flickering pictures

Sand animation is the art of storytelling through continuously created and recreated images in sand, and there may be no one better at it than Kseniya Simonova. In the video above, she steals the show on Ukraine’s equivalent of the America’s Got Talent TV show, and has the judges and audience in tears as […]

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In case you didn’t catch this back in December, an apparently homeless man named “Mustard” recorded a pretty damn fantastic cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” on the sometimes controversial Opie and Anthony show, broadcast on XM Radio and Sirius Satellite.
Little-known fact: “Creep,” now one of Radiohead’s biggest hits, sold just 6,000 copies as a single in […]

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This has been one of my favourite YouTube videos for ages now — six drummers wait until an elderly couple leaves their apartment to walk the dog, then breaks in and proceeds to turn each of their rooms into a distinct and remarkable musical instrument. Truly odd and wonderful, and I never did figure […]

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Before I read this, I didn’t know that octopuses could navigate mazes, solve problems, and even work the lid off a screw-top jar in search of food.
Wikipedia says:

An octopus has a highly complex nervous system, only part of which is localized in its brain. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in the nerve cords […]

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Burning corpses generates a lot of heat, and a crematorium in East Sussex plans to convert that energy into usable electricity to reduce its own power costs — essentially turning dead bodies into a renewable energy source.
“A crematorium uses vast amounts of energy,” says Hastings Borough Council amenities manager Peter Mead. “We buy about £25,000 […]

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Just a little one today.
A Scottish study is shedding light on ways to safely manipulate hormone levels in men to decrease — or increase — sperm production. The result could finally lead to a long-elusive birth control pill for men, as well as new fertility-enhancing techniques for men with low sperm counts.
From the Times […]

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At least in South Africa.
Frustrated with Telkom, South Africa’s biggest ISP, the cheeky staff at a South African IT company devised a race to see what would be faster: e-mailing a large file from their Pietermaritzburg offices to the city of Durban, 77 km away, or strapping a data stick to a pigeon’s leg and […]

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Check out this simple and fascinating primer on how to visualize ten dimensions by Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Every so often — and it doesn’t happen often — I’m just really glad we have physicists.
(Apologies if this video loads slowly — Bryanton’s site got Boing-Boinged and doesn’t seem to be […]

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When I was a kid, comic books always had those little ads for mail-order venus flytraps, with promises that they’d keep your home bug-free by crushing the life out of unsuspecting houseflies with their razor-sharp fangs and super-corrosive digestive juices. When my mom finally got me one, I was a little disappointed — no […]

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The top-notch Web design team at the New York Times has put together a very neat interactive graph highlighting the ways different groups of Americans spend their day. Here are some interesting facts, with the usual caveat about correlation not equaling causation and all that:

People with two children are more likely to be actively […]

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