Two counties in Southern England have kept a disturbing secret since 2000. Big cats. Huge, killer beasts have prowled their streets. According to a Freedom of Information Act request, over 205 sightings in a ten year time.

Details of the phone calls range from straightforward details of times, locations and descriptions, to the somewhat strange.

One call recorded in February 2000, from the Roche area of Mid Cornwall, states: “Sighting of large cat-type creature. Caller stated that her son saw a large cat in fields behind their farm in the last five minutes or so.

“Caller stated that it has disappeared again but she wanted to know if they could shoot it, if seen again, or is it protected?” Seven months later, a member of the public from Axminster said: “The beast of Bodmin Moor is in the top of my garden lying down digesting his dinner. I called you 30 minutes ago re. this.”

Although reports have tapered off in recent years, there still remains the mystery of where these cats came from and if they are still lurking in the darkness. Waiting to strike.

[This Is Cornwall]

Surgery robot Da Vinci shows off exactly how precise it is by peeling a grape. Like a show off.

[Da Vinci Surgery]

A good friend of mine, frustrated by the current, sixth, season of the rebooted Doctor Who summed up relatively positive fan reaction to the current series thusly: “nobody wants to say anything bad about it because they are afraid it will be taken away from them.”

So it is with full knowledge that I love the Doctor and hope his TARDIS adventures continue on ad infinitum that I make the following statement. The recently completed sixth season of the rebooted series is easily the worst since the 2005 relaunch. A moribund plot, confusing big bads, stalled motivations and one particularly overused side character served to ruin an initially compelling Doctor-Companion tandem and left a humming mythology in neutral.

Full breakdown, including spoilers (sweetie), AFTER THE JUMP. (more…)

Brasil! Home of Carnival! Steak houses where they never stop bringing you meat! Sports fans! Random schools of piranhas that swarm beaches with no warning!

Three out of four ain’t bad.

In a scene right out of a horror-movie, complete with scantily clad bathing beauties screaming bloody murder, a swarm of flesh-eating pirahna’s munched on 100 frolicking beachgoers in Brazil this week. The bathers were subsequently treated at a hospital for bites on their heels and toes.

According to River Monsters host Jeremy Wade the attack was most likely caused by swimmers disturbing the resting period of the fish. That would mean the wounds were defensive and not predatory.

What a relief.

[Animal Planet]

Get door to door from London to Sydney in under three hours, one hour 45 minutes of flight time to be exact, and you get to call yourself an astronaut when you land.

That is the dream of Michiel Mol. The 42-year-old Dutchman who co-owns the Force India F1 team has announced that he hopes to send commercial travelers into sub-orbital space via rockets to drastically cut down travel time between destinations.

“It’s the first time a spaceship will be capable of doing four flights a day and of doing 5,000 flights with one engine,” he said.

Passengers, who will be entitled to call themselves astronauts if they reach an altitude of 100 kilometres, will be required to pass physical tests which he says are no more stringent than would be expected of an air steward. The first generation spaceship will travel at 2,200mph, but the second generation will need to reach a velocity of 13,750mph to achieve the desired orbit.

The breakthrough is expected to bring unexpected new relevance to the lyrics of Elton John’s “Rocket Man”.

[Perth Now]

Inspired by the Ansari X Prize for private space travel, NASA decided to put $1.35 million on the table to push forward the progress of election aviation. Their challenge? Fly 200 miles at a speed of at least 100 mph with four passengers using only slightly less than a gallon of gas per passenger.

It was a task that even optimistic researchers initially thought was science fiction. Until two teams beat those benchmarks this weekend.

Team Pipistrel-USA.com took home the big money with their Taurus G4 aircraft which used less than a half gallon of gas per passenger. Team E-Genius also completed the trial and was awarded $12,000.

Check out this awesome Flickr set from the event and hear all about the specs of the winner in the video below.

[Cosmic Log]

Sightings are up. The legends are building. In the foothills of Siberia, the time has finally come for scientists from around the globe to unite in a common cause.

Finding the Yeti.

Researchers from Russia, the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Estonia, Mongolia and China will arrive later this week at a conference designed to find evidence of the beast.

Alleged sightings of Yetis in Kemerovo and the neighboring Altai region, about 1,988 miles (3,200 kilometers) east of Moscow, are up three times compared to 20 years ago, with scientists estimating that there is a current population of at least several dozen in the area.

Other evidence of the existence of the creatures — such as basic twig huts, twisted branches and footprints of up to 35 centimeters (14 inches) — also has been found in the area.

Wood Goblins are next.

[Fox News]

When Jack Bauer says it, it must be true.

Actor Kiefer Sutherland was asked if he believed in aliens and here’s what he said.

“When I look up at the sky on a clear night and see the wash of stars and planets, and everything that is outside our universe, I have to believe there is life everywhere.

“It would be very arrogant to believe this is the only planet that could sustain some kind of life.”

Although we want to learn how he looks up into the sky and sees beyond our universe, we are totally on Team Kiefer.

[Contact Music]

Songbirds and Snakes thought they were really awesome with their superfast muscles. But we mammals, we are not to be left out, no. Bats have now been proven to use the special class of muscle to help create their echolocation calls.

The discovery of superfast muscles in mammals may also help scientists disentangle the muscles’ evolution overall, Elemans said.

For instance, researchers will now be able to compare the bat genome with other genomes of superfast-muscled animals—such as songbirds and snakes—to figure out when and how the muscles evolved.

What’s more, Elemans suggests that the tracking boost afforded by terminal buzz helped bats flourish when they first evolved 50 million years ago.

“You need these buzzes to catch stuff,” Elemans said. In addition to flight and “regular” echolocation, terminal buzz is “the third reason why they’ve been successful evolutionarily.”

[National Geographic]

Who doesn’t love Remember The Titans. A story of redemption, hope, togetherness and the cheerleader from Heroes when she was like, 9.

You know who really loves Remember The Titans? High School football coach Jim Marsh. On the way back from a loss, he decided to inspire his team in the style of that film by pulling all of his kids off the bus at a cemetery, telling them to lie down and giving a motivational speech.

The same way Coach Boone brought the kids to Gettysburgh and encouraged his team to learn a “lesson from the dead“? Right?

The only difference is that Coach Boone’s team took that energy, conquered racism and won the championship and Coach Marsh just got suspended for two weeks thanks to some parental complaints.

As for the people in the graves that were walked upon, they had no comment. Because they are dead and dead people don’t give comment.

[CBS]

Florida Panhandle resident Stephanie Pistey is currently on trial as an accessory to the murder of a 16-year-old friend. When explaining to a local television station her role in the death, she cited a supernatural bloodlust:

Cracking a smile, she said: ‘I know this is going to be crazy. But I believe I’m a vampire – part vampire and part werewolf, so it’s not really a cult, it’s more just like my personality.’

Pistey’s fiancee is accused of murdering 16-year-old Jacob Hendershot.

The Daily Mail reports that Pistey posted the following on her Facebook page days after the alleged murder:

On August 20, days after changing her relationship status to ‘engaged,’ she posted: ‘Yea were merryied and hes going to die hes the one that killed jacob hendershot well i let him i wanted the blood.’

Pistey has since claimed her account was hacked.

[Daily Mail]

If you’ve used hallucinogenic mushrooms (active ingredient psilocybin) in the past year, you could still be feeling the effect. Long past peaking, 60% of participants in a Johns Hopkins study found a marked rise in openness a far as a year past initially tripping their faces off.

Openness is defined as such:

…traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness.

The changes were measured against the normal shift in adult personality. Researches said that openness is traditionally something that decreases as one gets older.

Here is another fun fact to the study, more than half of the 51 participants had postgraduate degrees. Higher learning, indeed.

[Science Daily]

Welcome to the big leagues Ireland. You’ve just confirmed your first ever case of spontaneous human combustion!

The pioneer went by the name Michael Faherty, he was 76.

“This fire was thoroughly investigated and I’m left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation,” he said.

This would also represent the first confirmed spontaneous human combustion case this decade.

[BBC]

Wrangled by a man in overalls, friends with people in devil costumes, ladies and gentleman: Medusa, the world’s largest snake.

Ghostbuster, Blues Brother, UFOlogy advocate: Dan Aykroyd.

The comedic titan has remolded himself in recent years as not only a hawker of Crystal Head vodka but a celebrity endorser of UFO research. What follows is a brief tour trough Aykroyd’s opinions on the matter including his eight-part Unplugged documentary opus.

Above we see the most recent interview with DA at a Crystal Head signing. A self-confessed spiritualist, Aykroyd’s most refined passions in the research community surrounding unexplained flying objects. In the interview (in which Aykroyd rattles off a who’s who of UFOlogists and gives props to up and coming research teams) he mentions his 2005 UFO doc Unplugged which cemented the actor’s place in the UFO community.

We see that AFTER THE JUMP… (more…)