…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…

• 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.

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

• Marketing research discovers ‘Netflix adultery’: the act of watching shows ahead of your spouse
• The twins, separated at birth, who led strikingly similar lives
• The Economist: How does copyright work in space?
• 7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy (An Insider’s Perspective)
• An editorial against ‘Bravery’ Debates
• Kiwi man sick of playing Xbox on home detention asks for jail
• Letter from Loretto – A Prison Letter from a CIA Whistleblower
• Japan’s radiation disaster toll: none dead, none sick
• Why DIY fecal transplants are a thing (and the FDA is only part of the reason)
• The self-inflicted brain wound that cured a man’s mental illness
• Peterborough City Hospital patients watch films during surgery
• The world that only formerly-blind people can see
• The World’s longest hangover
• Information Theory in Three Minutes
• Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics’ biggest problems
• How one man had sex on the moon
• Pixar’s Lightspeed will entirely ray-trace all of Monsters University
• 5 clever clues of foreshadowing in films
• Steven Spielberg predicts ‘Implosion’ of Film Industry
• If Developers Were Houses on Game of Thrones

And to cap off, some remarkable NASA footage of those Oklahoma tornadoes of late.

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: https://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
• https://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…