The lining of the Reflecting Pool at Washington D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial was painted blue to please Trump: a no-bid $14.7m contract that went to a company that had worked on one of his swimming pools. Within days of the pool being refilled, it was full of algae. And two weeks on, the blue paint is peeling.

Reuters reports that neith…

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On the night of 21 August 1986, Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon released between 100,000 and 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide in a single outgassing event. The cloud rose at nearly 100 km/h, then sank — carbon dioxide is 50 percent more dense than air — and moved downvalley at 20 to 50 kilo…

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According to the Bencao Gangmu, a 16th-century Chinese medical compendium, elderly men in Arabia would voluntarily mummify themselves in honey. The donor would stop eating all food except honey, bathing in it as well, “till after a month his excreta are nothing but honey; then death ensues.” The body was placed in…

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Watching a cow eat grass probably sounds boring, but this video proves that it can be made into something fabulous. Thanks to the right angle and sounds, this cow video is addictive to watch. My only complaint is that it’s not longer.

The video of the chewing cow is filmed from the silliest fish-eye angle. It also contains some fan…

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Severe storms in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood sent several pool chairs flying off a high-rise balcony and into the traffic below. The video of the incident shows the lightweight lounge chairs being pushed across a rooftop pool deck by powerful winds. One by one they start lifting off into the air …

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This sweet video shows a honeybee curled up inside of a flower bed. The timelapse shows the bee wrapped around the inner part of the flower, as the petals slowly close inward. I can’t imagine a more enchanting place to lay down than inside the cozy bed of this orange flower.

Honeybees often use flowers as temporary resti…

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As I’ve stated, I did not watch Donald Trump’s masturbatory UFC Freedom 250 fight. I spent the day kicking my heels and giggling over Bob Odenkirk returning to his most iconic character for his American anniversary celebration instead. If I have to watch a narcissist, I’d like him to at least be a well-written one!

Fortunately, though, …

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In colorful, funny, and appealing comics, Perrin Roosevelt Ireland’s new book Poking the Squid describes the incredible, diverse array of sexual behaviors and anatomies in the animal kingdom.

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The Vatican Observatory has operated continuously since 1774, when the Papacy established the Observatory of the Roman College in Rome. The Church’s interest in astronomy predates that: the Gregorian Calendar, issued in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, required precise astronomical data to calculate the date of Easter. The o…

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While chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan developed what economist Alan Blinder called “a turgid dialect of English” — deliberate obscurantism designed to prevent financial markets from overreacting to his words. He admitted as much in a 2007 interview with 60 Minutes’s Lesl…

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Between 1993 and 2009, investigators across Austria, France, and Germany found DNA from the same unknown woman at 40 crime scenes — murders, burglaries, a police officer shot in Heilbronn. A special task force codenamed Parkplatz worked the case for years; by January 2009, the reward had reached €300,000.

In Marc…

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In 1888, a French government official named Charles-Marie David de Mayréna was sent into the highlands of what is now Vietnam to negotiate treaties with local tribes. Instead, he convinced the tribes to crown him king. He took the name Marie the First, esta…

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Grandpa Pudding Brains signed a peace deal at Versailles, because apparently nobody in the room had a history teacher, a calendar, or access to the phrase “ominous symbolism.”

Versailles remains a bold venue for anyone announcing a peace deal with reparations.

MAD Magazine published its 600th issue this week, and celebrated with a gorgeous cover (and back cover) by the reigning champ of MAD cartooning, Sergio Aragonés. Aragonés’s first appearance in the magazine was in issue #76, published in 1963.

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Max Fosh is the only YouTube prankster out there worth a damn. He’s not obnoxious, he isn’t self-centered, and most rare of all, he doesn’t hurt anyone. His workflow begins with isolating a ridiculously silly idea, like hiring stuntmen to throw a fight so he can look c…

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How many times do you think I can get away with saying Spider-Man in this post? You know, for maximum SEO points? Let’s give it a shot:

The upcoming Avengers: Doomsday is rumored to be a sort of soft reset for the MCU. Good thing too, since catching up on ten million movies and TV shows becomes a more and more daunting prospect for…

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Meta laid off thousands of workers, started monitoring employees’ computers, assigned people to train the AI that may replace them, and then discovered the real missing ingredient: snacks.

Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth told employees morale is “probably one of the worst it’s ever been” and that the “vibes are off.” The company’s answer includes bigger snack, travel, and events budgets, which have strong Severance melon-bar energy for a workplace where employees say they have been “drafted” into AI training work.

So far in 2026, Meta staff have had plenty to grumble about. The company laid off 8,000 jobs in April and began tracking workers’ computer activity. The monitoring is so that the company can train its AI models, raising the awkward issue that staff could be helping the very tech that could wind up replacing them.

Aside from the layoffs and 1984-esque surveillance, Meta has assigned roughly 10% of its workforce to train its AI models full-time, which is largely mind-numbing data-labeling. The Applied AI engineering unit comprises roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers. Workers liken it to being “drafted” — one even went so far as to describe it as a “gulag.”

The changes led to Boz declaring that the “vibes are off” in the company during the leaked call that was held on June 2. The CTO hosts a weekly session known as “Tuesdays with Boz.”

PetaPixel

Welcome to the dark side. We have snacks, surveillance, and vibes that are off.

Grandpa Pudding Brains tried to sound tough about America and somehow wandered into saying that strength is based on stolen elections.

“Nobody plays rougher than the United States,” Trump said. “Look, our elections are totally rigged. We have rigged elections.” It is the usual election-denial poison, but with an extra little Freudian garnish: he says “we” right after bragging about how rough the United States plays.

What began as a creepy and weird flex became a self-own and evidence.

The HP 16c Collector’s Edition [HP via Adafruit] revives a mundane but well-loved tool. In 1982, the original 16c was designed specifically for programmers and engineers; after three decades, only modest refinements were called for in an otherwise fully-retro recreation. With a supercomputing UX disaster in every pocket, simple hardware that do…

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