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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.

In July 1990, six people - a would-be priest, his parents, and three others - gathered in the family thrift store in Belvue, Kansas and held what they called a papal conclave. On the first ballot they elected one of their own, 30-year-old David Bawden, who took the name Pope Michael. - Read the rest The post When six people in a Kansas thrift store elected their own pope appeared first on Boing Boing.

Spike Milligan - the manic force behind BBC radio's anarchic The Goon Show and a founding influence on modern British comedy - was also one of history's great writers of furious letters. In July 1973, the target was a parking fine. - Read the rest The post The time Spike Milligan refused to pay a parking fine: "send me to prison" appeared first on Boing Boing.

Four years ago, New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz had a stroke. "I was making puzzles in bed while I was in the hospital," he told A.J. Jacobs in a recent interview.Recovery has been slow. He still does daily physical therapy and figures he may never be all the way back. - Read the rest The post The NY Times' crossword editor kept building puzzles from his hospital bed appeared first on Boing Boing.

Before multitasking made it easy to control-tab away from a goofing-off page (and when people work in offices with other people), PC games shipped with a boss key - a single keystroke that instantly hid the game and threw up a screen meant to look like real work. - Read the rest The post The keystroke that hid your game behind a fake spreadsheet appeared first on Boing Boing.

Otzi the Iceman died in the Alps roughly 5,300 years ago, and researchers have now used yeast recovered from his frozen body to bake sourdough bread. According to Smithsonian magazine, a team at Eurac Research's Institute for Mummy Studies found four cold-adapted yeast strains clinging to the mummified remains, one of them a Glaciozyma that came to dominate the culture. - Read the rest The post Scientists baked sourdough with yeast from a 5,300-year-old mummy appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kimberly Wheeler moved her family from California to Aix-en-Provence three years ago, and she keeps getting the same small reaction from French neighbors: a furrowed brow, a soft "bfff," a shrug. In a Substack essay, she catalogs the ordinary American habits that set it off. - Read the rest The post Six American habits that baffle the French appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get a lifetime license toMicrosoft Office Professional Plus 2019for Windows - including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access - for $19.97 (reg. $229).If your idea of productivity is getting work done instead of learning new features,Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019might be all the Office suite you need. - Read the rest The post Skip the subscription with Microsoft Office 2019 for $20 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Do you remember WarioWare? If any of Nintendo's in-house series can be said to be relatively obscure, these games are: each one is a collection of twitchy, seconds-long "microgames" that you're challenged to ace before being shuffled onto the next. Given that "seconds long" is about the length of your average American political scandal, it was only a matter of time before the two were made to meet. - Read the rest The post JDWare is "WarioWare for the politically disturbed" appeared first on Boing Boing.

All the collective hours the Internet has put into Geoguessr practice are finally starting to pay off! If anyone ever tells you that being able to pinpoint geographical locations just by looking at them is a useless talent, I would direct them to the curious case of colsto. - Read the rest The post Leveraging the power of Geoguessr to track down an animal abuser appeared first on Boing Boing.

Games like Peak and Big Walk - which is to say, cheap, cutesy co-op experiences geared toward friend groups who like messing with each other - fill an important niche. When you can't hang out with your friends every day, sometimes logging on and shoving them off a cliff is the next best thing. - Read the rest The post New indie game tasks you and your friends with becoming the most unethical airline pilots on the planet appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tom the Dancing Bug: The MAGAs, in "Stigmatized!"-Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US INTHE INNERHIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic - before it's published anywhere. - Read the rest The post Tom the Dancing Bug: The MAGAs do their own scientific research appeared first on Boing Boing.

Senator Amy Klobuchar asked Trump's Attorney General candidate Todd Blanche whether it is unacceptable for federal agents to break into someone's home without a warrant and drag them into the street without checking that they have the right person. Blanche's answer was, somehow, "it depends." - Read the rest The post Todd Blanche says warrantless home raids are not a "black and white" issue appeared first on Boing Boing.

J.K. Rowling has found a new way to spend Harry Potter money on the anti-trans movement: offering to bankroll groups angry that Amnesty International UK briefly called them "anti-rights."The report, titled "A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK," was removed shortly after publication. - Read the rest The post J.K. Rowling offers to bankroll anti-trans groups' revenge on Amnesty International appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Tidbyt is a compact retro pixel display that makes it pleasant instead of corrosive to keep track of things you'd grab your phone to check: weather, sports, when the train comes, whether he's dead yet, and so on. You plug it in, pick apps from a phone-based library, and it cycles through them without calling for interaction. - Read the rest The post Tidbyt: a 64-by-32 pixel LED display that you can make your own apps for appeared first on Boing Boing.

Manhunter, Michael Mann's 1986 thriller, was restored for its forthcoming release on 4K Blu-ray and in theaters. A trailer is out. Starring Willian Petersen, Tom Noonan, Kimt Greist and Dennis Farina, it was the first movie based on Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon and features Brian Cox in the first screen appearance of imprisoned murderer Hannibal Lecter (here named Lecktor), induced to help authorities track down a serial killer. - Read the rest The post Trailer for Michael Mann's "Manhunter: The Final Cut" appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Microsoft Visio Professional 2024includes more than 250,000 templates and shapes for creating flowcharts, floor plans, network diagrams, and more. Get a lifetime license for $44.97 (reg. $579).Sometimes the fastest way to explain an idea is with a few boxes, arrows, and lines. - Read the rest The post This $45 Microsoft Visio deal makes diagrams a lot easier appeared first on Boing Boing.

On December 5, 2014, Korean Air Flight 086 was taxiing toward takeoff at JFK when it turned around and rolled back to the gate. The reason: Heather Cho, a company vice president and the daughter of its CEO, had been handed her first-class macadamia nuts in a bag instead of on a plate. - Read the rest The post An airline exec turned a jet around over nuts in a bag appeared first on Boing Boing.

Joe Lombardo, the governor of Nevada and former law enforcement officer, was pulled over on May 15 after his pickup truck was seen running a red light. After a police officer approached his vehicle, Lombardo announced "I'm Joe Lombardo," and was allowed to leave without a citation. - Read the rest The post Nevada governor escaped traffic ticket after telling cop who he was appeared first on Boing Boing.

In June 2011, a Swedish treasure-hunting team called OceanX returned from the Gulf of Bothnia with a blurry sonar image of something on the seafloor: a roughly circular, 200-foot feature they said looked man-made. When the Daily Mail ran the image in 2012, it became a global sensation - a sunken UFO, some said, its outline helpfully redrawn by tabloids to resemble the Millennium Falcon. - Read the rest The post The blurry sonar blob tabloids turned into a sunken UFO appeared first on Boing Boing.

Between 1885 and 1917, the House of Faberge built 50 jeweled Easter eggs for the Russian tsars - lavish confections of gold, enamel, and gems, each hiding a tiny surprise inside, given by Alexander III and Nicholas II to the women of the imperial family. - Read the rest The post Six of the tsars' jeweled Faberge eggs have never been found appeared first on Boing Boing.

The sprawling lore of the Backrooms, now a blockbuster film, flows from a single photo of an unsettlingly dingy office space. The pic captured the imagination of image-board users in the late 2000s, and inspired artists to recreate the distinctively bland yellow wallpaper for use in illustrations, games and other media. - Read the rest The post The real Backrooms wallpaper texture appeared first on Boing Boing.

Amanita muscaria - the red-and-white toadstool of fairy tales and Mario games - is poisonous raw, but boiling breaks down enough of its toxins that brave people around the world eat it. Mycologist David Arora serves it on his forays; Russians prize its nutty flavor. - Read the rest The post They boiled a toadstool to eat it and tripped for hours instead appeared first on Boing Boing.