Chris Chandler

The next 200+ exciting minutes hits theaters on December 13th, 2013! [Video Link via Laughing Squid]

MTorrice writes "A new type of headphone heats up carbon nanotubes to crank out tunes. The tiny speaker doesn't rely on moving parts and instead produces sound through the thermoacoustic effect. When an alternating current passes through the nanotubes, the material heats and cools the air around it; as the air warms, it expands, and as it cools, it contracts. This expansion and contraction creates sound waves. The new nanotube speaker could be manufactured at low cost in the same facilities used to make computer chips, the researchers say." And it exists in the real world: "The Tsinghua researchers integrated these thermoacoustic chips into a pair of earbud headphones and connected them to a computer to play music from videos and sound files. They’ve used the headphones to play music for about a year without significant signs of wear, Yang says. According to him, this is the first thermoacoustic device to be integrated with commercial electronics and used to play music."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ron024 writes "The Cassini probe has detected propene, or propylene, on Saturn's moon Titan. It is the first definitive detection of the plastic ingredient on any moon or planet, other than our home world, says the US space agency (Nasa). The discovery, made by Cassini's infrared spectrometer, is reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters [abstract]."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the pattern-welded sword blades made from the Migration Period through the mid-Viking Age (5th through 10th centuries), swordsmiths manipulated the piled structure of the blade to create a striking decorative effect

The post The Serpent in the Sword: Pattern-welding in Early Medieval Swords appeared first on Medievalists.net.

I want to thank Pencils.com for sponsoring Boing Boing. You might be aware that I love their Blackwing 602 pencil. Recently Pencils.com introduced a new Blackwing model: the Pearl. I have to say this is my favorite Blackwing yet. The graphite is ever-so-slightly softer than the 602, making a rich dark line with very little pressure. It's perfect!

My daughters swiped the 12-pack of Pearls I ordered, and I had to get another. I'm asking my wife to buy me a gross for my birthday.

Support Boing Boing by supporting our sponsor - grab a box of Palomino Blackwing Pearls here.

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Have you got your tickets FOR BAHFEST yet?

Steve Jackson Games stuff has been available in Barnes & Noble for a while now. In fact, big retailers like Barnes & Noble are part of our success with mainstream audiences. As a thank you to B&N, we've got a couple of exclusive expansions that will only be sold in Barnes & Noble stores!

Munchkin Game Changers

More Munchkin Stuff!

Want more silly cards for your Munchkin game? Some cool level counters? Giant pink sparkly dice?! Here they are! This box combines four of our most popular Munchkin boosters into a single expansion:

• Fairy Dust gives you new cards for being nice!
• Munchkinomicon gives you new cards for being nasty!
• Monster Enhancers is full of ways to help the monsters!
• Reloaded! is full of ways to help the players!

Munchkin Unnatural Axe

Munchkin Rides Again!

This set includes 108 more cards for the game of killing monsters and taking their stuff! Play a new race: Orcs! Face foes like the Hydrant and the Tentacle Demon. Equip yourself with dread armor like the Spiked Codpiece. Recruit allies like the Shoulder Dragon. Wield mighty weapons like Druid Fluid, the Slug Thrower . . . and, of course, the dread Unnatural Axe!

This set includes six plastic female Munchkin pawns, matching the Unnatural Axe cover. We even included four blank cards so you can add your own insane jokes and abusive rules!


– Brian Engard

Warehouse 23 News: Build A Solid Defense.

With the Combine Heavy Infantry, they can stand against the worst the Paneuro forces can throw at them.

Protect your big guns with a reinforcing heavy-weapons company.

Get these and other Ogre miniatures at Warehouse 23.

Only a few days left to get tickets for BAHFEST!

Perhaps you've heard tell of Krokodil, an injectable street-drug popular in Russia that causes your skin to go green and scaly and eventually to rot off all the way to the bone at injection sites, and gives its habitual users permanent slurred speech and jerky motions, earning it the nickname of the "zombie drug?" Phoenix poison-control centers now report that they're treating krokodil users, suggesting that the practice of using the drug recreationally is has begun to spread to American shores. A Google Image search for "krokodil" will supply you with ample nightmare fuel for years to come.

The main ingredients in krokodil are codeine, iodine, and red phosphorous. The latter is the stuff that's used to make the striking part on matchboxes. Sometimes paint thinner, gasoline, and hydrochloric acid are thrown into the mix. Like meth, it's fairly easy to cook up in a home kitchen. You need a stove, a pan, and about 30 minutes. The drug is then injected directly into the vein, producing a high that lasts about an hour and a half. According to the Week, each injection costs about $6 to $8, while heroin is up to $25.

Zombie Apocalypse Drug Reaches US: This Is Not a Joke (Graphic Image) [Dana Liebelson/Mother Jones]

(Image: Crocodile_1, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from vassilisonline's photostream)

First time accepted submitter loftarasa writes "A group of scientists led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have developed a form of matter by binding massless photons together in a special kind of medium to create 'photonic molecules', effectively bringing us a bit closer to a world with lightsabers. 'The discovery, Lukin said, runs contrary to decades of accepted wisdom about the nature of light. Photons have long been described as massless particles which don't interact with each other – shine two laser beams at each other, he said, and they simply pass through one another. "Photonic molecules," however, behave less like traditional lasers and more like something you might find in science fiction – the light saber.' The work is described in Nature (paywalled)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From TED Ed: "What do Game of Thrones’ Dothraki, Avatar’s Na’vi, Star Trek’s Klingon and LOTR’s Elvish have in common? They are all fantasy constructed languages, or conlangs. Conlangs have all the delicious complexities of real languages: a high volume of words, grammar rules, and room for messiness and evolution. John McWhorter explains why these invented languages captivate fans long past the rolling credits."

glowend writes "On 24 September 1993, computer users were introduced to Myst. Grantland takes a look at the game's legacy, two decades on. Quoting: 'Twenty years ago, people talked about Myst the same way they talked about The Sopranos during its first season: as one of those rare works that irrevocably changed its medium. It certainly felt like nothing in gaming would or could be the same after it. Yes, Myst went on to sell more than 6 million copies and was declared a game-changer (so to speak), widely credited with launching the era of CD-ROM gaming. It launched an equally critically adored and commercially successful sequel, and eventually four more installments. Fans and critics alike held their breath in anticipation of the tidal wave of exploratory, open-ended gaming that was supposed to follow, waiting to be drowned in a sea of new worlds. And then, nothing.' Why didn't Myst have a larger impact?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes with news that a recent 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Pakistan killed 45 people and caused a new island to form a few hundred meters off the country's coast. The island is roughly 35 meters long, and 7-14 meters high. "Seismologists suspect the island is a temporary formation resulting from a "mud volcano," a jet of mud, sand and water that gushed to the surface as the temblor churned and pressurized that slurry under the ocean floor." Long-time residents of the area say a similar island formed in 1968 after another earthquake, but disappeared a year later. "It is clear that 'the islands are not created because the ground was ... pushed up by the earthquake,' [said geophysicist Paul Earle], but more likely it was a secondary effect of shifting sediments. He also agrees the formation appears to have been caused by a mud volcano, but added that they don't need an earthquake to set them off. There are 'mud volcanoes in Yellowstone that have not been triggered by earthquakes,' he said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meghan sez, "My coworker Rachel Moani created this awesome book display for the Lacey Timberland Library highlighting some of the insane reasons books have been banned over the years - including The Wizard of Oz for depicting women in strong leadership roles and The Diary of Anne Frank for being 'too depressing'."

Libraries: We’re With The BANNED

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In a piece on octopus farming, Katherine Harmon mentions a fascinating fact — octopuses don't have an adaptive immune system, the handy-dandy network of different immune-response cells that allow us vertebrates to more easily fight off infections our bodies have encountered before.

That's a problem if you're trying to raise a bunch of invertebrates in close quarters (as per a farm) because you can't immunize them against pathogens that could easily spread from one octopus to another. As a random biological tidbit, though, it's just damned fascinating. Check out this doctoral thesis for more information on how the octopus immune system does work. You should also read this story that looks at the evolution of the adaptive immune system and asks a key question — does having immune "memory" really make us that much better off than the animals that don't have it?

Image: Octopus, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from alicecai's photostream

Not only is today, September 22, the Autumnal Equinox it also happens to be Hobbit Day, the date Tolkien fans celebrate the shared birthdays of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins as well as Hobbit culture in general. So go around barefoot, or smoke some pipe-weed, but watch out for eating seven meals each day, because you know. . .

that kind of thing can be Hobbit-forming.

smi.james.th writes in with news about new laser technology developed in South Africa. "The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) announced in Pretoria on Tuesday that it had developed the world's first digital laser. 'I am always very cautious about using the term "breakthrough",' noted Science and Technology Minister Derek Hanekom. 'We scrutinized this very carefully before we said that this is really new! South African scientists are once again making noteworthy contributions to the world.'... A normal laser contains two mirrors, opposed to each other and at opposite ends of the instrument. One is highly reflective and the other is a curved, partially reflective mirror. In the digital laser, the curved mirror is replaced by a liquid crystal display (LCD) system. The LCD is connected to a computer and monitor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

judgecorp writes "Twenty-three British universities are contributing to a British provider of "massive open online courses" (MOOCs) by the name of FutureLearn. Backed by long-established expert, The Open University, which has been doing remote learning for 44 years, the British MOOC provider aims to compete with US outfits such as Khan Academy and Coursera."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

cold fjord writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Most of what humanity knows about the outer planets came back to Earth on plutonium power. ... The characteristics of this metal's radioactive decay make it a super-fuel. ... there is no other viable option. Solar power is too weak, chemical batteries don't last, nuclear fission systems are too heavy. So, we depend on plutonium-238, a fuel largely acquired as by-product of making nuclear weapons. But there's a problem: We've almost run out. 'We've got enough to last to the end of this decade. That's it,' said Steve Johnson, a nuclear chemist at Idaho National Laboratory. And it's not just the U.S. reserves that are in jeopardy. The entire planet's stores are nearly depleted. ... what's left has already been spoken for and then some. ... Political ignorance and shortsighted squabbling, along with false promises from Russia, and penny-wise management of NASA's ever-thinning budget still stand in the way of a robust plutonium-238 production system." The plutonium shortage has been deepening for a long time, leading to some creative solutions. The Wired article alludes to the NASA project underway to create more, but leans toward gloom.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The barbarian invasions definitely did not happen to an unsuspecting empire, as though mysterious beings had landed from outer space. On the contrary, Rome had always had warlike tribesmen at its gates and had centuries of experience in dealing with them.

The post Rome, Constantinople, and the Barbarians appeared first on Medievalists.net.

Zack sez, "On eBay -- a first edition of Bradbury's anti-book-burning classic signed and numbered by the author -- and bound in asbestos, to save it from the firemen depicted in the book. Of course, no telling if that would save it from the Mechanical Hound..." It's in pretty rough shape, but it's a much-sought-after rarity (albeit one that should be kept in an airtight plastic bag). Bidding starts at $600.

Not only do we think this is this a first edition, but this appears to be the EXTREMELY RARE 1953 edition published by Ballantine Publishing Group that was bound in Johns-Manville Quinterra, a chrysolite asbestos material. This edition was limited to 200 copies, each signed and numbered by the author. This is copy #109 of 200.

This edition did NOT originally come with a dust jacket, so that is not a missing item here. However, the book is far from mint. As you can see from the pics (and please do study those closely, and ask ANY questions you may have ahead of time!), it has the following "issues":

-The spine binding is missing. Now, the spine is still intact and there are no loose pages, and pages still turn and read easily. But having a professional restoration should be considered for future preservation

-There is staining and aging on the front and back cover (both outside and inside) as well as some browning on the pages closest to both covers. But that dissipates a few pages in and the interior of the book is pretty clean and solid.

-In the lifetime of the book, the owner wrote his name on the top of the first page and put an address sticker on there as well (wouldn't you want this copy returned if you ever lost it?)

Now, since we are not experts on any of this, the item is absolutely sold "AS IS". But based on our research this copy is not only a legitimate first edition, but is very rare and sought after as well. In addition to all of the information matching up to true, verified first editions of this version (color of cover, font text, publication date, signature, numbering, lack of dust jacket, etc), as you can see this in the pic of the "table of contents page", this version also contains the two short stories not found in later versions.

FAHRENHEIT 451- mega rare 1953 Ballantine asbestos bound first edition #109/200 (Thanks, Zack!)

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Hey, I was on The Collapsed Psi talking about BAHFest. Check it out!

Hey geeks! If you want a nice poster of the comic about raising a geek, it's only available for 2 more days. I will probably not keep this in store, so this is the only way to get it for relatively cheap.