Fair warning, this video is an illustrated version of the periodic table set to The Can-Can. There are consequences to watching. But hopefully one of them is that you learn all the chemical elements in order without even trying. Which would be a convenient, if incredibly nerdy, bar trick to bust out sometime.Read more...    
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Over the past year, we've thrown a brisket party, a Faux Loko party, and a planetarium party. And on Friday, after we announced some very big news about our new Editor in Chief, we added another unusual party to our list: a dinner in the Skyroom of the New Museum and a tour of the museum's new design exhibition, Adhocracy. Read more...    
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Sometimes it's important to just take a moment and reflect on life. It can be a real relief to let go of technology for a moment and think about something else. History maybe. And there's no better way to slow down than by taking a walk with an eight-foot-tall, 1,000-pound robot that moves 10-feet per minute. Ahh, how quaint.Read more...    
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In April NASA's Landsat Data Continuity Mission took a huge panorama. From 438 miles above the Earth, the satellite shot a 6,000-mile-long, 120-mile-wide strip of planet from Russia to South Africa. It is aptly named ‘The Long Swath.’ Oh and it's 19.06 gigapixels.Read more...    
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The youtube.com domain name was activated on February 14, 2005, and the first public preview of the site went live eight years ago today. So...birthday!Read more...    
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Seriously, what is the deal with allll those janky lyrics sites? You google the lyrics for Random Access Memory and you're suddenly transported to the early 2000s. It's sort of surreal. I'm not the first person to mention this by far, and yet the lyrics world just seems to stagnate.Read more...    
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Cash! The WSJ says "the Yahoo board has approved a deal" to make this happen, and it's hard to imagine Tumblr turning this down. One of the most unpopular companies in the world will soon own one of the most popular in history, and we'll all find out if you really can buy cool.Read more...    
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It's hard not to be curious about the true identity of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, since he or she basically just stuck around on the internet long enough to introduce Bitcoin/get everyone all riled up and then disappeared. But Ted Nelson, the sociologist who invented the term "hypertext," thinks he knows who Nakamoto really is, and in the video below he calls out Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki.Read more...    
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I don't have a desk, because there's no room in my apartment, but if I did it would probably be covered in so much crap that I wouldn't be able to use it anyway. And it makes me feel a little better to know that Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman doesn't have a desk either.Read more...    
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45 mice, 15 newts, eight gerbils and a handful of snails returned to Earth today after a month in space in a Russian capsule. The Bion-M completed a parachute-assisted landing about 750 miles southeast of Moscow, and researchers immediately set up a mobile lab near the capsule to begin tests on the animals.Read more...    
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Keeping flowers or plants in your house is supposed to make things more beautiful, not chaotic. But this vase is only balanced when the flowers have water. If too much liquid evaporates, the counter-weight pulls one side of the vase down.Read more...    
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Streetlight Manifesto's new record, The Hands That Thieve, is an instant classic in the ever-shrinking world of really stellar ska music simply by virtue of being a Streetlight Manifesto album. But what "Ungrateful" brings to the table is something a little subtler; it's a great Catch 22 song.Read more...    
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There are probably a lot of things you learned in school that you don't even remember, but the "order of operations"—also known as PEMDAS—is likely to be one that stuck with you; you'll mess up even simple equations without it. The catch? Well, it's wrong. Read more...    
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Want some more tech to put on your face? Neither full-on goggles like the Oculus Rift nor slender no-AR-yet specs like Google's Glass, CastAR takes a whole different approach to modified-reality tech by slapping tiny projectors on your face, and The Verge got to take a peek.Read more...    
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While you are hanging out on the Internet (in your underwear, maybe?) on a Saturday, kids that are smarter than either you or I are out there getting ready to change the world. 18-year-old Eesha Khare (left), for instance, not only invented a supercapacitor that could someday be a phone battery that charges in just a couple of seconds; she also won $50,000 for it.Read more...    
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Who has time to watch a whole movie anymore? It's summer! So in the spirit of phoning in everything once the temperature rises above 70-ish, here's Ridley Scott's Aliens in 60 seconds of adorable animation. Brought to you, of course, by the fine folks who did Star Wars Episode IV, Back to the Future, and The Matrix. Not bad for a human. [YouTube]Read more...    
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So, Google's new Hangouts app keeps all of your chats in sync across all of your devices. Cool, right? But what if you're in a video call on your phone, and then open the same video call on your computer. Boop! Suddenly there's two of you, as I just discovered when chatting with my friend Bay. Read more...    
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Not too long ago, Patton Oswalt riffed on his idea for a great plot for the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII film on Parks and Recreation. Now, it's got a whole bunch of..."digital effects" that turn it into the film we all deserve. It's alright JJ, we've got this one on lock. But thanks for throwing your hat in the ring! [iZacLess via Patton Oswalt]Read more...    
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It's been a big, big week. Google I/O hit this week, bringing along a whole bunch of Android updates, if not a new version or any actual hardware. And aside from all that jazz, we've got an ode to Chris Hadfield, (a wild guess at) how much it would cost to build the starship Enterprise, why 3D-printing is overrated, the best streaming radio service, why your ears pop on an airplane and more. Read more...    
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Last night, the pilot of US Airways Express Flight 4560 was having some bad luck. The landing gear on his turboprop twin-engine plane just wouldn't go all the way down. So with some quick thinking and righteous piloting skills, he went in for a wheelless, sparky touchdown, and pulled it off without a hitch.Read more...    
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Sometimes, you love a song and it’s not on the web. That’s just not right, because the three or so generations alive today are largely responsible for making sure that all the important and interesting stuff (and not just cat videos) make it onto the Internet.Read more...    
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There are all kinds of ways to design a table, but most of them don't include resonant frequencies or specially-designed abrasive enzymes, much less both. Bonus Table 571 isn't most tables though, and that's exactly how it gets its very specific pattern. Read more...    
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For the most part, we're all happy if we can get Internet that's fast enough to stream some HD video. But faster is always better, and a new, world-record setting network developed in Germany is so blazing fast you wouldn't know what to do with it. It can deliver 10 HD films in a second.Read more...    
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Lasers, bubbles, edge-tracking, and Daft Punk are all pretty awesome in their own separate ways, but put together, they can put one one hell of a useless, random, but awesome show. Read more...    
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Mixing surreal anaglyphic animation and a haunting soundtrack, this stunning short by Stephen Chan is cool enough to watch even without the glasses. Of course if you want the full effect but don't have access to pair, just blink your eyes alternately real fast. That might work.Read more...    
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