A bunch of river otters has recently been attacking people in Anchorage, Alaska. There were three attacks in September alone, on a child, a woman, and several dogs. Apparently these… Read the rest of the article: Gang of violent otters is attacking people in Alaska

A guy bought a new plane but, as yet, had zero hours of flying experience. For some reason he was allowed to taxi his plane from one part of the… Read the rest of the article: Man with zero hours flying experience accidentally takes off, and barely lands

In 1909, Scott Perky of Niagara Falls patented a font where each letter and symbol has a vertical line of symmetry. This allows you to write a word either forwards… Read the rest of the article: A bi-directional font that can be read forwards or backwards

tweet2Doom is a bot, created by Georgi Gerganov, that lets you play DOOM by @replying commands to the account. You can chain together a bunch of commands, and the bot… Read the rest of the article: Playing DOOM via Twitter

Jay of JBV Creative is an engineer and artist who specializes in 3D printing to make gorgeous automata — you can see some of his models, like a handcranked marble… Read the rest of the article: Flingbot, a robot that hurls paint at canvases

"Spot It" is an incredibly fun card game where you try to match objects printed on round cards — and the twist is that there's aways one, but only one,… Read the rest of the article: The math behind the card game "Spot It"

Hugging Face, a company that makes AI language-and-image-processing tools, just released this little web toy "Draw To Search". You draw something and it attempts to recognize what you've drawn and… Read the rest of the article: Draw a picture and this AI matches it to a movie image

Nature surveyed 300 scientists who've done media interviews about COVID. The results had some surprisingly positive notes — 85% said "their experiences of engaging with the media were always or… Read the rest of the article: Survey finds 22% of scientists who do media interviews about COVID get violent threats

Frankie Carino is a photographer and sculptor who lately has been focusing on ice castles — i.e. human-created buildings made of ice. He's taken some gorgeous and eerie photos of… Read the rest of the article: Spooky photos of ice castles

A team at MIT has developed a technique for getting plants to behave like glow-in-the-dark toys—they can absorb light, store it, and then radiate it back out. This team has… Read the rest of the article: Scientists create plants that store light and radiate it back out

James Lipnickas, a phenomenal graphite artist, has lately been creating these haunting drawings of high-rise towers—populated with cryptic humans who appear to periodically wrestle with aliens. Some of my favorites… Read the rest of the article: James Lipnickas' eerie graphite drawings of alien-human high-rises

John Dee was a 16th-century astrologer and science advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, but as he got older he became increasingly obsessed with magic. He frequently claimed to contact otherwordly… Read the rest of the article: John Dee's scrying mirror has Aztec origins, analysis finds

That's a video of the Rockats, a rockabilly-revival act that blew up in the late 70s and 80s. The bass player is Smutty Smiff, beloved amongst fans for his athletic… Read the rest of the article: Famous stolen rockabilly bass found after over 40 years

In July 2020, Louis Barclay published "Unfollow Everything," a clever Chrome extension that let you unfollow all your friends on Facebook. Its function? To let you use Facebook without having… Read the rest of the article: A Chrome extension let you bulk-unfollow everyone, until Facebook squashed it

Ever since Darwin first wrote on carnivorous plants, in his still-fun-to-read 1875 book Insectivorous Plants, there have only been 11 independent origins for plants that eat animals. Now scientists have… Read the rest of the article: New carnivorous plant discovered, right under our noses

New York City now has several ultratall buildings constructed for ultrawealthy owners. They're a Jungian archetype of howling inequality: many apartments stand empty, since they're either pieds-à-terre for the moneyed… Read the rest of the article: Ultrarich complain that their superskinny tower is a shoddily-built mess

Aaron Francis wanted a pen-plotter that could write out thousands of pieces of direct mail. He bought the Axidraw from Evil Mad Scientist and liked it a lot — but… Read the rest of the article: An eight-foot-long handwriting robot

The Italian creative studio Invasione Creativa took a bunch of famous paintings and used voxelizing techniques to transform them into chunkily-pixeled relief-maps. The Mona Lisa, in that video above, becomes… Read the rest of the article: Famous paintings rendered as Minecraft-like 3D terrain

Today, "harbanger"—a septet of turntablists—performed live online as an event with the Library of Congress. Check out this track from the show, "Where The Movement Is": It's truly mesmerizing to… Read the rest of the article: "A septet of turntablists" — harbanger performs at the Library of Congress

Seoul has sky-high real-estate prices, rising inequity, and incredibly important "goshi" tests that determine admittance to valued jobs in law or civil service. Students want somewhere to retreat for months… Read the rest of the article: What it's like in a "goshiwon", a 50-square-foot Seoul microapartment