NASA describes the dying star, NGC 6543, in elegant scientific prose.

“The Cat’s Eye (NGC 6543) represents a brief, yet glorious, phase in the life of a sun-like star.”

The space agency recently posted a sharpened image of the distant planetary nebula, located some 3,000 light-years beyond Earth. These sprawling clouds of dust and gas form when stars similar to our sun reach the end of their lives and “gently eject their outer gaseous layers,” according to NASA and ESA astronomers. The legendary Hubble Space Telescope, now nearly 30 years old, originally captured this image of the planetary nebula. Read more…

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Like everyone else who’s not a monster, Lady Gaga is deeply distraught following the recent spate of mass shootings. On Friday, she pledged to do something about it.

In a Facebook post, Gaga announced her intent to “fully fund the classroom project needs” in Dayton, Ohio; El Paso, Texas; and Gilroy, Calif. Those three communities have all suffered in recent weeks in the wake of mass shootings that left, in total, close to 100 people dead or injured.

“My heart goes out to those who were taken from us too soon and to their families, loved ones, and communities who are left to grieve,” Gaga’s note begins. “Everyone has the right to laws that make them feel safe in their communities. In this moment, I want to channel my confusion, frustration, and fury into hope. Hope that we are there for each other and for ourselves.” Read more…

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Hope, a 19-year-old college student at the University of Texas, had just walked off a plane from a family vacation when she had a sinking realization: she had left her AirPods onboard.

She soon grew desperate. In an effort to get back her beloved earbuds before the plane left for its next destination, she climbed onto the wing. But she was unsuccessful, and the plane took off with her struggling to cling to the wing — still trying to retrieve her AirPods.

It was literally a nightmare scenario. “I woke up crying,” she said. 

The whole ordeal had been an exceptionally vivid dream.

Hope, a design student who asked to be identified by her first name only, says she, like most people, has had stress dreams in the past. But this one — the only, so far, to feature her AirPods — affected her much more than other dreams. Read more…

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TL;DR: Get this quirky, flask-shaped Bluetooth speaker for $24.99. Usually priced at $69.99, you’ll be saving $45. 

With the influx of Bluetooth speakers on the market, consumers are faced with an embarrassment of riches. But think of it as a delightful dilemma. You’re no longer relegated to only a handful of options that you most likely don’t even want; you quite literally have hundreds and thousands of options to choose from.

Need to procure speakers with excellent sound quality? All it takes is one Google search. Want one that you can carry on a hiking trip? There’s a speaker designed for that. If your motive for buying new speakers is purely for recreational purposes, though, we have the perfect suggestion: the iHome flask-shaped Bluetooth speaker — a speaker that screams F-U-N. Read more…

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Everyone hates parking tickets. Not everyone, however, is an information security researcher with a mischievous side and a freshly minted vanity license plate reading “NULL.”

That would be Droogie (his handle, if that’s not obvious), a presenter at this year’s DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas and man with a very specific problem: He’s on the receiving end of thousands of dollars worth of tickets that aren’t his. But don’t tell that to the DMV.

It wasn’t, of course, supposed to end up this way. In fact, exactly the opposite. Droogie registered a vanity California license plate consisting solely of the word “NULL” — which in programming is a term for a value of zero — for fun. And, he admitted to laughs, on the off chance it would confuse automatic license plate readers and the DMV’s ticketing system.  Read more…

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Nina Kollars just wanted a cheaper cup of coffee. Stumbling across an online credit card fraud ring was simply an added bonus. 

As she explained to a crowd at the annual DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, the associate professor at the Naval War College didn’t set out to become an unwitting money mule accidentally helping to defraud senior citizens, but hey, not everything goes the way you think it will. 

Kollars, a fan of Nespresso coffee pods, had found what seemed to be an amazing deal on eBay: 200 of the pods listed at half price. So she placed her order, and, soon after paying via PayPal, her order arrived — along with a brand-new $280 Nespresso espresso maker that she hadn’t ordered or paid for. Read more…

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We don’t know what jade vagina eggs are supposed to do, but helping memory clearly isn’t one of them. Goop founder and Marvel star Gwyneth Paltrow has a reputation for forgetting her fellow stars in some of the biggest blockbusters of movie history — including, most recently, Nick Fury himself.

First it was Sebastian Stan, the Winter Soldier, who starred alongside Paltrow in several Avengers movies and had to reintroduce himself to her three times (and counting). Then it was the entirety of the Spider-Man: Homecoming cast, when Paltrow completely forgot she was in the movie while doing an episode of The Chef Show inspired by her role in said movie. Read more…

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A man in a hotdog suit repeatedly smashes a computer with a sledgehammer as raucous cheers fill the room.  

No, you did not just wander into a David Lynch dreamscape, but rather the d(struction)20 CTF at the annual DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas. The competition, which pits a group of hackers and researchers against each other in random security and cryptography challenges, comes with a very DEF CON-esque twist: Participants are subject to the roll of a 20-sided die, and the resulting number corresponds to physical damage inflicted upon their computer. Then they have to complete the next challenge.  Read more…

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Look, I get it. Temperatures are rising, leaders are getting dumber, and it seems like an apocalypse is nigh. We’re all freaked — including at least one member of the social media team at Charleston, S.C.’s paper, The Post and Courier.

How do I know? Just look at this tweet posted on Friday, linking to a story about Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.’s Charleston location closing.

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Your luck can change on the dime in New York City — and rain will likely have something to do with it.

The Big Apple has been dealing with the torrential effects of bad storms over the past several months. Up until now we’ve only seen endless, hellish Twitter videos of subway flooding. But now, in a time-lapse video captured on an iPhone XR, we can get a different perspective on the city’s weather problems. The video comes courtesy of Reddit user allsp49, who shot it from a vantage point in Jersey City, right across the water from Manhattan.

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