• HEAVILY ARMED SEX CRAZED DOLPHINS on RAMPAGE in Black Sea
  (new ‘best headline ever’ nominee)
• Scientists have gotten one rat brain to ‘talk’ to another using electronic link
• A study has shown that using a handsfree kit while driving can be just as dangerous as being over half the legal alcohol limit. Texting? You’re totally shitfaced.
• Gender differences in education scores persist regardless of gender equality
• A story full of aww: How a newly wed couple found their son in the Subway
• An illuminating article on How Disney bought Lucasfilm — and its plans for ‘Star Wars’
• Great short essay: The many wonders of Christopher Walken
• Scathingly brilliant – An Oscar voter’s brutally honest ballot
• Nice op-ed on design: Why we love beautiful things
• The King Clone is estimated to be the world’s oldest bush, dating around 11,700 years
• Atlas Obscura: The Skeleton Lake of Roopkund, India
• Vice answers: What do hate groups think of Jennifer Lawrence?
• Your obsessive love or hatred of me means nothing in the grand scheme of geological time by (not) Justin Bieber
• Video: Hitler finds out Google Reader is shutting down
  (Looks like me and Hitler finally agree on something)

• The ‘end of history’ illusion and why we can’t imagine getting old
• “The finite is nested within the infinite” (or my favourite parable: somewhere in infinity, an alternate universe exists where you are the Batman)
• Of last year’s bestselling sci-fi list, only one was published that year
• Does a techno utopia require physical books?
• Reshaping the brain: scientists reprogram neurons after birth
• The mysterious disappearance of the Russian Crown Jewels
• The courtroom sketches of Bill Robles
• Inside the prison journal of West Memphis Three’s Damien Echols
• Papers reveal extent of the British royals’ veto over bills
• The Guardian’s stats on the size of their commenting community
• The science of why comment trolls suck
• An interesting design proposal: I want the world to scroll this way
• Good god, someone’s patent application disturbingly mirrors the artificial second stomach sketch from Tim and Eric
• Parkinson’s treatment can trigger creativity
• Password security in Deus Ex
• What Games Are: the fun boson does not exist
• To look into: a best comedy books of 2012 list

Lastly, a super-cut of famous people playing themselves

• Whoa, now the KKK are also fighting against Westboro Baptist
• “We still look at ourselves as survivors”: over 80 years later, remembering the deadliest school massacre in American history
• The rather interesting origin story of ‘Miranda Rights’
• Warren Ellis on The Social Web: end of the first cycle (stoked it’s close to what I’ve been mediating on throughout the year)
• UCL research paper on Why the Internet only just works (.pdf)
• What the world will look like in 2030 — as predicted by the Government
• Will we ever… have cyborg brains?
• A few Tolkien-rific facts about the book version of The Hobbit
• Try this interactive/zoomable four BILLION pixel image of Mt Everest
• Earthmoving: Ways of moving the Earth’s orbital path

Lastly, the latest TEDEd on ‘What is colour’ gives a very concise and simple explanation on the how with some very nice animation too.

The Best Astronomy Images of 2012

• Should society be able to tell you how to augment your reality?
• The mind-uploading solution for interstellar missions
• Does Twitter kill TV comedy? Writers from “Daily Show,” “SNL,” “Fallon” and others sound off
• Game of Thrones gets a mind-blowing Minecraft makeover
• Mark Cuban, Minecraft creator donates big to help EFF “fix” software patents
• World’s biggest patent troll saves Kodak from bankruptcy
• Scapegoating at its finest: Proposed US Senate bill to further study violent game effects
• Reformed hitman who inspired ‘The Wire’s’ Omar dies at 58

Also, the chemistry of how snowflakes form their unique shapes.

• Texas pastor asks whats keeping Christians out of church? Other ‘Christians’
• Google grants $1.2M to help analyze female roles in TV, film
• So apparently, we’re teaching dogs to drive here in New Zealand
• Surgeons implant the first ‘brain pacemaker’ for Alzheimer’s disease
• New evidence on how red wine can prevent cancer
• The latest eye research on emotional states and pupil dilation
• Scientists historical uncover evidence of Hawaiian megatsunamis
• Earliest known dinosaur discovered
• Mystery $35K donor to The Oatmeal’s Tesla museum fund revealed
• Bigthink op-ed: Kim Jong-Un isn’t sexy, but he’s not crazy either
• What James Cameron found at the deepest known point in the ocean
• Rolling Stones’ 50 greatest hip-hop songs

• The BBC is making a six-part adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell!
• North Korea have found a secret Unicorn lair
• A rather rare interview with Fran Walsh on The Hobbit
• The really strong possibility to there being a Planescape: Torment sequel
• Apple, SSDs and the Fusion Drive rip-off
• The Austim Advantage
• The science behind those Obama campaign e-mails
• How long are people willing to wait for a video to load? Two seconds.
• A sociological take on the Powerball Facebook fake
• Video: a 1994 profile of… the Haunted Toaster
• Video: kitty in a claw crane machine

• Scientists create brain implant that improves thinking in monkeys
• Gaining consciousness: Could the Internet Ever “Wake Up”?
• What the brain draws from: Art and neuroscience
• MDMA through an MRI, for science!
• Wiki-editor’s guide: No one cares about your garage band
• Magic Mushrooms: Violins constructed from infected wood sound like those of Stradivari (awesome!)
• A 2,000 year old Magnolia seed was found, planted and it grew
• Potentially usable: The most well persevered Wolly Mammoth cells yet found
• 7 Things Science Says Make You Happy (Basically, I just need to keep up doing more of this)
• Who What Why: What is blood rain?
• The Astronomical Unit is now a fixed number: 149,597,870,700 meters
• Murder-Suicide in the Keys Unravels a Doctor’s Decades-Long Mystery
• Hollywood Accounting: How A $19 Million Movie Makes $150 Million… And Still Isn’t Profitable
• The patent, used as a sword
• A real-time map of Global Cyberattacks
• Interactive cool: comparing map projections
• 99 Life Hacks to make your life easier!

London Underground guerrilla signs

• Okay, so a very promising virus that eats cancer has been sitting in a researcher’s fridge for years undeveloped due to – wait for it… lack of funding for its £1 million price-tag
• At least biomedical researchers have made a computational model of another anti-cancer drug that works on the quantum level
• But then, Ars Technica on how press releases are creating a confused history of biology
• Research now shows that monotony breeds creativity
• and that green tea boosts brain cell production to aid memory
• Telegraph has an article on how the distraction of the internet can really stunts creativity
• That, and an Atlantic article on why we all have an internet-addiction gene
• New York Times profiled Valve and their awesome vision for future gaming
• Plus, an interview series with game developers, this one: the folks behind Portal and Portal 2
• Also, holy shit… Black Mesa:Source is finally coming out, this Friday!
• Here’s an excellent infographic of Breaking Bad’s death count
• Lastly, a video of a lot of Cos-players dancing Gangnam Style at Dragoncon

• Brain’s visual centers study finds that men and women do see things differently
• Neuroscientists successfully control the dreams of rats
• An excellent interactive infographic: How many alien civilizations exist?
• Voyager 1 is yet to find the boundary line of the Solar System
• Twenty-nine of history’s most iconic scientists in one photograph (now in color)!
• The Brooklyn bookshop saving out-of-print sci-fi, one e-book at a time
• Obama and Romney tackle 14 top science questions
• #presspushback: the lost art of fact checking returns
• From Mental_Floss: What’s the Song That Clock Chimes Play?
• How Your Cell Phone Hurts Your Relationships
• Spike Jonze’s Next Movie: A Man Falls in Love With His Phone
• Kickstarter: Charlie Kaufman’s animated feature Anomalisa
• This method is how find cat adopters online: Cat Roulette!

Hooking up an ipod to a squid’s nervous system, scientists observed and recorded the microscopic effects of Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Membrane on the cephalopod’s pigmentation cells. The results are pretty damn funky.

More details can be found here: https://news.backyardbrains.com/2012/08/insane-in-the-chromatophores/ and an explanation of how it works can be found on our TED talk: https://on.ted.com/Gage