Lots of odd creatures come from the sea, and add to the list a one-eyed bull shark fetus that was removed from the body of its captured mother recently off La Paz, Mexico, in the Sea of Cortez.

A brief story about the shark is on the Pisces Sportfishing blog. Pete Thomas Outdoors shared the top image with two shark experts in California and both were skeptical at first, suggesting it was some kind of hoax.

One of them jokingly identified the species as a “Cycloptomus” because of a single eye — if it is, in fact, an actual eye — located just above the mouth.

But Tracy Ehrenberg, general manager at Pisces Sportfishing, has been in touch with renowned shark expert Felipe Galvan, who has seen the shark and has even produced a paper on the discovery.

[Pete Thomas Outdoors]

A woman in Kazan, Russia was rushed to the hospital by her husband after reportedly suffering chest pains and collapsing. Doctors soon told her devastated husband the sad news, his wife was dead.

Family was called and preparations were made for the funeral.

But there was one very special guest in attendance: Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, the woman who had earlier received the death diagnosis and was currently surrounded by mourning family and friends praying for her soul to go to heaven.

That sight, reportedly, was enough to kill her.

Devastated husband Fagili Mukhametzyanov, 51, had been told his wife had died of a heart attack after she’d collapsed at home suffering from chest pains.

Mr Mukhametzyanov said: ‘Her eyes fluttered and we immediately rushed her back to the hospital but she only lived for another 12 minutes in intensive care before she died again, this time for good.

‘I am very angry and want answers. She wasn’t dead when they said she was and they could have saved her.’

Talk about waking up dead.

[Daily Mail]

Fisherman found a 23-foot long, dead squid floating about 12 miles off the Florida coast near Port Salerno. The fisherman hauled it ashore and donated the body to the Florida Museum of Natural History.

“We pulled up… thought it was something to fish on, a pallet or something like that. We looked at it, all three of us were like ‘holy mackerel,’ ” recalled Benz.

It turned out to be a 23-foot long giant squid.  It’s a rare find in our waters.  The main part of the body was about 11-feet long, but with its two long tentacles, it barely fit in the 23-foot boat Benz was riding in.  But he knew they had to bring it ashore.

“Nobody believes a fisherman,” said Benz.  “It didn’t seem it had been dead long, the tentacles were still moving and it was sticking to you when we got it in.

[WPTV]

“Residents in Huanshan City in East China encountered one of the best and most clearest mirage of their city a few weeks ago after a rainfall. Apparently some believed to be a “ghost city” that materialized over the Xin’an River. Yet others believed that what they were looking at was a real city from another dimension.”

[GhostTheory]

We can’t understand a word of this report but it seems as if a nosy dog owner recording his mutt running around happened upon some kind of levitation training session. A girl wearing a red parka levitates what looks to be 12 feet off the ground and hovers. She returns to the ground and then runs away with an older supervisor.

Are there a team of Russian mutants training in the woods? You be the judge.

Thank to Weird Things reader Kevin for sending this in.

[YouTube]

Fans of J Pop girl group AKB48 were delighted to see the addition of a new member in a candy commercial. Her name is Aimi Eguchi and she smiled and waves alongside her new band mates as they happily sung the virtues of Ezaki Glico. Yum!

But there is something about Aimi…

Fans immediately took to message boards and pounded out furious speculation on who the new girl was, why they hadn’t heard of her before the commercial and if she was related to one of the other AKB48 songbirds, because she looks a lot like… well… all of them.

The secret: Aimi Eguchi is a digital creation. Her face and body are a composite of the other girls. Ya’ll wanna see how it’s made? Let’s take a look at this behind the seasons demonstration featuring the AKB48 gals doing what they do best, singing their little faces off (so they can make another face):

Want even more? Listen to this comment from Aimi. Is there any doubt in your mind now that a totally digital pop star is a reality, if not already in our midst? Would anyone be surprised if Bruno Mars was really an elaborate project to market a singing version of a young Muhammed Ali?

[Singularity Hub]

Justin foolishly rushes into surgery that could make his creepy stare deadly. Brian gets sold a house on the cheap for his family to move into but when winter comes, a vile secret becomes a disgusting reality. Andrew plots the confusing world of global conspiracies and possibly uncovers one that could fundamentally reshape our idea of space travel.

PLUS! The first two chapters of Andrew Mayne’s new book The Chronological Man: The Monster In The Mist, as read by Justin is FREE at the end of the podcast!

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s new book The Chronological Man: The Monster In The Mist for only .99 at Amazon.com by clicking the image below!

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Well this is certainly a step in the right direction for downloading instructions on how to fly a helicopter right into your brain. Researchers have stuffed chips into rat brains that enabled them to instantly know things. They can also flip the switch off and the rats forget. Fascinating.

After studying the chemical interactions that allow short-term learning and memorization in rats, a group of scientists lead by Dr. Theodore Berger—from the University of South California’s Viterbi School of Engineering—have built a prosthetic chip that uses electrodes to enhance and expand their memory abilities. The chip is capable of storing neural signals, basically functioning as an electronic memory, allowing rats to learn more and keep it in the devices.

Dr. Berger’s description is almost frightening:

“Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget […] These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes.

[Gizmodo]

Recently, a dog in Jerusalem got uppity and entered the courts and would not leave. This prompted some judges to remember that they had cursed a lawyer 20 years early to have his spirit enter a dog, because in traditional Judaism dogs are impure creatures. Naturally, they issued a verdict that the lawyer dog should be stoned to death. Luckily for the dog, it escaped before its sentence could be carried out.

“A Jewish rabbinical court condemned to death by stoning a stray dog it feared was the reincarnation of a lawyer who insulted its judges, reports say.

The dog entered the Jerusalem financial court several weeks ago and would not leave, reports Israeli website Ynet.

It reminded a judge of a curse passed on a now deceased secular lawyer about 20 years ago, when judges bid his spirit to enter the body of a dog.

The animal is said to have escaped before the sentence was carried out.”

[BBC]

A strange little video. Thoughts?

“We caught whatever this is on our digital still camera on video mode. We were zoomed in as far as the camera would go. It took off when we tried to get closer. We were startled by the result of the zoomed image, PA.”

[Bigfoot Evidence]

A great white shark tour operator in Australia has made a startling discovery. Sharks love AC/DC. They love them so much, playing their songs is a more effective method of luring sharks than spreading chum in the water. After all, they may not always be hungry but there is always time to RAWK!

“We know the AC/DC music works best by trial and error, and we are doing more research to see what works best with different species of shark,” says Waller.

Apparently, sharks are attracted by songs in the low frequency range, and two AC/DC songs in particular are best at working the great whites into a frenzy — namely the tunes You Shook Me All Night Long and, fittingly, If You Want Blood. Waller, whose business allows tourists to get up close and personal with the ocean predators in shark cages, says the music even gets the sharks head-banging, in a way.

This leaves only two possibly evolutions for sharks to become even more metal: 1) be made out of fire 2) wield a battle axe.

[Treehugger]

The Bounty
io9 will be offering a $2000 bounty for the best photographic or video evidence of a genuine cryptid. In August, we will invite our panel of experts, including zoologists, the team behind excellent cryptid blog Cryptomundo, cryptid expert Loren Coleman, and a photoshop analyst, to judge which pictures are the most authentic. We’ll give the bounty to the one that they judge to be the most mysterious yet authentic creature.

Don’t have a cryptid photo or video? We still want to hear your stories.
Help your fellow cryptid hunters this summer by telling them where you saw cryptids, or heard about them showing up. You can post your stories in our Cryptid Summer Forum, or put your sightings upon our community cryptid map here.

While the bounty is out, throughout June and July, we will post updates on the best photos we’ve gotten, and ask you to vote on which ones you think are most likely to be authentic.

Something For The Fakers, Too
Want to give us your best fake picture of a cryptid? Well, start your engines. In July, we’ll ask for your most awesome fake images of cryptids, and readers can vote on the best ones. If yours wins, we’ll give you some free books and DVDs.

[io9]

An Australian chap named Chris Malloy has built a hoverbike from motorbike parts, and he claims it can fly at 173 mph at an altitude of 10,000 feet.

Those are theoretical figures for the time being because the contraption hasn’t flown too far yet. Malloy bases those outlandish specs on the 231-pound device’s thrust-to-weight ratio. It consists almost solely of a pair of massive propellers powered by an 1,170-cc engine good for 107 horsepower. The fuel tank contains enough juice to give it a range of 92 miles at a cruising speed of 92 mph.

The pilot’s right hand controls the thrust of the rotors, while the left adjusts the angle of the control vanes, pitching the nose down or up to move forward or backward. Turning the handlebars turns the machine.

[Wired]

A man’s home is his castle. The sense of satisfaction derived from looking out his bedroom window at night and knowing “these walls protect my pregnant wife and family” can provide the strength to carry him through the day. It is the American dream.

Unless.

Unless when you look out your window you see the ground move. You’d inch closer to get a better look at why this strange phenomenon is happening if you didn’t already know the answer. It seems the idyllic $180,000 home you purchased in rural Idaho is infested by thousands of snakes. Sliding through the grass, contaminating your well water supply and slithering inside the walls.

Your castle has been besieged by dragons.

Each day, before his pregnant wife and two small boys got out of bed, Sessions said he would do a “morning sweep” through the house to make sure none of the snakes had made it inside. That didn’t always work. One day, he heard his wife scream from the laundry room, where she had almost stepped on a snake. He rushed into the room to find that she’d jumped onto a counter.

“I was terrified she was going to miscarry,” he said…

At the height of the infestation, Sessions said he killed 42 snakes in one day before he decided he couldn’t do it anymore. He had waged war against the snakes and “they won.”

The Sessions family fled the home and now JP Morgan Chase who owns the property has delisted it for future sale.

Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes.

[MSNBC]

Scientists at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have genetically engineered the world’s first living laser. This is a living cell that can emit laser light. Based on previous Nobel winning work on Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) the researchers believe these laser shooting cells can be used in imaging and the targeted destruction of diseased cells.

Now, GFP has been incorporated into living human cells for an entirely new purpose: the production of laser light. Optical physicists in Boston have genetically engineered a cell capable of amplifying light and emitting a bright-green directional laser beam visible to the naked eye. Their research is published in the June 12th issue of Nature Photonics.

“This is the first time that we have used biological materials to build a laser and generate light from something that is living,” said Dr. Seok-Hyun Yun, who, together with his colleague Malte Gather, created the living laser.

[io9]

And now: taxonomic correction during assault.

Police say a man was carrying a dead weasel when he burst into a Hoquiam apartment and assaulted a man.

The victim asked, “Why are you carrying a weasel?” Police said the attacker said, “It’s not a weasel, it’s a martin,” then punched him in the nose and fled.

The attacker was apparently looking for his girlfriend and had gone to her former boyfriend’s apartment Monday night where the victim was a guest.

KXRO reports he left carcass behind.

[The Seattle Times]