Andrew

Here’s what you need to know about the strange, tingly sensation that could help you relax.

Millions of people have watched a video of a woman whispering into a camera. She doesn't do anything particularly interesting. She just whispers in a melodic voice and makes seemingly random hand movements. Yet millions of people are mesmerized by it.

For someone who’s unfamiliar with this phenomenon, this might trigger one question: What the hell is going on?

This is the world of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response). In this corner of the internet, dozens of video makers record themselves doing something as simple as whispering to elaborate sci-fi role-plays and developing storylines about time travel and demons, and millions of viewers gobble it all up. As one of those regular viewers, let me explain what’s going on.

1) What is ASMR?

ASMR is the term for the sensation people get when they watch stimulating videos or take part in other activities — usually ones that involve personal attention. Many people describe the feeling as “tingles” that run through the back of someone’s head and spine. Others say the feeling is deeply relaxing, and can even cause them to fall asleep.

Although the term ASMR may sound very technical, there’s actually no good science or research behind the phenomenon. The term is believed to have been coined in 2010 by Jennifer Allen, who started a Facebook group dedicated to finding out more about it. The term quickly caught on, as people finally had a way to reference the pleasurable feeling they had been experiencing.

2) Wait, what? So how does ASMR work?

How ASMR works varies greatly from person to person. Some — perhaps most — people don’t get it at all. And the science on ASMR is basically nonexistent, so our understanding of it is so far based on anecdotes from around the internet.

People get the feeling of ASMR from various triggers. Some people enjoy role-plays in which someone gives close personal attention and whispers, while others like videos that show incredibly mundane tasks such as spraying a water bottle, tapping, stirring a bowl of soup, or crinkling wrapping paper. Others are triggered by more elaborate role-plays, which can vary from someone acting like a doctor to getting a haircut. (I tend to prefer simpler videos, which I find very soothing and tingle-inducing.)

The feeling isn’t usually sexual. Although some people are triggered by videos that appear sexual, other people I’ve talked to who experience ASMR emphasized that the tingles and feelings of relaxation have nothing to do with sex. But ASMR is a little similar to sexual turn-ons in that some people are very specific in what they like, and many people tend to grow tired of experiencing the same thing over and over.

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Maria, who oversees the Gentle Whispering channel, which has more than 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube, told me by phone in 2015 that people’s experiences can even vary by the day or depending on their mood. “I’ve noticed that one day you will be more sensitive toward role-playing, then another you’ll be more sensitive to swishing sounds,” she said. “It really varies.”

People also appear to grow tolerant of triggers if they listen or watch them too much. So it’s important for ASMR video makers to keep things fresh, and for viewers to make sure they don’t overplay that one amazingly tingly video.

Again, this is all based on anecdotal evidence. We know some people experience ASMR. I can attest to it for myself. But no one really knows how it works or why.

Steven Novella, a clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine, suggested a potential scientific basis for the experience in a 2012 post on NeuroLogica Blog:

Perhaps ASMR is a type of seizure. Seizures can sometime be pleasurable, and can be triggered by these sorts of things.

Or, ASMR could just be a way of activating the pleasure response. Vertebrate brains are fundamentally hardwired for pleasure and pain — for positive and negative behavioral feedback. We are rewarded with a pleasurable sensation for doing things and experiencing things that increase our survival probability, and have a negative or painful experience to make us avoid harmful behavior or warn us about potential danger or injury. Over evolutionary time a complex set of reward and aversion feedbacks have developed.

Add to this the notion of neurodiversity — the fact that all of our human brains are not clones or copy cats, but vary in every possible way they can vary. We have a range of likes and dislikes, and there are individuals and even subcultures that seem to have a different pattern of pleasure stimulation than what is typical. (Perhaps in some cases this is largely cultural, not neurotypical.) S&M comes to mind. If reports are accurate, there are some people who experience pain as pleasurable and erotic.

Some people are trying to fill the gap in science. Allen and two other researchers from around the country put together an online survey that they hope will give them some answers about why some people get ASMR and others don’t. A 2015 study published in PeerJ looked into ASMR and suggested it can improve mood and even pain symptoms through various common triggers, including whispering, personal attention, crisp sounds, and slow movements. But there really isn’t any great science on ASMR yet.

3) How do people know if they have ASMR?

Maria’s story of discovering ASMR seems to echo the typical experience. She first got the feeling very early on in her childhood while interacting with her peers and friends, and later discovered a big internet community dedicated to the strange sensation.

“The first reaction I had was from physical contact in kindergarten, when girls would run their fingers through my forearms,” Maria said. “It wasn’t the sensation of them touching my skin as much as the attention they were giving me.”

Later on, Maria would get even more intense tingles from role-playing with her friend when they acted as doctors or teachers. “It put me in such a trance-like state,” Maria said. “The sensation was so overwhelming that I think I’ll remember it forever.”

Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images

Maria would continue getting this feeling for much of her life, but she never really knew what it was. When she tried to describe the feeling to friends and family, they reacted as if she was “a freak.” In 2009, she discovered videos that triggered her ASMR.

“I started watching videos when I was going though a hard time in my life, and I was going through a bit of depression,” Maria said. “I was watching relaxation videos and therapeutic videos, like meditation and massage videos. And one day I saw a whisper video, and I clicked on it. From that moment, when I heard that lady’s voice, I felt a rush of tingles.”

She added, “It was definitely one of those ta-da moments for me.”

Back in 2009, there wasn’t a well-known term for ASMR. But as Maria searched for more videos over the next few months, she began seeing the term in more and more YouTube comments. When she began developing her videos, the community and the term for the strange tingles they got was pretty well-established.

4) What are some examples of ASMR videos?

There are literally thousands of videos dedicated to ASMR, but there are some consistent themes.

Here’s an example of a video with mostly whispering, which is Maria’s most popular video with more than 18 million views:

Here’s an example of someone doing something seemingly dull — using a hair dryer for a couple hours:

And here is a role-playing video, in which someone acts as an esthetician to help people relax:

For some video makers, ASMR videos are a creative outlet. Maria described it as art — and many other video makers describe themselves as ASMR artists (or “ASMRtist” for short). “I always had creative ideas, and I had inspiration from watching [videos],” she said, “so I began making my own.”

One big goal for video makers is to find new triggers — mostly to keep things fresh. “Whenever a new trigger pops up, people just go crazy about it,” Maria said. “We also need to diversify a bit — otherwise we’re going to get stale and boring.”

Making these videos can take a long time. Maria said she considers all sorts of components, including what she’ll wear, what items she’ll use, how far she and the different items should be from the microphone and the camera, and even what the background should look like. She then tests the different sounds and angles for a few days, and finalizes the video through a recording session of four to five hours. Every step of the way, the idea is to perfect the mood of each video to maximize its ability to induce tingles and relaxation.

5) How big is ASMR, really?

It’s fair to say ASMR is now pretty big. There are dozens of videos with more than a million views, and multiple channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The main subreddit dedicated to it, r/ASMR, has more than 130,000 subscribers. The New York Times, Washington Post, and BuzzFeed have covered it. CollegeHumor even satirized it, which is actually a great ASMR video on top of being funny.

And in 2016, actor Eva Longoria gave ASMR a shot:

Some of this success is surprising to video makers. “I never expected to be that much of an influence on someone’s well-being,” Maria said.

6) So why do people watch ASMR videos?

Why do people do anything on the internet, really? Some people watch cat videos. Some people watch politicians yell at each other. Some people watch comedians pose as — and sometimes excel at being — news anchors. And some people watch videos of someone whispering to relax.

Part of this shows perhaps the internet’s greatest strength: its ability to bring people together in a way that was simply impossible before.

Yale’s Novella explained this in his 2012 post on the issue on NeuroLogica Blog:

By the way — this is perhaps another phenomenon worth pointing out, the internet allowing for previously personal and hidden experiences to come to general awareness. Human communication has been increased to the point that people who have what they think are unique personal experiences can find each other, eventually bringing the phenomenon to general awareness, giving it a name and an internet footprint. Of course, such phenomena are not always real — sometimes a real pattern emerges from the internet, sometimes illusory or misidentified patterns, the cultural equivalent of pareidolia.

It’s easy to imagine that millions of people who experienced ASMR and tingles before the internet were simply at a loss as to what was going on or whether they were just weird. Like Maria, they may have tried to keep it a secret after seeing their friends and family react with confusion at attempts to describe the feeling. It’s only with the internet that people could stumble into one another and suddenly realize they’re not alone in experiencing this strange sensation.

7) What’s the future of ASMR?

Since not everyone experiences ASMR, it will likely remain a niche for a subset of people on the internet.

But there are some technological advancements that could greatly advance ASMR. Virtual reality in particular has a lot of ASMR video makers and viewers excited, since it could bring a whole new level of immersion to the experience.

Maria already collaborated with other video makers to make one of the first ASMR experiences that’s fully supportive of virtual reality, which was very well-received by the ASMR community on Reddit. (Although Maria said it wasn’t perfect, and the three hope to improve on the style of video in the future.)

“The more we push the boundaries, the better,” Maria said. “We’re trying to give people as much entertainment as we can, and give them options to choose from.”

She added, “We’ve gotten feedback from firefighters, soldiers, pilots, lawyers, single mothers, and suicidal teenagers who just watched these videos and it changed their attitude and mood for just a few minutes. It’s an amazing feeling to hear someone tell you that.”

Since late 2014, Japan’s Himawari 8 weather satellite has been in stationary orbit above New Guinea, 22,000 miles out (Earth’s average diameter is 7,918 miles). It shoots one photo of Earth every 10 minutes, capturing 144 pictures of our planet over the course of a day.

When combined, the photos form a gorgeous time-lapse video showing the passing of a day on Earth. In the 20-second video above, the Sun’s reflection can be seen in the daylight that moves across the surface of the globe.

Australia is visible through a gap in the clouds at the bottom of the frame, and above it, Typhoons Chan-hom and Nangka can be seen moving towards Asia earlier this month.

The Himawari 8 website began publishing these day-lapses of Earth on July 7th, 2015. You can also find a page that shows the latest live photos being beamed down from the satellite.

The New York Times reports that NASA is planning to launch a similar satellite in March 2016 to point a camera at weather systems moving toward the United States.

2015 may see a first for Google’s line of Nexus Android phones: a Chinese manufacturer. The Information reports that Huawei is in line to produce the device, which is said to be planned for fall. It’s not the first we’ve heard of the possibility; IBT said last month that the Huawei Nexus phone was coming, citing an employee at the company’s UK branch, while Android Police published a tentative rumor in May suggesting that there would be two Nexus phones this year — a 5.7-inch Huawei device and a 5.2-inch phone from LG.

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Is this tangled mass of limbs the future of flight?

Wired's Jordan Golson spotted this horrifying recent patent from Zodiac Seat France. It imagines a future in which the legs and arms of strangers on a connecting flight to Atlanta are constantly grazing one another.

The patent claims good intentions — the idea is to "increase cabin density while also creating seat units that increase the space available at the shoulder and arm area." The seats can be configured in other ways as well, though the most likely arrangement is the space-maximizing configuration seen in the drawing above.

Another angle looks like something from a future Mad Max sequel:

ESpace Patent Search

Of course, this is just a patent application — who knows if it will ever be implemented. It may join the dustbin of history along with more pleasant flying innovations, like a family-friendly seating arrangement and the many designs for accommodating "high percentage hip widths."

But there are a lot of scary ideas out there, too — and not just the proposals for standing-room-only flights. This 1998 patent, intended for long flights, shows an arrangement where your fellow passengers are constantly hovering over your head.

Google Patents

Still, most of these ideas probably won't happen, so don't be too fearful of 12 hours of knee-on-knee contact. Instead, dream about the future.

After all, in 1995, somebody patented an overhead conveyer belt for airline food:

Google Patents

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WATCH: The better way to board a plane

I do design for a company’s internal website. My point of contact is their communications coordinator, who often ends up changing my designs, stating afterwards that we “created them together.” She is adamant about always having her input included.

Client: I saw your design, and I really love it – I just made some minor changes. What do you think about them?

She replaced all the different brand colours around the website with red – and only red. I was not a fan.

Me: It looks good… but do you see how now the contrast between those two elements is really low? What if we change this red with another color?

I change it to the one I used in my original design.

Client: Yeah, it looks much better now!

Me: And do you see this font here?

I proceed to reverse all of her changes, under the guise of “discovering solutions”. After 40 minutes, we back to my original design.

Client: You see? Now it looks MUCH better! What would you do without me?

Get 40 minutes of my life back.

If someone asked you what color Pluto was, you'd probably describe it as a icy blue or gray, which is how it's depicted in the vast majority of illustrations and renderings.

But as NASA's New Horizons probe nears Pluto, it's confirmed something that most scientists have believed for years: The dwarf planet is actually reddish brown.

(NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI)

Though this might seem like a surprise, scientists have thought it to be true since at least 2002, when the Hubble Space Telescope imaged Pluto and created some of the first maps of its surface.

Still, in those images, Pluto only appeared as a blurry blob. It was too small to photograph in detail from so far away, and impossible to learn much about its color or surface features. But as the New Horizons probe closes in for its long-awaited flyby on July 14, it's giving us sharper and sharper images — and one of the first things we've learned from them is Pluto's true color.

Why Pluto is brown

Scientists believe that the color is the result of interactions between methane molecules in Pluto's atmosphere and a specific kind of ultraviolet light, emitted by both the sun and distant galaxies. When this light hits the methane, it triggers the formation of solid molecules called tholins, which are reddish brown in color.

(Chao He, Xinting Yu, Sydney Riemer, and Sarah Hörst, Johns Hopkins University)

New Horizons has measured high levels of this type of light hitting Pluto, providing some evidence for the idea, and scientists have replicated the same chemical process in labs on Earth. The same phenomenon has also been observed on Saturn's moon Titan and Neptune's moon Triton.

This is just the beginning for New Horizons

(JHUAPL/SwRI)

Over the next week, New Horizons will send back better and better images — before flying past Pluto on Tuesday, coming within 6,200 miles of the dwarf planet's surface at speeds surpassing 31,000 miles per hour.

As it does so, the probe will photograph and map Pluto in unprecedented detail, providing information about the mysterious dark regions recently spotted on its surface. It could reveal polar ice caps, mountains, or perhaps even volcanic activity.

Other instruments will detect particles escaping from the dwarf planet's nitrogen-based atmosphere, while a radio antenna will send signals through it. By analyzing these signals after they pass through the atmosphere and reach radio dishes on Earth, we'll get a better idea of the specific gases present in the atmosphere.

One of the things that makes this mission so amazing is that as large as Pluto looms in the public imagination, we still know very little about it. Two of its moons have actually been discovered since New Horizons was launched in 2006 — and we still have just a rough idea of what Pluto even looks like.

That's about to change in a big way. And in showing us Pluto, New Horizons will mark the end to a momentous, 50-year era in space history.

In the 1960s and '70s, the Mariner missions showed us Mars, Venus, and Mercury, and in the '70s and '80s the Pioneer and Voyager missions showed us Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus in detail for the first time. Though it's technically not a planet, Pluto remains one of the few unexplored worlds in our solar system — but not for long.

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WATCH: This is what Earth looks like from the ISS

If you want some pickles as soon as possible, but don’t want to go to the store, you can make your own at home in about 30 seconds.

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States can take away a driver's license for drunk driving. What if they could go a step further, and stop the driver from drinking altogether?

This idea could tackle a broader problem than drunk driving: Alcohol abuse causes 88,000 deaths each year, is linked to 40 percent of violent crimes in the US, and led to more than 4.6 million emergency room visits in 2010.

To lower those numbers, one state has started to take the right to drink away from those who repeatedly show they cannot consume alcohol safely, like repeat drunk drivers. Since 2004, South Dakota has used a 24/7 Sobriety Program, which allows judges to order sobriety for those type of offenders. Police have different ways to monitor drinking, such as regular check-ins at a station or even a bracelet that can track blood alcohol level. But the idea is to always punish a violation or a missed test with a night or two in jail — to create a very credible deterrent.

A 2013 study that compared counties with and without the 24/7 Sobriety Program attributed a 12 percent reduction in repeat DUI arrests and a 9 percent reduction in domestic violence arrests to the program — although the evidence was mixed on whether it reduced traffic accidents.

While the research on the 24/7 Sobriety Program for alcohol is early and mostly limited to the program in South Dakota, the results so far are promising. Beau Kilmer, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and author of the 2012 study, said these results should be grounds for bringing the idea to other parts of the country and at least testing it.

I spoke to Kilmer last week by phone about his research and the sobriety program. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How the 24/7 Sobriety Program works

To celebrate its 20th birthday, Amazon is introducing Prime Day, a "global shopping event" that the retail giant says will offer more deals than Black Friday. The deals will become available at midnight ET on July 15th, but will only be available to Amazon Prime customers in the US, the UK, Spain, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Canada, and Austria. Amazon says new deals will be introduced as fast as every ten minutes, and will come from every product category, from clothing to electronics.

The new promotion appears to be part of Amazon's ongoing attempt to drive regular shoppers toward Prime membership, having last month expanded its same-day rapid-delivery service Prime Now outside the US. According to Consumer Intelligence Research...

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After a weeks-long search for the perfect unique, eye-catching font for his project, my client spotted one he LOVED on some website, and tried to show me by copying some text and pasting it into our chat window.

Of course, when you do that, the text loses formatting and reverts to Arial (or whatever the default chat font is). Despite my repeated attempts to explain this, he just kept getting irritated and pasting the same thing again.

Eventually I convinced him to just give me the page’s URL so I could see this font myself.

The font turned out to actually be Arial.

Full disclosure: This article was written by a ghost.

Charlize Theron and Sean Penn are starring in a terrifying ghost story, one that speaks to this day and age. It didn't take place on a dark and stormy night, nor did it involve poltergeists and cameras. From the outside looking in, Theron and Penn were a loving couple, until one day, out of the blue, Theron simply stopped talking to Penn.

"Charlize wasn’t responding to his calls and texts," someone told Us Weekly. "She just cut it off."

Penn, despite all the different ways in which you can reach a person today, could not get in touch with her. It was like she never existed, but he knows she did. Theron was "ghosting" him.

What makes Theron and Penn's story so scary is that "ghosting" is actually happening all across this wondrous country. It's relatable. Every mid-morning, some poor sap sends a flurry of text messages to last night's date, slowly filling his message thread with a one-sided series of text bubbles that, despite their cheery appearance ("Happy Hump DAY!"), scream with desperation. And every weekend, someone wonders if the great guy she recently went out with lost his phone.

We live in a world where potential suitors vanish, where future sweethearts up and disappear, leaving us with nothing more than the digital evidence that they were, in fact, not always ghosts.

And these tales aren't just one-off personal experiences — everyone has a ghost story. Ghosting points to a bigger way culture has shaped us, and to how our dating lives have changed.

What is ghosting?

Ghosting is the act of cutting off all communication with a person whom you do not have any romantic feelings for — or whom you no longer have feelings for. What makes ghosting different than, say, just not talking to said person after dumping them is that ghosting isn't something you announce. The cutoff just happens, and the person being ghosted is often left wondering, haunted by uncertainty and sending text messages into the ether in hopes of getting a response.

The act of ghosting isn't something new. It's been around since people have had telephones, but it's only recently become more common, thanks to the advent of text messaging, Gchat, Twitter DMs, and more. It's easier than ever to get in touch with someone, and in that same vein, it's easier than ever to ghost someone.

How do you know you're being ghosted?

It's really easy.

Think of someone you have a crush on and are currently texting with. If you suddenly stop hearing from that person, you are being ghosted. Your text messages may look like this:

I orchestrated this example with my colleague Sarah Kliff to illustrate that what you're looking for is the time when the texts were sent, the time the texts were read (if possible), and the time that's elapsed between active messaging and silence.

But here's the thing: In contemporary society, there's no reason that someone who likes you as much as you like them can't return a text. There are outliers, of course; death comes to mind, or maybe you're dating a surgeon. But most people should be able to get back to you within a reasonably short amount of time. If you find yourself rationalizing silence ("Maybe she lost her phone?"), you are probably being ghosted or, at the very least, an unwilling participant in a macabre game of hard-to-get.

There are no hard and fast rules of ghosting, but if it's fair to assume that a person has been awake for 12 hours and you haven't received a response, you are experiencing paranormal activity.

The Supreme Court recently legalized same-sex marriage. Is same-sex ghosting legal too?

Yes.

Why would you ever ghost someone?

It's pretty simple: The reason you ghost someone is that you're not interested in pursing any sort of a relationship with them. Maybe he likes the movie Diner? Or she puts ginger on her sushi? Perhaps he raves about the bullshit that is red velvet cake? Here are a few justifications for engaging in the practice:

• They do not brush their teeth.
• They prefer Star Wars over Star Trek.
• They do not know how to pronounce "gnocchi."
• They like black licorice.
• They create racist children's coloring books.
• They microwave asparagus.
• They have long toe hairs.
• They reach over the sneeze guard at Chipotle.
• They describe everything as "amazing."

We live in an America where you can ghost people over the most minor complaints. It's a wonderful freedom. The right to ghost freely is essentially what this country was founded on.

Are there rules one must follow when ghosting?

Usually, ghosting is something that occurs before you enter a committed relationship. The lower the number of dates you've been on with someone, the more likely it is that ghosting will happen:

Of course, this isn't always the case. The New York Times recently published an article about ghosting that invited readers to share their own ghost stories, which the newspaper then published. Some readers were confused, and misinterpreted the experience of being stood up as ghosting. But I found myself taken in by one account in which a Times reader described being ghosted by someone they'd been seeing for 18 months:

It happened to me a while back, in a relationship of 18 months that had grown quite serious. After three weeks of silence, I decided someone ought to issue an acknowledgement, and wrote him a note (by hand, sent via the post office) saying I was hurt and confused by his behavior, but had enjoyed good times with him and wished him well.

That is not the behavior of a ghost. That is the behavior of a full-blown poltergeist. That is the behavior of someone whom you should not be dating.

Is ghosting rude?

Many people subscribe to an overarching belief, one that was probably instilled by earnest, well-meaning parents, that we should never just disappear on someone without explaining ourselves. Back in the day, our parents and our parents' parents probably made phone calls or scheduled face-to-face conversations to inform their suitors that they weren't interested.

But we live in a different era.

And in this era we have what's known as thirst, a word that's meant to define the sweet spot where "desperate" and "eager" converge. Thirst has existed since humans first walked the earth, when cavemen spent their days drawing paintings, making fire, gathering berries, and visiting the cavewomen (or fellow cavemen, we can't be too sure) they were interested in. As time progressed, thirst became realer and more tangible as our modes of communication evolved. What started out as conversations in real-life, face-to-face settings eventually began to take place over the phone, and then via the internet, Gchat, text messages, and so on.

I firmly believe that thirst has a direct effect on ghosting. Someone who is thirsty and thus won't stop calling, texting, Gchatting, and Facebook messaging the object of their affection is more likely to inspire a ghosting response. Cutting off all communication becomes a natural reaction:

Another factor to consider is that our human interactions are now more impersonal than ever before. It's possible, if you desire, to go through an entire day without speaking to someone on the phone or talking with someone face to face. Consequently, many people have forgotten some of the basic tenets of face-to-face, or even phone-to-phone, etiquette.

The same is true of dating, where you can have myriad conversations online or on the phone without ever meeting someone in person.

"As people have gotten less and less comfortable talking face to face about hard things, it’s become easier to move on, let time pass and forget to tell the person you’re breaking up with them," Anna Sale, managing editor of the WNYC podcast Death, Sex & Money, told the New York Times.

I'm not entirely sure that "forget" is the right word, but Sale makes salient points. Ghosting is an active behavior, not a passive one; it's not a matter of forgetting to tell someone you're not interested, but rather an act of avoidance. It's easier to move on and let time pass, and it's also easier to not have to deal with typing words into a text message or telling someone you don't want to date them.

Are ghosts bad people?

No. I mean, I'm sure there are terrible people out there who ghost, but ghosting itself isn't what makes terrible people terrible.

A lot of the hurt that comes from ghosting is rooted in the pain of rejection. Granted, there are some masochists in our wake who believe that hearing the words "I would like to pass on the opportunity to try monogamy with you" is better than not hearing anything at all. But the same feeling of rejection remains.

"When it comes to modern digital relationships, the rhythm of the exchange tells us as much as its literal content, and it doesn’t take any specialized skill to read between the lines," Slate's Amanda Hess astutely explained.

Most people are smart enough to understand when they've been ghosted. But it's human nature to not want to accept this, and to instead hope for the best. Perhaps that's why ghosting can seem so confusing — when there's too much human feeling and rationalization in play, some people simply ignore the ghost in the machine.

Yesterday we learned some horrible news: Sealed Air, the company that makes Bubble Wrap, is rolling out a new version that doesn't pop.

The reasoning behind this choice is sound. The version of Bubble Wrap we all know and love takes up a lot of space, and therefore is expensive for the company to ship. That also means they must use more trucks, which in turn produces more emissions.

The new version — called iBubble — basically arrives deflated, and customers doing the packing inflate it on-site. The bubbles are no longer individual, and instead each row of them is actually one long, connected chamber of air. It won't completely replace the OG Bubble Wrap but it's plain to see that having a more cost-effective option means the poppable...

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Think that battery-powered electric vehicles are the future of four-wheeled transportation? They may very well be, but an unlikely competitor is gaining a surprising amount of traction.

Hydrogen fuel cells — which use compressed hydrogen as their fuel and release only water vapor as their emissions — have been in development for decades. But only recently have they become livable, with performance and range numbers good enough to replace an average driver's gasoline-powered car. Now BMW, which has been engaged in a hydrogen R&D partnership with Toyota for several years, has announced at an event in France that it will begin testing fuel cell vehicles on public roads starting later this month as it ramps up for a commercial vehicle "some...

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We all have a favorite big, dumb, fun movie that's loud and raucous and less interested in any thematic depth than in giving us a great time. Such movies exhaust any critical objections and simply leave you spinning around, with a giddy smile on your face.

For me, that movie is and always shall be Back to the Future, a movie I consider literally perfect. Tell me about its imperfections. Point out to me its plot holes. Lecture me on how time travel doesn't work like that. I don't care. It's a weird little science-fiction incest comedy that, to me, sets the standard all other popcorn movies must match, the one that leaves them all feeling a little bit lacking.

Thus, on the 31st anniversary of its release — the movie debuted on July 3, 1985 — I give you five reasons why Back to the Future is perfect.

1) It boasts the best blockbuster script ever written

Universal

From start to finish, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis's Oscar-nominated screenplay is a marvel. Its structure is an elaborately constructed concoction that winds itself as tight as it possibly can in its first half, then unleashes all of that pent-up energy in a second half that never once pauses for breath yet still manages to cram in a full musical sequence.

Marty McFly (a perfectly breezy Michael J. Fox) travels back in time to see his parents as teenagers, and then he must find a way to travel forward again. That's pretty much it, but Gale and Zemeckis build the story in such a way that everything that occurs early on serves as a setup for a payoff you might not realize is going to come later. Back to the Future sets up all the pieces on its board, then knocks them over one by one — and with great flair.

Why, for instance, is some woman pressing a flyer about fixing Hill Valley's clock tower on Marty? Well, because he'll eventually need to know exactly when lightning will strike. The movie even reveals exactly how it's going to use this constant series of setups and payoffs in its opening scene, when a long pan around time-machine inventor Doc Brown's room full of ticking clocks and misbegotten inventions ends with a shot of the case of plutonium a newscaster was talking about just a few moments prior. The way such moments are buried is so elegant that you might not even notice some of them until your fourth or fifth viewing of the film.

And Back to the Future is no slouch in the character development or world-building departments, either. Hill Valley feels like a real town, with a real history, where Marty's adventures might change the name of the mall or disrupt the carefully established status quo. Meanwhile, both Marty and his parents begin the film as seeming caricatures and gain depth as the plot moves along and we realize that the sad-sack parents Marty started out with are a far cry from the hopeful teenagers they once were.

Finally, as if all that weren't enough, Back to the Future is also a really great movie for sharp, comedic dialogue, something that few blockbusters can brag about. Yeah, by now you've probably heard all of the most famous lines too many times for them to really register, but then something like George McFly (Crispin Glover, in one of the greatest weirdo screen performances ever) demanding, "Lou, give me a milk ... [dramatic pause] ... Chocolate," sinks in, and you realize anew just how crammed full of great lines the film is.

2) Everything in the movie is a ticking clock. Everything.

Universal

One of the greatest things about Back to the Future's construction is how the movie is completely centered on the idea of running out of time. Literally everything is a ticking clock, counting down to the moment when Marty will be stranded forever in 1955, or even to the moment when Marty will literally cease to exist because he's interfered with his parents getting the chance to fall in love.

For example, there's one scene — when Marty is briefly locked in the trunk of a car by Biff's gang — where Gale and Zemeckis have wrapped seven (and possibly more) countdowns around one another, like some sort of nesting doll. They begin with Marty escaping the trunk (which he does shortly after being stuck inside of it) and then, working from the inside out (and in successive scenes, no less), they are resolved one by one until we arrive at the question of whether Marty will make it to the mall in time to save Doc Brown (the manic, brilliant Christopher Lloyd) from Libyan terrorists.

All things considered, ticking clocks are often a cheap way to build suspense. But Back to the Future makes them work, both because the film piles them on with reckless aplomb and because the very idea of a countdown is so integral to a time-travel movie that it has some extra room to maneuver.

But even if you ignore those allowances, Back to the Future's countdowns work because the movie is, on some level, about adolescence, about the idea that when we're teenagers, we're all racing against the clock of impending, boring adulthood. There's never enough time because maturity catches up to all of us sooner or later.

3) Director Robert Zemeckis had something to prove

Universal

As revealed in the new book We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy, Zemeckis — who would go on to produce numerous beloved big-screen hits, including Forrest Gump and Cast Away — was young, hungry, and intent on not leaning on his mentor Steven Spielberg to get his film made. Anyone who takes a moment to read Back to the Future's opening credits will see Zemeckis failed in this endeavor; Spielberg is credited as a producer, and his production company, Amblin Entertainment, signed on to help shepherd the film through the studio system.

But Zemeckis's desire to prove himself filters out to almost every element of his direction. He shoots even normally prosaic sequences — like a school dance — as if they were car chases. When it comes time for the bells of Back to the Future's ticking clocks to start ringing, his editing leaps to a breathless level of intensity. Even something like Marty's final conversation with his parents before he returns to the future is afforded a kind of armrest-gripping excitement you wouldn't typically expect.

Throughout the film, Zemeckis displays an admirable level of expertise in turning the movie into a kind of living pinball machine, steadily ramping up the pace of his action sequences to train you for the all-out assault of the final half-hour. But all along, he builds in necessary respites, like Marty's alien arrival in 1955 Hill Valley or that musical sequence, to lift up the final act until it's rocketing into the sky.

4) Back to the Future is now a double period piece

Universal

To watch Back to the Future now doesn't just offer a glimpse of 1955. It allows us to understand what people in 1985 thought about 1955 and what they thought about 1985, as well. The film is about as squarely positioned within the Ronald Reagan era as one could possibly imagine, and it reflects that era's fascination with the supposedly idyllic life of the 1950s, even as it's constantly undercutting those notions at every turn.

To watch Back to the Future 30 years after it was released is to watch a movie that very earnestly wishes to reclaim the present (of 1985) as a place worth being nostalgic about. Indeed, the film's first sequel (which is set partially in 2015, no less) deliberately goes about creating a world where the 1980s are remembered with the hushed fervor assigned to the 1950s in the original film.

But the message is clear: you can never force time to stand still, any more than you can keep teenagers from growing up. All you can do is live in the time you've been deposited in as best as you can (and, okay, occasionally warn the mad scientist you hang out with that he's going to die on a specific night 30 years in the future).

5) The movie features wonderful themes of reconciliation

Universal

Adolescence involves realizing that your parents were once just like you and that you will someday be like them. They are, after all, human beings, just like yourself.

Ultimately, that's what Back to the Future is about: realizing that your parents had hopes and dreams of their own before you came along and that those hopes and dreams may remain long-buried. Marty inadvertently gives his parents a second chance to live a life that wasn't suddenly interrupted by him and his siblings, one where they actually achieved some of the things they'd always hoped they would.

Nobody's ever going to claim that Back to the Future is a movie of unparalleled depth, but in both the original film and its two sequels, the idea of generations reconciling with one another returns, again and again. Children are reconciled with their parents, then become parents themselves.

Back to the Future has never been remade. There are no plans, so far as I know, to produce a latter-day sequel to the film. That's probably for the best. A modern version would almost certainly be tempted to send Marty and Doc Brown caroming through history to several different time periods, like Bill and Ted. But that would obscure what made the original so successful.

Back to the Future works because, in the end, its stakes are so very small. Beneath all the jokes and the moments where a mother unknowingly flirts with her son and the time travel and the action-packed countdown sequences, all that remains is a theme so universal that we keep returning to it in story after story after story: can you ever understand your parents? And perhaps even harder: can they ever understand you?

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For whatever reason, Apple hasn’t allowed you to enable TRIM (one of the best ways to maximize the life of your solid state drive ) on third-part SSD drives. Now, you finally can, no third-party app required .

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I took a trip to Iceland this past March, but weather wasn’t the greatest while I was there. We encountered a few blizzards, and I took some photos to see what I could recover from them. Adobe recently announced a Dehaze tool for Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC, and I wanted to know how well it could recover image data from a blizzard — which could be considered be an extreme version of haze. After trying the slider on my images, I’m very impressed!

Example 1

Here’s one unedited photo. It’s just a straight RAW to JPEG conversion:

All we see is a nasty blizzard and the vague shape of a mountain in the background. The colors of the house aren’t clear either. Now here’s the Dehazed image at +90 without any other edits or raw filters applied:

Notice how the colors of the house and details of snow and rock from the mountain emerge after Dehazing.

Example 2

Now here’s a much more extreme photo of a blizzard in the same area. Notice how this image shows almost nothing but a vague shape covered by a blizzard:

I then applied the Dehaze filter at +90 (no other raw adjustments), and the details recovered are just spectacular!

Impressive, wouldn’t you say?

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About the author: Bimal Ramdoyal is a software developer and a photography enthusiast based in Canada. You can find his photography and writing on his website and blog. This article was also published here.

The $299 OnePlus One proved that you can get a flagship-quality smartphone without paying traditional flagship prices. And now its successor is almost here. OnePlus will officially unveil its next phone, the OnePlus 2, on July 27th at 7PM PT (10PM ET). The company has already shared a few key specifications for the device; it'll be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 chipset and will feature a USB-C port — making it one of the first major smartphones to adopt the brand new, more convenient USB standard. But that's pretty much all we know at this early stage, leaving plenty for OnePlus to tease over the next few weeks before the whole story is revealed next month.

The #OnePlus2 will be the first flagship to use Type C USB. We want to...

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Upon first glance, the images in art director Stephen McMennamy’s #combophoto project may look like surreal photo-manipulations created using Photoshop. They’re actually the result of a much simpler process.

For each one, McMennamy carefully shoots two photographs and creatively arranges them side-by-side to create imaginative new scenes.

“It’s really just from looking around and seeing what things are out in the world might make for an interesting fit or what would make for a nice contrast once combined,” McMennamy tells PetaPixel. “As far as process, it’s just a matter of me hunting things down and aiming for the cleanest shot possible.”

McMennamy says he looks for simple backgrounds that allow the viewers’ eyes to focus on the combinations. Some of the photos were shot in his garage, while others were on the side of the road after spotting something. “Wherever I need to get my shot I go get it,” he says.

Many of the early images in the #combophoto project were shot using an iPhone, but McMennamy recently purchased a new camera to improve the quality of the images. He also occasionally uses a drone to capture aerial photos.

You can follow along with this project on McMennamy’s Tumblr and Instagram pages. You can also participate by using the tag #combophoto.

(via Colossal)

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Image credits: Photographs by Stephen McMennamy and used with permission

snydeq writes: LAMP diehards take note: The flexible simplicity of MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and Node.js is no joke and could very well be a worthwhile stack for your next programming project, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner. "It was only a few years ago that MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js were raising eyebrows on their own. Now they've grown up and ganged up, and together they're doing serious work, poaching no small number of developers from the vast LAMP camp. But how exactly does this newfangled MEAN thing stack up against LAMP? When is it better to choose the well-tested, mature LAMP over this upstart collection of JavaScript-centric technologies?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A violet ray is an antique electrotherapy medical device invented by Nikola Tesla that’s essentially a portable tesla coil. Altdorf, Germany-based photographer Marc Simon Frei purchased a unit from 1920 on eBay and customized it for experiments with photographing electricity at home.

Frei generated electrical discharges in various ways and forms, and then captured them using a Nikon Df, a macro extension tube, and a Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens.

“Don’t try this at home,” Frei says, “the high frequency voltage could damage your equipment.” Bringing his camera close to the apparatus also caused his LCD screen to flicker.

Frei has also experimented with creating miniature lightning at home using some stuffing taken from the guts of a teddy bear as clouds. “I wanted to create a private thunderstorm at home,” he tells us.

You can find more images from Frei’s experiments and follow along with the series in this online photo album.

(via Marc Simon Frei via Colossal)

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Some people might call it a waste of time, others, "a poetic gesture toward the futility of the scale of big data." Either way, it's clear that printing out Wikipedia is hard. The latest person to attempt this feat is Michael Mandiberg, an interdisciplinary artist whose exhibition on the subject — titled From Aaaaa! to ZZZap! — opens at New York's Denny Gallery this week.

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The guiding principle of Dutch company Fairphone is simple: fight back against wasteful consumer culture by offering an ethically sourced smartphone that tries to use as few conflict minerals as possible. With this pitch, the company managed to sell 60,000 first edition Fairphones — a small figure, sure, but the company still says they sold "quicker than anticipated." Now, it's unveiled the Fairphone 2, saying that this time the device will not only be ethically sourced but also easily repairable. Fairphone will sell spare parts for the phone itself, and says that users will be able to easily change the most commonly broken components, including the screen, camera, CPU, and speaker.

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Nerval's Lobster writes: In the eleven years since Mono first appeared, the Linux community has regarded it with suspicion. Because Mono is basically a free, open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, some developers feared that Microsoft would eventually launch a patent war that could harm many in the open-source community. But there are some good reasons for using Mono, developer David Bolton argues in a new blog posting. Chief among them is MonoDevelop, which he claims is an excellent IDE; it's cross-platform abilities; and its utility as a game-development platform. That might not ease everybody's concerns (and some people really don't like how Xamarin has basically commercialized Mono as an iOS/Android development platform), but it's maybe enough for some people to take another look at the platform.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The humble text editor is an indispensable tool for many developers, web designers, writers, and people simply looking for a quick way to jot down notes. But there are much better options than notepad.exe; one of our favorites is Notepad++.

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