Cabinet of Curiosities

Graphene - sheets of carbon just one atom thick - is one of the strongest artificial materials, and spider silk is one of the strongest natural ones. So Nicola Pugno of the University of Trento, Italy, wondered what would happen if you combined them.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27468-spiders-sprayed-with-graphene-or-carbon-nanotubes-spin-super-silk.html

Ghost Song

Researchers have found that, based on enough Facebook Likes, computers can judge your personality traits better than your friends, family and even your partner.

Porto Universidade do Porto, Rua Jorge Viterbo Ferreira

The Sad Internet

The Sad Internet is a place full of unwatched videos, unliked photographs, unheard music, tweets that no one cared about, and crowdfunding projects that nobody backed.

Forgotify plumbs Spotify’s unheard depths to present you with a random selection from the zero-listen archives.

There’s a note of optimism, or at least yearning, in the name of No Likes Yet - yet! As a practical matter, the site is designed to let you “discover” Instagram photos with zero likes. Or you can just indulge in the potential schadenfreude of narrowing results to your own circle of Instagram contacts. Or wallow in the self-pity of reviewing your own unliked pictures.

Sad Tweets: Connect the application to your Twitter account, and it presents you with a lowlights reel of your attempts at “sharing” that attracted no likes, and no retweets. It’s “a graveyard for your most depressing Twitter failures”. And despite his (rather depressing!) wish that the service would expand to allow users to peruse other people’s sad tweets, for now it remains purely a mechanism for self-loathing.

Petit Tube plays a stream of YouTube videos with zero views.

Kickended, a site that collects campaigns launched on the crowdfunding platform that failed to attract a single backer.

This Exquisite Forest is an art-meets-data visualization-meets-crowdsourcing experiment. Inspired by a Surrealist artistic movement called The Exquisite Corpse, in which a collection of words or images is assembled without narrative constraints, Koblin and Milk envision a forest of collaborative storytelling driven by short animations, writing, and music.

“Trees” in the Forest are grown from “seeds” created by leading contemporary artists, including Miroslaw Balka and Olafur Eliasson. Using a web-based drawing tool, contributors add short animations that become the leaves and branches of each tree. A Web Audio API also allows for the addition of music. The stories grow into a forest and, in what the artists call “a natural selection process,” visitors to the site will help select the strongest contributed elements and ensure they survive.

UK laws governing online porn changed

Acts that are no longer acceptable include: spanking, caning and whipping beyond a gentle level; penetration by any object "associated with violence"; activities that can be classed as "life-endangering", such as strangulation and facesitting; fisting, if all knuckles are inserted; physical or verbal abuse, even if consensual; the portrayal of non-consensual sex; urination in various sexual contexts; and female ejaculation.

It's quite a list, but one mostly made up of stuff that seems to have been picked out pretty arbitrarily (women orgasming, exactly which items can or can't be inserted into a consenting adult's body).

"It's a set of weird and arbitrary censorship rules [...] There appear to be no rational explanations for most of the [...] rules – they're simply a set of moral judgements designed by people who have struggled endlessly to stop the British people from watching pornography." Jerry Barnett, founder of anti-censorship campaign Sex and Censorship