Freshwater mussels? Goats? Wombats? If you've ever wondered whether a particular animal farts or not, hie thee to the #DoesItFart database. It's not some weird, fake meme thing, by the… Read the rest of the article: Scientists build a database of animal farts

Behold The Philosophy of Beards, a short 1854 book on the allure, upkeep, and clear moral superiority of the beard. The Public Domain Review found this gem scanned at the… Read the rest of the article: "The Philosophy of Beards" from 1854

Love Hultén is a designer who builds gorgeous devices that merge faintly-retro stylings with digital guts (previously, previously, previously, and previously). Now he's created the Bivalvia Synthesis, which is adorable… Read the rest of the article: Gorgeous tiny synthesizers in wooden boxes

Amongst people who care deeply about typography and fonts — which is, in our typographic age, probably a reasonable chunk of people online — there's been a low-level war about… Read the rest of the article: Study: two spaces after a period makes reading easier

I am heavily digging this ASCII art generator: Type in your text and it'll render it in one of several dozen ASCII fonts. A few of my favorites …

So, Geocities — the service that, back in 1994, set off the first phase of everyday folks putting crazy, fun stuff online — still exists as a hosting service. Better… Read the rest of the article: A search engine for old Geocities sites — find yours, and you can start re-editing it

Here's some promising eco-news: A simple scientific experiment tweaked the ecosystem of a California farm, and the soil began capturing tons of carbon from the atmosphere. The experiment began in… Read the rest of the article: Supercharging farm-soil to hoover up atmospheric carbon

In the wake of the Toronto van attack (image above), media attention is turning to the next strand of online white-guy aggrievement that the mainstream hasn't yet discovered — the… Read the rest of the article: Today's "lone wolf" killers are actually a pack

Archaeologists have long known that tattooing goes back for millennia. But recently they made a cool find: what appears to be a Native American tattoo kit that's at least 3,600… Read the rest of the article: 3,600-year-old tattoo kit found

Behold the incredibly weird-looking Horten Ho 229 — an all-wing "wonder weapon" plane that the Nazis frantically developed even as they were collapsing and losing WWII.

Most Cubans have terrible access to the Internet — estimates suggest only 5-25% of the populace can regularly get online. The government made it a bit easier in recent years… Read the rest of the article: Inside Cuba's massive, weekly, human-curated sneakernet

"PC Building Simulator" is … kind of what the name suggests, yes? A sim in which one builds PCs. I admit I'm intrigued. Sort of? As this review at Motherboard… Read the rest of the article: A video game that simulates building custom PCs

Robotron: 2084 is one of my favorite games of all time. It has the rapidly-escalating-curve-of-difficulty I prefer in arcade games — the first level is easy, the second is harder,… Read the rest of the article: New, unusued Robotron cabinet found still in the box

Yesterday, Seamus noted here the remarkable act of policing in Toronto this week: A man had just killed ten people, and injured many more, by driving into them with a… Read the rest of the article: Step-by-step analysis of what police "de-escalation" looks like

A fun little tale of interspecies aid here at Youtube: We spent our Holidays at the red sea. While walking along a lonely beach we saw a stranded Octopus in… Read the rest of the article: Rescued octopus comes back a day later to chill with its rescuers

Apple has unveiled Daisy, a robot that can disassemble nine different types of iPhones, as part of their program to try and recover and recycle more materials that go into… Read the rest of the article: Apple robot that disassembles iPhones

Begun, the deepfake wars have. As usage grows of FakeApp — the software that makes it comparatively easy to create "deepfaked" face-swapped videos — a couple of researchers have decided… Read the rest of the article: An algorithm for detecting face-swaps in videos

Get Out director Jordan Peele and Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti got together to make ObamaPeele — a faked video of Obama, using Peele's voice. It's a PSA aimed at getting… Read the rest of the article: Buzzfeed guide on how to detect "deepfaked" videos

Is it possible that modern humans aren't the first civilization on Earth? This is the insanely interesting question probed by "The Silurian Hypothesis", a new paper authored by Gavin A.… Read the rest of the article: What if humans weren't the first civilization on Earth?

Stéphane Pigeon has created Purrli, a web site that generates audio of a cat purring. It's customizable; I found setting it for "sleepy" and "relaxed" produced my particular fave timbre… Read the rest of the article: Customizable cat-purr emulator