Celebrating the 20th anniversary of OK Computer (a favourite here at Lapsus) and Radiohead’s announcement of OKNOTOK, we’ve decided to compile a list of our top 10 favourite Radiohead songs. Write-ups are by our two resident journalists: Julian and Billy. There is no order, except perhaps for our mutual number one. And just for you, …
AN ICY-BLUE DOME STANDS AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF A HARSH, RED LANDSCAPE. This mysterious frosty globe guards a band of pioneers against the unforgiving Martian environment. This isn’t a sci-fi story, buddy. This is NASA’s ambitious new concept for living on Mars. While working alongside a group of expert architects and designers from industry and academia, an unlikely material for building these chill-pads was proposed …
SUGAR AND ALCOHOL have been discovered in the icy furrows of comet Lovejoy. The comet’s orbit is highly elliptical. On a close arc around the sun, blue-green sails of booze and sugar trail off into space. Lovejoy marks the first time that ethyl alcohol (or ethanol), the same type we use in drinks here on Earth, has been …
THE FIRST PERSON TO LIVE TO 1000 YEARS OLD MAY HAVE ALREADY BEEN BORN, says gerontologist Dr. Aubrey de Grey. According to de Grey, age itself is a disease. And the cure is close. “We are working to develop medicines that will bring ageing under true medical control,” says de Grey, former professor at Cambridge University …
IN A FARAWAY SOLAR SYSTEM awash with distant, milky stars smearing through velvety blackness, an exoplanet modestly named HD 131399Ab is treated to a boastful triple sunset. This little piece of paradise is located roughly 320 light-years from Earth, in the HD 131399 system in the constellation of Centaurus. The exoplanet Described as a gaseous, …
THERE IS A NEW GLOBAL EPIDEMIC, it has kids and adults alike mindlessly roaming alleyways, searching dark bushes at night, and trespassing private property for that sweet, sweet hit. The other day I was a passenger in my brother’s car, cruising as we do. When out of nowhere one of the victims stepped in front …
So you’ve fallen into a black hole. Oh dear! The gravitational pull of these collapsed stars is so fierce that not even light can escape—hence the name, black. And the further you fall, the fiercer it gets. If you’ve slipped in feet-first, the exponential suck of gravity will be pulling on your toes at forces …
THE BLACKEST SHADE OF BLACK EVER is known as Vantablack, and British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor has been given the exclusive artistic licence to use it. “It’s so black you almost can’t see it,” Kapoor told BBC Radio 4. “Imagine a space that’s so dark that as you walk in you lose all sense of where you are, … Continue reading
JUNO ORBITS JUPITER. After a five-year journey through space, NASA’s space-probe Juno arrived last week at planet Jupiter, the gas-giant, the largest planet in our solar system. NASA’s Mission Juno surveys the northern and southern lights of Jupiter, the planet’s magnetic field, radiation, as well as the secrets that lie beneath Jupiter’s thick swirl of … Continue reading
THE FBI is offering up to $25,000 ($32,400 AUD) for any information on the seven Andy Warhol paintings stolen from a Missouri art museum last week. The iconic Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, part of a set of 10, worth $500,000 in total, were taken from the Springfield Art Museum during a break-in, in the early … Continue reading
Well, this is awkward. Some of our Homo Sapien ancestors had sex with Neanderthals. We know this because a curious bunch of palaeontologists at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany decided to spool through Neanderthal genomes in 2010. However, we never quite understood the implications of such filthy, prehistoric debauchery. That’s where John Capra … Continue reading
By engaging in and embracing your phone’s personal linguistic glossary, is it possible you could also eliminate some of the responsibility of ‘confessing’ your true feelings and emotions, thus reducing the negative stigma of such a purge? After all, it’s just a silly message, right? Maybe not. Continue reading
Special Relativity is the 1905 babe of Albert Einstein, a physical theory on the interwoven relationship between space and time. In physics today it stands as an accepted and experimentally well-confirmed set of ideas. Consider the following. In a field by some train tracks, James throws a ball to Larry at 20 km/h, which he catches amiably. … Continue reading
THE TIME TRAVEL RECORD is held by retired cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who trumps us all with 23 milliseconds more reality than you or I. Yes, it’s a stretched qualification for ‘time traveller’ — the sharper way to put it is that for Krikalev, time has been slightly dilated. Slowed down, as it were, leaving him … Continue reading
