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Meta has patented a wearable that listens to you all day and guesses how you feel. As 404 Media reports, the device would continuously record audio and surroundings, then use AI to read your emotional state from "sighs, laughter" and other vocal cues, ostensibly to fine-tune workout suggestions. - Read the rest The post Meta patented a wearable that listens all day to guess your feelings appeared first on Boing Boing.

Congo's latest Ebola outbreak has killed 600 people and is now spreading into provinces that had been untouched. Authorities have logged 1,759 confirmed cases since declaring the outbreak on May 15, and new suspected cases have surfaced in Kisangani, in Tshopo province, well beyond the epicenter in Ituri. - Read the rest The post Congo's Ebola outbreak has killed 600 and is reaching new provinces appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Paris Review was partly a CIA front, and one of its founders led a double life to match. In the London Review of Books, Christian Lorentzen reviews a new biography of Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, nature writer, and CIA operative who helped start the magazine as cover. - Read the rest The post The novelist who co-founded the Paris Review was a CIA spy appeared first on Boing Boing.

At the time that this post was written, at least 50 individuals had died in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The deaths were due to a lack of care for people with chronic medical issues like heart disease and diabetes, and, thanks to a shocking lack of oversight, the completion of suicide by individuals under extreme mental duress in custody or who suffered from pre-existing mental health conditions. - Read the rest The post Mexican Government files charges against ICE for murder appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1929, a Moscow newspaper editor discovered that one of his reporters never wrote anything down because his brain was apparently already doing the recording.That is where the popular myth starts to wobble. People talk about photographic memory as if the brain can take a perfect screenshot of a page and retrieve it on demand. - Read the rest The post Photographic memory is not real, but this guy's brain came close enough to scare everyone appeared first on Boing Boing.

SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin testified before Congress about nonconsensual AI replicas, warning that deepfakes are not just an actor problem but a reality problem.In his testimony, Astin said AI can now make people appear to say things they never said, endorse things they do not believe, or confess to things they know nothing about. - Read the rest The post Sean Astin tells Congress AI should not get to steal your face appeared first on Boing Boing.

Folarin Balogun is eligible to play for the United States because he was born in Brooklyn, which is awkward for Republicans currently trying to make "born in America" mean "terms and conditions apply."

Astronomers keep finding enormous rings of radio light in deep space that nothing in the textbooks can account for. Each is more than 50 times the width of the Milky Way, glows only at radio wavelengths - invisible to optical, infrared, and X-ray telescopes - and is brightest around its edges. - Read the rest The post Astronomers keep finding giant radio rings in space they can't explain appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Wicked Bible is a 1631 reprint of the King James Bible that accidentally ordered its readers to sin. Setting the Ten Commandments, London's royal printers dropped the word "not" from Exodus 20:14, so the Seventh Commandment read "Thou shalt commit adultery." - Read the rest The post A 1631 Bible accidentally ordered readers to commit adultery appeared first on Boing Boing.

According to Wikipedia, spontaneous human combustion is the belief that a person can simply burst into flame from within, leaving the body burned to ash while the surrounding room barely chars. It is pseudoscience - but the cases behind the legend are real, and they have a grim, ordinary explanation. - Read the rest The post What is spontaneous human combustion, and is it real? appeared first on Boing Boing.

There are already plenty of reasons to stay the hell away from anything that Meta has its grubby little rat hooks on: Facebook surveils and monetizes everything you do while you're online, and their shitty Meta AI glasses pick up the surveillance slack in meatspace, capturing every moment they're on your face while robbing others of their privacy to boot. - Read the rest The post How to opt out of Meta using your Instagram posts to make AI images appeared first on Boing Boing.

I'm obsessed with YouTuber Husk IRL's infuriatingly hilarious conversations with ChatGPT. If you need a laugh (and who doesn't, nowadays?), you should watch some of his videos on your next lunch break. Last year, Grant St. ClairhighlightedHusk's experiments to get ChatGPT to help him out in stressful or dangeroussituationslike being pulled over by the police, being swallowed by a whale, or having a tree fall on him. - Read the rest The post ChatGPT failures make for truly hilarious content appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Work on your self-growth, boost your professional skills, and become a trivia night menace withlifetime access to Headway Premium- now just $69.99, no subscription, no expiration.We're not saying you should cheat at trivia. But if you happen to absorb 15-minute summaries of the world's best nonfiction books on psychology, leadership, productivity, and random historical facts, and then happen to dominate your local pub's trivia team, well, that's just strategy. - Read the rest The post Your excuses for not reading are over - Headway Premium is just $69.99 for life appeared first on Boing Boing.

A dockside owl rescue turned into a successful wildlife handoff after several young barn owls were found nesting in a loft above the water. As they neared the age to leave the nest, there was concern they could fall into the water during their first attempts at flight and drown. - Read the rest The post Baby barn owls rescued from a dock loft before first flight appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1996, beverage maker Clearly Canadian introduced Orbitz, a clear soft drink filled with brightly colored edible spheres suspended throughout the bottle. The unusual appearance made it look more like a science experiment than a soda, and the company leaned into the comparison by marketing it as a drinkable lava lamp. - Read the rest The post In 1996, Orbitz turned a soda bottle into a lava lamp appeared first on Boing Boing.

A concrete playground slide in Bucharest, Romania, looks more like a piece of brutalist architecture than a place for children to play. Built in the late 1950s or 1960s in the Floreasca area, the towering structure has become an internet curiosity because of its unusual scale, sharp angles, and all-concrete design. - Read the rest The post This concrete playground slide looks like brutalist architecture appeared first on Boing Boing.

Psyllium husk has been rebranded by the internet as "nature's Ozempic," which is unfair to nature, Ozempic, and this extremely beige powder that mostly wants you to drink more water.The evidence is decent for digestion and modest for cholesterol and blood sugar. - Read the rest The post Psyllium husk is not nature's Ozempic, but it is a pretty good source of fiber appeared first on Boing Boing.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo spent 35 years in the United States, raised three sons, built houses, built his own home, and was shot by ICE before work.His son Ronaldo said he did not learn about his father's final moments from the hospital or law enforcement. - Read the rest The post ICE killed a Houston father, then called him the aggressor appeared first on Boing Boing.

Just when we thought we were safe, Max Fosh returned. The only good YouTube prankster on the Internet (a title I have no authority to bestow) has made a career out of taking the most absurd ideas possible and making them a reality. - Read the rest The post Max Fosh entered a nine-year-old into a roast battle appeared first on Boing Boing.

Denis Villenueve's first two Dune (or DUNC depending on how badly you misread the poster) movies, with love to David Lynch, have been by far the best adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel. Evidently, Villeneuve has taken a little time before the next Bond film to hammer out a third Dune, this time adapting the original novel's sequel Dune Messiah and serving as a neat endpoint to his trilogy. - Read the rest The post Dune: Part 3 drops trailer full of fun in the sun appeared first on Boing Boing.

Nothing says happy holidays like a new Robert Eggers film cast with his growing merry band of weirdos. With this in mind, it's gonna be a Christmas to remember as my favorite cinematic discomfort aficionado returns to theaters this December with Werwulf: a dread-filled imagining of a creature that has haunted the woods and dreams of European culture for hundreds if not thousands of years. - Read the rest The post Werwulf is coming just in time for Christmas! appeared first on Boing Boing.

As has been discussed to death both here and on the Internet at large, Fallout: New Vegas is one of the best RPGs ever made. Although it started life as a contracted-out amuse-bouche to keep Fallout fans happy while Bethesda was all hands on deck with Skyrim, Obsidian - an RPG studio formed from the same ex-Black Isle devs who created the series to begin with - knocked it out of the park nonetheless. - Read the rest The post We might be getting that New Vegas followup, but not in the way anyone expected appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tale of Two Wastelands might just be the best Fallout mod of all time, and it's pretty inarguably the most influential. On its surface, the idea is simple: Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas both use the same iteration of the same engine, so why not combine them together into a single megagame you can play for 200 hours? - Read the rest The post Making Fallout 76 bearable by playing it inside Fallout 4 appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1966, apprentice printers in Beccles, Suffolk revived a pub game for the town's summer fete, claiming its rules came from a 1585 manuscript rediscovered in an attic. The game was dwile flonking, and the manuscript never existed. According to Wikipedia, "the Suffolk county archivist was unable to find any evidence for the game before 1966, and the supposed 1585 rules are a hoax." - Read the rest The post Dwile flonking, the ancient pub sport invented in 1966 appeared first on Boing Boing.

On a single day in January 1982, a Cuban cow named Ubre Blanca ("White Udder") produced 109.5 liters of milk - "more than four times a typical cow's production," according to Wikipedia. Guinness World Records recognized that mark, along with her 24,268.9-liter output in a single lactation period. - Read the rest The post Castro's supercow got a state obituary and a marble statue appeared first on Boing Boing.

According to the Wikipedia entry for British Army officer Adrian Carton de Wiart, he "was shot in the face, head, stomach, groin, ankle, leg, hip, and ear" across the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War. He was blinded in his left eye, survived two plane crashes, and "ripped off his own severely injured fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them." - Read the rest The post Soldier who was shot in eight places said he "enjoyed the war" appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:NewCostco Gold Star Members who enroll in auto-renewal can receive a $50 Digital Costco Shop Card*at sign-up. This promotion is only available through 8/2 at 11:59 PM.Costco offers members access to brand-name products across grocery, household, and seasonal categories, along with Kirkland SignatureTM items, at more than 500 warehouses across the U.S. - Read the rest The post Sign up as a new Costco Gold Star Member and receive a $50 Digital Costco Shop Card* appeared first on Boing Boing.

According to Action 52, the unlicensed 1992 cartridge crammed 52 original games onto one Nintendo chip and sold for US$199, becoming "one of the worst video games of all time." Businessman Vince Perri founded Active Enterprises after watching his son play a Taiwanese 40-game bootleg: "I figured I'd do it legally." - Read the rest The post This $199 NES cartridge was "one of the worst video games of all time" appeared first on Boing Boing.

According toMilbenkase("mite cheese"), the German specialty is made by flavoring balls of quark with caraway and salt, drying them, and leaving them "in a wooden box containing rye flour and cheese mites for about three months." "An enzyme in the digestive juices excreted by the mites causes the cheese to ripen." - Read the rest The post This German cheese is ripened by live mites, which you then eat appeared first on Boing Boing.

According to the account of the 1947 crash of the airliner Star Dust, the British plane left Buenos Aires for Santiago on 2 August 1947 and vanished over the Andes. Four minutes before its planned landing, the radio operator tapped out a final Morse message ending in one word: "STENDEC." - Read the rest The post A plane vanished in 1947 after sending "stendec" in Morse Code appeared first on Boing Boing.

According to IP over Avian Carriers, the internet's standards body once published a straight-faced proposal "to carry Internet Protocol (IP) traffic by birds such as homing pigeons." RFC 1149, written by David Waitzman and released on April 1, 1990, was one of several April Fools' Day standards. - Read the rest The post In 1990, engineers wrote an internet standard for carrier pigeons appeared first on Boing Boing.

Virgin Media was fined $28m by telecom regulators in the U.K. over its tactics to prevent customers canceling their service. The method was not especially sophisticated: its agents would simply hang up on customers or put them on hold until they hung up themselves. - Read the rest The post UK's Virgin Media fined $28m for hanging up on people calling to cancel appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Kennedy Center's argument was basically that removing Trump's name might hurt fundraising, because apparently donors were lining up to support the arts only after seeing the words "Donald J. Trump" bolted onto John F. Kennedy's memorial. The court asked for evidence. - Read the rest The post Court rejects Trump's claim that The Kennedy Center needs his name to survive appeared first on Boing Boing.

There's nothing new about hired mourners. The practice of paying folks to pretend to care about someone's passing goes back thousands of years, crossing cultural divides, from east to west. Moirologists, wailers, keeners-call them what you will. For the vain or the superstitious, there's comfort to be found in knowing that someone will be there to witness their remains ritualistically given to the dust. - Read the rest The post You can hire a mysterious stranger to mourn your passing appeared first on Boing Boing.

In a perfect world, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty would be honoured by every nuclear-armed nation in the world, allowing everyone to breath easy about the fact that, of all the ways we humans have sorted out how to kill one another, at least we can rule out atomic fire from beyond our planet's atmosphere (yeah, ballistic missiles get high up there, but work with me here). - Read the rest The post Scientists working to uncover space-based nuclear weapons appeared first on Boing Boing.

I mean, you could put a window in the wall?United Airlines tried to argue that a "window seat" does not necessarily include a window, which is the kind of corporate reasoning that makes a person check whether "airplane" still means airplane. - Read the rest The post United argued that a window seat is just a seat near a wall appeared first on Boing Boing.

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani wears a classic and relatively inexpensive Casio A1000MA-7 [casio.com]. It's typical of the company's perfectly archaic digital watches; there's little need to significantly upgrade the design as it works well and we never stopped buying them, though the "Premium Vintage" edition he wears was made in 2022. - Read the rest The post Zohran Mamdani's retro wristwatch is a Casio classic appeared first on Boing Boing.

Grandpa Pudding Brains' White House has opened 25 "Freedom Fuel" gas stations around Philadelphia, selling gas below the national average, because socialism becomes freedom when you slap a flag decal on the pump.USA TODAY reports the stations are selling gas at $3.47 a gallon, below the $3.79 national average, and that the White House promoted the launch with a video of customers thanking Trump for cheaper gas. - Read the rest The post Trump's answer to high gas prices is socialism with patriotic branding appeared first on Boing Boing.

I have been sucked into Cabin in the Woods, a YouTube channel that presents Bigfoot videos with the tone and pacing of a serious documentary series, while frequently veering into the kind of paranormal speculation that makes me pause the video and stare at the wall. - Read the rest The post This Bigfoot YouTube channel is entertaining woo in documentary drag appeared first on Boing Boing.

Solvej Balle's incredible story of a woman trapped in time continues in Book II of On the Calculation of Volume.Book I introduces us to Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller who becomes trapped on November 18th. Every day she wakes up, it is once again November 18th. - Read the rest The post I just finished "On the Calculation of Volume II" appeared first on Boing Boing.

What did the sky look like yesterday? This interactive web project called What Color Was The Sky invites visitors to revisit a moment in time through a blend of science, data, and imagination. Rather than showing a simple weather report or satellite image, the project transforms atmospheric conditions into a poetic portrait of the sky, creating a more emotional way to think about the places we inhabit. - Read the rest The post This website turns yesterday's sky into a poetic memory appeared first on Boing Boing.

Verba Prima is a website dedicated to the opening lines of books. Its archive contains thousands of first sentences from notable literary works. It's a simple way to explore how famous authors chose to begin their stories.You click "next chapter" to jump from one opening line to the next. - Read the rest The post Verba Prima collects thousands of literary opening lines appeared first on Boing Boing.

Another Day is a web experiment that lines historical events up by date. It pairs a moment that still feels recent in our shared memory with an older event, and the two often sit closer together on the calendar than you'd expect. - Read the rest The post The shootings at Kent Stateare now closer tothe end of World War Ithan to today appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace described roadside bombs as "a bomb that goes on when you're driving your little around," which is not how English, bombs, cars, or presidents are supposed to work.A roadside bomb is horrifying enough without Grandpa Pudding Brains turning it into Mad Libs from the VA waiting room. - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains explains roadside bombs in nightmare toddler English appeared first on Boing Boing.

The PocketMage is a retro-styled e-ink PDA ("personal digital assistant," remember?) with a clamshell case, a tactile QWERTY keyboard, and a "wizard-inspired" operating system built for notes, journaling and calendars. At under 4 by 3 inches, it actually fits in a pocket, unlike similar gadgets such as the chunky PicoCalc and the tablet-sized Alpha. - Read the rest The post PocketMage, an e-ink PDA inspired by wizards appeared first on Boing Boing.

Pixel Skylines collects background graphics from old video games that depict city skylines. The simple, grid-like design of skyscrapers lends them to representation as pixel art (faves that age me: 1987's Double Dragon, below, and 1988's Robocop, above) so that genre naturally dominates the set. - Read the rest The post Collection of pixel-art skylines from old arcade and video games appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Convert, edit, and unlock PDFs into Word, Excel, and more with AcePDF Converter & Editor for $23.99 (MSRP $99.99) with promo codeEXTRA20until July 19, including OCR and batch tools in a lifetime license.Working with PDFs can get frustrating fast, especially when you just need to make a quick edit, pull text from a scan, or convert a file into something usable. - Read the rest The post Stop PDF headaches - convert, merge, and edit files in minutes with AcePDF for a one-time $24 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Russian villagers have begun buying horses instead of cars as the country's gasoline crisis deepens, The Moscow Times reported Monday, citing claims by horse breeders there. Demand for workhorses has risen severalfold in recent weeks, sparing about 1,000 animals from slaughter. - Read the rest The post Russians returning to 1 horsepower amid gasoline shortages appeared first on Boing Boing.

A federal judge in Florida dismissed with prejudice a copyright lawsuit brought against Taylor Swift by self-published poet Kimberly Marasco, ruling (not for the first time!) that the material Marasco claimed Swift stole is not protected by copyright at all.Marasco alleged that more than a dozen songs from Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department lifted from poems she wrote between 2017 and 2021. - Read the rest The post Poet's copyright lawsuit against Taylor Swift tossed again appeared first on Boing Boing.

Knockoff is "Amazon, without the knockoffs": a browser extension for Chrome that filters out the gibberish factory brands that are typically favoried over quality products in the online retailer's search results. What's left, creator Josh Pigford writes, is "brands with a reputation to lose" rather than HORUSDY or PHRXXI or whatever. - Read the rest The post "Knockoff" browser add-on filters junk brands from Amazon results appeared first on Boing Boing.