Taiwan abuzz with tale of live bees feeding on woman’s eye
A young Taiwanese woman received the shock of her life when she sought hospital treatment for a suspected eye infection and doctors extracted four live bees that had been feasting on her tear ducts. The 29-year-old, identified only by her surname He by Taiwan’s CTS news channel, said she had assumed that sand or dirt…
French minister denies ‘complicity’ in rehabilitating a ‘fascist’ over new Le Corbusier museum
France’s culture minister has been forced to deny "complicity" in rehabilitating a "fascist’ for backing a new museum in honour of France’s best-known architect, Le Corbusier. It has long been known that Le Corbusier, famed for his revolutionary concrete creations, including a housing project in Marseille called La Cité Radieuse, had some ties to France’s…
Black hole seen for first time in image showing matter being sucked into timeless oblivion
A black hole surrounded by swirling ring of fire has been pictured by scientists for the first time in an image described as ‘the gates of hell, at the end of space and time.’ The phenomenon which has never been observed before shows superheated matter being pulled towards the event horizon after which nothing can…
While You Were Offline: Hey Please Don’t Call Trump's New Hotline to Report UFOs
It's rare that the world experiences such a perfect storm of schadenfreude as the one offered up by #FyreFestival, the on-the-ground reports from an "exclusive" musical fest in the Bahamas gone terribly wrong. Even if the rest of the week had proved to a battle to maintain composure in an ambivalent and occasionally cruel world,…
While You Were Offline: Sean Spicer, Everyone. Round of Applause for Sean Spicer
In the past seven days, Nintendo abandoned its past, America's relationship with North Korea got appreciably worse (so did the country's relationship with Russia), and the internet had a lot of feelings about a Star Wars video. It's been quite the week. Do you have a sinking feeling that something escaped your notice during those…
The Fascinating Art of Hollywood’s Made-Up Languages, From Dothraki to Klingon
If you ever want to find a bathroom on Vulcan or ask for dressage lessons in Essos, you’ll need to learn a constructed language first. "Conlangs", as they're known, are common in genre movies and literature, and through them, a viewer or reader can better appreciate what it would be like to approach an Arwen…
The Incredible, Urgent Power of Remembering the Holocaust in VR
Pinchas Gutter has returned to Majdanek at least a dozen times, but this trip is his final one to the onetime Nazi concentration camp. His first was one he was 11, when he was taken to Majdanek; now he's 85 years old, and this is the last time he'll come here to tell people what…
Meet PatriotHole, the Onion's New Right-Wing-Skewering Mockery Machine
The best word to describe PatriotHole's launch probably won't ever apply to the site again: quiet. Sometime this morning, The Onion's spinoff brand ClickHole became PatriotHole, a new site promising to provide a "loud light in the darkness." True to claim, the site features a color—a shade of ’70s chain-restaurant orange Breitbart News readers might…
Cantina Talk: Could Episode IX Mark the End of Annual Star Wars Movies?
Now that Star Wars Celebration is over, things have been fairly quiet in the Land o' Lucas. But really, that stillness is to be expected—pretty much everything fans wanted to know was announced during that four-day stretch. Well, almost everything. After Celebration ended, Disney revealed the release date for Star Wars: Episode IX and also…
Satirizing Silicon Valley Should Be Easy. So Why’s It So Hard?
Playground-style slides. Corporate-issued backpacks and fleeces emblazoned with company names straight out of a Pokedex. A CEO who brazenly circumvents local regulation. If the tech industry was a person, it would sew MOCK ME onto all of its shirts so as not to deplete the global supply of scotch tape. Nothing could be easier, one…