There are many mysteries to hagfish goo.Hagfish are "widely regarded as the most disgusting creature on earth", in part because of how they defend themselves: They excrete a ton of viscous, revolting slime out of 100 glands on all sides of their bodies, blocking the gills of the unlucky predator and essentially drowning them in marine snot. The trick works well enough that hagfish haven't evolved much in 300 million years. Indeed, the slime is so nauseating that there aren't very many predators who'll even dare to attack a hagfish. One of the few? The mako shark.Still, scientists have long puzzled over one mystery: The hagfish only release the goo after they've been attacked. So how do they survive the first bite? Maybe hagfish skin is so thick the shark teeth don't penetrate?Only one way to figure it out: Build an artificial mako shark-mouth and have it chomp on a bunch of recently-deceased hagfish, then observe the slime production!A bunch of scientists actually undertook this awesome steampunk experiment. There's a fun writeup at Popular Science:

An Indian man was charged for making a bomb threat over the phone at the Mumbai airport on Sunday, but he says he was misunderstood: he was simply asking about the “Bom-Del status,” referring to his flight going from Bombay (now called Mumbai) to Delhi.But investigators don't buy his explanation. According to The Guardian:

MIT Tech Review's Antonio Regalado rounds up the year's stupidest, worst moments in tech, from the guy who created his own CRISPR-based gene therapy to beef up his muscles and injected it to Donald Trump's Twitter feed to the FCC's Net Neutrality catastrophe. Of course, Juicero rates a mention. (more…)

Talking Heads frontman and all-round hammy mutant hero David Byrne's "Reasons to be Cheerful" project seeks out "encouraging things that are happening anywhere, and if they have been tested, if they have been proven to work, if they can be transferred and adopted in other places, if they can scale up." (more…)

Youtube star Logan Paul, who has over 15 million subscribers, decided to entertain his viewers by going to Japan's Aokigahara Forest, a place where over 500 people have committed suicide, and find a dead body to show them. He succeeded, but when people around the world were outraged, he realized the video could be detrimental to his lucrative career shilling for major brands like Pepsi and HBO he took it down. Now he's sorry, so sorry.No apology yet from Youtube, which added the video to its trending page, helping it get 6 million views before it was pulled.From The Washington Post:

Maybe 2018 will be the year of social media burnout. A lot of people I know are quitting Twitter and Facebook because the're sick of the trolls and Nazis that neither social network seems to care about. A spate of research suggests that social media makes people depressed, too.Here's a funny placeholder app that reflects the zeitgeist. It's called Placeholder Twitter and it "does nothing but reroute you to the Kindle app."

Have you read "Grand Design", Ed Piskor's remix of the X-Men's epic history? You must, even if you're not into Marvel's legendarium, because it's amazing work. Not just a more enganging distillation of the characters and their history than the movies, either. With Ed's style and wit, it's like something from a parallel world where the X-Men were alt comics. Truly uncanny!

Alabama newspaper publisher H. Brandt Ayers has apologized for spanking female employees while he was publisher of The Anniston Star newspaper in the 1970s.Ayers, who is currently the chairman of the company that publishes the newspaper, has been accused by several women of spanking them or their colleagues, including one time when he bent a woman over a desk for being a "bad girl" and hitting her hard with a metal ruler 18 times.According to Time:

Math student Carl Størmer acquired a hidden camera in 1890, and put it to use on the streets of Oslo.

In 1968, the Foreign Policy Association gathered experts together to predict what life would be like in the year 2018 -- and issued their forecast in the book Toward the Year 2018.The book jacket promised that the contents were "MORE AMAZING THAN SCIENCE FICTION," and, like a lot of sci fi, it wound up frequently missing the mark. The 1968 progrosticators figured that we people of the future would have TV ads for anti-gravity belts, the "suppression of lightning," a country powered heavily by nuclear, and the ability to launch "a man-made hurricane" as an offensive weapon.But as this writeup in the New Yorker notes ...

Scotty of Strange Parts gives a tour of the fantastic makerspace, Noisebridge. I love this place because it's filled with interesting people working on all kinds of wild projects.

In the early days of TV, it was routine to tape over the recording medium after the initial air-date, which means that no video record exists of many of the pioneering moments in television. (more…)

Bobby Duke makes all kinds of cool woodworking projects in his inimitable video style. This floating cup pencil carving is especially impressive. (more…)

Looking for a monumental tree for a photo or just to enjoy in person? Check out Monumental Trees, a compendium of over 31,000 impressive trees, like this live oak in Virginia. (more…)

David Honnorat created The Great Map of Movieland, a delightful atlas showing 1,800 movies organized into regions by genres. (more…)

Filmmaker Adrien Mauduit collected his favorite timelapse shots of 2017 into a contemplative piece that is a lovely way to look back at 2017 and ahead to 2018. (more…)

In 1996, a powerful storm tore through a Canadian drive-in theatre, destroying a screen. Some witnesses recall it was during a screening of 'Twister,' which includes a scene where a drive-in is destroyed by a twister. The short documentary "Twisted' looks at how memories can be distorted over time. (more…)

Ma Ydoum Hal may sound relaxed, but the lyrics about a friend in crisis get real deep real fast. Created by TREE9 (a way), it has a strong philosophical message about the impermanence of our lives. (more…)

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The artist and William Forsythe has mounted a mesmerizing installation in Paris called "Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time No. 2" -- in which he fills a huge room with swinging pendulums, and viewers are supposed to walk among them without running into any.Quite a challenge, as the video shows! As a writeup at Colossal notes:

"Cryptojacking" is the latest trend in malware; by some estimates, there are at least 2,500 sites that illicitly run Javascript in your browser to secretly mine cryptocurrency.So the browser pushback has begun. Opera just announced its latest release includes anti-mining measures:

Rain Nos roundup of the Core 77's Favorite Objects from 2017 has some real beauts that are of note to aficionados of physical culture and made objects. (more…)

Dutch sociologist and Holocaust survivor Frederik Lodewijk Polak's massive future studies text The Image of the Future makes a bold statement about optimism and pessimism, creating four categories of belief about the future, divided on two axes: things are improving/worsening; and people can/can't do something about the future. (more…)

Last October, the Supreme Court heard argument in Gill v. Whitford, a Wisconsin gerrymandering case that has far-reaching implications for the November midterms in 2018; the court is expected to rule next June. (more…)

Inspired by Kubrick and Nolan, designer Thomas Vanz set out to create cool effects depicting massive phenomena from our universe: (more…)

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Roulette.pizza allows you to order a random pizza, "because maybe you were unfair to pineapple."

https://youtu.be/Ht0_Kkx5-YUCaltech posted video of a stable plasma torus, created by engineers using water and a dielectric plate: "lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle."

When the USA decided to retroactively extend the term of copyright, it deprived itself of free, open access to important cultural treasures that new creators could build upon as creators have done since time immemorial. (more…)

r/doglifting, a forum to post pictures of you lifting up your dog, is my new favorite subreddit.https://twitter.com/drewtoothpaste/status/947260181913751557

The 15 Second Horror Film Challenge is an annual competition run by a nonprofit (you have until Oct 2018 to get your entries in for next year). This year's top twenty has some entries that literally made the hair on my neck stand up, especially Luma Films' Good Night, which is an especially good take on a recurring horror theme. More of my favorites below. (via JWZ) (more…)

When Washington State legalized recreational marijuana three years ago, it created a licensing regime that was supposed to protect and encourage small growers, but the data shows that marijuana growing has consolidated into a few large suppliers, even as the price per gram has fallen -- and that the industry's embrace of exotic derivatives like edibles and concentrates is capital-intensive and inaccessible to small, independent providers. (more…)

More than a dozen major US airports are now covered in facial-recognition cameras, installed by the DHS to scan people departing on international flights without the legally mandated federal review process. (more…)

Britain is one of the most unequal countries in the world, thanks to the Tory-in-sheep's-clothing policies of Tony Blair, and the naked banker-coddling and brutal austerity of the real Tories who followed on from Blair. (more…)

Spamnesty is a simple service: forward your spam to it and it will engage the spammer in pointless chatbot email chains, wasting their time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmYbV_7xGL4&feature=youtu.be&t=25sDerek DeBrosse, a lawyer specializing in defending gun owners who get in trouble, has interesting advice for those who bear arms: don't carry a pink gun, and definitely don't carry a gun with the Punisher logo on it. Why? Because "the jury is going to see it."Kind of obvious, when you think about it.

Literature vs. cinema, the great tonal constrast of the 20th century. [via]

Erica Garner, the daughter of police brutality victim Eric Garner, died early Saturday aged 27. Inspired to activism by her father's killing, she suffered a massive heart attack on Christmas Eve and fell into a coma. ABC News:

Sometimes I think I've reached the end of the internet, you know, that I've simply "seen it all." Then a video of a humans dressed as sheep -- hunchbacked and bleating, no less -- pops up and I know there's plenty in this world left to surprise me.This absolutely splendid "human-sheep shepherding" was performed by Toronto's Les Moutons, which is a special troupe within the CORPUS dance project.Its description is as follows:

I'm so utterly charmed by these intricately-cut paper dresses by Ukranian artist Eugenia Zoloto (and, really, all her work). She has a few of these kirigami pretties up for sale on Etsy, starting at $250.photos via Eugenia Zoloto

The $77 Pizzacraft PC0601 Pizzeria Pronto Stovetop Pizza Oven is a clever design: it's a stovetop oven that has a large thermal mass (thanks to a cordierite pizza stone) and other good thermal properties, allowing it to hit 600F in 10 minutes of pre-heating on your gas burner; it gets top marks in Wired's pizza gadget guide, too.

The web blew up at the same time as the Reagan/Clinton/Bush financial bombs were detonating, leading to a huge private equity bubble in which super-wealthy Americans used debt financing and other forms of financial engineering to buy out successful companies, then hollowed them out, selling off their real-estate and plant, loading them up with debt, and raiding their reserve funds. (more…)

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani campaigned for re-election last year on a reform platform, and in the wake of his successful campaign, the police in the Iranian capital of Tehran have notified women that failures to adhere to the country's brutal religious dress-code will be treated as civil offenses and punished with fines, not jail sentences. (more…)

The early days of the Chinese national internet strategy were dominated by the 50-Cent Army, so-called because they were reputed to be paid 0.5 RMB for ever patriotic message they posted to social media; but as the volume of quackspeak astroturfing rose, the army's composition changed to patriotic government employees putting in extra time off the clock to support their country. (more…)

Until the GOP tax plan came along, rich people who donated to religious schools only get partial tax write-offs for their gifts, because the constitutional principle of separation of church and state obliged them to use special scholarship funds that were not under direct state control. (more…)

Eight of Trump's 17 cabinet secretaries do not release any information about their travel schedules -- a standard practice under the Obama and GW Bush administrations; 4 others only release incomplete, "sporadic" information; Treasury only started releasing Munichin's schedule in November and six departments illegally withhold details on who their cabinet secretaries meet with (two released some information after being sued). (more…)

Swatting is the practice of tricking police SWAT teams into storming your victim's home by phoning in fake hostage situations; it's especially prominent among cybercriminals, gamers and was a favored tactic of Gamergater trolls. (more…)

Google has long maintained that it must keep the workings of its search and ad-placement algorithms a secret, lest they provide a roadmap to the kinds of bad actors who'd like tweak the results and give their bad ideas (or sleazy products) pride of placement on its pages. (more…)

I chanced upon an ancient backup of my RSS feed subscriptions, a cold hard stone of data from my time at Wired in the mid-2000s. The last-modified date on the file is December 2007. I wiped my feeds upon coming to Boing Boing thenabouts: a fresh start and a new perspective.What I found, over 212 mostly-defunct sites, is a time capsule of web culture from a bygone age—albeit one tailored to the professional purpose of cranking out blog posts about consumer electronics a decade ago. It's not a picture of a wonderful time before all the horrors of Facebook and Twitter set in. This place is not a place of honor. No highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here. But perhaps some of you might like a quick tour, all the same. (more…)