geekosystem

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.

If you're not great at doing math in your head, you're in pretty good company around these parts. In general, too -- an estimated 20% of otherwise healthy adults regularly struggle to do basic arithmetic without showing their work. Don't give up hope, though! A new treatment being studied at Oxford University could make you better at doing math in your head for up to six months at a time -- and all you have to do is put on what looks like a steampunk gimp mask and let someone deliver electrical shocks to your brain!

On a recent expedition, researchers from Imperial College London discovered an ancient fossil from Earth's cambrian period that had never been seen before. The long lost relative of animals like lobsters and scorpions had one clear connection to both of those animals -- a set of arms ending in scissor-like pincers. The appendages instantly reminded team members of the iconic character of Edward Scissorhands, and thus, Kooteninchela deppi -- the first fossil creature named in honor of actor Johnny Depp -- was born.

For some species of social spiders, it seems the family that lives together, kills together. A recent study in the journal Animal Behavior shows that young spiders who live with alongside their older siblings grow up big and strong, at least in part because they're dining on the leftovers brought home by their older siblings.

Last night, National Review Online writer Kevin Williamson lived out our collective dreams and tossed the phone of a fellow audience member into the wings of a small outdoor theater. Part of us wants to call Williamson a hero, but polity brings us up short on that point. The cure for rudeness shouldn't be more rudeness, and grabbing someone's phone is likely to land you in some legal trouble or a fistfight, depending on the demeanor of the person whose phone you just threw. It's just bad behavior all the way around, and though it's tempting to, we can't condone any of it.

Sure, the Watson Supercomputer is pretty great at Jeopardy!, but IBM thinks it's time to branch out. They're going to be giving software developers access to Watson with a goal to "launch an ecosystem where Watson is a service and you build applications around it," said CEO Ginni Rometty. Could Watson soon challenge -- and probably dominate -- Siri?

There are few things more amusing than anti-piracy advocates being caught, well, pirating. It's the best kind of hypocrisy, if that's a thing. That's the situation Canadian anti-piracy company Canipre found themselves in this week after it was revealed that they totally didn't receive permission to use a bunch of the images associated with their website. Oops.

People really seem to enjoy music, so Google figured they'd get a little more involved in the music scene. They just announced the cumbersomely named Google Play Music All Access. They were pretty sparse with details, but All Access appears to be for all intents and purposes Google's version of Spotify.

In a move that's going to have them receiving curses from a very vocal minority of people, Nintendo's now going to profit from user-generated videos that people upload to YouTube. As in, all those really sweet Let's Play videos that people upload to show off their wicked skills? Yeah, Nintendo's going to get the whole pie on that, not just a slice.

Batman: Arkham Origins is set to launch October 25th, 2013, and this recently dropped teaser shows off some impressive CG, a grizzled Batman, and a really, really cool take on Deathstroke. Between you and me, Deathstroke's definitely in my top five when it comes to DC, so I'm pretty excited that he's been getting a lot of love lately. Young Justice, Arrow, and even his own ongoing for a bit there in the New 52 come to mind. This teaser him battling with a younger Batman is just gravy.

Like so many of you, I've lost count of the nights I've found myself sleepless, lost in thought, wondering if the universe will ever see fit to grace our small, grey lives with a follow-up to Shaq-Fu. Well, that which we didn't dare dream has come to pass, brothers and sisters. Shaquille O'Neal's media company, Mine O'Mine, has registered the trademark for a little something called "Shaqfighter." Let us give thanks.

Well, folks, EA's finally gone and dropped their Online Pass program. In case you weren't aware that this was a thing, the publisher was essentially holding multiplayer and similar video game features behind a gate that was meant to help promote anything but used game sales. That's dead and gone, at least going forward. That said, the fact that EA's officially discontinued the Online Pass so close to Microsoft's next-gen console reveal is worrisome.

With all the hubbub surrounding the landing of the Curiosity rover, folks tend to forget that it's not the only device operating on the planet. The Opportunity rover's still kicking up there, for example, and it's hauling butt to get the job done. It's been hauling so much butt, in fact, that on Thursday it broke NASA's 40-year-old record for total distance traveled on a world other than Earth.

Today at 12:00 PM EDT J.J. Abrams and the cast of Star Trek Into Darkness will have a Google Hangout with astronauts, including Chris Cassidy, one of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station who recently went on a space walk to fix an ammonia leak on the station. You can watch the whole thing right here, and we even have the details on how you can try to get a question in.

NASA had a press conference earlier today where they announced that the planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has gone into safe mode. It doesn't look great for the mission at the moment, because when engineers brought the craft back to normal mode they found one of its reaction wheels is dead. It's the second of the craft's four wheels to die, which is bad because it needs a minimum of three.

The Sun is ramping up towards its peak activity in its 11-year-cycle, and it's doing so in a big way. In one 24-hour period, the Sun has erupted with three progressively more intense X-class solar flares from the same region, each with its own coronal mass ejection. The CMEs are not heading in the direction of Earth, but could affect some spacecraft.

One of the issues that people have with J.J. Abrams on both Star Wars and Star Trek is the idea that he's going to end up confusing the two somehow. What, exactly, does that mean? It's hard to say, but Official Comedy's taken a stab at what they think must be going on with J.J. Abrams' Star Trek Wars.

It wouldn't be an inaccurate statement to say that the prospect of a Zombieland show over at Amazon initially piqued the interest of pretty much everyone here. Like, the movie, but a show? Sign us up! Or so we once foolishly thought. That was before the pilot dropped and shattered every dream we had about seeing Columbus and the gang in a new series. Amazon Studios apparently agreed, as they've officially passed on the show.

Our buddies over at Slacktory recut the 1971 Steven Spielberg movie Duel, replacing most of the audio with that of a driver's ed filmstrip from 1949. The result is pure genius, as well as a great way to watch pretty much all the important parts of the movie in just under four minutes.

Yesterday, we were almost giddy over the news that you can now green screen Arrested Development's Tobias Funke (doctor, actor, and the world's first analrapist) into any video through the promotional magic of the new InsertMeAnywhere tool. We were so excited at this development, though, that we actually may have missed one of the other awesome uses for InsertMeAnywhere -- putting the many faces of Tobias Funke to work in video games. Capcom didn't miss a beat, though, and their supercut of Tobias guest-starring in a number of classic Capcom games has officially won Tobias Funke green screens. Well, it's won Round One, anyway.

Using just LEGO and Bionicle pieces, builder Robiwan Kenobi has crafted the LEGO answer to any problem -- the LEGO Swiss Army knife. The contraption features a LEGO blade, saw, toothpick and what looks to be a screwdriver arm, all of which fold in and out of the body, just like a real Swiss Army knife. The only thing it won't do is actually cut anything, but come one -- how often do you use a Swiss Army knife for that?

There are disadvantages to factory farming. The crowded conditions lead to health risks for the animals. As a result, they're given antibiotics which can lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Oh, and also sometimes there's foam that makes pools of hog poop explode. Farmers don't know the cause of the foam, but they think they may have a solution, but it's not a very good one.

In an embarrassing turn of events, an Australian politician was injured during a run-in with a kangaroo. While the kangaroo that attacked Canberra politician Shane Rattenbury was reportedly just spooked by its unexpected encounter with a human, we can't help but wonder if the menacing marsupial didn't have loftier political goals in mind.

Do you have your own bodyguard? No? Well this flower sure does. It's a Lady's Slipper orchid, and it's on the brink of extinction. Le Jardin de Yorkshire exhibition will be displaying one of the rare flowers, and a team of botanical experts/flower mercenaries known as the Cypripedium Committee have agreed to protect it.