geekosystem

In case you haven't had your fill of heartbreaking news this week -- looking at you, Oklahoma tornado -- it's been announced that Zach Sobiech lost his battle with cancer on Monday, May 20th. You may recall him as the young man that went viral late last year with his "Clouds" song, and recently with some help from Rainn Wilson and Soul Pancake. He was 18.

If you are going to do a deeply nerdy bit of fan art for a band, you could do a lot worse than They Might Be Giants.  David Mackenzie (@divmazie) has done the thankless and necessary work of charting the frequency of words as they appear in all 487 songs from TMBG's more than two decades worth of studio albums. Ever wanted to know how many times the word "rocket" is used in the band's songs? Now you don't need to guess.

The topic of the Alien movies came up in the office the other day, and I realized I probably haven't watched the first two since high school at the latest. I probably would have wasted hours of my life watch Aliens again, but now thanks to 1A4 Studios I don't have to. They've done a Speedrun version of Aliens that compresses it down to 60 seconds. Thanks! I remember Aliens as kind of boring.

Last night was the finale of this season of Doctor Who and we're now left wanting until the 50th Anniversary special airs on November 23rd. That's going to be a long six months for fans of the show, but thankfully the BBC seems to be dribbling out bits of information about the 50th. They've even released some behind-the-scenes stuff like this clip of Matt Smith and David Tennant having a chat about what it's like to be The Doctor.

Space food is the kind of thing that's fun to eat if you happen to be visiting NASA, but probably not something you want to have every day. For astronauts in space, they don't have much of a choice beyond freeze-dried and shelf-stabilized menu items. While Chris Hadfield was still in space Tested.com enlisted Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman, and chef Traci Des Jardins to help Hadfield come up with an original space recipe. The result: The Traci Spacey Burrito. Looks tasty.

NASA released this image today. It shows the storm that produced the devastating F4 tornado that hit Oklahoma yesterday minutes before the tornado touched down south of Oklahoma City. The image was taken with NASA's MODIS instrument on one of their Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites. You can donate $10 to the victims of the tornado by texting REDCROSS to 90999.

Remember that scene in Apollo 13 where the NASA engineers had to come up with a way for the astronauts to fit a square filter in a round hole using only things already on board the craft? The Mythbusters did that for Chris Hadfield when he was still on the International Space Station. They weren't fixing an air filter, but they took care of an important problem

Chris Hadfield had us riveted with his stream of updates from the International Space Station. We learned so much about life in space, not just from someone who had been there, but from someone while they were still there. We were a little sad to see Hadfield leave the ISS earlier this month, but we're glad he's back safely, and that he's still tweeting about every step of the readjustment process.

One of the great things about setting aside land as a sanctuary for one creature is that it helps to preserve a whole ecosystem full of plants and animals -- some of which we may not even know exist yet. Take for example the two new species of spider -- both among the world's tiniest -- that were just discovered on the grounds of a panda sanctuary in southwest China. One of these little guys averages less than a millimeter across. You could eat, like, 50 of them in your sleep and never even know it!

I'm sure there are a lot of you out there who utterly get, in a second nature sort of way, how algorithms work. I, however, am not among them. I mean, I know that algorithms are 'a way that computers sort information to figure things out,' but that's basically one step up from saying 'magic.' Lucky for me and the rest of the folks out there who don't quite get the what an algorithm is, Harvard computer scientist David J. Malan is is here to narrate a TEDEd cartoon on the subject that will save us all from ignorance.

Okay, so, don't freak out or anything, but Earth's atmosphere is escaping. Ridiculously slowly, I should say, and there's no concern that it'll happen at any point soon. We're talking billions of years before it's gone. MinuteEarth breaks it all down in this handy video, but it's pretty much a problem of our hydrogen and helium trying to get the heck out of here whenever they can.

I'm a big fan of "The Elements" by Tom Lehrer. You might not know the name, though you really should, but you've likely heard the song at some point. It's literally just Lehrer singing the elements on the periodic table while playing the piano. It's great, and no other song about the periodic table has ever come close to dislodging it from the cockles of my heart. Enter AsapSCIENCE's new periodic table song.

Fan fiction is something that I never understood. Why put all the effort into writing something that you can never have published because you don't own the rights? That's not a problem anymore. Amazon just announced Kindle Worlds -- a publishing platform that lets anyone publish content set in licensed worlds. I'm going to write so much Pretty Little Liars fan fiction.

Octopi are great swimmers, but they're pretty weird about how they do it. The cephalopods get around via a strange swimming technique known as sculling, which uses all eight of their rubbery legs. Unfortunately for researchers working to recreate this movement in robots, octopi around the world have failed to leave thorough notes on just how sculling works. That means a European team working to build a robotic octopus is trying to recreate the movement from scratch, with...oh, let's call it varying degrees of success. 

People are using 3D printing technology for all kinds of things -- even guns! Anjan Contractor thinks 3D printing can solve the world's hunger problem, and NASA is backing him with a $125,000 grant to build his food printer. Since 3D printing food requires that food to be built in layers, what better food to start with than pizza?

LinkedIn just updated their user agreement, and it brings some bad news for sex workers. The updated UA explicitly bans the use of LinkedIn to promote prostitution and escort services -- even in places where those things are legal. I don't know how widely LinkedIn is used by the sex worker community, but this is bound to upset some people.

So you've gone and caught em' all. Now what? Pokémon (maybe) are living things and you've crammed them into a tiny Poké Ball without a second thought like a savage. What's it really like in there? The real estate experts at Movoto broke it down in their latest infographic. It seems like they are either completely wonderful or horribly monstrous living conditions.

According to a recently published study in Nutrition Journal, frequency of candy consumption is not linked to obesity. If that's not a shocker, they also suggest it isn't linked to other health risks such as heart disease. In related news, there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that there is any correlation between interacting with water and getting wet. Feel free to eat as many Snickers in your bathtub as you deem fit, safe in the knowledge that you are the pinnacle of health and dryness.

Do you enjoy a good slice of melon with your breakfast, but can't stop wishing it was branded with the face of the world's most adored cartoon cat? Well, the weirdest problem in your life has just been solved, as a Japanese food company has just released a very special Furano melon with the visage of Hello Kitty etched into it, and it will only run you $50.

On the latest episode of True Facts, our favorite amateur biologist Ze Frank enlightens us on all matters related to one of nature's freakiest looking creatures -- the aye-aye. A lemur that looks like it traded in most of it's fur for a middle finger that looks like something you would pry off of a mummy and got the raw end of the deal, the aye-aye was long considered a rodent by scientists, due to its rodent-like teeth. The aye-aye, though, is a very specialized primate, which hunts by...you know what, just watch the video, I don't want to spoil it for you.

I have little to no idea what's going on with the Call of Duty: Ghosts reveal trailer. It's part PTSD-fueled drama, part nationalistic jingoism, and all Call of Duty. On the other hand, it doesn't have to be high art to sell a boatload of copies, and I'm pretty sure Activision's well aware of this particular fact. Guess we'll all find out come November 5th.

Well, the next-gen Xbox reveal event has come and gone. First things first: It's called the Xbox One. Also, Microsoft would very much like you to stop using every other device you have in your entertainment system. As made clear by the event, the Xbox One is definitely being marketed as The One Device to Rule Them All, but I'm not sure I buy into all the hype.

Today marks the official announcement of the new Xbox 720 Durango Infinity... you know what, the technical name is kind of immaterial, and we'll all have an official one for it in just a few hours when the big reveal kicks off at 1 pm ET/10 am ET. Join us for the launch and watch the live stream to learn more about the latest console you can't afford to buy but probably will anyway.

A study released this week finds that not all aggression associated with gaming is created equal. Reporting their findings in the latest issue of the journal Mass Communication and Society, researchers from the University of Connecticut found that games in which the villains are clearly human may make players more aggressive than those where the player is battling hordes of inhuman monsters.