Now his site pulls in over 60 million page views a month (as of October 2007).It describes itself as a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language”, suffers from something of an obsession with the velociraptors out of Jurassic Park, and may be the only cartoon in the world that features The Grim Reaper playing Dungeons & Dragons against Gary Gygax (“RIP, Gary”).

It features a collection of talking animals, notably the patriarchal Mr Cornelius Bear, a five-year-old otter called Philippe, and Roast Beef, a depressed cat, living in a house in California.What would happen to the Earth if the Sun suddenly switched off? Putting mathematics, declassified military research, complex computer models, big data and common sense to the test, he endeavours to answer questions such as…For answers to questions like these – and the chance to put your own queries to ‘nerd royalty’ Randall Munroe, join the how to: Academy on 26th September. Randall Munroe left a job building robots at NASA to draw comics on the internet full-time.What would happen if one tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a straw?How many fairies would fly around, if each fairy is born from the first laugh of a child and fairies were immortal? Beyond his stick-figure comics that philosophise on romance, science and politics, and poke fun at general ignorance and first-degree pedantry, Munroe is a genius at providing serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions – using pictures and words that can be understood by anyone from ages 5 to 105.You'll also receive the latest news and top stories in your inbox every week with the New Scientist email newsletter. To create your free account, simply complete this quick form.Another word of warning: we know it says "the 10 best" in the headline, but because there are so many great webcomics out there, any list was always going to be controversial; we've had to leave off Mega Tokyo and Ctrl Alt Del, for heaven's sake, to name just two.In order for you to become a victim, you just have to listen to a malicious You Tube clip via your smartphone or have it nearby – researchers placed the device 10.1 feet away from the speakers and it was hacked'So a possible scenario could be that a million people watch a kitten video, and 10,000 of them have their phones nearby and 5,000 of those phones obey the attacker's voice commands and load a URL with malware on it,' Sherr says.'Then you have 5,000 smartphones under an attacker's control.'The team used their knowledge about how speech recognition systems work to construct audio recordings that can be understood as speech by computers but lack the necessary resolution for human comprehension.'We learned that if you remove those parts and keep everything else, you get something that a computer can still understand but the human brain cannot,' Sherr explains.The title is pretty self-explanatory: these are some rules and examples of tricky, confusing, frequently abused/ignored, or difficult-to-remember aspects of English grammar. What is necessary for ease of reading is the comma after it.With a free New Scientist account you'll enjoy increased access to New Scientist content and ideas.Every week the editors release a selection of articles to New Scientist account holders.The storylines are generally strung out over a number of strips.Much of the humour comes from the finely drawn characters, and can be bittersweet - Beef’s depression gets in the way of his relationship with his long-suffering wife Molly, for instance. Beyond his stick-figure comics that philosophise on romance, science and politics, and poke fun at general ignorance and first-degree pedantry, Munroe is a genius at providing serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions – using pictures and words that can be understood by anyone from ages 5 to 105.Could a bird deliver a standard 20″ New York-style cheese pizza to a moving aircraft?