In Botswana, conservation scientists from the University of New South Wales are painting eyes on the rear ends of cattle in an effort to deter lions from eating them. As the lions' protected habitats shrink, they move closer to human settlements. In Botswana, the lions attack the livestock that the subsistence farmers count on. That leads the farmers to kill the African lions, further endangering the species. (UNSW conservation biologist Neil Jordan’s idea of painting eyes onto cattle rumps came about after two lionesses were killed near the village in Botswana where he was based. While watching a lion hunt an impala, he noticed something interesting: “Lions are ambush hunters, so they creep up on their prey, get close and jump on them unseen. But in this case, the impala noticed the lion. And when the lion realised it had been spotted, it gave up on the hunt,” he says.In nature, being ‘seen’ can deter predation. For example, patterns resembling eyes on butterfly wings are known to deter birds. In India, woodcutters in the forest have long worn masks on the back of their heads to ward-off man-eating tigers. Jordan’s idea was to “hijack this mechanism” of psychological trickery. Last year, he collaborated with the BPCT and a local farmer to trial the innovative strategy, which he’s dubbed “iCow”."Eye-opening conservation strategy could save African lions" (UNSW)

Alex Schmidt of Cracked makes a passionate (and hilarious) argument for DC putting Superman and Batman into the public domain, pointing out that comics companiesmake a hell of a lot of money on public domain characters from Sherlock Holmes and Thor. (more…)

A new International Labour Organization report called ASEAN in transformation: How technology is changing jobs and enterprises predicts that "sewbots" -- sewing robots that can piece together garments with little or no human intervention -- will replace up to 90% of garment and footwear workers in Cambodia and Vietnam in the years to come. (more…)

Snake Plissken is back in these epic Escape from New York comics! I loved the comic book continuation of Big Trouble in Little China and these Escape from New York books are more of the same. Excellent art and story telling pick up right where the film ended, the ass-kicking continues. Our hero Snake decides he needs a little vacation and heads south to Florida. Naturally, nothing works out as easily as he plans, and Plissken finds himself stuck putting down a new southern rebellion.Escape From New York Vol. 1 via Amazon

On a Saturday, a 3.7 magnitude "earthquake" was detected about 168 miles off Florida's Daytona Beach Shores. It now appears that the quake was actually a "shock trial," an explosive test conducted by the US Navy to test the fortitude of the USS Jackson, a new combat ship. From the Daytona Beach News-Journal:Asked about the reported earthquake on Monday, Dale Eng, a public information officer for the Navy’s Sea Systems Command in Washington, said the Navy is working on a statement it expects to release this week.Seismographs as far away as Minnesota, Texas and Oklahoma, as well as along the coast of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, registered the event on Saturday, said Bruce Presgrave, a geophysicist and shift supervisor at the Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in California.(After being shown the above photo of a shock trial conducted last month) Presgrave said, "That's a smoking gun, isn't it?"Presgrave planned to contact the Navy to learn more about the charges used in the shock trials as part of the agency's ongoing investigation.

Jonathan Jarry's short video on the problems with anaecdotal evidence for "alternative medicine" is a powerful, easy-to-digest primer on the ways that confounding variables, survivor bias and regression to the mean can make stuff like reiki seem like it works, and how double-blind tests can uncover these problems and help us figure out what works and what doesn't -- especially important is the idea that "dead men tell no tales"; that is, no one who died because alternative medicine failed to help them will ever tell you how great it worked. (via Motherboard)

From self-driving cars to financial software to the recommendations you get on Amazon and Netflix, machine learning is at the core of modern technology—and its implications for future technology are staggering.And now, you can dive into the field of machine learning yourself with The Complete Machine Learning Bundle. This package of 10 courses includes 406 lessons that will teach you everything from the basics to practical applications of machine learning (like how to apply machine learning to stock trading).So put on that thinking cap and snap up this bundle while it’s available—it’s currently a steal for just $39.99 (94% off the regular price of $780).

Posavina bez mina, a humanitarian organization that works to defuse landmines in the former Yugoslavia, has posted a warning to its Facebook page saying that they've been told that Pokemon Go players are venturing into active minefields to catch virtual critters, and warning people not to go into minefields to catch Pokemon, which is very good advice. (more…)

Pooper is an app for dog owners willing to pay to have other people pick up their dog's poop. Just snap a photo of your dog's poop, and a scooper (paid per scoop) will drive, walk, bus, or bike over and collect it for you. It's $15 a month for 2 scoops/day in a 15-mile radius. An unlimited plan is $35 a month.

Iowa congressman Steve King Steve King of Iowa loves his "sub-group" of people. Here's what he said on a televised panel on MSNBC:“This whole ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”“Than white people?” Mr. Hayes asked.Mr. King responded: “Than Western civilization itself that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.”Even if King's proudly ignorant statement was true, which it most assuredly is not, the fact remains that King himself hasn't invented anything, other than fabulist history. To be proud of someone else's invention because you have the same color skin as them is just about the stupidest thing a human being could think. It's unfortunate that this nincompoop has enough admirers to vote him into office.Quartz put together a list of things not invented by white people. I wonder if Rep King sullies his hands by touching any of them?numeralsmathematicsreligionChristianityirrigationnovelspaperinkdancemusicgunpowdergunsbombstime bombsthe seismographthe compassjust-in-time manufacturingCD playersMP3 playersPokemoncalculatorskaraokelithium ion batteriesyogamartial artssilkumbrellasteanoodlesinstant noodlesshampoopunk futurismfutures markets

It's hard to believe it's been nearly six years since Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt introduced the Glif tripod mount for the iPhone 4. I bought one and liked it a lot. Now they have introduced a new Glif. This one works with all kinds of smartphones, has 3 tripod mount points, and comes with a couple of accessories. It looks great.

Charges were dismissed for the Madison, Alabama police officer who body slammed a 58-year-old man from India walking on the sidewalk last year. Sureshbhai Patel, who does not understand English, was seriously injured and needed an operation to fuse two vertebrae.From NBC News:Hank Sherrod, Patel's attorney, told NBC News in an email that the state's decision to drop the assault charge is deeply troubling, though not entirely surprising."This decision illustrates how difficult it is to hold law enforcement officers accountable under the criminal laws for brutal acts that would send an ordinary citizen to jail," he said.[Former Madison, Ala. police officer Eric Sloan] Parker, 27, still faces a civil lawsuit in connection with the incident. Parker encountered Patel last Feb. 6 while responding to a call of a suspicious black man looking at garages and walking near houses. Patel, in from India to visit his son and grandson, testified that he did not understand English or the officers who confronted him while he was out for a walk.Nice people around the world gave $209,000 to Mr. Patel's GoFundMe account.

In 1985, Marie Osmond energetically recited Hugo Ball's 1916 poem "Karawane" on the TV series "Believe it or Not." I believe Mr. Ball would have loved this.(Thanks, Gareth!)

The Moto Z phone uses a system of magnetically aligned components that snap on and off to add functionality, from high-quality speakers to extra batteries to a projector. (more…)

This bird soy sauce container makes me happy. Perfect for my gluten-free soy sauce.

The average price of a US movie ticket hit $8.72 during 2016's second quarter, the highest they've ever been -- in possibly related news, ticket sales were down 9.5% in the same period. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=EHRc-QMoUE4The 8-Bit Guy's 15-minute explainer on floppy discs is a great potted history of 80s- and 90s-era storage media (it follows his segment on tape-drives) and the way that competitors learned from each others' mistakes and dead-ends, and engineered clever solutions to one of computing's most serious challenges. (via Motherboard)

Marta sez, "The Modern Poland Foundation is calling for speakers at the 5th International CopyCamp Conference (Warsaw 27-28th October 2016) to discuss the Future of Copyright in Europe. If you'd like to join the debate on the impact copyright has and will have on education, politics, culture and society, send us your proposal and meet with other speakers from all over the world: lawyers, artists, politicians, academics, representatives of NGOS and the media."It's the fifth time CopyCamp gives floor to all interested parties to talk about copyright in the friendly space of the popular movie theatre in the heart of Warsaw.Thematic tracks of CopyCamp 2016:*Copyright and Art*Remuneration Models*Copyright, Education and Science*Technologies, Innovation and Copyright*Copyright and Human Rights*Copyright Enforcement*Copyright Debate*Copyright LawmakingFind more information here. If you are interested in presenting your viewpoint during a 10-minute talk, please send us an abstract of not more than 1800 characters by 31 July.The International CopyCamp Conference 2016Future of Copyright in Europe

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Friends of Tom the Dancing Bug join its subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and much more. And check out Ruben Bolling’s new book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

You saw the thumbnail and you came to the post, so here's the cold truth: it's just a rendering. Zont Sound's beautiful little pocket synth will have an AMOLED display, softly-backlit matte-touch controls, wireless and USB-C connections, and 3.5mm out. There's a dock that adds MIDI, writes Sean O'Kane, and at least a year of dreaming ahead of us. [h/t daneel]Unfortunately, it seems that it will be a long time before anyone gets a chance to play with the Zont synth: the official website says it won’t be available until the fall of 2017. And while the designer behind the project, Pavel Golovkin, claims to have industrial design experience at Nooka (a company known for its wild wristwatches), this appears to be his first attempt at making his own hardware. That’s not always a promising proposition, though Teenage Engineering pulled it off with their own (admittedly low-budget) pocket synthesizers. (In fact, Zont's already drawing comparisons to Teenage Engineering's synth.) Golovkin will start up a crowdfunding campaign for the Zont synth later this year. Here’s hoping he befriends some audio engineers in the meantime.

The best part of smoking is the moment when it’s finally time to inhale that first breath, kick back, and relax. But getting to that first inhale isn’t always the easiest task, and you’re often left with a bigger mess than when you started.There’s a better way, and it’s called the Hippie 2.0 Vaporizer. This compact little vape packs a powerful punch: it has a temperature scale of 356 F- 428 F, is constructed with a full ceramic chamber, and charges quickly via USB.Plus, it’s smart enough to remember what your last temperature setting was, so you’ll always have the best smoking experience, every time (no more fiddling with the perfect way to pack the bowl).The Hippie 2.0 Vaporizer also comes with an assortment of goodies including a USB charger cable, a glass pipe attachment, and a sleek leather carrying case—all for just $96 (39% off the original price of $159).

A group of South African astronomers announced on Saturday the discovery of more than a thousand galaxies never before known to have been seen or recorded by human beings. The astronomers “were showing off the first taste of the ultimate cosmic feast of what is to come, at least as seen from this particular dusty crumb called Earth,” writes Dennis Overbye at the New York Times:[caption id="attachment_472309" align="alignnone" width="930"] Left: A patch of sky about as big as the full moon where the MeerKAT telescope discerned the radio glow of about 200 galaxies. Only a few (circled) had been previously observed; Right: A distant galaxy that is being blown up by a black hole at its center. Credit SKA South Africa[/caption]When it’s done, sometime around 2030, the Square Kilometer Array, as it is known, will be the largest telescope ever built on our planet. It will consist of thousands of radio antennas that will collectively cover a square kilometer (hence the name), spread out in mathematically intricate patterns in South Africa and Australia.The telescope is being built by an international collaboration with its headquarters at the University of Manchester in England. The first phase, to be completed in 2023, will cost 650 million euros.Astronomers estimate that it will pull some 35,000-DVDs-worth of data down from the sky every second. So much that it would take 2 million years to play on your smartphone.For now the bounty consists of the radio glow of some 1,300 distant galaxies spotted in a patch of sky about 20 times the size of the full moon, where only 70 galaxies had been counted before. Some of them are erupting in cataclysms as massive black holes in their hearts spew radioactive high-energy particles across the dark sea of space.South African Telescope Spots 1,300 Unknown Galaxies [NYT]These Frank Chu signs are fake and created with the acme.com/chumaker, but the New York Times headline reminded me of Chu's intergalactic imaginings.[caption id="attachment_472313" align="aligncenter" width="930"] The MeerKAT radio telescope. Photo: SKA South Africa.[/caption][caption id="attachment_472319" align="aligncenter" width="930"] The MeerKAT radio telescope. Photo: SKA South Africa.[/caption][caption id="attachment_472318" align="aligncenter" width="930"] The MeerKAT radio telescope. Photo: SKA South Africa.[/caption][caption id="attachment_472320" align="aligncenter" width="930"] The MeerKAT radio telescope. Photo: SKA South Africa.[/caption]

"How To Hide Anything" is Michael Connor's 1984 book about rigging secret hiding places for your contraband and even yourself. Download the book for free here at Archive.org or purchase a hardcopy from Amazon. Connor is also the author of other well-intentioned self-help books like "Sneak It Through: Smuggling Made Easier" and "The Power of Positive Revenge: A Winner's Guide to Exacting Vengeance."

For more than 50 years, Justo Gallego has spent his days building his own beautiful cathedral outside of Madrid, all by himself."When I started to build this cathedral, the word on the street was that I was crazy," Gallego says.

Approximately 350,000 people in the US are diagnosed with gonorrhea each year. According to the CDC, it may soon be untreatable. Currently, the sexually-transmitted disease, not-so-fondly known as The Clap or The Drip, is treated with two antibiotics, azithromycin and ceftriaxone. Data is currently showing a rise in gonorrhea samples that are resistant to those drugs. Companies are developing new antibiotics but could be "years away," says CDC medical epidemiologist Robert D. Kirkcaldy."We think … it’s a matter of when and not if with resistance,” he says. “This bug is so smart and can mutate so rapidly.”(Scientific American)

The copyright troll business-model: a sleazy lawyer gets copyright holders to one or more films (often, but not always, porn) to deputize them to police those rights; then the lawyer's company uses sloppy investigative techniques to accuse internet users of violating those copyrights; they use deceptive notices to get ISPs to give them contact details for those users (or to get the ISPs to pass notices on to the users); then they send "speculative invoices" to their victims, demanding money not to sue -- usually a sum that's calculated to be less than it would cost to ask a lawyer whether it's worth paying. (more…)

Lucky there are leash laws!(via Reddit)

The failed military coup in Turkey was bizarre, even (especially) by the standards of Turkish military coups (which is a surprisingly large data-set), and in the wake of the coup, 6,000 people were promptly rounded up and arrested including respected judges, powerful military leaders, prosecutors, and a whole list of others whose names seem to have been put on an enemies list long before any coup. (more…)

No matter where you place it, pointerpointer.com has a photo with someone point at your pointer.

This Ecuadorian caterpillar not only looks like a scary snake, it will also "strike" at curious creatures.

I run a website with Kevin Kelly and Claudia Lamar called Cool Tools. The three of us have started a weekly email newsletter of things (experiences, tips, entertainments) we personally use and recommend. It's called Recomendo. Here's what Kevin says about it:We'll be recommending 6 items in an extremely short email every week. Mark, myself, and Claudia — the entire staff of Cool Tools — will suggest good stuff we have personally used, consumed, or experienced. We'll try to keep each recommendations light and fast, to no more than a sentence or two. They won't be definitive reviews; rather they'll be quick recommendations. Going back again to our roots, we've named it Recomendo — which, believe it or not, was the name of this site before I renamed it Cool Tools.If you want great tools, stay on (or sign onto) the Cool Tools newsletter. To get all the other kinds of things we encounter and enjoy sharing, sign up for Recomendo here. As usual, we don't do anything with your info except send you short and sweet one-screen news once a week.

When the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act in 2015, we learned that the 2016 election would be the first in two generations without the basic protections for equal voting rights for all people. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.The Worrier's Guide to Life by Gemma CorrellAndrews McMeel Publishing2015, 112 pages, 6.5 x 8 x 0.4 inches (softcover) $11 Buy a copy on AmazonAre you an every-second second-guesser? Do pizza, sweatpants, and pugs sound like your perfect Friday night? Do you ever want to punch your brain in the face? Are you starting to feel anxious because I’m asking you so many questions? Find comfort in Gemma Correll’s new collection of comic snapshots, The Worrier’s Guide to Life. You can easily slip this slender book into your bag and bring it along to all those anxiety-producing other-people-filled situations that seem to dominate life. When faced with an overly crowded waiting room full of obviously contagious people whose germs will surely turn your sinus infection into a face plague, hide your nose in this book! If you’re forced to stomach a social gathering full of professional bloggers who couldn’t possibly look that good or be that happy in real life but ohmygod they do and they are and you haven’t showered in three days, steal away to a corner, flip open this book, and remember you’re not alone! Correll offers sketches of an anxious life, as lived by everyone from fetuses to fairytale princesses, interspersed with snippets from her ongoing series of punny visual lists. These delightfully silly sets include “Urban Birthstones,” featuring rings topped with a bit of styrofoam, a cigarette butt, or a balled-up passive-aggressive note, depending on your month, as well as “Pasta Shapes for the Depressed,” “Sexy Halloween Costumes for the Ladyeez,” and “Ye Olde Video Games.”You can get a daily fix of Gemma Correll’s illustrated insights and anxieties via her various social media streams, but it’s lovely to actually flip through her work in a real-life book rather than, or in addition to, reading it on a scrolling screen. The Worrier’s Guide to Life also makes a fabulous gift for that perfect friend who never judges you for eating all the ice cream, texting her the conversations you have with your pet, or using Google like a magic eight ball. You know, the one who gets it.– Marykate Smith Despres

MTV's Carvell Wallace offers a condensed history of white rappers. As the genre grew from art to hustle to full-fledged industry, multinational corporations began to exert increased control over its products and direction. Protecting its cultural roots against the ensuing opportunistic influx became a martyr's errand; so much so that Rakim himself felt it necessary to reframe his famous line, placing it in entirely different context on his 1990 single “In the Ghetto”: "So I collect my cash, then slide / I've got my back, my gun's on my side / It shouldn't have to be like that / I guess it ain't where you're from, it's where you're at." Rather than an open invitation for all into rap, the line is flipped into a necessary reminder of the genre’s dour beginnings. And possibly a subtle dis at what it was already becoming.Blondie's Rapture was the first rap video MTV saw fit to play. The second was a comedy song by Rodney Dangerfield, embedded above.

Retronaut posted a fabulous gallery of women railroad workers from World War II. [via]

On June 21, Joshua Lee Long's aunt was cleaning her trailer in Carlisle, Pennsylvania when she found a department store bag containing a human brain under the porch. She called the police, who interviewed Mr. Long. He admitted that he sprayed his marijuana cigarettes with the formaldehyde-based embalming fluid used to preserve the brain before smoking them. The 26-year-old was charged with abuse of a corpse and conspiracy.

r/BadCGI is my new favorite subreddit, whose inhabitants share examples of grotesque, inept, or amusingly dated computer graphic animation. Embedded here for your enjoyment is the full movie of Joshua and the Promised Land.P.S. Has anyone noticed that the cripplingly addictive game in Star Trek: The Next Generation is basically Pokemon Go, but with only one Pokemon? Right down to the quality of the graphics! Speaking of Pokemon, here's a genuinely terrifying PC version from 2000:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpf25GfbjpM

This simulation of live mobile internet stats offers a sense of scale: there are millions of concurrent Google searches, and, every minute, about half a million photos posted on WhatsApp, 3,000 smartphones sold (roughly half from Samsung and Apple), 35m messages sent on Facebook, and 40m emails opened. It is a marketing infographic, take heed, but it does conclude "Heck some people think smartphones are the gateway to transhumanism, where one day we will fully merge with machines!", which is nice.

Best orchid species ever: Telipogon diabolicus!From EurekAlert:Discovered by Dr Marta Kolanowska and Prof Dariusz Szlachetko, both affiliated with University of Gdansk, Poland, together with Dr Ramiro Medina Trejo, Colombia, the new orchid grows a stem measuring between 5.5 - 9 cm in height.With its only known habitat restricted to a single population spread across a dwarf montane forest at the border between departments Putumayo and Nariño, southern Colombia, the devilish orchid is assigned as a Critically Endangered species in the IUCN Red List.[via]

Like most other online services, Pokemon Go's are a reboot of the Book of Revelations, full of bizarre horrors, each more grotesque than the last. (more…)

Rick Santorum said pregnancy from rape is a "gift from God" and compared gay relationships to "man-on-dog" sex -- and he signed a pledge saying that African-Americans had it better during slavery. (more…)

You walk into Disney’s Haunted Mansion, and whether you’re in Orlando, Anaheim, or Tokyo, after the foyer you enter a place known as The Stretching Room. The Ghost Host intones, “Our tour begins here in this gallery where you see paintings of some of our guests as they appeared in their corruptible, mortal state. Your cadaverous pallor betrays an aura of foreboding, almost as though you sense a disquieting metamorphosis. Is this haunted room actually stretching? Or is it your imagination, hmmm? And consider this dismaying observation: This chamber has no windows and no doors, which offers you this chilling challenge: to find a way out!”And the room stretches, growing many many feet taller, the four paintings on the wall (by Imagineer Marc Davis) also stretch, revealing that the seemingly innocent pictures are actually much more devious and reveal peril at every turn for those portrayed in them.If you’re a Haunted Mansion fan then you know all this backward and forward. But how would you like to carry The Stretching Room around on a rainy day to cheer you up with a fancy new Stretching Room Umbrella? The price is $34.99 with a money back guarantee. The seller gives the details:Stretching Room Umbrella. Imagine you are in the Haunted Mansion every time you open your umbrellaMade from 100% polyester pongee waterproof fabric.Image imprinted using heat sublimation technique to prevent discoloring.Opens up to 41" span.Can be reduced to a collapsed height of 9"8 ribs made from strong fiber for extra support.Each rib consists of 3-section aluminum for flexibility and strength.Main holder made from reinforced plastic.Buy it here.

https://twitter.com/EsraD/status/754126477659111424Turkey is in the throes of an attempted military coup at the time of this post. Military officials aligned with the junta tried took over CNN Turk in Istanbul, minutes after the news network reported the death toll from Parliament, and word that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was flying back to the city after being briefly (?) sort of ousted from control. (more…)

Congress today publicly released 28 previously secret pages of its 9/11 inquiry that detail possible connections between officials in the Saudi government, and the hijackers who carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (more…)

The 2016 edition of the Roku streaming stick is even better than the last.I love Roku. I've replaced all my set top boxes with Roku units. I was using Roku 3 and 4's but this streaming stick is just as fast, has the same video quality and is a lot smaller/easier to deal with. Less cabling. Sporting 4 processors the Roku 3600R is every bit as fast as my set top box style Roku units. It does everything they do that I want from it. I understand games may not function as well, but that has never been something I tried on the Roku.Roku with Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Plex is how my video consumption occurs these days. The YouTube app is also wonderful. Roku sports hundred, if not thousands, of custom and 3rd party channels as well. If you like international sports, or just miss programming from far away, Roku is pretty great.Roku Streaming Stick (3600R) via Amazon

In 1924, representatives of the world's leading lightbulb manufacturers formed Phoebus, a cartel that fixed the average life of an incandescent bulb at 1,000 hours, ensuring that people would have to regularly buy bulbs and keep the manufacturers in business. (more…)

Chill like you know who Number One is! At the park, on the beach, in the pool -- people will wonder if that thing really is comfortable, or if it was a gift? Get excited about the Air Hammock! Go ahead, try!This portable, durable inflatable chair is easy to take with you anywhere, and might chase down rogue agents on your prison island. The rectangular, but Rover-like chair inflates with just a few scoops of wind.Wherever you go this summer, you’ll have a place to sit. Problem SOLVED, Number Six! Save 54% on the Air Hammock now in the Boing Boing shop and get your summer started right.