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Russia currently has 44 publicly acknowledged closed cities with a combined population of approximately 1.5 million people. The government calls them "closed administrative-territorial formations," or ZATO. Seventy-five percent are run by the Ministry of Defense; the rest are administered by Rosatom, the state nuclear agency. - Read the rest The post Russia has 44 secret cities with 1.5 million people that don't appear on public maps appeared first on Boing Boing.

JPMorgan Chase has terminated a senior executive seen on video taking a city trash can during the New York Knicks' championship parade, TMZ reported.The bank told the New York Post it fired Angie Baez after reviewing footage from the June parade. - Read the rest The post JPMorgan Chase cans executive who stole trash can appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Cigar Galaxy is a cosmic mess: warped, dusty, furiously making stars, and apparently photogenic enough that Webb stared at it for nearly three days and produced a 223-megapixel glamour shot.The new image combines Webb's ability to peer through dust with Hubble's view of glowing gas and dusty structure. - Read the rest The post Webb spent three days photographing one beautiful galactic mess appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Katanning All Ages Playground in Western Australia looks like so much fun. It features a large, free outdoor play space designed for visitors of every age, not just children. Some of the equipment looks more like a human-powered ride than a typical play structure, and I wish I could go visit right now. - Read the rest The post Free all-ages playground in Western Australia has a 35-meter walkway and flying fox appeared first on Boing Boing.

This kitty roller coaster is completely virtual, and hilarious. The coaster involves a POV video on a TV of a ride down a part indoor, part outdoor track. The coaster is slow moving, and passes by other cats while Led Zeppelin plays. - Read the rest The post Cat goes full rider mode watching POV roller coaster on TV appeared first on Boing Boing.

This video of a hot pot restaurant in Taiwan shows a video of a fan playing on a TV while people eat. The digital fan rotates back and forth in a way that is somehow convincing, even knowing it's just a video. - Read the rest The post Taiwan hot pot restaurant plays a fan video instead of running AC appeared first on Boing Boing.

And they were doing so well, too! This must be part of that brand revitalization Xbox - oh, sorry, XBOX - has been bragging about since getting a new CEO. Stop me if you've heard this one before: the rising cost of components, propelled by the completely pointless AI boom, is forcing consumer hardware manufacturers to up their prices. - Read the rest The post Xbox raises console prices by up to $150 starting August appeared first on Boing Boing.

I can't pretend I'm immune to Nintendo DS nostalgia, okay? Nintendo's little clamshell that could was the last true handheld console we ever got (well, to be technical, its eventual upgrade the 3DS was), and just looking at mine in its eternal closet prison is enough to transport me back to a simpler time when one device was for one thing. - Read the rest The post Make your phone look and feel like a Nintendo DS appeared first on Boing Boing.

Truly, the turning of the seasons can be best measured by the rotating Steam sales. More than anything else, it feels like these are the factor most responsible for Valve becoming so powerful they feel like they can charge a thousand dollars for their underpowered cube: whoever you are, and wherever you are on the planet, you can get games for cheap on Steam. - Read the rest The post Steam Summer Sale is back with Witcher 3 at $4, Cyberpunk under $20 appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1897, The Strand Magazine - the London monthly best known as the home of Sherlock Holmes - published a photograph of a polished green jade specimen under the heading "The Price of a Man." The caption described it as "of very considerable interest, not only on account of its beauty as a fine specimen of the green jade, now so rare, but also from the fact of its representing the price paid by cannibals of the Mare Islands, Polynesia, for a fat man for eating purposes." - Read the rest The post The Strand once published a jade specimen worth exactly one fat man appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: For just $21.97 (reg. $49.99), you can get a portable charging tool that fits right on your keyring. Get theGoCable: 8-in-1 Keyring Cablebefore the sale ends tomorrow!Traveling with baggage is already a hassle before you add in the multiple security checks you have to go through at airports. - Read the rest The post Cut cable clutter with this 8-in-1 keyring charging tool for $22 during Deal Days appeared first on Boing Boing.

Retroid announced details of its Retroid Pocket Nova, a horizontal handheld built around a 4.5-inch 1280*960 120Hz AMOLED display in the 4:3 aspect ratio that God intended.Inside is Qualcomm's QCS8550 chip with Adreno 740 graphics, functionally close to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 but without the phone stuff. - Read the rest The post Retroid's Pocket Nova takes a second shot at getting 4:3 right appeared first on Boing Boing.

ICE agents reportedly tracked down a Syracuse poll worker on Election Day to demand she remove an Instagram post, because apparently, federal immigration enforcement now includes showing up in person to do content moderation for hurt feelings.According to Syracuse.com, Paigelynne Gonyea was working as a poll worker at the Central Library on Salina Street when two ICE agents contacted her, came inside, and handed her a warning letter over an Instagram account they claimed might violate federal law. - Read the rest The post ICE does in-person Instagram moderation now appeared first on Boing Boing.

Generative AI was supposed to make computers smarter, but its most immediate consumer benefit appears to be making every other computer more expensive.The Verge reports that Apple is raising prices across much of its lineup: the MacBook Neo jumps from $599 to $699, the iPad Air from $599 to $749, and the M3 Ultra Mac Studio from $3,999 to $5,299. - Read the rest The post Apple raises prices because AI ate the RAM appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool mystery has everything: alleged vandals, a $16 million rush job, algae, peeling blue coating, and one enormous clue shaped like the presidential motorcade that drove across the freshly coated empty pool before it was refilled.AP reports that the Park Service reported the damage to the U.S. - Read the rest The post Ignoring tire tracks, NPS hunts mystery Reflecting Pool vandal appeared first on Boing Boing.

A Bob Ross painting titled Mountain Summit is headed to auction June 30, and the proceeds will benefit Ball State PBS, the Muncie station that helped turn Ross's soft-spoken landscape magic into public television immortality.Ross created Mountain Summit for season 13 of The Joy of Painting. - Read the rest The post A rare Bob Ross painting could sell for a happy little fortune appeared first on Boing Boing.

Shades of Death Road is a real two-lane road in Warren County, New Jersey, running 6.7 miles through forest and swamp. According to Weird NJ, residents have gone "so far as to smear the pole holding the street sign" with grease to stop people from stealing it. - Read the rest The post New Jersey has a road called Shades of Death and residents grease the sign to stop theft appeared first on Boing Boing.

By the summer of 1858, three million Londoners were flushing their sewage into the Thames through an aging system that emptied directly into the river. Temperatures hit 48 C (118 F) in the sun. The water level dropped. Raw effluent sat on the banks. - Read the rest The post In 1858 the Thames smelled so bad that Parliament fled and Disraeli called it a 'Stygian pool' appeared first on Boing Boing.

From July to September 2001, heavy downpours of red-colored rain fell across the southern Indian state of Kerala, staining clothes pink. Yellow, green, and black rain also appeared. Each milliliter of rain water contained about 9 million red particles. Scientists estimated that 50,000 kilograms of them fell in total. - Read the rest The post Blood-red rain fell on India for two months and some physicists blamed a comet appeared first on Boing Boing.

In August 2008, German developer Armin Heinrich released I Am Rich on the App Store for $999.99 - the maximum price Apple allowed. The app displayed a glowing red gem. Press the gem and it showed a mantra: "I am rich / I deserv [sic] it / I am good, healthy & successful." - Read the rest The post The $999.99 iPhone app that did absolutely nothing sold 8 copies before Apple killed it appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1847, a young Crow hunting party killed the wife of John Garrison Johnston, a former Navy deserter turned mountain man in Montana Territory. According to historian Andrew Mehane Southerland, "He supposedly killed and scalped more than 300 Crow Indians and then devoured their livers" to avenge her death, and "as his reputation and collection of scalps grew, Johnson became an object of fear." - Read the rest The post A mountain man spent 25 years eating the livers of the people who killed his wife appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Leica SL3-P is its new full-frame mirrorless camera, landing in the middle of the L-mount SL line with a 44-megapixel sensor, plain black controls and no red dot. As discreet as a $7k-ish camera might be, then, it's aimed at working photogs in need of multishot frame-stacking, 14 stops of dynamic range, 8K open-gate video, and 5-axis stabilisation. - Read the rest The post Leica's SL3-P loses the dot, gets 8K open-gate video appeared first on Boing Boing.

A while ago, we talked about the fact that Meta's employees were upset that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to watch them use their computers while they were on the clock. It's irony so delicious you wanna eat it with a ladle. 1,600 of Meta's minions signed a petition against being treated the same way that Meta has been treating Facebook users for years. - Read the rest The post Facebook employee data exposed in Meta's own surveillance program appeared first on Boing Boing.

During Grandpa Puddin' Brain's first term, he declared that COVID-19 wasn't a big deal. He asserted that he wouldn't close the country down for a flu, so COVID wasn't gonna lock the doors either. He scoffed at how dangerous the coronavirus was at the time, downplaying the danger that the pandemic represented and said that it would simply "go away." - Read the rest The post CDC buried this COVID vaccine study, so scientists published it anyway appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: The certified refurbishedHP EliteBook 840 G8packs a Core i5 processor, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and Windows 11 Pro for $274.97 (reg. $899.98) during Deal Days.The laptop industry would prefer that you replace your computer every few years. - Read the rest The post Deal Days knocks this HP EliteBook workhorse down to $275 appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace's newly renovated Reflecting Pool turned green, peeled apart, and became a national monument to contractor-grade grift, so naturally, Trump has identified the real villain: an alleged Hillary-Biden-ActBlue pool saboteur.This is the thing Donholio does when reality is too small for him. - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains pens backstory for nefarious Reflecting Pool vandal appeared first on Boing Boing.

8BitDo's Arcade Controller Pro is a Hit Box-style device that trades the arcade stick for a button-only layout. The new model tightens the cluster and adds a fifth programmable button while keeping the slim profile of last year's original. A wee LCD display is the fanciest upgrade, showing live inputs, battery level, and settings normally buried in the app. - Read the rest The post 8BitDo's button-only arcade controller gets a tiny screen appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Babbel's lifetime plan gives you access to14 languages, 10,000+ hours of lessons, AI conversation practice, and courses created by 100+ linguists-all for a one-time $134.99 payment during Deal Days.Learning a new language is one of those goals that tends to sit on a to-do list for years. - Read the rest The post Learn 14 languages from 100+ linguists while this Deal Days Babbel offer is still valid appeared first on Boing Boing.

Carlos Castaneda's 1968 book The Teachings of Don Juan recounted his apprenticeship to a peyote-dosing Yaqui shaman named don Juan. The University of California Press published it as anthropology; it became an international bestseller and drew fans from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to George Lucas and Octavio Paz. - Read the rest The post Carlos Castaneda faked an anthropology classic, then built a cult appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1916, a bearded Long Island showman named Louis Enricht gathered reporters on his lawn and offered them a gasoline substitute that would "sell for a penny a gallon" - wartime alchemy, with gas running short on Europe's battlefields. He had them inspect a small car's empty tank, fill a bucket with garden-hose water, then tip in two ounces of a greenish, almond-smelling fluid. - Read the rest The post In 1916 a con man ran a car on water and fleeced Henry Ford appeared first on Boing Boing.

Writer John Biggs wanted no part of psychedelics, he writes in his newsletter - he pictured being "trapped in a room with a bunch of weirdos while they sang songs and listened to techno." But he was in a bad way after his father's death: drinking, gaining weight, and stuck on the antidepressant Pristiq, which he calls "a numbing pill" that gave "painful zaps" whenever he tried to quit. - Read the rest The post Mushrooms got him off antidepressants, so he built TripSitter appeared first on Boing Boing.

Pete Hegseth gave the flu virus a stirring lecture about freedom, and the flu virus responded by infecting hundreds of recruits at Lackland Air Force Base.This was not an unknowable mystery. Basic training is basically a respiratory virus theme park: recruits sleep close together, train close together, shower close together, and spend weeks exhausted in a giant human cough terrarium. - Read the rest The post Whiskey Pete discovers viruses do not respect vaccine freedom speeches appeared first on Boing Boing.

The artificial intelligence revolution has reached the point where management begs employees to stop feeding PDFs into the robot so it can burp out PowerPoint decks nobody wanted in the first place.The entire AI bubble is built on the idea that someday, somehow, customers will pay for the insane costs of using AI. - Read the rest The post Companies discover AI is expensive when employees actually use it appeared first on Boing Boing.

Yet again, the President of the United States, at an official-looking manufacturing/economy event, performed microphone goblin theater while everyone pretended this was normal governance.This is the central mystery of late-stage Trumpism: not that he does these things, but that hundreds of adults stand around afterward and describe them using words like "remarks," "agenda," and "message." - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains visits a truck factory, makes haunted chew toy noises appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kevin Mitnick, the legendary hacker, once tried to social-engineer his way into Novell's network by phoning a network admin named Shawn Nunley late at night, posing as an employee who needed "direct inbound modem access" for a top-secret project.Nunley smelled a rat, played along, and asked the caller to leave a voicemail - which he recorded onto a cassette recorder. - Read the rest The post Kevin Mitnick left the man who helped jail him enough for a Porsche 911 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Please Remain Seated, Permanezca Sentados Por Favor!A 13-year-old boy at Disneyland climbed out of his Tiana's Bayou Adventure ride vehicle before the end of the attraction and then received a brief, terrifying seminar in why Disney repeatedly, and in multiple languages, tells you to stay in your seat. - Read the rest The post Teen exits Disneyland ride, learns why you keep your arms, legs, and body inside the boat appeared first on Boing Boing.

Radio-frequency chips - the parts in every phone, car radar, and satellite link that send and receive signals - have stayed a hand-crafted "dark art," mastered over years, even as CPUs and GPUs got designed by algorithm. Writing in IEEE Spectrum, Princeton's Kaushik Sengupta describes teaching AI to design these RFICs from scratch, with no human templates - and the results look nothing like human work. - Read the rest The post AI-designed radio chips look like QR codes and beat human ones appeared first on Boing Boing.

America's 250th birthday celebration has reached the "FBI director's girlfriend is available" stage of event planning, which is the sort of sentence that makes the Founders look smart for dying early.To be fair, America has always relied on volunteers in moments of crisis. - Read the rest The post What luck, America! Kash Patel's girlfriend joins Trump's talent-fleeing Freedom 250 event appeared first on Boing Boing.

It's no secret that AI is frigging terrible for us. The experts building it scarcely understand what they've created; the technology is a threat to the environment, and if handed the reins of war machines or infrastructure like hospitals or the power grid, it could cost lives. - Read the rest The post Microsoft CEO wants people to shut up about AI being bad for us appeared first on Boing Boing.

We need to de-normalize punching down at trans people during your comedy sets and start normalizing turning them into weird social experiments. Aaron Westberry has become one of my favorite comics for this precise reason, injecting his open mic appearances with one weird twist after another. - Read the rest The post Comedian guilt-trips audience into laughing appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you have even the slightest interest in peering behind the curtain into the world of game design, I cannot possibly recommend /noclip enough. No, not the console command, the documentary team covering the triumphs and pitfalls and huge feats of coordination that go into bringing any project home. - Read the rest The post What is the Jedi problem, and why does every game designer fear it? appeared first on Boing Boing.

I'm truly, genuinely sorry to everyone who was looking forward to helping Gabe Newell buy a hundredth yacht, but it's just an unavoidable truth: the Steam Machine is kind of a bad deal, guys. Valve's overpriced, underpowered little cube is just the latest victim of soaring component prices driven by investment in AI, because who cares if you can't afford a computer as long as the most racist person you know can make his virtual girlfriend say a slur. - Read the rest The post Building a better PC than the Steam Machine for cheaper: is it possible? appeared first on Boing Boing.

Sporothrix brasiliensis is a fungus that gives cats oozing skin ulcers, can spread through their whole body, and jumps to the people around them. Since it emerged in Brazil in the 1990s it has sickened thousands of cats and more than 11,000 people across South America, and the CDC's Shawn Lockhart told Science News it's "just a matter of time" before it reaches the US - "We're waiting." - Read the rest The post A cat-borne fungus infected 11,000 people; the US is next, CDC says appeared first on Boing Boing.

A standard office printer, a paper cutter, and a book binder - that's the "printing press" the FBI logged when it raided Elizabeth and Ines Soto's Texas home. That, plus their membership in a leftist reading group called the Emma Goldman book club, became part of the government's case that the couple provided "material support to terrorists." - Read the rest The post Zine publisher sentenced to 50 years in prison for "material support to terrorists" appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:ChatPlayground lets youcompare responses from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and morein one interface. Lifetime access to the Unlimited Plan is $54.97 (reg. $619) through June 28 as part of Deal Days.It didn't take long for AI power users to figure out thatthe best answer usually isn't hidden inside one chatbot. - Read the rest The post ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini are all invited-and lifetime access is just $54.97 during Deal Days appeared first on Boing Boing.

A manager at the Arbys in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, spat in a customers food, say police, an act that allegedly resulted in the victim contracting oral herpes. The Smoking Gun reports that Amanda Hendricks, 38, was charged with adulterating food, assault and battery. - Read the rest The post We Have The Herpes: Arby's worker accused of infecting customer by spitting in food appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kodak's Charmera, the keychain-sized digital camera that became a minor cultural phenomenon last year, is back with a new look. Reto, the company that makes the camera and licenses the Kodak name, has launched the Charmera Millennium Edition, which trades the original's '80s styling for a Y2k take on tech: think shiny metallics, fussy gradients, and early pixel nostalgia. - Read the rest The post Kodak's new Charmeras have Y2K vibes appeared first on Boing Boing.

Joseph McGrail-Bateup, a 58-year-old air conditioner cleaner and honorary town crier from Canberra, Australia, has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's loudest person. McGrail-Bateup yelled the word "now" at 122.4 decibels, beating the previous mark of 121.7 dB set by Northern Ireland schoolteacher Annalisa Flanagan in 1994, who shouted "quiet." - Read the rest The post Canberra's town crier recognized as world's loudest person with 122.4dB yell appeared first on Boing Boing.

Professional cycling spent decades looking for cheating in blood, urine, and hotel mini-fridges. Then came the suspicion that the real juice was hiding in the bike.The video follows the story from early viral accusations against Tour riders to the day scanners found a motor hidden inside a seat tube. - Read the rest The post The cheating wasn't in the rider. It was in the bike appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get a lifetime license toMicrosoft Office Professional 2021 for Windowsfor $29.97 (reg. $219.99) during Deal Days - no subscription required.The easiest way to lower a software budget isn't finding a cheaper subscription. It's eliminating one altogether. That's what this deal on theMicrosoft Office Professional 2021 for Windowssubscription brings: one payment, then years of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more without renewal notices. - Read the rest The post Deal Days cuts Microsoft Office Professional 2021 from $220 to $30 appeared first on Boing Boing.