Science Daily reports that a Smithsonian research team has uncovered the first megafossils of a neotropical rainforest.

Titanoboa, the world’s biggest snake, lived in this forest 58 million years ago at temperatures 3-5 C warmer than in rainforests today, indicating that rainforests flourished during warm periods.

While, modern day snakes have been measured over 30 feet in length, it’s been speculated that that the warmer climate contributed to Titanboa’s 42 foot length.

If 58 million years sounds like a good amount of distance to keep between you and a creature capable of swallowing you and all your friends whole, keep this in mind from a recent National Geographic article on the creature:

So could Titanoboa-size snakes return with global warming? “Maybe,” study co-author Jonathan Bloch said. “They definitely could, or maybe … the warming could happen so rapidly that [snakes] wouldn’t have time to adapt.”

Let’s hope this cooling trend continues.

link: First Neotropical Rainforest Was Home Of The Titanoboa — World’s Biggest Snake

link: VIDEO: Biggest Snake Found

What’s better than a photo? A photo of a ghost. What’s even better than that? Capturing that photo on a friend’s iPhone. Of course the problem is, ghosts are never very cooperative and not likely to show themselves on demand. That’s why we’ve created this handy tutorial for faking a ghost image on a friend’s iPhone.

via http://www.iPodTricks.com

Mike from the Bigfoot Discovery Project explains on his latest YouTube video an investigation into a recent sighting. Did Bigfoot make the nest they found? Or was it a homeless person?

The US Defense department has green-lit a two-year $10 million dollar program to look for practical applications of the Casimir Effect. This is a quantum of effect with potential in everything from energy to levitation.

It’s the quantum version of the attractive force that pulls two ships at sea closer together when they’re nearby. Hendrick Casimir, discoverer of the effect, speculated that two metal plates held apart from each other in a vacuum could tap into the energy in a vacuum that quantum electrodynamics predicts.

Getting actual energy from the effect has proved quite elusive. Now researchers are exploring the potential of the repulsive and attractive forces created by the Casimir effect. One possibility is levitation. From the Scientific American article, researcher Hong Tang:

Then we’re going to engineer the structure of the surface of the silicon device to get some unusual Casimir forces to produce repulsion,” he says. In theory, he adds, that could mean building a device capable of levitation.

We’re all for device capable of levitation – even on the nanometer scale.

link: Research in a Vacuum: DARPA Tries to Tap Elusive Casmir Effect for Breakthrough Technology: Scientific American

link: Casimir effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

According to Science News, hypnosis is gaining new found respect in the laboratory as experiments indicate that hypnotic suggestions actually have a measurable effect on parts of the brain.

In one experiment, suggestion of a paralyzed hand actually changed the way the brain routed instructions for motor movement differently than those with no instruction or those told to just imagine their hand was paralyzed.

The Mesmerized Mind / Science News

Hans Rollman, professor of Religious Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, writing for the Telegram has shared some details about Newfoundland sea monster lore. The best part? These are amphibious man eaters!

A sea creature of considerable ferocity is also known to the Inuit of Labrador. Nennorluk derives its name from the polar bear (Nennok, nanuk), but the Inuktitut affix “luk” indicates its evil intent. One of the earliest mentions of the Labrador Nennorluk appeared in David Crantz’s “History of Greenland.” Crantz, preserving a 1773 tradition from Nain, says that the legendary amphibious creature “hunted and devoured the seals.” Each of its ears was “large enough for the covering of a capacious tent.” Worse yet, the “beast did not scruple to eat human flesh, when he came on shore.”

link: The Telegram – St. John’s, NL: Columns | Newfoundland and Labrador sea monsters

Check out this video that’s eerily remiscent of the 1980’s TV series V and District 9 (if the aliens spaceships were made from vaporous ice crystals and not actual technology…).

The Sun has an article here on it: Mystery UFO halo in clouds over Moscow | The Sun |News

As the Hollywood and occult hype machines spin into overdrive about the proposed end of the world on December 21st, 2012, at least one person who may or may not know something about it says it’s all bunk. According to an AP story, Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan Indian Elder had this to say:

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. “I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff.”

Another person who should know points out:

“If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea,” said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. “That the world is going to end? They wouldn’t believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain.”

He goes onto suggest this doomsday thing is a Western concept we’re projecting onto the Maya. So if the Maya say it’s bunk, who should we believe? Them or the folks who remade Godzilla?

link: Mayan Year 2012 Stirs Doomsday Theories – International News | News of the World | Middle East News | Europe News – FOXNews.com

Mark your calendars. August 31st, 2009 may have been the day the insects got the upper hand in their war against mankind.

Reportedly, a truck driver for the Minot Air Force Base 91st Missile Wing lost control of his vehicle when a “large insect” flew into the cab and (attacked) landed on his back.

When one solitary bug accomplishes what all of our enemies combined have been unable to do, it’s time to start buying Raid by the bulk.

‘Large insect’ sparked missile truck’s crash – Military- msnbc.com

Remember that time you went to take a photo and when you looked at it your iMac screen mysteriously shown through your body as if you were an ephemeral spirit because deep down your souls are intertwined? I do.

Got a weird photo? Send it to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail with “Weird photo” in the subject line or upload it to Flickr and tag it #weirdthingscom.

I took this photo outside Disneyland. It’s of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. No retouching took place. This is exactly how the photo appeared!

Want to see something spooky? Click on these slideshows and see some various ghost photos on Flickr.

The spirit photographs of William Hope

Vintage Spirit Photography

Seances

Got a spooky photo or video you want to share? Upload it to Flickr and tag it with #weirdthingscom

According to ScienceDaily it turns out those ugly yellow splotches of bug guts on your car can serve science. They use the bug guts to to do DNA sequencing to determine species distribution and other information.

To gather genetic material, they utilized a simple but effective collection method – the front bumper of a moving vehicle. Two samples of bug splatter were collected, the first after driving from Pennsylvania to Connecticut, and the second after traveling from Maine to New Brunswick, Canada.

link: Bug Splatter On Your Car’s Windshield Is A Treasure Trove Of Genomic Biodiversity

Excitement over augmented reality applications for the iPhone and other devices is certainly justified to an extent. But let’s not forget the original augmented reality baring device as imagine by James Cameron, the Terminator T-800.

What we want is Terminator vision like Arnold had, to help us hot wire cars, find appropriate wardrobe and decide who lives and who dies. Hopefully we can use Terminator vision to fight off the inevitable machine apocalypse – instead of it being used to murder us all one-by-one.

In the meantime, maybe we should call a moratorium on any more augmented reality develop for platforms named “android”.

It took 2,500 years but investigators finally cracked the case of out what killed an Egyptian woman. What makes this particularly interesting is how recent DNA extraction techniques made it possible to extract fragments of tuberculosis bacteria DNA. She had been misdiagnosed just a decade earlier as having been killed by ovarian cancer.

After analyzing ancient DNA from tissue samples, Helen D. Donoghue of University College London and colleagues say that the mummified woman, who lived around 600 B.C. and was entombed in Thebes, died of tuberculosis, not ovarian cancer.

link: Observatory – Revising the Diagnosis Behind an Ancient Death – NYTimes.com

Researchers now speculate that an island chain once inhabited by the Minoan’s may have been a much larger island that was wiped out in a volcanic eruption that sent tidal waves as far as Israel.

Speculation has abounded as to whether the Santorini eruption inspired the legend of Atlantis, which Plato said drowned in the ocean. Although the isle is often regarded as just an invention, the explosion might have given rise to the story of a lost empire by helping to wipe out the real-life Minoan civilization that once dominated the Mediterranean, from which the myth of the bull-headed ‘minotaur’ comes.

link: Real Tsunami May Have Inspired Legend of Atlantis – Yahoo! News

link: Google Maps