Let’s all go poop together!

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Five images, six decades: capturing the iconic “Earthrise” photo

“An Earthside sunrise is one of life’s most spectacular vistas. Sixty years ago, the Lunar Orbiter 1 captured a similar, yet infinitely rarer-to-behold wonder: our home planet ‘rising’ above the lunar surface. On August 23, 1966, NASA’s first lunar orbiter snapped the header photo above, a few weeks after it launched from Cape Canaveral on August 10th. After taking a couple of hundred more images of the moon over the course of a year, the orbiter met its demise when it dived into the lunar surface.”

Ten years of AR research just became something you wear

AR has been promised as “basically here” for about a decade, long enough that most people have learned to file it under concept video, not consumer product. Snap’s Lens platform quietly has millions of people already using AR effects through a phone screen without thinking of it that way. SPECS move that same foundation onto a transparent waveguide built into actual glasses, which makes this less a leap of faith than the payoff of a bet Snap already placed years ago. [Ad]

It moves like a cat, climbs like a primate and spends much of its time high up in trees — meet the world’s strangest dog

“Shortly after midnight, under the faintly flickering stars of the desert night, a long, blue shadow — the size of a large house cat — trots along the cliff edge, jumping from boulder to boulder until it reaches the roots of the saguaro. It pauses for a moment, then effortlessly and silently scales the trunk of an adjacent ironwood tree, gripping with its forelegs and uses its hind limbs to power the ascent, its proportionately enormous tail maintaining balance. … Like primates, it has rotating wrists that enable it to grip the sides of trees to climb branchless trunks. Its long, curved claws and large, spreadable paws resemble those of cats — again, useful for gaining traction on essentially vertical surfaces.”

Designer creates world’s most hideous Hawaiian shirt to hide from AI surveillance cameras

“While some privacy advocates are content to saw down camera towers, one artist is pushing back against the panopticon with an unconventional tool: the ugliest aloha shirt you’ve ever seen. Freshly reported by Dezeen, German designer Simon Weckert designed the hideous shirt to be untraceable to AI-integrated surveillance systems. Using a dizzying blend of colors and patterns, the shirt is ugly precisely because it’s designed to confuse surveillance algorithms — as Weckert explained, it’s the ‘interplay’ of ghastly colors and shapes that hide its wearer from detection.”

The Batmobile now costs less than a tank of gas

Rocksteady closed out the Arkham trilogy by handing you the keys to a tank-shaped Batmobile and turning Gotham into your personal demolition derby. Scarecrow’s back with a body count in mind, the Arkham Knight shows up as an original threat nobody saw coming, and the whole roster of familiar troublemakers tags along. This gaming bundle includes the base game plus the Season Pass, which is a lot of Gotham for ten dollars. [Ad]

For ancient Romans, pooping was a group activity

“Imagine answering the call of nature in a dark, stinking chamber alongside dozens of strangers, all while making pleasant conversation. When it’s time to wipe, perhaps you reach for a communal sponge on a stick, hoping that the person before you rinsed it well. You’re also hoping that the hole you’re sitting over won’t suddenly release rats, or flames. This might sound like some kind of punishment or endurance challenge today, but in Ancient Rome this was just a standard public restroom. So what exactly was it like to use a Roman toilet? Here are all the smelly details.”

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