…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…

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

Amanda Hugginkiss (variant) by Tim Doyle

• You Won’t Finish This Article – Why people online don’t read to the end
• Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?
• 33 Unwritten Social Rules Everyone Needs To Follow
• Changes in China: 2000, now and 2025
• Then again, China’s real-estate bubble
• How the US Turned Three Pacifists into Violent Terrorists
• Despite doomsayers, the world’s agriculture is on the rise
• The man who can see in ultraviolet
• Two accelerators find signs of a particle that nobody can explain
• A huge discovery in prime numbers and what it means for the future of math.
• Watch a Bread City Slowly Decompose Over 6 Months
• The sealed bottle garden still thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water
• When We Held Kings: The oral history of the 2003 World Series of Poker
• Moby Offers Music to Filmmakers for Free
• Trends found amongst the top Youtube channels

• The ‘end of history’ illusion and why we can’t imagine getting old
• “The finite is nested within the infinite” (or my favourite parable: somewhere in infinity, an alternate universe exists where you are the Batman)
• Of last year’s bestselling sci-fi list, only one was published that year
• Does a techno utopia require physical books?
• Reshaping the brain: scientists reprogram neurons after birth
• The mysterious disappearance of the Russian Crown Jewels
• The courtroom sketches of Bill Robles
• Inside the prison journal of West Memphis Three’s Damien Echols
• Papers reveal extent of the British royals’ veto over bills
• The Guardian’s stats on the size of their commenting community
• The science of why comment trolls suck
• An interesting design proposal: I want the world to scroll this way
• Good god, someone’s patent application disturbingly mirrors the artificial second stomach sketch from Tim and Eric
• Parkinson’s treatment can trigger creativity
• Password security in Deus Ex
• What Games Are: the fun boson does not exist
• To look into: a best comedy books of 2012 list

Lastly, a super-cut of famous people playing themselves

• Even Rupert Murdoch wants tighter gun control
• Building a Better Truth Machine: Could algorithms help debunk online rumors before they spread?
• Secretaries of Safe: will Obama’s new cabinet be ‘too safe’?
• 9 signs the War on Drugs is almost over
• Monotremes (Platypus/Echidnas) are still fucking weird
• Bioethics, should we live to 1000?
• Hrm… Basketballer Yao Ming came from a special genetic breeding program to produce super-atheletes
• Why afternoon may be the best time to exercise
• Website: Google60 (punch card interface)
• Website: Moodstream (streams depending on set mood)
• Website: Mathrun (brain-juicing)

• The Secret Lives of Supercutters
• NASA is actually working on a Faster-than-Light Warp Drive
• Cambridge to study technology’s risk to humans
• Shinichi Mochizuki’s ABC proof too tough even for mathematicians
• China’s state paper falls for Onion joke about Kim Jong-Un, publishes 55 photos in “sexy” tribute
• The New Moot: 4Chan wants to make Kim Jong-Un Time’s Person of the Year
• What would happen if Texas actually seceded?
• Building the World’s tallest skyscraper in 90 days
• An interesting outcome to a really good job interview

• Some guy called Brad does acid, live-tweets it
• Ordos: The biggest ghost town in China
• Sweden is so efficient with its waste-to-energy program, that it’s importing trash from other European countries
• Awesome: Focus on the Family is giving up on reaching out to Millennials
• The TPP: A first-hand look at the secret international talks that could change the Internet
• A university built a supercomputer with Raspberry Pi(s) and Lego
• Mathematician claims proof of connection between prime numbers
• It Ain’t 1979 Anymore: Why this week’s attacks on American embassies aren’t the Iran hostage crisis all over again.
• Somehow missed: Vice interviewed my hero cinematographer Christopher Doyle
• Cool… 45 Years of the John Peel Show is available on Soundcloud.
• Comedian Josh Sankey will travel across the U.S. with only bacon as currency
• On the tubes: a recording of Tolkien reciting a poem in Elvish

Lastly… cats compilation video, because cats compilation video.

Bill Bailey + Maths + Dinosaurs = YES

Photographer Nick Moore is in the midst of various sound experiments, recording the effects of different audio frequencies on materials and played back in slow motion. The effects can be quite hypnotic and totally cool to see in action.

This first one shows off the rythmic behaviour of match flames next to a speaker running at 60 Hz.

And then there’s this one displaying what happens to a blob of mercury, which at normal speed doesn’t seem like much, but when slowed down, forms intricate ‘dancing’ geometric shapes.

This phenomena is called Cymatics and turns out, it has been around for a significant period of history.

One figurative example is the ‘musical’ boxes of Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel; where a sequence of 213 cubes protrude from the pillars, with each displaying a selection of geometric patterns. The meaning of these were unknown until a hypothesis in 2005 by Thomas Mitchell identified these as cymatics and correspond to the Chapel’s carved angels that are depicted playing musical instruments and each pointing to a certain note on a musical staff.

Though not upheld scientifically or historically, it sure is pretty damn cool math.

• Awesome: European Agency Backs Approval of a Gene Therapy
• The ‘chemputer’ that could print out any drug
• Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
• The Artist’s Lens: What It Means to See the World With an Eye Toward a Facebook Update
• Silicon Valley Warns That Their Products Are Addictive
• Oldest record in the world: recreated from photographs
• The most polite cease and desist letter ever
• The ‘feasibility’ of gun control in the US
• A man’s penis stolen by thieves in his sleep
• Website: An ermahgerd translator/generator
• Gorilla Youngsters Seen Dismantling Poachers’ Traps
• Pretty visualisation: Prime number patterns
• Chart: Distribution of colours in movie posters between 1914 and 2012
• 30 Awesome Behind The Scenes Photos From Old Movies
• 15 Hacks That Will Make You Life A Whole Lot Easier
• 10 of the Most Doomed Expeditions in History