Even good old fashioned crop circles are getting totally pwned in the digital age. Corn-stopping shapes are totally old and busted, mysterious digital radar patterns are the new hotness in Australia.

THEY are the digital-age equivalent of crop circles – mysterious patterns appearing on the Bureau of Meteorology’s national radar system without any explanation.

And the random images described as red stars, rings of fire and white doughnuts are sending online conspiracy websites into meltdown.

The anomalies first began on January 15 when an “iced doughnut” appeared over Kalgoorlie in WA.

Satellite imagery showed there was no cloud over the area at the time to explain the unusual phenomenon but farmers’ online comments claimed it was “unusually hot” all day.

It was followed by a bizarre red star over Broome on January 22 and a sinister spiral burst over Melbourne described by amateur radar buffs as the Ring Of Fire Fault.

The Bureau, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has acknowledged the anomalies on its popular website.

Could this be communications with an alien force or just a desperate attempt by regular weather patterns to rustle up a few headlines since Iceland’s drama queen volcano is hogging all the ink? YOU DECIDE!

[News.com.AU via Conspiracy Journal]

Bob Saget is shooting a new show for A&E entitled Strange Days where he hunts down the strangest elements of our society, including Bigfoot, which was the episode he was shooting last week.

“Bob Saget’s Strange Days” delves into weird, wild stuff: biker gangs, partying Amish teenagers, mail-order brides, a survivalist cult — and, of course, Bigfoot.

So out Saget came to the North Olympic Peninsula to peek at the West End woods and interview John Bindernagel, author of two books about the hairy creature supposedly living in the deep forest.

And since Saget wanted a nice spot to meet Bindernagel — who came down from Courtenay, British Columbia — he and his entourage found the George Washington Inn, a replica of the first U.S. president’s estate in Mount Vernon, Va.

[Peninsula Daily News]

New controversial new research suggests that a separate “hobbit” hominid evolved on an Indonesian island after migrating from Africa more than one million years ago. Apparently they had the “There” part down. “And Back Again”? Not so much.

[Science News]

That explains a lot.

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.

Women in the Islamic Republic are required by law to cover from head to toe, but many, especially the young, ignore some of the more strict codes and wear tight coats and scarves pulled back that show much of the hair.

“What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” Sedighi asked during a prayer sermon Friday. “There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made headlines recently that Tehran will suffer an earthquake soon and many of it’s 12 million inhabitants should flee and presumably lose their jorts and halter tops in the process. That being said, if immodest dress does cause earthquakes there is no doubt as to why George Clooney has been so active on the subject.

[Yahoo via Pharyngula]

You know, you see enough bizarre animals and after a while it probably just gets tiresome calling them all proof positive of urban legends. Just ask Adair, Oklahoma. They went and found themselves a mangey raccoon and try as some locals might to cite the frightened critter as an example of the legendary Dry Gulch Chupacapra, most folks just aren’t buying it.

Scheffel says they believe it’s a raccoon that has an advanced case of mange, but that’s not stopping people in the area from calling it something else.

He says it’s known as the Dry Gulch chupacabra, after the legendary animal that supposedly sucks the blood of goats.

The experts at Wild Heart Ranch say the animal will grow its hair back so it will again look like a normal raccoon.

OR the regeneration of hair is proof that they’ve found the legendary Dry Gulch Raccoon That Was Bit By A Werewolf Once.

[News on 6]

The magical Monet-esqe dreamscape where your soul mingles with the realm beyond, only for your Grandmother to pause her game of bridge with your pee wee football coach so she can tell you that your time on earth isn’t over, after all who else will leak a prototype of the new iPhone model? Yeah… all that near-death experience stuff? Oxygen depravation.

People who report near-death experiences have elevated levels of carbon dioxide in their blood and may be suffering oxygen deprivations, according to a new study published in the medical journal Critical Care.

The study, by Slovenian researchers, examined 52 heart attack patients in three large hospitals. Of those, 11 reported having near-death experiences (NDEs), such as movement toward a bright light, feelings of peace and joy, and profoundly spiritual moments during their heart attacks. Studies suggest that between 10 percent and 25 percent of heart attack survivors report NDEs

Boooring.

[Live Science]

If this isn’t the coolest picture ever taken, I don’t know what is.

Santisuk Phromdao is a pig-tailed macaque monkey from Sai Buri district, Patttani province, southern Thailand. Although only five years old, Santisuk patrols the streets of Thailand everyday dressed in a blazer with the words ‘Monkey Police’ laced across it.

According to Thailand’s Nation newspaper, Santisuk was adopted by Pol Col Yutthapol Phromdao Yutthapol, who, after discovering the injured monkey at a local clinic, recruited him into his squad, thereby turning the simple-minded primate into the first-ever monkey cop.

Satisuk’s tour of duty began at a local checkpoint, where Yutthapol taught him how to collect coconuts and other fruits from locals by enticing him with bottles of delectable Vitamilk. Soon afterward, Satisuk’s duties grew from mundane tasks into full-fledged public relations.

Halt citizen!

[Weird Asia News via Derren Brown Blog]

Hey space fans, don’t be blue that Mean Ol’ Obama said we aren’t sending men to the moon anytime soon. Because once we get there… our pad is going to be totally sick thanks to a new 3-D printing technology that could turn boring lunar dust and moon rocks into a bomb ass base of operations.

Future astronauts might end up living in a moon base created largely from lunar dust and regolith, if a giant 3-D printing device can work on the lunar surface.

The print-on-demand technology, known as D-Shape, could save on launch and transportation costs for manned missions to the moon. But the concept must first prove itself in exploratory tests funded by the European Space Agency (ESA)

“We will make very basic printing trials in a vacuum environment to verify if this is possible,” said Enrico Dini, chairman of Monolite UK Ltd and creator of D-Shape.

Dini’s D-Shape has created full-size sandstone buildings on Earth by using a 3-D printing process similar to how inkjet printers work. It adds a special inorganic binder to sand so that it can build a structure from the bottom up, one layer at a time.

Totally sweet.

[Yahoo!]

No one expects to Sget their camera stolen by an octopus. Which makes it the perfect crime…

[Stuff.co.nz via Pharyngula]

Ever pointed out which tooth is killing you to the dentist, only for the smug dong to give you a wide-eyed glance, then shoot a bemused look at the hygienist, then give you a patronizing “suuuuuuuure it’s the back right molar” whilst stifling a giggle?

Well as it turns out, our brains have a really hard time pin-pointing if tooth pain comes from the bottom or the top. Jerk.

The results, which will be published in the journal Pain, help explain why patients are notoriously bad at pinpointing a toothache.

For the most part, humans are exquisitely tuned to pain. The brain can immediately distinguish between a splinter in the index finger and a paper cut on the thumb, even though the digits are next-door neighbors. But in the mouth this can be more difficult, depending where and how intense the ache is.

“We don’t know much about tooth pain,” comments dentist and neuroscientist Alexandre DaSilva of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not part of the new research. The new study is one of the first to address the puzzle of toothache localization, he says.

Also, dentists are the The Back Up Plan of doctors.

[Science News]

From Stone Pages.com.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig recently announced that analysis of DNA from a tiny fragment of bone from the Denisova Cave in the Siberian Altai Mountains indicates that it may belong to a hitherto unknown hominid type.

John Krause and colleagues managed to isolate a complete sequence of mitochondrial DNA from a fragment of finger bone found by Russian researchers in 2008 that weighed only 30mg. This was compared with 54 sequences from modern humans, an early human sequence from Kotenski, Russia, six from Neanderthals, and one each from a chimpanzee and a bonobo. While Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA sequences have on average 202 differences from modern human sequences, the Denisova sequence has almost twice that number.

The director of the Institute’s genetics department, Svante Pääbo said “The results practically blew me away when I heard.” The researchers suggest the Denisova hominid shared a common ancestor with both Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans, and may have lived alongside them as recently as 30,000 to 48,000 years ago. In turn, this completely new mitochondrial DNA sequence might imply a fourth wave of hominin migration out of Africa.

You might remember a similar point being raised by Andrew (with a far darker ending) on the most recent Weird Things podcast.

[Stone Pages]

Panicked cheeseheads across the Quad Cities area of Wisconsin reported seeing a massive fireball light up the night sky on Wednesday. But, was the brilliant streaking light, thought to be caused by a meteor shower, just a repeat of another similar phenomenon that some believe left far greater devastation nearly a century and a half ago?

In short, could a fireball like this be what ignited the Great Chicago Fire?

In 2004 engineer and physicist Robert M. Wood posited exactly that, citing other fires that began at the same time the Chi Town conflagration began in… guess where… the farming towns of Wisconsin!

All of this has happened before and it will happen again. Except now we have modern fire brigades and flame extinguishing foam.

[CNN]

Who needs The Watcher? According to radio astronomers at the University of Manchester, a “baffling new object” in a nearby galaxy is unlike anything they’ve seen before.

But those who know better sure recognize that color scheme, that stature…

The object appeared very suddenly last May at radio wavelengths and has persisted ever since, showing no signs of going away. It was originally thought to be a young supernova, as M82 is a known star nursery. But most of M82’s stars die quickly in massive stellar explosions — a new supernova generally occurs once every two or three decades — at which point their radio wavelengths begin a slow decay. The mystery object has shown no such signs of dimming.

I for one welcome our new world eating overlord.

[PopSci]

From CNN:

European countries shut their airspace one after the other Thursday as a cloud of volcanic ash wafted over from Iceland and posed a danger to flights.

Airspace over the United Kingdom was due to be closed for six hours from midday but air authorities later extended the closure until at least 7 a.m. BST (2 a.m. EDT) Friday…

In all, around 3,000 flights across Europe were expected to be affected by the closures, according to Eurocontrol, the intergovernmental body that manages European air travel.

Many airports were already shut and flights were grounded across the United Kingdom on Thursday because of the ash, which came after an eruption under an Icelandic glacier early Wednesday, airport authorities said.

The ash cloud came from an eruption of a volcano beneath Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull glacier early Wednesday.

…just as you were getting used to paying for checked baggage, this happens.

[CNN]

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a.) Said to prowl the dry air above the deserts of the American Southwest, these winged creatures appear to propel themselves using jets of flame that light up the night sky.

b.) During the 1980s, two American carnival owners spent countless hours trying to hunt and capture this legendary 8-foot-tall avian monster.

c.) Usually sighted in the vicinity of swamps and rivers, this African pterosaur-like beast is known for sinking boats and attacking locals.

Answer AFTER THE JUMP…
(more…)

What has sharp teeth, is the size of a pinkie finger and slides up the noses of Peruvians? Tyrannobdella rex! The Tyrant Leech King!

The beast has teeth five-times larger than other leeches and has most recently been found in the noses of recent swimmers in the Amazon river.

[Wired]