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Link Mouse Trap: The dangers of using one lab…

"I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory…

December 13 2011, 1:34pm | Comments

Wikipedia Trap street A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose…

October 16 2011, 9:10am | Comments

Link How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing…

On June 17, 2010, Sergey Ulasen was in his office in Belarus sifting through e-mail when a report caught his eye. A computer belonging to a customer in Iran was…

July 13 2011, 3:09am | Comments

Wikipedia Experiments in the Revival of Organisms Experiments in the Revival of Organisms is a 1940 motion picture which documents Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms. It is available from the Prelinger…

June 15 2011, 9:12am | Comments

Wikipedia Alien space bats Alien space bats (ASBs) is a neologism for plot devices used in alternate history to create a point of divergence that would otherwise be implausible. [edit]Definition "Alien space…

May 3 2011, 3:13pm | Comments

Wikipedia Alien space bats Alien space bats (ASBs) is a neologism for plot devices used in alternate history to create a point of divergence that would otherwise be implausible. [edit]Definition "Alien space…

May 3 2011, 12:27pm | Comments

Link To Have Is to Owe

We need to understand what philosophers in the Middle Ages, from Italy to India to China, already understood perfectly well: Money is not a thing, and is certainly not a…

April 5 2011, 1:36am | Comments

Link Alvin Lucier: I am Sitting in a Room

"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it…

February 16 2011, 7:48am | Comments

Link When new narratives meet old brains

We're hard-wired to turn our lives into stories - how will we cope with the dizzying digital fictions of the future, ask John Bickle and Sean Keating "We are our…

November 25 2010, 9:29am | Comments

Link Kubrick on 2001

You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their…

November 19 2010, 3:29am | Comments

Link Geocities - The Torrent

This is a collection of Geocities data downloaded by a bunch of people who call themselves ARCHIVE TEAM, who began scraping the Yahoo! Geocities site during a six month period…

November 10 2010, 3:05am | Comments

Link Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

FOR DECADES in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art -…

November 1 2010, 3:57pm | Comments

Link What concepts do not exist in the English…

Carl Honoré (In Praise of Slow) says Canada's Baffin Island Inuit "use the same word—'uvatiarru'—to mean both 'in the distant past' and 'in the distant future.' Time, in such cultures,…

September 10 2010, 4:17am | Comments

Link Cave Painting: Videogames as Art

Lanchester allowed that computer games would never tell us as much about character as other forms of narrative, but pointed out two great virtues of the form: “The first is…

September 3 2010, 6:29am | Comments

Link The most isolated man on the planet

He's an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he's the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for…

August 30 2010, 8:05am | Comments

Link A world without mosquitoes

So what would happen if there were none? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed…

July 27 2010, 8:17am | Comments

Link The Writer Who Couldn't Read

"In January of 2002," writes the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, "I received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist describing a strange problem." Engel's problem was so strange, I decided…

June 27 2010, 8:03am | Comments

Link The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty

In the 1990s, Paul Romer revolutionized economics. In the aughts, he became rich as a software entrepreneur. Now he’s trying to help the poorest countries grow rich—by convincing them to…

June 12 2010, 9:21am | Comments

Link The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: What happens when…

In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together…

June 12 2010, 9:18am | Comments

Link 15 Great Movies That Were Never Finished

Thousands of movies are made every year, and have been almost all the way back to when we first figured out how to make them. We love the theater experience…

June 10 2010, 9:07am | Comments

Link The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could…

Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers…

June 6 2010, 3:54am | Comments

Link The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could…

Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers…

June 6 2010, 3:54am | Comments

Link Time Traveler Caught in Museum Photo? | forgetomori

It’s the short description for the photograph shown at the virtual Bralorne Pioneer Museum, from British Columbia, Canada. The image can be seen specifically on this page (scroll down to…

April 20 2010, 3:40pm | Comments

Link Caleb Larsen's A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter

Perpetual online auction, internet connection, custom programming and hardware, acrylic cube... Combining Robert Morris' Box With the Sound of Its Own Making with Baudrillard's writing on the art auction this…

February 14 2010, 6:45pm | Comments

Link Leonardo da Vinci's Resume

From the Codex Atlanticus, this is a letter that Leonardo da Vinci wrote in 1482 to the Duke of Milan advertising his services as a "skilled contriver of instruments of…

January 29 2010, 2:31pm | Comments

Wikipedia Coriolis effect In physics, the Coriolis effect is an apparent deflection of moving objects when they are viewed from a rotating reference frame. For example, consider two children on opposite…

January 20 2010, 6:57am | Comments

Wikipedia Cargo cult A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are…

January 8 2010, 10:51am | Comments

Link We have a message from another world

In the summer of 1899, whilst alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he…

December 11 2009, 5:11pm | Comments

Video

November 21 2009, 3:46am | Comments

Link The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English

In depicting the emergence of the world’s languages as a curse of gibberish, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel makes us moderns smile. Yet, considering the headache that…

November 1 2009, 4:32am | Comments

Link The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About…

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to…

October 15 2009, 8:12am | Comments

Wikipedia Oklo Oklo is a region near the town of Franceville, in the Haut-Ogooué province of the Central African state of Gabon. The discovery in September 1972 of several natural…

September 28 2009, 9:07am | Comments

Link Is Star Trek A Religion?

Star Trek has long been described as a cult phenomenon…but is it an actual cult? Some anthropologists think so. Following the example of anthropologist Margaret Mead, they lived among the…

July 30 2009, 1:22pm | Comments

Link Fifty Books for Our Times

We know it's insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for…

June 29 2009, 4:43pm | Comments

Link Atlas Obscura

Welcome to the Atlas Obscura, a compendium of this age's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloguing all of the singular,…

June 16 2009, 3:14pm | Comments

Link Within Any Possible Universe, No Intellect Can Ever…

Deep in the deluge of knowledge that poured forth from science in the 20th century were found ironclad limits on what we can know. Werner Heisenberg discovered that improved precision…

March 17 2009, 9:35am | Comments