Mexico’s Haunting Underwater Sculptures

• There’s currently a cheese fire in a Norway tunnel causing traffic issues
• “It might not get weirder than this” an account of being in a North Korean-visiting delegation
• How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp
• CurbTXT service: contacting drivers through their license plate
• Very interesting study into the growing dichotomy of our online and offline identity
• Sleep problems could jeopardise future missions to Mars
• Using pulsars as a form of interstellar GPS
• What would hyperspace travel really look like?
• How a quarter of the cow genome came from snakes
• How Leprosy reprograms the body
• Wired’s best of CES 2013
• It’ll certainly be interesting to see how Oculus Rift will effect gaming
• The ridiculously charming world of ‘Ni No Kuni,’ Studio Ghibli’s gaming masterpiece
• This device supposedly trains you to become a human compass
• A great send up on attending a tech press release conference (and subtly, tech ‘journalism’)
  
• Answered: How valid is the implied legal advice in Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”?
• The producer of ’2 girls 1 cup’ has been sentenced to 4 years for obscenity
• Drew Struzan may return for the new Star Wars trilogy posters
• A great observational piece that goes behind the scenes of Paul Schrader’s The Canyons and what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie
• Some anniversaries you can expect to see covered this year
• 7 Strategies to outsmart writer’s block
• Bad writing advice from famous authors
• The Serif Readability Myth
• Clay Shirky: Remembering Aaron by taking care of each other
• A gallery of 30 insane cloud formations from around the world
• Another gallery of 18 Funny Restaurant Signs
• This website interestingly maps and tracks every current flight: http://www.flightradar24.com/
• And then there’s this video of this dog strutting around on two legs. TWO!

Fascinating Photos of Abandoned Olympic Sites Around the World

• Mystery fossil turns out to be giant fungus
• Europe’s oldest prehistoric town unearthed in Bulgaria
• North Korean army minister ‘executed with mortar round’
• I.B.M. Reports Nanotube Chip Breakthrough
• In the Olympics of Algorithms, a Russian Keeps Winning Gold
• The bleeding edge of self-healing skin-like materials
• Popular physics theory running out of hiding places
• Totally Bizarre Experimental Video Explores Slit Scanning
• The Island Where People Forget to Die
• For Zelda-playing daughter, dad gives Link a sex change
• Australian drunk survives attempt to ride crocodile
• Jimmy’s End by Alan Moore: exclusive look at the first full trailer
• Chris Addison: Fuckety-Bye To All That
• Op-ed: Is the Web Driving Us Mad?
• Puzzle: Four Men in Hats
• Flash-based puzzle: Einsteins Riddle
• and Frog Faction

London Underground guerrilla signs

• Okay, so a very promising virus that eats cancer has been sitting in a researcher’s fridge for years undeveloped due to – wait for it… lack of funding for its £1 million price-tag
• At least biomedical researchers have made a computational model of another anti-cancer drug that works on the quantum level
• But then, Ars Technica on how press releases are creating a confused history of biology
• Research now shows that monotony breeds creativity
• and that green tea boosts brain cell production to aid memory
• Telegraph has an article on how the distraction of the internet can really stunts creativity
• That, and an Atlantic article on why we all have an internet-addiction gene
• New York Times profiled Valve and their awesome vision for future gaming
• Plus, an interview series with game developers, this one: the folks behind Portal and Portal 2
• Also, holy shit… Black Mesa:Source is finally coming out, this Friday!
• Here’s an excellent infographic of Breaking Bad’s death count
• Lastly, a video of a lot of Cos-players dancing Gangnam Style at Dragoncon

Bilateral gynandromporphism - half female, half male. This genetic anomaly is usually restricted to arthropods, but has been known to express itself in birds as well.

• An Inuit village, too remote for cars is on Google Street View via tricycle
• The medical case of the woman who needed to be upside down
• From The Atlantic: How Headphones Changed the World
• From BBC News: DNA test jailed innocent man for murder
• Finally some traction: UK clampdown on debit and credit cards surcharges
• The Verge interviewed Rian Johnson on Looper
• To ripen a tomato, place a ripe banana beside it
• There is a place called Monkey Island and it’s in the name of science!
• A top 10 list of strange topics that need more explaination
• Alternate Histories: 7 Ways the World Could Be Completely Different
• Water Worlds: 15 Real Floating Towns & Ocean Cities
• The Mysteries and Tragedy of Russia’s Bottomless Karst Lake
• Shame it’s only for the US, but still very cool: wind map site
• Word Dynamo: How many words do you know?

Also, this is a video of a guy fashioning some molten glass into a horse in under two minutes. Yeah, it’s impressive.

Tech/Science Stuff
• Harvard creates cyborg flesh that’s half man, half machine
• Heat-proof face paint to withstand bomb heat
• Researchers Believe They Have Found a Single Dose Cure for Malaria
• Researchers have also potentially deciphered the ‘manic gene’
• High quality Denisovan genome sheds light on human evolution
• Of course, the Antarctic may host large stores of methane
• Illuminating tales of modern mainframes
• A litigator’s love/hate relationship with Apple
• The History of the Floppy Disk
• From The Atlantic: How Can Bioscience Push the Limits of Lifespan?

Internet/Sociological Stuff
• Placing some context into the ‘odd’ Eastwood bit at the recent RNC: The Long History of Americans Debating Empty Chairs
• But then, #eastwooding twitter trend was pretty amusing
• The Samsung/Apple jury foreman’s explanation for verdict? Yeah, he doesn’t understand prior art
• Twitter Says It’s Going To Start Aiming Ads At Users Based On Content Of Tweets
• 4chan wants Taylor Swift to perform at a school for the deaf
• The Attention Economy is now the Location Economy
• A poll on polls shows they’re not very accurate
• From Ars Technica: How video copyright went insane

Culture/Media
• Another Willy Wonka letter of note: If ever an actor can do it – Gene can
• Inside Author Ray Bradbury’s FBI File: Was He a Communist Sympathizer? 
• Manga Artist Lets Anyone Use His Work, Royalty-Free
• This beer chase ad is pretty damn good
• Watch on this Youtube channel: every Troma film online
• This online tournament of movie sequels will be awesome!

Other Things
• Badass of the Week: Neil Armstrong
• An animation of the growth of Walmart in America
• What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?
• 12 Hotel Secrets by Hotel Staffs, From Minibar ‘Refills’ to Ritz-Carlton Largesse
• http://hackertyper.com/

And just because; here is some Maru…

Amphipod: zoomed in from 1 milimeter to 500 nanometers

• New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000 AD
• Stanford biologist and computer scientist discover the ‘anternet’
• Semen: Nature’s antidepressant?
• Simple animations to explain complex principles
• A gallery visualizing the properties of turbulence
• Big Think: The Neuroscience of Creativity and Insight
• The most likely to order late night take out? Art students.
• English language ‘originated in Turkey’
• Millennials: The Cheapest Generation
• Fake Bus Stops For Alzheimer’s patients in Germany
• Surviving a Death Sentence: 27 Years With HIV
• A Different Justice: Why Anders Breivik Only Got 21 Years for Killing 77 People
• A couple I disagree with, but the accusations I can’t deny: The 20 Worst Hipster Bands
• Gangnam Style, Dissected: The Subversive Message Within South Korea’s Music Video Sensation

Lastly, another asshole cat…

• Top 10 photos from the Guardian’s eyewitness app
• Surreal images of the Deepwater Horizon disaster
• The winners from National Geographic’s Traveler Photo Contest
• Infographic: comparing 10 years of the internet
• Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram
• On the horizon: A male birth-control pill
• Science confirms: The only workday we like is Friday
• The Mpemba Effect: how hot water freezes faster than cold
• Amelia Earhart: 75 Years of Mystery — and Now an Answer?
• Scientists discover genetic key to Elephant Man’s disfigurement
• The lost towns of Russia
• Whut: eBay Bans Sales of Spells, Curses, Advice and Other ‘Intangibles’
• How to back up your Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts and why you should
• Iceland’s hard stance on bankers is working out pretty well
• Romney’s tax plan: mathematically impossible

Also, the Sarychev Volcano Eruption viewed from the International Space Station…

• Pareidolia: A Bizarre Bug of the Human Mind Emerges in Computers 
• How text messaging became a humanitarian technology
• The internet as a hive mind
• How Mat Honan had his digital life dissolved by hackers and multiple security flaws
• France has backed away from it’s three strikes downloading law
• John Birmingham on the real cost of Curiosity
• From a NASA contractor: a conceptual video of the Dream Chaser space vehicle
• The ‘spray on’ skin that heals wounds
• The perfectly legal ‘heist’ of $95,000 from a bank
• House cats kill more critters than thought
• Returned to Family: Outlaw Ned Kelly’s Remains, 132 Years After His Death
• Trojan’s PR stunt: hands out 10,000 dildos today from hot dog carts
• From NPR: Dean Norris On Playing Good In ‘Breaking Bad’
• Prometheus (2012) – Calvinball Mythology and the Void of Meaning
• 21 links between unexpectedly shared TV universes
• Tumblr: People Dying Like Marion Cotillard

This also looks interesting: aupcoming HBO documentary called About Face that speaks with former supermodels and talks about plastic surgery and the business of beauty.

A slideshow by renowned animal photographer Tim Flach with annotations about their body language

In science/tech:

• New Computer Will Simulate One Billion Neurons
• Microsoft reveals a muscle controlled computer interface
• Voyager 1 is getting close to ‘the edge’ of interstellar space
• The waves in Quantum Mechanics are real
• The discovery of a HIV protein’s structural change
• The Greenland Ice Melt might not be as apocalyptic as some would make it out to be
• Plants Can ‘Talk’ To Each Other by Clicking Their Roots

In society:

• Why Bronze Medalists Are Happier Than Silver Medalists
• A US Marine couple’s personal account of the Aurora Shooting
• Scientology’s insane concentration camp for it’s Executives
• A counter-editorial of Why Men Can’t Have It All
• Still haven’t seen ‘Girls’, but the parody trailer ‘Boys’ looks good
• Revealed, at last: why women live longer than men
• How to rewire your brain for success
• Do You Believe in Magic? Yes, You Do.
• Interesting Chronicling: history’s changing understanding of mammals
• Lost footage from The Karate Kid

Others:

• Project allRGB: creating images using only one pixel for each rgb color (16,777,216)
• Online app: based on weight/height, who’s your Olympic equivalent?
• The internet map: websites illustrated according to traffic and user activity
• Web-based Game Boy emulator with a slew of games to choose from
• Video: some guy almost walks into a bear while texting

LEGO life-size forest in the Australian outback

• Don’t wipe out the masterpiece! A teacher who makes 25-minute whiteboard artworks in his lunch break
• The Master Race’s Graphic Design Manual
• Here’s What An Animated Font Looks Like
• The Not-So-Perfect Kilogram and Why the Metric System Might Be Screwed
• Dark Matter Filament Found, Says Scientists
• Women Infected with Toxoplasma Gondii Parasite Have Increased Risk of Attempting Suicide
• GQ writer interviews six people on different levels of income
• San Diego Accidentally Set Off All Its Fourth Of July Fireworks at Once
• Pearl Jam Allows Longtime Fan To Create Setlist For Amsterdam Show
• Forget rap disses, here’s The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History

Lastly, this: Super Moonwalking.

Merging Oceans photo

• Quantum Computing Research Breakthrough: no cooling required, as diamond stored quantum bits last for nearly two seconds
• First animation reveals how a face forms in the womb
• Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library
• 572 – The Phantom Island of Brazil
• Hidden Doggerland underworld uncovered in North Sea
• Will the boomers trust anyone under 30?
• What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect
• Shoe pants??
• Musicians missing royalties over copy-cat chart songs
• Charles Carreon drops lawsuit against The Oatmeal
• EU rules that downloaded games can be resold
• How Steven Spielberg’s Malfunctioning Sharks Transformed the Movie Business

Also, a trailer for Jerry Seinfeld’s new show called ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’. You’re guess is as good as mine.

• Cloak of invisibility: Engineers use plasmonics to create an invisible photodetector
• How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good
• Read Every Line of Dialogue Rihanna Says in Battleship
• Scarlett Johansson On The Ridiculous, Sexist Portrayals Of Superheroines
• The end of drug discovery?
• This INSANE Graphic Shows How Ludicrously Complicated Social Media Marketing Is Now
• SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully
• How do you cook a unicorn? Chef Anthony Bourdain’s got the recipe
• Andre the Giant: The Greatest Drunk on Earth

The Milky Way’s black hole may spring to life in 2013
Astronomers have spotted a cloud of gas with three times the mass of the Earth on a near-collision course with the Milky Way’s central black hole. [full article]

Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane Oscar up for auction
The Oscar Orson Welles won for Citizen Kane 70 years ago will go up for auction online this month, a Los Angeles auction house announced Monday. [full article]

We all lose when ‘healers’ take everything from the sick
There is a legitimate role for a variety of complementary therapies such as yoga, meditation, mindfulness, a balanced diet and moderate exercise. The problem arises when the generic multivitamin tablet from the chemist morphs into weekly intravenous injections costing $1000 a shot. Or when the notion of cleansing the body of toxins is exploited with sham diets and enemas that land patients in the very hospitals they are determined to avoid. [full article]