USPS asked Rico Lanáat' Worl, a Tlingit and Athabascan artist, to create a stamp. He drew an awesome piece showing Raven, the Trickster, stealing the sun. Over at his web site, Worl… Read the rest of the article: First stamp designed by Alaskan indigenous artist, showing Raven stealing the sun

A group of researchers has spent the last 20 years testing pigs to see how well they can play a computer game—in which the pigs use a joystick to maneuver… Read the rest of the article: Pigs can play video games

Volvo thinks self-driving cars will create a motion-sickness problem: Because passengers will probably kill time by staring at their phones, they'll get queasy. Seems likely! Motion-sickness is caused by a… Read the rest of the article: Using sound to reduce motion-sickness in cars

In 1919, the American biologist John Ernest Weaver published The Ecological Relations of Roots, a study of the root-systems of desert plants. It contains some truly amazing hand-drawn illustrations of… Read the rest of the article: Illustrations of plant-root systems from 1919

Scientists were down in Antarctica, drilling through a half-mile of ice to try and grab some seafloor sediment. When they finally pierced through, they dropped a camera down to discover… Read the rest of the article: Odd lifeforms discovered under a half-mile of Antarctic ice

Back in 2014, a Twitch streamer launched a fascinating crowdsourced experiment called "Twitch Plays Pokemon", in which a programmer coded a system that would play Pokemon Red, controlled entirely by… Read the rest of the article: Rival Peak lets thousands of players control characters living in a Lost-like world

Pedal of the Day reviews the Atreides Analog Weirding Module, which is so delightful and nutty that I want to buy this pedal and record an entire album of straight-up… Read the rest of the article: "Weirding module" for guitar

Over at JSTOR Daily, Jody Amable digs through the scholarly literature on murder ballads and discovers they were an early form of true-crime media: Songwriters would rip lurid stories from… Read the rest of the article: Murder ballads were the original true-crime media

Over a Gizmodo, Kim Kelly—a journalist with deep knowledge of heavy metal—wrote a terrific guide on how to figure out if the metal band you've just discovered has any Nazis… Read the rest of the article: A guide on how to recognize Nazis in the metal scene

I tweeted Miss Cellania's awesome post about how tardigrades poop crystals — possibly the best thing I've yet learned in 2021 — and was talking about it on Twitter with… Read the rest of the article: How to catch tardigrades

H. Moser is a Swiss watch manufacturer with a deeply weird sense of humor. Back in 2015, when the Apple Watch first came out, Moser released the "Endeavour Perpetual Calendar… Read the rest of the article: $30,800 all-mechanical timepiece that mocks the Apple watch

Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time" is a hilarious song — a tendentiously overwrought, extended prog-rock opener that abruptly morphs into a reasonably catchy 70s pop-rock big-hair anthem. The folks at 8 Bit… Read the rest of the article: Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time" done as 8-bit arcade-style chip music

Normally, a trackball floats around on a set of wheels, which detect its movement and translate that into pointer-control on the screen. Jacek Fedoryński created a trackball that has no… Read the rest of the article: A trackball that's just a ball

Ski lifts are shut down in the pandemic, so a bunch of skiers in France found an interesting route-around—they used paragliding motors to propel themselves up the hills. Looks very… Read the rest of the article: Using paragliding motors to go up a ski hill

The Göteburg Film Festival in Sweden holds an event called the "Isolated Cinema experience", a contest in which the lucky winner goes to the lighthouse on the remote Pater Noster… Read the rest of the article: Nurse wins contest to watch movies for one week in isolated Swedish lighthouse

Marcel at Astonishing Studios is obsessed with Egg McMuffins, and has been trying to build a robot that makes one automatically, using only Legos. He hasn't gotten there yet, but… Read the rest of the article: Robotic egg-cracker built entirely using Legos

So, the online tax-filing system of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) was reliant on Flash. Like many sites, they were left in the lurch when Adobe—and most browsers—stopped supporting… Read the rest of the article: Still reliant on Flash, South Africa's tax agency creates its own Flash-compatible browser

For years I used Soulver, a Mac-based calculator app that let you write out calculations and formula, and it would render the calculations on the fly. It was a superb… Read the rest of the article: Numbr, an elegant online calculator

This one is pretty cool — I'm gonna try it out later today!

Here we go again: Another chatbot is trained on a big pile 'o online utterances, and — surprise, surprise — having soaked up Internet bile, begins repeating it. Haven't developers… Read the rest of the article: Yet another chatbot, trained on online utterances, starts spewing hate