• Delusional Doppelgängers: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti State Hospital
• I’m Sick Of Pretending: I Don’t “Get” Art
• NASA outlines ingenious plan to resurrect the Kepler planet hunter
• A spurned techie’s revenge: Locking down his ex’s digital life
• Physics explains why tapping the top of a beer bottle produces a geyser of foam
• TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats From The US That Prove It
• The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath
• The quest for Shadow of the Colossus’ last big secret
• Pop music is louder, less acoustic and more energetic than in the 1950s
• What the … Why everyone and your mother started using ellipses … everywhere
• A simple explanation of how money moves around the banking system
• U.S. family that tried living without anything ‘Made in China’
• Mexican Cartels Enslave Engineers to Build Radio Network
• Population 1: the town that’s been reclaimed by the prairie
• Confessions of a porn site boss: Part 1 & Part 2
• The War on the War on Death Begins
• Never let the facts get in the way of a good story eh?

by Jean-Yves Lemoigne

• Trending: The ethics of live-tweeting a break-up
• English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
• Jack Vale’s social media experiment on people’s ‘privacy’
• Why Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold
• Genetic Russian Roulette or how to second-guess having children
• The Pentagon’s 6’2″, 330-pound humanitarian robot
• How Facebook uses your profile for advertising
• Businessweek looks at what’s in store for 2014
• Polling academics: 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel
• Tinder Dates, Drake Retweets, and Sex Offenses: Seven Streakers Share Their Stories
• The Inokashira Park dismemberment incident where some poor sod was cut into 1cm slices
• Gallery: Cats wearing thights

Plus, these freakin’ kids cover Tool’s 46 and 2 and kick some serious arse with it yo.

• Psychopaths don’t lack empathy, they just have a switch for it
• Serco: the company that is running Britain
• ‘Rivers’ in air could boost flooding
• Scientists discover what’s killing the bees
• They Finally Tested The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ On Actual Prisoners — With Unexpected Results
• Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
• New app puts idle smartphones to work for science
• 5 thoughts from a month with the Oculus Rift (Christ, I want one)
• More optogenetics: Fake memory implanted in mice with a beam of light
• US government recognizes League of Legends players as pro athletes
• This is what happens when you attempt to take a video of police in Sweden
• Video: Historically Accurate Disney Princess Song
• If Facebook existed during World War II
• Web Game: You Can’t Write Proper English Under Pressure
• To play later: Kanye Quest 3030

Also, these guys made a campfire setup with lazer lights and the visual effect is effin’ awesome.

Earth from Saturn’s orbit via Cassini

• Share it like Cicero: How Roman authors used social networking
• The Sun, gravitational lensing and the 70 billion mile telescope
• DNA from a Russian cave: The Case of the Missing Ancestor
• Optogenetics: a new technique to controlling genes with light
• Scientists discover the molecule responsible for causing feelings of depression
• Life Satisfaction Linked to Personality Changes
• The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements
• From the Manson Myth to My Friendship with Charles Manson
• The 11-year-old who ran away so she wouldn’t have to get married
• Six Brain-Damage Scourges That Cripple IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Cool webpage design/animation: Riding the New Silk Road
• Professor E. Paul Zehr on How Wolverine’s Claws Could Work
• 18 obsolete words, which never should have gone out of style
• 50 Great Works of Video Art That You Can Watch Online
• Great re-issue review of (one of) my Mountain Goats favourites: All Hail West Texas

Evolution of the alphabet

I really should be posting this stuff more often rather than piling up these posts over the course of days. Well, should…

• So Cool: A surgical knife that diagnoses cancer almost immediately on contact
• Shit. Lack of sleep is key in activating excessive worrying
• Elon Musk wants to get you from NY to LA in 45 minutes
• Curiosity Mars Rover Passes Kilometer of Driving
• Four scientists debate on the origins of mathematics
• Damn, I want to see this chart: Family Tree of Fish Yields Surprises
• 33,000 feet (10 Km) up, is a bubble of bacteria that surrounds the Earth
• When at the ends of the Earth: On getting drunk in Antartica
• How Scientology changed the internet
• Woman’s work: The twisted reality of an Italian freelancer in Syria
• Yes: I Write All My Blog Posts Out Longhand, and You Should Too
• Reuters, deliberately toning down their Climate Change coverage
• Here’s What It Looks Like When You Replace Photographers With iPhone-Wielding Reporters
• Think Your Office Is Soulless? Check Out This Amazon Fulfillment Center
• Woman sues Japan Yamaguchi-gumi crime boss to refund protection money over “employer liability”
• If true, this is a charming twitter story of how Erin Faulk tried to find Matt Damon
• From the master cinematographer: 20 Tips by Roger Deakins
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviews Charlie Brooker
• They’re making a Star Wars comic based on the original draft, looks good
• 10 of the most cryptic texts in the world
• Gallery: What does 200 Calories look like?
• Whoa, an augmented reality colouring book: colAR App

• A few notes on The Culture by Iain M Banks
• A Nigerian cook survived 2 days underwater in a shipwreck air bubble
• CIA Releases Analyst’s Fascinating Tale of Cracking the Kryptos Sculpture
• Why France insist school pupils master philosophy
• A SEAL Team 6 veteran comes out as transgender and what it could mean for the military
• Fitch says China credit bubble unprecedented in modern world history
• The numerous crazy keywords the NSA is tracking
• Brain training app brings big data to human cognition
• Recent breakthroughs mean we are on the cusp of Big Graphene Solar Sails for crude interstellar missions
• How Close Are We to Getting Google Glass in a Contact Lens?
• Is “ironic” the most abused word in English? When is it correct to say “that’s ironic?”
• The Quiet Shame of the Half-Book Reader
• At The Movies, The Women Are Gone
• I wanna play Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe

• A gamer ‘leaked’ fake news on the new Xbox and it went mainstream within hours, wonderfully re-illustrating just how easy it is to be a ‘source’ in today’s ‘information age’. Nicely done, though seems to think this is lack of journalistic integrity is unique to video game reporters. If only.
• Kottke on inexpert experts: The challenges of conversational journalism
• So, this techwriter dies and goes to heaven…
• The best shots fired in the Oxford Comma wars
• The deadly history of Persia’s ancient assassins
• Yeesh… the strange, violent reach of Israel Keyes
• Interesting feature: Why you truly never leave high school
• Grantland: A battle for the best Chappelle’s Show sketch ever
• Prototype: a privacy visor that blocks facial recognition software
• Must remember this for the next time I have a pool and/or a party: projecting onto 65,000 floating ping pong balls

More amazing splash photography by Markus Reugels via This is Colossal

• Hrmm… 2012 was the best year yet?
• How the internet is accelerating the evolution of language
• 12 Letters that didn’t make it into the alphabet
• Recreating the Mona Lisa using polygon rendering genetic algorithms
• Testing audiophile claims and myths
• An eBay for Professors to sell college courses directly to students
• Why are (almost all) economists unaware of Milton Friedman’s thermostat?
• Unexpected behind-the-scenes horror film photos 
• Authors’ responses to the film adaptations of their work (Ellroy’s praise for The Black Dahlia is somewhat inaccurate)
• The oldest living species of the modern house cat: Palla’s Cat

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…

Vintage Photos of Soldiers Kissing Loved Ones Good-bye

• Oh hell no… Rush Hour 4 Confirmed
• Oh hell yes… Unbaby.me replaces baby photos on Facebook ‘with awesome stuff’
• “Terminated”: Pepper-Spraying UC Davis Cop
• Editorial: Are the Boomers screwing the Millennials?
• White people with dreadlocks: Fearless fashion choice or co-optation by the privileged and clueless?
• The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?
• Looks to be interesting: Apple v Samsung case
• Interesting: Failing at Geek Feminism
• The speeding up of SETI’s hunt for aliens
• Is exploring Mars worth the financial investment?
• Crown Prosecution Service will attempt to persuade a jury that images of fisting should be classified as “extreme pornography”
• At the Olympics: 8 Badminton Stars Booted for Playing to Lose
• Recounted: The Time They Used a Cigarette Lighter to Light the Olympic Torch
• 35 Modern Words Recently Added to the Dictionary
• Today’s web-based game: Organ Trail