Add a little dino magic to your Sunday with this video of visual effects supervisor John Rosengrant—a.k.a. one of the Jurassic Park velociraptors—honing his raptor skills from the suit’s earliest tests to its final version. Yes, there were real people playing the raptors in the kitchen scene. No, it wasn’t CGI. There’s a reason the special effects have aged so well, you know!

(via: io9)

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Say goodbye to your dreams of a real-life Jurassic Park. (Actually, why would you want a real-life Jurassic Park? Do you have a death wish? I’d rather not be eaten by a velociraptor, thanks.) Researchers in New Zealand have determined that DNA has a half-life of only 521 years, meaning that any dinosaur DNA a white-haired old scientist might happen to find in a chunk of amber will be so broken down as to be unreadable and, needless to say, uncloneable.

No, we’re not talking about this utahraptor, unfortunately, but it’s still a pretty cool utahraptor.

What’s not cool is the budget cuts at Jurassic Park Melbourne that have reduced the animal park’s handlers to transporting their specimens on foot, with such minimal security. Someone could be hurt, or worse, the dinosaur might be injured!

Fun fact: one of the founders of Melbourne was a guy named John Batman, and he wanted to name the place “Batmania.”

(via ion.)

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I don’t know if the addition of an umlaut to vowels also demotes the badassness of a title to anyone else but me. But I do know that Tracy Widdess does incredible things with yarn, and those incredible things are going to up in an arti show soon. I’ve never seen a barnacle covered knit tentacle that deserved it more.

Nine-year-old Martha Payne was on her way to having a successful food blog. In April, she began not just documenting her school lunches on Never Seconds, but rating them on how healthy they were, how good they were, and how much they cost. On May 9 she wrote, “When I got up this morning Dad told me my blog had 25,000 hits so I thought I’d better not forget to count my mouthfuls!” But then things got really crazy. The next day the hits jumped to 105,000! And it’s all thanks to Food Revolution’s Jamie Oliver.

So this is pretty much the best thing I’ve seen all day (and I’ve already seen the synopsis for Pacific Rim and two commercial spots for The Dark Knight Rises including one where Catwoman poses as Mrs. Bruce Wayne to steal his car). Limor Fried is an Open Source pioneer, engineer and business owner, and being there for the first Open Source Hardware summit and drafting the Open Source Hardware definition and being the first female tech professional to grace the cover of Wired in fifteen years would be enough to make her a role model for any young science inclined girl. Probably my favorite thing that Fried has done was going up against the mighty corporate power of Microsoft, and winning, when she offered a cash prize for the first person to make open source drivers for the Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360. Microsoft was by historical default very protective of who could use its hardware and for what, and initially threatened legal action against anyone who would interfere with their desire to keep the Kinect tamper-proof. Fried’s response was to increase the value of the prize by 50%.

So in 2011 when we all (including, by official statement, Microsoft) enjoyed dozens upon dozens of YouTube videos of programmers and animators showing off the Kinect hacks they’d made to create virtual puppets controlled by putting your hand in the air, turn things invisible to the computer screen, and create 3D models of objects simply by rotating them in front of a piece of hardware that cost less than $200, we had Fried to thank.

And so we might have her to thank for the above Lego set, if she gets enough votes.

Yes, I know, Prometheus isn’t here yet because it’s not June 8, but don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean, Alien fans! I’ll be honest, I’ve been a little overwhelmed with how much footage and pictures the studio has released of the film so far but I’ve been enjoying these extras that won’t actually show up in the film. They give us a nice little sneak peek into the characters. For instance, this one of Noomi Rapace’s character Elizabeth Shaw. I really liked what director Ridley Scott said the other day about the women in his films, and it made me even more excited for what Rapace will get up to in Prometheus. See more at ProjectPrometheus.com.

(via Deadline)

For her work covering the sex abuse scandal at Penn State, Sara Ganim has earned herself — and her staff — a Pulitzer Prize. And at the age of 24, she is the youngest recipient this year and one of the award’s youngest recipients ever. Considering how this story, which she first started covering when she was fresh out of college, blew up all over the world, it’s a signal of a pretty huge career ahead for the young reporter.

Ok, so little Rose’s song may require subtitles both for her gibberish and the real lyrics but she still one-ups me when it come to singing Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements.” The video is about a year old now but her dad says she’s still interested in the periodic table (mostly because of the song) and writes, “She likes the video of Daniel Radcliffe singing it, and the one where two older girls sing a Japanese version.”

(via io9)

Throughout his life, Charles Darwin endured a religious struggle as he uncovered more and more about evolution in his travels and studies. As he put together his writings on evolution, he brought in his family to help him edit his work, including his daughter Henrietta Darwin (also known as Etty to the family). One of the most famous and controversial pieces of her father’s that she worked on was The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. That was Darwin’s follow-up to The Origin of the Species, and when he doubled down on his theories of evolution as it applied to humans. But Henrietta’s opinions on these matters were never really detailed, and all some people really knew of her was an unflattering portrayal in her niece’s memoir. But now, we’re finding that Henrietta went through similar struggles as her father did, and it’s painting a whole new picture of one of Darwin’s closest confidants.