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December 9, 2014 Rhett Jones

Anyone who’s ever been on the Cyclone in Coney Island can tell you that if you want to feel the pit in your stomach on a dangerous and poorly constructed carnival ride, there’s just nothing better than a rickety wooden roller coaster. Students at MIT took that sensibility all the way recently, constructing their own wooden […]

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August 8, 2014 Marina Galperina

At the Burning Fleshtival, “Hey, man, can you help me out?” really means “Hey, man, check this rock chained around my balls for me?”  The Red Light District is a basement of a house in the suburbs on the beach in New York City. Walking around the Rockaway neighborhood, you’d never know that behind this nondescript house, […]

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August 6, 2014 Peter Yeh

A hacktivist calling himself Phineas Fisher, has hacked into Gamma International, a UK-based spyware company that makes malware for governments, and leaked 40 GB of internal documents including the source code of their premier spy agency tool, FinSpy or FinFisher. The tools’ source has been released on BitTorrent, meaning now you too can be your […]

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July 25, 2014 Sophie Weiner

When the MTA launched its geo-locating bus tracker, the API was made public, encouraging developers to build useful apps. Inspired by the countdown timers in subway stations (which make people really happy), Brooklyn programmer and public transit enthusiast Ian Westcott decided to get one in his home. Using the open source data, Westcott designed a wifi-enabled LED display that counts […]

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April 25, 2014 Backdoor Pharmacist

Palcohol, the powdered alcohol that will completely change the way we brunch and justify our one bottle of wine a day habit, had its label approval cruelly torn from it after the alcohol law blog Bevlaw reported on it. The makers claim it was just an error in the packaging but from the history of […]

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March 19, 2014 Andy Cush

For her midterm project in an electronic music class, Princeton student Bonnie E created Mug Music, a hack that turns a cup full of water into a working electronic instrument. Touché, a touch sensor created by Disney hangs in the water, so that when you dip your fingers in or otherwise move the liquid around, it […]

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February 10, 2014 Aymann Ismail

“I’m willing to get a ticket or get arrested,” artist Serge Miquel told ANIMAL after finishing installing his unauthorized art show inside a Bank of America in NoHo on Friday. After taping up the abstract drawings in every window of the ATM-only branch, Miquel walked across the street and started working on a sculpture. He asked […]

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January 24, 2014 Andy Cush

The FAB Velo, a DIY vehicle created by Mark Richardson, is an assemblage of the kind of stuff laying around in the basement of your parents’ house: razor scooters, walkers, old beach chairs, and the like. Put together, it looks a bit like a homemade Tron bike, with two wheels up front, one in back, […]

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January 13, 2014 Sophie Weiner

In conducting the interviews for this piece, something became clear: The reason that so many people care so deeply about end of 285 Kent, is that 285 Kent was more than a room where bands played. At 285 we witnessed the collapse of genre barriers in real time, as internet rap stars mingled with hardcore […]

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September 18, 2013 Aymann Ismail

Wobbling over the Williamsburg Bridge on a misaligned bike wheel earlier today, I ran into Michael — a bike mechanic who set up his DIY shop in the middle of the bridge where the bike lane crosses the pedestrian path. I haven’t had the time or the funds to stop by a bike shop since getting hit […]

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