Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences released an interesting demo of blending rigid and soft materials during 3D printing to create hybrid robots with enhanced performance for tasks like jumping and landing. Read the rest

Cooperative of Photography released a great video with 8 DIY tips to improve your smartphone shots, ranging from super-simple and cheap to fairly simple and maybe cheap. Read the rest

Detroit's historic Park Avenue Hotel was demolished on July 11, and YouTuber TheGadgetGuy1 caught all the action via drone. Read the rest

Ville-Matias Heikkilä posted four trips to YouTube, each the work of a different "DeepDreaming"-style neural network (based on the Caffe deep learning framework) but the same source image. Read the rest

We are as close as we've ever been to Pluto, and images even more spectacular than this are on the way. Read the rest

My War "Freestyle" by Medhat Mamdouh. Amazing. (YouTube)

Just look at it.WTFDuino (Thanks, Marc de Vinck!)

A California administrative judge ruled that Uber's license to operate in California will be suspended in 30 days if it doesn't appeal or start complying with state laws. Read the rest

From big-eared Yoda hats to C-3P0 undies, Star Wars clothing has you covered Read the rest

Ever pooped in the shower? If you play Shower Game, you probably will. Read the rest

This Wednesday at the PianoFight theater in San Francisco, Imran G and Red Scott present their new monthly comedy show #PhotobombSF, which combines today's best comics, a theater with San Francisco's best bar, and the stupid and silly fun of a photo booth. Read the rest

At a press conference this afternoon, NASA revealed the first close-up details of the surface of Pluto. Read the rest

The Hootananny pub in Inverness, Scotland no longer will feature barman dresses in kilts. The owner and assistant manager say intoxicated customers were lifting the employees' kilts, and in some cases, grabbing their penises. Read the rest

Since January, Tabby the cat has returned to her family's home in Canada five times with a square patch of fur shaved from her body. The family is mystified, and when they told neighbors about it, one of the neighbors reported that his four-year-old cat Twilight has received similar treatment. Read the rest

Lesson learned! Or perhaps not.

Won't someone think of the poor exoplanets? Read the rest

Aww. Poor little Pluto.(more…)

Before the Amiga, before the C64, there was Commodore's PET, its first great 8-bit machine. Now it's being resurrected, in spirit, as a cellphone. Read the rest

I want to make this delicious looking ice cream (but with much less sugar). No ice cream maker needed!

A rare Enigma machine, the proto-computer used by the Nazis to send codes during World War II, just sold at auction for $233,000 to an unnamed buyer. Of course, the Enigma code was cracked by Alan Turing and the other cypherpunks at Bletchley Park. Read the rest

Recode's Mark Bergen and Kurt Wagner take us through the internet's latest crazy craze, from top to endlessly repeating puppy-eyed bottom. Read the rest

ProxyHam is a portable WiFi router that costs $200 and mask users’ IP addresses. Rhino Security Labs, the company that developed ProxyHam was scheduled to debut it at the Def Con convention in Las Vegas in August, but on Friday Rhino tweeted that they were scrapping the project without explaining why. Read the rest

Gawker's Jesus Diaz points us to this bangin' video charting the escape route of noted Sinaloa drug cartel boss Chapo Guzmán, with a narco-corrido soundtrack. Read the rest

A good puzzle from Futility Closet. Read the rest

Episode 9 of the "100 Years of Beauty" series looks at Italian hairstyles and make up from the 1910s to the 2010s.See also:

My daughter got a Mini OgoSport Discs set as a gift last March and we finally broke it open last week. Read the rest

On March 14, 2005 "William O" received an anesthetic for root canal surgery. The next morning when William woke up, he thought it was still March 14 and that he had a dentist appointment. Read the rest

This mystery where you solve a crime with a search engine is brilliantly made—but it has one big problem. Read the rest

Imagine checking into a hotel with a robotic dinosaur receptionist behind the front desk. You then hand your bags over to the bell-bot, or trolley robot that takes them to your room. Read the rest

Coulrophobics were unable to convince England's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to ban a movie poster with a sinister-looking clown. Read the rest

Reddit's army of seething adolescents found a target for their anger in the form of Ellen Pao, the site's caretaker CEO and the presumed feminist fascist monster who presided over the censorship of r/fatpeoplehate and other bastions of free speech. Read the rest

After more problems with the plugin, Firefox temporarily blocked it, a Facebook executive requested a sunset plan, and web advocates just want the proprietary, closed-source, notoriously unstable platform dead. But not everyone's happy…

It is exactly what it says it is. It is $6. [h/t Heather] (more…)

The skull of FW Murnau, the director of the classic vampire film Nosferatu (1922), has been stolen from his grave in Stahnsdorf, Germany. Read the rest

IN WHICH master sleuth Donald Trump investigates why all those illegal immigrants are coming to the U.S. Read the rest

Cops in Gardena, Ca., didn't want the public watching them kill a man who took his hands off his head, but a federal judge decided it was in the public interest, reports Richard Winton and Joel Rubin at the LA Times. Read the rest

Game developer Tom Fracis has distilled the essence of this marvelous show into something that covers 70% of all episodes: "the exceptions are kind of nuts." Read the rest

In Artificial Killing Machine, visitors sit in a chair below cap guns that fire for each drone strike death reported publicly, which print out on a tally from a public database. Read the rest

Frank Kidd, 83, is the proprietor of Kidd's Toy Museum, a private collection of 20,000 antique toys, from cars and trucks to figurines to, Kidd's favorite genre, mechanical banks like the one above. Some of the toys reveal a lot about the era they're from. Read the rest

In a very special episode, Rudy teaches Fat Albert that getting friendzoned doesn't mean no, thanks to "Rudy's Little Helper." Hope this doesn't trigger the Cos! (more…)

These parasitic corpse plants (Monotopa uniflora) don't need chlorophil for energy, so they are white or pale pink. Krik & stony of Black Owl Outdoors found some in the wild. Read the rest

If you've ever stressed out about the new batch of timed CAPTCHAs that involve math equations, games, or inaudable audio, this video on CAPTCHA anxiety by videogamedunkey may feel all too familiar.

“We have a healthy spacecraft, we recorded data on the Pluto system, and we're outbound from Pluto.” Read the rest

The Oscar-winning documentarian, who directed Citizenfour, was detained and searched over 50 times, but the breaking-point was when the US Government refused to respond to her Freedom of Information Act request for the reasons for her harassment. Read the rest

Marketed as packing twenty-three functions into one pocketable gadget, the Kelvin 23 is a screwdriver with 15 bits, a hammer, a level, an LED light, a tape measure, and a magnetic picker-upper. Read the rest

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is expected to radio home any minute now. We're watching on NASA TV. The moment will end a nearly 22-hour radio blackout as the probe focused on a series of close-up observations of Pluto and its moons. Read the rest

Donald and Rudy!

Lindsay is a silent comedian, and her performances are unlike anything I've seen. Besides being clever and funny, Lindsay is a very skilled juggler and magician. Read the rest