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New book from Ed Yong! Life Beyond Measure:...

New book from Ed Yong! Life Beyond Measure: Nature’s Hidden Wonders at Every Scale . “A bristlecone pine rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; shorebirds fly without stopping across the world’s largest ocean…” Out in April, pre-order now .

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Using a Railway as a Massive Flatbed Scanner

By taking a camera, pointing it out the window of a train, and keeping track of how fast the train is moving, you can create very wide panoramic scans of the scenery. It’s a little more complicated than that — all the details are here — but you’re essentially using the train

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Japanese architect Tadao Ando designed a floating...

Japanese architect Tadao Ando designed a floating children’s library and donated it to Kagawa prefecture. “We created reading spaces throughout the ship. A large circular bench was placed on the rear deck, and children can even lie under the sun.”

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With Adapted Sailing, the Sea Is for Everyone ....

With Adapted Sailing, the Sea Is for Everyone . “The program and others like it across the world are opening up a new frontier for people with reduced mobility, out on the open sea, free from the limitations of buildings and streets.”

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Max Verstappen vs. 100 Normies in Go-Karts

This is fun: Red Bull took over one of the karting tracks at Silverstone (home of the British Grand Prix), put 100 regular folks in karts, positioned four-time F1 champ Max Verstappen at the back of the pack, and gave him 75 minutes (or 30 laps) to pass everyone. Spoiler alert:

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Animal eye

Probing the biology, beauty and mystery of animal eyes, this short poetic documentary explores an alien world - by Aeon Video Watch on Aeon

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Who will taste the cherries?

The computist has one dream: to debug the subjectivity out of all of human knowledge, creating a pure, frictionless world - by Liam Spradlin Read on Aeon

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GFI (and the alternative)

If you can provide the cheapest, fastest and best option, there will be a line out the door for your service or product. Most providers know, though, that good, fast and inexpensive are trade-offs. You will have trouble offering all three. And in a competitive marketplace, as

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How Reading Changes the Way Your Brain Works

Reading is unnatural. This will hardly come as a surprise to any child trying to put off his homework for just one more hour of watching other kids play Minecraft. Yet there really are implications worth considering if we accept that our cognitive systems didn’t evolve to

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An In-Depth, Immersive Journey Through the Bayeux Tapestry

With the Bayeux Tapestry now on display at the British Museum, Deep Down History presents a deep dive into the embroidery’s full story: “The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most remarkable survivals of the Middle Ages — a 70 metre embroidered account of the events leading to the

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How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking

We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises. False promises — those people make not

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Genius Design Details: Pips and Nubs

The gang from Craighill explains the origins and uses of three seemingly small design details that show up everywhere: pips, nubs, and the very useful union of pips and nubs. You’ve seen pips on dice and dominos, nubs are used for Braille text, and the pips/nubs combo is used

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