Oliver Hayes

The Fish That Still Looks Dangerous Dead From March 15 through May 12, 2013, the Nara Kenko Land hotel in Nara, Japan, hosted an event called the “Big Amazon Mysterious Fish Exhibit.” Among its three featured dishes was something called “Pirania No Amazonesu”: a piranha, dusted lightly with flour, deep-fried, and served whole over rice … Read more

The Studio in a Single Link Back in 2009, getting a professional-looking video interview onto your blog usually meant either arranging an in-person meeting or fighting through software that seemed designed to punish you for trying. David Lee had a different idea. His personal project, which he developed with co-founder James Lee and which eventually … Read more

The Art of the Self-Arrest Police work gets romanticized as a battle of wits, the shrewd investigator running down the cunning fugitive. But a surprising number of cases require almost no detective work at all, because the person responsible essentially does it for them. Consider the robbers who stormed behind the counter at a pizza … Read more

We Know Mars Better Than Our Own Backyard Spacecraft have photographed Mars from orbit in enough detail to chart individual craters and ridges. The Moon has been mapped with similar precision. Meanwhile, Earth’s oceans cover roughly 140 million square miles, about 71% of this planet’s surface, and as of April 2026, only about 28.7% of … Read more

Wings Are Wonderful. But Can They Point at Something? Picture a pigeon on a park bench. Now picture the same pigeon flexing a fully formed, muscular human arm, bicep tight, fingers spread wide. That image shouldn’t work. The brain snags on it, tries to file it somewhere, and comes up empty. That snag is exactly … Read more

Cutting a Virus Out of Human DNA Nearly every treatment for a viral infection works by interfering with the virus: blocking cell entry, stopping replication, neutralizing it in the bloodstream. What researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University did was structurally different. They used a gene-editing tool to physically remove HIV … Read more

When Homer Melts Picture the most familiar animated faces on television, but wrong, not wrong the way a rushed sketch goes wrong, but wrong on purpose. Sam Taylor’s drawing “Melthouse” takes characters that anyone could recognize from over two decades of Sunday-night viewing and lets them drip. The shapes that usually snap together into familiar … Read more

Two Monsters Walk Into a Review Picture Freddy Fazbear and Slender Man not lurking in the dark, but sitting on a couch together, debating what actually makes a horror game work. That is the premise The Warp Zone ran with, and the result is a surprisingly sharp piece of genre criticism dressed up as sketch … Read more

Your Brain Is Running on Multiple Clocks at Once Think about flinching at a sudden loud noise, no decision, your body just moved. Then think about weighing a difficult choice, turning options over for minutes or hours. Same brain, two completely different operating modes. Most people assume the difference is simply attention. The reality is … Read more

The Thing That Makes You Better at Learning Is the Thing You Dread Most people treat an exam like a report card: you find out the verdict after the fact. Either you learned the material or you didn’t, and the test is just there to tell you which. If that’s how you think about tests, … Read more