FeedCity

These contact lenses give their wearers the ability to see infrared light, even with their eyes closed. Sign me up!!

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A collection of kooky-but-rideable bikes (treadmill bike, pull-up bike, etc.)

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Light pollution has lengthened birds’ days. “Their day is almost an hour longer. They start vocalizing about 20 minutes earlier in the morning and they stop vocalizing about 30 minutes later in the evening.”

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Shelby Talcott, reporting under the euphemistic headline “White House Fires CDC Director Over Vaccine Disagreements”: A showdown at the CDC culminated in the White House formally firing its director, Susan Monarez, on Wednesday night. Monarez was ousted earlier in the d...

Truly phenomenal video from Real Engineering about a genuinely phenomenal product. In my review of the AirPods Pro 2 in 2023 — a year after they originally shipped, when the cases were changed to use USB-C — I called them “the best single expression of Apple as a company today”. That remains true. AirPods exemplify everything that sets Apple apart: miniaturization, “it just works” ease of use, opinionated design (you get them in any color you want, so long as it’s white), and, most of all, joyfulness.

It occurs to me that Apple doesn’t brag enough about its engineering accomplishments these days. Under their previous CEO, they’d spend more time in product introduction explaining how things work, like a lecture in a 101 college course. I miss that. This Real Engineering video fills in those gaps.

Link: nebula.tv/videos/realengineering-the-hidden-design-of-the…

Hear a Prehistoric Conch Shell Musical Instrument Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years. “The shell may have had more range, and been more comfortable to play, with its mouthpiece, likely made of a hollow bird bone.”

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Kevin Kelly recently published a guide called “Everything I Know about Self-Publishing”. “The way I approach publishing today is with as much self-publishing as I can handle.”

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Yoah… the acting was quite good, and I liked the partly suspenseful editing, too. But the plot is bonkers and for this to be entertaining, it's not enough action for my tastes.

This week was another Homebrew Website Club here in Düsseldorf. Mark and Jochen came around. It was mostly chatting about IndieWeb and AI topics, but each of us also managed to get some work done on one or more of our projects.

I, for example, published a new photo journal entry. And I registered that site with a WebSub hub and send out WebSub notifications for this new post.

I’m also having fun creating these little animated AVIFs of our little group.

Atlas Obscura’s resident food and death reporter Sam O’Brien takes us to Smithfield, Virginia, where we meet a 120-year-old ham, and the people who love it.

 

All week, we’re featuring the stories behind a few of our favorite things – from ancient hams to mummified fingers. Want to tell us about your own favorite unusual object? Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message, record a voice memo and email it to us at hello@atlasobscura.com. We may air your story on a future episode!

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Werner Herzog doesn’t use a cell phone, but he has joined Instagram.

“The world’s biggest frogs build their own ponds” is art as a headline because it sounds like an adage your grandfather would tell while fishing one afternoon, but also oops the adage has now been corrupted by grind culture tech bros.

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The regulator set to take on primary crypto oversight is down to a single Commissioner, and new pro-crypto PACs focus on installing more Republicans in the midterms

“More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina.”

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Just wanting to let y’all know the cops have never had to chase a bear out of my ice cream shop, though I suppose that’s what an ice cream shop would say if they had had to have cops chase a bear out of it at some point.

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Are the AirPods Pro 3 coming soon? Here’s what the rumors say. “Apple is said to be testing a faster audio chip that drives ‘much better’ Active Noise Cancellation than the already‑impressive ‌AirPods Pro‌ 2 manage.”

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We were back in London for a few days and yesterday had a day of culture. First up: the brand new V&A East Storehouse museum in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park near Stratford, which opened on May 31st this year. This is a delightful new format for a museum. The building...

My guest today is Jia Tolentino. Jia is the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Paris Review, and more. She won a National Magazine Award for her work at the New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer since 2016. Her writing covers so many different topics, from Roe V. Wade to the internet to pop culture and music. And today, we’re going to talk about the 1996 pop hit “I Love You Always Forever” by Donna Lewis. 

For more, visit songexploder.net/jia-tolentino.

This hilarious commercial for a 90s mail-order punk CD is for a compilation with hardly any punk music on it.

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