• Wheels Down on Mars. Now It’s Time to Reinvent America, Says Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Why NASA should abandon a manned mission to Mars
• How mobile phones will pioneer future space technology
• The implications of overpopulation are terrifying. But will we listen to them?
• Woo hoo! First pictures from the new set of Arrested Development
• US Olympian aren’t too thrilled about Fox news either
• Take a Cue from the Olympics to be the Best Business Athlete
• Why the Sikh temple shooting got less coverage than the Aurora massacre
• Why Do So Many Murderers Have Three Names?
• The Moral Significance of Sex Workers and People With Disabilities
• From Damn Interesting: Better Call Sol
• New type of chemical bond may form in extreme magnetic fields of stars
• How Big Is Infinity? An Animated Explanation from TED
• Probably should: Please turn on two-factor authentication
• The Science of “Breaking the Seal”
• 25 Behind-the-Scenes TV Photos That Will Mess With Your Mind
• Website: https://www.ilooklikebarackobama.com/
• Video: Animals Acting Like Sharks Week

Finally, a recording still for the ages: In 1996, just months before he died, Carl Sagan recorded this message to future colonists living on Mars.

A slideshow by renowned animal photographer Tim Flach with annotations about their body language

In science/tech:

• New Computer Will Simulate One Billion Neurons
• Microsoft reveals a muscle controlled computer interface
• Voyager 1 is getting close to ‘the edge’ of interstellar space
• The waves in Quantum Mechanics are real
• The discovery of a HIV protein’s structural change
• The Greenland Ice Melt might not be as apocalyptic as some would make it out to be
• Plants Can ‘Talk’ To Each Other by Clicking Their Roots

In society:

• Why Bronze Medalists Are Happier Than Silver Medalists
• A US Marine couple’s personal account of the Aurora Shooting
• Scientology’s insane concentration camp for it’s Executives
• A counter-editorial of Why Men Can’t Have It All
• Still haven’t seen ‘Girls’, but the parody trailer ‘Boys’ looks good
• Revealed, at last: why women live longer than men
• How to rewire your brain for success
• Do You Believe in Magic? Yes, You Do.
• Interesting Chronicling: history’s changing understanding of mammals
• Lost footage from The Karate Kid

Others:

• Project allRGB: creating images using only one pixel for each rgb color (16,777,216)
• Online app: based on weight/height, who’s your Olympic equivalent?
• The internet map: websites illustrated according to traffic and user activity
• Web-based Game Boy emulator with a slew of games to choose from
• Video: some guy almost walks into a bear while texting

Asperatus clouds over Scotland via The Cloud Appreciation Society

• Olympic opening ceremony: Ai Weiwei’s review
• South Korea’s Im Dong Hyun:the ‘blind’ Olympics world record setting archer
• There Are Four Olympic Athletes Without Countries To Represent
• The Greatest Chris Brown Album Review of All Time: ‘No Stars Ever’
• Music Labels Won’t Share Pirate Bay Loot With Artists
• Computer confirms: All music sounds the same these days
• Strong evidence that a real name policy would fail to improve comment systems
• The New York Times is Now Supported by Readers, Not Advertisers
• Celebrities and their Unnecessary Public Apologies
• From Forbes: “The porn industry as I knew it is dead. And it appears a new industry has arisen.”
• Heath Ledger’s Joker was probably inspired by Tom Waits (gets an automatic yes from me)
• Where Did John Wayne Get His Walk?
• Ancestry.com Claims Obama Is Descendant of John Punch, First Enslaved African-American
• Mitt Romney follows up insulting London with straight-up racism in Israel
• Horror Hospital: The Most Shocking Photos And Testimony From The Dawood Military Hospital Scandal (warning: very graphic)
• Fall, Mortality, and the Machine: Tolkien and Technology
• Climate change study forces sceptical scientists to change minds
• The 50 Best Socially Awesome/Awkward Penguin Memes

• Awesome: European Agency Backs Approval of a Gene Therapy
• The ‘chemputer’ that could print out any drug
• Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
• The Artist’s Lens: What It Means to See the World With an Eye Toward a Facebook Update
• Silicon Valley Warns That Their Products Are Addictive
• Oldest record in the world: recreated from photographs
• The most polite cease and desist letter ever
• The ‘feasibility’ of gun control in the US
• A man’s penis stolen by thieves in his sleep
• Website: An ermahgerd translator/generator
• Gorilla Youngsters Seen Dismantling Poachers’ Traps
• Pretty visualisation: Prime number patterns
• Chart: Distribution of colours in movie posters between 1914 and 2012
• 30 Awesome Behind The Scenes Photos From Old Movies
• 15 Hacks That Will Make You Life A Whole Lot Easier
• 10 of the Most Doomed Expeditions in History

• Military Strategy: What are the optimal siege tactics for taking Magic Kingdom’s Cinderella Castle?
• John McCain Comes to Huma Abedin’s Defense
• The real reason Marissa Mayer left Google: She had to
• Also: Marissa Mayer on the day she ‘broke’ the Internet
• Green streets can cut pollution, says study
• Study: Users more satisfied with Google+ over Facebook
• Texting overtakes talking in UK, says Ofcom study
• What Central Europe thinks of Britain and why
• Broken down: How an executable file works
• 90’s Nostalgia: A Windows 3.1 interface with a working command prompt too!
• The intensity of auditioning for the Boston Symphony Orchestra
• Twitter account: Bane Capital
• 10 Famous Roles Almost Played by Bill Murray
• 10 Bizarre Crimes in Walmart Parking Lots

Also, using a high speed camera, the good folks at MIT have recorded the properties of a drop of water at 10,000 frames/second, revealing a ‘behaviour’ that’s normally invisible to the human eye.

Boy watching solar eclipse… taken from 1.5 miles away

• If you “Like” something on Facebook, you just gave it permission to post in your Timeline
• Having Access to the Internet is Good for Your Love Life (But Only if you are Under 30)
• White LEDs Lighting Directly On Paper
• Q: Why Do We Wear Pants? A: Horses
• UK government slammed for ignoring key security issues
• Lucas Foglia: the photographer in search of off-the-grid Americans
• The trouble with wind turbines
• No Matter the Drilling Method, Natural Gas Is a Much-Needed Tool to Battle Global Warming
• Mysterious radiation hit the earth just over 1200 years ago
• What divorced readers did with their wedding rings
• How Neuroscience Is Challenging Our Conception of Justice
• The Ghost in the Machine: Unraveling the Mystery of Consciousness
• Scientists Predict Synthetic Life Within a Year
• Crime Waves Will Follow the Heat Waves of Climate Change
• Letters of Note: A government complaint about a ‘debris’ dam and the landowner’s response on behalf of its builders
• Want: I’ve Never Meta-Pizza I Didn’t Like
• Build a bonkers hi-fi system
• Super-Resolution From a Single Image
• A rare interview: with Christopher Tolkien
• If the Wizard of Oz were set in China, it might look something like this

• YES: Rumored film about Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison rivalry starring Christian Bale and Nicolas Cage!
• Bill Murray Announces Party Crashing Tour Starting In August
• Book ‘pirate’ goes underground after being named by Terry Goodkind
• Reddit Cracked a Mysterious Cipher That Might Be a Viral Marketing Scam
• Scientists Figure Out how Dinosaurs Did it
• World’s heaviest woman sheds 98 lbs with seven-times-a-day sex
• South Caroline Funeral Home Adds a Starbucks (of course)
• Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity
• Proving you’re gay to the Turkish army
• Surveyed: Many Wall Street executives says wrongdoing is necessary
• Editorial: The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama
• Supercut: See James Bond Do Vehicles
• North: How a Small Arctic Town Became a Global Epicenter of Climate Science
• Ranked: Disney Princesses From Least To Most Feminist
• 20 Best ‘Arrested Development’ Inside Jokes and Recurring Gags
• Photos: 18 Years Of Friendship

And for your daily freak out, this video demonstrates what one, ONE DROP of Russell’s Viper snake venom can do to blood.

(Kinda graphic, only because of the ‘holy shit! That was from just one drop!’ factor).

• Vast Video Game Collection Sells for $1.2M
• A Hot Drink on a Hot Day Can Cool You Down
• Why Were CD Boxes So Big in the Early 1990s?
• Is the Web Driving Us Mad?
• Walker Arts Center Validates the First-Ever Internet Cat Video Film Festival
• Discovery of an arsenic-friendly microbe refuted
• Scientists just discovered what makes migration possible
• Tire reefs fail to revive marine life in Florida
• Share it Maybe with Cookie Monster “Call Me Maybe” Parody (yes, I know, I too feel awful)
• The 20 Awesomest Photos of Women & Bacon
• 17 Famous Literary Characters Almost Named Something Else
• 12 Fascinating True Stories About Guest Stars On ‘The Simpsons’

And lastly, a short commercial by Jon Lajoie. If you were completely honest with yourself, you’d realize that you are a terrible person.

• Prometheus, Viewed as a Roleplaying Game (contains spoilers; but seriously good fun read)
• What If Beethoven Gave Your Commencement Speech?
• ‘I Just Want to Feel Everything’: Hiding Out With Fiona Apple, Musical Hermit
• Anatomy of CGI: A Scene from “Tangled”
• 20 Things Fantasy Characters Should Do More Often
• Germany’s Ambitious Energy Plan (here’s hoping it works)
• Most Internet trolls are probably trolls in real life, too
• Photos: Behind the scenes of The Empire Strikes Back

• The only honest revenue based sites out there are porn
• Scientists Closer than Ever to Discovering Higgs Particle
• Is Earth at an Environmental Tipping Point?
• Inside the Troubled ‘World War Z’ Production
• The heartwarming story behind the ugliest man on YouTube
• It’s Gettin’ Hard Out There For A Troll
• “I’ve been playing the same game of Civilization II for 10 years”
• ‘Game of Thrones’ Director Explains All the Rampant Nudity
• Brain Scans Show Specific Neuronal Response to Junk Food When Sleep-Restricted

Also, Conan teaching the blues to school kids: