Boing Boing

At 5:10 p.m. on Saturday 26 November 1977, viewers in parts of southern England watching an ITN news summary heard the audio mutate into a deep buzz. A distorted voice took over, introducing itself as Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, and telling humanity that it had a short time left to put down its weapons and learn to live in peace. - Read the rest The post In 1977, a voice claiming to be an alien took over British TV for four minutes appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 2014, a talking doll named My Friend Cayla was voted Innovative Toy of the Year. Three years later the German government was telling parents to destroy it. Cayla listened to a child through a hidden microphone, beamed the audio over Bluetooth to a phone app, searched the internet for an answer, and spoke back after about a one-second delay. - Read the rest The post Germany told parents to destroy this talking doll appeared first on Boing Boing.

AI companies are facing a data problem of their own making: the open web is clogged with AI-generated text, and training new models on that sludge invites "model collapse," where machines degrade by eating their own output. One company is filling the need for human-written content by buying old printed books in bulk. - Read the rest The post AI companies are buying up old books to escape their own AI slop appeared first on Boing Boing.

Designer and writer Matt Webb has a bone to pick with the movie ratings board. Ferris Bueller's Day Off carries a PG-13 for cursing and kissing, but Frozen 2 - where a tidal wave nearly levels an entire kingdom - sailed through with a PG. - Read the rest The post Frozen 2 should be rated R, a writer argues with data appeared first on Boing Boing.

On the evening of October 15, 1991, the University of Utah's Fly's Eye detector at Dugway Proving Ground recorded a single subatomic particle arriving from space with an energy of about 3.2*10^2 electronvolts - an atomic nucleus carrying the kinetic energy of a baseball traveling 100 kilometers per hour. - Read the rest The post A single atomic nucleus hit Utah with the force of a pitched baseball appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Stop fearing your PDFs! Easily edit, convert, annotate, and master your PDFs with this license toPDF Agile Premiumfor Windows and Mac for just $39.99 (Reg. $119).We've all been there: staring down the barrel of a PDF, needing to do more with it than our OS allows. - Read the rest The post PDFs fill you with dread? Save yourself the stress with a PDF reader appeared first on Boing Boing.

FreeInk is an open-source ecosystem for e-ink readers, aiming to replace locked-down software and walled gardens with a stack that includes everything from firmware to fonts and free file formats. There's even reference hardware and a manifesto.

The Castle Map is an interactive atlas of the world's greatest strongholds, featuring (at press time) 1,706 castles, 543 fortresses, 760 palaces and 682 ruins. They are further filterable by "fame ranking," with 100 in the top category, and by their date of construction (going back to ~3000 BC's Aniba fortified village.) - Read the rest The post Interactive map of the world's castles, fortresses, palaces and ruins appeared first on Boing Boing.

The World Wide Web address turns 41 this year.DNS.pizza has analyzed 85,879 domains with verified registration dates and ranked the oldest active domains.The DNS "opened for business in 1985," the site notes: nordu.net, a Nordic research network, was created on January 1, and symbolics.com - Read the rest The post A tour of the oldest domains still on the internet appeared first on Boing Boing.

Before becoming a 1980s TV-dinner hall of famer, Salisbury steak was a 19th-century health fad. Dr. James Salisbury looked at chopped beef and somehow saw medicine; America looked at it and covered it in gravy.Dr. Salisbury wanted to start a high-beef-scraps diet, and apparently only missed on the "please cover it in cholesterol" attractant. - Read the rest The post Salisbury steak was health food before it became cafeteria nostalgia appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for Windows is $54.99 (reg. $249.99)with Excel, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Access, and OneNote for one Windows 10 or 11 PC.Somewhere between the ninth app login and the fourth "manage subscription" page, normal software started to feel weirdly needy. - Read the rest The post Microsoft Office 2024 puts the old reliables back on your PC appeared first on Boing Boing.

The latest addition to LEGO's Ideas is a gorgeous dose of nostalgia. The upcoming X-Files set was introduced by none other than Gillian Anderson herself. When a mysterious black box arrives at her door, she dons her gloves and investigates. "This is where it gets implausible," Anderson says with a skeptical grimace, as she assembles the alien ship. - Read the rest The post Gillian Anderson reveals X-Files LEGO set appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace puked out a Truth Social post that started whinging over how Iran's "Arrogance" and the Reflecting Pool are his "TOP Concerns," then somehow swerved into an ad for a Fasset/Tether gold-backed Visa card already issued to "Myself and My Family." - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains turns foreign policy into a crypto gold-card ad appeared first on Boing Boing.

Asked why Democrats dumped Graham Platner after a sexual-assault allegation while Republicans keep Max Miller and Cory Mills in the conference despite domestic-violence allegations, "MAGA" Mike Johnson's offered the kind of moral clarity you get from a used car salesman:"The key word there is allegation." - Read the rest The post Mike Johnson discovers the word "allegation" only applies to Republicans appeared first on Boing Boing.

Light, maker of the stripped-down Light Phones (previously recommended), today announced the Light Flip, a clamshell model that swaps e-ink for matte OLED and gets a hinge, a keypad and (drum roll!) a camera. As much as I loved my Light Phone II, the slow and frustrating e-ink screen ground me down; with OLED, the main tradeoff for responsiveness and clarity will be shorter battery life. - Read the rest The post Light Flip is a minimalist phone without the dumb appeared first on Boing Boing.

The lightsaber that Mark Hamill held and lost, along with the hand holding it, to the central reactor shaft of Bespin's Cloud City in "The Empire Strikes Back," which canonically was preserved in a cloning tank by Emperor Palpatine, or whatever, sold for $3.75m at Heritage Auctions' Hollywood & Entertainment Signature Auction last week. - Read the rest The post Luke Skywalker's severed hand and lightsaber prop sold for $3.75M appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Learn to speak one (or more!) new languages confidently and naturally with aone-year subscription to Rosetta Stone Sapphirefor $127.20, a 20% savings on the $159 regular price.Learning a new language has a ton of benefits: It challenges the mind, open up new career opportunities, and make travel more rewarding. - Read the rest The post Speak a new language confidently sooner than you dreamed with Rosetta Stone Sapphire for $127.20 appeared first on Boing Boing.

From the South Korean side of the DMZ you can look through binoculars at a tidy North Korean town - bright blue roofs, multicolored walls, a childcare center, schools, a hospital. Kijng-dong is a stage set.The buildings are concrete shells with no glass in the windows, and some of the windows are just painted on. - Read the rest The post North Korea's fake village with painted-on windows appeared first on Boing Boing.

Fear of the number 13 has a proper name - triskaidekaphobia - and it's baked into the buildings around you. In 2002, an Otis Elevator executive estimated that among buildings with 13 or more floors and Otis elevators, 85% had no floor labeled the 13th. - Read the rest The post Why 85% of tall buildings skip the 13th floor appeared first on Boing Boing.

Most attempts to hide a drone tinker with how it looks - camouflage, transparent shells, light-bending optics. Northwestern University engineers went the other way and changed how your eyes see it. Their prototype, the "Phantom Twist," spins up to 25 times a second, too fast for the eye to track, so the whole aircraft smears into a ghostly blur that all but disappears against whatever's behind it. - Read the rest The post Drone spins into a ghostly blur, making it almost invisible appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:GetMicrosoft Office Professional 2021 for Windowsfor $27.97 instead of $219.99. The one-time purchase includes eight familiar productivity apps for one PC, with no recurring subscription fee. The deal ends July 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT.Subscriptions have quietly colonized everything. - Read the rest The post Microsoft Office is just $28, but only through July 26 appeared first on Boing Boing.

China's humanoid robots continue to improve their kung fu and have expanded into MMA cage fighting. The Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend tournament is a showcase for EngineAI's humanoid robot, the T800.The model is seemingly unironically named after the Terminator model with the same designation, but perhaps legally distinct without the hyphen. - Read the rest The post Humanoid robot keeps fighting, even after his block was knocked off! appeared first on Boing Boing.

Everyone in Seattle and beyond is obsessed with a raccoon with a spinal condition.Kiana Hall recorded a video of a ball-shaped creature with long legs, resembling a cryptid or alien, sprinting away from her as she asks, "What am I looking at???" - Read the rest The post Jimothy is the weird little raccoon we need in these dark times appeared first on Boing Boing.

Riot Fest has packed its lineup for 2026, with the Pixies, the Sex Pistols (sans Johnny Rotten), Patti Smith, and... William Shatner? The 95-year-old actor/space tourist/horse semen owner/singer and his heavy metal band the *uckers - the asterisk appears to actually be part of the name, not censorship - will perform live for the first time at the three-day annual music festival. - Read the rest The post William Shatner's metal band is playing Riot Fest appeared first on Boing Boing.

For the past decade and a half, one question has been at the forefront of gamers' minds: what the absolute hell is Bethesda Game Studios up to? Although no AAA dev cycle could ever reasonably be accused of being snappy, Bethesda's apparent inability or unwillingness to do anything with two of the biggest RPG franchises in the industry has been a source of great frustration and speculation alike. - Read the rest The post Bethesda provides "studio update" on its franchises appeared first on Boing Boing.

I'm blown away by eleven-year-old Samuel Henderson, who has an amazing ability to mimic birds. Sam lives in Oklahoma, where he's become a bit of a local celebrity. He's also begun sharing his incredible talent on his social media, where his mom describes him as "bird caller extraordinaire." - Read the rest The post This Oklahoma boy is truly a "bird caller extraordinaire" appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tesla is finally selling a bicycle, something the company's fans have apparently been speculating about excitedly for years. This bike, however, is not an e-bike and is not for adults. It's a toddler balance bike.The $225 "Balance Bike for Kids" has a silver and black design, complete with Tesla branding, and actually looks pretty cool, not that most toddlers care about that. - Read the rest The post Tesla's latest offering is a $225 bike for toddlers appeared first on Boing Boing.

In May 1974, locked inside California's Vacaville Prison, Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson put together a manuscript they called The Periodic Table of Energy - a system of correspondences among the periodic table of elements, Leary's "neurogenetic theory of evolution," the Tarot, the I Ching, and the zodiac. - Read the rest The post A prison manuscript maps the periodic table onto Tarot and the zodiac appeared first on Boing Boing.

"Surveillance Monitor" gets a new meaning.LG's screens have apparently entered their "consent is someone else's problem" phase: some monitors can trigger silent Windows software installs, while some LG TV terms reportedly tell you to warn guests they may be recorded by AI voice features to comply with local wiretapping laws. - Read the rest The post LG monitors install spyware; LG TVs make wiretapping your problem appeared first on Boing Boing.

The internet is the world's most efficient copy machine, and everything it touches - music, movies, books, code - slides toward a price of zero. In an essay called "Better Than Free", Kevin Kelly argues that isn't a death sentence for creators. - Read the rest The post Eight things you can still sell when digital copies are free appeared first on Boing Boing.

Trump Border "Czar" Tom Homan's message is clear: when masked men come for you, surrender first and ask questions after they bash your head into the pavement.Make the violence more convenient for the government, or suffer the consequences? This Republican talking point is pretty ripe, as the party of guns and guts now thinks letting the Gestapo stomp your head is the American way. - Read the rest The post Tom "Bag o' Cash" Homan says people killed by ICE should have complied appeared first on Boing Boing.

Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer facing rape and sex-trafficking charges in multiple countries, was arrested in Miami this weekend, putting another accused sex offender from Trumpworld's orbit back in the legal spotlight.Reuters reported that the Tates returned to Florida in February 2025 after Romania lifted travel restrictions while they remained under criminal investigation there, and that the Financial Times had reported Trump administration officials pressured Romanian authorities to lift the ban. - Read the rest The post Andrew Tate, another accused sex offender in Trumpworld's orbit, arrested in Miami appeared first on Boing Boing.

California already had feral pigs. Then a Monterey County landowner added Russian wild boars for sport hunting, and nature responded with a century-long "absolutely not."Like many problems in California, a rich man decided he wanted to do something and to hell with the public good. - Read the rest The post California's wild pig problem started when a rich guy imported Russian chaos hogs appeared first on Boing Boing.

Spain won the World Cup, but Grandpa Pudding Brains saw a gold trophy, cameras, and a stage, so naturally he seemed to assume the ceremony had taken a wrong turn away from him.Reuters reports that Trump and Infantino were booed as they entered the field for the trophy ceremony. - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains thinks he won the World Cup appeared first on Boing Boing.

Trump's FDA appears to have shat the bed on the cyclospora outbreak: a major lettuce recall disrupted the food chain, the outbreak kept spreading, and now the agency says its positive product test was wrong.On July 19, FDA said its lab experts re-reviewed a Taylor Farms de Mexico lettuce sample that had been reported positive the day before and concluded the result "does not represent true amplification" and should be considered a false positive. - Read the rest The post Cyclospora: Trump's FDA shits the bed appeared first on Boing Boing.

It seems the "Avengers: Doomsday" trailer is here, giving away all the goodies.Disney needs money, so they've packed this with as many people as they could, including the characters they killed off. Shockingly, they aren't CGI'ing in people who actually passed away. - Read the rest The post Disney bravely waits one movie before resurrecting dead Avengers appeared first on Boing Boing.

Every tool has two ends: the business end that does the work, and the end that meets your hand. Manufacturers obsess over the first and skimp on the second, which leaves anyone with a weak grip or sore joints to fix it themselves. - Read the rest The post Four cheap ways to fatten a tool handle so it stops hurting your hand appeared first on Boing Boing.

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.