There are tons of houses worldwide in coastal areas, and as climate change proceeds, they'll see more and more flooding. Those owners can't all afford to move. So the Buoyant… Read the rest of the article: Houses that can float, to survive climate flooding
Last year this new train station, "Cambridge North", opened in Cambridge, UK — with its walls cut into this mesmerizing pattern. A bunch of mathematically-minded folks started sending snapshots of… Read the rest of the article: A train station with walls designed using cellular automata "Rule 30"
On May 22, 1984, the Army asked Joseph McMoneagle — a "psychic spy" — to astrally project himself to the planet Mars … 1 billion years in the past. The… Read the rest of the article: Transcript of the Army's attempt to remote-sense Martian life via astral projection
Is your New Years' resolution to start writing quantum-computing algorithms as a side hustle? Hey, me too! So I'm going to spend this weekend playing around with Microsoft's newly-released "Quantum… Read the rest of the article: Microsoft releases Q#, a language for writing quantum algorithms
There are many mysteries to hagfish goo. Hagfish are "widely regarded as the most disgusting creature on earth", in part because of how they defend themselves: They excrete a ton… Read the rest of the article: Scientists test hagfish slime-defense techniques by building an artificial shark mouth
In 1968, the Foreign Policy Association gathered experts together to predict what life would be like in the year 2018 — and issued their forecast in the book Toward the… Read the rest of the article: A 1968 book predicts life in the year 2018
The artist and William Forsythe has mounted a mesmerizing installation in Paris called "Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time No. 2" — in which he fills a huge room… Read the rest of the article: Artwork that challenges you to weave in between pendulums
"Cryptojacking" is the latest trend in malware; by some estimates, there are at least 2,500 sites that illicitly run Javascript in your browser to secretly mine cryptocurrency. So the browser… Read the rest of the article: Opera browser now includes cryptojacking protection
How anatomically correct are animal emoji? Great question, people! And one that the folks at National Geographic News pondered. So they interviewed a bunch of biologists — who, as one… Read the rest of the article: Fact-checking the anatomical details of animal emoji
Old-school pagers are still in use today — even though they're wildly insecure. The messages aren't encrypted, so each pager receives every message in its region, and simply discards all… Read the rest of the article: "Holypager", an artwork that eavedrops on unecrypted pager messages
The game designer and artist Yifat Shaik has just released "The Workplace Saga", a video game based on Conway's "Game of Life" ruleset that runs in Excel as a set… Read the rest of the article: A video game based on Conway's Game of Life, running in Excel
Newfangled muon imaging recently discovered a huge empty space inside Khufu's Pyramid (also known as the Great Pyramid of Giza), but exploring these ancient structures without damaging them is tricky.… Read the rest of the article: A collapsable blimp to explore the inside of pyramids
The "uncanny valley" is the well-known propensity for us to get super creeped out by robots that look nearly, but not completely, human. The hypothesis, for years, is that uncanny… Read the rest of the article: The "uncanny valley" effect might be a learned behavior
Behold the "international eye chart" designed by George Mayerle, a German optician who made his name working in San Francisco in the 1890s. Optometry was a new field back then,… Read the rest of the article: An "international eye chart" from 1907
Textio, a company that makes tools for composing job-postings, analyzed the language used by major tech firms in their job listings. They found distinctive phrases that various firms used much… Read the rest of the article: Job-listing language as a mirror of high-tech company values
Given the many historic records for dreadfulness that 2017 handily destroyed, let's try and find some a tiny moment of joy upon which to end the year, shall we? So:… Read the rest of the article: A pig and his five-dog posse
The German geometer Max Brückner was fascinated by polyhedra, and he wrote about them in depth in his 1900 work Polygons and Polyhedra: Theory and History. Over at the Internet… Read the rest of the article: Max Brückner’s polyhedral models
The parents of redditor odin917 were away on vacation, and he needed to get into their mailbox. They had the only key with them. So they emailed him a picture… Read the rest of the article: 3D printing a key to save the day
Plenty of parents are unsettled by abysmal quality of videos aimed at kids on Youtube — which range from the merely dull/hacky/ultra-branded to the slurry of possibly-autogenerated brain porridge that… Read the rest of the article: "The Kid Should See This" is an antidote to idiotic kid-meme Youtube
[Hi everyone! I'd like to re-introduce you to Clive Thompson, who will be writing posts for Boing Boing. You may remember Clive from his guestblogging stint here a few years… Read the rest of the article: Scientists model the climate in Game of Thrones
