The Ig Nobel Awards handed out last week proved something Your Friday Diversion has long held dear: Scientists are not stuffy.
September 13, 2019
Earlier this summer, the most exciting thing in Matty Roberts’s life was World of Warcraft. Then he posted an idea on social media and went to bed. He woke up, and it was quickly becoming reality. It was like Fyre Festival, but with aliens. Robert’s master plan: A raid of…
September 6, 2019
Grinders—body modification artists who specialize in biohacking—like to implant nonmedical stuff in their bodies. The latest is PegLeg, an implantable wireless file-sharing device the size of half a card deck that can securely hold data and stream content to connected…
August 23, 2019
The ultimate—and perhaps only—anticapitalist utopia in the desert, Burning Man has weathered many an identity crisis.
August 9, 2019
Besides a love of hockey, there are perhaps 2 chief stereotypes about Canadians: That they say “eh” a lot, and that they are extremely polite. As it turns out, they could be cut from the same cloth.
August 2, 2019
If you don’t feel think shower knobs should be standardized, perhaps you haven’t met Gabriella Paiella’s nemesis.
July 26, 2019
“It was like seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time at the Louvre,” gushed Lincoln Boehm, the Californian who found on a Queens sidewalk perhaps the only culinary delicacy not available to New Yorkers: an In-N-Out burger. The cult favorite find set off a viral firestorm of…
July 12, 2019
If you’ve never seen a research citation set to the music of Cyndi Lauper, here’s your chance.
July 5, 2019
The latest rage in augmented reality: Fake eye contact is on the way. Or, as Apple is calling it, “FaceTime Attention Correction.” It digitally fixes the position of your pupils, so it looks like you’re gazing straight at the person you’re talking to. It aims to fix a…
June 28, 2019
If you see a carrot on the menu at Arby’s fast food restaurants, be warned: That is not the vegetarian option. While its rivals embrace meatless burgers, the roast beef sandwich specialist has bucked the trend, defiantly beefing up its marketing campaign by inventing a…