There's a fascinating linguistic fight brewing in Kazakhstan, due to the president's decision to adopt a new alphabet for writing their language, Kazakh. The problem? It's got too many apostrophes!… Read the rest of the article: The war over apostrophes in Kazakhstan's new alphabet

People often stumble while trying to find metaphors that explain what, precisely, writing computer code is like. In "Code Like a Weaver", the software developer Kristina Taylor notes that she… Read the rest of the article: How to "code like a weaver"

The coder and artist Brannon Dorsey (previously) wondered about the potential of "browser based botnets" — running Javascript on tons of machines, stitched together into one massively parallel computer. As… Read the rest of the article: Ad networks let you easily and quickly make a botnet

LED bulbs provide incredibly low-power light, and can last way longer than incandescent bulbs (though the lighting industry is trying to make LEDs artificially die more quickly, too). They also… Read the rest of the article: Filament LED bulbs that mimic hipster old-school incandescence

The Financial Times does a long, deep dive into the exploding world of Americans who crowdfund their health-care costs. It's a sad — if gripping — document of the wildly… Read the rest of the article: Crowdfunding for medical costs is turning health-care into a reality-TV competition

Wired has done a fun job of documenting the history of “badday.mpg" — which became a passaround hit in 1997, making it probably the first viral video of the Internet.… Read the rest of the article: The history of the Internet's first viral video

Here's a paper outlining a way to make logic gates out of nothing but links and rotary joints. It's quite ingenious — binary states are indicated by the lean of… Read the rest of the article: Logic gates made purely of joints and levers

Telcos despise community-owned broadband, and fight like mad whenever a city announces it's going to build its own network. Why? Because when communities provide their own broadband, it costs users… Read the rest of the article: Study finds municipal broadband is up to 50% cheaper than telcos

How are the feathers of Papua New Guinea's "birds of paradise" so freakishly black? Because, man, they really are. Crows and blackbirds look, y'know, black-like … but birds of paradise… Read the rest of the article: The wild physics of superblack "bird of paradise" feathers

1816 is famous for being the year that Mary Shelley began to write Frankenstein. But it's also infamous for being "The Year Without A Summer". One of the hugest volcanic… Read the rest of the article: Frankenstein considered as a novel about climate catastrophe

That rock you see above? It's 620 tons, over 2.5 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty. Yet some powerful wave in the North Atlantic was mighty enough to… Read the rest of the article: Ocean waves can hurl boulders 2.5X the weight of the Statue of Liberty

I love this concept of a "measuring cube" for cooking — where each side is indented with different measurements. It's downloadable for 3D printing from Thingiverse, and posted by the… Read the rest of the article: 3D print a "measuring cube" for cooking

In the 1920s, young Americans kindled a new craze: Stowing away on ships bound for overseas adventures. The goal? To get famous and, in predigital media, go viral. My friend… Read the rest of the article: The stowaway craze of the 1920s

Jeroen Boeye is a data scientist who was parsing the power output of his panels, and noticed that they were influenced — as you'd expect — by the trees near… Read the rest of the article: Using solar panels as a camera

In the 1970s, the CIA created a dragonfly-shaped drone that carried a microphone, with the goal of using it to snoop on remote targets. It was a pretty ingenious piece… Read the rest of the article: The CIA's 1970s-era "Insectothopter" spy drone

Ken Shirriff decided to mine bitcoins by hand, to illustrate what cryptocurrency math looks like in practice. As he notes, the calculations aren't terribly complicated — but going by hand,… Read the rest of the article: Mining bitcoins by hand

It turns out that 18th-century pirates liked to curl up a with a good book. In 1718, Queen Anne's Revenge — the flagship of the infamous pirate Blackbeard — went… Read the rest of the article: Blackbeard's pirates liked to read novels

Last winter, Dante de Kort — an eight-year-old boy who lives in central Arizona — found a dead collared peccary, a wild pig-like animal, near his house. He set up… Read the rest of the article: Eight-year-old boy discovers that wild pigs appear to grieve their dead

David Chapman writes about how he's spent the last year "navigating the medical maze on behalf of my mother, who has dementia." His key observation? The American health-care system isn't… Read the rest of the article: The US health-care system looks awfully like post-apocalyptic chaos

Grab some superglue, some lab supplies, and you're good to go: Set microscope slides, coverslips, and superglue outside when it's 20°F or colder to chill them. Catch flakes on the… Read the rest of the article: How to preserve a snowflake for decades