Cooper Griggs

It gets hot in the Australian outback; like, really hot. We're talking "130 degrees fahrenheit in the shade" sort of hot -- definitely not the sort of place that many people would want to even visit, much less work in on a daily basis. But this inhos...

We've got good news for you... though it may actually be bad news, depending on how you feel about Hollywood anime adaptations. That live-action Robotech movie might actually happen now that Sony Pictures has officially fished it out of limbo and sna...

PayPal has has agreed to pay the US Department of the Treasury $7.7 million, after the financial giant processed transactions for a number of companies and individuals on the US sanctions list. A total of 486 violations of US regulations had apparent...

With little more than thin wooden dowels and a bit of glue, artist Janusz Grünspek creates scale replicas of everyday objects that from a distance appear like line drawings. Dining room tables, power tools, an Apple laptop, and even a candle chandelier are formed from delicately cut and bent wooden pieces that mimic the form of digitally-rendered wireframes. Grünspek calls the 2011 series Drawings in Space, and you can see a bit more on his website (warning: Flash). (via Junk Culture, Visual News)

There was good news and bad news for Motorola in its second round in court with the patent holding firm Intellectual Ventures. A Delaware jury cleared Motorola of infringing on one of IV's wireless patents, but it also said that the cellphone maker i...

When American astronaut Scott Kelly Russian Cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka leave Earth for their 12 month stay on the International Space Station, they'll be riding this Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft. The launch is scheduled for this Fri...

via http://www.flickr.com/photos/rufusknight/3277556609/in/set-72157604569604101/

“Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity. That’s a big one, when you begin to move into the unfamiliar.”

- James Hillman

Video: Old Dog Tricks Puppy Into Running Laps

Seattle-based artist Isobelle Ouzman creates 3D illustrations from discarded books found in dumpsters, recycling bins, and local thrift stores. She adopts these forgotten books as a way to give them a second life, cutting and pasting the books into layered fairy tale scenes instead of letting the novels collect dust or fall prey to the elements.

Ouzman creates her whimsical and monochromatic environments with an X-Acto knife, glue, watercolors and Micron pens. Each work focuses on plants and animals, several layers of winding forestry surrounding her central characters.

Each book can take between two and three months to complete, which is why Ouzman is currently on hold with commissions until October. To submit a commission for her found book illustrations contact her here, or browse the books on her Etsy site. (via Lustik)

Russia's Roscosmos space agency is in a bind. It makes money ferrying American astronauts to the International Space Station, but it's going to have a lot of unclaimed seats once NASA starts using capsules from Boeing and SpaceX. The solution? It's r...

A compendium of mortifying examples of cake inscriptions gone wrong.

A four-wheeled vision of gleaming silver glides toward me, shining brightly under the warm California sun. The vehicle looks otherworldly against the empty backdrop of the former naval base in Alameda, a site perhaps more famous for Mythbusters stunt...

Kelli Hoversten was a tireless and fearless adventurer. She’d ice climb during the Colorado winters, rock climb in the warmer months, and travel the country in search of her next challenge. She was also an avid reader, devouring four or five books at a time when she wasn’t working on her family’s Missouri cattle ranch.

But not anymore.

At Burning Man 2014, Kelli — you may know her as Ranger Halston — was working with her fellow Black Rock Rangers as a “Sandman”, the caretakers of the inner circle during the Man Burn. While the citizens of Black Rock City watch the Man and the Fire Conclave performances in the Great Circle, Sandman Rangers keep their eyes on the crowd, ensuring nobody makes an ill-advised sprint toward the flames.

That was when Kelli’s life was instantaneously and irreversibly changed, when somebody in the crowd pointed a handheld laser at her face, permanently blinding her left eye. And then one mounted on a Mutant Vehicle partially blinded her right eye.

Some Burners think it’s “fun” to aim a laser at the Man, or at the people around them — it’s the functional (and intellectual) equivalent of tagging, I suppose. It used to be no big deal, really. Back in the day, the only lasers that could actually harm somebody were big, unwieldy and expensive, but with recent technological advancements, the $20 laser you picked up and stuck in your pocket can reach 3-10 miles, and it could blind anybody who catches it in the eye. And facing the crowd as they do during big burns, Black Rock Rangers are especially vulnerable.

Since the accident, Kelli has been forced to relearn everything she’d come to know in her life, and to reconsider everything she’s taken for granted. “I had no idea how important depth perception is. I don’t think anybody does, until they lose it,” she tells me. She no longer rock climbs or ice climbs. “It’s too dangerous with one eye, and the risk of another injury on top of this? If I lose my other eye, well …” She leaves the sentence hanging in the air. She’s lost her job as an arborist because they can’t insure her now. She’s got enough vision left in her right eye to still be allowed to drive, but just barely, and she’s rightfully worried about losing that privilege. “There’s a black dot in the middle of everything I see.”

Don’t use handheld lasers in crowds, don’t ever aim them at people, and make sure nobody around you does either.

It’s too difficult and painful to read as much as she used to, but low-vision therapists are helping with lighting systems that will help a bit. “Reaching out to pick up a water glass now requires thought. Even cutting my food is a challenge. And God, shaving my legs is like a bloodbath,” she laughs. “I sure didn’t see that one coming.”

I hear sadness cutting through the laughter, and I’m struck by her strength. She’s angry, and she has every right to be. Her future was stolen through somebody’s ignorance. But she’s not bitter. More than anything, as she comes to terms with the fact that she’ll never have her former life back, she’s most concerned about making sure others are aware of the dangers of modern handheld lasers. Makes sense, really. She’s a Black Rock Ranger.

Kelli is raising funds to cover the lost wages and medical bills she’s accumulated since the injury, carrying her over until (and hopefully beyond) her Workers’ Comp claim gets processed by Burning Man’s insurance company. Please join with us as we help her, if you can.

But more importantly, don’t use handheld lasers in crowds, don’t ever aim them at people, and make sure nobody around you does either. And don’t bring them to Burning Man ever again — it’s just not worth the risk to the livelihood of another human being. Share this story around. That’s what Kelli really wants. That’s what Burning Man wants.

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(via pleatedjeans:via)

In this brief profile by filmmaker Liam Saint Pierre, we dive head-first into the strange mind of British artist and inventor Dominic Wilcox who’s been entertaining the world for years with his delightfully impractical ideas. His recent off-the-wall inventions include a stained glass driverless car, shoes with built-in GPS that guide you back home, and a giant listening device called Binaudios that mimic tourist binoculars for the purpose of listening to a city. “Let’s do the ridiculous and by doing the ridiculous something else might come of it,” Wilcox shares in the film, perfectly encapsulating his entire artistic practice. He also just published a book filled with comic-like sketches of his most outlandish ideas, Variations on Normal, which is available on his website. (via It’s Nice That)

As California limps through another nearly rain-free rainy season, the state is taking increasingly bold action to save water.

On Tuesday, the California state government imposed new mandatory restrictions on lawn watering and incentives to limit water use in hotels and restaurants as part of its latest emergency drought regulations. On Thursday, California Gov. Jerry Brown announced a $1 billion plan to support water projects statewide and speed aid to hard-hit communities already dealing with shortages. Last month federal water managers announced a “zero allocation” of agricultural water to a key state canal system for the second year in a row, essentially transforming thousands of acres of California farmland into dust.

This week’s moves come after the state has fallen behind targets to increase water efficiency in 2015 amid the state’s worst drought in 1,200 years. Last year, voters passed a $7.5 billion water bond and the legislature approved its first-ever restrictions on groundwater pumping, which won’t go into full effect until 2025. Stricter, more immediate limits on water use are possible as summer approaches.

But it’s not enough. These moves are small potatoes compared to what’s needed to rein in statewide water use, of which agriculture forms the vast majority. Last week, a pair of op-eds, one in the Guardian, the other in the Los Angeles Times, spoke with urgency about the West’s growing water crisis.

“California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain,” wrote NASA water scientist and University of California-Irvine professor Jay Famiglietti. A better plan, he said, was for “immediate mandatory water rationing” across the state. Famiglietti’s work has focused on the shocking recent declines in groundwater across the West, where excessive pumping has caused the ground to sink at rates up to a foot per year and a measurable rise in global sea levels.

Underlying the frantic, short-term search for water is an ominous underlying trend that threatens to fundamentally transform America’s most important agricultural state. Climate change may have already initiated a new megadrought.

But first, a reality check: California’s cities have more than enough water to withstand the current drought and then some. They simply don’t use that much. Not true for agriculture, which uses 80 percent of California’s water—10 percent of that just on almonds. Though it’s still a national powerhouse, fed increasingly by fast-depleting groundwater supplies, the state’s agriculture industry has likely begun a long-term decline due mostly to simple math. Abnormally dry conditions have dominated in 11 of the last 15 years, and the cuts have to come from somewhere. Agriculture is the elephant in the ever-shrinking room of California water.

Statewide, California’s snowpack is now at a record low—just 12 percent of normal, and less than half of last year’s astonishingly meager total. Normally, California’s snowpack holds the equivalent of about 15 million acre-feet of water around its traditional April 1 peak, about as much as all the state’s reservoirs combined. This year, it’s as if half of the state’s water reserves simply vanished. It’s difficult to imagine the hardship the state will face this summer as the rivers of snowmelt that normally feed the state during the dry season dwindle dangerously. As I wrote last year during my drought-themed reporting trip across the West, California just wasn’t built to handle a world without snow.

But it’s not just California. It’s been freakishly hot out West all winter. Other states are also suffering, with record low water levels expected this year in the two major reservoirs on the Colorado River—Lake Mead and Lake Powell. The warm winter has helped to dry up the land even more, and pre-emptively melt what little snow has graciously fallen.

If a megadrought has already begun—and there is increasingly strong evidence to support that it has, or will soon—there will be widespread implications, including a significant reshifting of California agriculture outside the state. The California of the past is gone, and climate change is bringing a new one faster than it seems we’re ready for.

If Carbon3D's capability to print out objects 25 to 100 times faster than usual is the reason why you can't wait for it to come out, then you'll love this machine, too. An Australian company has announced it's also working on a super speedy printer c...

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hypothesizes that when Jupiter rocked up to our then-infant solar system, it obliterated the incumbent planes, and gave us a lot of apparent quirks of our solar system. K...

Want to understand why far-reaching, poorly scrutinized spying programs are dangerous? Here's why. The Intercept and the New Zealand Herald have obtained a document showing that New Zealand used the US National Security Agency's XKeyscore surveillanc...

Fuck Yeah Good Guy Lucifer:

LOL! These are hilarious!

Rumor: A Brazilian scientist was attacked by a prehistoric species of owl he had cloned.

Even the FAA itself knows it needs to speed up its notoriously slow drone approval process. That's why it has debuted a new rule that will quickly grant permits to companies that promise to adhere to certain restrictions. All applicants whose drones ...