When my country band the Delorean Sisters was recording our second album, our phenomenal audio engineer Drew Guido set up a mic stand to record my acoustic guitar—and pulled out… Read the rest of the article: Superb, inexpensive microphones built into 12-gauge shotgun shells

A company called HourOne is paying people to "hire out their faces". HourOne will scan you talking and emoting, then use deepfake-style AI to create videos for its corporate customers,… Read the rest of the article: AI firm pays people to use their faces in deepfaked corporate videos

Last spring, Guillaume Cabanac—a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse—and two colleagues noticed a weird trend: A surge of published comp-sci academic papers that were using weird phrases in… Read the rest of the article: Scholars discover a mysterious wave of scientific papers using odd, "tortured phrases"

In 2019, the city of Ottawa opened up the Flora Footbridge, an attractive new structure that spans the city's Rideau Canal. At night when it's lit up, it's quite beautiful,… Read the rest of the article: Ottawa bridge attracts spiders that cast giant shadows

Secondary custom keyboards are terrific if you're doing something technical — like editing music or video, or even playing a video game. You can assign a key to run a… Read the rest of the article: Hacking a cash register to use as a custom keyboard

Olesya Chernyavskaya is an artist who works with AI, and her new project is https://thisolesyadoesnotexist.glitch.me. As she writes … GAN generated photos of Olesya, a project by Olesya. If this Olesya… Read the rest of the article: Artist trains AI to generate new pictures of herself

Apparently the pandemic has created a boom in sales for a C02 monitors — because they're a useful way to figure out, how well ventilated is the space you're in?… Read the rest of the article: C02 monitors are selling like hotcakes, thanks to COVID-19

As several obituaries to Charlie Watts have noted, his drumming was key to the sound of the Rolling Stones — he played "with a minimum of motion, often slightly behind… Read the rest of the article: How to drum like Charlie Watts

"Hyperaccumulator" plants grow in metal-rich soil—and suck a huge amount of metal out of the ground. If you cut open the leaf of a hyperaccumulator plant, you get sap that's… Read the rest of the article: Harvesting metal from plants that suck it out of the ground

OpenAI has just published a fascinating piece pointing out the strengths of its top-of-the-line vision system — as well as one big weakness: You can fool it just by slapping… Read the rest of the article: OpenAI discovers its visual AI can be fooled by written notes

I never thought of ostriches as particularly dangerous — until I read the unexpectedly gripping Wikihow article on "How to Survive an Encounter with an Ostrich". Now I'm terrified! Basically,… Read the rest of the article: How to survive an ostrich attack

Behold flowchart.fun, a little web tool that generates a quick-and-dirty flowchart from text. You type in words; they appear in a flowchart box. To make a new box with a… Read the rest of the article: Web tool that generates flowcharts from text

Astute readers will recall the "Smellicopter" from last fall, a robot that used an amputated moth antenna to navigate toward smells. Robot-insect hybrids seems to be a hot area, because… Read the rest of the article: Robot hears by using the ear of a dead locust

To add to our towering ziggurat of pandemic Zoom incidents, we can add this one: A California surgeon showed up for his online traffic-court date during surgery. Despite the surgeon… Read the rest of the article: Surgeon joins Zoom meeting while his patient lies on operating table

Xai Bou is a photographer who takes photos not of birds, but of the movements of birds — the shapes they trace as they move through the sky. A while… Read the rest of the article: Video shows the shape of a flock of starlings evading a hawk

MyHeritage, a company for "discovering family history" — as they describe themselves — has released "Deep Nostalgia", which uses AI to animate photos. Upload a picture, and the AI produces… Read the rest of the article: Animating old photos using AI

In New York City, it's common to walk down the sidewalk and see pristine furniture being thrown out. People get rid of stuff a lot, because apartment-space is tight. If… Read the rest of the article: The pandemic is producing a golden age of stooping

Coca-Cola has been working on a paper-based bottle, and this summer it'll test it — by producing a 2,000-bottle run of its fruit drink Adez, in Hungary. That video above… Read the rest of the article: Coca-Cola testing a paper-based bottle

When NASA released photos and video of Perseverance being lowered to the surface of Mars (screengrab above), astute Internet folk noticed the weird pattern on the parachute. Did it have… Read the rest of the article: NASA hid an Easter Egg in the parachute for Perseverance

Ken Dryden—an author, and former NHL goalie and Canadian politician and author—has written an intriguing piece on the ballooning size of goalies, and how it has changed pro hockey. Basically,… Read the rest of the article: An argument for making hockey nets bigger