Boing Boing

Boing Boing

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Minneapolis has been hearing unexplained booms for decades and nobody can figure out why
Residents of the Longfellow neighborhood in Minneapolis have been reporting loud, unexplained explosions for several decades.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
A 1977 trawler hauled up a carcass that Japan took for a sea monster
In April 1977 the Japanese trawler Zuiyō Maru, fishing east of Christchurch, New Zealand, pulled up a decomposing carcass about 10 meters long.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
Steam is killing physical gift cards to cut off scammers
Here’s a question: when was the last time you went out to the store and got yourself a physical gift card for online games retailer Steam?
 • Grant St. Clair
Boing Boing, June 11, 2026
Boulders, blimps, and a caterpillar that stings
 • Boing Boing
Scammers are already using the hantavirus to fleece people
When I say scammers are using the hantavirus, I don’t mean they’re engineering devious biological weapon attacks (although I’m sure they would if they…
 • Grant St. Clair
An anonymous group posted internet puzzles to recruit code-breakers, then vanished
Cicada 3301 is the name of “three sets of puzzles posted under the name ‘3301’ online between 2012 and 2014.” The first appeared on 4chan on January 4…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
Five men left a basketball game in 1978 and drove into a mystery
The Yuba County Five were five young men from Yuba County, California, “each with mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions,” who went…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
Giant inflatable Elon Musk appears in Times Square, protesting Grok’s lack of limits
New York, baby!
 • Grant St. Clair
In 1932, John W. Campbell imagined machines outliving humanity
In 1932, a 22-year-old John W.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
The first Tarzan pulp sold for $58,560 at a record-setting auction
A worn copy of a 1912 pulp magazine, graded just 2.0, sold for $58,560 this month because Tarzan is on the cover.
 • Mark Frauenfelder
A sculpture at CIA headquarters has kept a coded message secret for 35 years
Kryptos is a sculpture by artist Jim Sanborn on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
How Claude Shannon used his wife as a language model in 1950
Grant Sanderson’s new 3Blue1Brown video starts from a 1940s question — how far can you compress text?
 • Mark Frauenfelder
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