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TL;DR: Take your AI knowledge from basic understanding to exam-ready withThe Ultimate AI Learning Bundle: ChatGPT, AI Agents & Microsoft AI Certificationfor just $24.99 (reg. $145).The Ultimate AI Learning Bundle: ChatGPT, AI Agents & Microsoft AI Certification is a three-in-one beginner-friendly bundle that will not only help youbuild ChatGPT fluency but also provide you with agent-building skills and preparation for a Microsoft-backed certification, all in a single $24.99 (reg. - Read the rest The post Master ChatGPT and AI Agents with this $25 Certification Prep Bundle appeared first on Boing Boing.

Yet another untouched Roman wreck has been discovered off the coast of someplace in the Mediterranean.This time, off the coast of Sicily. Naturally, Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli declared the sunken boat "one of the most significant underwater archaeological discoveries of recent years." - Read the rest The post Man, those Romans sure lost a lot of cargo boats appeared first on Boing Boing.

I'm not fond of bricking my hardware. But I'm very fond of Valve's SteamOS. If you haven't had the opportunity to mess with a Steam Deck or Steam Machine, SteamOS is a deliciously easy-to-use, low-maintenance Linux distribution tuned to work on their hardware with next-to-no maintenance. - Read the rest The post SteamOS is coming to more computers appeared first on Boing Boing.

The upcoming hour-long film on Disney+, "Disney Worldbuilders," focuses on how the cinematic visions of seven filmmakers have been realized as physical, immersive areas of Disney theme parks.The film has more than its share of Disney and former CEO Bob Iger corporate P.R., - Read the rest The post How Disney builds immersive theme park worlds from their movies appeared first on Boing Boing.

Researchers at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon ran a test to measure how often chatbots flatter users. In a paper on social sycophancy in AI advice, they ran OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral through thousands of personal dilemmas. - Read the rest The post AI told Reddit's biggest jerks they did nothing wrong 51% of the time appeared first on Boing Boing.

Getting sick in Antarctica is no fun. Getting sick in Antarctica in the middle of winter is another problem.On July 31, an Australian crew flew a cold-weather-configured Airbus A319 Long Range from Hobart to McMurdo Station, answering an urgent call to evacuate a seriously ill American. - Read the rest The post Australian crew pulls off extraordinary Antarctic medical evacuation appeared first on Boing Boing.

Katsushi Murakami designed the Voltron robots, most of the robots in Power Rangers, and many of the Go-Bots. Matt Alt, the author of Pure Invention, reported Murakami's death in a farewell to the designer on his newsletter on August 10, 2026. - Read the rest The post The designer of Voltron and the Power Rangers robots has died appeared first on Boing Boing.

On May 14, 1945, doctors at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco injected Albert Stevens, an Ohio-born house painter, with plutonium without telling him. Stevens had checked in with what doctors diagnosed as terminal stomach cancer. Manhattan Project researchers wanted to know how plutonium moved through the bodies of the workers who handled it, and they selected him as patient CAL-1. - Read the rest The post The government secretly injected a house painter with plutonium appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kindle jailbreakers have another way into Amazon's famously locked-down e-reader. Vera, released August 10 by developers Ava and sparklerfish, uses the Kindle's own web browser and a pair of specially prepared books to get supported devices running outside code. The KindleModding project says exact model and firmware compatibility matters, and directs users through its jailbreak wizard rather than claiming every current Kindle will work. - Read the rest The post Kindle jailbreakers have a new way in with Vera appeared first on Boing Boing.

Paleontology already gives us giant carnivorous lizards, five-eyed sea creatures, and enough weird fossils to make science fiction seem boring. So, obviously, fringe paleontology has to start off the rails and then dive deep.This entertainingfirst installment of afringe paleontology icebergdescends into the theories, hoaxes, and pseudoscience that revolve around the study of prehistoric life. - Read the rest The post Fringe paleontology gets weird fast appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Learn a new language on your own terms with thislifetime subscription to the Promova Premium Planfor just $79.99 (reg. $299.99).If you're looking to learn a new language, you don't need to spend a fortune on specialist lessons or keep up with rigid schedules, thanks to Promova's Premium Plan lifetime subscription. - Read the rest The post Learn up to 12 languages without the hassle and self-doubt for just $80 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Anyone going to court in England and Wales will be obliged to turn in smart glasses and pick them up when they leave. The ban targets devices such as Meta's and clarifies that existing restrictions on recording devices apply to attire: "There are clear restrictions on taking images or videos within courts and tribunals which is why the use of Meta glasses is prohibited," a spokesperson told The Guardian. - Read the rest The post English courts ban Meta glasses and other spywear appeared first on Boing Boing.

A French manuscript from about 1485 shows a woman spinning wool in her doorway while her child plays beside her. The doorway is the mouth of a giant snail shell. She lives there.

Charles le Brun (1619-90) drew a set of human heads that match the heads of animals: an ox, a fox, an eagle, a raven, a parrot, and a pig. Louis XIV put him in charge of the decoration of Versailles in 1669, and the palace pictures needed crowds of figures a viewer could tell apart at a glance. - Read the rest The post A Versailles painter drew people with the faces of animals appeared first on Boing Boing.

F. D. C. Willard was a Siamese cat named Chester, who lived from 1968 to 1982. In 1975, his owner, the physicist Jack H. Hetherington of Michigan State University, wrote a paper on low-temperature physics and used the word "we" throughout, according to Wikipedia. - Read the rest The post A Siamese cat co-authored a physics paper in 1975 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Undertale, an indie RPG released in 2015 after a successful Kickstarter campaign by developer Toby Fox, has become nothing short of a pop culture icon. Since its release, critics and audiences fell in love with its memorable characters, humor, illustrator Temmie Chang's art style, bullet-hell-meets-RPG gameplay, storytelling, and of course, the soundtrack. - Read the rest The post Fans are cramming Undertale into EarthBound's Super Nintendo engine appeared first on Boing Boing.

Mario Kart 8 asks you to pick a driver, a kart body, tires, and a glider, and each category has dozens of options with their own speed, acceleration, handling, and weight. Antoine Mayerowitz's interactive guide to the Pareto frontier sorts the resulting thousands of builds with a method an economist developed over a century ago. - Read the rest The post The best Mario Kart build is an economics problem from 1900 appeared first on Boing Boing.

About 9,000 people a year search Arizona's Superstition Mountains for the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine. Some have died in the search. The mine is named for Jacob Waltz, a German immigrant ("Dutchman" was the era's term for Germans) who supposedly found a rich gold vein and kept its location secret until 1891, when he confessed on his deathbed to a woman named Julia Thomas and gave her a crude map. - Read the rest The post 9,000 people a year hunt a gold mine that geology says can't exist appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Pok Pok gives kids ages 2-8 anad-free, low-stimulation spaceto explore, create, and learn-and lifetime family access is $59.99.Most kids' apps seem designed by someone who asked, "How many flashing buttons can we fit on one screen before a parent throws the iPad into the sea?" - Read the rest The post Trade loud, addictive screen time for Montessori-inspired Pok Pok, just $59.99 for lifetime access appeared first on Boing Boing.

Cruelty is a growth industry, and the deportation business is booming.Surprise! MAGA's favorite mass-deportation program has produced at least one conspicuous group of winners: the companies paid to lock people up.America's two largest private-prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, reported a combined $1.4 billion in revenue for the second quarter, as the number of people held in immigration detention approached 66,000. - Read the rest The post Trump's mass deportation machine is a $1.4 billion private-prison bonanza appeared first on Boing Boing.

This video is the most pleasant thing I've seen in a couple of days. Perhaps I should give up on the mainstream news.Puppies being cute is one thing, but puppies playing on ice? In little figure skater outfits? With SKATES? - Read the rest The post Dogs on Ice are beyond adorable appeared first on Boing Boing.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate whose career has accumulated enough corruption allegations to require its own filing cabinet, has yet another interesting financial arrangement to explain.The New York Times reports that Paxton co-founded a cell-tower company, Premier Vertical Properties, in 2005. - Read the rest The post Texas' Ken Paxton somehow gets even sleazier appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander found strong "life affirmation" results in a Martian soil sample. Robert Jastrow, then director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said, "Short of seeing something wiggling on the end of a pin, the case for life on Mars is now as complete as the Viking experiments could make it." - Read the rest The post Viking lander's 1976 Mars soil test may have found life after all appeared first on Boing Boing.

All the money in the world, and he still can't buy a beat. Elon Musk is dancing as if his firmware update just failed.The Six Flags old man literally hands Elon his ass. Even Diaper Donald's double-fisted dance of glory (holes) is more cohesive. - Read the rest The post Elon Musk has all the rhythm of an Austin Powers villain appeared first on Boing Boing.

Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup delivers everything I want from a fantasy detective story. Wonderful characters, fantastic world-building, and a mystery worth solving.Bennett tells the story from the point of view of Din Kol, an altered human whose misshapen talents left him useless to most regular sources of employment for altered humans in the Empire. - Read the rest The post The Tainted Cup gets the fantasy detective novel exactly right appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:SwifDoo PDF Prolets you edit, convert, translate, sign, and run OCR on PDFs without paying a recurring subscription. A lifetime Windows license is $29.97 with code SAVE5.Adobe Acrobat isn't the only way to wrangle PDFs anymore.SwifDoo PDF Procovers editing, conversion, OCR, and document signing for a one-time fee of $29.97 (reg. - Read the rest The post SwifDoo PDF Pro handles your PDF headaches for $30 for life appeared first on Boing Boing.

Victoria Gordon, operator of a cleaning service, found a 35-year-old Mars Bar while plowing through a hoarder's house in Scunthorpe, England. Shocked by its enormity, she posed it with a contemporary bar and took a photo. The old bar, from 1991, was 62.5g, while a 2026 model is just 40g. - Read the rest The post 1991 Mars Bar highlights shrinkflation and inflation alike appeared first on Boing Boing.

Britain's Minstry of Justice has so far spent 85,300 removing a mural painted on a wall at the Royal Courts of Justice in London by Banksy, just one of several similarly costly removals.

We're big fans of the classic Blackwing pencil (here's a 24-year-old post by Mark Frauenfelder from the depths of the Blackwing Dark Age), and its makers recently posted a video showing how they are made.Now you know how Blackwing pencils are made. - Read the rest The post How Blackwing pencils (and Hagamoro Fulltouch chalk) are made appeared first on Boing Boing.

Nearest Pint is an interactive map of Britain showing pub density by parliamentary constituency, with each color-coded according to the number of pubs per 10,000 drinkers, which is to say, the population. At the top of the chart is Liverpool Riverside, with 23.73 pubs for every 10,000 people, closely followed by the Cities of London and Westminster, with 21.7 pubs per 10,000 people, and Manchester (21.6), then Bristol, Edinburgh and Brighton, about 21 per 10k. - Read the rest The post UK pub density map appeared first on Boing Boing.

On February 10, 1355, two Oxford students named Walter de Spryngeheuse and Roger de Chesterfield complained about the wine at the Swindlestock Tavern. The vintner, John de Croydon, dismissed the complaint. One of the students threw his drink in de Croydon's face, and by one account beat him with the quart pot. - Read the rest The post A complaint about bad wine left 93 dead and Oxford paying for 470 years appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1860s San Francisco, the city routinely poisoned or trapped stray dogs. The city exempted Bummer and Lazarus by name. Bummer was a black-and-white Newfoundland who lived on the sidewalk outside Frederick Martin's saloon on Montgomery Street, and he was an exceptional rat-killer. - Read the rest The post San Francisco exempted two stray dogs from its own laws appeared first on Boing Boing.

Doi Toshitsura was a feudal lord in Edo-period Japan who studied snow for about twenty years. His 1832 book of woodblock prints, Sekka Zusetsu, has eighty-six drawings of what he called "snow flowers" (sekka), plus a dozen more copied from a 1779 Dutch natural history book. - Read the rest The post A Japanese lord spent 20 years drawing snowflakes under a microscope appeared first on Boing Boing.

1999 A.D. is a short film the appliance maker Philco-Ford made in 1967 to show what family life would look like at the end of the century. It opens with a boy named Jamie, who builds a sandcastle version of his family's house on a Southern California beach. - Read the rest The post This 1967 short film got video chat and online banking right appeared first on Boing Boing.

Luke Howard was an industrial chemist in London. He studied clouds as a hobby in the early 1800s. In hisEssay on the Modification of Clouds,he gave the standard cloud formations the names we still use today. Cirrus is the Latin word for a wisp of hair, cumulus for "convex or conical heaps," stratus for a "horizontal sheet." - Read the rest The post One hobbyist named cirrus, cumulus, and stratus back in 1803 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Microsoft Visio Professional 2024helps turn workflows, networks, floor plans, and other complicated ideas into polished diagrams. Get a lifetime Windows license for $44.97 (reg. $579.99).Some ideas are much easier to understand once you stop trying to explain them in a wall of text. - Read the rest The post Turn complicated ideas into clear diagrams with Microsoft Visio 2024 for $45 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Ask questions about PDFs, generate summaries, edit documents, and convert files without juggling multiple apps.PDNob Prois $49.99 for life (reg. $349.95).AI has finally made its way into one of the internet's least cooperative file formats: PDFs.PDNob Pro PDF Editorcan summarize, translate, and answer questions about your documents while handling all the editing tools you'd expect, and right now, you can get lifetime access for $49.99 (reg. - Read the rest The post This AI PDF editor can answer questions about your documents for $50 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Save big on tools you'll actually use with thisMicrosoft Office Professional Plus 2019 for Windows license, now only $19.97 (MSRP $229).From building a budget to crafting the perfect presentation to get your point across and drafting documents, it's pretty rare to find a suite of apps that can help you tackle a full workday. - Read the rest The post From Word to Excel, score seven Microsoft Office apps for just $20 (MSRP $229) appeared first on Boing Boing.

A metal that has never been recorded before turned up in a grain of sand from Hiroshima Bay. Writing in Science Advances, Luca Bindi, Hans-Rudolf Wenk, Mario Wannier, and Teresa Salvatici report the discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast, sealed inside a glassy bead that formed during the airburst of 6 August 1945. - Read the rest The post A new alloy turned up in a grain of sand from Hiroshima Bay appeared first on Boing Boing.

A medevac flight that should have taken half an hour ended on the side of a mountain in New Mexico, killing all four aboard. Jeff Wise reports for Wired that a military GPS jamming exercise 100 miles away is part of the reason. - Read the rest The post Four died after a military exercise took GPS away over New Mexico appeared first on Boing Boing.

The surface of the Sun has been photographed in more detail than ever before, and it turns out to be covered in whirlpools. Victoria Gill reports for BBC News on the most detailed images of the Sun yet, taken by the Inouye Solar Telescope on a high peak in Hawaii and published in the journal Nature. - Read the rest The post The sharpest pictures ever taken of the Sun show it swirling appeared first on Boing Boing.

NASA created a Martian Dust Limit Working Group this year to figure out how much Mars dust a person can safely breathe, and Leonard David reports for Space.com on the dust hazard and how future astronauts might deal with it. - Read the rest The post Mars dust is full of perchlorates, silica, and heavy metals appeared first on Boing Boing.

Now you can immerse yourself completely in the uncanny valley by watching Fairgound, a new 24/7 AI slop channel available on Roku. It offers "series, films, and shorts from the world's best AI storytellers" across a variety of genres. [via Cord Cutters]

TL;DR:Headway Premiumnow includes a growing selection of fiction summaries alongside its huge nonfiction library. Get lifetime access for $69.99 (reg. $299.95).Big news for anyone who loves books but never seems to finish them:Headway now includes fiction summaries alongside its popular nonfiction library. - Read the rest The post Own Headway for life for $69.99 and finally make waiting in line productive appeared first on Boing Boing.

Osaka ranked seventh and Tokyo tenth in the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2026 Global Liveability Index. Japan was the only Asian country with two cities in the top 10. BBC Travel asked residents and planners why, and their answers came down to four rules. - Read the rest The post Why Osaka and Tokyo keep landing in the world's top 10 cities appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: If you regularly bank, shop, and manage your finances online, this discounted15-month subscription offers an affordable way to monitor your identity and respond quickly if fraud occurs-grab it now for just $99.99 (reg. $187.35).WithLifeLock Core Identity Theft Protection, you don't have to be a cybersecurity expert to protect your identity thanks to this all-in-one fraud defense software. - Read the rest The post This $100 subscription helps protect against identity theft and financial fraud appeared first on Boing Boing.

Google has a difficult engineering problem at its enormous Fort Wayne data center: some of the land it wants to build on is protected wetlands.The search giant's solution is simple: build anyway. In the permitting documents for the not-evil-mastermind-sounding "Project Zodiac," Google's developer, Hatchworks, claims "meeting the project purpose and completely avoiding water resources was not feasible." - Read the rest The post Doing no "evil," Google proposes paving over protected wetlands for a data center appeared first on Boing Boing.

Los Angeles' stiffest self-proclaimed superhero is fighting a branding problem of his own devising.Based on the name alone, I had already imagined an incredible origin story involving the ever-popular fateful tumble into a vat of chemicals. His crackling electric baton was named either the Magic Wand or the Rabbit, and Rock Hard's sidekick could only be Rock Steady. - Read the rest The post Can you guess Rock Hard's branding problem? appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Never lose your wallet or ID cards again with thisGen 3, 1-pack KeySmart SmartCardfor just $31.99 (reg. $39.99).TheKeySmart SmartCard is a credit-card-thin, IPX8 waterproof, rechargeable smartcardthat works with Apple Find My or Google Find to help you keep track of your belongings. - Read the rest The post Never lose your wallet again with this $32 smart tracker appeared first on Boing Boing.

Meta is paying for posts that appear to break its own rules, according to an ABC (Australia) New Verify investigation by Lucy Carter. The report cites four accounts that have received payment from Facebook's invitation-only Content Monetization program, including a white nationalist with neo-Nazi links and an anti-vaccine campaigner. - Read the rest The post Meta pays 16.2 million accounts, including neo-Nazi-linked pages appeared first on Boing Boing.