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In December 1958, a Soviet expedition reached Antarctica's Pole of Inaccessibility, the point on the continent farthest from any coastline: 1,400 kilometers inland and 3,700 meters up in the coldest region on Earth. The year-round average temperature there is minus 58 degrees centigrade. - Read the rest The post Resin Lenin presides over Antarctica's Pole of Inaccessibility appeared first on Boing Boing.

Sergio Furnari, a Sicilian-born New York sculptor, plans to unveil a life-size Charlie Kirk statue in Times Square on the first anniversary of Kirk's assassination. But the announcement drew thousands of hostile comments to his Instagram account, reports Rhea Nayyar at Hyperallergic. - Read the rest The post Crowdfunding campaign for $100k Charlie Kirk statue languishes appeared first on Boing Boing.

Florence Foster Jenkins(1868 - 1944) has been called the worst opera singer who ever lived, and she filled Carnegie Hall anyway. A wealthy New York socialite, she sang coloratura arias wildly beyond her range - consistently flat, mangling the rhythm, her accompanist scrambling to follow - while dressed in wings and tinsel of her own design. - Read the rest The post The worst opera singer who ever sold out Carnegie Hall appeared first on Boing Boing.

Indiana's State Personnel Department booted a burger truck from the Statehouse Market over its slogan, "you'll love our meat in your mouth," but a First Amendment scholar suspects the state may have bitten off more than it can chew. Here's Jack Forrest, reporting for the Indiana Capital Chronicle:

In October 2000, a stunning discovery hit the antiquities market in Pakistan: a mummy in a gilded coffin, wearing a golden crown, with a cuneiform inscription identifying her as Rhodugune, a daughter of the Persian king Xerxes. Experts dated the Persian Princess to around 600 BC, and Iran, Pakistan, and the Taliban each rushed to claim her. - Read the rest The post The $11 million mummy that turned out to be a fake appeared first on Boing Boing.

Minutes before she was to be killed at a slaughterhouse in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, a three-year-old, 1,600-pound heifer named Emily cleared the five-foot gate and ran. She stayed loose for 40 days through record snowfall in the winter of 1995, foraging in backyards and, at times, running with a herd of deer. - Read the rest The post A cow escaped a slaughterhouse and hid for 40 days appeared first on Boing Boing.

Mexico's Ministry of Health has issued a travel advisory for citizens heading to the United States, where foodborne parasites have infected more than 1,600 people. The advisory was published by the National Committee for Epidemiological Surveillance, known as CONAVE. Newsweek was first to report in English, but neglects to link to the official Mexican advisory. - Read the rest The post Mexico warns travelers of "Explosive Diarrhea Risk" in USA appeared first on Boing Boing.

Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying: tell a fib, your nose grows. But the late tech writer Om Malik argued in an essay that reading "misses almost everything." Carlo Collodi's original 1881 serial, before Disney sanded it down, is a bleak portrait of a society where "deception has gone ambient" - courts punish victims, experts are decorative, and the society is focused on spectacle instead of accountability. - Read the rest The post The original Pinocchio was a dark parable about a world of lies appeared first on Boing Boing.

For most of human evolution, the air held about 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide. It has now surpassed 420 and is climbing by more than 2 ppm per year. A new open-access study in Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health argues that shift may already be showing up in our blood. - Read the rest The post Rising CO2 may already be showing up in human blood - a "potentially toxic atmosphere in 50 years" appeared first on Boing Boing.

In the 19th century, people living near the Barisal region of Bangladesh kept hearing what sounded like distant cannon fire booming out of a clear sky. The Barisal guns became one of the best-known examples of a "skyquake," a sudden loud sound with no corresponding earthquake activity. - Read the rest The post What is the cause of mystery booms heard around the world? appeared first on Boing Boing.

On December 5, 1945, five Navy torpedo bombers took off from Fort Lauderdale on a routine navigation exercise and never came back - the disappearance that launched the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. Partway through, the flight leader, Lt. Charles Taylor, radioed that both his compasses had failed: "I am sure I'm in the Keys but I don't know how far down and I don't know how to get to Fort Lauderdale." - Read the rest The post In 1945, Five bombers vanished and launched the Bermuda Triangle legend appeared first on Boing Boing.

Most UFO theories reach for outer space. The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis reaches down instead: it proposes that flying saucers come not from distant planets but from an advanced, hidden civilization that has been living on Earth all along - under the oceans, inside mountains, or beneath our feet. - Read the rest The post The theory that UFOs come from Earth, not space appeared first on Boing Boing.

On the morning of July 17, a redditor who normally pays Amazon Web Services about five cents a month opened their inbox to a wall of billing alerts and a running tab of $2.5 billion. Their whole setup was a single S3 storage bucket, untouched since 2023 and not even public. - Read the rest The post An AWS bug turned a 5-cent bill into $2.5 billion appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:This Grade Arefurbished 2020 MacBook Prohas 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 13.3-inch Retina display for $429.97 instead of $1,999.A new MacBook Pro can cost the approximate GDP of a small moon colony. Or you could get this refurbished 2020 model for $429.97 and spend the remaining $1,569.03 on rent, groceries, or an unreasonable number of novelty lamps. - Read the rest The post This $430 MacBook Pro once cost nearly $2,000 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Sexsomnia is a parasomnia - in the same family as sleepwalking - in which a person engages in sexual acts during non-REM sleep. People in an episode often appear fully awake because their eyes are open, but they're unconscious and typically have no memory of what they did. - Read the rest The post Some people initiate sex in their sleep and remember none of it appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:FileJumpis offering 2TB of cloud storage in an easy-to-use package for only $59 (MSRP $467) for a lifetime subscription.No more 'out of storage' notifications blocking your flow - go with cloud storage fromFileJump for 2TB for life. - Read the rest The post Free up computer space with 2TB of cloud storage for $59 - for life appeared first on Boing Boing.

Someone at TryAI handed two frontier AI models the same assignment: here's Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk," a budget, and a shell with ffmpeg plus access to every video-generation model on the market - now direct a music video by yourself. - Read the rest The post Two AIs got $100 each to make a music video by themselves appeared first on Boing Boing.

An international team including Yale researchers has described a new species of Colobus monkey living high in the forest canopy of the Democratic Republic of Congo - only the fifth new African monkey found in the past 75 years. The small, black animal wears orange-cream patches around its mouth and nose, and the people who share its forest call it "Likweli." - Read the rest The post New monkey: so rare only 8 of 52 nearby villages knew it existed appeared first on Boing Boing.

Knitters call it the sweater curse: knit a sweater for a significant other and they'll break up with you - in one version, before the sweater is even finished. In a 2005 poll, 15% of active knitters said they'd experienced the curse firsthand, and another 41% considered it a possibility to be taken seriously. - Read the rest The post Knitters believe a hand-made sweater can end your relationship appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1970, composer Gavin Bryars and a group of students at the Portsmouth School of Art formed the Portsmouth Sinfonia, an orchestra open to anyone regardless of talent. Trained musicians could join too, as long as they picked an instrument entirely new to them. - Read the rest The post An orchestra with inept players sold out the Royal Albert Hall appeared first on Boing Boing.

Ten years ago, an Australian company called Geeky Sex Toys launched a line of adult toys based on Pokemon. It sold out almost instantly. Now, according to the relaunch drop, Pokemoan is back with four redesigned toys - and a disclaimer that distances it from the franchise it's plainly spoofing: "It is not licensed or endorsed by, or affiliated with, The Pokemon Company." - Read the rest The post Pokemon-parody sex toys are back, with holographic trading cards appeared first on Boing Boing.

Harkening back to the good old days when Bub Rub and Lil' Sis were all the rage, this interview is pure gold. These two gentlemen may not like turtles, but they sure have their priorities in line.A day after Los Angeles' crumbling infrastructure wiped out a critical roadway, these guys wanna know what is up with the Supreme clothing brand summer sale. - Read the rest The post This Los Angeles man-on-the-street interview is internet gold appeared first on Boing Boing.

Keith Thomas broke his neck diving into a pool in 2020 and was paralyzed from the chest down. Six years later, thanks to a set of brain implants that bypass his spinal injury, he can feed himself, drink from a cup, and feel the fur on his dog again, the Guardian reports. - Read the rest The post Brain implant lets a paralyzed man feed himself and pet his dog appeared first on Boing Boing.

You know the trick of picking one voice out of a crowded room - the "cocktail party" problem. A new study in PLOS Biology looks at the messier moment when you switch your attention from one talker to another, and finds the brain doesn't hand off cleanly: for a beat, it tracks both voices at once. - Read the rest The post Your brain can track two voices at the same time appeared first on Boing Boing.

JD Vance reinforced the stereotype that the U.S. Vice President does nothing by asserting that it is a great time to raise a newborn. Apparently, JD has cracked the code on modern parenting: be vice president, surround your family with taxpayer-funded security professionals, and then marvel at how manageable everything feels. - Read the rest The post JD Vance discovers parenting is easy when the Secret Service does the hard parts appeared first on Boing Boing.

CNN Business has produced a headline so pure, so direct, so violently inevitable, that no rewrite desk should be allowed within 500 feet of it: "Taco Bell has a diarrhea problem."The actual story is grim and gross: CNN reports that shredded iceberg lettuce sold at some Midwestern Taco Bell locations has been linked to a cyclospora outbreak involving more than 1,600 cases and nearly 100 hospitalizations. - Read the rest The post CNN writes the Taco Bell diarrhea headline America needed appeared first on Boing Boing.

The 1,024,000^2 2b2t World Download Project is a public archive of the Minecraft anarchy server 2b2t, preserving roughly 13.7 TiB of compressed world data covering a million-by-million-block section of the server's Overworld, plus smaller captures of its Nether and End dimensions. - Read the rest The post Explore a snapshot of a massive million-by-million block Minecraft server appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Get aBabbel lifetime subscriptioncovering all 14 languages for $159 (reg. $299) with code LEARN.Plenty of language apps will happily teach you a stockpile of nouns and verb tenses, then leave you frozen the moment a real person answers back faster than your flashcards prepared you for. - Read the rest The post All Babbel language courses just dropped in this exclusive offer appeared first on Boing Boing.

On June 3, 1978, Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski was checking malfunctioning equipment on the U-70 synchrotron - the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union - when the safety mechanisms failed. He leaned over and put his head directly into the path of a 76 GeV proton beam. - Read the rest The post In 1978, a physicist took a particle accelerator beam through his brain and went back to work appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 2004, John Bergeron built an animatronic from about $2,000 in materials - a 5'10" metal skeleton with synthetic rubber skin, a wig, and women's clothing - and set out to market Tara the Android as "the world's first pop star android," complete with plans for live shows. - Read the rest The post Remember Tara, the singing android that terrified the internet appeared first on Boing Boing.

In March of the year 536, the sky over Constantinople went dark for a year-and-a-half. The Roman historian Procopius wrote that "the sun gave forth its light without brightness... and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse." The statesman Cassiodorus described noon without shadows, a full moon "empty of splendour," and "a winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer without heat." - Read the rest The post In the year 536, the sun dimmed for 18 months: "one of the worst periods to be alive" appeared first on Boing Boing.

On the night of May 22, 1969, Sergeant Paul Meyer - a 23-year-old Air Force mechanic and Vietnam veteran stationed at RAF Mildenhall in England - drank heavily at a party, was arrested by Suffolk Police for being drunk and disorderly, and was escorted back to barracks to sleep it off. - Read the rest The post A homesick mechanic stole a C-130 to fly home to his wife appeared first on Boing Boing.

Modern voice AI can talk about anything, which is the problem: do you want therapy from your fridge? On his blog Interconnected, Matt Webb posted excerpts from sci-fi stories about machines that talk only about one thing.

Codex Micro is a keypad by Work Louder, for OpenAI, that's designed for use specifically with LLM-related tasks such as chatting to chatbots and marshalling agents, whatever that means. It has 16 RGB keyswitches (clicky or silent) in a 4*4 grid and 32 keycaps for various functions; the top corner switches are fancy rotary ones and it comes with dials and knobs for them. - Read the rest The post A tiny keypad for chatting with chatbots appeared first on Boing Boing.

On October 25, 1924, witnesses at Margate, South Africa reported watching a huge white creature battle two killer whales offshore for three hours, using its tail to attack and lifting itself an estimated 20 feet out of the water. Farmer Hugh Ballance said it looked like a "giant polar bear." - Read the rest The post The "polar bear sea monster" that fought whales was a blob of whale appeared first on Boing Boing.

Decoy is a font where each glyph is ambigious, the idea being that machines will interpret it one way and humans another. In the example above, HAPPY HUMAN is the hidden blurred text behind the clearer SORRY ROBOT text. Some casual testing by the Hacker News crowd suggest it doesn't work very well, but it's an interesting demonstration of an idea ("Is it useful? - Read the rest The post Decoy is an ambigious font that "hides" from AI appeared first on Boing Boing.

Almost everything you've read about how Anthony Burgess came to write A Clockwork Orange may be invented - by Burgess himself, argues The Memory Hole. As the standard account has it, in 1959 a doctor gave the Burgess a year to live, so he churned out novels to leave his wife some money. - Read the rest The post The A Clockwork Orange origin story may be a total fabrication appeared first on Boing Boing.

Signalbox plots every train moving across Britain in real time (or close to it), each choo choo represented by a dot creeping along the lines. Click one to see its origin, destination and the stops along the way. As of 6:05 p.m. - Read the rest The post Live map of Britain's trains appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Anti-Forbes List ranks the richest humans not by their net worth (illiquid, volatile and unrealizable as it is) but by the value their companies have created for other people, excluding themselves. The list shows the top 28; if the number seems peculiar, it's because that's where Elon Musk, with the largest net worth, slips to. - Read the rest The post Anti-Forbes list ranks wealthy by the wealth their companies generated for others appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:EbookMagicuses AI to generate, format, and package ebooks with custom covers, Kindle-ready exports, commercial rights, and more - all with a lifetime license for $39.99 (reg. $149.99).The hardest part of writing a book used to be writing the book. - Read the rest The post This $40 AI tool writes, formats, and covers your next ebook appeared first on Boing Boing.

Heikki Lotvonen's Text Art Tools is a collection of websites and apps that make it easier to make what once was known as ASCII art but is now a vast and sprawling universe of options. I found out about PabloDraw, "The best RIPScrip editor," Telepaint, a "Teletext paint and animation program," and Textual Paint, "a textmode version of MS Paint that runs in the terminal," among many other creative curiosities. - Read the rest The post Collection of useful text art tools appeared first on Boing Boing.

To celebrate what is somehow the tenth anniversary of Stranger Things, Netflix is turning up the nostalgia to 11 with Stranger Things: VHS special edition. According to a Netflix press release, the remastered episodes contain "visual and audio effects that seem to come straight from a video store rental," which means fuzzy video quality and pan-and-scan. - Read the rest The post Watch the first season of Stranger Things in full 1980s pan and scan VHS glory appeared first on Boing Boing.

Most countries give tourists a 30- or 90-day stamp and start counting the days. The Republic of Georgia gives you a whole year, no application required. In his travel newsletter Nomadico, Tim Leffel calls it the best tourist visa in the world - land in Tbilisi, get a stamp, and you can legally stay for 365 days. - Read the rest The post The country that hands you a one-year tourist visa at the airport appeared first on Boing Boing.

Anyone who's spent a lot of time in second-or third-world nations will tell you that tuk-tuks are definitely a thing. They're inexpensive to operate, compared to a car or truck, and serve in almost every capacity that you can imagine. From colectivos where public transport isn't available to makeshift dump trucks hauling supplies to a construction site. - Read the rest The post Cuba's surviving Trump's oil embargo with solar powered tuk-tuks appeared first on Boing Boing.

Fantagraphics Books is nearing completion of its ambitious mission to publish the entirety of master cartoonist Carl Barks's 1942-1966 run of Donald Duck comics for Western Publishing. Comics fans (full disclosure: including me) and historians generally consider it one of the best, if not the best, comic book runs of all time. - Read the rest The post The Newest Complete Carl Barks Library volume has Donald Duck lost beneath the sea appeared first on Boing Boing.

Osamu Tezuka's influence on comics and animation is monumental. Before Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Chainsaw Man, and countless other manga and anime that found devoted audiences across the world, there was Osamu Tezuka. His storytelling, cinematic page layouts, and seemingly inexhaustible imagination helped invent the modern language of manga and influenced comics far more broadly. - Read the rest The post New documentary explores the astonishing legacy of manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka appeared first on Boing Boing.

Americans filed 158 million card-transaction disputes in 2025 - up 29% since 2021, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek piece by Amanda Mull. Worldwide, the jump was even steeper, 46%. Bloomberg describes it as "friendly fraud" - shoppers disputing charges they know are legitimate, a habit TikTok now teaches with step-by-step tutorials on chargeback-ing your way to free stuff. - Read the rest The post Bloomberg calls chargebacks "friendly fraud" - but it's often the only option appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Get alifetime license to Microsoft Windows 11 Profor $9.97 (reg. $199), no coupon code needed.A Windows license for under ten bucks sounds like the setup to a scam, but this one's real, no code required, and it's only around through July 16. - Read the rest The post Copilot, BitLocker, and Hyper-V for under $10? Meet this Windows 11 Pro deal appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: If you're looking for the perfect technological assist for all your browsing, streaming, and document-management needs, thisrefurbished 2018 MacBook Airis now just $199.97 (reg. $1,199)-grab your 128GB one in Gold.12+ hours of battery life to keep you supportedMacBook Airs have all the reliability of MacBook Pros, plus everyday battery life, portability, and minimal financial headache. - Read the rest The post This refurbished MacBook Air is under $200 appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Peking Man fossils - the Homo erectus skullcaps and bones from Zhoukoudian cave that anchored the theory that humans evolved in Asia - disappeared in December 1941 and haven't been seen since.With Japanese forces advancing through China, the fossils, representing at least 40 individuals, were packed into two wooden footlockers to be carried by U.S. - Read the rest The post The Peking Man fossils vanished in 1941 and are still missing appeared first on Boing Boing.