This Horrific Mannequin Head Camera Wants to Make VR Porn More Intimate

Virtual reality porn production company VR Bangers on Monday unveiled its “POV Head Rig,” a disembodied mannequin head with cameras for eyes that the company says will help make VR porn "more intimate and emotional."

Abject horror, not intimacy, is the first thing that comes to mind when I look into its hollow eyes, but it's an interesting concept. Cameras on the front, back, and top of the head record everything the actor does to its eager noggin. The porn star cradles the androgynous head while they do their thing, whispering sweet words into the binaural microphones in its ears. The result, VR Bangers said, is a more immersive experience.

There are a lot of jokes to be made here about head, but this is a family blog.

This thing was deemed too weird for the prudes at CES 2017, CTO Boris Smirnoff claims in a press release. They took it to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo instead. He writes in the release, sans irony:

“It’s easy to think that performers will be able to overcome all the odd positions and constraints of filming content so it looks pristine on a virtual screen, but the fact is, the more we can help our models get the most out of their play space, the better our content will continue to be and the real winner in this line of advancements is always our fans,” Smirnoff said. He adds that there’s a “much warmer and more intimate emotional attachment between the performer and the recording device” if you can stroke and whisper to the camera as if it were your audience.

Image: VR Bangers

Virtual reality porn actors do have to overcome a lot more awkwardness than the good ol’ fashioned 2D porn actors. 360 degree rigs, like the one Motherboard visited behind-the-scenes of a shoot, can be heavy and hard to work around. Holding a head sounds a lot easier on the artist.

Whether it rows your boat or not, virtual reality porn is inspiring. The industry is its own microcosm of innovation and the growing pains. It’s carving out new territory for virtual technology, with potential for sex education, advances in automation, and has its own special kinds of legal battles. The adventurous soul can even get a big whiff of someone’s junk through the magic of VR.

It’s beautiful and we’re all going to hell for it, but why not breathe deep and hold our disembodied heads close on the way down.

from This Horrific Mannequin Head Camera Wants to Make VR Porn More Intimate

A Cotton Candy Machine Helps These Scientists Grow Human Cells

Biological engineers are developing a method for regrowing human tissue that’s straight out of a macabre carnival.

Hak-Joon Sung and Leon Bellan at Vanderbilt University developed a novel method of spinning capillary-sized polymer fibers out of a cotton candy machine, as part of their work in growing artificial human tissue.

Their work focuses on rebuilding damaged tissue in the heart, brain, blood vessels or other parts of the body, the scientists explain in a National Science Foundation video. One of the biggest hurdles in developing viable tissue is making the scaffolding on which cells live. Capillaries, the smallest type of blood vessel which are 10 times thinner than a human hair, are that support structure for blood throughout our bodies. Cells stick close to those capillaries—within a hair’s distance or less—in order to get oxygen or nutrients.

The size of fibers flung out of a cotton candy machine are very close to the size of capillaries, the researchers found. Polymer fibers spin out of the machine, which are then hardened in a hydrogel, a jelly-like material, and dissolved away. What’s left are capillary-like chambers, which they can grow cells around.

Using a circus appliance to grow human tissue sounds like horror fodder, but being able to build such delicate structures artificially is a step toward grown-on-demand regenerative organs and tissue.

from A Cotton Candy Machine Helps These Scientists Grow Human Cells

Why Do Some Men Have Such Big Butts?

Trump boarded the Marine 1 helicopter on Thursday, and on his way in, a photographer snapped the photo that shook the world:

When the hair slim but the booty thicc >><<><><><<<<>>><<< yc January 27, 2017

That, I'm sure you'll agree, is a fairly thicc booty, which is not something I see on a man often. As Select/All noted, the photo took the internet by storm, with the viral joke eliciting a mix of disgust and delight.

Why? We live in a culture that fetishizes women with big butts in music videos that proclaim that we love them and cannot lie about it. There are entire exercise regimens aimed at giving women bigger butts. For men, however, the standards are different. We appreciate a man's butt when it is firm or sculpted, but rarely do we see or celebrate a man's butt for being big.

As a result of it being more rare in men, and perhaps more culturally associated with an effeminate shape, the internet is full of dudes who are stressed out about the size of their butts. They band together for support on bodybuilding forums and Quora, asking one another about hormonal imbalances and the size of their pelvic bones.

Is this purely a social construction, or are large butts on men truly more rare than they are on women? How is a booty born?

Let us examine some of the possible reasons for why a man might have a big butt.

Maybe he's born with it

The shape of a butt is defined by the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus muscles, as well as the fat surrounding these muscles. Women tend to store fat in their hips and lower body thanks to hormones and evolution, preparing females for childbearing. Higher levels of oestrogen make fat storage efficient in preparation for pregnancy, as women carry 6 to 11 percent more body fat than men. Because of these differences in where the sexes store fat, a man is more likely to be overweight with a flat ass and round stomach, while a woman might see it all go to her hips. But even this is dependent on each person’s individual genetics.

Hormones and genetics play the biggest roles in the natural size of one’s booty. Broadly investigated the “sex makes your butt bigger” myth (which was debunked, so we can rule this cause out), and found that estrogen is what would stimulate your butt to increase in size or change your body composition. There’s not a ton of literature out there about why some men have bigger butts than others. It’s most likely the reason why some women do: Everyone’s body shape is different.

Maybe he does a lot of squats

Strength training can make a butt more defined, but fitness trainer Tony Gentilcore told me that yes, it’s most likely genetic.

“Some people picked the right parents with regards to having well developed areas of the body without having to work for them,” he said, when presented with the photo above. Fitness coach Kellie Davis recommends a full glute-training program to build a better butt, including deadlifts, glute bridges, hip thrusts and of course the trusty squat. These might highlight, but ultimately can't fundamentally alter the butt you're working with.

Maybe his posture sucks

Certain postures can minimize or accentuate a person's butt. As noted by user tpt on the Bodybuilding.com message board, and as you can see in the image below, the Anterior Pelvic Tilt, with the butt jutting out and chest puffed forward, will definitely make a butt look bigger than it naturally is.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Some photos and videos of Trump make it look like he doesn't have the best posture in the world, but there are many posture problems that are just as likely to make one’s butt tuck in as opposed to pop out. Also, this would still not tell us how much butt one is working with in a resting position.

Maybe it’s the angles

Gentilcore’s skeptical of the way this photo was shot. He calls it "a perfect storm scenario,” where the camera position, fit of the pants, and lighting collided to create a butt that seems bigger than it actually is. There's another photo of Trump golfing that would contradict this theory, but unfortunately, there aren't many more photos of Trump's butt that we are aware of. With limited evidence, we can't prove that POTUS is thicc, but haven't found compelling evidence that he isn't.

*

His butt could be the result of any combination of the explanations above, but common sense says he was just born with it, and that it caught everyone's eye because it is actually more rare in men than women for evolutionary reasons.

To be absolutely clear, Motherboard is pro butts, in all their shapes and sizes. There's no such thing as a wrong, bad, or ugly butt. The only thing that matters is that you're not an asshole.

from Why Do Some Men Have Such Big Butts?

Nintendo: Play the Switch While You Poop

Nintendo knows exactly how you’re going to use your shiny new $300 Switch. You’re gonna take it into the shitter and you're going to play it until your legs fall asleep.

New European TV ads for the Switch, the company’s newest handheld gaming device that’s set to launch in March, shows a guy playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with his friends while taking a crap. We see his hairy man-ankles first, pants around his feet, and then full glorious view of him rocking and rolling on the throne, face planted in the screen.

It might seem shocking now, but Nintendo’s reaching out to its base with this one, calling back to the Wavebird wireless controller for GameCube ad from 2002. And if you’ve never spent hours of your childhood in the toilet clutching a Game Boy while your parents yell at you to get out, you’re lying.

from Nintendo: Play the Switch While You Poop

The Alt-Right Is Trying to Crowdfund Twitter's Destruction

Image: WeSearchr

WeSearchr, a crowdfunding platform for the so-called "alt-right," is threatening to sue Twitter for discrimination against conservatives and violations of antitrust regulation.

“Twitter hates us, folks. And they're $#@!ing us. It's time to $#@! them back,” WeSearchr states on the funding page. “We're going to sue Twitter for its discrimination against conservatives, its censorship, its violation of antitrust regulation, and for everything else that we can. We're going to make Twitter the next Gawker.”

WeSearchr is a crowdfunding platform, only instead of funding products, users can fund investigations into questions they want answered. It was founded by Charles C. Johnson, who has a history of incorrectly doxxing innocent people including a woman he thought was “Jackie” in the UVA rape case and journalists covering the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. in 2015. He was permanently banned from Twitter in 2015 for suggesting his followers “take out” civil rights activist Deray McKesson.

Suggested WeSearchr investigations into the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, and a woman who a user claims set a Trump supporter’s hair on fire make it clear the site has a far-right bent. Once an investigation is "solved," the money raised is split between the person who originally asked for the investigation, people who helped provide information, and WeSearchr. For the Twitter lawsuit, contributions will be treated as shares: The more users donate, the more they can get back if WeSearchr wins.

“Twitter has a censorship problem and they routinely discriminate against white males and Trump supporters,” Johnson told Motherboard in an email. “That behavior is illegal. It's tantamount to denying a lunch counter to a black man. Their application of their terms of service is vague.”

Ken White, attorney at Brown White & Osborn LLP and blogger on First Amendment issues, disagrees.

"WeSearchr’s claims of censorship and discrimination are frivolous," he told me in an email. "Twitter may be 'censoring' in a colloquial way, but it’s a private platform and not governed by the First Amendment. It’s free to kick people off for speech it doesn’t like unless doing so runs afoul of a particular federal or state statute, and WeSearchr hasn’t cited a plausible relevant one."

As for antitrust accusations, White said those are misplaced as well.

"Antitrust law is very complicated and it’s pointless to speculate about what WeSearchr thinks it means by citing it," he said. "But antitrust law doesn’t say 'it’s illegal to be a big company that dominates a field.' Generally it restricts anti-competitive practices, and WeSearchr has never credibly identified any."

Twitter suspended the WeSearchr account on January 23, after it posted a call for information on the protestor who punched noted white supremacist Richard Spencer in the head on inauguration day.

However, there's still a lot of activity around the #SueTwitter hashtag, and WeSearchr is also soliciting funds on one of the alt-right's new favorite social networks, Gab:

Image: Screencap

At the time of publication WeSearchr has raised over $3,000 for the lawsuit. It hopes to hit a goal of $250,000 in the next 1,094 days. WeSearchr claims to be independently pursuing funding for the lawsuit from “wealthy patrons.”

“The Twitter Rules prohibit targeted abuse and harassment, and we will take action on accounts violating those policies,” a Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard in an email. I followed up with Twitter to ask if it hates white males and if it's trying to "$#@!" them, but have yet to hear back.

Johnson has a history of litigious behavior. He previously tried to sue Gawker for defamation and St. Louis County Court for Michael Brown’s juvenile arrest records.

“It may be a mistake to evaluate WeSearchr’s actions as serious legal propositions as opposed to trolling, theater, and Trump-era ally-pleasing bluster,” White said. “Anyone can sue anyone for anything, but I see no indication that WeSearchr’s lawsuit—if they filed one, rather than merely scamming obliging suckers—would be anything other than frivolous and potentially sanctionable.”

from The Alt-Right Is Trying to Crowdfund Twitter's Destruction

Trump Is Taking Action Without Sharing Basic Information With the Public

On Friday evening, Donald Trump issued his first Executive Order as president, a move “minimizing the financial burden” of the Affordable Care Act. Nearly three days later, the text of the order hadn’t been posted to the official White House website or to the Federal Register, an official record of the actions of the executive branch and its agencies.

Other official actions that should be on the site—a transcript of Trump’s speech to the CIA, a memo issued by Reince Priebus ordering regulatory freezes, Sean Spicer’s first press briefing—have also not been posted. The only information on the “Briefing Room” section of this public resource is a transcript of Trump’s inaugural address.

Just before this article was published, the first Executive Order had been posted, after Motherboard asked for comment on this story. The administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"To not do it is either a sign of being unprepared or not thinking it’s important"

We know these actions have been taken, because members of the media on the White House press list are receiving official notices and official text for the orders, speeches, and Executive Orders. White House visitor access records are “being updated,” as are financial disclosures. Instead of posting this information publicly, it’s being sent to the press directly, not to the people.

“When the White House doesn’t post these things they’re failing to reach out to all Americans and give them information,” Alex Howard, Deputy Director of the open government accountability group Sunlight Foundation, told me. “They’re depending on emails to the press, and that’s simply not enough.”

When a president issues an Executive Order, it’s standard protocol for it to go on the White House website as well as the Federal Register, so that the actual text of the order can be reviewed by the public. Under Obama, this happened immediately.

1st @POTUS tweet signed DJT https://t.co/EuySYmVrPk For transparency, @realDonaldTrump tweets should also be signed: https://t.co/0yX2DQ4HW7 https://t.co/vCKuPCiCuF
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) January 23, 2017

Presumably, the Trump administration plans to update these sections eventually. Some growing pains are to be expected with a new administration, but this is the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, not a move-fast-and-break-things startup.

Howard said that, as one of the Obama administration’s earliest efforts, the website’s relaunch in 2009 represents digital infrastructure meant to serve the public. As Obama signed executive orders on day one of his presidency, they hit the website in text form, easily accessible to anyone with internet. They rebuilt the website using open-source content management system called Drupal, which remains in place today. Obama didn’t take his CMS with him. Trump’s team could easily insert text in these blank spaces, but hasn’t—either by outright neglect, or incompetence.

“I think it’s fair to say at this point, that after a couple of months of transition, they should have been able to hit the ground running,” Howard told me. “We’re not talking about redesigning the website. We’re talking about publishing text to the internet using Drupal. That is really easy to do. To not do it is either a sign of being unprepared or not thinking it’s important.”

Such information is particularly important considering the information environment the administration is operating in. Spicer held his first press conference on Saturday and told reporters that Trump’s inauguration was the most well-attended in history, something that appears to be blatantly untrue according to photos of the event. Meanwhile, Trump is spreading information directly through the press but continues to vilify them, calling into question their credibility with his base. Trump and the National Parks Service have also deleted tweets, a violation of public records law.

List of corporate execs meeting at the WH this morning with Pres Trump: pic.twitter.com/34pGyjC1ZU
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) January 23, 2017

In lieu of plain-text documents and releases on their own website, the Trump administration is using social media to perform what Howard calls “transparency theater.” The result of all of this is that there is no one, unified place where people can learn about the goings-on of their Federal Government.

A photo of someone signing a document is not transparency if everyone can’t see what the document itself says.

from Trump Is Taking Action Without Sharing Basic Information With the Public

Behold a Lego Train Traveling Through a Homemade Underwater Tunnel

Please take a mental break to enjoy this video of a toy train running through a miniature world with its own tiny underwater tunnel surrounded by fish.

Youtuber and Lego nut Bananenbuurman built the path out of 18 meters of Lego track, working on this thing for years (he uploaded the first “making-of” video in 2015).

To make the railway, he turned a perfectly charming garden into a mud pit, carving out sections of the path with water. A tube laid in a pond and tarped up in blue becomes the see-through tunnel, complete with goldfish. Cameras attached to the top and sides capture the first-person POV.

Bananenbuurman’s done just about every stunt with a Lego train that you can imagine, including running that bad boy in a vertical loop, ramming it through a Minions cake for some reason, and smashing it into glass.

The locomotive eventually stalls, and as the tunnel springs a leak, floodwaters drown the train. But don’t dwell on that part. Just watch it wind its way through a miniature landscape, and try not to think about how it’s all destroyed in the end.

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What to Bring to a Peaceful Protest

These won't be the first mass protests of an incoming administration that this country has seen, but for many people attending the demonstrations around the country this weekend, it’s their first time participating for causes they believe in.

As millions prepare to head into the fray on Inauguration Day and for the Women’s March on Washington, read up on how to prepare yourself physically for protest.

Many of these suggestions are geared toward this weekend’s events in Washington, DC, and some include advice for if you’re detained or arrested during protest. Most demonstrations happening in the capital are adamant about remaining calm and don’t encourage civil disobedience. The First Amendment guarantees "the right of the people peaceably to assemble," but if we’re to learn anything from this country’s history with peaceful protest and interactions with the authorities, it’s that it’s always best to come prepared.

READ MORE: How to Protest Without Sacrificing Your Digital Privacy

Basic awareness of your surroundings is the first and best place to start. From there, here are a few items you might consider bringing:

Identification

Some activist groups will tell you not to bring ID to a protest, as you do not have to present ID or immigration status to police in DC. Not showing ID could keep you detained for longer, however, as police try to identify you. The ACLU suggests you do bring it. Whether you bring it or not, don’t ever lie to the police—but remember that they can lie to you. Flex Your Rights has a good section on identification.

$100, or whatever you can scrape up, in small bills

Or whatever amount you think you can comfortably get by on if you’re forced to take a cab home in traffic, eat out for a day or two, or purchase incidentals along the day like water or snacks.

These three notecards, and a Sharpie

Make a notecard with your emergency contacts’ phone numbers on it, in case your phone dies and you don’t have these memorized.

Carry a second card with emergency legal counsel—one DC law group is offering free legal help for demonstrators this weekend—or, if you’re not a citizen, the number of the Women’s March immigration lawyers: (202) 670-6866.

Your third card is for your rights, if you don’t already know them by heart or are prone to drawing a blank under pressure. The ACLU’s pamphlet on your rights when questioned or under arrest is a good place to start.

Image: meeh/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

Your own food

Throw a bunch of granola, protein bars, or hard fruits in a plastic grocery bag and bring that—along with as much water as you can carry—with you to the march or protest. No one wants to deal with your hanger while you wait 200 people deep for a food truck taco.

Battery banks

Even the best phone batteries and power banks suck after hours of taking photos and texting fellow demonstrators. When it’s cold out, they extra-suck. Small power banks can extend your phone’s battery for a few extra hours, long enough to find your way home or notify a friend to meet you somewhere.

Image: Alisair Hickson/Flickr/CC-By-SA 2.0

A big scarf

Something wide enough to cover your face and layer a few times in the event of teargas. You may have seen some suggestions for soaking a scarf in water and breathing into it, but the International News Safety Institute says that could interact with the type of gas and make it worse.

Image: Anthony Albright/Flickr/CC-by-SA 2.0

A coat with pockets

Layer up! Alongside 200,000 people, things will likely get sweaty, but it’s January so you’ll likely be losing body heat as quickly as you’re gaining it from your new friends. If you can move freely in it, it’s somewhat insulated, and has pockets for all of the other stuff on this list, it’s perfect.

Image: Elvert Barnes/Flickr/CC-By-SA 2.0

Sturdy shoes

Prepare for mud, rain, uneven ground and a lot of people who will inevitably step on your toes as you march. Steel-toed footwear is best; sturdy hiking shoes work, too. Whatever you’re comfortable standing in for hours.

Basic first aid

You don’t have to be anticipating brick wounds to need a small first aid kit. Something as simple as blisters or headaches can sap energy. Put together a kit of bandages, any medications you might need in the next 24-48 hours, a spare pair of contact lenses (or opt for glasses if there’s a high probability of teargas or dirt getting involved), enough OTC aspirin to share with others if needed, tampons or pads.

A (clear) backpack to stash it all in

All of this is for naught if you toss it into your black Jansport and it gets seized once you arrive. Most grassroots protests won’t have such strict rules for what bags you can bring, but a large demonstration on federal property, like the Women’s March, does. From their FAQ page: "Backpacks are not permitted unless they are clear and no larger than 17"X12"X6" (colored transparent bags are not permitted)."

A plan with your comrades

In a mass gathering of any size, it’s incredibly easy to get swept into the flow of the crowd and lose track of your friends. Cell service will probably be spotty due to demand. Make a plan for if you’re separated from each other, such as “If we’re apart for over an hour, meet at the Smithsonian castle” or some other tall, recognizable landmark.

DON’T BRING: Anything that could conceivably be seen as a weapon

Wooden poster signs, selfie sticks, knives, guns, boxcutter—If you can’t get through TSA with it, don’t bring it to the demonstration. Even if you’re bringing them without intent to harm anyone, getting detained with a big-ass knife or a baseball-bat size poster pole isn’t a good look.

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Inauguration Day Is Testing the Limits of Uber, Airbnb and the Sharing Economy

Washington DC is bracing for millions of visitors to flood the capitol on Inauguration weekend. Trump’s ceremony and parade on Friday is expected to draw nearly a million (just ask him), and that doesn’t include hundreds of thousands of people who are coming to protest and demonstrate against the incoming administration. The Women’s March the following day is estimating at least 200,000 attendees.

WIth scores of visitors trying to make their way around the city, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb are preparing riders and drivers with information on how to get around amidst the millions. And since DC is notorious for shutting down roads and public transport, there are plenty of hurdles.

Lyft speaks directly to drivers in their Inauguration Day blog, detailing the schedule of events from Thursday’s wreath laying ceremony in Arlington to the protests and demonstrations on the National Mall on Saturday. They’re advising drivers to read up on road closures before they drive, and use designated staging areas, airport taxi queue style, with signs that say “Emergency Stand: Rideshare Location” where Lyft Ambassadors will be posted nearby to help confused riders. They’ll be located at RFK Stadium’s Lot 3, Capitol Riverfront, and the Kennedy Center.

Image: Lyft

Uber’s Inauguration 2017 blog outlines road closures and maps out the security perimeter set up around the National Mall, where cars won’t be able to enter beginning 48 hours prior to the ceremony and into Sunday in some spots. To hail a car, you’ll be forced to walk outside of the perimeter.

Since visitors will be forced to do a lot of walking, they’re vying for the closest crash-pad to Capitol Hill. As of publication, the average Airbnb room in DC for Friday night was around $400, but the bulk of rooms available are priced into the thousands per night, with only one percent of rooms available for booking. Next Friday night, the average is around $150.

Uber is playing down the sheer volume of people expected to visit the DMV for this weekend with an “every four years” vibe on their blog. Business as usual? Not quite — DC Inno reports that over 10,000 guests are expected to stay in Airbnbs alone, over seven times as many as Airbnb experienced during the 2013 Inauguration.

The Daily Caller reports that some Airbnb hosts may be using a hotelier tactic called “Compression Pricing,” basically surge pricing for lodging on popular dates.

Of course, your ability to hail a car or book a last-minute room from your phone will depend on how much strain your cell carrier can take on its 4G LTE network. For a clue into how they’re preparing, watch for the COWS.

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from Inauguration Day Is Testing the Limits of Uber, Airbnb and the Sharing Economy

Check Out the Homemade Planetarium Built By A Very Committed Dude in Wisconsin

Frank Kovac built the Noah’s Ark of astronomy geekery: A working planetarium in his backyard.

Kovac has been recognized for his achievement before in various articles, and was recently profiled in a video documentary from Coolest Thing. As he explains in the interview, Kovac used to make his living at a paper mill, and had dreams of becoming a planetarium director. “But I am very weak at math, and you need a lot of math and science in order to get that degree,” he says. Major same.

'Screw the system,' he thought, 'I’ll build my own planetarium and spend over a decade and $180,000 doing it.' It weighs two tons, and needed a custom foundation and housing structure built around it.

The globe is made of plywood sheets and panel board, with five thousand hand-painted glow-in-the-dark stars inside. He gives tours year-round for up to 25 people per show, with up to 4,000 people visiting a year. The show even includes Kovac’s version of the Northern Lights: a penlight shone through a green-tinted water bottle.

This massive labor of love is inspired by, and named after, his father Frank Kovac Sr., who spent nights with his son staring up at the stars. If you’re ever in northern Wisconsin, stop on by for a tour.

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from Check Out the Homemade Planetarium Built By A Very Committed Dude in Wisconsin

Do You Want Smell-O-Vision for Your VR Porn? Neither Do We But Here It Is

Image: CamSoda

Smell-o-vision for porn is not, you may be surprised to hear, only about filling the air with the pungent odor of bodily fluids and sweaty balls. There is definitely some of that if you want, but not entirely and not so simply. It can also smell like fresh baked cookies.

CamSoda, an adult entertainment webcam platform and among the first to use virtual reality in cam girls’ work, is developing smell-o-vision custom-picked by their models. Like its recent forays into virtual reality, it's hard to tell how serious CamSoda is about the technology and how much of it is just a promotional stunt, but smell is a sensation other developers are seriously trying to bring into VR, so it's worth considering how it might be used with porn.

If you’re surprised about the food, so were the developers of this technology.

As CamSoda tested out their new device, called OhRoma, they found people are more turned on by the smell of food than they are of sex. “You wouldn’t want the smell of sex 24/7 in your face, even in a real life scenario,” company president Daron Lundeen told me.

CamSoda's gas mask-like device is comprised of several interchangeable canisters, a heating element, and Bluetooth to connect it to your smartphone. They’re offering 30 scents to start, including “private parts,” “body odor,” “fragrances,” “panties,” “aphrodisiacs,” and “breath.” Viewers can use an app to control the scents’ strength or turn one off altogether. The company is taking pre-orders and hopes to ship by the spring. The mask plus 30 scents costs $99, with additional scent cartridges priced from $5.99 to $9.99.

It’s a boon for the horny masses already willing to strap bulky devices on their faces for the sake of getting off. But OhRoma could also give the women doing the cams more creative control over their work than ever. They can choose what scent profile represents whatever scene they’re doing. A gamer model requested Cheetos, beer, and weed for her room’s scents.

Image: CamSoda

“The models who make the most money are not fucking themselves on camera the entire time,” Lundeen said. They’re hanging out, cooking, having a glass of wine, talking about the news. There’s still a show, rest assured, but it’s not all about watching her have sex. It’s building a relationship, Lundeen said—acting as the always-there girlfriend for a hundred watchers at a time. Anything that can add intimacy to the user’s experience makes for a better show, and a better show means more tips from happy, loyal viewers.

“Scent is something that brings back memories, it just adds depth and color to our work,” Lundeen said. “It makes perfect sense to let a model create that in her own room.”

It all sounds very immersive, if you can forget you’re wearing a VR headset strapped to your face and a gas mask pumping chocolate chip cookie and vagina smells into your nose. The design of the device is OhRoma’s biggest challenge. How do you make a complicated device less of a bulky boner-killer?

As “generation one” of the future of smell-o-vision porn, Lundeen believes the design will lose its girth and get smarter. Like any essential technology in the last decade, it could get more sleek and compact, as a nose clip or some other compact wearable device. It all depends on whether the people demand to smell cake with their cams.

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Why Environmental History Is Black History

National parks are waiving their entrance fees in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. On a day that’s meant to honor one of history’s greatest men and civil rights activists in history, it’s welcome encouragement to find some solitude outdoors.

For people of color, however, taking the day to commune with nature isn’t always as simple as lacing up and getting outside. American history largely amplifies the white men who put their names on our nation’s landmarks, and leaves out or downplays the rest. Even the branding of hiking and outdoor activities skews heavily white.

But groups like Outdoor Afro, which organize hiking and nature excursions for people of color, aim to overcome the isolation and fear that can come with being a minority in the great outdoors. Outdoor Afro is hosting healing hikes on inauguration weekend around the country, using song and sunshine to recharge for what wilderness lies ahead.

Join us to increase Black engagement in nature: Outdoor Afro January 11, 2017

Founder Rue Mapp told the Guardian, “African Americans have been segregated from using public parks and lands, there have been black sections only. We have had to unravel the exclusion people have had in the past, coupled with realities that people now have to figure out how to fit it into their busy lives. If you don’t have historic connection to national parks, that’s a very big ask.”

Rahawa Haile, an Eritrean-American writer who hiked the Appalachian Trail last year, told me that hiking groups for people of color provide a “safe entry point” for those who want to get out in nature, but fear being “othered” in the experience.

“They are an attempt to rebrand the concept of wilderness from its historic ties to exclusion and violence to one of freedom and belonging,” she says. “If nothing else, they provide a sense of community in a space that can often feel isolating.”

While the number of black visitors to parks is in the single digits — seven percent in 2008-09, according to the most recent NPS data on racial and ethnic diversity — there are many, many examples of black people carving the path for how we experience nature today As Outdoor Afro highlights on their blog, Harriet Tubman herself was an adept outdoorswoman, using the stars to navigate along the Underground Railroad and leading people quietly and safely by night. To call her a “hiker” might be understating her accomplishments, but she was inarguably a wilderness survivalist.

James Beckwourth, another former slave, was a mountain man and fur trapper in the early 1800s. He’s credited with discovering Beckwourth Pass in 1850, and is the only African American in the West to record his own life story. Colonel Charles Young, born to enslaved parents in 1864, became the first African-American National Parks superintendent.

Beckwourth. Image: Wikimedia

The Buffalo Soldiers were black servicemen who quite literally shaped how the parks system began.

But history has tainted that perception: The Homestead Act of 1862, for example, allowed European-descended settlers to land-grab throughout the West, with no recourse for indigenous people already living there. Black people were left out entirely.

Although the stereotype that people of color don’t “do” nature, the act of hiking while black brings up tensions around what it means to be American. As geographer and author Carolyn Finney told the Boston Herald: “Even though the way I am is very American, and I was dressed in backpacker gear and all that, it really messed with their minds that I could possibly be from the US. My presence, in nature, literally colored the way people were able to see me.”

Meanwhile, there’s a decent case to be made that MLK himself was probably an environmentalist, or at least a lover of the natural world. He did implore that freedom ring from the “heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania” to “every hill and molehill of Mississippi,” after all.

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from Why Environmental History Is Black History

Watching Popcorn Pop at 30,000 Frames Per Second Might Make You Cry

Are you ready to weep salty tears over the beauty of our universe?

Warped Perception, Chicago-based Youtubers who’ve turned their Phantom Flex 4K high-speed camera on everything from dog tongues to eyebrow tweezing, bring us the most moving video on the internet today.

They’ve recorded the incredibly delicate yet highly volatile process of a corn kernel popping.

At 1,300 frames per second, the kernel leaps from the heating element, full of starch and joy, and explodes into its fluffy final form before tumbling down in a cloud of steam. Before it pops, the pressure inside reaches around 135 psi and its internal temperature hits 356 degrees fahrenheit.

But that’s not slow enough. At 30,000 FPS—1,250 times slower than real time—you can watch the kernel’s insides expand peel the hard hull apart like a rose blooming. If it gets much slower, this kernel’s heading back in time.

from Watching Popcorn Pop at 30,000 Frames Per Second Might Make You Cry

Lawsuit Accuses Bitcoin ATM Owner of Smashing Competing Machines With Hammers

A hammer-wielding group involved in the bitcoin ATM business is allegedly smashing its way around Detroit and Chicago in an effort to destroy the competition, according to court documents filed last month and obtained by industry blog CoinDesk.

Andrew Konja, Alvin Konja, Sam Konja, and Odai Mabrouk—along with a number of other co-conspirators—are allegedly running a scheme to put competing bitcoin ATMs out of business in the Detroit and Chicago areas.

Some backstory on Andrew Konja, who’s allegedly the ring-leader: He was running his own bitcoin ATM business, the Southfield, Michigan-based MT Group, before either selling it to or merging it with Bitexpress, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, brought to Northern Illinois District Court by SandP Solutions, Inc., also known as Bitcoin of America, claims that the Brothers Konja are deploying a band of lackeys to bash the screens of their competitors, in an effort to put them out of business. The lawsuit claims they’ve also threatened owners and demanded ransom, which worked on one owner. The lawsuit claims that they told one owner that “he would be shot in the head if he continued to operate bitcoin ATMs in the Detroit metropolitan area.”

Bitcoin of America claims the Konjas are responsible for smashing up nearly 20 of their own machines, and as many 70 ATMs of other owners in total. According to the lawsuit, in some instances, after they damaged the machines, some of their goons have approached ATM owners offering to replace them with their own machines.

The whole thing’s been coordinated using “sites that automatically destroy posted messages after the passage of time,” the complaint notes, making it harder for authorities to track their plans. It is not clear what tool or website the lawsuit is referring to here, or why Bitcoin of America or the police wouldn't be able to document these exchanges, but it does claim it’s been going on for at least nine months, and is ongoing.

Konja was interviewed and photographed for the Detroit Free Press in 2015 in a story about bitcoin ATM owners. At the time his business was also called MT Group. Earlier that year he was arrested for possession of a fraudulent transaction device.

Coin ATM Radar estimates total cost of a new Bitcoin ATM at around $10,000-15,000, not including rent and legal guidance. CoinDesk has seen reports of ATM owners making up to $36,000 a year off of these machines.

Bitcoin of America is seeking three times damages. If the machines need to be completely replaced, that’s around $600,000, plus court and attorney fees.

Motherboard has reached out to Bitcoin of America and the Chicago and Detroit police departments and will update if they respond.

from Lawsuit Accuses Bitcoin ATM Owner of Smashing Competing Machines With Hammers

Watch Boxing Hares Battle In A Mating Ritual

It looks like a petty slap-fight but the battle is much more dramatic: A female hare fighting it out with her male suitors, to judge which will be her worthy mate.

According to the video description, whisky distillery worker and hobbyist photographer Alister Kemp, from Evanton, Scotland found these boxing hares in Cairngorms National Park.

Being a female mountain hare is exhausting. Their breeding season lasts from January to August, and the males are fertile year-round. Ovulation is induced by mating, and an ovulating hare can be impregnated again by a waiting male almost immediately after giving birth, Dana Krempels, a biologist at Florida’s University of Miami tells National Geographic.

Needless to say, they’re willing to fight to make sure their next offspring will have the strongest genes possible. To determine this, they sometimes battle it out bunny-style, the female racing around until her pursuant pack of wannabes gets tired, leaving only the strongest to catch up and duke it out.

Or sometimes the female is simply not ready to mate, so she delivers a couple slugs to the face. Hey, whatever works.

from Watch Boxing Hares Battle In A Mating Ritual

Russia Has Deployed the First State-Sponsored Pepe

The Russian Embassy to the UK tweeted what would normally be a mundane message, if not for the addition of one controversial cartoon frog.

In today’s papers: pundits call on Russian Embassy, UK January 9, 2017

Pepe, a meme that I can’t believe we’re still talking about, is a slimy-lipped frog that went from Matt Furie’s innocent comic character, to the darling of 4chan forums, to the Anti-Defamation League’s watchlist for hate speech. When you give a gimmick a long leash and racism for fuel, this is what you get. This and our president-elect, but we’re here to talk about Pepe’s new role at the Russian Embassy.

As far as we can tell, this is the first incident of an openly state-sponsored Pepe. Very rare indeed.

When asked about this escalation in meme warfare, a spokesperson for Russian Affairs at the US Department of Defense said, "I don't even know what tweet you're talking about.” We’re following up and will update when they respond.

The tweet’s gone viral, but it’s not like this is off brand for the account. It frequently posts mockery of the US intelligence community and “liberal elites,” tweeting about Syria in between posting gorgeous shots of snow-covered Russian landscapes.

But as a dog-whistle for Neo-Nazis, this one’s a new low. Whenever someone shows up in the replies to point out that this is widely regarded as a white nationalist meme, a flood of other Pepe-avatar accounts chime in to scream that there’s no proof of a cartoon frog serving as a dog whistle for Neo-Nazis.

It’s really, really hard to perform the mental gymnastics necessary to assume that the social media person running @RussianEmbassy is ignorant of the white supremacist undertones of this frog. Especially when they’re favoriting tweets from accounts defending the thing, and attacking reporters:

“I would be mighty surprised if whoever runs the Embassy’s Twitter account doesn't know of the white nationalist double entendre that has come to be associated with Pepe over the last year,” College of Charleston media communications professor Ryan Milner told Motherboard. “I’d imagine the Venn diagram of people who know Pepe and would use Pepe in that context and don’t know that Pepe has been co-opted by white nationalists doesn’t have much overlap. I could be wrong, but that’s my inkling.”

Image: Twitter

Milner says this was most likely meant to stir up the exact frenzy that it has, as a wink to the group it’s intended for (alt-right white supremacists) and a provocation to those outside of the group. “This doesn’t mean that we should ‘just ignore it’, but rather we should get meta and call out its antagonistic dimensions with every assessment of it. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ in other words. ‘And it’s not impressive.’”

Meanwhile, back on 4chan, some Trump supporters are chalking up a victory to the frog itself: They believe that splatting this ugly frog all over the internet, in as many variations as possible, would work some kind of “meme magic” that they could ride straight to the White House.

Motherboard has contacted the Russian Embassy to the UK, the US State Department, and the Department of Defense for comment, and will update when they respond.

UPDATE: "We monitor various traditional and social media platforms, but I am not going to get into the specifics," Defense Spokesperson Lt. Col. Michelle L. Baldanza told Motherboard in an email. "This particular tweet is not a Defense Department issue to address."

from Russia Has Deployed the First State-Sponsored Pepe

One of the World’s Strongest Materials Looks Like a Chunk of Coral

Hydraulic presses aren’t just for smashing Legos and Barbies and making fake teeth explode. They’re also for real science—although, exploding objects are still part of that, too.

Engineers at MIT designed a geometrical configuration that can withstand high pressure at five percent the density of steel, with 10 times the strength. They created this confection-like neon pink stuff by compressing small flakes of graphene and 3D printing it into a shape resembling coral, with high surface area and low density.

Two dimensional materials, at only an atom’s thickness—and graphene, in particular—are typically very strong and conductive. But their experiments found that it didn’t matter what the material itself was made from, more that it was formed into this coral-esque shape. Adjusting the thickness of the material gave interesting results: thicker walls burst suddenly under pressure, but thinner walls allowed the pores to crumple gradually, maintaining its shape longer.

They imagine this material building lightweight bridges, insulation and infrastructure, but its applications aren’t confined to Earth. One of the researchers, Zhao Qin, told Fast Company that he foresees its use in space engineering. Its extremely lightweight strength could make it valuable in colonies on other planets.

Until it starts showing up on the walls of your Martian home, enjoy watching it explode in the press.

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from One of the World’s Strongest Materials Looks Like a Chunk of Coral

Pluto Has Towers of Ice 1,600 Feet Tall

Pluto, our solar system’s former ninth planet and current dwarf planet, has another surprise for us: landscape features seen on only one other planet—Earth.

Called “penitentes” after their resemblance of a crowd in kneeling penance, these icy spires can reach over 1,600 feet tall. Here on Earth, the same features are found in the Dry Andes above 13,000 feet, but they only grow to about 16 feet. Scientists suspected Europa might have these icy towers as well, but Pluto’s the first world to show real evidence of them outside Earth.

In looking at photos taken by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015, John Moores of York University, Toronto, and his team deduced how they formed. The spires are rather young, and formed by erosion. Penitentes need atmosphere to form, but Pluto’s colder, thinner and darker atmosphere—combined with the ice forming from methane and nitrogen instead of water—allow these icy structures to stretch to fantastical heights as never seen before.

The signature of methane ice where the penitentes form on the Tartarus Dorsa mountains of Pluto is different from other parts of the surface, where ice is mostly nitrogen. This ice is transitioning straight from solid to gas, in a process called sublimation.

Fun fact: In Greek mythology, Tartarus is the lowest part of Hades where the wicked were thrown to suffer eternal torment—Pluto, of course, being the god of the underworld. So, we have a crowd of penitent people kneeling in the -400 degree frozen hellscape of Pluto’s backside. Neat!

Moores’ work is published in Nature. Watch Moores explain his findings, here:

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from Pluto Has Towers of Ice 1,600 Feet Tall

Meet the Farm Hackers Working to Make Growing Food More Efficient

Brian Luck posing with a drone to be used in agriculture. Image: University of Wisconsion-Madison/Flickr

Tractors do a dance. They go up a row, offset their track by a dozen or so feet, go down a row. One tractor might be for tilling, another for harvesting, another for trucking the harvest to the bunker to be stored. They’re all following an orchestrated set of rules. But with humans behind the wheels and entropy at play, it’s not as simple as till a row, sow a row. Machinery breaks down, and parts of crops are lost to rain, sun, and general inefficiency.

If you ask a farmer tomorrow how his harvest efficiency is doing, he may not answer that question. Until you know you need it, you don’t much miss it. “He might look at you funny,” says Brian Luck, professor of Machinery Systems and Precision Agriculture Biological Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Something most can agree on, however, is the need to get as much of a crop off of the field as possible, at the highest quality possible.

Luck and his students in the Biological Systems Engineering program are working on ways to improve how the whole farm’s run. In recent years, they’ve developed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that use thermal sensors and infrared wavelengths to read the moisture of a corn stalk or how heavily it respires. But drones used for agriculture are still quite futuristic for the typical farm. For optimizing harvests, you’ll need to start on the ground.

One of Luck’s graduate students, Joshua Harmon, is doing his thesis work in forage harvest logistics: How the stuff we feed to dairy cows and cattle is harvested, and how GPS and CAN (Controller Area Network) systems can streamline the process.

How it works

Harmon describes the tractors’ dance more like they’re running lines of code. Data from CAN—the same kind of system that turns on the check engine light in your car—shows what the transport vehicle is doing, while GPS data shows where it was doing it. Newer vehicles have these systems built in, but for the older tractors, he retrofitted them to include GPS and CAN data collection.

“For any given point of time, a harvester was constrained to the given work states: harvest, travel, delay, idle, and downtime,” Harmon explained via email. The states are defined as:

• Harvest: Exists when the harvester is actively loading a transport
  
• Travel: Movement to fields, as well as headlands turns
  
• Delay: Time spent delayed due to detecting metal (forage harvesters have metal detectors, and the rolls drawing feed into the machine shut off to prevent knife damage if something like a fencing nail were to get picked up)
  
• Idle: Time spent waiting on transports
  
• Downtime: Time spent broken down or other reasons for stopping the operation
  

From there, the transports each exist in their own states: loading a harvest actively, travelling to the storage site or field, unloading at the storage site, or idle.

By watching how these states cycle as the machines go about their field business, they can start seeing patterns and gaps in efficiency. “Based on all of that, he could essentially define cycle times for how long it took a certain type of truck to get loaded, how long it took to get back to the bunker and unload the vehicle... It defines the whole cycle process,” Luck says.

From there, it becomes a word problem: If I have a forage harvester with “X” harvesting capacity and my field is “X” distance away from the storage site, and I know all of the routes I have to take to get to the field, what is the optimal number of trucks that I need to maintain harvest efficiency and never have that forage harvester stop and wait on a truck to get back?

The solution depends on never having a harvester waiting on a tractor. As a farmer, you want a just-right number of tractors running at once. Too many and you’re wasting manpower and machine-power (which equals money), too few and you’re wasting your crop yield, a.k.a more money. Precious time is gained when drivers know exactly which field entrance to use, where in the field the harvester is, and most importantly, when it needs the next empty truck to fill.

Big data, big business

You might get a funny look from a farmer about efficiency, but it’s a problem agricultural scientists have been working on for decades. Some suggest new strategies for timing, others use tech to track satellite imagery and weather data for a better yield. It’s studied for good reason: Forage harvest, and silage, is a big part of the industry.

Harmon’s work is focused on silage, a livestock food that’s used when forage production gets low. Wisconsin produced nearly 19 million tons of corn for silage in 2015, and in 2012, the U.S. corn industry was valued at $67.3 billion, including both corn for grain and corn for silage. That’s 17 percent of all agricultural sales in the country, and Wisconsin is king of the silage states. It’s big business, and big data could help it boom even more.

But there’s not a set standard for how efficient a farm needs to be to succeed. “The ultimate goal is to provide the producer with the tools necessary to enable the most efficient harvest possible,” says Luck. There’s a balance between paying an extra tractor driver at the ready, and improving harvest by a small margin.

“Making silage production more efficient allows producers to get more work done in a shorter period of time,” Harmon says. “As a result, silage quality improves, because there is a better chance of harvesting at the right maturity and moisture, as well as less chance of being affected by adverse weather conditions.”

Robot tractors

Once you’ve broken the goings-on of a harvest down to states and statistics, it makes one wonder: Are people the biggest problem with farming efficiency?

“People are talking about self-driving semis, and self-driving cars... I see a lot of risk involved with that, when you’re talking about somebody riding in the vehicle and not driving it,” Luck says. “It’s all well and good—I’m gonna be one of the early adopters of that, I think—but I see a greater opportunity to at least perfect the technology [in agriculture].”

He’s not alone in the idea. The Case IH autonomous tractor drew skeptics and admirers at the September Farm Progress Show in Iowa. Like Harmon’s systems sensing machinery’s position in the field, a farmer in Maryland is using GPS to guide his own self-driving John Deeres. Slower speeds, simpler parameters and less human interference make the farm field a playground for robot tractors. It’s the difference between learning to drive in an empty parking lot and a four-lane highway. “Probably in 10 or 20 years, I think we will have some sort of autonomous field operation machine that have been implemented and being used,” Luck predicts.

from Meet the Farm Hackers Working to Make Growing Food More Efficient

Someone Recreated the Entire ‘Bee Movie’ Trailer in ‘Rollercoaster Tycoon 2’

Stop reading here and watch the video.

What the hell did you just watch, you might ask? The straightforward explanation is that it’s the trailer for the Bee Movie recreated with Rollercoaster Tycoon 2’s editor, setting down different ground tiles as pixels and taking snapshots to create a stop-motion video. It comes complete with the “The Following Preview Has Been Approved For All Audiences” screen and goes downhill—or uphill, depending on your tolerance for the absurd —from there.

This creation leaves us with more questions than answers. How long did this take? Does anyone know where Jerry Seinfeld went? Is he secretly posting videos under the name JustinBeiberIsPoop? Why are people so obsessed with meme-ing Bee Movie, a nearly 10 year old film about one woman’s questionable relationship with a talking bee? Why are people still obsessed with Rollercoaster Tycoon, a game that came out 14 years ago? (That’s a trick question; it’s an awesome game). Why undertake this in Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, and not, say, MS Paint or Mario Paint? What would George Michael say about “Freedom” living on like this, if he could speak for himself today? Would he be appalled or honored?

There are no words, only enormous respect for this dedication and genius. Thank you, JustinBeiberIsPoop.

from Someone Recreated the Entire ‘Bee Movie’ Trailer in ‘Rollercoaster Tycoon 2’