Shakespeare was a creative-commons powerhouse – he borrowed tons of plots for his plays, happily plundering from the writings of Plutarch, contemporary Italian authors, and more. Now there's evidence of… Read the rest of the article: Plagiarism software finds Shakespeare plundered cool words from a little-known book

Cleo is a donut-shaped drone with a single propellor in the center, which steers by changing the airflow direction, so its blades are entirely contained – and can't be easily… Read the rest of the article: Donut-shaped drone that isn't hurt by collisions

Here's a clever, artistic hack: Taking a dot-matrix printer and using its mechanism to tap a pencil against paper — slowly drawing out a picture as a series of tiny… Read the rest of the article: A dot-matrix printer that taps out a picture using a pencil

The software developer Simone Seagle has taken the images of several paintings in the Met collection – released on open access – and transformed them into lovely and moody animated… Read the rest of the article: Met paintings transformed into interactive art

Here's one side-effect of the Internet I hadn't expected: It may be reducing our carbon footprint — by getting us to stay home more. A group of academics studied data… Read the rest of the article: Using the Internet to shop, work and chill at home reduces the US' energy use by almost 2%

"Humans Not Invited", a project by the artist damjanski, shows you a CAPTCHA that can be solved by robots using AI vision — but not by humans, with our useless… Read the rest of the article: A reverse CAPTCHA designed to filter out humans

The New York Academy of Medicine has organized #ColorOurCollections, in which various member libraries take images from their holdings and put 'em online as high-end coloring-book material. The image above… Read the rest of the article: Dozens of museum collections turned into coloring books

In 1921, Edith Swan — a 30-year-old laundress in the UK — began sending abusive, curse-studded letters to several of her neighbors. She got away with it for a while… Read the rest of the article: A 1920s UK woman frames her neighbor by writing filthy, abusive letters

Christie's is holding an auction of meteorites, and they're strikingly gorgeous. Prices? Anywhere from $1,000 to $250,000. The essays attached to each meteorite are unusually fun to read. Auction-houses typically… Read the rest of the article: Buy your own space artifact at this meteorite auction – or just read the fun descriptions

Andrei Kashcha‏ has created a lovely fractal generator, using WebGL. Click "Randomize" to have it generate a new fractal. If you want, tinker with some of the parameters by changing… Read the rest of the article: Fractal generator

My Esel is an interesting design concept: It's a bike where the frame is made out of wood, with each cut bespoke to the dimensions that best fit the rider's… Read the rest of the article: Wood bicycles customized to a rider's body

Here's an amazing set of photos of the female librarians of the 1930s, who traveled by horse to remote mountain areas in Kentucky, delivering books to catalyze literacy. It's the… Read the rest of the article: The horseback librarians of the 1930s

Plenty of folks have bemoaned the disappearance of the audio jack from phones. Among other problems, it'll create "DRM for audio", since any sound that reaches your need-to-charge-them-all-the-time earbuds will… Read the rest of the article: An ode to the audio jack as an engineering marvel

So, geophysicists have been studying the earth's magnetic field, and they think it's getting ready to "flip" — with the north and south poles changing places.

Jon Yablonski has created a site that crisply illustrates the "Laws of UX" — some well-known precepts of how people interact with on-screen information. One of my favorite laws, which… Read the rest of the article: The laws of UX

Buzzfeed has curated a list of old words that we should revive, because man, they seem to really fit modern life. Like "fudgel" — "pretending to work while actually doing… Read the rest of the article: Lost words of English that we should probably reclaim

A dolphin ate an octopus, but the octopus got its revenge — it attacked the dolphin's internal organs, killing it in turn. From National Geographic: Stephens says that the 4.6-pound… Read the rest of the article: Octopus attacks and kills a dolphin from within, while being eaten

Steven Burton embarked on an amazing project — taking photos of ex-gang members in LA and then meticulously photoshopping away their extensive tattoos. It took about 400 hours of 'shopping.… Read the rest of the article: Artist photoshops away the tattoos of ex-gang members

It looks like everyday folks — recruited on Mechanical Turk, no less — are better at predicting recidivism than the elite, secretive private-sector algorithms used by courts. The software, COMPAS,… Read the rest of the article: Mechanical Turkers paid $1 are better at predicting recidivism than secret, private-sector algorithms

Isaiah Odhner has recreated MS Paint in javascript. JS Paint! You can try it out here — and the code's on his Github account. This is too much fun. As… Read the rest of the article: MS Paint, redone in Javascript