Headlines from August 9, 2012
- We’ve essentially put a monster truck on Mars. A team of 20 drivers can’t wait for their chance to operate Curiosity.
- Roundup of Curiosity camera pics and resources. #mars
- Study finds athletes who travel more than five timezones to compete double their chances of illness.
- Earthquake clusters like the one that began Tuesday in Southern California aren’t uncommon to the region, just infrequent. #earth
- Three new fossil findings offer compelling evidence of evolution within our genus.
- Lady Gaga arrested for civil disobedience after winning Nobel Peace Prize. A timeline of future events.
- Q&A on the set of freak shark attacks that inspired Jaws. #nature
- Why Harry Reid is telling the truth about Romney’s tax evasion—and why it takes an intelligence expert to figure that out.
- DC man “shocked” to receive a Sig Sauer SIG716 assault rifle instead of the 39-inch LED TV he ordered through Amazon.
- Beck partners with McSweeney’s to release his new album exclusively as sheet music.
- There’s no way to control your oven temperature, and there’s no reason you should worry about it. #food
- Take note of the top 1,000 books owned by libraries—especially no. 15. via
- Aleppo becomes Syria’s focal point and faces a crippling stalemate.
- Shadow war between Israel and Iran sees return to “the black arts of the cold war.”
- The world’s oldest bank took five centuries to accumulate its wealth—and three years to gamble it away. On the recent demise of Tuscany’s Siena.
- Bob Hoskins to retire from acting after diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
- Only 47 percent of Irish are religious—a 22-point drop from 2005.
- Introducing the chork, a chopstick-fork combo that took two years to build.
- International Institute for Species Exploration lists top 10 new species.
- Stories from the night that the Cleveland Indians disastrously offered 10-cent cups of beer.
- Reading notes on 10 of the English language’s most difficult books to read.
- Rehearsal tapes of Dylan rediscovering his catalog while preparing to tour with the Grateful Dead. via
- Mitch Hedberg’s wife on the great, late comedian’s joke-writing process. #video
- Life with body-hackers, grinders, wannabe cyborgs. #longreads
- New Facebook extension replaces friends’ baby pictures with bacon photos.