…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…

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 ‘Mad Men’ Economic Miracle: the new business model that’s brought on a wave of great TV
• From the Criterion Collection: Christopher Nolan, self-made filmmaker
• Facebook scans private messages for brand page mentions, admits a bug is boosting Likes
• GravityLight: lighting for developing countries
• Quantum networks may be more realistic than we thought
• Largest glacier break-up yet caught on video
• Video: These guys get two hookers to re-enact a scene from Braveheart
• Video: Kids songs with Cat Power

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

Celebrity Make-Unders via my modern met

• In 1989: a couple set out for a 18-month road trip and 23 years later, they’re still going
• Nostalgia: The making of Warcraft I
• via individual atoms: Researchers observe chemical reaction on the quantum level
• Scientists create basis for quantum processor chip
• Scientists also achieve single photon transmitter for quantum computing (thanks science)
• Force of Habit: Stress Hormones Switch Off Areas of the Brain for Goal-Directed Behaviour
• Whoa: US House of Reps overwhelmingly pass Federal Reserve Audit Bill
• The insane junk-food diets of high-endurance Olympians
• 9 of the Coolest Secret Subway Stations in the World

And then er… yeah, Russia.

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.

Since the announced discovery of the Higgs boson, I’ve been ranting on about it to damn near everyone I come into contact with, on and offline.

Thankfully there’s this video doing the online rounds at the moment that does a much better job of explaining what the search for the Higgs has been all about and incidentally, also involves less crazy eyes and frothing at the mouth.

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

• The father-son team who run L.A.’s vibrator empire
• Hollywood, Inception, and the Cinematic Dream State great interview with Jason Silva
• A bizarrely well reasoned look at Adam Sandler’s career
• How to Determine If A Controversial Statement Is Scientifically True
• European Space Agency gave the go ahead on the Euclid telescope’s search for dark matter and energy
• Using a quantum theory with black holes to consolidate physics principles
• Why Do People Feel Phantom Cellphone Vibrations?
• The influence of Twitter on language and culture
• I love how creepy these Disney Face Swaps are…

And hooray! A teaser is out for Pixar’s follow up to Monsters Inc: Monsters University.

• Wes Anderson Bingo!
• The ‘New Yorker’ Is Going To Tweet Out An 8,500 Word Jennifer Egan Short Story, For Some Reason
• Brian Cox on the Heart of Science
• Physicists Build the First Quantum Interface
• Ex-POTUS Pic of the Day

Missing planet explains solar system’s structure
All but 10 per cent of the four-planet simulations wound up with only three left, he says. But in half the five-planet simulations, they ended with the four in a solar system that looks remarkably like our own. The best results occurred when the fifth planet started off between Saturn and Uranus and ended up being ejected after an encounter with Jupiter…  [read more]

Quantum mechanics difficult to grasp? Too bad
To those uncomfortable with quantum theory’s picture of wavelike particles that are simultaneously everywhere, their message in The Quantum Universe is clear: tough. Scientists are, they tell us, “not mandated to produce a theory that bears any relation to the way we perceive the world at large” [read more]

A wedding featuring Bastion’s narrator? For one fan, it happened
The story begins simply: after becoming a fan of the game’s soundtrack, Greschner sent an e-mail to Supergiant about helping out with the ceremony itself. After that? Well, I’ll let him tell the story. [read more]

Christian 4th grade school textbook tries to explain electricity, gives up
As Myers points out, “[W]e can use [electricity] to build hair dryers and Large Hadron Colliders; to make the argument that we are mystified by it is lying to the kids.” I’ll go one further, to subject children to this sort of “education” is anti-intellectual child-abuse… [read more]