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How Memes Are Orchestrated by the Man
Google's trend charts of the phrase "Harlem Shake" are seismic. No one looked for the words until Feb. 7, then searches surged faster than any term Google ever had, except for "Whitney Houston" after...
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Did You Know Scallops Have *Eyes*? Me Neither, but Look
Unless you are an avid scuba diver, when you think of scallops, you probably think of linguine and garlic more than oceans and shells. That's because we only eat the muscle of the scallop: You never...
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PWOPPP, Click! This Is What Spaceships Sound Like When They're Docking
Bow-chicka-bow-wow! The Soyuz spacecraft docked to the International Space Station during a mission of Russian cosmonauts in August 2012 (Reuters) When two spaceships love each other very much ......
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Evidence Lost: We're Not Likely to See Editing Like Proust's in the Future
Bibliotheque nationale de France (click to expand)This image comes from the notebooks of Marcel Proust, one page among the thousands that would eventually become In Search of Lost Time. Though there...
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Facebook: 2.7 Million People Showed Their Support for Marriage Equality by...
I happen to know the person who made the matzah one, no joke. (Facebook) If you are friends with a generally pro-marriage equality bunch, you probably saw your Facebook News Feed morph into a stream...
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Newspapers, Delivered by Drone
A drone on its paper route (La Poste) Add one more to the list of career paths that are being obviated by robots: news delivery. In Auvergne, a province in southern France, residents get their daily...
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Why Google Ran a Cesar Chavez Doodle: An Alternative Theory
Conservative online media exploded yesterday with another story about Google. To celebrate one day -- the birthday of the labor activist Cesar Chavez -- Google had swapped into its homepage a doodle...
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Want to Join the Foreign Service? There's an App for That
A new State Department mobile application gives prospective Foreign Service officers a taste of what could be in store for them. The app, which is being promoted online and during career fairs,...
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What's an Obituary For?
President Obama presents the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Yvonne Brill during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in 2011. (AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais) The controversy...
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Michigan's March Madness Bandwagon, as Mapped by Facebook
Facebook (click to enlarge) March Madness is drawing to a close. Now that we have four teams left standing (and shooting, and dribbling) to fight for the win in this year's NCAA Men's Basketball...
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How to Count Komodo Dragons
Komodo dragon and a critter cam. Note the hanging goat meat. (You could make a mean birria with that chunk.) If I know one thing about komodo dragons, it is: you cannot ride a komodo dragon, no matter...
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Joseph and the Giant Balloon: The First Aeronaut of the American West
Crowds at a turn-of-the-century balloon race in St. Louis. (Library of Congress) On a summer's day in August of 1853, a crowd assembled at a lot on Third Street near Oakland's wharf, ready to see what...
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The Most Epic Frog Fail in Glorious High-Speed Video
The New York Times ran a dynamite story on dragonflies yesterday featuring a gallery of animated GIFs of dragonflies in flight. But it was a certain frog that really stole the show. Leaping after a...
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A Little Outliner, Named 'Little Outliner'
Three years ago I mentioned an intriguing, easy, collaborative cloud-based outliner named Thinklinkr. It doesn't seem to be around any more, and its official blogsite doesn't appear to have any entries...
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The First Mobile Phone Call Was Made 40 Years Ago Today
AP The first mobile phone call was made 40 years today, on April 3, 1973, by Motorola employee Martin Cooper. Using a prototype of what would become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, the world's first...
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A Very Practical Guide for Breaking Into (Science) Writing
Smithsonian Institution Bora Zivkovic, the blog editor at Scientific American, and a central figure in the science blogging world, has penned a lengthy guide for writers trying to get in the game....
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8 Guys, 6 Weeks: How the Cell Phone Was (Finally) Invented
Joaquim Marques Nielsen The first call publicly conducted on a cellular telephone was made for two reasons: show, and spite. Dr. Martin Cooper and a design team at Motorola had just developed a...
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Q: What Became of the Parachute That Delivered Curiosity to Mars?
A sequence of seven images from the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows wind-caused changes in the parachute of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ....
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How Metafilter Brought a Deceased Father's Jokes Back to Life
David Drucker (Daniel Drucker) Two weeks ago Daniel Drucker went to Metafilter with a request. "My father passed away this morning," he wrote. "I'm going through his file, and I came across JOKES.TXT...
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This Is How You Shoot Aerial Footage of San Francisco
Teton Gravity Research, a production company based in in Wyoming, has produced more than 20 films about skiing, snowboarding, and other action sports since the mid-1990s. When it comes to getting...
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