Archive for May, 2011

By The Hammer Of Thor! Anti-Matter Found Streaming From Thunderstorms

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

BBC News  Antimatter caught streaming from thunderstorms on Earth

Positrons. They are all around us. Specifically if you are standing naked in the middle of the thunderstorm taunting the Old God’s to strike you down if they indeed still hold sway over this earthly realm.

“Take your sacrifice or wallow in a pit of lies, frauds!” you scream while spittle trains down your chin and mixes with the driving sheets of rain.

Or, you could eliminate everything else and just say that anti-matter has been photographed with a Fermi telescope during thunderstorms.

Such storms have long been known to give rise to fleeting sparks of light called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes.

But results from the Fermi telescope show they also give out streams of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.

The surprise result was presented by researchers at the American Astronomical Society meeting in the US.

It deepens a mystery about terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, or TGFs – sparks of light that are estimated to occur 500 times a day in thunderstorms on Earth. They are a complex interplay of light and matter whose origin is poorly understood.

You know else is poorly understood? Tempting the Old God’s on “public property,” by the police.

[BBC]

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Thursday, May 12th, 2011

ITricks com Magic News Magic Videos and Podcasts

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Strange Bird Carcass Found In Iran

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

The carcass of a strange bird said to inhabit a local cave has been found in Iran. What do you think this it could be?

The dead body of a strange dinosaur-like bird has been reportedly found near the city of Meshginshahr in the northwestern Iranian province of Ardebil.The locals found the feathered bipedal creature, which seemed to have died a few days ago, near a remote village of Meshginshahr, IRNA reported on Sunday. A team of officials of Iran’s Environment Protection Organization (EPO) were dispatched to the region to investigate whether the reports were true. One of the villagers has reportedly hidden the carcass and the EPO team is trying to find it. The team has managed to obtain a photo of the creature taken by one of the locals. The team has also found evidence that confirmed the locals’ claims the bird lived in a cave near the village. The creature has a reptilian skull with long canine teeth and large molars. It has small wing bones like those of flightless birds. The avifauna of Iran includes a total of 527 species, none of which are similar to the found creature; however, the discovery needs ornithologists to verify the claims. Scientists believe that fossil evidence demonstrates birds and dinosaurs shared many features such as hollow bones, gastrolith in the digestive system, nest-building and brooding behaviors. The discovery of fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex soft tissue also suggests that the 68-million-year-old dinosaur and birds are closely related to each other.

[IRNA vis Cryptomundo]

The Necropants Of Iceland

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

I am not even really sure where to start with this one. Apparently, the Holmavik Museum of Scocery and Witchcraft in Iceland contains a gruesome exhibit called the necropants. Let us just cut to the chase – these are pants made from the skin of the lower half of a dead person. When worn, these pants would produce money as long as a coin stolen from a poor widow (!) was placed in the scrotum.

It was believed that the necropants would spontaneously produce money when worn, as long as the donor corpse had been stolen from a graveyard at the dead of night and a magic rune and a coin stolen from a poor widow were placed in the dead man’s scrotum.

Another source claims that you must first gain permission from the man before he dies. Once that is done, just follow these steps:

After he has been buried you must dig up his body and flay the skin of the corpse in one piece from the waist down. As soon as you step into the pants they will stick to your own skin. A coin must be stolen from a poor widow and placed in the scrotum along with the magical sign, nábrókarstafur, written on a piece of paper. Consequently the coin will draw money into the scrotum so it will never be empty, as long as the original coin is not removed. To ensure salvation the owner has to convince someone else to overtake the pants and step into each leg as soon as he gets out of it. The necropants will thus keep the money-gathering nature for generations.

The museum website is mostly in Icelandic and Google translate is really sketchy, but you can also learn all about the Icelandic witch trials of the 17th century. Side note: the witches from Iceland had farting runes (Fretrúnir) that they used against their enemies.

[Tywkiwdbi and Mental Floss]

Google Lobbies Nevada For Robot Driver’s Rights

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

Robots deserve to legally drive in Nevada. Google is fighting for their rights. Will the Silver State agree? Or perpetrate yet another act of human bigotry upon our silicon brothers?

The search giant is currently lobbying Nevada to make self-driving cars street legal on public roads. This would also allow drivers behind the wheels of these vehicles to text message their friends while rolling along the highway legally.

[New York Times via Kurzweil AI]

The Alien Who Was Confused For A Drunk Driver

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

Skitched 20110511 131911

A loud bang shatters the calm of a California morning.

Outside, indulging in her ritual cup of coffee and a cigarette, a local mother simply assumes that a neighbor tied one on a little too tight last night. An evening at the bar turned into a morning on the road and ended with a crash into the community’s gate.

No big deal.

Then, it came from around the house. At first, she assumed by the hurried pace it must have been a thief. A tall, skinny, silver thief. Silver?

It came around the house, still trying to hide. My mother said the figure’s height reached the bottom of the start of the roof, which is around or more than 7ft in height.

She said it was very slender like a pole and silver.

The oddity then ran away from the woman and toward a tree where it disappeared from view.

Questions: was any wreckage found to have caused the loud bang? Did anyone else see the creature? Can we totally rule out that the alien wasn’t, in fact, drunk driving?

[UFO Casebook]

Student Discovers Unknown Ice Age Virus In Indiana Cave

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Students in the Introduction To Biotechnology (IT220) class at Purdue were instructed for one of their projects to collect soil samples as part of the National Genomics Research Initiative. Most of the students were content to collect samples from around the Purdue campus, but Emilia Czyszczon traveled 3 hours to a remote Indiana cave and then took a boat on an underground river to a spot deep within the cave. The soil sample that Emilia ended up taking turned out to be glacial mud untouched since the ice age and contained a bacteriophage virus that was unknown to science. Scientists think that this virus might be beneficial to humans and could be used to fight diseases like tuberculosis.

Further analysis proved to be even more remarkable. Lurking in the dank sample of cave mud she collected was a virus previously unknown to science — a bacteriophage that attacks bacteria from the same family as those that cause tuberculosis.

In other words, despite the usual connotation associated with the discovery of a virus, this virus is not harmful to humans. Rather, just the opposite: it is a virus that attacks bacterial strains that could be harmful to humans. The discovery has prompted the adventurous young Czyszczon to look ahead in her career; she has already received grant money to probe into the DNA of the virus to help find alternative cures for debilitating diseases like tuberculosis.

[Chicago Tribune via MNN]

Fossils Indicate Awesome Battle Between Awesome Prehistoric Sea Monsters

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Skitched 20110510 114636

An era before time. An era before aquatic decency. An era of totally bitching ichthyosaur fights!

New fossil finds indicate a very violent encounter (most likely) between two ichthyosaurs which left one scarred by deep gouges in the snout. Little is known for sure about the 20-foot-long creatures, since it has no living relatives. Since the bite pattern on the recovered fossil matches that of another ichthyosaur, it is telling that they fought amongst themselves for land and territory.

Either way, it’s a tragedy of epic proportions that these two beasts were fighting and killing each other before YouTube was invented.

[Cryptomundo]

Did The Moon Reveal A Translucent UFO Over Argentia?

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Skitched 20110510 111629

The dusky skies of San Juan, Argentina glowed extra bright on April 25th. Beams of light from the peaking moon, normally soft and gentle, a nudging reminder of the coming night pierced through the air with uncommon veracity.

What could make the moon explode with such vibrant spires of light? More specifically: why did whatever was magnifying the moon form a triangle shape as it moved slowly out of it’s direction, returning the familiar orb to it’s muted degree of intensity?

So frames the alleged sighting of Argentina’s translucent UFO…

“I swear that I was petrified!” said Martin Pastor as he pointed at the image that he picked up last Sunday in Calingasta. he said that he thought the recently rising moon had a strange shape to it, and thus began to photograph it. After a while, he was able to see a triangle with three circular vertexes superimposed over the moon. As it moved away from the moon’s glow, it became invisible. “It was a UFO to me,” he said.

Check out the pictures, what do you guys think?

[Inexplicata]

Scientists Make Computer Schizophrenic

Monday, May 9th, 2011

Filed under “Things That Maybe Aren’t That Great”, scientists have figured out how to induce schizophrenic symptoms in a computer.  In the test, they were able to overwhelm the computer with so much information that it developed crazy delusions, even claiming responsibility at one point for a terrorist bombing.  Using a neural network called DISCERN that is able to learn using natural language, they cranked up the rate of learning and instructed DISCERN to forget less, thus causing a mental breakdown.

Telling the computer to “forget less” was akin to flooding the system with dopamine, confounding its ability to discern relationships between words, sentences and events, according to a news release from UT.

“DISCERN began putting itself at the center of fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall,” according to the news release. In one answer, it claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.

[Popsci via Geekologie]

Theory Of Alien Life Raining Down On Earth Historically Linked To Meteor Passing

Monday, May 9th, 2011

Skitched 20110509 125408

In 2001, a bizarre scarlet rain showered southwest India on-and-off over two months. Many were baffled by the cell structures which gave the droplets its red hue. Some even suggested they might be extra terrestrial.

Those people have a sturdier stage to stand on today as a new study links historical accounts of similar red rains with meteor passings.

Mc­Caf­ferty an­a­lyzed, as he wrote, “80 ac­counts of red rain, an­oth­er 20 ref­er­ences to lakes and riv­ers turn­ing blood-red, and 68 ex­am­ples of oth­er phe­nom­e­na such as col­oured rain, black rain, milk, bricks, or hon­ey fall­ing from the sky.”

Six­ty of these events, or 36 per­cent, “were linked to me­te­oritic or com­et­ary ac­ti­vity,” he went on. But not al­ways strongly. Some­times, “the fall of red rain seems to have oc­curred af­ter an air­burst,” as from a me­te­or ex­plod­ing in air; oth­er times the odd rain­fall “is merely recorded in the same year as a stone-fall or the ap­pear­ance of a comet.”

If this study is on to something and if we can link meteor air bursts to this type of rainfall and if we can assume that something is being dropped from outer space into our atmosphere, the next question is… what is it?

[World-Science]

Podcast: O Positive & Blade Face Blow Their Unicorn Whistles

Friday, May 6th, 2011

Skitched 20110225 175343

Andrew would like to clone a Unicorn and comes up with a new way to fund a Space Elevator. Brian and Justin discuss their new lives as undead Special Forces agents. Meanwhile, a mysterious signal from an advanced alien civilization puts President Young in a pickle with his Vice President Brushwood and NSA Chief Mayne.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s new SciFi book The Grendel’s Shadow for only .99 at Amazon.com by clicking the image below!

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Tehran: Now Officially The Worst Place In The World To Pull An Ambitious Card Routine

Friday, May 6th, 2011

A power struggle between Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has led the latter to arrest many of the former’s top allies on charges of “sorcery.”

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being “magicians” and invoking djinns (spirits).

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as “a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds”.

No, but seriously Supreme Leader, was this your card?

And Now: Extreme Evolutionary Mimicry

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

This treehopper insect has developed an absolutely insane helmet that looks like an aggressive species of ant. There are more of these over at New Scientist.

[New Scientist via io9]

Alligator Does Not Respect The Police

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Florida is where the magic happens. Also, don’t turn your back on the wildlife.

[Jalopnik]

Dr. Ian Malcolm Is Pissed: All-Female Lizard Species Created In Lab

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Skitched 20110504 120527

Henry Wu: You’re implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will… breed?

Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I’m simply saying that life, uh… finds a way.

Scientists looking to create a species of all-female lizards have finally succeeded. An origin of a species like this has never been directly observed.

“It’s recreating the events that lead to new species,” said cell biologist Peter Baumann of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, whose new species is described May 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It relates to the question of how these unisexual species arise in the first place.”

Female-only species that reproduce by cloning themselves — a process called parthenogenesis, in which embryos develop without fertilization — were once considered dead-end evolutionary flukes. But in the last decade, unisexuality has been found in more than 80 groups of fish, amphibian and reptiles. It might not be such a dead end after all.

Peter, the kind of control you’re attempting is not possible. If there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories. It crashes through barriers. Painfully, maybe even.. dangerously, but and… well, there it is.

[Wired Science]