Behold the Mary River Turtle (previously!), which has, alas, recently joined the endangered-species list maintained by the Zoological Society of London. Apart from sporting a totally rad green mohawk, the… Read the rest of the article: Turtle that breathes through its genitals is now endangered

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2NMffyX2yw "Forced rhubarb" is rhubarb grown to maturity in complete darkness — during which it grows so rapidly it produces incredibly cool, weird sounds.

Behold a photo of a massive lava bubble, taken by the United States Geological Survey in 1969. It's from the long eruption of the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii, which began… Read the rest of the article: Massive lava bubble from 1969

NASA just released this fascinating and gorgeous video of Jupiter's north pole — and its wild, swirling storms. They're not some CGI mockup; these are actual images of the real… Read the rest of the article: Trippy infrared flyover of Jupiter's swirling north pole

There are 500,000 pieces of space junk orbiting the earth, many of which significantly endanger satellites and crewed space missions. Now there's a fascinating experiment underway to test various techniques… Read the rest of the article: A satellite designed to get rid of space junk

Almost ten years ago, I interviewed Mike Brickley, an inventor who'd designed a new architecture for an internal combustion engine — one that he predicted would produce 35 per cent… Read the rest of the article: Prototype of a low-friction "Brickley Engine" built

Back in 2011, Sara Hendren — a design and disability-studies researcher — teamed up with the graffitti artist and philosophy professor Brian Glenney to redesign the International Symbol of Access.… Read the rest of the article: The debate over the redesigned Wheelchair Symbol

Stanley Kubrick had a lot of trouble getting the right voice for HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He initially used the Oscar-winning actor Martin Balsam, but his Bronx accent… Read the rest of the article: HAL's voice sounds unsettling because it's Canadian

Now that is not a headline I thought I'd type when I got up this morning. Nonetheless, science! So, here are the grisly details: Black-footed and Laysan albatrosses have thrived… Read the rest of the article: Bloodsucking mice are attacking the albatrosses of Midway Atoll

A 19-year-old named Paul Williams discovered someone named "LisaJames419419" had started following him on Instagram. He idly checked her account and found … she was following dozens and dozens of… Read the rest of the article: A mystery Instagram account is only following people named "Paul Williams"

The Aral Sea is one of the worst human-authored environmental disasters in history. It used to be the world's fourth-largest freshwater lake, until the Soviet Union in the 1960s diverted… Read the rest of the article: Intelligent engineering and planning brings (some) life back to the Aral Sea

Some new calculations suggest that a small red-dwarf star — accompanied by a smaller brown dwarf — flew so close to our solar system 70,000 years ago that it passed… Read the rest of the article: A small star grazed our solar system 70,000 years ago

Courtesy the International Comet Quarterly, here's a list of meteorite strikes that focuses on situations where the meteorite hit something — ranging from houses to cars to mailboxes and even… Read the rest of the article: List of meteorites that hit people, houses, and other objects

Every time I think I understand how weird platypuses are, I obtain additional information that further weirdifies them. Popular Science has a great little piece that kicks off by talking… Read the rest of the article: Platypuses sweat milk, use electricity to see underwater, and are composed 100% of wtf

Can a "griefbot" help you mourn? In recent years a few computer scientists have created chatbots of deceased loved ones, by training AIs on transcripts of the deceased's online utterances.… Read the rest of the article: On the psychological value of "griefbots"

Back in 2010, the video-game designer and scholar Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, a withering satire of Farmville and other clicker games that were, at the time, wildly popular on… Read the rest of the article: How a cow-clicking parody game harvested Facebook user data

"Flag Waver" is a fun online tool that lets you upload any image and have it displayed as a flag, waving in the wind.

So, in the famous Grant Wood painting "American Gothic", there's a little white farmhouse in the background. It turns out you can rent it and live in it. That's what… Read the rest of the article: What it's like to live in the house from "American Gothic"

Here's a piece of tech history that was new to me: Apparently Thomas Dolby played a crucial role in the development of the first polyphonic ringtones. Tedium has a great… Read the rest of the article: How Thomas Dolby helped create the first polyphonic ringtones

The art of tattoing is really, really old, according to a new study of some Egyptian mummified bodies that date back to around 3,000 B.C.E. The mummies — accidental ones,… Read the rest of the article: Popular tattoos 5,000 years ago were sheep