Damn Interesting

The AI Productivity Illusion

Productivity Is About (Much) More than Finishing Tasks Quickly

short-stories.co

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury | Short Stories

The voice-clock sang, breakfast was ejected, but no doors slammed. The garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. The house sat alone in a city of rubble and…

VICE

This 'Simpsons' Joke Was So Controversial, Fox Actually Removed It: 'It Was Inappropriate'

A 13-year-old boy with Tourette's syndrome was offended by the gag and convinced the showrunners to edit it out of future broadcasts.

Damn Interesting

Smoke Detectors and a Radioactive Boyscout

How I Lost Faith in Google

While working at Google, Claire Stapleton cracked the code for generating corpspeak with personality. Then she lost faith in what the company was selling.

This Image Led to a Photographer Being Sentenced to 74 Lashes in Iran

'No one can separate me from photography.'

bbc.com

Bluey released in Australian Indigenous language for first time

Five episodes of the award-winning children’s cartoon have been released in Australian Indigenous language for the first time.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

The brutal, powerful legacy of Threads

Mick Jackson’s 1984 film Threads endures as the most devastating depiction of nuclear war in apocalyptic cinema. Its portrayal of societal collapse is unrelenting. Threads depicts nuclear war as a catastrophe that extends far beyond the initial exchange, tracing the long-term degradation of social order, governance, language, and human development across generations. Compared to the better-known American television film The Day After, Threads had less influence on public opinion and policy at th

Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

Damn Interesting

The Inexplicable Voynich Manuscript

Boing Boing

Man lives with a knife blade in his chest for 8 years

A 44-year-old Tanzanian man visited a hospital for a leaking nipple. Doctors found a knife blade lodged in his chest from stab wounds 8 years earlier.

The Conversation

How to avoid tick bites in your yard or while hiking in the woods, and what to do if one starts feasting on you

A tick disease researcher explains the risks and how she avoids bringing home ticks from both work and walking her dog in the woods. Lint rollers, tick checks and some types of chemicals play a role.

New Scientist

Inhaling high-dose CO2 clears Alzheimer's proteins from the brain | New Scientist

Intermittently inhaling a high dose of carbon dioxide seems to remove the proteins amyloid and tau, which are implicated in Alzheimer's disease, from the brain by boosting its glymphatic system

Blogging Scheme

A biotech company has secured funding to start phase 2 trials for the world's first tooth regeneration treatment

Kyoto-based Toregem BioPharma has raised approximately $5.3 million in a Pre-Series C financing round to support Phase II clinical trials of its experimental

A Star Orbiting Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole Tests the Limits of Relativity

A Sun-like star orbits the supermassive black hole in our Milky Way so closely that it comes within the distance of Neptune's orbit of the Sun. It has a top speed of more than 8% of light speed. With such extreme motion the star gives astronomers the opportunity to test the limits of general relativity.

bbc.com

For 1,000 years, a cult worshipped the hero of the Odyssey

The Odyssey was far more than entertainment to ancient Greeks. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of a cult that revered the Homeric hero on his legendary home island of Ithaca.

Ars Technica

New airliner sets record flying 24 hrs nonstop from Australia to France

Test flight shows viability of Qantas Airways’ Project Sunrise routes in 2027.

Nintendo Wire

We discovered a new variant of Super Mario Bros.

Inside, were 97 individually wrapped, brand-new copies of Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt. Each game was wrapped in the same baggie that would have come in an

AI before AI: The forgotten Soviet programme (1/3)

Beginning in the 1950s, the Soviet Union launched an ambitious programme aimed at developing artificial intelligence. While the history of AI today seems to be shaped by the giants of Silicon Valley,…

Gizmodo

Earth Has a Billion Years Left. This Plan Could Stretch It to 9 Quadrillion

A set of engineered safeguards could protect Earth's habitability for 9.1 quadrillion years, according to new research.

Futurism

Amazon Used a Startlingly Dirty Trick to Build a Data Center Without Consent of Community

Amazon exploited 45-year-old zoning laws in Gilroy, California, to start construction on a data center without any residents knowing.

Soldiers can refuse to commit war crimes. Can AI?

The Pentagon wants AI models that can’t say no.

Quanta Magazine

What Do Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems Truly Mean? | Quanta Magazine

At 25, Kurt Gödel proved there can never be a mathematical “theory of everything.” Columnist Natalie Wolchover explores the implications.