You know what gives away CGI every time? It's the skin.

Computer-generated human skin is almost always too smooth and too plastic-y. Even the best CGI look like they're wax models. That close-but-no-cigar skin puts CGI faces right smack in the uncanny valley.

But not for long: Researchers at the University of Southern California Institute of Creative Technologies have released a new technique that can create amazingly realistic artificial skin.

Koki Nagano and colleagues scanned real human face to capture details at the 10 micron magnification level - close enough to capture details like tiny wrinkles and pores - and then created an algorithm to mimic the stretching and compression of the skin in regular human facial expressions.

The results are absolutely stunning:

Via Co.DESIGN

Nothing beats (ahem!) a good pair of headphones, especially those that feel solid and substantial in your hands. Like those iconic Beats By Dre headphones you see everywhere you go. Surely they're made with top shelf components that justify their sky-high price of $199, right?

Bolt's prototype engineer Avery Louie decided to see what the Beats headphones are made from and exacty how much they cost ... and he's found quite a few surprises, like this one:

One of the great things about the solo headphones is how substantial they feel. A little bit of weight makes the product feel solid, durable, and valuable. One way to do this cheaply is to make some components out of metal in order to add weight. In these headphones, 30% of the weight comes from four tiny metal parts that are there for the sole purpose of adding weight.

So, how much do the components in a $199 headphones actually cost? Find out at Louie's post over at Medium - via Core77

Got parents with high expectation? Impress them by telling them you got into Harvard.

Got parents with really high expectation? Impress them by telling them that you not only got accepted at Harvard and Stanford with full scholarships, but also that they both want you so bad that they're creating a special joint program so you can attend both schools.

And if that's not enough, tell them that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called you on the phone to give you advice on which college to attend.

That's what one high school senior, dubbed by the media as "Genius Girl," did. Too bad that none of it was true and when the story went viral. The Washington Post reports:

The senior’s tale of academic conquest of admission into what turned out to be a bogus program apparently was designed to impress her parents, peers and teachers as part of the annual cutthroat competition for the relatively tiny number of spots at the nation’s top schools. The faked admission story went much further than most teen fantasies: It made its way to the international media, where the student’s parents admitted the truth and publicly shamed themselves before the Korean community. ...

The question now at the school is what caused the student to concoct the elaborate college admissions scheme. The answer seems obvious to students and teachers there: overwhelming pressure to succeed from parents and unrealistic expectations from the teens themselves.

Creating a story that went viral and brought you internet notoriety? Now that's impressive!

If your idea of cooking is more pushing some buttons on the microwave oven, then with this new technology, you may well be on your way to become a gourmet chef.

Behold the next generation microwave, as developed by Freescale Semiconductor. This microwave uses solid-state radio frequency (RF) technology to heat meals and allows you to cook food at different intensities, prevent overcooking, and heat up multiple dishes at the same time. The microwave has a wide array of cooking techniques, including searing, browning, baking, and poaching. Plus, it looks boss!

"Consumers worldwide are strapped for time but still want nutrient-rich, high quality meals at home," said Paul Hart, senior vice president and general manager for Freescale’s RF business. "They will no longer need to choose between quality and convenience. Imagine not only having ready-to cook, gourmet meals delivered to your door, but achieving restaurant-quality results in mere minutes. This is an exciting new appliance concept based on a novel cooking paradigm."

That's a tall promise for a technology that's been around for almost 70 years (yes, the first microwave, built from radar technologies developed during World War II, was sold in 1946).

Via Mashable.

The Imperial insurance adjustor's not going to like this!

French artist Nicolas Amiard has created a set of composite photographs depicting what would happen if starships from the Star Wars universe crash landed on planet Earth.

As he imagined the Imperial Star Destroyer plopped down in Paris to the Millennium Falcon crash landed in the Hudson River, Amiard said to VICE's The Creators Project, "Star Wars is an imaginary universe and bringing elements from this universe in our real world seemed to be a very interesting contrast to work on."

We'll say that the Force (of Photoshopper) is strong with this one!

Psst, wanna million bucks? Just write the next pop hit! And you don't even have to worry about having some divine inspiration for writing the song because, as it turns out, there's a formula for writing catchy pop songs.

And what better form to write said formula than in an actual song?

Here's a pop song about pop songs, by Josh Ramsay of Marianas Trench. And he should know what he's talking about - Josh wrote and produced Carly Rae Jepsen's 2011 earworm "Call Me Maybe."

Via Twisted Sifter.

That carton of milk you buy from the grocery store? Y'know, the one that's hard to open. If you've been having an infernal time prying open the gable top carton and squeezing the two sides to pop the spout out, then watch this clip below.

It'll change your life FOREVER!

Here's how a professional opens a milk carton, courtesy of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF):

Photo: Jeff Schultz/Flickr - via Bored Panda

What magical stone is this?! Flickr user Jeff Schultz took a photograph of a Mexican opal that looks like it has a fiery sunset and clouds captured within. Gorgeous!

Rocks shouldn't move, should they? YouTube user TurboMuffin filmed her corgi Turbo chillin' in the yard next to a rock ... which suddenly moved! Oh, that sneaky turtle!

Remember that Chris Pratt raptor training pose? Turns out, wrangling velociraptors was just preparation for something much more challenging: training human children.

Chris Pratt's Jurassic World raptor training pose

Redditor chrysias posted this image of Jurassic World actor Chris Pratt at Our Lady of the Lake hospital in Baton Rogue, Louisiana, taming entertaining the kids and their families.

Just to underscore how dangerous little children could be, does anyone know where Chris Pratt is now? He hasn't been heard from since ...

Image: MarcoBrusa

If you think you have to wait for a long time for pizza, just be thankful that you didn't have to wait 18 hours like for this one. But result is worth it: a new Guinness World Record for world's longest pizza!

For the 2015 world fair in Milan, Italy, sixty pizza makers came together to cook a sizzling margherita 1,595.45-meter long (that's nearly a mile-long!) The pizza was made using over two tons of tomato sauce and half a ton of mozzarella cheese, and stretched over 800 tables.

Photo: Olivier Morin/AFP

After the pizza was declared as world's longest, it was fed to over 30,000 fair visitors, and donated to a local food bank.

So, just how does one cook a mile-long pizza? With moving ovens, of course:

Now this is different! For the first time in 33 years, a cat has been given the "Hero Dog" award by a Los Angeles animal shelter. And wait till you hear what she did to win the award: she attacked a dog.

Last year, Tara the cat saw her owner, 6-year-old autistic boy named Jeremy Triantafilo, got attacked by a neighbor's dog. Tara body-slammed the dog and chased it away. The incident was caught on Triantafilo's home security video, which Miss C posted on Neatorama.

"We were so impressed by Tara's bravery and fast action that the selection committee decided that a cat this spectacular should be the National Hero Dog," said Madeline Bernstein, president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal Los Angeles, to WPVI.

As you'd expect, the word "Dog" on the trophy was scratched out and replaced with "Cat."

Great Vocab Didn't Save The Thesaurus From Extinction

"We are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event."

That line belongs in a sci-fi movie, but it was actually said by Gerardo Ceballos to the BBC, now a scientist at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. "If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover and our species itself would likely disappear early on," he added.

Species extinction over the past centuries

Ceballos and colleagues from Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, have just published a paper that showed the current extinction rate of vertebrates is more than 100 times greater than normal. Since 1900, there are more than 400 vertebrate species that went extinct.

The study laid the blame on modern human activities, including deforestation, introduction of invasive species, pollution, and, you guessed it, climate change.

"There are examples of species all over the world that are essentially the walking dead," added Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. As species disappear, so goes their benefits to the ecosystem such as crop pollination by honeybees and water purifications in the wetlands. At the current rate of loss, we could lose biodiversity within just three generations. "We are sawing off the limb that we are sitting on," added Ehrlich.

Eso les pasa :/ #PartidoVerde #NoMemes pic.twitter.com/6xI9U9LTGH

— Veronica (@EdithVazqu) June 19, 2015

Shouldn't we all know how the Interwebs work by now? Apparently not this lawmaker in Mexico!

Congresswoman Selma Guadalupe Gomez wanted to protect the "moral patrimony" of the Mexican state of Sonora by banning Internet memes and regulating social media content. She recently introduced a bill, titled "Law of Civil Responsibility for the Protection of the Right to Private Life, Honor and the Image of the State of Sonora" or more popularly known as the "anti-meme" law, calls for fines up to $1,600.

Needless to say, the Internet responded by turning the congresswoman into a meme. Twitter exploded with memes tagged #ladymeme and #NoMemes, a word play on "No Mames," a Mexican slang roughly meaning "you're kidding."

All we got to say is, well, that escalated quickly.

Photo: Gail Worley / Worleygig

Actually, she's not ... but it's amazing how our modern brain interprets that situation, right?

Gail Worley of the awesome blog Worleygig (seriously, check it out) went to The Met and saw this 1855 marble statue "Indian Girl, or The Dawn of Christianity," by Erasmus Dow Palmer. Like many of us, she immediately thought "doesn't it look like she's checking her Instagram feed or catching up on Tweets?"

It turns out that the object that the Indian Girl was looking at is a crucifix, not a smart phone. Could've fooled us, though.