Measles is having its best year in America since 1991, which is excellent news for measles and a little embarrassing for everyone else.

Most of the cases are among unvaccinated people, and health officials continue to warn the surge could cost the United States its measles-elimination status. — Read the rest

The post The anti-vax movement keeps setting records nobody wanted appeared first on Boing Boing.

On his way to receive four fallen service members at Dover, the President of the United States claimed the dead had strongly endorsed the Iran policy that sent them there.

Nothing is as ghoulish as Grandpa Pudding Brains using dead US service people as props in his illegal war. — Read the rest

The post Trump makes the dead endorse his war appeared first on Boing Boing.

Liminal spaces are so hot right now, guys. I hope you're ready for the surge of movies about being trapped in weird, unexplainable places we're going to see in the next few years now that Backrooms is a proven money maker. — Read the rest

The post It Ends is a horror movie about a road that ironically doesn't do that appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you've spent any time wandering the borderlands where technognosis, occulture, and the weirdosphere collide, you already know Erik Davis — a scholar of the weird who has spent decades mapping the multidimensional margins of human consciousness. In the latest installment of his always-inspiring Burning Shore newsletter, Erik shares some welcome news: the entire catalogue of his Expanding Mind podcast, after vanishing from the web without warning, is back and now safely enshrined on YouTube, ready to stream. — Read the rest

The post A decade of cult podcast episodes vanished, then reappeared online appeared first on Boing Boing.

A program rumored to launch as soon as next week will allow customers to lease Apple hardware, but financing companies can lock down those devices for missed payments.

The Apple Upgrade program will provide 12- to 36-month leases on iPhones, iPads, and iMacs, but may also mean giving up control of your device. — Read the rest

The post Apple's upcoming leasing program may come with a big caveat appeared first on Boing Boing.

I just discovered, through Frank Santopadre's podcast Fun for All Ages, the radio and television universe of artist Rachel Lichtman's imagined 1960s/1970s town of Golden Sands.

It's a surreal town stuck in a mid-century far out brown-and-orange aesthetic. Lichtman creates parody television commercials, and print and radio ads from the town of Golden Sands, as well as opening credit theme song videos from the town's television station, Programme 4. — Read the rest

The post Enter Rachel Lichtman's groovy, shag-carpeted world of Golden Sands appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tom the Dancing Bug: Follow Little Donald Trump's Odyssey

-Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it's published anywhere, plus lots of other stuff. — Read the rest

The post Tom the Dancing Bug: Follow Little Donald Trump's Odyssey appeared first on Boing Boing.

Budget carrier EasyJet sent a Liverpool-bound flight back to Tenerife after a fight broke out among the 186 passengers aboard on Tuesday evening. "About 10" people were reportedly involved in the brawl, half an hour after takeoff, leading the captain to turn flight EZY3352 around and request that police meet them after landing at Tenerife South airport. — Read the rest

The post 10-person passenger brawl sends EasyJet flight back to airport appeared first on Boing Boing.

Worse on Purpose is a website about the decline in product quality and the forces driving it, ranging from mundane cost-cutting to enshittification. Private equity is a regular theme, but corporations of every kind are at it, and the site offers "autopsies" of notable offenders and categories. — Read the rest

The post Products are getting worse on purpose appeared first on Boing Boing.

At 5:10 p.m. on Saturday 26 November 1977, viewers in parts of southern England watching an ITN news summary heard the audio mutate into a deep buzz. A distorted voice took over, introducing itself as Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, and telling humanity that it had a short time left to put down its weapons and learn to live in peace. — Read the rest

The post In 1977, a voice claiming to be an alien took over British TV for four minutes appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 2014, a talking doll named My Friend Cayla was voted Innovative Toy of the Year. Three years later the German government was telling parents to destroy it. Cayla listened to a child through a hidden microphone, beamed the audio over Bluetooth to a phone app, searched the internet for an answer, and spoke back after about a one-second delay. — Read the rest

The post Germany told parents to destroy this talking doll appeared first on Boing Boing.

AI companies are facing a data problem of their own making: the open web is clogged with AI-generated text, and training new models on that sludge invites "model collapse," where machines degrade by eating their own output. One company is filling the need for human-written content by buying old printed books in bulk. — Read the rest

The post AI companies are buying up old books to escape their own AI slop appeared first on Boing Boing.

Designer and writer Matt Webb has a bone to pick with the movie ratings board. Ferris Bueller's Day Off carries a PG-13 for cursing and kissing, but Frozen 2 — where a tidal wave nearly levels an entire kingdom — sailed through with a PG. — Read the rest

The post Frozen 2 should be rated R, a writer argues with data appeared first on Boing Boing.

On the evening of October 15, 1991, the University of Utah's Fly's Eye detector at Dugway Proving Ground recorded a single subatomic particle arriving from space with an energy of about 3.2×10²⁰ electronvolts — an atomic nucleus carrying the kinetic energy of a baseball traveling 100 kilometers per hour. — Read the rest

The post A single atomic nucleus hit Utah with the force of a pitched baseball appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Stop fearing your PDFs! Easily edit, convert, annotate, and master your PDFs with this license to PDF Agile Premium for Windows and Mac for just $39.99 (Reg. $119).

We've all been there: staring down the barrel of a PDF, needing to do more with it than our OS allows. — Read the rest

The post PDFs fill you with dread? Save yourself the stress with a PDF reader appeared first on Boing Boing.

FreeInk is an open-source ecosystem for e-ink readers, aiming to replace locked-down software and walled gardens with a stack that includes everything from firmware to fonts and free file formats. There's even reference hardware and a manifesto.

From the rendering engine to the charging circuit, every layer is documented and open.

— Read the rest

The post Open-source firmware and software for e-readers appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Castle Map is an interactive atlas of the world's greatest strongholds, featuring (at press time) 1,706 castles, 543 fortresses, 760 palaces and 682 ruins. They are further filterable by "fame ranking," with 100 in the top category, and by their date of construction (going back to ~3000 BC's Aniba fortified village.) — Read the rest

The post Interactive map of the world's castles, fortresses, palaces and ruins appeared first on Boing Boing.

The World Wide Web address turns 41 this year. DNS.pizza has analyzed 85,879 domains with verified registration dates and ranked the oldest active domains. 

The DNS "opened for business in 1985," the site notes: nordu.net, a Nordic research network, was created on January 1, and symbolics.com — Read the rest

The post A tour of the oldest domains still on the internet appeared first on Boing Boing.

Before becoming a 1980s TV-dinner hall of famer, Salisbury steak was a 19th-century health fad. Dr. James Salisbury looked at chopped beef and somehow saw medicine; America looked at it and covered it in gravy.

Dr. Salisbury wanted to start a high-beef-scraps diet, and apparently only missed on the "please cover it in cholesterol" attractant. — Read the rest

The post Salisbury steak was health food before it became cafeteria nostalgia appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for Windows is $54.99 (reg. $249.99) with Excel, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Access, and OneNote for one Windows 10 or 11 PC.

Somewhere between the ninth app login and the fourth "manage subscription" page, normal software started to feel weirdly needy.  — Read the rest

The post Microsoft Office 2024 puts the old reliables back on your PC appeared first on Boing Boing.

The latest addition to LEGO's Ideas is a gorgeous dose of nostalgia. The upcoming X-Files set was introduced by none other than Gillian Anderson herself. When a mysterious black box arrives at her door, she dons her gloves and investigates. "This is where it gets implausible," Anderson says with a skeptical grimace, as she assembles the alien ship. — Read the rest

The post Gillian Anderson reveals X-Files LEGO set appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace puked out a Truth Social post that started whinging over how Iran's "Arrogance" and the Reflecting Pool are his "TOP Concerns," then somehow swerved into an ad for a Fasset/Tether gold-backed Visa card already issued to "Myself and My Family." — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains turns foreign policy into a crypto gold-card ad appeared first on Boing Boing.

Honest Trailers tackles Backrooms, the horror franchise where the monster is fear and the production designer apparently died in a 1990s office park.

The creepiest place in America is not a haunted house or even the supermarket. Fear is a corporate office building devoid of cubicles. — Read the rest

The post Honest Trailers gets lost in the beige hell of Backrooms appeared first on Boing Boing.

Asked why Democrats dumped Graham Platner after a sexual-assault allegation while Republicans keep Max Miller and Cory Mills in the conference despite domestic-violence allegations, "MAGA" Mike Johnson's offered the kind of moral clarity you get from a used car salesman: "The key word there is allegation." — Read the rest

The post Mike Johnson discovers the word "allegation" only applies to Republicans appeared first on Boing Boing.

Light, maker of the stripped-down Light Phones (previously recommended), today announced the Light Flip, a clamshell model that swaps e-ink for matte OLED and gets a hinge, a keypad and (drum roll!) a camera. As much as I loved my Light Phone II, the slow and frustrating e-ink screen ground me down; with OLED, the main tradeoff for responsiveness and clarity will be shorter battery life. — Read the rest

The post Light Flip is a minimalist phone without the dumb appeared first on Boing Boing.

The lightsaber that Mark Hamill held and lost, along with the hand holding it, to the central reactor shaft of Bespin's Cloud City in "The Empire Strikes Back," which canonically was preserved in a cloning tank by Emperor Palpatine, or whatever, sold for $3.75m at Heritage Auctions' Hollywood & Entertainment Signature Auction last week. — Read the rest

The post Luke Skywalker's severed hand and lightsaber prop sold for $3.75M appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Learn to speak one (or more!) new languages confidently and naturally with a one-year subscription to Rosetta Stone Sapphire for $127.20, a 20% savings on the $159 regular price.

Learning a new language has a ton of benefits: It challenges the mind, open up new career opportunities, and make travel more rewarding. — Read the rest

The post Speak a new language confidently sooner than you dreamed with Rosetta Stone Sapphire for $127.20 appeared first on Boing Boing.

From the South Korean side of the DMZ you can look through binoculars at a tidy North Korean town — bright blue roofs, multicolored walls, a childcare center, schools, a hospital. Kijŏng-dong is a stage set.

The buildings are concrete shells with no glass in the windows, and some of the windows are just painted on. — Read the rest

The post North Korea's fake village with painted-on windows appeared first on Boing Boing.

Fear of the number 13 has a proper name — triskaidekaphobia — and it's baked into the buildings around you. In 2002, an Otis Elevator executive estimated that among buildings with 13 or more floors and Otis elevators, 85% had no floor labeled the 13th. — Read the rest

The post Why 85% of tall buildings skip the 13th floor appeared first on Boing Boing.

Most attempts to hide a drone tinker with how it looks — camouflage, transparent shells, light-bending optics. Northwestern University engineers went the other way and changed how your eyes see it. Their prototype, the "Phantom Twist," spins up to 25 times a second, too fast for the eye to track, so the whole aircraft smears into a ghostly blur that all but disappears against whatever's behind it. — Read the rest

The post Drone spins into a ghostly blur, making it almost invisible appeared first on Boing Boing.