The boys each have to spend $500,000 in the most bizarre way possible leading to robotic carnage, bullets, Bigfoot, mint juleps and a very special visit from a King of Kings. Brian recoils when explained the concept of Necropants. Andrew tells tale of man who flew across the Grand Canyon using a rocket pack.

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Picks:

Brian-

• 2010: A Space Odyssey
• The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman

Justin-

• The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy
• Sherlock

Andrew-

• Hell House

The Cold War has just begun. The next several decades will be defined by an escalating race of espionage and technological one-upsmanship. You owe it to yourself to give your nation every advantage. That includes investigating the shadowy world of ESP and the transmission of messages from one brain to another.

So the tests begin. On animals at first. A hypothesis is formed that two bonds would be universally easy to detect changes in: A) the natural relationship between mother and child B) the continuity of life itself. Logical, no?

Comrades, this is the gilded pathway to hell as you blink to reality and find yourself on a Soviet submarine killing baby rabbits.

The document continues: “According to Naumov, Soviet scientists placed the baby rabbits aboard the submarine. They kept the mother rabbit in a laboratory on shore where they implanted electrodes (EEG?) in her brain. When the submarine was submerged, assistants killed the rabbits one by one. At each precise moment of death, the mother rabbit’s brain produced detectable and recordable reactions.”

Experiments like this when on through the 1970s with a particular focus on documenting if other animals could innately sense one of their own kicking the bucket.

[Mysterious Universe]

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]

Hello all,

Since we debuted Weird Things in 2008 we’ve sought to make this a collection of stories, videos and experiences from a certain perspective. A fascination with everything we don’t know matched with the curiosity to follow the rabbit hole where ever it might lead. Singularity, Sasquatch and space elevators mix seamlessly for us. SpaceX’s apparent determination to reach Mars alongside travelers from unknown star systems and their apparent determination to reach us back.

We love this stuff and you do too.

We’ve since added a very successful podcast featuring myself, Andrew Mayne and Brian Brushwood along with a YouTube series. You, the audience, mean the world to us and connecting with you is the lifeblood of this common interest.

Now, we’d like to offer a high profile way that you can connect with each other even further.

Beginning now, we are going to sell slots on the side bar of this website. Each button will be 220 x 25 pixels and live on the right sidebar for every visitor to the site. That includes over a 1,000 unique visits per day and growing. It will link to your blog, Twitter, Facebook fan page, or anything else you’d like to have a regular presence on the site.

Along with any other Weird Things advertisement, we are gearing this to be affordable to you, the average reader. In that spirit, we are going to sell these permanent slots for only $25 per month.

We are providing a subscription link here. If you’d like to sign up, please email your 220 x 25 button to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail. By supporting this site as an advertiser we hope to give you a great value and share our audience as it grows with the people we entrust most… our audience.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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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Picks:

Brian-

• Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham

Justin-

• The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

Andrew-

• Tremors

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?

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]

Imagine an ant so large it could tear your flesh. Now imagine an entire colony of them descending upon you in your sleep.

You wake up almost instantly as the shifting weight of a cadre of insect killers disturbs your dreams. Terror creeps quickly as you come back to the terrifying reality.

You brush off as many as you can, frantically running your hands over your arms and legs while stamping madly on the ground. But your feet can’t crush these resilient bastards. They regroup and circle around your position. This time they try and climb you from the back of your legs.

This is how you die. Cold. Alone. Mutilated by a creature no longer alive in your native time.

Now: be happy you didn’t live 50 million years ago, when these things really existed.

At about 2 inches (5 cm) long, the specimen is a “monstrously big ant,” said Bruce Archibald, a paleoentomologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who reported the discovery today (May 3) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Though fossils of loose giant ant wings have been found before in the United States, this is the first known full-body specimen.

Massive ants of this size have been found before but not in America. It remains a mystery how they arrived there.

[Live Science]

A very careful analysis from Loren Coleman says that Sasquatch and Osama Bin Laden were most likely around the same height. Spoiler Alert: they were both a littler shorter than we thought.

Also, Bigfoot survived Osama Bin Laden. That makes me really, really excited.

[Cryptomundo]

Andrew describes a harrowing trip into the woods where he comes face to face with a real Chupacabra. The Boys get into an extremely nerdy screaming match about the relative merits of going to Mars or building a Space Elevator. Justin is delighted by the exploits of a human freak of nature whose run up and down Mount Kilimanjaro in only shorts.

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!

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

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Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings042911.mp3

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Picks:

Brian-

• Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Justin-

• Jurassic Park by Michael Chrichton

Andrew-

• Game of Thrones (TV series) based on Game of Thrones (the book)