A year ago, the city of Dunkirk in France made its bus system entirely free — causing a boom in ridership, as well as a drop in car usage. In… Read the rest of the article: French city makes its buses free, spurring new ridership and decreasing car use

In 1964, a German experiment asked people to randomly tap their fingers — whenever they wanted — while having their brain's electrical activity monitored. The scientists discovered something nifty: The… Read the rest of the article: Debunking the "Bereitschaftspotential", the brain signal that seemed to kill off free will

Apparently mountain chickadees have crazily awesome memories: Despite weighing less than half an ounce, mountain chickadees are able to survive harsh winters complete with subzero temperatures, howling winds and heavy… Read the rest of the article: Mountain chickadees remember the location of tens of thousands of seeds

In Slate, David Polansky argues that the quality of audio in hearing aids is plummeting for the same reason the quality of recorded music plummeted in the age of the… Read the rest of the article: Digital hearing aids are producing sound as lousy as MP3s

A random dude did about $15,000 worth of damage to the famous bronze "Charging Bull" sculpture, by attacking it with a banjo. He managed to cut a deep gash in… Read the rest of the article: Man attacks the Wall Street bull with a banjo, leaving big gashes

I love semicolons. I probably use too many of them, because of how incredibly flexible they are; how they loosely tie together loosely related ideas; how you can use them… Read the rest of the article: Why semicolons are lovely and colons less so

Tarek Loubani is a Palestinian-Canadian doctor who works with the Glia Project, a group that creates open-source designs for 3D-printable medical hardware. Their goal is to let local populations manufacture… Read the rest of the article: 3D printing stethoscopes, tourniquets and crucial dialysis-machine parts in Gaza

Turns out fast food hits crows the same way as it does humans: In the cholesterol levels. Scientists measured the cholesterol levels of crows in different parts of the country… Read the rest of the article: Fast food gives crows higher cholesterol, too

This is pretty brilliant: A rap battle between Alexander Hamilton and Satoshi Nakamoto over the merits of centralized, government-fiat currency, versus decentralized cryptocurrencies. It's a note-perfect homage to the terrific… Read the rest of the article: Rap battle between Alexander Hamilton and Satoshi Nakamoto over Bitcoin

In the early days of busing kids to school, buses were painted all sorts of colors, and built to different specs. But in the late 1930s, education expert Frank Cyr… Read the rest of the article: How school buses became yellow, and some of the safest vehicles on the road

Essay-writing services have been around for a long time, but the maturation of the interwebs has allowed for increasingly customized operations. Schools and teachers are now well-equipped with plagiarism-busting tech… Read the rest of the article: Inside the lives of people writing essays for US students

Check out this lovely interactive version of an Enigma machine coded up by Tom MacWright! You can type in your plaintext message and then watch an animation simulate how the… Read the rest of the article: Virtual Enigma machine illustrates how signals traveled through its wiring and rotors

"Alice Campion" is the pseudonym used by a group of Australian writers — who, back in 2013, published their first collectively-written book, The Painted Sky. Five of them wrote the… Read the rest of the article: What it's like to collectively write a novel

I'm a pencil fanatic, who sits around reading pencil blogs and meditating on my favorite pencil sharpeners. (Mark once filmed me gushing about the Kum long-point pencil sharpener packaged by… Read the rest of the article: Pencil recommendation: ForestChoice #2 graphite

The protestors in Hong Kong, leery of state eavesdropping on digital communications, have been adept at using communications tools not normally associated with activism, like Tinder, Twitch, and Apple's Airdrop… Read the rest of the article: Hong Kong protestors using mesh-networking messaging app to evade authorities

Last week Trump infamously suggested nuking hurricanes. Loopy, of course — but it also put me in mind of a similarly bananas idea from 1965: Using nukes to dig ditches… Read the rest of the article: Using atom bombs to dig ditches: The 1965 comic-strip proposal

To break a world record, Rob Scallon linked together 319 pedals and played his guitar through them. What does it sound like? A wall of whooshing, muttering, occasionally howling noise!… Read the rest of the article: What a guitar sounds like played through 319 pedals

The journalists at The Next Web scripted a bot — Satoshi Nakaboto — that crawls around the aether looking for Bitcoin news and tweets, then assembles into a daily news… Read the rest of the article: Bot authors a most-read article at The Next Web

Vantablack — the darkest, most light-absorbing pigment on the market — is freaky stuff to behold (previously, previously, previously, previously, and previously). Vantablack reflects vanishingly little visible light, making anything… Read the rest of the article: A BMW painted with Vantablack

Back in the 80s, the inventor Cy Enfield created this fascinating device — a six-button "Microwriter" where you'd chord combos of buttons to produce the entire alphabet, letting you jot… Read the rest of the article: The Microwriter, a tiny chording word processor from 1984