Cape Times Selfies ad campaign

• Music skills evolved at least 30 million years ago in the common humans-monkeys ancestor
• Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia
• 21st century heists: Five more men charged in global bank heist that netted $45 million in hours
• The Pink Panther gang: The astonishing story behind the world’s most feared robbers.
• Havana Marking meets and interviews members of the Pink Panter
• Sigh…  The death throes of the keyboard cellphone
• Mike Tyson writes My Life As a Young Thug
• Goodness Gone Viral: Paying it Forward lives on in drive-thrus
• DIY your smartphone into a digital microscope for $10
• Witzelsucht: the neurological affliction that causes a person to make constant puns, jokes and sexual comments in an inappropriate and random setting

…or catching up on about three months of internet.

Science

• Charles Darwin’s ecological experiment on Ascension Isle
• Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island
• Dinosaur Feathers Discovered in Canadian Amber
• 419-million-year-old armoured fish fossil resolves ‘missing link’ in evolution, scientists say
• Scientists link genes to why wounds heal quicker for young people
• DNA Double Take – having multiple sets of DNA is pretty common
• Scientist discovers DNA ‘biological clock’
• Gamers solve decade old HIV puzzle in ten days
• New drug mimics the beneficial effects of exercise
• Getting drunk without the hangover or health risks – scientist seeks investment for ‘alcohol substitute’ drug
• The Rat Pack study – Drug addiction: The complex truth
• Tastes Like Chicken: How one company created a plausible substitute for meat that has the texture of real flesh.
• How the shape of chocolate can change its taste
• How much can an extra hour’s sleep change you?
• Sleep – Now By Prescription
• Sleep debt and recovering from it
• The Curious Case of Polywater: In the 1960s, scientists ‘discovered’ a new form of water. How did they get it so wrong?
• Global warming: What the leading scientists say
• First sign that humanity is slowing its carbon surge
• Looking to disprove climate change, Nebraska fails in finding scientists to participate
• Breaking Deep-Sea Waves, as High as a Skyscraper, Reveal Mechanism for Global Ocean Mixing
• What would it be like if another planet just barely missed colliding with the Earth?
• Celebrating the Nobel win for it’s discovery, NYTimes made this great explanation as to what the Higgs is
• The Apmlituhedron: A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics
• Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement
• The Crew That Never Came Home: The Misfortunes of Soyuz 11

Technology

Dialup handshake example

• The Printer That Can Print A 2,500 Square Foot House In 20 Hours.
• Transfer a secret audio message by poking someone with your finger
• Hyperloop—a theoretical 760 mph transit system made of sun, air, and magnets
• Police firing GPS tracking ‘bullets’ at cars during chases
• Engineers use sound waves to detect bombs remotely
• The Status of Moore’s Law: It’s Complicated
• Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon
• You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up
• Hackers Courted by Government for Cyber Security Jobs: The Geeks on the Front Lines
• I challenged hackers to investigate me and what they found out is chilling
• Debugging a live Saturn V rocket

Sociology (and stuff)

The 1939 New York World’s Fair

• Is Google Wrecking Our Memory? Nope. It’s (transactive memory) much, much weirder than that.
• Why even the worst bloggers are making us smarter
• Online comment systems reveal multiple layers of social bias
• The datamune difference between funny and LOL
• The 29 Stages Of A Twitterstorm
• Kids Can’t Use Computers… And This Is Why It Should Worry You
• A vast cloud of blah: Charlie Brooker on taking a break from columns
• A Slate backpack investigation: When Did Two-Strapping Get Cooler Than One-Strapping?
• Even babies discriminate until taught not to
• Man… The ocean is broken
• The debate over: Is population growth out of control?
• Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets
• Urban Design: The secrets of the world’s happiest cities
• Golden Gate Bridge: Triumph, Tragedy : Suicide Rate Shadows the Span’s 50th-Anniversary Celebration
• PBS commentator Mark Shields says more killed by guns since ’68 than in all U.S. wars
• Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy
• Stoya on ethics, porn and worker’s rights
• 16 People On Things They Couldn’t Believe About America Until They Moved Here
• How to be miserable in ten easy steps
• Ten Surprising Facts About Rejection
• Comfort In, Dump Out: the Kvetching Order of handling traumatic (or any other kind of) crisis
• Perceiving Time: Why Waiting Is Torture
• Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

Media

Supercut: 50 “four in the morning”s – Museum of Four in the Morning

• Warren Ellis on Breaking Bad and the Horrible Glory of Heisenberg
• Korra’s a Girl? TV producers think boys won’t watch girl heroines. Turns out that’s not true.
• Netflix studies piracy sites to decide what to buy
• Study accuses media companies of cooking the books on piracy losses
• David Byrne: ‘The internet will suck all creative content out of the world’
• How Marvel Unified Its Movie Universe (And Why That Won’t Be Easy for DC)
• Lucasfilm will combine video games and movies to axe post-production process
• Why Stephen King Spends ‘Months and Even Years’ Writing Opening Sentences
• Why Everyone Gets Robocop But Nobody Gets Starship Troopers
• Todd Alcott: Some thoughts on the state of screenwriting in 2013
• ‘Canned laughter’ doesn’t exist, so why complain about it?
• Soundworks: The Sound of Gravity

Randomness

https://thumbsandammo.blogspot.co.nz/

• Animals would stop the zombie apocalypse before it started
• “Christ, what an asshole” works for everything
• 35 years after the clock tower shooting, Whitman belatedly claims his 15th victim
• A Marine recounts his one afternoon with a notorious serial killer
• Get ordained for free as a Dudeist minister
• Mexico’s Tales of Bus Passengers Forced to Fight to the Death
• Colombian women get their road fixed by refusing to have sex
• Civ II’s “Eternal War” continues on reddit more than a year later
• Carpet designer threatens cosplayers with legal action
• This Guy’s Eaten Nothing but Raw Meat for Five Years
• A map of Pangea with modern political borders
• What happens when you replace guns with thumbs up?
• Images of Vietnam Zippo engravings (yes, gratifying rewards too as a Preacher fan)
• The wonderfully wierd emoticon art of Ryder Ripps
• Questlove’s Celebrity Stories
• Back to toilet reading basics with new technology: backlabel
• Webgame: Z-Type

Christ…

Earth from Saturn’s orbit via Cassini

• Share it like Cicero: How Roman authors used social networking
• The Sun, gravitational lensing and the 70 billion mile telescope
• DNA from a Russian cave: The Case of the Missing Ancestor
• Optogenetics: a new technique to controlling genes with light
• Scientists discover the molecule responsible for causing feelings of depression
• Life Satisfaction Linked to Personality Changes
• The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements
• From the Manson Myth to My Friendship with Charles Manson
• The 11-year-old who ran away so she wouldn’t have to get married
• Six Brain-Damage Scourges That Cripple IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Cool webpage design/animation: Riding the New Silk Road
• Professor E. Paul Zehr on How Wolverine’s Claws Could Work
• 18 obsolete words, which never should have gone out of style
• 50 Great Works of Video Art That You Can Watch Online
• Great re-issue review of (one of) my Mountain Goats favourites: All Hail West Texas

• Pareidolia: A Bizarre Bug of the Human Mind Emerges in Computers 
• How text messaging became a humanitarian technology
• The internet as a hive mind
• How Mat Honan had his digital life dissolved by hackers and multiple security flaws
• France has backed away from it’s three strikes downloading law
• John Birmingham on the real cost of Curiosity
• From a NASA contractor: a conceptual video of the Dream Chaser space vehicle
• The ‘spray on’ skin that heals wounds
• The perfectly legal ‘heist’ of $95,000 from a bank
• House cats kill more critters than thought
• Returned to Family: Outlaw Ned Kelly’s Remains, 132 Years After His Death
• Trojan’s PR stunt: hands out 10,000 dildos today from hot dog carts
• From NPR: Dean Norris On Playing Good In ‘Breaking Bad’
• Prometheus (2012) – Calvinball Mythology and the Void of Meaning
• 21 links between unexpectedly shared TV universes
• Tumblr: People Dying Like Marion Cotillard

This also looks interesting: aupcoming HBO documentary called About Face that speaks with former supermodels and talks about plastic surgery and the business of beauty.

• In 1970, a NASA director wrote this letter answering Why Explore Space?
• Worthwhile read: an unexpected meeting with the inventor of the first programmable computer
• Also, visit the very first web page from more than 20 years ago
• Reddit harasses a teen  who may have faked her own cyber-bullying
• Thirty Is Not The New Twenty: Why Your 20s Matter
• Sad news: Tig Notaro Has Breast Cancer
• The Criminalisation of Mental Illness in Black America
• A 74 year-old car buff is selling off his antique car collection, says he wasted his life and would rather have had a wife
• Meanwhile, a New York neighborhood had a proper funeral for a 1982 Honda Civic
• Swiss sheep will warn shepherds of wolf attacks by SMS
• UK Kindle eBook sales have overtaken Amazon UK print sales
• How the BBC crushed NBC and brought Olympics coverage into the future
• Editorial: So, bumbling Boris Johnson is lovable and funny? Well, have I got news for you
• Video: Olympic Stadium sings “All You Need is Love”
• Plus: 10 hours of Ping Pong

Also, here’s the trailer for Zero Dark Hour, the new film from Hurt Locker director Katherine Bigelow about the events of SEAL Team Six and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Slightly underwhelming, but I’m still looking forward to it.

• The Connection Between Genius and Madness?
• CDC disclaims ‘Zombie Virus’
• History of Facebook Developer Platform: Infographic
• Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
• Eating dark chocolate reduces heart diseases
• The World of Wes Anderson
• Why popular music isn’t always the best
• Photos: Students Home Party, 1960s, New York
• We encouraged people to learn to program and just look at what happened