As some of you know both I and Justin Robert Young attended the amazing Dragon*Con in Atlanta, GA this past weekend. EVERY type of fandom is represented at this mega-convention, and cosplay is the main event. I spent approximately 60 billion hours walking the floor just taking it all in while trying to avoid drunk people piking on the floor, and what follows are the five most creative Dragon*Con costumes I saw.

Hell yeah.

Spider silk milked from goats may be used to replace body’s strained tendons, ligaments and bones in the future.

In a new experiment, Professor Lewis and his team at the University of Wyoming successfully implanted the silk-making genes from a golden orb spider into a herd of goats.

Spider silk has been used for centuries to dress wounds with varying degrees of success, but the problem has until now been how to get it.

“We needed a way to produce large quantities of the spider silk proteins,” News.com.au quoted Lewis, as saying.

He added: “Spiders can’t be farmed, so that route is out and since they make six different silks, even that would not work if you could.”

It’s all fun and games until spider DNA in a goat creates a real Chupacabra…

Thanks to Weird Things reader Fracis for passing this along.

[ThaIndian]

Check out this amazing video that shows what happens when electricity meets flesh. A Japanese women scaled an electric pole and refused to come down, and while arguing with authorities touched one of the lines, sending a 10,000 volt spark arcing from her finger to her face. To her credit, she argued for another 45 mins. before firefighters finally talked her down.

Astronomers are chuckling to themselves after laypeople paying attention freaked out last week when two astroids swooped through Earth’s orbit, nearly missing our planet. While a double complete asteroid swipe is rare, the still scary idea of a single asteroid nearly destroying our lives happens, like, all the time.

In fact, with a rough estimate of 50 million unknown asteroids, a 33-foot-wide (10-meter) near-Earth object could pass harmlessly between Earth and the orbit of the moon every day, Johnson added. Such an asteroid might hit Earth’s atmosphere once every 10 years, but because of its small size, it would pose no substantial threat to the people or property below.

“They would certainly break up in Earth’s atmosphere, or we might get some meteorites on the ground,” Johnson said.

So, don’t worry so much. Or worry every day. Either way.

[Space]

This is what some Vancouver motorists will see surrounding a local school over the next week. It’s a horrific reminder that YOU ARE ABOUT TO RUN OVER A HELPLESS LITTLE GIRLWATCHOUT!!!! Oh wait, it’s fake? I guess we better slow down then…

These kind of remind me of George Bluth hiring a one-armed actor to have his “arm” “ripped off” in front of his children so they’d learn to follow directions.

The illustrations will be removed in a week to evaluate effectiveness.

[PopSci]

All of your unconscious reactions can now be transferred to Sims like computer characters. The Singularity will arrive with a green crystal over its head.

[Science Daily]

In a bizarre scene, members of the Orlando bomb squad exploded a lovable toy pony next to an elementary school. The fake horse was initially suspected as a possible bomb and authorities quickly locked down the scene and took immediate action to deal with the stand-up stuffed animal.

The video on this is pretty amazing.

[WFTV]

It’s official… we can now move objects with simple lasers.

Developed at the Australian National University, the new discovery can move small objects 100X larger than a bacterium up to a meter in water.

The device works by shining a hollow laser beam around tiny glass particles. The air surrounding the particle heats up, while the dark center of the beam stays cool. When the particle starts to drift out of the middle and into the bright laser beam, the force of heated air molecules bouncing around and hitting the particle’s surface is enough to nudge it back to the center.

A small amount of light also seeps into the darker middle part of the beam, heating the air on one side of the particle and pushing it along the length of the laser beam. If another such laser is lined up on the opposite side of the beam, the speed and direction the particle moves can be easily manipulated by changing the brightness of the beams.

Researchers are confident that with enough testing they should be able to move larger objects longer distances, eventually allowing you to become even lazier!

[Physorg.com]

The random opening could be related to an oil well abandoned in 1950 that’s close to the home. The only silver lining now is if the opening leads to a Goonies-style adventure.

But it probably won’t.

Unless it does.

[KTLA]

Apparently “quantum cats” are “photons (particles of light), boosting prospects for manipulating light in new ways to enhance precision measurements as well as computing and communications based on quantum physics” and not a new Saturday Morning cartoon featuring super powered felines solving mysteries and learning a little about themselves and others along the way.

[Science Daily]

A crimson rainfall in India at the turn of our most recent century has been rumored to feature properties that we’ve never seen on Earth before or since. New research demonstrates that the cells of the rain can replicate in extremely hostile environments. The results also suggest that the rain might have originated in extragalactic dust clouds.

This only ends one of two ways. 1) the rain creates the zombie disease outbreak which changes our lives (and since it will be local to India: Bollywood films) forever 2) this is the first sign of the coming of Galactus.

[arxiv.org via Kurzweil]

Well… duh.

Other theories (notably less awesome than an all powerful, semi-emo superman) include an “oblique impact, when a small body struck the surface at a very shallow angle.”

Boring.

[Pop Sci]