Boing Boing

While it sure is a sight to behold, there’s much more to this magazine than meets the eye. I met Steve and Tanya, the duo at the top of the Singapore counterculture scene best known for curating Kult, the top local alternative art magazine and galley, and learned more about EYEYAH!Their new initiative aims to leverage their global network of 1000 plus artists to produce engaging multimedia content, events, and social campaigns to “inspire children, changing perceptions and provoking new points of view”.Their flagship creation, EYEYAH! Magazine, was launched this January. The first issue brings together interactive artwork, launches a social campaign for kids to contribute their own pieces, and comes with six visceral stickers. It kicks off with the below invitation where the authors rightly proclaim the magazine to be the “Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Wild Wild Web” and overall does a kickass job of teaching kids about the Internet.Though they just launched the first issue in January, selected pages are already being distributed to local schools in a black and white zine format, spicing up education about the Internet in participating local schools. While the magazine and curriculum are currently only available in Singapore, there are plans for a global launch later this year (which I am helping their team with). For now, you can check out their website to learn more about the magazines, prints, and tees they have to offer.

It's been six years since investigative journalists published their expose accusing London's Metropolitan Police of colluding with the UK's construction cartel to blacklist workers who complained about unsafe working conditions, abusive bosses and wage-theft, as well as union organisers and other "troublemakers" -- this week, the Met confirmed that its officers were an active part of the illegal blacklist. (more…)

After you #DeleteFacebook (here's step-by-step instructions, because they make it damned hard), you'll be wanting to replace the services it provided like instant messaging, event planning, and social news sharing. (more…)

A statistical analysis of the unsolved Zodiak killer cipher shows that it is like fake ciphers and unlike true ones, such as the Zodiak's other, cracked ciphertext. In the chart above, created by Tom S Juzek, the red dot is the unsolved cipher, the purple dot the solved one, the other squares known-true ciphers and the diamonds known-fake ciphers. [via r/codes]In my view, the most likely explanation is that the cipher is a ruse. Serial killers tend to be subject to hubris, as Douglas points out in his excellent book on the subject [html link]. It must have been a shock to the Zodiac Killer when he learnt that his z408 cipher had been deciphered so quick, by two hobby cryptographers. To prove intellectual superiority, he needed another cipher, one so strong that couldn't be deciphered, certainly not as easily as z408. I think the Zodiac Killer was unable to produce such a cipher, which is why he chose to take another route: He decided to cheat. The Zodiac Killer created a fake cipher that no-one could ever decrypt. If you're wondering why the cracked Zodiak cipher is way past the rest of the "true" ones, it's because they all involved more randomness than his--never roll your own crypto. Be sure to read Juzek's post as it's staggeringly thorough, yet interesting to someone like me who knows nothing of mathematics. Compare to Craig Bauer's solution, which Juzek describes as "far fetched."Here's the original, if you'd like to take another futile stab at it:

Welcome to the convergence point in a venn diagram of video games, youtube and J.G. Ballard.A very short comparison between BeamNG and reallife traffic accidents. That's pretty much how much attention I spend to detail when I recreating reallife dash cam crashes in beamng.Someone should make a forensics/legal-type show using BeamNG.Previously: Cult driving simulator spawns YouTube genre of automotive chaos

Exhibit A (above) is the Jovivi Handmade Natural Rose Quartz Gua Sha Scraping Massage Tool Massage Wand For Acupuncture Therapy Stick Point Treatment. It is 10cm long, $14, and comes with a free bag.Exhibit B is a 99c song titled "The Crystal Healing Dildo (Original Mix)" by an artist named The Real Kim Shady. It has the parental advisory sticker and is on YouTube with 415 views and the description "no copyright intended." There are no comments. I haven't listened to it.2 results for "healing crystal dildo" [Amazon.com]

After interviewing Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie and other CA sources and reviewing leaked documents, the Washington Post has pieced together the story of how the dirty-tricking electioneers worked their way Republican political circles, as billionaire founder Robert Mercer opened doors for them with other notorious GOP billionaire backers, with an able assist from newly minted national security adviser John Bolton, a notorious war-criminal with close ties to terrorist groups like MEK. (more…)

Here's Chris Baraniuk on people who make their own mechanical watches, from scratch: an intricate and delicate traditional craft that is, for once, not lost to time.He started reading forums, researching tools and materials, and checking out where parts could be acquired, such as cases, dials, hands, strap and movement. “It becomes like a big jigsaw puzzle, you try to work out what pieces will fit together,” he says.Thanks in part to the availability of information over the web, many people just as curious as [Matthew] Wright have embarked on their own home-made watch projects. And some have even launched businesses as a result. But how easy is it to get started?A quick hit on Google will bring up a wave of results that can kick things off for enthusiasts. There’s the Reddit Watch forum, the TimeZone Watch School, which offers courses via the web for a price, discussions on the WatchUSeek forum, and hundreds of YouTube videos aimed at makers.People can buy kits for assembling watches or individual parts online with relative ease, too. This is the exact rabbit-hole that Wright fell down when he started researching.“You see other people who’ve made little changes to watches, they’ve changed dials or whatever, and the next thing, I stumbled across websites where you can buy the cases completely empty,” he recalls.Pictured here is a watch made by Mike Hamende, who also took the photo. I once almost managed to put together a Lego kit and I'm still proud of myself.

This is a fun video introduction to feeding yourself in Japan, even if you don't know Japanese. Really, it's pretty easy to get food in Japan if you're a foreigner, but this video shows you different options, from konbini (convenience stores, which are much better than the ones in the US), to chain restaurants (again, usually tastier than US chains), to shopping mall food courts (beautiful and mind bending), and actual non-chain eateries.

Did the scene in the new IT movie where Pennywise bites Georgie's arm, only for the camera to cut to an exterior shot of the drain, leave you frustrated and hankering for more? If you want to dwell on the boy's dismembered fate on an indefinite basis, this animatronic prop at the TransWorld Halloween & Attractions Show in St. Louis this week should be right up your sewer. You might be fortunate enough to see this at your local haunted house this fall, the laughing and shaking and screaming as an endlessly looping moment.I usually love the pop-culture grand guignol transgressive trash of modern Halloween horror, but I really hate this! A sense of amazed wonder subsiding to cold dismay. There's something very 2018 going on here. It doesn't have anything to do with our lives but we all know that terrible things will soon be happening and we've developed a very strange language to accomodate ourselves to the prospect of it. Here's the top comment on the YouTube thread:Funny Vine Videos | FVV3 hours agoCan we feature your video in our YouTube channel ? Please make sure to email me at funnyvinevideos.fvv(at)gmail(dot)com I have a great offer for you $$$ Am I just getting old? Tell me if I'm just getting old.

Naomi Klein's l(ooooo)ongread in The Intercept about the state of play in Puerto Rico is the comprehensive summary of the post-Maria fuckery and hope that has gripped America's colonial laboratory, the place where taxation without representation, austerity, chemical weapons, new drugs, and new agribusiness techniques get trialed before the rest of America are subjected to them. (more…)

There are a lot of comedy specials on Netflix and I do my best to watch them all, as I have a voracious appetite for seeing professional comedians perform their craft.Now, I don't normally do this but I feel compelled to share the one I watched last night with you. It's called Gad Elmaleh: American Dream and it's showing on Netflix right now. This is the first special the Moroccan-born comedian has done in English, though apparently it's rehashed material from his 2016 French language Gad Gone Wild. It doesn't matter. He's gone ahead and created something wonderfully funny for us to enjoy without having to read subtitles. His unique insight on everyday American culture and the quirks of our language really had me laughing. His observational humor is Seinfeld-esque (though distinctly his own) and, in fact, he's been described many times as "the Jerry Seinfeld of France." Amazingly, Elmaleh's debut appearance on American television was just two years ago. He recounted on Seth Meyers' show the first time he met Seinfeld in person, on his then-home turf of Paris:https://youtu.be/WnH7nuKvbpo

A Fly Jamaica Airline crew member tried to smuggle $160K worth of cocaine in his pants, from Montego Bay into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. His ingenious transport method for the nearly nine pounds of cocaine failed to trick agents for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (more…)

We see these lawmakers representing the NRA, and not their constituents. We see our “leaders” making excuses and refusing to act. On Saturday, they’ll see US. pic.twitter.com/7OGttnRSsz— March For Our Lives (@AMarch4OurLives) March 21, 2018America will be marching to end gun violence on Saturday, March 24. #MarchForOurLives. “Have you registered to vote? RSVP’d for the march? Signed the petition? You can do it all at marchforourlives.com.” https://twitter.com/AMarch4OurLives/status/976514096693735424https://twitter.com/AMarch4OurLives/status/976894746118512641https://twitter.com/AMarch4OurLives/status/976618936602185731

The inimitable Dave Pell, managing editor of the Internet, shares 20 quick (and brilliant) insights about the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. Here are a few:2. Facebook is constantly urging you to share your immediate thoughts and reactions to every life event. We were a couple days into the company’s biggest challenge before Facebook’s creator shared any of his thoughts on the matter. There’s probably a lesson in that...11. You read the stories about Cambridge Analytica and you think, Damn, these guys are total geniuses who can control our minds. You watch the undercover video of the Cambridge Analytica execs and you think, Damn, these guys are seriously some clown-ass schmucks. Like always, believe what you see...12. If Facebook really manipulates our thoughts, they must want us to be really pissed at Facebook...19. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. The only privacy policy that matters is your own."The Flight of the Zuckerberg" (via NextDraft)

Use code QAXI6QOK at check out and get this power outlet tester for $5 on Amazon. It'll indicate if an outlet is wired correctly and, if not, what the problem is.

Dropbox has published a set of guidelines for how companies can "encourage, support, and celebrate independent open security research" -- and they're actually pretty great, a set of reasonable commitments to take bug reports seriously and interact respectfully with researchers. (more…)

Writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, Paul Ford says Facebook's "not-a-breach" of personal information on 50 millions of its users is just the latest example of why it's time for a digital protection agency.Facebook’s recent debacle is illustrative. It turns out that the company let a researcher spider through its social network to gather information on 50 million people. Then the Steve Bannon-affiliated, Robert Mercer-backed U.K. data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica used that data to target likely Trump voters. Facebook responded that, no, this was not a “breach.”OK, sure, let’s not call it a breach. It’s how things were designed to work. That’s the problem....How might a digital EPA function? Well, it could do some of the work that individuals do today. For example, the website of Australian security expert Troy Hunt, haveibeenpwned.com (“pwned” is how elite, or “l33t,” hackers, or “hax0rs,” spell “owned”), keeps track of nearly 5 billion hacked accounts. You give it your email, and it tells you if you’ve been found in a data breach. A federal agency could and should do that work, not just one very smart Australian—and it could do even better, because it would have a framework for legally exploring, copying, and dealing with illegally obtained information. Yes, we’d probably have to pay Booz Allen or Accenture or whatever about $120 million to get the same work done that Troy Hunt does on his own, but that’s the nature of government contracting, and we can only change one thing at a time.Photo of Mark Zuckerberg: JD Lasica, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

John Dowd, the lead attorney for President Trump in the Russian inquiry, quit today. Here's Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, in the New York Times:Mr. Dowd, who took over the president’s legal team last summer, had considered leaving several times in recent months and ultimately concluded that Mr. Trump was increasingly ignoring his advice, one of the people said. Under Mr. Dowd’s leadership, Mr. Trump’s lawyers had advised him to cooperate with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russia’s election interference and possible ties to Trump associates as well as whether the president obstructed the inquiry. The president has instead in recent days begun publicly assailing Mr. Mueller, a shift in tone that appears to be born of the president’s concern that the investigation is bearing down on him more directly.

This is Akira 100% and he likes to play with balls, silver ones. Wearing just an oversized golden sequined bowtie, this Japanese entertainer removes that metal tray covering his junk at the perfect moments when the pendulum swings. These are genital-free videos, though they may still be NSFW.I imagine these tricks took many many takes. https://youtu.be/0Y0y873dQcQ(Dangerous Minds, Kraftfuttermischwerk)

In this video, a room full of deejays (including a few world champs) create a cacophony of noise by using vinyl to reconstruct classical music. They call themselves the Philharmonic Turntable Orchestra and are described as the "world's first ensemble performance using only turntables and mixers." They recommend putting on headphones before hitting play. Here's its behind-the-scenes video:https://youtu.be/J2KK3vqJqogThanks, Stewart!

John "Bolton" Mustachio, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a hot pick to become Trump's National Security Advisor when he gets around to firing the current one, appeared recently in a bizarre video beseeching Russia to loosen its gun laws.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPM-FXHj5gAThe episode, which has not been previously reported, illustrates the common cause that Russian and American gun rights groups were forming in the years leading up to the 2016 election through former National Rifle Association president David Keene. Keene appointed Bolton to the NRA's international affairs subcommittee in 2011. ... The Bolton video appears to be another plank in a bridge built by Russia to conservative political organizations inside the United States. It's unclear why Russian leaders wanted to curry favor with the NRA, but Torshin and Keene appeared to have developed close ties over in the years prior to the 2016 election.

German pastry chef, gamer, cosplayer, and Twittizen, Sonja decided to make a batch of edible candy RPG/polyhedral dice. She posted pictures on Twitter and all the nerds came running to her yard. Realizing she might have a hungry market on her hands, Sonja has quickly opened up an Etsy store, the cleverly-named, Sugar and Dice.Batches of the dice are Isomalt sugar and are edible. They can either be "eaten as a hard candy bonbon or dissolved into a hot cup of tea or coffee." Sonja points out that they are not balanced and not perfect on all sides, so they can't really be reliably used in gaming.A set of 7 dice (1 each of d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d100, and d20) will run you £18, shipped to the US (and take 1-2 weeks). Not exactly penny candy, but a cool novelty and a unique, fun gift for a gamer friend. I will definitely be getting some. A set of these will make a nice gaming night prize.

This may look like grasslands, but it's a horse carefully positioned and beautifully photographed by Lee Diegaard, part of her Equuleus series. Below: Copper Valley. (more…)

In 2010, Steve Almond started work on a Tea Party-inspired novel called Bucky Dunn Is Running, about a racist demagogue businessman who comes within a whisker of the Republican nomination for their presidential candidate; he'd aimed to have it done for the 2016 election season, but then Trump happened, and his satire seemingly caught up with him. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR5WT12B_88Fidget spinners are wonderful. (more…)

Bordalo II creates massive sculptures from junkyard artifacts. Here, he creates an underwater scene. (more…)

The Illinois Republican Party was unable to draft a candidate against Holocaust denier Arthur Jones, and now he's won the Republican primary in Illinois' Third Congressional District. Jones is a former member of the American Nazi Party and, as a student at the University of Wisconsin, founded a conservative newspaper and was active in the Young Republicans and a Nationalist Socialist student group. The good news is that the Third Congressional District is heavily Democratic, but in these crazy times of Russian meddling and the refusal of the White House to disavow American Nazis, there's no telling who will win.From the New York Times:“Arthur Jones is not a real Republican — he is a Nazi whose disgusting, bigoted views have no place in our nation’s discourse,” Tim Schneider, the Illinois Republican Party chairman, said in a statement. He said the party had urged voters “to skip over his name when they go to the polls” and moving forward planned on “vehemently opposing Jones with real campaign dollars.”A spokesman for the Illinois Republican Party said those dollars would be used to support an independent candidate in the November general election. Party leaders are in talks with several potential candidates, the spokesman said, but have not yet decided which one to endorse.From CNN:Jones says he supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election but in 2017, he expressed his regret over voting for Trump over a weakened stance on the US-Mexico border wall."I'm sorry I voted for the son of a b****, I really am," Jones told the Guardian.

I like my lightbulbs to be very warm. Early LED bulbs had a harsh whitish blue color that made every room look like a 7-Eleven at 3am. These amber glow Emotionlite LED dimmable bulbs (6-pack for $20) are the opposite of LED bulbs of yore. I got them for our dining room chandelier and everyone in the household agrees they are splendid. And they work perfectly with the existing old dimmer switch - no annoying buzz.

Two Sacramento police officers were placed on administrative leave after shooting an unarmed black man to death in his backyard on March 18, 2018. The officers were responding to a call about car windows being broken nearby. They entered Stephen Clark's backyard. Clark was holding a cell phone but they are saying they thought they phone was a weapon and they opened fire. (more…)

Science fiction writer and ecologist Kim Stanley Robinson (previously) writes that we need to "empty half the Earth of its humans" to save the planet -- but not by the Green Left's usual (and potentially genocidal) tactic of reducing our population by 50%. (more…)

Cartoonist Lauren eLL secretly recorded a funny family video, then turned it into a charming cartoon about how Alexa Ruins Families. (more…)

"Flag Waver" is a fun online tool that lets you upload any image and have it displayed as a flag, waving in the wind.

Four Democratic challengers backed by United Working Families (linked with the progressive Working Families Party) have successfully challenged establishment Dems backed by Chicago's legendarily unassailable "Democratic machine," effectively winning their offices at the same time, because the Democrat candidate always gets elected to those offices, thanks to Republicans not bothering to field candidates (leaving a vacuum that is sometimes filled by Holocaust-denying Illinois Nazis). (more…)

Just in time for the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to disappear! The chart was created by Jaydub.Data Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/data/mortoutstand/current.htm Tools used: Microsoft Excel and Plotly

YouTuber NileRed was curious about how lactose-free milk is made, so he did a little research and came up with this helpful explainer. (more…)

I've experienced other incredible interactive-type adventures (for instance, 49 Boxes, Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return, and the Jejune Institute along with its offshoot, the ongoing Elsewhere Philatelic Society), but I had never gone through an escape room proper before. I was definitely not disappointed.Late Saturday afternoon, I arrived in Los Angeles to host a meetup I had planned for the readers of my inbox zine. A new Koreatown escape room called Stash House topped our agenda. Per the instructions emailed to us at the time of booking, our party of seven arrived promptly at 6 PM to a storefront painted matte black. A green glass light clued us in that we were at the right door. I buzzed the video doorbell, the door cracked open, and the fun began. For a little over an hour, we chaotically cracked codes and solved puzzles in small groups which then led us to more clues and surprises. Our host watched us through surveillance cams in the back room and, when we appeared to be getting stuck, offered us gentle clues through texts on a provided cell phone. For the finale, we all gathered to crack the last code together. Everyone seriously had a blast. Stash House has my highest recommendation.The object of the Stash House escape room is to find the six little baggies of coke a drug dealer named Ray has hidden in his apartment and flush them down the toilet (shown above in the "Shitter" cam) before the cops arrive. If you succeed, you become part of Ray's "crew." Honestly, I think it would be a crime to call Stash House simply an “escape room,” as it’s more than that. For one, you're not really trying to "escape" from anything. You're invited to become part of a drug dealer's world by immersing yourself in his. Also, like other immersive experiences, it weaves a well-crafted story around deeply-engaging play, which results in surprise and delight for its participants. There's no one easy way to describe it but we all left feeling we had been through the "gold standard" of escape room experiences. Of course, the ability to solve a bunch of inter-related puzzles quickly is how you ultimately succeed in the space and that's how it is like an escape room. Its co-creator and our host Tommy Honton described it to us as a "real-life video game." Honton, who has escaped from nearly 200 rooms himself, also escaped from his soul-sucking corporate PR job and opened Stash House with his partners earlier this year. It is now his full-time job. In a post-game discussion and recap, Tommy shared with us that he had been designing games since he was a child. After being wowed by a scavenger hunt he experienced as a young boy, he started planning elaborate adventures for neighborhood pals. It took many years, and losing that deeply-dissatisfying career in PR, to finally make the jump into interactive game design.Tommy's been reading my zine for a few years now and when I wrote that I was planning a reader's meetup in LA, he wrote me privately to tell me that he was in the middle of creating Stash House. That was about a year ago. Through our conversations, the plan solidified, and he offered to host us when it was complete. In early January he pinged me again to share the good news, it was finally open for business.Here are some Stash House pro tips/notes:-- All phones (and other personal property like jackets and purses) will be put in a plastic tub prior to game play. You don't need any of it to play. But don't worry, that bin will be easily accessible to you in the room.-- You will have an opportunity at the end to take a photo against a police "line-up" wall:Ray's new crew: Heather, Susan, Sarafina, Haley, Brittany, and Brenton-- Nothing is going to jump out at you. It's a safe place to play, not scary.-- One beautiful thing is that it completely takes you out of your regular mind. All your everyday worries and concerns are put on the back burner while you try to figure out the puzzles. I'm in my head a lot worrying about this or that, so it was delightful to have "permission to play."-- The "coke" bags are water soluble, so don't worry about flushing them. -- Move quickly but focus on cracking one thing at a time. Don't let other puzzles distract you.-- Ask the story behind the tagging in the bathroom.-- Bring cool stickers to leave. There’s a pretty good chance they’ll end up being part of the room itself.I also want to mention that Tommy is one of the creators of the upcoming Museum of Selfies opening April 1 in Glendale, California. I hope to host another meetup in April or May to check that out.

The Ataribox, announced after Nintendo scored surprise hits with its popular NES and SNES classic consoles, is going to be called "Atari VCS" instead -- the same name as Atari's original, way back in 1977. The company is showing off the Atari VCS, Classic Joystick, and Modern Controller prototypes to the press this week at GDC. And it is working with game developers, content creators, and other partners to finalize details. In April, Atari will announce a preorder date for the Atari VCS. Earlier, Atari canceled a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo because its development hit a snag.If you suspected this was an empty nostalgia-marketing ploy, this might not allay your fears: someone's already made it so the Wikipedia page for "Atari VCS" is an ad for the new machine. But the concept is essentially Pi-like hackable hardware in a pretty box with well-made controllers, so what could go wrong?Update: as noted by nungesser, the potential wrong is the price: $300. Better be a great GPU in there for all that cabbage.

Reuben Wu's latest series of landscapes (Instagram; previously at BB) are "traditional landscape photography influenced by ideas of planetary exploration, 19th century sublime romantic painting, and science fiction." Nothing on earth is alien to us.

Freediver Jake Koehler, better known as DALLMYD, ignored posted alligator warnings to explore what looked like a garden variety Florida swamp. Below the duckweed covering the surface, he found a crystal-clear freshwater spring. (more…)

YouTuber Count Dankula turned his girlfriend's pug into the star of several Hitler and Holocaust jokes. He was arrested, charged under hate crime statutes, and convicted yesterday. (more…)

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California recently found a 6th century manuscript by Greek physician Galen, which had been scraped from its pages 500 years later and replaced with religious text. Who needs science when there are religious texts that need copying? (more…)

Pu o Hiro is a roadside rock in the Easter Islands, but at one time its value was so great that factions fought over its possession. The rock's natural holes allowed it to be played like an instrument. Rare Earth uses it as a starting point for discussing consensus value. (more…)

The Cambridge Analytica scandal devouring Facebook may not have been a 'breach' of data, but it was a breach of trust. (more…)

Fortnite is the most popular game to be searched about in Pornhub's online database of videos. I am not sure what that means, really. While I am enthusiastic about both forms of entertainment-art I find their intersection to be a bit confusing.There are a lot of great stats and tables about what people are searching for, to answer their Fortnite related pornographic need.Via PornHub:The most popular Fortnite related searches include “hentai”, “battle royale”, “animation” and “strip”. Following some viral videos on YouTube, “try not to nut fornite” also became a popular search. “SFM” is a term often combined with game searches (see Overwatch Insights).

Karl Marx was born in the German city of Trier 200 years ago and lived there until he was 17; to celebrate his bicentennial, the city has installed a Marx-themed pedestrian signal light designed by Johannes Kolz, with another to come. (more…)

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a big-business think-tank that authors "model legislation" at the local, state and national level that benefits corporations at the expense of everyday people; their greatest hits make for scary reading -- you can thank ALEC for ag-gag laws, stand-your-ground laws, private prisons, bans on municipal ISPs, killing Obamacare and jailing pipeline protesters. (more…)

I'm getting a vasectomy this summer. I'm 42 years old and neither I nor my wife want kids. It's time--at least for me. I know that going under the knife isn't the right choice for a lot of guys. The good news is that, according to Gizmodo, there's been a promising development in the area of male birth control.It seems that research teams at UCLA and the University of Washington may have come up with a drug that's just as effective as the pills that many women have been popping on a daily basis for years. The drug compound, called dimethandrolone undecanoate (DMAU) could allow men to take responsibility for themselves and their partners beyond what a condom can offer:Researchers gave DMAU to a hundred healthy adult volunteers from the ages of 18 to 50. Volunteers were given one of three varying doses of DMAU, and in one of two different formulations, in a capsule with either castor oil or powder. Five volunteers from each dosing group were randomized to receive a control placebo as well. The trial lasted for about a month, with each volunteer being told to take a daily pill with food. Eighty-three men finished the entire regimen.By experiment’s end, the volunteers who took DMAU experienced a drop in their levels of testosterone and two other hormones involved in producing sperm, which was starkest in those who took the highest dose.Best of all, those involved in the DMAU study suffered no adverse effects--at least in the short-term. Women have done most of the heavy lifting in the area of birth control for years. Should a one-a-day pill be released for dudes to swallow and kill their spunk, there'll be no excuse not to our part. Image via Wikipiedia

In the 1930s, brothers Homer and Langley Collyer withdrew from society and began to fill their Manhattan brownstone with newspapers, furniture, musical instruments, and assorted junk. By 1947, when Homer died, the house was crammed with 140 tons of rubbish, and Langley had gone missing. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the strange, sad story of the Hermits of Harlem.We'll also buy a bit of Finland and puzzle over a banker's misfortune.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

This video, posted by "Ghost Worm," shows a mysterious myriapod suddenly leaping onto a countertop late at night. The spooky infra-red footage gives the whole thing a "paranormal activity"-esque atmosphere, but I'm quite certain someone just set up the camera and threw the worm in front of it. [via]