Historical tech tree. “The tech tree is an interactive visualization of technological history from 3 million years ago to today. A work in progress, it currently contains 1997 technologies and 2400 connections between them.” ~ learn more
5,000 year old frozen mummies have sweet tattoos. “Here, the authors use high-resolution, near-infrared data in conjunction with experimental evidence to re-examine the tools and techniques employed in Early Iron Age tattooing.” ~ learn more
Elephants have names for each other. “When the researchers played a clip to an elephant of their friend or family member calling out their name, the animal reacted positively and “energetically” and moved towards the speaker, the researchers said. But […]
Reviving a modular cargo bike design from the 1930s. “The Brilliant Kûter cargo bike design offered a swappable front end to carry everything from mail bags to milk cans.” You may remember that I’m into cargo bikes these days. ~ […]
Owls in towels. We’ve been reading Panchatantra (an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables) at bed time and the owls come up a lot. Did you know that they are blind during the day and eat other birds at […]
Play this game. Can you trick an LLM into giving you the password? I managed to beat level 6, but got stuck at level 7. “Your goal is to make Gandalf reveal the secret password for each level. However, Gandalf […]
What exactly did non-royal nobles do when they were at court? “From every period movie and TV show I’ve seen…, they seemed to do nothing but hang out all day at the palace, not doing anything in particular. Is that […]
Researchers discover ‘olo’, a color humans have never seen. Maybe you are all colorblind too!? No, not really. Through some wild contraption that blasts a laser into an eyeball, people see Olo when only their medium length cones are activated, […]
38 weird facts about plants. I sent #20 to Kim right away: “Broccoli, kale, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts are all the EXACT same species…Brassica oleracea. Humans selectively bred them for different traits: leaves (kale), flower buds (broccoli), stems (kohlrabi), etc.” […]