…or catching up on about three months of internet.

Science

• Charles Darwin’s ecological experiment on Ascension Isle
• Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island
• Dinosaur Feathers Discovered in Canadian Amber
• 419-million-year-old armoured fish fossil resolves ‘missing link’ in evolution, scientists say
• Scientists link genes to why wounds heal quicker for young people
• DNA Double Take – having multiple sets of DNA is pretty common
• Scientist discovers DNA ‘biological clock’
• Gamers solve decade old HIV puzzle in ten days
• New drug mimics the beneficial effects of exercise
• Getting drunk without the hangover or health risks – scientist seeks investment for ‘alcohol substitute’ drug
• The Rat Pack study – Drug addiction: The complex truth
• Tastes Like Chicken: How one company created a plausible substitute for meat that has the texture of real flesh.
• How the shape of chocolate can change its taste
• How much can an extra hour’s sleep change you?
• Sleep – Now By Prescription
• Sleep debt and recovering from it
• The Curious Case of Polywater: In the 1960s, scientists ‘discovered’ a new form of water. How did they get it so wrong?
• Global warming: What the leading scientists say
• First sign that humanity is slowing its carbon surge
• Looking to disprove climate change, Nebraska fails in finding scientists to participate
• Breaking Deep-Sea Waves, as High as a Skyscraper, Reveal Mechanism for Global Ocean Mixing
• What would it be like if another planet just barely missed colliding with the Earth?
• Celebrating the Nobel win for it’s discovery, NYTimes made this great explanation as to what the Higgs is
• The Apmlituhedron: A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics
• Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement
• The Crew That Never Came Home: The Misfortunes of Soyuz 11

Technology

Dialup handshake example

• The Printer That Can Print A 2,500 Square Foot House In 20 Hours.
• Transfer a secret audio message by poking someone with your finger
• Hyperloop—a theoretical 760 mph transit system made of sun, air, and magnets
• Police firing GPS tracking ‘bullets’ at cars during chases
• Engineers use sound waves to detect bombs remotely
• The Status of Moore’s Law: It’s Complicated
• Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon
• You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up
• Hackers Courted by Government for Cyber Security Jobs: The Geeks on the Front Lines
• I challenged hackers to investigate me and what they found out is chilling
• Debugging a live Saturn V rocket

Sociology (and stuff)

The 1939 New York World’s Fair

• Is Google Wrecking Our Memory? Nope. It’s (transactive memory) much, much weirder than that.
• Why even the worst bloggers are making us smarter
• Online comment systems reveal multiple layers of social bias
• The datamune difference between funny and LOL
• The 29 Stages Of A Twitterstorm
• Kids Can’t Use Computers… And This Is Why It Should Worry You
• A vast cloud of blah: Charlie Brooker on taking a break from columns
• A Slate backpack investigation: When Did Two-Strapping Get Cooler Than One-Strapping?
• Even babies discriminate until taught not to
• Man… The ocean is broken
• The debate over: Is population growth out of control?
• Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets
• Urban Design: The secrets of the world’s happiest cities
• Golden Gate Bridge: Triumph, Tragedy : Suicide Rate Shadows the Span’s 50th-Anniversary Celebration
• PBS commentator Mark Shields says more killed by guns since ’68 than in all U.S. wars
• Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy
• Stoya on ethics, porn and worker’s rights
• 16 People On Things They Couldn’t Believe About America Until They Moved Here
• How to be miserable in ten easy steps
• Ten Surprising Facts About Rejection
• Comfort In, Dump Out: the Kvetching Order of handling traumatic (or any other kind of) crisis
• Perceiving Time: Why Waiting Is Torture
• Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

Media

Supercut: 50 “four in the morning”s – Museum of Four in the Morning

• Warren Ellis on Breaking Bad and the Horrible Glory of Heisenberg
• Korra’s a Girl? TV producers think boys won’t watch girl heroines. Turns out that’s not true.
• Netflix studies piracy sites to decide what to buy
• Study accuses media companies of cooking the books on piracy losses
• David Byrne: ‘The internet will suck all creative content out of the world’
• How Marvel Unified Its Movie Universe (And Why That Won’t Be Easy for DC)
• Lucasfilm will combine video games and movies to axe post-production process
• Why Stephen King Spends ‘Months and Even Years’ Writing Opening Sentences
• Why Everyone Gets Robocop But Nobody Gets Starship Troopers
• Todd Alcott: Some thoughts on the state of screenwriting in 2013
• ‘Canned laughter’ doesn’t exist, so why complain about it?
• Soundworks: The Sound of Gravity

Randomness

https://thumbsandammo.blogspot.co.nz/

• Animals would stop the zombie apocalypse before it started
• “Christ, what an asshole” works for everything
• 35 years after the clock tower shooting, Whitman belatedly claims his 15th victim
• A Marine recounts his one afternoon with a notorious serial killer
• Get ordained for free as a Dudeist minister
• Mexico’s Tales of Bus Passengers Forced to Fight to the Death
• Colombian women get their road fixed by refusing to have sex
• Civ II’s “Eternal War” continues on reddit more than a year later
• Carpet designer threatens cosplayers with legal action
• This Guy’s Eaten Nothing but Raw Meat for Five Years
• A map of Pangea with modern political borders
• What happens when you replace guns with thumbs up?
• Images of Vietnam Zippo engravings (yes, gratifying rewards too as a Preacher fan)
• The wonderfully wierd emoticon art of Ryder Ripps
• Questlove’s Celebrity Stories
• Back to toilet reading basics with new technology: backlabel
• Webgame: Z-Type

Christ…

Thomas Jackson

• Exposing the Racket: A Simple Stunt Reveals How Blogs Will Print Anything for Pageviews
• Cleaner air linked to more hurricanes
• English is no longer the language of the web
• Only The Lonely By Stephen Fry
• Some of the interesting mindgames of the Korean DMZ
• Secrets of the Magus: a 1993 profile of magician Ricky Jay
• Sophia Stewart, The Real Creator of ‘The Matrix,’ Wins Billion Dollar Copyright Case
• The Changing Shape of Cinema: The History of Aspect Ratio
• Deconstructing the Cinema’s resolution jargon
• Mystery solved: meteorite caused Tunguska devastation
• DroneNet: The future of pizza delivery
• Man creates “invisible headphones” by implanting magnets into his ears
• Ryan Holiday on How To Read More
• Infographic: An Astounding Map of Every River in America

This great video recounts the history and establishment of the border between these sister countries and reveals some pretty crazy shit that exists right up to today.

Stevefaces (gallery)

• ‘Stomach share’ The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
• How stomach bacteria may affect weight gain
• New study to measure effect of hip hop music on native birds
• This Whale’s (After) Life
  Studies into how a single whale’s body can support an ecosystem for years familiar to those of hydrothermal vents.
• Boxcar Energy – Brilliant new strategies for storing power. No. 4: First you roll a train uphill …
• Airline to charge overweight passengers more
• The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet
• How to Build Your Own Syncing RSS Reader with Tiny Tiny RSS
• The Saddest Map In America
  Charts the “missed connections” of Craigslist
• With S3, The Walking Dead is a “different show”—the most interesting one yet
• 10 amazing scientific facts about lists
• Huey Lewis reverses roles in this clever American Psycho parody

Minority Opinion by Gino Ruggeri

• I have always detested the word meme, and not just because it was coined by Richard Dawkins, though that certainly helps”

  One of many gems in this great article on the ‘Meme Generation’. Dunno why I picked that quote in particular, given it’s just subjective snide humor, but really, the rest of the article is a fantastic observation into the culture of memes, media and meta-humour. Recommended.

• Here’s another good one – on the frequent fliers who flew too much
• From an former employee, this provides a great dissection and history of Amazon’s low margins business strategy
• A wonderful deconstruction of “first world problems” condescending attitude
• Studies show that ‘Moral Realism’ may lead to better moral behavior
• From the writers perspective: How much should ebooks cost?
• Great title: The Pope’s Dove of Peace attacked by Seagull of Irony
• What’s the price of copyright crime in New Zealand? Only $617
• Oh man, the original artwork for all 12 Watchmen covers will soon be up for auction
• I have zero knowledge about the film, but I love the design of Young and Wild‘s end credits
• Cleaning work at Rome’s Colosseum has turned up 2000 year old graffiti
• North Korea is now properly on Google Maps and here 4 interesting ‘must-sees’; Informative, though zero external links to the actual maps/locations. I’m really starting to despise this trend of closed system hyperlinks on blogs. (update: this one‘s at least links out with it’s list and be sure to check out the awesome user reviews)

This view of Earth at night is a cloud-free view from space as acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (Suomi NPP). A joint program by NASA and NOAA, Suomi NPP captured this nighttime image by the satellite’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The day-night band on VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, gas flares, and wildfires. This new image is a composite of data acquired over nine days in April and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 satellite orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of land surface.

An X-Ray of a Heliotrygon Gomesi Stingray

• What your crutch word says about you
• Tracking LiveJournal: the demise of the social media platform
• Oddly (if not depressingly) plausible: The Onion gives up
• From The Atlantic: How Google builds it’s maps
• Amusingly, author Philip Roth needed a second source to correct his own book’s wiki page
• Amazon’s approach with it’s new Kindle is looking pretty good yo
• Declassified: footage from the “Starfish Prime” tests
• From Foreign Policy: Why environmentalists should reconsider nuclear energy
• May is still the operative word: Too much light at night may lead to depression
• John Cusack interviews law professor Jonathan Turley about Obama administration’s war on the Constitution
• Looking back at the year 1555 AD
• Four geeky laws that rule our world
• 7 Urban Wonders of the Modern World

Also, this automated bar-tending drinks machine. Wants it.

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.

• Feel Good Read of the Week: 6 True Stories That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity
• The redemption of Michael K Williams
• David Fincher: A Film Title Retrospective
• New study says music is way more depressing now
• Why Do So Many Pretty Female Comedians Pretend They’re Ugly?
• 579 – A 1939 Map of Physics
• Arctic sea ice coverage plunges to record low
• Our image of Africa is hopelessly obsolete
• What Do Swedes Think of the Swedish Chef?
• Ask A Writer: “How Do I Write What The Audience Wants To Read?”
• Images examples of how a colour-blind person sees the world (and the genius of Van Gogh)
• Couple Faces $4,000 Fine for High-Decibel Sex
• Naked People Saluting Prince Harry: The Definitive Gallery
• Make it so: How three guys got most of the Enterprise-D bridge
• Video: Insane Clown Posse Watch “Call Me Maybe”
• Interesting: 10 weird wikis
• Gallery: Inside a Creepy Abandoned Russian Sub

History of Comics in 6 Panels with write up via Paul Lopes

• The first color 360-degree panorama from Curiosity
• The Internet May Have Upended Traditional Institutions, But It’s a Brittle Weapon
• The Internet Archive Now Offers Torrent Downloads
• New software that helps employers read your emotional state
• New Global Warming Culprit: Dams
• New salt-based battery a leap for green energy
• How rogue biohackers are revolutionising the human body
• The science of Staring
• A new prehistoric species of humans identified
• Conservative pundits are plain wrong: Barack Obama hasn’t lost Europe. That was his predecessor’s doing.
• How billionaire backers pick America’s candidates
• The Fog of War: How can we talk about the military if we can’t define what it is?
• The Elephant in the Map Room: The Israel/Palestine Border
• The 1916 Shark Attacks that were the inspiration for Jaws
• Wait… There’s a 30 minute longer cut of The Shining?