Motherboard

Perhaps you too are first imagining this thing clutching your face, maybe slithering down your throat, and, oh, I dunno, taking control of your body to do its awful soft robot bidding. You might hurl it against a wall in defense or crush it with your boot or run over it a bunch of times, but it survives because it has no actual hard skeleton, just tiny chambers of air that deflate and inflate in different patterns to do things like walk and slither.

Is it better to know or not to know? What are the most valuable qualities of knowledge, and how does its acquisition justify the various ills it occasionally visits upon the world and its people? And what is the deal with Mars?

The raid on the Occupy stronghold of Zucotti Park left laptops smashed and wifi towers missing. Questions about the NYPD’s aggression may come down to lawsuits over property damage.

Fewer sunny days and a warming climate are making ladybugs off the coast of the Netherlands turn from black to red. Mammals might adapt to a warming climate by, say, losing fur over generations or developing more sweat glands. Fish might adapt by moving to deeper, cooler water. Ladybugs apparently change color.

Nineties Korn anthems be damned, it turns out that men aren’t only thinking about sex all day. According to Terri Fisher, a psychology professor at Ohio State, college-age men indeed do think about sex more often than women do. But they also happen to think about food and sleeping as well—so there.

It can’t be very hard for Bertrand Piccard to explain to his family why he wants to fly around the world with only sunlight for fuel. In the 1930s, his grandfather, Auguste Piccard, a physicist and inventor, applied his excitement and interest in ballooning to designing a high-flying balloon attached to a pressurized aluminum gondola. The first of its kind, Auguste’s flying machine completed a record-breaking climb more than 50,000 feet into the air, gathering valuable data about the Earth’s upper atmosphere along the way. Fitting that Bertrand, for what it’s worth, defeated the notorious Sir Richard Branson by becoming the first man to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon in 1999.

Red Hook is pretty much Javeliner Tom van Buskirk’s favorite part of New York, so the duo, makers of quite-fine post-neon freeform electronic music, picked it to mic and sample for a new track. “What makes this place is great that there are no trains. Anyone here is either working here or taking a bus or riding a bike to get to a train to access the rest of the city,” says van Buskirk in a video about the project’s birthplace and home. And so they go out rattling chains, mic’ing lapping waves and workers doing worker stuff, and finding a bunch of little unexpected sound sources. Then, they make a track from it all in the trunk of their car. Here is it is:

If the thought of landmines evokes images of war-torn death-scapes (or the haunting boxes of a Windows 3.1 computer game) Brett Van Ort has some photographs you should see.

Creator Aaron Koblin heads up the Data Arts Team at the Google Creative Lab and he’s been behind some of the most exciting and innovative online projects of recent times. His collaborations with director Chris Milk have given the world the browser-based music video The Wilderness Downtown, the collective, evolving tribute to Johnny Cash, The Johnny Cash Project, and the dynamic, surreal interactive film 3 Dreams of Black created for the song “Black” off Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi album ROME.

Were it not for the fact that Cyber Monday takes place online, and that it enables businesses of all sizes to make some bank on America’s annual consumer binge ritual, it would probably be just another addendum to the depraved human behavior inspired by the pursuit of inane material possession. But consumerism doesn’t have to be a vacuous (and ultimately self-destructive) upward redistribution of wealth. If capitalism is to survive in the United States, perhaps it can thrive, through the internet, on a ‘Peer to Peer’ system of exchange.