Peak Ong, a 72-year-old cleaner at Aberystwyth University in Wales, won £264,442.09 from the school after a dispute that started with a banned rice cooker ended in her firing and a vindictive job reference.

Catherine Green, Ong's manager, accused her of giving a rice cooker to a student living in university dorms, where they're banned. — Read the rest

The post How a banned rice cooker cost a Welsh university £264,442 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Watch an adorable, fluffy newborn gosling take its first leap, and what a leap it is. This brave little chick jumped from an I-5 offramp high above Portland's Eastbank Esplanade and the Willamette River, falling toward its parents and siblings waiting below. — Read the rest

The post Newborn gosling leaps from an I-5 offramp into the Willamette River appeared first on Boing Boing.

This video shows the weirdness of the Devils Hole pupfish. Deep inside a single limestone cavern in Nevada's Mojave Desert lives one of the rarest fish on Earth. The tiny, shimmering blue fish can be found in only one known natural habitat in the world: a water-filled limestone fissure called Devils Hole. — Read the rest

The post Devils Hole pupfish: rarest fish on Earth lives in one Nevada cavern appeared first on Boing Boing.

A YouTuber going by Flamethrower spent nights listening to his brother's new hamster squeak through the exercise wheel and decided to harvest the energy. The result is a working phone charger powered by the rodent.

A hamster runs in bursts, while a phone wants steady voltage — that's the engineering problem. — Read the rest

The post His brother's hamster is charging his phone now appeared first on Boing Boing.

This unusual set of dentures was made in the 1940s by a California miner named George Washington Hancock, who couldn't afford conventional dental care. He needed teeth, so he made them. Hancock fashioned the bases himself by heating celluloid toothbrush handles and pressing them into denture-shaped molds. — Read the rest

The post 1940s miner crafted dentures from toothbrush handles and coyote teeth appeared first on Boing Boing.

In August 1926, Jagadish Chandra Bose walked into an Oxford lecture hall carrying a snapdragon stem. He hooked it to one of his handmade instruments, told the audience they were watching the plant's heartbeat, and pointed to a tracing that rose and fell in rhythm. — Read the rest

The post The man who discovered microwaves measured a flower's heartbeat in 1926 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Give your wallet and chosen device an easy win with lifetime access to both Windows 11 Pro and Microsoft Office 2024 Home & Business for Mac or PC—now just $95.97 (reg. $448.99). 

Microsoft recently ended Windows 10 support, which means there's never been a better time to upgrade your operating system. — Read the rest

The post Upgrade to Windows 11 and get Office 2024 for under $100 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Everytime I want to make pixel art look old-timey, I find myself searching for and fussing with online filter sites that don't look right, or trying to do something clever with scanlines or shadowmask textures in Photoshop, which also never looks quite right. — Read the rest

The post Simple app to make images look like they're on an old CRT display appeared first on Boing Boing.

Elon Musk defended his conduct in federal court Thursday as former Twitter shareholders accused him of deliberately driving down the company's stock price ahead of his 2022 purchase of the platform now known as X.

The case, which represents Twitter shareholders who sold the stock between May 13 and Oct.

— Read the rest

The post Musk defends tweets that allegedly tanked Twitter stock before buyout appeared first on Boing Boing.

A security researcher who decompiled the White House's new mobile app says it contains hidden GPS-tracking capabilities, weak security protections, and code loaded from an outside GitHub page, raising serious questions about privacy and cybersecurity.

And it gets even stranger. Apparently, the app is loading JavaScript from a random person's GitHub site for YouTube embeds.

— Read the rest

The post Security researcher tears apart White House app and finds a tracking and security nightmare appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tom the Dancing Bug: Dementia Donnie, in "Atrophy Case"

-> 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. — Read the rest

The post Tom the Dancing Bug: A peek into the skull of Dementia Donnie appeared first on Boing Boing.

At a certain point, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Whoever first said that must have been talking about Skyrim modding, because it feels more like wizardry at this point.

As the single most fan-modified game in history, Skyrim has been twisted into any number of unrecognizable shapes. — Read the rest

The post SkyParkour mod turns Skyrim into a better Assassin's Creed appeared first on Boing Boing.

Authorities say a Spokane County woman drove onto a sidewalk and allegedly chased a child riding an electric dirt bike while intoxicated before later wandering onto a stranger's property looking for eggs.

The Spokane County Sheriff's Office and court documents show the incident happened just outside Cheney city limits in the West Terrace neighborhood.

— Read the rest

The post Woman accused of drunken sidewalk chase after child on dirt bike appeared first on Boing Boing.

In this wonderfully self-aware 1990 episode of Tomorrow's World, presenters revisit the futuristic photographic gadgets they'd hyped throughout the 1980s—from floppy-disk digital cameras and 3D photo systems to autofocus lenses and disposable cameras. Marvel at which inventions actually survived contact with reality. — Read the rest

The post Remember when digital cameras stored photos on floppy disks? appeared first on Boing Boing.

Emerich Juettner spent nearly a decade printing one-dollar bills in his New York kitchen, and the U.S. Secret Service spent nearly a decade unable to catch him. According to Kaushik Patowary at Amusing Planet, Juettner's bills were terrible. Wrong paper, poor ink, blurry engraving, occasional spelling errors. — Read the rest

The post America's worst counterfeiter forged $1 bills for a decade appeared first on Boing Boing.

On August 5, 2026, a SpaceX rocket booster is going to smash into the moon at 5400 miles an hour. Bill Gray, an astronomer who notes that although astronomy is his profession, he is reluctant to call himself a professional astronomer as he lacks a PhD, used his own software to pinpoint the time and location of the impact. — Read the rest

The post A errant SpaceX rocket booster is going to smash into the moon appeared first on Boing Boing.

Goldie Hawn told Jimmy Kimmel about an emotional extraterrestrial encounter she says occurred when she was a teenage dancer in California, involving paralysis, high-frequency sounds, and silver beings with triangular heads communicating through vibration.

The Academy Award winner explained that about three months after she spoke to the sky, she was dancing at a theater one night and "got really sleepy," so she went to nap in the back of one of her fellow dancers' cars.

— Read the rest

The post Aliens or Rohypnol? Goldie Hawn describes extraterrestrial encounter appeared first on Boing Boing.

After Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that Pope Leo XIV supports Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, the pope responded with a calm reminder that the Catholic Church has consistently opposed nuclear weapons for decades.

Without responding to Trump's comments directly, Leo said in remarks transcribed by Vatican correspondent Michael Haynes, "I have already spoken from the first moment 'peace be with you.'

— Read the rest

The post Pope issues diplomatic version of "Whatchu talkin' about, Willis?" appeared first on Boing Boing.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with having a kink. If you want to strut around wearing comically massive fake breasts and fantasize about being a blonde-haired, sparkly-lipped valley girl, more power to you. The issue, rather, is with hypocrisy: which is exactly why Bryon Noem, husband of queer-hating, family-values-spouting ICE Barbie Kristi Noem is in hot water at the moment. — Read the rest

The post A revealing interview with Bryon Noem's domme appeared first on Boing Boing.

After Michael, can we agree that biopics have gotten a bit paint-by-numbers? They're great for squeezing easy cash out of fans of the famous faces they depict, but their plot has been refined to a cynical formula with plenty of space reserved for musical breaks. — Read the rest

The post Anthony Bourdain biopic a fresh take on the genre appeared first on Boing Boing.

I can't stop watching videos of a beaver named Tulip who is absolutely OBSESSED with bananas. Tulip came to Something Wild wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center when she was a tiny sick baby, after a kind human found her stranded and all alone after her home was destroyed. — Read the rest

The post Banana-obsessed beaver makes brilliant ASMR appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Save 63% with this lifetime subscription to PDF Reader Pro Premium for Windows.  

For a universal format dubbed "the gold standard," PDFs are still pretty difficult to work with. Sure, they're a lifesaver when it comes to printing, but try to edit one and you'll put yourself in a bad mood for the rest of the day. — Read the rest

The post Windows users can save 63% on this lifetime PDF editor subscription appeared first on Boing Boing.

Chris Nolan may be done making Batman movies, but you could be mistaken for thinking otherwise with how dark, gritty and full of black armor his upcoming The Odyssey movie is shaping up to be. Better-informed historians than I have torn into this movie for its lack of any real-world historical aesthetic. — Read the rest

The post Extended trailer for Christopher Nolan's Odyssey appeared first on Boing Boing.

Are humans just LLMs in meat suits? Arturo Nereu doesn't quite think so, but in a recent essay, he lays out the uncomfortable parallels between how large language models work and how he experiences his own thinking. The more he interacts with AI tools for research and development, the more he notices the overlap — and the more he wonders whether the comparison goes deeper than metaphor. — Read the rest

The post The case for thinking of yourself as a meat-based language model appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: The ultimate project management tool, Microsoft Project Professional 2024: Lifetime License for Windows, is available now for $54.97 (MSRP $1,129.99) until May 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Level up in the workplace with prime project management software from the GOAT. — Read the rest

The post Keep your projects on track with Microsoft Project Professional 2024 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Try to keep the idea of a white bear out of your head.

Daniel Wegner's 1987 experiment is now showing up in a critique of one of the most recognizable AI writing tics, the LinkedIn-saturated "It's not X, it's Y," by University of Guelph linguistics scholar Joshua Gonzales, writing for The Conversation. — Read the rest

The post Why the "It's not X, it's Y" AI tic backfires on its writers appeared first on Boing Boing.

A new paper in Nature Communications, covered by Ian Sample at the Guardian, claims a single 25mg dose may leave behind anatomical changes in the wiring itself, still visible 30 days on.

Researchers at UC San Francisco and Imperial College London recruited 28 psychedelic-naive adults and gave each of them a token 1mg primer, then a full 25mg session a month later. — Read the rest

The post One psilocybin dose may reshape brain wiring a month later appeared first on Boing Boing.

This Friday, May 8, Meta will turn off end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs. The feature, added as opt-in in 2023, is being yanked because almost nobody used it — or at least, that's the official explanation, according to MacRumors, citing a Meta spokesperson who told The Guardian: "Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months. — Read the rest

The post After Friday, Meta can read your Instagram DMs again appeared first on Boing Boing.

Newly released 3D scans of the RMS Titanic wreck site reveal a sprawling debris field where everything from delicate tableware to massive machinery lies scattered across the ocean floor, presenting an unusually clear picture of how the ship broke apart during its final descent. — Read the rest

The post Stunning new scans reveal RMS Titanic debris field in eerie detail appeared first on Boing Boing.

Jeff Bezos may be looking to unload his record-setting sailing yacht Koru after discovering that a 417-foot floating monument to excess is, inconveniently, too large to dock in many of the places billionaires like to show them off.

Koru is one of the largest sailing yachts in the world, and the largest that moves under sail only.

— Read the rest

The post When your yacht is too big for Monaco, Italy, and reality appeared first on Boing Boing.