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Most people consider mushrooms to be the small, ugly cousins of the plant kingdom, but theirs is a surprisingly beautiful and wonderful world waiting to be explored. Steve Axford shoots mushrooms from around the globe in addition to the ones found in his native Australia. Martin Pfister lights them from behind with tiny LEDs. Vyacheslav Mishchenko shoots mushrooms along with various creatures. And time-lapse photography shows the eerie power of the fruiting bodies bursting through the soil.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:37 PM PST - 19 comments

"Binzel suspects that Pluto’s “heart,” particularly its left ventricle region, called Sputnik Planitia, was created by an impact with another object in the Kuiper belt, an asteroid belt near the edge of the solar system. That impact gouged out a piece of the surface of Pluto, making the crust very thin at the point of impact. Underground water, kept warm by Pluto’s radioactivity, then flooded this area of thin crust like water in a blister. This formed the extra mass that caused Pluto to reorient itself so the impact zone faced away from Charon." [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:08 PM PST - 22 comments

single link youtube?
posted by hot_monster at 7:23 PM PST - 55 comments

German Lopez reports for Vox on recent research about methods for addressing bias and prejudice. "As much as it might seem like a lost cause to understand the perspectives of people who may qualify as racist, understanding where they come from is a needed step to being able to speak to them in a way that will help reduce the racial biases they hold."
posted by zeusianfog at 7:06 PM PST - 74 comments

Tonight, the National Book Foundation will honor and celebrate some of the year's best American literature at the 2016 National Book Awards ceremony. Hosted by Larry Wilmore, the event will be livestreamed, or you can follow on Twitter at #NBAwards. If you can't wait for bookish goodness, the recording of last night's readings by the finalists is available; Young People's Literature finalist Nicola Yoon called it one of the most inspiring nights of her life. This season hasn't been without controversy, however: the various ways the awards reflect the current state of publishing have been criticized but also defended.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 3:53 PM PST - 9 comments

Public In/Formation

for decades. They have raucously debated how to accommodate all kinds of online behavior, and have developed tools for promoting free speech and open access while discouraging illegal activity and shielding patrons and staff from offensive images. They have tested policies and procedures — time limits, download caps, and content filters — for ensuring that resources are shared fairly. The information commons is messy, and negotiating such issues is part of living in a robust democracy. What works in the public library can work on the street.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:15 PM PST - 9 comments

Isaiah Lopaz is an American artist living in Berlin. After years of racist comments, he printed some of them on t-shirts and asked a friend to photograph him wearing them around Berlin.
posted by frimble at 11:26 AM PST - 57 comments

The 15-year-old legal proceedings against author Michael Peterson for the alleged murder of his wife, Kathleen, constitute one of the more notorious and extensively documented criminal cases of our time. It has provided fodder for two Dateline segments, a Lifetime movie, an expansive documentary film series, and dozens of true-crime television episodes and podcasts. It is lurid, tinged with drugs and alcohol, replete with an ongoing extramarital affair with a prostitute, and soaked in blood—lots of blood. It also spawned a criminal defense theory that sounds like a punch line: The owl did it.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:14 AM PST - 67 comments

Hell Freezes Over: Microsoft Joins Linux Foundation as a Platinum Member. In another twist that 2016 has to offer, the closed-source software giant has allied with the foundation, 15 years after former CEO Ballmer called it "cancer".
posted by bodywithoutorgans at 9:39 AM PST - 57 comments

Three warships sunk in the Battle of the Java Sea in 1942 have largely disappeared from the sea bed. [more inside]
posted by Pendragon at 9:30 AM PST - 51 comments

To coincide with the release of the NES Classic, Nintendo has published a small trove of NES instruction manual scans. (Make sure to click "printed manual.") via
posted by griphus at 8:22 AM PST - 36 comments

Today’s American fascist youth is neither the strapping Aryan jock-patriot nor the skinheaded, jackbooted punk: The fascist millennial is a pasty nerd watching shitty meme videos on YouTube, listening to EDM, and harassing black women on Twitter. Self-styled “nerds” are the core youth vanguard of crypto-populist fascist movements. And they are the ones most likely to seize the opportunities presented by the Trump presidency.

Willie Osterweil identifies how "The myth of the bullied white outcast loner is helping fuel a fascist resurgence."
posted by SansPoint at 8:03 AM PST - 216 comments

It was twenty years ago today
Michael Jordan taught the toons to play
They've never gone out of style
Even though we thought we’d wait a while
So may I introduce to you
The act you've known for all these years
Bugs et cetera vs. the Monstars again
posted by Etrigan at 6:52 AM PST - 28 comments

Google's "AI Experiments" include several different ways that you can use machine learning to brighten up your life. Get Giorgio Cam to rap to you about pictures you take with your phone or webcam. Sick of CAPTCHAs? Turn the tables and see if the computer can guess your drawing with Quick, Draw! Or satisfy a need you never knew you had and make a totally sick drum beat out of fart noises, camera shutters and tiger roars with Infinite Drum Machine.
posted by dashdotdot dash at 6:17 AM PST - 14 comments

Noel Meek writes about Gaelic psalm singing and includes several recordings from the 1970s and 80s. A precentor sings the opening line from a hymn, and then the congregation joins in, improvising on the melody. With the decline of the Scottish Gaelic language the tradition is fading and lives primarily on the islands of Lewis and Harris in the Hebrides. Here is a video from Back Free Church on Lewis and a BBC radio documentary on Gaelic psalm singing by Ken Hyder.
posted by Kattullus at 5:42 AM PST - 5 comments

He's a god, he's a man, he's a ghost, he's a guru. From the amazing world of Deviant Art comes DrFaustusAU (previously) who has created an almost pitch perfect mashup of Nick Cave's classic song and Dr Seuss. We'll soon be whispering his name through this disappearing land.
posted by h00py at 4:49 AM PST - 14 comments