Lancaster University's Aurora Watch issued an alert on Tuesday that the Northern Lights would be clearly visible in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, the alert was cancelled after the scientists determined that the data from one of their magnetometers was spurious. A surge in geomagnetic energy is indicative of auroras but this particular spike was likely caused by a lawnmower. "We believe the interference was caused by University staff mowing the grass on a sit-on mower," Aurora Watch stated. "We’ll work with the facilities team to try and avoid an incident such as this occuring in the future!"(via BBC)

One of my favorite management techniques, back during the dotcom boom and bust, was to have engineers on my team solve their differences with Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots!A quick check shows Rock 'em Sock 'ems aren't gone, but I haven't seen a set in years. Mine are in a box in my basement, marked for the last start-up wherein I attempted decision-making by robot duel. The controls? Kinda awful. Opponents sliding forward/back and side-to-side tends to keep the boxing ring bouncing about. Those buttons also take a lot of force, and over time one robot or another's head latch would get loose, giving the opposing color a sure win. Repairs were possible, but over time both robots would become incredibly sensitive. Sometimes, as the weary boxers aged, heads would break free and launch themselves into orbit! I miss knocking your block off.Current Era Mattel Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots via Amazon

The Apple iCloud account of comedian and actor Leslie Jones was recently hacked, with nude photographs posted concurrently with racist threat messages. The incident is being investigated by federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security, according to reports. (more…)

The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that grad students working at private universities can form unions, something that the universities themselves have fought tooth-and-nail for years, with elite universities posted FAQs explaining why trade unionism was a bad match for academic institutions: that each academic institution was unique, and so unlike any other place, that collective bargaining just couldn't work. (more…)

In the past, saving a well worn pair of shoes or boots was a very frustrating mission. Freesole urethane shoe glue is amazing, and good for a lot more than shoes!I've had a lot of success using Freesole to repair wetsuit booties, flip-flops, and a pair of Asolo hiking boots. The booties and flip-flops were both cases of reattaching rubber to neoprene. The hiking boots had a crack in the sole. All three have been held together wonderfully by Freesole.Freesole is a urethane glue that remains super flexible after it cures. The Freesole creates a super strong bond between the surfaces and purportedly will handle extreme temperatures, and water, as well or better than your manufacturers glue. I believe it! The reattached soles on my wetsuit booties have lasted 2-3 months without peeling at all, with probably north of 10-15 hours in the water. Applying Freesole is pretty easy. First, just clean the two surfaces you need to attach with rubbing alcohol. Next spread a layer of Freesole on one side, making sure to get good coverage. I then use binder clips to clamp everything together and simply set it aside for 24-48 hours. The glue takes a day to cure, but when it does the seal is as permanent as when the shoes were new. You can get a few uses out of Freesole if you make sure to wipe the tip of the tube off, put the cap back on, and then stick it in your freezer! It'll keep if you are careful not to let it sit out for very long, and store it cold. The first time I bought Freesole I wasn't so diligent, and a small bit cured in the neck of the tube. I'm pretty sure this is a very similar formulation to AquaSeal, made by the same brand. I've been using the Freesole interchangeably with it. Packaging states that adding Cotol-240 cure accelerant will speed the drying time, and add additional strength to the bond. I've used it on wetsuits and it does work, but makes the glue harder to work with. You can fill in cracks, holes, and reattach separating surfaces with Freesole. There are plenty of videos about how to build up worn down soles as well, but I haven't tried it. Gear Aid Freesole Urethane Formula Shoe Repair 1oz via Amazon

Uber lost at least $1.27 billion before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in the first six months of 2016, Bloomberg reports today. (more…)

These unusual "radio drama staircases" are inside the BBC's sound studios. When an actor is recorded walking up or down the stairs, the different surfaces (wood, carpet, cement) give the acoustic impression of unique locations for the radio drama. Samuel West shot the image above at BBC's Maida Vale Studios. Apparently, they are actually functioning staircases that lead somewhere in the building.(via Neatorama)

Alexander Senko wrote Pure Data code that "produces a lissajous figure with different frequency ratios and a phase modulation. The curve generates pitch, harmonics and volume of sound. The inflection points on the curve create rhythmic structures."I don't always blog about figures, but when I do, they're lissajous ones.

And you thought Stranger Things had a cool opening. (via /r/obscuremedia)

The mobile messaging app will soon begin sharing with Facebook the phone numbers and analytics data for its more than one billion users. When messaging app WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014, WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum promised the deal wouldn't affect users' privacy. (more…)

Explore.org has a very relaxing live feed of bears feeding on salmon at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park, Alaska. At night, they run a highlight reel. Great for having on as you work. (more…)

Once it became clear that a US-backed militia coalition was going to chase Isis out of the northern Syrian city of Manbij, Isis planted at least 14,000 mines, boobytrapping refrigerators, onion-baskets, rocks, appliances, tea-kettles, "everything." (more…)

Hey, it's your ol' pal Joel! Used to write a gadget blog that wasn't about gadgets? Man, great to see you. No, no, have a seat. Can we get a couple of...yeah, no ice, thanks.So let's get business out of the way before we eat: One of my clients is launching a Kickstarter today and I hope you'll check it out.(I have clients now! I started a company. It isn't a media company or even a gadget blog. Just a regular, ol' fashioned intragalactic-HUMINT-and-covert-ops-themed strategic comms company, where people hire me to help them solve problems. I like it.)The Kickstarter is set at $500k, which is a lot of money; it's also how much is needed to build a dedicated printing facility under one roof that can provide 20 museum-quality, ad-supported prints to tens of thousands of customers for free each month. That's what they need to increase production, in both volume and speed. Bear in mind this is a company that took an initial $160k Kickstarter success and 1) made a functional iPhone app 2) established a printing process that exceeds all other consumer printing quality, and 3) spun up production that is putting out 80-100k prints a month. There were many pitfalls along the way—screwed up batches of prints that had to be reprinted before delivery, equipment that was promised that didn't work, greater-than-expected software delays—but they didn't walk away from it. They pushed through it and have built a company. They've got major advertisers lined up to start sponsoring prints. They've got a plan for expansion. They're focused on making people really excited to hold memories in their hands again.If that has caught your eye, go click on their Kickstarter and read through all stuff, maybe watch that "Robots & Lasers" video which sounds like a cheesy faux nerd reference but is quite literal, maybe kick the tires on the business model and ask some questions.Hrm, I guess that was all business! No, ha ha, let me get it. In fact, I've got to get to another meeting. Yeah, no, for sure! Let's do this again.

The dystopian satire site Scarfolk (previously) has scored another direct hit, this time on the human-rights-hating new, post-Brexit Prime Minister and the savage faction she's stacked her cabinet with. (more…)

Millionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump has a knack for projecting criticisms of himself back onto his opponents, however hamfistedly. The latest: Hillary Clinton is a bigot."Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future," Trump said, reading from prepared remarks.Unlike past lines that have drawn scrutiny, including Monday's comments in Ohio about African Americans not being able to walk the street without being shot, this one was not a Trump ad-lib. ...Clinton, for her part, has repeatedly declined opportunities to call Trump himself a racist, despite repeated questioning on the subject and multiple labelings of some of his campaign statements as racist by her campaign.Trump's guest for the evening was UK far-right leader Nigel Farage, who as a younger man boasted that his initials matched those of the white supremacist National Front and sang jaunty ditties about gassing jews.

TeamLab creates gorgeous interactive art installations, like this beautiful piece poetically titled Drawing on the Water Surface Created by the Dance of Koi and People. It's not a video loop, but a program where the swimming koi interact with each other as well as the people wading among them. (more…)

Francesca4me has created arguably the best Poop Emoji Cookie Cutters on the market, and they come in four different sizes. They include depressions for the eyes and mouth that can be filled with white icing, and the thin lines they cut halfway into the cookie give them the most accurate-looking result. (more…)

After half a century of war, the Colombian government and Farc rebels say they have reached a historic peace agreement. The two sides have been meeting in Havana, Cuba since November 2012. Both signed a bilateral ceasefire in June, which was needed before a final agreement could be reached.An estimated 220,000 people have died in the decades-long conflict, and millions have been displaced. (more…)

Two anti-yoga candidates are seeking seats on the Encinitas Union School Board. Both candidates feel the district spending $400k on yoga, while other programs struggle, is out of balance. Via the Encinitas Advocate:In June, the board approved spending $416,000 for a health and wellness program centered on yoga practice, as part of the district’s 2016-17 budget. That amount was scaled back from the $800,000 that Superintendent Tim Baird initially wanted to spend on district-wide yoga instruction, after losing grant funding that previously paid for the program.The decision to devote school funding to yoga infuriated many parents, who said they must raise money constantly to pay for services including science, art, music and physical education instruction. District money would be better spent on those programs, or on class size reductions, rather than yoga, they said.

The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party has issued an apology to attendees at a 3-day, $300-400 Conservative Leadership Foundation seminar where attendees experienced sexist epithets, thrown shoes, and denial of food and drink. (more…)

Former NYC mayor and current nut Rudy Giuliani says he has proof Hillary Clinton is too sick and frail to be president of the US: "Go online and put down Hillary Clinton illness, take a look at the videos for yourself."Stephen Colbert did that and said, "when you look it up on the internet, it says that Giuliani says she’s not healthy and to look it up on the internet. It’s an endless loop. It’s like a snake with its tail in its mouth. Or a man with his head up his own ass.”

Indian Country Today shares the decades long investigation into Effigy Mounds National Monument's missing bones. A large number of human remains went missing, and no one could track them down. Turns out park superintendent Thomas Munson had stashed them in his garage. Munson hid the bones to avoid returning the funerary objects they were buried with, and were on display in the parks museum, to their ancestors. Via ICTMN: It’s like something out of a Stephen King story. An aging National Park Service superintendent steals the remains of hundreds of ancient medicine men and leaders and sticks them under a workbench in his garage in cardboard boxes. It’s 1990 and NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, is about to go into effect. The superintendent suspects the remains will have to be returned to the Native tribes in the area because of NAGPRA. He’s not worried about that so much, but he fears also having to return the funerary objects that were buried with them thousands of years ago, objects now on display in the park’s museum. He hides the bones in his garage.Then, after sitting there for years, the bones suddenly come to life and possess the park superintendent, taking control of his body and forcing him to start killing people.Ok, so, that last part didn’t really happen. But the first part did, according to a timeline prepared by current Effigy Mounds National Monument superintendent Jim Nepstad. The timeline shows how approximately 2,200 human bone fragments where stolen from the park’s museum collection and hidden in former superintendent Thomas Munson’s garage for over 20 years while park employees and several state agencies half-heartedly searched for them.The timeline reads like testimony from the 1973 Senate Watergate Hearings, with letters, phone conversations and in-person meetings being documented between park administration, the Office of the State Archaeologist, the Midwest Archeological Center and the Midwest Regional Office of the National Park Service. Boiled down to its essential elements, the timeline sounds more like a government version of the Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on first?”“Who’s got the bones?” “I don’t know. I thought you had ‘em.” “No, we sent them to you.” “Are you sure? Our records say we sent them to you.” “Ok, let me check. Nope. We definitely don’t have them. Seems like I remember sending them to Lincoln, Nebraska.” And so on... for years!Seems like the kind of mystery the Scooby gang would solve.

Singapore, fearing cyberattacks -- especially ones related to the ongoing South China Sea cold war -- will, as of next May, disconnect its entire civil service from the internet, airgapping the whole government. (more…)

I took Ghent University's vocabulary test, and according to the results, I know 83% of the English words.The Minnesotan took the test and got a 94%. He said:The test does not require you to define or spell words. Instead you are asked to determine whether an entry ("glyph," "moktam," "macrophage," "wookel" etc) is or is not a word in the English language.There seemed to be about a hundred words in the test, which you can proceed through at your own pace, and you can retake it if you wish (with a different group of words on the retest). At the end you can review your errors and see the definitions of the words you missed.

If you're looking to earn a top salary in the tech industry, there's no better career than coding. However, sometimes the hardest part of entering this career path is knowing where to begin.We took the Complete Web Developer Course because it took that decision out of our hands. This course teaches beginner-friendly coding languages that will also help land an immediate position. We didn't want to spend hours studying a language only to realize it isn't even used anymore, and this course avoids that common mistake completely.Packed with over 28 hours of course content, this course is awesome because it has you building sites yourself the entire time. By the end, you'll have a portfolio of work that will turn heads at companies like Twitter and Facebook. Course material includes:Getting Started & HTML - You'll learn to code with HTML, often thought of as the "build blocks" of the Internet.CSS - You'll use CSS to control the layout and style of sites and apps.JavaScript - You'll become fluent in JavaScript, the language that is responsible for the front-end of practically every site on the Internet.You'll need to know all three of these languages to land any major coding position, and we think this course does a great job of laying them out in a digestible manner. For a limited time, you can grab lifetime access to The Complete Web Developer Course for just $14.99.

France has banned women in their country from wearing full-body, head-covering bathing suits. And "burkini police" are patrolling the beaches to catch violators, making them remove their swimwear. People are expressing their opinion on social media. Examples:Just let this sink in. Men with guns forcing a women to undress, with the weight of the law behind them. pic.twitter.com/4BI16Bbss9— Abdul-Azim আজিম (@AbdulAzim) August 23, 20161925 vs 2016. 90 years later and we're still policing women on what they wear to the beach. #BurkiniBan pic.twitter.com/gOUKM8H8NZ— Matthew Ruddle (@RuddleMatthew) August 24, 2016Handing themselves in to the French police. pic.twitter.com/JvOLrRfcHs— Giles Fraser (@giles_fraser) August 24, 2016Time for a swimwear quiz: Banned in France or not? 4 photos to highlight the hateful idiocy of the #BurkiniBan pic.twitter.com/ZGaGDbOhmY— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) August 18, 2016Armed french cops force woman to remove clothing on Nice beach. Has it come to this? #BurkiniBan pic.twitter.com/xMg71qC111— Ian Fraser (@Ian_Fraser) August 24, 2016[via]

Boing Boing has teamed up with MorningSave to offer this deeply discounted collection of House of Marley watches! House of Marley is committed to building superior, eco-friendly products, and every sale supports the Marley family's charitable organization, 1Love.I really like the wood accents on these watches!Boing Boing & MorningSave's House of Marley watch collection

Most states have no maximum temperature standards for their prisons: combine that with a succession of hottest-months-on-record and a prison system that provides less water than is medically recommended even when it's not hotter than blazes, and you've got a carceral state that is roasting prisoners alive. (more…)

The Airlander 10 hybrid airplane-airship, the world's longest aircraft that resembles a massive ass, crashed on landing at Cardington Airfield in Bedfordshire, England. Video below. Fortunately, the crew was uninjured. It was the aircraft's second test flight. "The flight went really well and the only issue was when it landed," said a spokesperson for Hybrid Air Vehicles, the company that developed the aircraft over the last decade, originally supported by a US Army contract.Sir Mix-A-Lot had this to say about the accident: "I like big butts but this one can't fly..."(BBC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg-RPTiVa_Q

Natural color! Shake well! Named after a city in eastern Thailand!

8Bitdo's prototype Desktop Arcade Joy Stick is a) an entire retrogame cabinet, complete with controls, display and guts, b) excellently crafted from wood, c) a surprisingly beautiful re-contextualizing of the experience of play. I'd like to own an entire arcadeful of these, in sizes ranging from 6 inches to 6 feet tall, in a colossal building the exact same shape, with anarchoprimitivist propaganda and classic arcade slowruns depicted on its vast screen. The real thing, though, is perfectly desktop-sized: about 12" across. (more…)

Artist Peter Doig, accused of damaging the value of a painting simply by denying that he was its creator, prevailed in court this week. U.S. District Judge Gary Feinerman found that there no evidence that Doig created the work, but plenty that it was by someone else: one Peter Doige, with an "e". Doig maintained from the beginning that he was the victim of a opportunistic "scam" enabled by similarity of the two artists' names and the recent death of Doige. Meanwhile, the plaintiff claimed Doig was "embarrassed" by a juvenile work that happened to expose a youthful stint in prison [Doige, not Doig, was imprisoned.]Doige's sister, Marilyn Doige Bovard, testified that the painting was her brother's work.As Doig's work sells for millions of dollars, much was at stake; the case was watched closely by artists and dealers concerned about an outcome that made it dangerous to discuss their own work lest they be sued by hungry speculators.Many was also angry that the judge had let the case go to trial in the first place, costing Doig heavy sums to defend himself even after producing ample evidence the painting could not possibly be by him.The case is unusual because disputes over the authenticity of a work of art normally arise long after an artist has died. When artists are alive, it is widely accepted that their word on whether a work is theirs or not is final. Mr Fletcher claimed Mr Doig had renounced the work to avoid admitting he had spent time in prison. Mr Doig's painting Swamped sold for $25.9m last year He said he had bought the painting from Mr Doig for $100 in 1976 when the artist was serving a sentence for LSD possession at Thunder Bay Correctional Centre in Ontario, where Mr Fletcher was working. But Mr Doig insisted he had never been jailed and had actually been attending high school in Toronto at the time.Doig, in a statement, said that justice prevailed "but it was way too long in coming.""That a living artist has to defend the authorship of his own work should never have come to pass," he wrote. "That the plaintiffs in this case have shamelessly tried to deny another artist his legacy for money is despicable."

Omnivore Salt is apparently so delicious that filmmaker Werner Herzog not only did a blurb on the package, but he even narrated a mini-documentary about its creator, blacksmith Angelo Garro, in his classic style: (more…)

“Martin Luther Trump stumbles through a teleprompted message of hope for absent black people.” (more…)

The head of the pharmaceutical company that makes EpiPens raised the price of the life-saving device by over 400%. She was rewarded with a 671% raise. (more…)

Late Tuesday in Thailand, two explosions are reported to have killed two people and wounded dozens at a hotel popular with tourists. The car bombs went off minutes apart in Pattani, in Thailand's deep South. “It was unclear whether the bombs were set off by timers or electrical signal,” the Bangkok Post reported. (more…)

Frequently seen in the pages of 1950s-era Popular Mechanics magazines, the Bensen B-8 was a small gyrocopter that was in production until 1987. Download the plans and build your own two-person gyrocpter fleet to compete with Uber and Lyft! (via Weird Universe)

Gawker.com, the pioneering and controversial media blog, officially died yesterday. It was killed by billionaire Peter Thiel in his successful quest to bankrupt Gawker Media Group through a series of lawsuits he funded – most notably wrestler Hulk Hogan, who sued over the publication of a portion of his sex tape four years ago. (more…)

The tech industry is constantly innovating, and in order to stay competitive, you'll need to keep up. The Programming Into the Future Bundle was created to teach you the skills employers are looking for at this very moment, including in-demand coding languages like Google Go.The bundle of courses includes instruction on a range of innovative tools that advanced coders use daily, including:Node.js - This server-side JavaScript environment creates real time web apps, builds APIs, and streams applications.Angular 2 - This JavaScript library gives you a competitive edge in UI/UX design, web development, and scaling apps and programs across platforms. Google Go Programming - This open-source language developed by Google is used in many Google (and non-Google) apps.With 42 lessons in many forward-thinking programming languages and tools, this bundle will help you catch the eye of any startup or top-name enterprise company you’ve got your eye on.Plus, this is a Pay What You Want based deal. Meaning, if you beat the average price, you'll get the entire bundle. If you pay less than the average price, you still get something awesome. But don’t wait too long: this deal ends in just a short 5 days.

These 1850s photos of Japan were taken with a stereoscopic camera like the one shown here. The photos were hand-tinted and meant to be viewed with a stereoscope. (A View Master is a stereoscope.) The images here are animated GIFs that blink back and forth between the two photos, giving you the 3D effect without having to use a stereopscope.[via]

When pictures of the forthcoming sleeker PlayStation 4 "Slim" showed up on Twitter and NeoGAF, no-one knew if they were the real deal. But when Sony started making noise and having the images disappeared from Facebook, everyone knew they were the real deal. https://twitter.com/erikkain/status/768098839249063936Eurogamer, having taken legal advice and removed video coverage of the box, confirms the story, with new high-resolution photos. Bear in mind here that what Sony got taken down were not NDA-sealed marketing images or even photos surreptitiously taken in its private facilities: if the reports are to be believed, it's scrubbing images it does not own, of a console that was, supposedly, prematurely sold to a member of the public. We can confirm that the PS4 Slim is real.In our bid to confirm the veracity of the images that leaked online last night (more on that below), Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter visited the person who claimed to have bought the console from Gumtree.ORIGINAL STORY: The PlayStation 4 Slim has leaked online.The new console was first spotted on auction website Gumtree, before being picked up by NeoGAF.Twitter user shortmaneighty2, who spotted the Gumtree listing, and NeoGAF user Venom Fox have posted multiple images of the console, showing it boxed, unboxed and compared to the original PS4 console.It's "kind of ugly," writes Erik Kain at Forbes.

Ten years ago a fisherman from the Philippines pulled up his anchor and found it was attached to a giant clam. Inside the clam was a massive pearl. He brought it home and kept it under his bed for good luck. Recently his shack burned down and he showed the pearl to a tourist officer, who encouraged him to get it appraised. Early estimates put its value at $100 million.Fisherman found a giant 34kg pearl worth $100million—but kept it for TEN YEARS for good luck https://t.co/XWI4Od9w6T— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) August 22, 2016[via]

In 1976 a television crew discovered a mummified corpse in a California funhouse. Unbelievably, an investigation revealed that it belonged to an Oklahoma outlaw who had been shot by sheriff's deputies in 1911 and whose remains had been traveling the country ever since. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll trace the postmortem odyssey of Elmer McCurdy, "the bandit who wouldn't give up."We'll also reflect on a Dutch artist's disappearance and puzzle over some mysterious hospital deaths.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

At TriNoma Mall in Quezon City, a metaphor for modern life was born when a rat raced in from the street and tried to ascend the down escalator. Luckily, Kru Bryan was on hand to film the tragicomic analogy. (more…)

Evan Palmer's reverent watercolors capture the verbal harmonies and surprising glories of J.R.R. Tolkien's origin story for the universe he created. (more…)

Graduate student Jason Ahrns captured a stunning image of red sprites over Nebraska while aboard a plane chartered by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And behold Scott McPartland's rare video of the phenomenon in May. (more…)

SER DAVOS: Well, hello there, little fellow? Who's that behind you? (more…)

Created by Rob Mulholland, the photon fairies await your presence in the wilds of Scotland. Just remember: if it bleeds, you can kill it—but these don't bleed. [via r/creepy]

Microsoft has announced an Xbox Onesie that looks like a cuddly spacesuit, and comes with pockets sized to fit game-controllers, forearm grips to prevent slippage at key moments, and roomy hoods that can accommodate enclosed gamer headsets. (more…)