When I was very little, my big brother brought me in to school for show-and-tell. In the lunchroom, a kid fired a rubber band that hit me right in the face. I still remember the welt. This fascinating...

Art conservator Emily Macdonald-Korth was evaluationg a client's Jean-Michel Basquiat untitled painting from 1981 when she looked at the work under ultraviolet light to reveal any repairs or varnishin...

Robert Crosland, the high school teacher who fed a puppy to a turtle in front of young teenagers, was found not guilty of animal cruelty this week.Robert Crosland, the Preston Junior High School teach...

In four days, federal employees will suffer their first missed paycheck since Trump's border wall shutdown; it's hard to say who will be worst hit: the employees who are furloughed will never see that...

After 20 years of unprecedented lows, Canada's central bank is gradually raising rates; this, combined with strict rules on new loans, empty house taxes in overheated cities like Vancouver, and mandat...

The leap from a Wacom's Intuos (a ~$300 graphics tablet) to its Cintiq (a $1200 pen-sensitive display) was always too much for me to make: a big investment in a new way of working that I'm not sure I'...

As any successful company can tell you, it's all about the numbers. Compiling and using data quickly and effectively is key, and the best programs for doing just that share one programming language: P...

Hyundai developed a "walking car" and "unveiled" it at the CES trade show yesterday. As far as I can tell it's just a mockup video, but the idea is timely. Traditionally, only flimsy and obviously imp...

@dyingmars, artist and author of the dark fantasy webcomic Aside, made the best "snowman" I've ever seen. We made a snowman today pic.twitter.com/r6gR0NKAnz— Zack Frost (@dyingmars) January 7, ...

No one in America explains the importance of good network policy than Susan Crawford (previously), a one-woman good sense factory when it comes to Network Neutrality, municipal fiber, and reining in t...

A gentleman was trapped in a Burger King restroom, forced to listen to the staff laugh at his plight. In compensation the local manager offered him 'meals for life' -- that's right, a lifetime supply ...

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me," and it analyzes how Big Tech has been able to "disrupt" incumbent industries, but has repurposed obscure technology regulation...

In the first injection in a human being of macromolecules whose primary structure was developed from a religious text a French 16 year old named Adrien Locatelli describes how he paid Vector Builder $...

After four years of Freedom of Information Act litigation, the ACLU has prevailed and forced the Customs and Border Patrol to release 1,000 pages' worth of training documents in which new agents learn...

The state of Tennessee pays doctor-contractors by the case to review Medicare disability claims, leading to a situation in which doctors review four or more cases per hour -- and kick profoundly disab...

Baylor University political scientist Patrick Flavin's forthcoming study in Social Science Research finds that people in states with higher public goods spending (on "libraries, parks, highways, natur...

The New York Times weighs in on an Authors Guild survey that shows a "drastic 42% decline in authors' earnings over the past decade. John Scalzi offers some important perspective.Here's the summary:* ...

Bill Gates has a long, complicated and showy relationship with malaria eradication, and in a new letter, he makes a case that mosquitoes are Earth's deadliest animals, outkilling even the murderous h....

I have a stainless steel Contigo Autoseal Water Bottle but it's a bit too heavy for air travel. This plastic version is lighter and less expensive than the metal bottle. And it's really cheap as an ad...

Bill Bailey, performing at the London Palladium, entertained the audience by playing major-key songs in a minor key, and vice versa. "Now some of the great national anthems are written in the major ke...

Previous studies into the effects of THC (the main psychoactive component of marijuana) have shown it to play a role in preventing symptoms of Alzheimers. But a new study published in Aging and Mechan...

We repeat: nothing for the ineffective, immoral and costly 'border wall'. #TrumpShutdown pic.twitter.com/0MoSry6LOv— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) January 6, 2019Soon millions of American c...

This black bear in Florida thought he'd pay a social visit to a family over the holidays. After lumbering onto the porch and knocking over some decorations for fun, he rang the doorbell. But the famil...

John Park conducted a video workshop on how to make a drum sequencer by putting black and white markings on a disc. When he spins the disk, a row of optical sensors trigger the different drum sounds. ...

The host of Life Where I'm From, a YouTube channel about life as a foreigner in Japan, visited a pop-up cafe with robot waiters that are remotely controlled by people with disabilities. The workers c...

It's an unusual day in the Fox news sphere when one of their own busts Press Secretary Sarah Sanders for her alternative facts.Fox host Chris Wallace interviewed Sanders on Sunday, and when she claime...

In 1978, Mr. Rogers hosted a television show for adults called "Old Friends...New Friends" in which he interviewed interesting musicians, artists, athletes, teachers, and others "about their search fo...

Sosena Gebre Eyesus by Sosena Gebre EyesusListen above to Sosena Gebre Eyesus's deeply spiritual and enchanting Ethiopian Orthodox hymns sung over the Begena, a ten string instrument also known as the...

Zuckerberg San Francisco General has arranged for all ER care to be out-of-network, allowing the hospital to charge whatever wild prices it likes.VOX:Zuckerberg San Francisco General (ZSFG), recently ...

I used to see/hear Porky say this 20x a day.I want this on my tombstone, but maybe higher res. Read the rest...

As a kid in the '70s, watching the annual monarch butterfly migration in Californa was a thing to see. Not so much any more.From KTLA 5 in LA:Researchers with an environmental group have labeled as di...

r/megalophobia is a my new favorite subreddit, specializing in things that are very big and therefore very, very scary. Postings range from Lovecraftian monsters looming in the mist to zoom-out animat...

A kid got a wireless mini-microscope for Christmas and quickly located the best bugs in their yard: "Do you think anyone will watch a 2-minute long video?"The model they got is the Tsaagan Wifi 1080p ...

David Shaerf, a professor of English and cinema studies at Michigan's Oakland University, is fanatical about Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick. He's so fanatical that he made a documentary about Moby Dick fa...

Too late for Christmas! Razer's laptopsone of few designed for playing games that an adult could use in public without embarassmentgot a spec bump to include 2000-series Nvidia graphics chips. The upd...

It should be no secret by now that thanks to Adobe's ubiquitous suite of design software, graphic designers do the bulk of their work in front of a computer screen. Why shouldn't they learn those tool...

Joshua Bearman has long been one of my favorite journalists (he wrote the Wired story that was adapted as the movie Argo, and a profile of the super weird software mogul John McAfee). He's got a new, ...

When this curious contraption is switched on, an inner circle of white balls appears to be rolling inside the outer circle, but that's actually not the case at all. Below is a video explaining this ci...

Ipek Irgit mass-produced a novel bikini design, making millions and soon getting into furious legal fights with anyone who would dare copy it. In fashion, there is a fine, sometimes indistinguishable ...

Flyjumper crafted this magnificent Stratocaster-shaped guitar from 1,200 colored pencils and a lot of grit. He's posted many more photos and GIFs of the build here."I saw a lot of people online making...

In Patients' crowdfunding campaigns for alternative cancer treatments, published by researchers from Simon Fraser University in The Lancet Oncology (Sci-Hub mirror) we learn that thanks to Gofundme, 1...

Documentarian Arlen Parsa had a key realization: slowing Trump down to half-speed "reveals how often times his logic is indistinguishable from that of a drunk person."my favorite way to listen to the ...

For years, Disneyland annual passes, parking fees and single-day-tickets have seen above-inflation price-hikes, but this year's will take the cost of the no-blackout-day "Premier Pass" to $1,949, up 2...

Last year saw a wave of teachers' strikes across America, but mostly in red states where public education has been starved of funds, putting teachers on starvation wages, subjecting kids to dangerous ...

The single best demonstration of the difference in emotional tenor between minor and major-key dominated variations of a tune -- and a great topical joke to boot, when it comes time to show the Star S...

The Cesar Romero "Joker" is the best Joker of all Jokers. Read the rest...

No matter where you go on the web these days, you're on somebody's radar. Advertisers, bots, or even hackers find it increasingly easy to pick up your trail and track your habits - unless you're using...

I want fudgy brownies.I am using a box mix that I really like, but I couldn't remember what I do to make brownies more 'fudgy,' so I searched the internet. That was fucking useless.Her royal highness ...

Uh, oh! Spaghetti-Os!Everyone loves canned pasta while riding on a carousel. Read the rest...

I pity the fool that doubts his wisdom.Also, I want to know what happened in Mexico City. Read the rest...

Faith Goldy is the white supremacist who failed in her bid for mayor of Toronto (despite an endorsement from US white supremacist Congressman Steve King); during her campaign, she unsuccessfully sued...

When Ios launched, Apple's App Store took a 30% royalty on all apps sold. App vendors responded in large part by switching to free apps that charged in-app for annual subscriptions and other fees, pro...

At least three people are reported dead after a gunman opened fire in a California bowling alley late Friday night.The Torrance Police Department says in a tweet there were "reports of shots fired wit...

Let's face it. Binge-watching nothing but sitcoms and melodramas is like a stereotypical Chinese food buffet: You'll feel empty an hour later. Finally, there's a streaming service out there for those ...

Last week, incoming Senator Kyrsten Sinema [D-AZ] was sworn in by Mike Pence, in his aspect as President of the Senate, choosing to take her oath on a book containing both the Constitutions of the Uni...

Fannie Mae predicts a "coming exodus of older homeowners" as Boomers die, downsize or enter retirement homes, which will dump a ton of housing stock on the market and crash prices, finally making home...

Step one: write a bot that hits the "play this captcha as audio for me" on a Google Re:captcha; step two: record that as an MP3; step three: feed the MP3 into the Google's Speech2Text API; step four: ...

How can America possibly fund a radical transformation into a carbon-free economy, centered on preparing for the coming centuries of climate crises? ACO knows: a 70% tax on people with more than $10,0...

Mark Marino is following up on his previous course on "how to write and read fake news" with an unaccredited Masters Class in Dad Jokes: "In this classy class, well explore the ins and outs of jokes o...

Machinist/sculptor Chris Bathgate (previously) has revealed his latest piece: the OTFB (out the front/out the back), a spring-loaded, switchblade-inspired piece that substitutes rotation for a sliding...

With the public domain re-opening for the first time in a generation (thanks, Sonny Bono), artists are once again getting a fresh installment of raw material with which to make new art, in the grand t...

Bruce Sterling says the future consists of old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky, and, as we all know, China is the future.Generations of brutally imposed limitations on fertility has created a...

Late last year, Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson sued Comcast for lying and lying and lying and lying and lying to the people of Minnesota, all the time, because Comcast is a garbage company, u...

Sound on!Mitch Centers did the effects, and says, I saw these two fighting and HAD to edit in some effects for them!This kiddo really delivers an Oscar-worthy performance. Watch: View this post on I...

The Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled that Uber can't use binding arbitration "agreements" to stop its drivers from joining a class action suit against the company; the court held that the arbitration...

The city attorney for Los Angeles is suing the company behind The Weather Channel and its mobile app, and says the app covertly mined user data.The Weather Channel app is hugely popular, and the the l...

Last month, an Australian Fortnite player who streamed himself attacking his wife off-screen while his screaming children watched was charged with assault and banned from Amazon-owned Twitch. But afte...

In the year 1987, at the John F. Kennedy Space Center, NASA launched the last of America's deep space probes. The payload, perched on the nose cone of the massive rocket, was a one-man exploration ves...

Blessed with an abundance of National Park attractions right in the midst of their metropolis, San Francisco leaders have decided not to let garbage pile up.SF Examiner shares:Trash has been piling up...

The Marriott hotel chain today said that a smaller number of customers were affected by a recent hack than initially estimated, but admitted that the hackers got customer passport numbers. The hotel ...

Hackers have published a big dump of private data related to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and hundreds of other of the country's politicians, in what is said to be the biggest data dump of its kin...

NBC News reports that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and other top executives are super pissed at the New York Times over what they say are weeks of antagonistic coverage and an anti-Facebook bias. Dylan ...

In response to the old-fart Republicans who thought they finally had a gotcha moment by digging up a college dance video of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she fired back with the best tweet o...

Below is New Year's Eve video of Michael Minnillo, general manager of Yountville, California's legendary French Laundry restaurant attempting a dramatic saber opening of a $2,000 bottle of Billecart-S...

This deck of 56 'Rider Back' Bicycle playing cards has blank faces.These come in handy for a number of magic tricks. The cards are printed on US Playing Card stock, and excepting the missing printed f...

I don't drink wine, but living in Northern California I still end up visiting wineries in Napa and Sonoma with friends and visitors. Next time we're headed on a wine tasting trip, I'm going to suggest...

Reminiscent of the Trumpkin congressman who blamed his wife for his illegal campaign expenses, we've now got a hunter who's pointing his trigger finger at his wife for his illegal killing of a deer.Wh...

A passerby in Perth, Western Australia heard a man inside a home yelling "Why don't you die?" amidst a toddler's screams. The concerned neighbor called the police who responded with haste. Turned out,...

Released in 1998 by Tiger Electronics, more than 40 million Furbies were sold in its first three years of life. What made this bizarre animatronic toy so damn popular? At IEEE Spectrum, Allison Marsh ...

This is only missing Max, the Bionic dog. Read the rest...

The Washington Post reports that without legislation to continue a pay-cap it appears senior Trump officials including Vice-President Pence will receive pay raises.The raises appear to be an intended ...

A gentleman in Charlotte, North Carolina tried to push a woman into his car, but she got away and ran into a nearby karate studio. The would-be kidnapper chased her inside the dojo, and that's where h...

I bought a six=pack of Gildan crew T-shirts to replace my ratty old ones. They're very inexpensive and comfortable. They're on sale right now, so I bought another six-pack of whites and a six-pack of ...

The unrepeatability of the FleischmannPons experiment in the 1980s soured the world on cold fusion as a possible energy source for decades, but recent fusion reactor breakthroughs seem to indicate tha...

Neil Green made a useful chart of the 42 types of difficult people you are likely to encounter on a software development team. Each type is represented by an animal, and by clicking on the animal you ...

A graph from Credit Suisse/Forbes reveals that 0.7% of people on the planet own 46% of the world's wealth. That tiny percentage controls $128.7 trillion and they've done a good job convincing the 70% ...

Italian knife dealer Giacomo Giovannitti shows his skills using a Japanese chef's knife to cut transparent slices of tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, apples, and radishes.Image: YouTube Read t...

Forbes publishes 300 stories a day, and is developing AI software that writes first drafts of articles. From Digiday:With Bertie, a contributor who writes regularly about the automobile industry might...

A memorial service was held Thursday for Angry Bob the bad swan. Bob went viral in 2010 after killing one mate and chasing two more away.The ceremony for 'Angry Bob' was held after a large online resp...

St. Petersburg, Florida. Facebook user TJ Biandudi posted a video he says was filmed by his mother and sister when they patronized a McDonalds in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Monday. The footage shows a w...

The threats to established networks are coming from all directions these days, which means any big company that can't invest in security isn't going stay that way long. Know a thing or two about cover...

I regret to inform you that Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is back on his inappropriate for a CEO tweets again.The two weird tweets were sandwiched between two other seemingly normal tweets about ...

Is 911 service down in your area? Got a complaint about your mobile provider? Just invented a new iphone-killer, and need safety approval before your product goes to market? Well, too bad, you'll hav...

The censorship industry in China is big business.My office is next to the big training room, Mr. Yang said. I often hear the surprised sounds of Ah, ah, ah. China's censorship machine is so well oiled...

On Saturday night, Casper the Friendly Ghost attempted to rob a Ramada Inn in Wayne, New Jersey. According to police, the ghost jumped over the reception desk, pried open the cash drawer, and ran off ...

Directing airplanes to their gates could be a monotonous job, but not for this marshall at the Toronto Airport, who simultaneously motions to the taxiing plane while busting out the moves. Similar to ...

When on a picnic, I've been known to toss an apple core or banana peel into the woods. Turns out, even "organic litter" is a bad idea. From Mother Nature Network:...An apple core can take two months t...

The honorable Nancy Pelosi of California, having received the majority of the votes cast is duly elected the representative for the 116th Congress.And after those words were spoken, cheers and clappin...

This paraglider is prepping for a cross-country trip across New South Wales, Australia with 39 other pilots when a dust devil decides to have some fun with him. He's tossed across the sky, out of cont...

Last week, private equity investor and adventurer Victor Vescovo became the first person to touch the deepest spot in the Atlantic Ocean, 27,480 feet down to the floor of the Puerto Rico Trench, in hi...

There is no better way to teach kids the improtance of saving than by having them stick fake $100 bills into a piggy bank. Read the rest...

Earlier today, the China National Space Administration's Chang'e 4 landed a rover on the far side of the moon for the first time. Blocked from direct communication with the Earth, the lander and rover...

Wow, never saw that one coming. The print your own guns proponent is a creep.In Texas, '3D gun' guy Cody Wilson has been indicted on multiple counts of sexual assault against a minor.Wilson rose to na...

Even though cheese is pretty disgusting when you think about what it is, most cultures enjoy eating the coagulated mammary secretions of hoofed animals. Even bleu cheese (which is little more that mol...

The David Rumsey Map Collection shares an amazing collection of photographs and the history of this 42 by 38 foot WPA built wooden map of San Francisco. Visit their site for high quality images.I will...

Rostislav Blaha created gridzzly, a simple single-page website where you pick the type of grid you want (lines, square, triangle, hex, dotted), set the size of the grid units and the weight of the lin...

For decades, the WELL has rung in the new year with a weeks-long public discussion led by Jon Lebkowsky and Bruce Sterling (2018, 2017, 2016, 2014, 2012, 2010, 2007, 2005, etc).This year's contributor...

I'm an avid reader of Fred Wilson's email newsletter, A VC. Wilson is a VC who invested in Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, and Kickstarter. In one of his recent issues Wilson predicted a very like...

Mookkie is a pet bowl with built-in AI and a fisheye lens that keeps a close watch on your pets' dietary habits, and will generate detailed reports on how much food they are eating. It will close up i...

Latif Nasser is Director of Research for WNYC's Radiolab. He wrote a piece for Transom about how he comes up with story ideas for the show. He has an interesting "bag of tricks" to find stories and ha...

New York Times columnist and all-around unclassifiably interesting person Rob Walker has a book coming out in May called The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discov...

Brazil's new president Jair Bolsonaro rode to power on a platform of racist and gendered discrimination, genocide for indigenous people, homophobia, torture apology, and the abolition of human rights;...

In 2015, Mozilla announced that it would turn Thunderbird -- one of the last freestanding, cross-platform email clients -- into a freestanding, independent project, and in 2017, Thunderbird became a c...

Get ghosted by Santa this year? Here's a tip: Once Christmas is over, it's ok to do a little materialistic self-care. To that end, here's one last sleigh ride through Boing Boing's best deals of 2018....

This 8 year old is a lot more patient and creative than most adults I know. What a cool little kid-made short film.My 8 year old daughter made a Stop-motion Lego movie hoping to post it on Legolife, b...

Adam Savage keeps mining deeper and deeper strata of nerdly obsessions, with recent Tested projects including collaborating with other prop makers to create a spot-on ACES NASA astronaut suit for cosp...

Welcome back to The Bureau. Its the tenth installment, with two remaining installments until your day is complete. You've found your way to a bar, and it's a comfortable view of the train. You may hav...

If you make your own espresso and want to pull shots that are always the same strength, this set of 2 shot glasses with markings for ounces, milliliters, teaspoons, and tablespoons might be what you'r...

If you make your own espresso and want to pull shots that are always the same strength, this set of 2 shot glasses with markings for ounces, milliliters, teaspoons, and tablespoons might be what you'r...

It isn't a dog movie! 1974's Benji is still a tear jerker.The theme song, "I Feel Love" was nominated for an Academy Award.The whole movie is on YouTube here. Read the rest...

Over at EDGE.org, the must-read hub of intellectual inquiry and head-spinning science, Boing Boing pal and legendary book agent John Brockman is launching a new series of essays "from important third ...

In southern Italy today, a brazen highway robbery in which thieves used bulldozers to pry open an armored van on the road. Police say the thieves blocked the money-mobile off with two big vehicles on ...

A gentleman stylishly dressed from head to toe in identity-concealing attire found a bicycle parked at a police station. The bicycle did not belong to him, and it was locked, but the man wished to tak...

Reminiscent of Trump's infamous remark that undocumented Mexicans coming into the United States were rapists and criminals, conservative writer Star Parker told hosts on Fox and Friends that people ne...

According to its infernal creator, HATETRIS "is bad Tetris. It's hateful Tetris. It's Tetris according to the evil AI from 'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.'"Background, hints, and links to others' ...

It's easy enough to pick this Caterpillar padlock with a lockpicking rake, but if that seems too difficult, just buy another Caterpillar padlock of the same model. They all use the same key. Read the ...

'Super Dave Osborne' and 'Marty Funkhouser' have left us. Curb Your Enthusiasm fans will best remember actor Bob Einstein from his impact on Larry David's long-running HBO comedy series.Einstein was 7...

Core77 published its annual collection of "the best mind-melting manufacturing videos," including furniture made from chocolate, a chicken-wire wrapper, a thermoformed case, a cookie-cutter former, an...

Is that a threat?During today's back-from-the-holidays meetings, Donald Trump said the United States Government could be shut down for a long time...as long as it takes.Hang on now.As long as it takes...

This rat has two green LED lights implanted near its bladder to help the animal regain control of its urination. According to Washington University researcher Robert Gereau, the technology -- which in...

YouTuber Toni Patanen "Pupsi" likes to make musical instruments ocarinas in particular with vegetables. Here he cuts up some sweet potatoes and a squash, and then (at 1:39) plays a mystical version ...

In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy prosecuted Eros magazine publisher Ralph Ginzburg for violating federal obscenity laws when Eros ran 8-pages of photos of a naked black man and naked white woma...

Sanctions are Coming - November 4. For today's Cabinet meeting at the White House, there was a weird Trump Game of Thrones political meme poster, wall sized, displaying Trump's face and those words, ...

Sanctions are Coming - November 4. For today's Cabinet meeting at the White House, there was a weird Trump Game of Thrones political meme poster, wall sized, displaying Trump's face and those words, ...

The Alpaca graphic design cooperative created this terrific "illustrated and interactive Dante's Inferno, an alternative learning tool for the Divine Comedy first Cantica, made for aiding visual memor...

In 1987, Max Headroom appeared on Sesame Street where he recited the alphabet. Catch the wave.And if you're not hip to Max's cyberpunk stylings, the 1985 UK TV movie is where it all started: Read the ...

This Norwegian sailer is one cool dude. While sailing in the Pacific Ocean, he spots what he at first thinks is trash. He wants to clean it up, and then realizes that it's actually sea turtles four i...

A neural network became a expert at detecting art forgeries by learning how famous artists drew their line strokes. Researchers at Rutgers University and the Atelier for Restoration and Research of Pa...

During a storm in Kununurra, Australia that dumped nearly three inches of rain, a farmer braved the weather to check on the dam near his home. That's when he spotted this 11-foot python "moving across...

Netflix removed an episode of the program "Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj" in Saudi Arabia because the royal family didn't like its coverage of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi....

It's been 48 hours since the American public domain expanded for the first time in 20 years, allowing Americans free access to works from 1923, including Cecil B Demille's 1923 epic "The Ten Commandme...

Dawn ver. is a Tokyo cafe in Akasaka where all the table service is performed by 120 cm tall OriHime-D robots that are piloted by people who are paralyzed and work from home; it was inspired by a fict...

Inter UI is a family of freeware fonts with ""a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text" designed for small screen text. (via Four Short Links) Read the rest...

Available in small, medium and large, the Unicorn Costume for Dogs [Amazon] offers a comfortable, adjustable-fit design that's secured under the dog's chin, neck and chest with three rows of velcro st...

Chris Patty made a wooden mini-jukebox where you pick songs by swiping magnetic cards. It's like a prop from an old BBC sci-fi show about how great it would be to listen to music would be in 2019.The ...

Words on paper. It should be easy, but as any screenwriter can tell you, the road from the first scene to final draft can be a slog - especially if you're collaborating. Writers need a tool that will ...

In 1983, The Toronto Star invited Isaac Asimov to predict what the world of 2019 would look like. He was astute in his understanding of likely technical developments, but wrong about other things. Whi...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Super-Fun-Pak Comix features Doug, Classix Comix, Not a Pipe, Public Domain Fart Funnies, and just a bit MORE!...

A Krispy Kreme donut truck caught fire this weekend and its cargo was destroyed. Responding police in Lexington, Kentucky, took to social media to mourn their loss."Hang tight, we are sending backup f...

Streaming sensation Ninja attempted to lead a very wet New York's Times Square mob in a million person 'Floss.'Ninja and his wife gave it their best and got soaked in the attempt. Apparently, support ...

I live in a small, grandfathered, community inside of the Golden Gate National Recreation area. The government shutdown is making parks scary for tourists and residents alike.It is vacation time! Peop...

And if shaking your head really fast is, er, problematic, you can also just look at an angle or move away from the screen until the image appears.Here's an Instructable on how to make your own head-sh...

NASA's New Horizons space probe passed by Ultima Thule, a tiny icy world four billion miles from the sun. It's the farthest target that humans have ever reached and will give scientists insight into t...

Sylvain Neuvel's series The Themis Files is a gripping tale where humanity repeatedly guesses wrong, the aliens are tied up in their own soap opera, and giant stompy robots are the least of anyone's p...

The first season of American Gods was great. Ian McShane! Ricky Whittle! Gillian Anderson! Orlando Jones as Mr. Nancy? Perfection.And then, after the season wrapped up, shit went down. Show runners le...

Patrick Ball and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) (previously) use careful, rigorous statistical models to fill in the large blank spots left behind by acts of genocide, bringing their ana...

From the Library Journal's Infodocket: "A Curated Collection of Recently Published or Updated Data-Rich Reports Available on the Web", from climate cost breakdowns to Nielsen's top nonalcoholic bevera...

As populism and a tilt to the political right has prompted many nations to question once welcoming immigration and refugee policies and embrace xenophobia, a nation with a centuries long reputation fo...

Ronald Reagan may be sainted by the right, but 2018 was the year conservatives broke with his slavish, simpleminded adherence to the Chicago School antitrust theory that says that governments should o...

This is the first day in 20 years for new works entering the American public domain, and to celebrate, Itch.io is hosting a 1923 public domain game jam, with prizes for best analog game, digital game,...

A driver from Orange County Florida was dinged by the cops for using a very slick-looking device to obscure his license plate while using a toll road. It would have been the perfect crime, except for ...

Despite gains over the past century in the area of equal rights, equal pay and, in some regions, not having some assclown with a penis dictate what they do with their bodies, women, on the whole, stil...

I hate to yuck you out before the holidays and I really love Japan but this is just gross.Its a Japanese delicacy called Katsu ika odori-don.The squid is deceased when the dish is served. A little s...

Happy nuke year, everyone! Man, the Trump administration's recklessness really makes people feel like they can just say whatever they want with no consequences. Apparently, Donald Trump's penchant for...

Here's who is getting rich off Trump's immigrant detention camps.A new Daily Beast investigation reveals new details about just how lucrative the business of detaining immigrant asylum-seekers in the ...

People like this guy waving his gun at a driverless Waymo van in Arizona are attacking self-driving vehicles with rocks, knives, and *their own cars*, sending a message to tech companies like Waymo, w...

A man with knife made a bomb threat at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam today, and was 'overpowered' and arrested by Dutch police. Departures and Arrivals in the airport's hall 3 were evacuated, but have...

This baby set a hospital weight record at birth. Of course it happened in Texas. Mother and child are reported by CNN to be healthy.CNN reports on the ginormous human baby born in Arlington, Texas, we...

Billy Joe White, the owner of Red Rose Tattoo in Zanesville, Ohio is taking a stand against hate. Red Rose Tattoos has an open door policy to anyone who chose to adorn their flesh with swastikas, whit...

A broadcast of the 2009 crime drama The Shinjuku Incident cost an Iranian TV chief his job last week, reports the BBC. He forgot to censor a sex scene featuring star Jackie Chan.Iranian media said the...

San Diego and Tijuana are practically a single city, separated by a border, which Donald Trump wants to close, claiming that "The most important way to stop gangs, drugs, human trafficking and massive...

Lots of folks celebrate Christmas by stashing their presents under the same reusable plastic and aluminum wire Christmas tree every winter: it's a thoughtful, cost-efficient way to cut down on the amo...

The End of Trust is the first-ever nonfiction issue of McSweeney's, co-edited by McSweeney's editors and the staff of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; on December 11, we held a sold-out launch even...

In 2009, Microsoft produced a video imagining the world of 2019. They did well with the software aspects of touchscreen interfaces and machine vision, but overshot the runway on bezel-less devices and...

Every year, Jennifer Jenkins and Jamie Boyle from the Duke Center for the Public Domain compile a "Public Domain Day" list (previously) that highlights the works that are not entering the public domai...

Just when you thought that the Chinese government's extensive surveillance of the country's citizens couldn't get any creepier or more intrusive, Xi Jingping slyly raises an eyebrow and asks the west ...

Detective Deirdre Mengedoht was killed when a truck crashed into her police cruiser on Christmas Eve. Some local news outlets experienced difficulties covering the story. Read the rest...