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A three-year-old video in which a young Chinese boy appears to demonstrate night vision is making the rounds once again, with news sources wondering if the boy really has mutant night vision or freaky alien powers. Yeah...this shouldn't take long. More »
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Space, the final frontier...of warfare? Science fiction tales often center around the militarization of space, with lasers and torpedoes made of light racing past (and through) battleships and star destroyers. More »
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You don't need to be an eccentric billionaire or rugged survivalist to take up residence in a cave. All around the globe, living in an rocky recess is just a fact of life and can be way more homey than any manmade structure. Here are some real estate destinations to investigate should you attempt to cultivate that post-modern caveman chic.

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As with pyrokinetics and human magnets, a heaping dose of skepticism is requisite when one hears that a little boy possesses superhuman night vision. According to this news report posted by the Alien Disclosure Group UK — promisingly titled "Alien Hybrid Or Starchild Discovered In China?" — Nong Youhui of southern China has the eyes of a fresh-faced morlock. Real deal or not, this kid is extremely lucky in that he can now easily purloin Paul Stanley's awesome nickname. More »
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Did you ever wish to star in your very own Gundam cartoon? For under $300, you can become the hero in a copyright-naysaying mecha epic! More »
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For 21 years, 34-year-old Wang Youping of China's Shaanxi Province hasn't been able to shut his mouth due to his giant tongue. More »
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Reality inched closer to Sim City (or Starcraft, pump out those barracks!) last month when China's Broad Corporation built a 30-story hotel prototype using prefabricated materials in 360 hours. Watch a time-lapse video of the construction site above. More »
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The US Air Force's high-tech, unmanned X-37B spaceplane launched on March 5, 2011, entering low Earth orbit with the mission designation USA-226 and a set of tantalizingly vague mission parameters: to "demonstrate a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the United States Air Force." More »
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China continues to make headway in its efforts to become one of the world's foremost spacefaring nations. In a white paper issued last week, the Chinese government officially announced its intentions to place a manned spacecraft on the moon. More »
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This is the Kiev, currently anchored in the Chinese port of Tianjin. Once she was the flagship of the mighty Soviet navy's Pacific fleet. Now she's available for business retreats, intimate getaways or simple relaxation. More »
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The greatest sculpture of all time? Perhaps! Outside of the 20,000-person Chinese town of Erlian on the Mongolian border, you can find this statue of two amorous sauropods making out for all the world to see. Built to showcase the region's reputation as a fossil hotspot, this reptile snog session instead is a stark reminder that if you build a tourist trap, it's never guaranteed that anyone will show. More »
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No, this wasn't the work of Vigo the Carpathian or a bunch of overzealous Slayer fans. In the city of Luoyang, illegal manufacturing workshops dumped chemical dye in the Jian River. The dye turned the river an unpleasant shade of hemoglobin crimson. It's not clear what the health ramifications of this unholy mess will be, at least there's the cold comfort that the Earth hasn't punctured an aorta. More »
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The UN's latest Climate Change Conference recently concluded after two weeks of intense negotiations in Durban, South Africa. There's going to be a new agreement to address climate change, but does that really mean anything? Let's break down what happened. More »
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Remember Ordos City, that ritzy urban planning project in the Gobi Desert where most people can't afford to live? Design firm MAD Architects recently completed the blob-like local museum. I repeat — the Chinese government commissioned a museum that looks sort of like a bashful Shai-Hulud in a chichi desert ghost town. If you build it, will they come? More »
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Bootleg toys can be all sorts of amazing, but this solar-powered jiggle novelty really deserves a Bootleg Toy of The Year Award (In The Field of Perversion of Source Material). I've heard dark rumors that they hold that ceremony annually in the back room of the nation's most successful Dollar Tree retail store. More »
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It's not hard to dress up as he who slumbers in R'lyeh. All you need to do is shove a bunch of wriggling snakes up your nostrils like 53-year-old serpent master Liu Fei of Mianiang, China. Sure, this tactic may require nerves of steel and a lifetime of practice, but once you perfect it, you can pull it out for picnics and birthday parties and board meetings and piano recitals and croquet tournaments. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5861118&view=rss&microfeed=true Apparently xenophobia is at least part of the reason for a recently-announced budget cut to the US Office of Science and Technology Policy. Science Insider reports: More »
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We've seen how gorgeous the dilapidated Wonderland amusement park in China can be when spruced up with good photography, but what does it look like when you're actually trekking out there? Turns out it's overrun with cornfields, children scampering in the shadows, and stray dogs. The folks over at Stuck In Customs made a video log of their journey out there. Definitely not the happiest place on Earth. More »
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When China was denied membership in the multinational partnership that operates the International Space Station, the country decided to build a manned space station of its own. Now, China is one step closer to achieving its goal: late last night, the China National Space Administration successfully launched its unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft into low-earth orbit. More »
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An upcoming Congressional report suggests that NASA satellites have been hacked four times in recent years, possibly by people involved with the Chinese military. NASA isn't confirming all of that - but they do admit "suspicious events" have occurred. More »
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I'll come right out and say it: you need to watch this video. It's quite a bit longer than a lot of what we feature here on io9, but the weekend is almost here, and you owe it to yourself to set aside 53 minutes to watch a veritable scientific dream team talk about humanity's future in space. More »
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This may look like your average German suburb on a quiet day, but it's actually a planned community 30 kilometers outside of Shanghai. This is Anting German Town, a one-square-kilometer residential development founded in 2001 and built specifically to resemble a little slice of Deutschland. There's only one problem for this quirky Teutonic oasis —nobody wants to live there. More »
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Roboticists at China's Zhejiang University have built a duo of blank-faced machines named Kong and Wu whose programming and dexterity make them formidable ping-pong players. The 5'3″ robots use cameras to track the ball and can hold their own against human opponents. More »
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Hidden in the dark caves of southwest China, a fragment of Earth's last Ice Age might well survive. Sadly, there aren't any mammoths hiding out in there, but tiny plants might represent a last link to 30,000 years ago. More »
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Meet Shu Mansheng and his 18-foot-diameter octocopter. This device — which uses eight motorcycle engine — set Shu back $3000 and can hover for 10 seconds at a height of three feet. The action starts at approximately 4:30. No word on whether he'll be able to steer this DIY air chariot out of his home village of Dashu. More »
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Disneyland's It's A Small World ride was never the paragon of normal, what with its chirpy dead-eyed puppets and hypnotically communitarian mantra. But Chinese theme parks take the sing-songy boat ride to new frontiers of uncomfortable. More »
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Dutch design firm MVRDV recently won a competition to build the China Comic and Animation Museum in the city of Hangzhou. The firm shaped this trippy building like a collection of intermingling speech bubbles. The designers estimate that this project will cost €92 million (approximately $125.6 million), begin construction in 2012, and will attract visitors with its "gigantic 3D zoetrope." Should it ever be completed, I imagine visiting this museum will be an experience on par with freebasing a copy of Detective Comics #27. More »
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In the upcoming faux documentary Ghosts With Shit Jobs, the West has been in a state of financial ruin for decades, and the indigenous North Americas (or "ghosts") are outsourced labor for China and India. What forms of employment are available? Among several careers, living spambot, robot baby technician, and silk collector. More »
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Remember the Chinese ghost city of Ordos? After visiting this unpopulated metropolis (which was built for one-million residents) in 2009, Al-Jazeera went back to find that even though Ordos was still mostly unoccupied, construction kept chugging along. But why? More »
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Earlier this week, a stereotypically round UFO flew over and shut down Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport in southwest China. It wouldn't be summertime without some high-profile Chinese UFO sightings, and this was one was most certainly not a lantern. More »
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Remember, Wonderland, that unfinished medieval amusement park outside Beijing that looks like a post-apocalyptic Magic Kingdom? Catherine Hyland recently visited Wonderland and toured its many abandoned nooks and crannies. Remember, if you're going to build an amusement park, you must finish it before the ghosts and drifters move in. More »
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In 1986, Chinese cartooning received its own cat-and-mouse duo in Inspector Black Cat, a cartoon about a hard-nosed feline detective who blew away any talking fauna who messed with him. More »
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Think portobello mushrooms are big? Think again. Scientists on Hainan Island in southern China have discovered the largest fungus ever recorded. Weighing in at around half a ton, and extending over thirty feet in length, fungus experts were shocked to discover the fruiting body (comparable to a mushroom in other fungal species) feeding on the underside of a large fallen tree. More »
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The algae is in full bloom off of the Chinese city of Qingdao, creating a giant greet splotch measuring as much as 70 meters by 100 meters. As you can see, it takes more than that to deter Qingdao beach-goers. More »
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The Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan were damaged over the centuries by souvenir-seekers, but researchers at the University of Chicago and Peking University have managed to reconstruct the cave's fractured sculptures digitally. Watch them do so in this video. More »
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China's concave-eared frogs are one of two amphibians that use ultrasonic frequencies to communicate. There's only one small problem: the males and the females have evolved along such vastly separate lines that females are completely deaf to the males' ultrasonic cries. More »
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First there was the replica of Lyons, France, being built in Dubai; it would be a replicant city "of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris," and it would "contain squares, restaurants, cafes and museums." More »
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Last Tuesday, a lake cryptid exposed its gleaming white belly to 30 tourists at China's Kanas Lake. This isn't the first time this saucy monster's been seen in Kanas. Back in 2007, the beast made headlines too. Here's that footage. More »
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At the Beijing Dongyue Temple, you can visit the various "departments" of the Daoist supernatural realm, where terrifying spirits and demonic government officials dwell. Let's meet some of the temple's stranger denizens. More »
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