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.

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

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!

• Whoa, now the KKK are also fighting against Westboro Baptist
• “We still look at ourselves as survivors”: over 80 years later, remembering the deadliest school massacre in American history
• The rather interesting origin story of ‘Miranda Rights’
• Warren Ellis on The Social Web: end of the first cycle (stoked it’s close to what I’ve been mediating on throughout the year)
• UCL research paper on Why the Internet only just works (.pdf)
• What the world will look like in 2030 — as predicted by the Government
• Will we ever… have cyborg brains?
• A few Tolkien-rific facts about the book version of The Hobbit
• Try this interactive/zoomable four BILLION pixel image of Mt Everest
• Earthmoving: Ways of moving the Earth’s orbital path

Lastly, the latest TEDEd on ‘What is colour’ gives a very concise and simple explanation on the how with some very nice animation too.

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.

• 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

• Cloak of invisibility: Engineers use plasmonics to create an invisible photodetector
• How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good
• Read Every Line of Dialogue Rihanna Says in Battleship
• Scarlett Johansson On The Ridiculous, Sexist Portrayals Of Superheroines
• The end of drug discovery?
• This INSANE Graphic Shows How Ludicrously Complicated Social Media Marketing Is Now
• SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully
• How do you cook a unicorn? Chef Anthony Bourdain’s got the recipe
• Andre the Giant: The Greatest Drunk on Earth