Inspired by the film Inception. What mysteries lie behind the cats eyes?

Humans effectively synchronize brain wave patterns when telling a story to one another. Look Spock, no hands!

[New Scientist via Kruzweil]

National Geogrphic has some really interesting historical findings on where the Dead Sea Scrolls might have originated. Also:

And on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion, archaeologists recently discovered and deciphered a two-thousand-year-old cup with the phrase “Lord, I have returned” inscribed on its sides in a cryptic code similar to one used in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

…either that or Jesus was really fussy about people using his favorite cup so he had to write his name on it.

[Nat Geo]

Low water level + tons of snacks = 300 Gators freaking the hell out in a random Georgia canal while a fisherman slowly cuts through them on his way to fish.

[CNN]

A hybrid zebra/donkey was born this past week at the Chestatee Wildlife Preserve in Dahlonega, Georgia.

According to the Preserve’s staff, “zedonks” (as the hybrids are known) are very rare. Turns out zebras usually find donkeys “out of their league.” Darn prissy zebras! You know they always settle for a donkey after they turn 30.

[Gainsville Times]

Remember the 1995 Sandra Bullock romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping? This story is nothing like that.

Paramedics in Vienna had a shock when they answered a call – and found a man “eaten alive” by maggots.

Ambulance crew were called out yesterday (Tues) after a woman rang to say her elderly partner was having breathing difficulties.

But when they turned up they found the man’s corpse covered in maggots.

Police spokesman Roman Hahslinger said today the 34-year-old woman had been arrested to clarify the background of the man’s death.

“She lived with the 61-year-old man for more than 10 years in Brigittenau district,” he explained, adding that the man had been bedridden and partially paralysed after a stroke some years ago.

Remember the Wham! song “Wake Me Up (Before You Go Go)”? In light of this, they should probably tack on “…Or If I Am Being Eaten Alive By Maggots”.

Thanks to Weird Things writer Darcy for passing this along.

[Australian Times]

The world’s first successful face transplant patient has revealed his improved face in Barcelona this week.

Known only as ‘Oscar,’ the patient thanked the hospital and the face-doner’s family for the medical breakthrough that will eventually allow him to regain up to 90% of his facial functions.

Unfortunately, ‘Oscar’ looks nothing Nicholas Cage OR John Travolta. See, kids? Sometimes even movies lie.

[BBC News]

Who’s got two thumbs and wants to get all up in some sacred Mayan pools once believed to be portals to the underworld where offerings were dropped down to appease the evil forces waiting below?

These guys!

Steering clear of crocodiles and navigating around massive submerged trees, a team of divers began mapping some of the 25 freshwater pools of Cara Blanca, Belize, which were important to the ancient Maya. In three weeks this May, the divers found fossilized animal remains, bits of pottery and — in the largest pool explored — an enormous underwater cave.

Would it be totally against the rules to leave a burger while you’re down there, you know, just in case?

[Science Daily]

A research team in Egypt has identified a “fresh” crater thought to be formed by a crashed iron meteor, could mean incoming space rocks would hit earth in bigger chunks than we once suspected.

The Italian-Egyptian team that found the crater in pictures recently visited and studied the 147-foot-wide (45-meter-wide), 52-foot-deep (16-meter-deep) hole. The team also collected thousands of pieces of the space rock that littered the surrounding desert.

Current impact models state that iron meteors around this size and mass should break into smaller chunks before impact. (Related: “Comet ‘Shower’ Killed Ice Age Mammals?”)

Instead, the existence of the newfound crater implies that up to 35 percent of these iron giants may actually survive whole—and thus have greater destructive power.

Hold on to your butts.

[Nat Geo]

Start off your week with this video of an ant trying to chug a massive raindrop. He’s going to feel that in the morning!

Justin Robert Young: Issac Asimov’s Foundation (Foundation Novels)

Brian Brushwood: Peter F. Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction (The Night’s Dawn)

Andrew Mayne: Matthew Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

Karen Stollznow: Benjamin Radford’s Scientific Paranormal Investigation

Purchasing from the above Amazon links helps support Weird Things. We thank you.

File this under “Things We Didn’t Know Were Super Cool Until We Heard It Was Real”:

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Researchers have discovered four new species of octopus in Antarctica with venom that works at sub-zero temperatures.

They hope to analyze the venom to see if it has medical uses, said one of the researchers, Bryan Fry, of the University of Melbourne. Their discovery, during a six-week expedition to Antarctica in 2007, was published in the journal Toxicon.

Experts have long known there were octopuses in Antarctica, but what surprised Fry and his colleagues was the sheer biodiversity and how natural selection changed the way they hunted and the nature of their venom.

The question now, does Sub-Zero Venom make a name for a band, album or song?

[Reuters]

A wooden version of Stonehenge was found less than a kilometer away from the original landmark Thursday. Using sophisticated equipment researchers have uncovered a very similar structure buried in the earth.

The new site is thought to be a complementary site to the original Stonehenge. While they have only just begun to analyze the data and have no plans of actually digging up the new find it is believed that the two structures were built around the same time.

Whether this new structure has anything to do with the wooden Stonehenge in Cincinnati we reported on yesterday remains to be seen.

[Reuters]

Everyday this week…Brett Rounsaville brings us the Weirdest Disasters ever to strike down man or beast.

In 1986 in Bangladesh death quite literally rained from above (…well, no…I guess that is figurative too since it was actually death, it was hailstones, and it didn’t actually rain so much as, y’know…hail).

Bottomline: These Bangladeshian iceballs measured almost seven inches across and weighed in at 2.2 pounds. They fell with such force that the storm killed 92 people and leveled entire homes.

Can you even imagine being smacked in the face by a 2.2 pound object falling at terminal velocity from the sky?! Oh, right…you probably cant. Let me help put this in terms I’m sure everyone is intimately familiar with:

That’s like being shot in the face with an iPad duct taped to a loaf of bread moving at over 100 miles per hour and being hit with the significantly less squishy iPad side so that the loaf of bread doesn’t add any padding, just weight. Better?

This is not the kind of hail where you put on a bike helmet and run around outside like an idiot taunting nature as it bounces off your Styrofoam and fiberglass covered noggin. This is the kind of hail where you hope to Science (this blog has a bit of a skeptic bent in case you haven’t noticed) that you’re near a bomb shelter and/or a giant hairdryer pointed at the sky.

Even larger hail fell in Nebraska in 2003…but apparently Nebraskans are better at staying indoors than Bangladeshians (probably because there’s nothing to do outside there anyway if you’re not growing corn…).

That’s it gang! Time for the Weird Off! How would you rank this week’s Weirdest Disasters? We have:

1. The Boston Molassacre!

2. World’s Laziest Volcano!

3. Dark Ages 2.0! (Coming soon to an Earth near you.)

4. World’s Most Homicidal Lake!

5. All Hail…um…Hail.

What do you think, gang? Sound off!

Darth Vader robbed a bank in Long Island.

Don’t you know it’s hard out here for a Sith?

Hustle & Force.

Point Bespin.

I’ll stop now. Thanks to Weird Things friends Katy and Lawrence for making sure this came our way.

[Daily Mail]

So Justin Robert Young and I have been scoping out murder scenes, ancient burial grounds and sites of all out massacres in research for our Weird Things Live project (where we investigate paranormal phenomena in front of a live internet audience). On a recent moonlit night standing in the middle of a mass killing field I had an epiphany. What are we going to do when we make contact with some kind of demonic spirit that may have caused people to go on murderous rampages and infect the scene with some kind of contagious inter-dimensional gloom? We need protocols and stuff.

Sure, we’re skeptics and we don’t actually believe in ghosts and spirits, but to be scientific about it, we have to accept the possibility that our premise could be wrong and this stuff is pure concentrated wickedness. We have a moral imperative to do something when we come face to face with wicked evil supernatural forces. So I decided to develop a plan and protocol for capturing and containing all that evil we’re going to encounter for your entertainment pleasure. I’ll describe our method for the capturing process in a later post. Here I’ll describe how we plan to contain it for transport and permanent confinement.

Level 1: Ghosts aren’t real Our first level of protection is based upon the virtual scientific fact that ghosts aren’t real. While we’re confident this should protect us and you, it’s only our first defense.

Level 2: Physical confinement We’re going to use airtight glass jars to physically contain the malevolent spirits. If there is some unknown physical property to dark spirits (like some kind of intelligent airborne bacteria) this should help confine them inside a physical medium.

Level 3: Sacred ground Inside each jar we plan on putting dirt from some kind of sacred holy ground where spirits are able to chill out peacefully. Our plan is that this should contain the spirit long enough to transport it to our final containment area.

Level 4: Sacred seal Using the Egyptians as a guide, we’re going to seal the jar with some kind of inscription designed to keep evil spirits inside. As we know from movies, breaking sacred seals are a bad thing, so we’re going to get some and put them on our jars. So don’t break them.

Level 5: Super Evil Super Max We’ve staked out a couple of remote plots of land located near burial grounds. We plan to bury these jars of tortured souls in this resting spot that will then be festooned with a variety of religious artifacts. We plan on bringing in some kind of Holy Man (under blindfold) to consecrate the grounds. We also plan on creating a ring of powder and pouring holy water everywhere.

That’s just the starting point. Your suggestions are welcome. Our goal is to keep adding to our final resting spot of evil as we capture more spirits. For it to work we’re going to have to keep the actual location a very closely held secret. We don’t want some interlopers to stumble in there and unleash what may be the greatest concentration of evil ever.

If this sounds silly to you, ask yourself this: Would you want these jars filled with the presumed spirits of serial killers and maniacs under your bed at night? When asked if they’d briefly wear a sweater that belonged to a serial killer (dry cleaned no less) most people flat out refuse. I’m sure they’d be even less happy to have our jars buried in their garden.