The designer/artisan Yuko Matsuzawa created a gorgeous insulated tote bag in which to carry around your snowman. Apologies for the undoubtedly-dodgy machine translation here, but this is how Google translate… Read the rest of the article: A carrying case for your snowman

Over at Technode, Shi Jiayi synthesizes recent stories in Chinese media showing how China's ever-surveilled population is getting sick of rampant face-recognition, and is speaking out. Face-recognition tech has penetrated… Read the rest of the article: Backlash in China brewing against rampant face-recognition in daily life

This "Electric SnowBike Kit" by the Canadian firm ENVO lets you replace the back wheel of your bike with a powered snowmobile-style tread, and the front with a snowboard. The… Read the rest of the article: Kit converts a regular bike into a snowbike

Here's a weird one: For the the last three years, a phishing scam has been targeting authors of fiction, getting them to cough up copies of their new manuscripts. The… Read the rest of the article: Mysterious phishing scam targets authors' first drafts

Low-rez, but deeply satisfying to watch. As The Awesomer notes: Making a metal sphere usually involves stamping or spinning sheet metal. But this video shows a process where they start out with a shape… Read the rest of the article: Explosive forming of a metal sphere

Smithsonian magazine has a fascinating history of PEZ candy, in which I learned that it was originally created and marketed in Austria in the 1920s as aid to quitting smoking.… Read the rest of the article: PEZ originally marketed as smoking cessation aid

In one sense, the voc-25 is just a keyboard controller triggering a synthesizer, with some visual yuks thrown in. But when I heard it played, I realized there's a loud… Read the rest of the article: Plastic-teeth synthesizer

Mattel Creations asked the artist Nina Abney to create a new design for UNO, and she knocked it flaming out of the park. I'm ordering a deck now. Apparently she… Read the rest of the article: Nina Abney creates a "Artiste" UNO deck

Pulse oximeters are little devices you clip on your finger, which shoot light into your skin to measure the percentage of oxygen in your blood. They're crucial tools for doctors… Read the rest of the article: The racial bias in pulse oximeters

Using the Python library Pysholar and some Javascript, John Kuiphoff wrote code that takes GPS coordinates, finds the amount of sunlight that falls all day long there, and turns it… Read the rest of the article: Wooden sculptures showing solar dataviz for your location

It's been out for more than a year, but just this week @strutting and Robin Sloan introduced me to "Fraidycat" — an intriguing tool for keeping up with people and… Read the rest of the article: On "Fraidycat", and the pleasures of non-algorithmic tools for following stuff online

Allison Parrish is one of my favorite poets; she writes code that transforms language into fascinating and evocative literary forms. Recently she wrote software that generates "compass poems". She'll plot… Read the rest of the article: Poems generated by finding midpoints between how words sound and are spelled

We humans are social animals, so we take our behavioral cues from people around us. A new bit of research suggests we'll take those cues from robots, too. In their… Read the rest of the article: Study finds that robots can pressure people to do risky things

The New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel found himself obsessed with watching videos of COVID-19 vaccines being delivered — big packages being unloaded by forklifts, opened up by medical officials… Read the rest of the article: Vaccine delivery footage considered as unboxing videos

nand2Tetris is a famed online course where you build a computer from the ground up — learning to chain together logic gates like AND and OR and NAND until you've… Read the rest of the article: Building computer logic in the oddly addicting "NAND Game"

In the realm of physics, a "perfect" fluid is one that flows with the smallest amount viscosity possible under quantum mechanics. It's predicted that you'd find them occurring naturally in… Read the rest of the article: MIT physicists capture audio of a "perfect fluid", people put it on their Soundcloud playlists

The New York Times has a piece on "tone indicators" — a growing trend on the Intertubes to use short-forms that clarify the emotional tone of an utterance. This tweet… Read the rest of the article: Tone indicators and the ever-evolving quest to clarify what we're saying online

This fall, Massive Science released the "Women of Science Tarot Deck". It includes such notables as Rosalind Franklin (the chemist whose work was key to understanding DNA), experimental physicist Chien… Read the rest of the article: Women of science tarot deck

Theodore Kim is a Yale computer science professor who's worked for years on techniques for rendering computer-generated humans; he used to be a senior research scientist at Pixar. In Scientific… Read the rest of the article: Former FX tech person points out the racist trajectory of skin and hair CGI

Maryam Tsegaye, a 17-year-old science adept in Fort McMurray, Alberta, entered a global contest called the "Breakthrough Junior Challenge", in which you create a YouTube video to try to explain… Read the rest of the article: Teenage science explainer wins scholarship for brilliant explanation of quantum tunneling