Video: Sholto Crow's Martin is an imaginatively animated tale that pays tribute to the coastal resort town where he grew up. The filmmaker notes that it's only "semi-autobiographical" — so you can rest assured that the thing with the giant, laser-blasting robots probably didn't happen.

Where there are landfills there are seagulls. An estimated 1.4 million of these opportunistic feathered critters feed on these vast tracts of waste across North America. And as a new study from Duke University shows, the voluminous amounts of poop from these gulls is compromising the water-quality of nearby lakes and reservoirs.

In 1911, a monument was erected in Orlando, Florida in honour of the Confederate traitors who fought to uphold slavery in the South. This week that monument was moved from its prominent position (despite protests from local losers) to a nearby cemetery, but the controversy hasn't died away yet. A local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy wants to take possession of the monument's time capsule.

The vast majority of infectious human diseases come from animals, yet we know surprisingly little about which animals pose the greatest risk. A new study helps resolve this shortcoming, ranking the mammals that are most likely to spread infectious diseases to humans.

Superhero TV season has come and gone, which means there's yet another season under the belts of Supergirl, Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow. Over the last year of TV some of these shows defied expectations, and some lost their way — but there's always room for the things we want to see them do next.

If you know science, you know it isn't perfect. Outside eyes review papers their peers wrote before those papers get published, results must be reproduced to establish truths, and even then, stuff can still contain mistakes.

Video: Imagine if everyone came pre-programmed with one special talent. It would be amazingly awesome — unless, like the frustrated protagonist of sci-fi short Exchangers, your talent is totally useless. Next stop: The black market, where skill swaps can change lives, sometimes in very strange ways.

Some of life's simplest questions get swept under the rug for a long time — after all, the most widespread phenomena often require the most data to understand. Take the shape of the boring egg, for example. You probably thought eggs are was shaped the way they are so they won't roll out of the nest or something. But a huge analysis shows the real reason eggs have their characteristic shapes may be completely surprising.

Blood Drive has got to be Syfy's most insane show ever. The 13-episode series pays homage to classic grindhouse films, knowingly pushing the boundaries of good taste at every opportunity. It's overstuffed with a gleeful sense of "Can you believe we're getting away with this?" — both for better and for worse

Thousands of years ago, indigenous people living in the California Channel Islands relied on a manufacturing process that exposed them to dangerous chemicals which likely compromised their health. The discovery shows that toxic substances of our own making have been around for a lot longer than we realised.

The price tag for the never-ending, but occasionally paused, war in Afghanistan is well north of a trillion dollars by now. Nearly $US100 million ($132 million) of that is attributable to America's generous decision to buy uniforms for the struggling Afghan National Army — and a newly released inspector general report says that as much as $US28 million ($37 million) of that cost was tacked on to pay for a proprietary camouflage pattern that Afghanistan's then-minister of defence thought looked cool.

Humans are pretty jaded these days. We can write most of the strange phenomena we see off as science (or we honestly don't care). But when Roman philosophers such as Pliny the Elder witnessed moonless nights glow bright like the day, it definitely made an impression. Others since then have been awestruck by these "bright nights", too.

We've seen the first episode of Spike's adaptation of Stephen King's The Mist — and though it's largely set-up, it reveals what the show is keeping from King's original story, hints of how the novella's being expanded for TV, and all the secrets and melodrama you'd expect from a King story.

In his new book The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, Brian Merchant gives us a rare look inside Apple, chronicling the development of the iPhone with details about everything from the selection of raw materials to the product's famous launch event.

Video: After nearly four years, David Lewandowski has created a new entry in his highly successful rubbermen videos. Now they're hungry.

Staring at this squishy little vibrator, that looks more like something you'd find on the beach than in a sex store, two thoughts went through my mind. The first was that I now understood what the seashells in Demolition Man were for. The second thought was perhaps more relevant to Tenga's Iroha Kushi: It is the perfect example of the rising trend of sex toys as art. It's the sex toy industry venturing past pure utility into art for art's sake, and it feels great humming against your clit.

It's been about 11 years since Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status, leaving a 2370km-sized void in our hearts. Since then, the hunt for Planet X — aptly renamed Planet 9 — has grown into an international movement to find such an object in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune's orbit. Now, scientists Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra from the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory are upping the ante — they suggest that a completely different, tenth planetary-mass object is hiding somewhere in the Kuiper Belt as well. Is someone keeping track of all these goddamn hypothetical planets?

I have too many Blu-rays. There, I said it. I have so many Blu-rays that I have to keep a list in my phone, just for times like this.

Australian scientists have developed a new efficient catalyst that converts carbon dioxide from the air into synthetic natural gas in a "clean" process, using solar energy.