The Foundation is a sprawling series of novels by Issac Asimov revolving around one core conceit. In the future, a brilliant man cracks the source code of the universe. He boils down the seemingly random emotions and decisions of billions into mathematical certainty.

He understands that civilizations will rise and fall and rise again only to again break down and rebuild.

So, he makes a choice for the betterment of humanity. He creates a society, far away from the hub of humanity, where a core group will curate the whole of human knowledge. The idea being, if he cannot stop the universe from descending into chaos he can certainly help it rebuild faster.

Today, we live in a world where that source code gets clearer every day. In a report published this week, we’ve begun to find mathematical patterns in seemingly random group decision making.

In the Jan. 29 Nature, for example, a team led by Scheffer reported success using one mathematical test of an approaching tipping point. Theory says that when a shift is coming, a system exhibits what scientists call a critical slowing down. Normally, a really stable system quickly recovers after being perturbed. But when everything is about to come unglued, the recovery time from even a small perturbation becomes slower and slower.

But the question remains, as we get better at this, how do we handle the knowledge? If we know outcomes won’t we become determined to change them? Doesn’t this effect the calculus? It is ironic that Asimov saw all this coming? Or was he truly the Seldon of our age?

[Science News]

Two movies, ten years apart, one friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

Both were preceded by teasers which didn’t quite hit as intended. Sam Raimi’s independent mini-story containing all original footage that wouldn’t be seen in the film was understandably shelved after 9/11 due to a final shot of a baddie helicopter ensnared in a web between the World Trade Center towers. Meanwhile, Marc Webb’s first peak into his Spidey universe was criticized for an over-serious tone, origin story fatigue and underwhelming “MADE FOR 3D” first person perspective sequence.

But let’s focus on the big trailers… the one that in 2001 proved to give us the most accurate look at 2002′s film and whose modern-day counterpart will hopefully do the same for July’s Amazing adventure.

The biggest difference upon watching both back to back is how differently Peter Parker is handled. Toby Maguire is an affable goofball who is gaining a sense of purpose by way of his powers. Oozing likability, Raimi gives him the trappings of a nerd (glasses, ill-fitting clothing, square hair cut) but aside from an awkward pass at Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson, we don’t see much of that evidenced in his character.

Even the Parker narration over the first minute of the trailer has a “Holy Moly, you wouldn’t believe what’s happened over the last few weeks” tone.

Compare that to Andrew Garfield’s far more brooding, introspective Parker. We skip the “spider bite shot” and get right into web swinging action. 20 seconds into the trailer, Parker is inventing his web shooters. A few seconds after that he’s defending Spider-Man in a heated conversation.

If there were a character narration over this trailer, one might assume it would sound much more like a Captain’s Log. He knows he’s smart and draws strength from that when dealing with others. His weakness comes for abandonment issues which makes him quiet, but not necessarily unsure of himself.

In a word, the difference is confidence. The Maguire’s Parker never truly understood his powers and was constantly struggling to make sense of them. Garfield’s version appears to look at them more like an experiment. He’s not afraid to push them past their limits and doesn’t view them as a reflection on himself.

Our new Peter Parker seems determined to make his mark on the word through science. His new abilities just give him another tool to do it.

Lake Vostock, a body of water concealed under 2.2 miles of ice in Antarctica has been contacted by Russian researchers who began drilling for it more than two decades ago. The subglacial lake has not been touched in over 20 million years.

What is found under the ice, could very well inform how we look to explore more exotic locales beyond Earth.

Many scientists see Vostok as not only a last frontier on Earth but also a potential gold mine for learning about possible conditions on Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Encedadus. Each is covered by a thick shell of ice with liquid water below, warmed by either the inner heat of the moon or by tidal forces.

The United States and Britain will begin drilling later this year into small subglacial Antarctic lakes. Scientists estimate that there are about 200 of these lakes beneath the ice sheet.

The breakthrough comes after worries that the Russian team might have been in trouble after they did not respond to colleagues in the United States in the days leading up to the discovery.

[Washington Post]

He spent his time with zombies.

That’s the excuse for a man claiming to be Zulu folk singer Mgqumeni, who died and was buried in 2009 on why he hasn’t be around. The would-be Mgqumeni says he’d spent the intervening years amongst the undead before freeing himself and returning to the world of the living.

The man claiming to be the resurrected artist, told The Times newspaper: “I have been suffering a lot at the place where I was kept with zombies. It was hell there and I am so grateful that I was able to free myself and return to my family and you, my supporters.”

The man has now been brought to a local court and authorities could exhume Mgqumeni’s remains to test them against his alleged incarnate. They are going to test his DNA against Mgqumeni’s and have warned him that he will be charged with fraud should they not match up.

Upon hearing of his return, many of the singers fans have flocked to see their possibly resurrected idol. Above is a picture of Mgquemi now after surviving the afterlife and below is a picture before.

[News24]

Many noticed an irregularity in the maps of Google Ocean. What looked to be a massive sunken land mass with a city-like grid.

Of course, the words massive sunken land mass with a city-like grid cannot be uttered around anyone with half a personality before someone wonders aloud… “Wait, is this the lost city of Atlantis?”

Now, it appears Google has taken steps to cover up this discovery. No doubt counting their newly dried doubloons from their waterlogged paymasters, the folks at Mountain View decided to “update” their maps with new “data” which “corrected” the “anomaly”.

A likely story.

In fact, the grid was merely caused by overlapping datasets, according to NOAA. Besides that, the grid that looked like a little town actually covered an area of ocean more than 100 miles (161 kilometers) wide — not exactly small-town proportions.

The updated Google Ocean has been scrubbed of this Atlantis artifact. Google Ocean is also becoming increasingly accurate in other ways.

Google has yet to confirm or deny reports that crucial early funding was delivered by Atlantean plutocrats or the Eric Schmidt is not, in fact, a fish.

[MSNBC]

In this remarkable video, we see two Texas heart surgeons who replace a dying man’s failing heart with a turbine. This does a few remarkable things.

1) Saves the dude’s life
2) Removes his pulse, since the turbine creates a continuous flow of blood
3) Changes the conventional definition of physiological death

Very emotional stuff. Things might have gotten a little dusty for me while watching it. The closer we get to liberating ourselves from the fragile limitations of our meat bag prisons the better.

[Design Taxi]

Legend has it that this caterpillar used to be a journalist, a good one too. If it weren’t for that one story about the Sin Eater he could have been Bob Woodward. But no, he was fed some bad information and revealed to be a fraud by Spider-Man.

Dejected and suicidal, he went to pray for The Lord’s Salvation when he was bonded with The Symbiote giving him powers equal to Spider-Man and a pathway to the true revenge he’d always sought.

Or it’s just an awesome picture taken by photographer Igor Siwanowicz.

[Geekologie]

There is no reason all newly discovered planets shouldn’t immediately be given science fiction inspired names. None at all. It would be easier for scientists to remember and reference, capture the imagination of those that find this kind of stuff awesome and create a cultural touchstone between us and our dreams for an exciting and adventurous future.

Take for example the newly discovered GJ 667Cc, it’s right in the middle of the “Goldilocks” zone making it a huge candidate to play host for liquid water and life as we know it.

Quote UC Santa Cruz astronomer Steven Vogt…

“The planet is around one star in a triple-star system,” Vogt explained. “The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky.”

You mean like this?

Just think of it as a really convenient place to put our pod races and slave-owning racist caricatures. In 3D!

Then again, it might al still be a trap.

“Statistics tell us we shouldn’t have found something this quickly this soon unless there’s a lot of them out there,” Vogt said. “This tells us there must be an awful lot of these planets out there. It was almost too easy to find, and it happened too quickly.”

You’re right, it did happen too quickly. I’ve got a bad feeling about this. That’s no possibly habitable planet, it’s a space station!

[Scientific American]

The picture you see at right is some kind of ape. It was seen running loose through the Florida Everglades in 2006 and successfully evaded capture.

Distribution of the pics inspired some to anoint them as photographic evidence of Florida’s premium cryptid, the Skunk Ape. A version of Bigfoot alleged to live in the swamps which dominate the southern, tropical wetlands of the Sunshine State.

But allow me to posit another theory. There is monkey kingdom in a swamp that also contains alligators, panthers and snakes so large they sometimes burst because they’ve attempted to eat an alligator. Also, Chris Cooper from Adaptation.

My question to the Weird Things readership, which is a cooler idea? A genuine cryptid albeit a lonely one OR an ecosystem of swamp monkeys that have learned to live amongst the rest of the Everglades buck wild natives.

[Cryptomundo]

Who doesn’t love a color changing cereal? It’s dumped into the bowl one color and boom, before you know it, your milk has changed your breakfast into a completely different hue. But it’s your milk itself that tells the tale true, as it is now tinted the original color of the previously dry crunchies.

That’s because the first shade was a powder applied to the cereal, since washed away to reveal the second stage.

But if you have any designs on making your own version of this fun breakfast classic, think again, the process is patented by Quaker Oats.

Their method is to create cereal pieces of one colour, then coat them with powder of a different hue. That leads to breakfast table magic: “The coating is of a second colour different from the first colour and is in a quantity sufficient to obscure the first colour … Upon mixing milk with the resulting cereal, the edible powdered surface is instantly dissolved or dispersed, revealing the specific colours of the individual pieces very quickly.”

What are the ingredients? Glad you asked. “The cereal base has a coating comprising cornstarch, powdered sugar, [and] food colouring.”

The patents in question were granted first to Hideo Tomomatsu of Crystal Lake, Illinois and then to the team of Joseph Farinella of Chicago, Illinois and Justin French of Cedars, Iowa through the late 80s and 90s.

[The Guardian]

A West Virginia Man caught this slowly moving aircraft above him. At first thinking it to be a refueling craft he realized as it got closer it was something different. It’s hard to get a great screen grab of it, but check out the video below for a flashes of the craft.

Kind of looks like an A-Wing to us.

[UFO Casebook]

The following is written by Andrew Mayne, it is republished with permission from his blog at AndrewMayne.com/books

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest on the edge of a forest. After school meant going home, climbing the fence and trekking through pine trees to battle Stormtroopers, hunt yetis and looking for our own version of Blackbeard’s treasure; a legendary mother-load of Playboy magazines hidden away by some high school kids in a buried foot locker.

One day after defeating the Empire and avoiding being narrowly killed by an AT-AT walker that some would swear looked like an oak tree, I sat down in front of our small kitchen television and turned the dial accidentally to channel 2 instead of 3 (the channel for our cable box). The dreaded channel 2! Oh, no! Public television!

Afraid that I might be forced to learn something against my will, I ran across the linoleum to turn the TV dial. As I gripped the chrome plastic knob, a strange sound filled the air and I froze. It was an otherworldly noise. Machine-like, but not like any machine I’d ever heard. It had purpose like a siren. It told you something important was about to happen. And it did.

Still holding the knob, I watched a blue box materialize and a man with curly hair and a scarf emerge. Well that was curious… Some minutes later when I watched him step back into the box and found out IT’S BIGGER ON THE INSIDE!!!, my life was changed forever.

Sonic screwdrivers, electronic pets, non-threatening female companions and most of all, the idea to go ANYWHERE and to ANY TIME became my obsession. I turned robot kits into my own version of K-9. I stuck flashlights to socket wrenches and tried to make my own Time Lord tools. I also developed an interest in physics and devoured everything my school library had on relativity and black holes.

For Halloween I’d borrow my dad’s old camel hair coat, wrap a scarf around my neck and go door to door as a homeless person (their interpretation, not mine) in search of Jelly Babies (as elusive as the Playboy-filled foot locker). My parents thought it was a phase. My brother thought I wasn’t getting enough oxygen at night because I had the habit of sleeping under my covers. Which I did. Because I was a perpetually scared child.

I was afraid of the world (well, just the people) and preferred to spend my time in my own thoughts either out in the woods or immersed in some fantasy. A nervous tic that made my chin quiver, triggered by cold air, caffeine or the female of the species, didn’t help either.

Doctor Who was the ultimate escapist dream for a kid who constantly wanted to be somewhere else. My interest in science and physics was because I wanted to figure out how to build my own TARDIS. A task I spent several years dedicated to and ultimately only produced a sad 1/3 scale model made out of cardboard for a book report.

But the dream didn’t stop. What I learned about science and the paradoxes of time travel and energy requirements to teleport matter gave me a good idea of what was and wasn’t possible. Not wanting to take ‘no’ for an answer, this lead to my interest in how I could at least fake it.

Where some people turn to mind altering drugs to alter reality, I picked up magic books. A few short years after watching the Doctor appear out of thin air, I was doing that on my school stage through magic illusions of my own design. A year later the scared kid who risked brain damage to hide from the world, was performing a full-scale magic show in the middle of a circus ring, causing non-threatening female companions (I called them ‘assistants’ by then) to vanish and reappear, defy gravity and break those laws of physics that had tried to hold me back.

The public shyness retreated and my magic tricks lead to a career performing in resorts, showrooms and cruise ships around the world. Most of all, it let me share my imagination with a theatre full of people. I wasn’t the solitary kid anymore walking down the street defeating an army of Daleks that mysteriously always materialized on garbage day. I had a room full of companions to take with me.

One thing lead to another and I found myself looking for other ways to share the world inside my head. It’s been said in magic that the real illusion takes place in people’s minds. A trick is just a series of inferences that the spectator pieces together to create the deception. Girl steps into cabinet + Swords goes through cabinet = magic (or homicide). This idea that I didn’t need any props or even a stage to create magic stayed with me for quite some time until one day waiting in an airport, I found myself trying to create this kind of illusion in a word processor. And that’s how I became a writer.

If you read my stories, particularly my Chronological Man adventures, it’ll be obvious to you now how the boy who turned to the wrong channel has been influenced by Doctor Who, science, magic tricks and the fun of being able pull your friends along on amazing adventures.

Smith, the protagonist of my Chronological Man stories is my mash-up of everything I loved about Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes, Tony Stark, plus the idea of how to tell a time traveller story while following the strict rules of physics. They’re not for everyone. But there’s a simple test…

If I ask you step inside my cardboard TARDIS and the answer is ‘yes’, I’m pretty sure you and I are going to have a lot of fun on our adventures…

I now have an (infrequent) mailing list for those folks who want to step inside and follow what I’m up to with my books and don’t need an explanation about AT-AT’s that look like oak trees or why it’s perfectly acceptable to wear a wool scarf in 90º weather:

Step inside here…

The Chronological Man Adventures are available as ebooks for just 99¢ on Amazon and the Nook (iBooks coming soon.)

Amazon Kindle:
Smith’s first adventure begins here: The Monster in the Mist
His latest is here: The Martian Emperor

B&N Nook:
Smith’s first adventure begins here: The Monster in the Mist
His latest is here: The Martian Emperor

Audiobook
The first book is going to be a free podcast in a couple weeks. You can sign up for my mailing list for details on when it’s available. Sign up here

Can’t wait? The 4.5 hour audiobook of The Monster in the Mist is here for only 99¢

My website is here: http://andrewmayne.com/books/

It looks like a few stray pieces of trash, the absence of any safety features and 2:54 is all it takes to completely destroy this washing machine.

[Live Leak]

Newt Gingrich is a lot of things. A LOT of them.

But no one will ever say that he’s a man afraid to dream big.

Much hay has been made about his recent comments on Florida’s Space Coast that, as president, he’d actively build a space colony on the moon and look to fund a mission to Mars. Many have particularly singled out his confession that early in his career he backed the “Northwest Ordinance for Space” which would allow for 13,000 space colonists to petition for statehood once they’ve permanently made homes off world.

What I find curious is that many of those mocking Newt are the same who lamented the brilliant Neil deGrasse Tyson saying on Bill Maher’s show Real Time that the budgetary issues with the James Webb telescope was an indication that America has “stopped dreaming” about space.

The dreams of society are corollary to our belief that we can accomplish them. As the price of rockets come down thanks to private companies like SpaceX, a lot of the “dreams” which seemed futile while operating completely inside of a slow moving, money bleeding, budget busting bureaucracy might seem more feasible.

Here is a quote from Newt about his Moon state ordinance:

I wanted every young American to say to themselves, “I could be one of those 13,000.” I could be a pioneer. I need to study science and math and engineering. I need to learn how to be a technician. I could be a part of building a bigger, better future. I can live the future, looking at the solar system. Being part of a generation of courageous people who do something big and bold and heroic.

No matter what your politics are, that sounds like a dream worth pursuing to me.

[Newt as Moon picture via BoingBoing]

His name is Nong Youhui.

His eyes are blue while his family all were born with brown eyes.

He squints when the sun is out but can see clearly in darkness so thick you cannot see the person in front of you.

He has “Cat’s Eyes” and has become famous for his strange vision. Is it a superpower? Sign that he is born of alien DNA? Will he get a scholarship for Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters?

Thanks to loyal Weirdo mxyzplx for the tip on Twitter.

[DisInfo.com]

A streaking object in the night sky led to panic in the Mexican region of Mexicali. Police were mobilized yet unable to apprehend the Unidentified Flying Object flashing with blue and white lights whizzing through the evening air.

It was seen around the airport and subsequently flying at dizzying speeds toward the new guard post after citizens reported seeing it over the Marán Industrial Park, and subsequently in the Rivera Campestre district and related areas.

Martin Ruelas, supervisor of the DSPM’s western region, saw it and stated that it was a sizeable round white object with visible blue and yellow flashes. He added that the object was seen high in the sky and moved up, down and sideways at very high speeds, vanishing from sight after heading south from the valley of Mexicali.

Officers tried to chase the object but were stymied by the nimble changes in direction. After giving up on trying to follow it, they eventually relied on reporting to each other via radio when it was headed toward stationary pairings of officers. The article does not mention if shots were fired.

[Inexplicata]

Can’t describe. Just watch. OMG.

Researchers have long thought that hallucinogenic stimulated parts of your brain, which created insane visuals like that one time Gary down the street saw the poster melt in his hands and then was all like “Did you see that?” but you were too busy holding your iPhone in your hands and wondering if apps have souls.

New brain scan research suggests there might be a more profound explanation, key parts of your brain turn off while on magic mushrooms. Specifically, blood flow is restricted to the brain.

This could possibly be beneficial in opening up patients to learning new behaviors, which could help in treating Obsessive Compulsive personality disorders.

“Chemically switching off might have very profound beneficial effects,” says Nutt, who suspects that psilocybin could also be useful for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder. “It may help people completely locked into a mindset that drives their lives.”

The study also found a positive reaction to the question, “look at my fingers, aren’t they weird?”

[Science News]

The laboratory that mutated a deadly bird flu into something humans can spread are now called for a 60 day suspension of research so they can open a dialogue with the scientific community. Since their announcement, much Sturm and Drang has been made about how the lab should disseminate the information they gained and if anyone should be in the business of creating a global super plague.

“We recognize that we and the rest of the scientific community need to clearly explain the benefits of this important research and the measures taken to minimize its possible risks,” write about 40 scientists.

“We propose to do so in an international forum in which the scientific community comes together to discuss and debate these issues,” they write in a letter released by the journals Science and Nature today, Jan. 20.

Translation: Everybody, be cool.

Those who worked on the project would surely like to emphacize how few steps it took them to mutate the virus into something that could affect humanity. Now that it’s been done, we can learn a lot about how to prevent the spread of the disease should it happen in the wild.

They would in equal measures like to de-emphasize the fact that they engineered an unnatural global plague.

[Live Science]

New findings by a Russian scientist may in fact prove that there is life on Venus, and we aren’t talking microscopic organisms in the soil either.

But in his article, published in the magazine Solar System Research, Ksanfomaliti says the Russian photographs depict objects resembling a “disk,” a “black flap” and a “scorpion.”

“What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus?” he wrote. “Let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living.”

Scorpions on Venus! Are they giant? Do the breath the acidic gas cloud cover that envelops the planet? What do they eat?

This is the coolest idea in the history of Mondays.

[Yahoo]