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By the summer of 1858, three million Londoners were flushing their sewage into the Thames through an aging system that emptied directly into the river. Temperatures hit 48 C (118 F) in the sun. The water level dropped. Raw effluent sat on the banks. - Read the rest The post In 1858 the Thames smelled so bad that Parliament fled and Disraeli called it a 'Stygian pool' appeared first on Boing Boing.

From July to September 2001, heavy downpours of red-colored rain fell across the southern Indian state of Kerala, staining clothes pink. Yellow, green, and black rain also appeared. Each milliliter of rain water contained about 9 million red particles. Scientists estimated that 50,000 kilograms of them fell in total. - Read the rest The post Blood-red rain fell on India for two months and some physicists blamed a comet appeared first on Boing Boing.

In August 2008, German developer Armin Heinrich released I Am Rich on the App Store for $999.99 - the maximum price Apple allowed. The app displayed a glowing red gem. Press the gem and it showed a mantra: "I am rich / I deserv [sic] it / I am good, healthy & successful." - Read the rest The post The $999.99 iPhone app that did absolutely nothing sold 8 copies before Apple killed it appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1847, a young Crow hunting party killed the wife of John Garrison Johnston, a former Navy deserter turned mountain man in Montana Territory. According to historian Andrew Mehane Southerland, "He supposedly killed and scalped more than 300 Crow Indians and then devoured their livers" to avenge her death, and "as his reputation and collection of scalps grew, Johnson became an object of fear." - Read the rest The post A mountain man spent 25 years eating the livers of the people who killed his wife appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Leica SL3-P is its new full-frame mirrorless camera, landing in the middle of the L-mount SL line with a 44-megapixel sensor, plain black controls and no red dot. As discreet as a $7k-ish camera might be, then, it's aimed at working photogs in need of multishot frame-stacking, 14 stops of dynamic range, 8K open-gate video, and 5-axis stabilisation. - Read the rest The post Leica's SL3-P loses the dot, gets 8K open-gate video appeared first on Boing Boing.

A while ago, we talked about the fact that Meta's employees were upset that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to watch them use their computers while they were on the clock. It's irony so delicious you wanna eat it with a ladle. 1,600 of Meta's minions signed a petition against being treated the same way that Meta has been treating Facebook users for years. - Read the rest The post Facebook employee data exposed in Meta's own surveillance program appeared first on Boing Boing.

During Grandpa Puddin' Brain's first term, he declared that COVID-19 wasn't a big deal. He asserted that he wouldn't close the country down for a flu, so COVID wasn't gonna lock the doors either. He scoffed at how dangerous the coronavirus was at the time, downplaying the danger that the pandemic represented and said that it would simply "go away." - Read the rest The post CDC buried this COVID vaccine study, so scientists published it anyway appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: The certified refurbishedHP EliteBook 840 G8packs a Core i5 processor, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and Windows 11 Pro for $274.97 (reg. $899.98) during Deal Days.The laptop industry would prefer that you replace your computer every few years. - Read the rest The post Deal Days knocks this HP EliteBook workhorse down to $275 appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace's newly renovated Reflecting Pool turned green, peeled apart, and became a national monument to contractor-grade grift, so naturally, Trump has identified the real villain: an alleged Hillary-Biden-ActBlue pool saboteur.This is the thing Donholio does when reality is too small for him. - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains pens backstory for nefarious Reflecting Pool vandal appeared first on Boing Boing.

8BitDo's Arcade Controller Pro is a Hit Box-style device that trades the arcade stick for a button-only layout. The new model tightens the cluster and adds a fifth programmable button while keeping the slim profile of last year's original. A wee LCD display is the fanciest upgrade, showing live inputs, battery level, and settings normally buried in the app. - Read the rest The post 8BitDo's button-only arcade controller gets a tiny screen appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Babbel's lifetime plan gives you access to14 languages, 10,000+ hours of lessons, AI conversation practice, and courses created by 100+ linguists-all for a one-time $134.99 payment during Deal Days.Learning a new language is one of those goals that tends to sit on a to-do list for years. - Read the rest The post Learn 14 languages from 100+ linguists while this Deal Days Babbel offer is still valid appeared first on Boing Boing.

Carlos Castaneda's 1968 book The Teachings of Don Juan recounted his apprenticeship to a peyote-dosing Yaqui shaman named don Juan. The University of California Press published it as anthropology; it became an international bestseller and drew fans from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to George Lucas and Octavio Paz. - Read the rest The post Carlos Castaneda faked an anthropology classic, then built a cult appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1916, a bearded Long Island showman named Louis Enricht gathered reporters on his lawn and offered them a gasoline substitute that would "sell for a penny a gallon" - wartime alchemy, with gas running short on Europe's battlefields. He had them inspect a small car's empty tank, fill a bucket with garden-hose water, then tip in two ounces of a greenish, almond-smelling fluid. - Read the rest The post In 1916 a con man ran a car on water and fleeced Henry Ford appeared first on Boing Boing.

Writer John Biggs wanted no part of psychedelics, he writes in his newsletter - he pictured being "trapped in a room with a bunch of weirdos while they sang songs and listened to techno." But he was in a bad way after his father's death: drinking, gaining weight, and stuck on the antidepressant Pristiq, which he calls "a numbing pill" that gave "painful zaps" whenever he tried to quit. - Read the rest The post Mushrooms got him off antidepressants, so he built TripSitter appeared first on Boing Boing.

Pete Hegseth gave the flu virus a stirring lecture about freedom, and the flu virus responded by infecting hundreds of recruits at Lackland Air Force Base.This was not an unknowable mystery. Basic training is basically a respiratory virus theme park: recruits sleep close together, train close together, shower close together, and spend weeks exhausted in a giant human cough terrarium. - Read the rest The post Whiskey Pete discovers viruses do not respect vaccine freedom speeches appeared first on Boing Boing.

The artificial intelligence revolution has reached the point where management begs employees to stop feeding PDFs into the robot so it can burp out PowerPoint decks nobody wanted in the first place.The entire AI bubble is built on the idea that someday, somehow, customers will pay for the insane costs of using AI. - Read the rest The post Companies discover AI is expensive when employees actually use it appeared first on Boing Boing.

Yet again, the President of the United States, at an official-looking manufacturing/economy event, performed microphone goblin theater while everyone pretended this was normal governance.This is the central mystery of late-stage Trumpism: not that he does these things, but that hundreds of adults stand around afterward and describe them using words like "remarks," "agenda," and "message." - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains visits a truck factory, makes haunted chew toy noises appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kevin Mitnick, the legendary hacker, once tried to social-engineer his way into Novell's network by phoning a network admin named Shawn Nunley late at night, posing as an employee who needed "direct inbound modem access" for a top-secret project.Nunley smelled a rat, played along, and asked the caller to leave a voicemail - which he recorded onto a cassette recorder. - Read the rest The post Kevin Mitnick left the man who helped jail him enough for a Porsche 911 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Please Remain Seated, Permanezca Sentados Por Favor!A 13-year-old boy at Disneyland climbed out of his Tiana's Bayou Adventure ride vehicle before the end of the attraction and then received a brief, terrifying seminar in why Disney repeatedly, and in multiple languages, tells you to stay in your seat. - Read the rest The post Teen exits Disneyland ride, learns why you keep your arms, legs, and body inside the boat appeared first on Boing Boing.

Radio-frequency chips - the parts in every phone, car radar, and satellite link that send and receive signals - have stayed a hand-crafted "dark art," mastered over years, even as CPUs and GPUs got designed by algorithm. Writing in IEEE Spectrum, Princeton's Kaushik Sengupta describes teaching AI to design these RFICs from scratch, with no human templates - and the results look nothing like human work. - Read the rest The post AI-designed radio chips look like QR codes and beat human ones appeared first on Boing Boing.

America's 250th birthday celebration has reached the "FBI director's girlfriend is available" stage of event planning, which is the sort of sentence that makes the Founders look smart for dying early.To be fair, America has always relied on volunteers in moments of crisis. - Read the rest The post What luck, America! Kash Patel's girlfriend joins Trump's talent-fleeing Freedom 250 event appeared first on Boing Boing.

It's no secret that AI is frigging terrible for us. The experts building it scarcely understand what they've created; the technology is a threat to the environment, and if handed the reins of war machines or infrastructure like hospitals or the power grid, it could cost lives. - Read the rest The post Microsoft CEO wants people to shut up about AI being bad for us appeared first on Boing Boing.

We need to de-normalize punching down at trans people during your comedy sets and start normalizing turning them into weird social experiments. Aaron Westberry has become one of my favorite comics for this precise reason, injecting his open mic appearances with one weird twist after another. - Read the rest The post Comedian guilt-trips audience into laughing appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you have even the slightest interest in peering behind the curtain into the world of game design, I cannot possibly recommend /noclip enough. No, not the console command, the documentary team covering the triumphs and pitfalls and huge feats of coordination that go into bringing any project home. - Read the rest The post What is the Jedi problem, and why does every game designer fear it? appeared first on Boing Boing.

I'm truly, genuinely sorry to everyone who was looking forward to helping Gabe Newell buy a hundredth yacht, but it's just an unavoidable truth: the Steam Machine is kind of a bad deal, guys. Valve's overpriced, underpowered little cube is just the latest victim of soaring component prices driven by investment in AI, because who cares if you can't afford a computer as long as the most racist person you know can make his virtual girlfriend say a slur. - Read the rest The post Building a better PC than the Steam Machine for cheaper: is it possible? appeared first on Boing Boing.

Sporothrix brasiliensis is a fungus that gives cats oozing skin ulcers, can spread through their whole body, and jumps to the people around them. Since it emerged in Brazil in the 1990s it has sickened thousands of cats and more than 11,000 people across South America, and the CDC's Shawn Lockhart told Science News it's "just a matter of time" before it reaches the US - "We're waiting." - Read the rest The post A cat-borne fungus infected 11,000 people; the US is next, CDC says appeared first on Boing Boing.

A standard office printer, a paper cutter, and a book binder - that's the "printing press" the FBI logged when it raided Elizabeth and Ines Soto's Texas home. That, plus their membership in a leftist reading group called the Emma Goldman book club, became part of the government's case that the couple provided "material support to terrorists." - Read the rest The post Zine publisher sentenced to 50 years in prison for "material support to terrorists" appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:ChatPlayground lets youcompare responses from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and morein one interface. Lifetime access to the Unlimited Plan is $54.97 (reg. $619) through June 28 as part of Deal Days.It didn't take long for AI power users to figure out thatthe best answer usually isn't hidden inside one chatbot. - Read the rest The post ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini are all invited-and lifetime access is just $54.97 during Deal Days appeared first on Boing Boing.

A manager at the Arbys in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, spat in a customers food, say police, an act that allegedly resulted in the victim contracting oral herpes. The Smoking Gun reports that Amanda Hendricks, 38, was charged with adulterating food, assault and battery. - Read the rest The post We Have The Herpes: Arby's worker accused of infecting customer by spitting in food appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kodak's Charmera, the keychain-sized digital camera that became a minor cultural phenomenon last year, is back with a new look. Reto, the company that makes the camera and licenses the Kodak name, has launched the Charmera Millennium Edition, which trades the original's '80s styling for a Y2k take on tech: think shiny metallics, fussy gradients, and early pixel nostalgia. - Read the rest The post Kodak's new Charmeras have Y2K vibes appeared first on Boing Boing.

Joseph McGrail-Bateup, a 58-year-old air conditioner cleaner and honorary town crier from Canberra, Australia, has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's loudest person. McGrail-Bateup yelled the word "now" at 122.4 decibels, beating the previous mark of 121.7 dB set by Northern Ireland schoolteacher Annalisa Flanagan in 1994, who shouted "quiet." - Read the rest The post Canberra's town crier recognized as world's loudest person with 122.4dB yell appeared first on Boing Boing.

Professional cycling spent decades looking for cheating in blood, urine, and hotel mini-fridges. Then came the suspicion that the real juice was hiding in the bike.The video follows the story from early viral accusations against Tour riders to the day scanners found a motor hidden inside a seat tube. - Read the rest The post The cheating wasn't in the rider. It was in the bike appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get a lifetime license toMicrosoft Office Professional 2021 for Windowsfor $29.97 (reg. $219.99) during Deal Days - no subscription required.The easiest way to lower a software budget isn't finding a cheaper subscription. It's eliminating one altogether. That's what this deal on theMicrosoft Office Professional 2021 for Windowssubscription brings: one payment, then years of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more without renewal notices. - Read the rest The post Deal Days cuts Microsoft Office Professional 2021 from $220 to $30 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Grandpa Pudding Brains tried to tell a story about a New York police officer "please, sir"ing him and somehow ended up admiring the man's muscles as if he had wandered into a weird Conan movie.If there were muscles, the muscles were all over the place, and so was the story. - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains gets lost in a cop's muscles appeared first on Boing Boing.

Irish artist Niall de Buitlear's eight-minute found-footage piece Duplicate Content splices video art from the mid-1960s through mid-1970s together with recent social-media clips - most of them, in his words, "people alone in a room filming themselves performing for the camera." - Read the rest The post Duplicate Content splices 1960s video art with today's TikToks appeared first on Boing Boing.

This structure called Expo Hall, or "Shining Hat", creates a stunning optical illusion in the sky. The top of the structure makes it look like a giant portal has opened in the atmosphere. Its defining feature is a vast, reflective golden underside that makes the roof appear to dissolve into the sky from certain viewpoints. - Read the rest The post Toyo Ito's Expo Hall "Shining Hat" looks like a portal opening in the sky appeared first on Boing Boing.

The creator, owner, and driver of the 23-foot-long Big Banana Car, Steve Braithwaite, gets to meet a lot of curious cops.

The Oregon Symphony performed Jaws live with the movie, and one bassist understood the assignment so completely that he played the entire thing dressed as a shark.A concertgoer praised the symphony's movie series after seeing Jaws in Concert in Portland, but gave special credit to the musician who wore the shark costume through the whole film while playing bass. - Read the rest The post Jaws in Concert gets the shark-costumed bassist it deserves appeared first on Boing Boing.

Don't you just love all the innovations that the advent of AI has allowed for? There's mass disinformation, the price of consumer computing going through the roof, poisoning groundwater for entire communities, but, uh... at least it's making some people's jobs easier! - Read the rest The post Don't be fooled by scammer deepfakes appeared first on Boing Boing.

A while ago, fans of Better Call Saul (it's me, I'm fans) were surprised by a new piece of official content dropped out nowhere on an unassuming YouTube channel. Bob Odenkirk was back in full force as criminal lawyer Saul Goodman, salmon-colored suit and all, to tell you about your rights in what we all assumed was a fun one-off video to celebrate America's 250th. - Read the rest The post So that Saul Goodman return video wasn't just a one-off appeared first on Boing Boing.

Loath as I am to admit it, I think we may all have seen this coming after Valve raised the price of their Steam Deck. Naturally, this raised questions about how much Valve's flagship Steam Machine "living room PC" would cost - questions that have now unfortunately been answered. - Read the rest The post Valve's Steam Machine will run you at least a thousand dollars appeared first on Boing Boing.

Karoline Leavitt returned to Fox News and immediately tried to convince America that the Lincoln Memorial Algae Farm is a campaign promise kept.On FOX, Leavitt called the algae-costumed protesters "deranged leftists" and said, "Only the Democrats could hate beautifying our nation's capital and making it a symbol of pride again, but this is what the American people elected President Trump to do." - Read the rest The post The Mouth of Moron returns to explain that pond scum is democracy appeared first on Boing Boing.

REI, the company that tells people to "Opt Outside," apparently opted out of looking at the AI bicycle before posting it.PetaPixel reports that REI shared an Instagram ad for a Van Rysel bike using an AI-generated image that immediately failed the "has anyone here ever seen a bicycle?" - Read the rest The post REI tells people to Opt Outside, posts AI bike from nowhere on Earth appeared first on Boing Boing.

I saw a coyote drinking matcha at Gjusta. His man bun was perfect.Los Angeles' offbeat Venice has already adapted to skaters, tourists, tech money, RV fights, influencers, and the occasional guy explaining crypto near the beach. Now the canals have coyotes. - Read the rest The post Venice residents add coyotes to the coexistence curriculum appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:DashResumeanalyzes resumes against job descriptions, identifies keyword gaps, and helps create ATS-friendly applications - all for $39.99 (reg. $139).You could be the perfect candidate for a job and still get rejected by a robot before a human ever sees your resume. - Read the rest The post This AI resume tool helps you get past ATS filters for $40 appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Colossi of Memnon are "two large stone statues of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III" that have stood on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor since about 1350 BC. According to Wikipedia, each rises about 18 meters and weighs "an estimated 720 tons." - Read the rest The post For centuries, a cracked Egyptian statue sang at dawn appeared first on Boing Boing.

Every year around the end of the Buddhist Lent, crowds gather along the Mekong River to watch the Naga fireballs - glowing balls that, according to Wikipedia, "are alleged to naturally rise from the water high into the air." They are said to be "reddish" and to "range in size from smaller sparkles up to the size of basketballs," and "the number of fireballs reported varies between tens and thousands per night." - Read the rest The post Mysterious glowing balls rise from the Mekong every year appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Man in the Iron Mask was "an unidentified prisoner of state during the reign of Louis XIV of France." According to Wikipedia, he was arrested in 1669 under the name "Eustache Dauger" and "held for 34 years in the custody of Benigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars in four successive French prisons, including the Bastille." - Read the rest The post The masked prisoner of Louis XIV whose name was never spoken appeared first on Boing Boing.

Wesley Willis was "an American musician and visual artist" from Chicago who, after being "diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1989," became a cult figure in the outsider-music tradition. According to Wikipedia, his songs were "partially spoken in an MC style, and partially sung in a nasal and out-of-tune manner reminiscent of punk rock vocals," recorded over "the auto accompaniment feature on his Technics KN keyboard." - Read the rest The post The schizophrenic Chicago artist who became an outsider rock legend appeared first on Boing Boing.

For three decades, a Hollywood director who wanted to disown a film could take his name off it and replace it with one man: Alan Smithee. According to Wikipedia, the name was "an official pseudonym used by film directors who wish to disown a project," coined by the Directors Guild of America in 1968. - Read the rest The post For 32 years, every director who disowned a film became Alan Smithee appeared first on Boing Boing.