So you get a new phone. It has a new number. You email all your friends with the new info. Then you find out the last person who had this number died suddenly in a hail of gunfire and the dude before him croaked the same way. Oh, the the guy before those two? Cancer.

How excited are you to have the admittedly awesome number of 0888 888 888?

The Mobitel number – 0888 888 888 – has proved to be both easy to memorize and deadly for three successive owners.

The first user – the former CEO of Mobitel – died of cancer in 2001. The number then went to Bulgarian mob boss Konstantin Dimitrov who was gunned down in an Amsterdam ambush in 2003. The final owner of the doomed cell number was another gangster, cocaine smuggler Konstantin Dishliev, who was shot to death outside a restaurant in 2005.

The number was on hold while the investigation of Dishliev’s death was underway but now Mobitel has disabled the cursed number.

Please leave a message.

[Examiner]

My bet is on pterodactyl.

[io9]

Phil Plait dissects a recent rumor about the Betelgeuse star. The short version of the rumor? The star is going to go all supernova in weeks or months (not years or hundreds of years) and the brightness could affect crops and cause streaming panic in the streets.

Phil’s rebuttal? Not so much.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start stockpiling canned goods and telling your friends the sky is falling just so in two months when you pal’s newly orphaned children are huddled in your bunker to get away from the blood-thirsty mobs left by a post-apocalyptic society you can say… “I told your pa this was coming, (wistful glance to a bare wall) wish he would’ve listened.”

[Bad Astronomy]

It’s lurking underneath the surface, waiting for little legs rubbery with summer excitement to come across it’s path. It’s the Hardy Lake Monster.

[CNN]

Here is the story thus far:

A little girl disappears into the Cambodian jungle in 1989 where she presumably learned the Bear Necessities for the next 18 years. In 2007 she was discovered and reunited with her family.

But things weren’t all milk and honey, Rochom P’ngieng (now 29 years old) refused to learn English and still crawled instead of walking.

Then…

“Even the day before she fled the house, she still helped the family pick vegetables. She must have gone back to the forest and we still cannot find her.” The dramatic reappearance and attempted reintegration of the “jungle girl” has gripped Cambodia, where she is also known as the “half-animal girl” because of her hunched appearance and the fact she makes animal noises rather than speaking.

Mr Lou blames his daughter’s second disappearance on “forest spirits”. In a society shrouded in mystic beliefs, he has also enlisted a fortune teller to help with the search. He is saving up for an offering of one wild ox, one pig, one chicken and four jugs of wine, which, the mystic assures him, will secure his daughter’s return.

When she was lost the first time, many locals reported seeing her with a naked man wielding a sword. This is said to represent the treacherous forrest spirit which may have lead her back into the brush.

So, be on the look out for that.

[The Telegraph]

PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Perkes

A young Chinese boy who was born with a thick patch of skin on his back had a surgery to remove the reason he’s earned the nickname “Turtle Boy” by school bullies.

[News.Com.Au]

We travel back and forth through time. We are time travelers. So much so we don’t even realize it. Nor do we realize that we are slightly leaning awkwardly while remembering the past or pondering the future.

The ability to mentally meander through time by remembering the past or imagining the future sets humans apart from many other species, helping us to learn from what came before and plan for what lies ahead. However, remarkably little is known about how such mental time travel works.

Past research showed that our perceptions of time are tightly linked with space. For instance, pondering the future makes us lean forward, while recalling the past makes us lean back, experimental psychologist Lynden Miles of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and his colleagues found.

Now Miles and his collaborators have discovered another interesting feat of the mind: Thinking about moving forward prompted speculation about the future, while imagining moving backward triggered reflections on the past.

This explains why downhill skiers are so good at remembering who’s birthdays are coming up.

[Live Science]

So you find a totally sweet cone-shaped rock but can’t shake the idea that it’s somehow special. Where to do you go to get clarity on what the geological oddity really is?

If you are Oregon couple Donald and Debbie Wesson you haul it down to a county fair, which leads you down a path of academic trail to realizing you’ve got your hands on a meteorite.

Wesson finally began asking around after watching a television program about meteorites. He took the rock to a local county fair in Castle Rock, Washington in the summer of 2009, where he spoke with a member of the Southern Washington Mineralogical Society.

The find was referred to Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., where initial sample tests showed it was probably a meteorite. Final confirmation came from the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University, which classified the Morrow County meteorite as an L6 ordinary chondrite that had been highly shocked (S5) but minimally weathered (W1).

The latest find represents a relatively common type of meteorite, according to Melinda Hutson, a planetary scientist at Portland State University who helped make the classification. But, she added that it has several intriguing features.

Also, they got an Elephant Ear and rode the Flying Dutchman.

[Space]

We now know when sharks are most likely to tear us apart.

Shark attacks are most likely to occur on Sunday in less than 6 feet of water during a new moon, a new study finds. And there’s good reason: That’s when a lot of surfers are in the water. Not coincidentally, surfers wearing black-and-white suits are most likely to be attacked.

Saturdays come in second place, and Fridays make a pretty good showing too, “reflective of people skipping work and taking three-day weekends,” explained George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida.

The scribbling you hear is the frantic rerouting of my cousin’s Sunday moonlight water wedding under a new moon.

[Yahoo]

There are over 115 reported dead in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador after a tropical storm ravaged the region. But this photo of a sinkhole that opened up in Guatemala City has to be among the most insane things we’ve ever seen.

[CNN]

If you had “strange but undeniable resulting pattern caused by a million years of whipping from Martian wind” in the What With The Bizarre Shape Of The Mars Ice Cap pool, please collect your winnings.

According to a new NASA study, the deep grooves in the ice cap, once considered to be proof of a horrific volcanic eruption which left chasms that could easily hold the Grand Canyon, now look the the results of eons of work done by natural forces.

It points to an ancient process, over millions of years, by which the ice and dust accreted while at they same time were sculpted by a powerful, persistent force: the Martian wind.

“Nobody realised that there would be such complex structures in the layers,” Holt said.

“The layers record a history of ice accumulation, erosion and wind transport. From that we can recover a history of climate that’s much more detailed than anybody expected.”

So, there we go.

[AFP]

A new finding suggests the earliest known human species swung from trees had the tools to make fire and was likely fond of eating other hominins.

Yummo.

The H. gautengensis fossils were found alongside basic stone tools and evidence of the use of fire. The most complete human ancestor skull from the sediments associated with H. gautengensis is a widely studied mid-1970s discovery labeled Stw 53.

The stone tools would have been used for “‘de-fleshing’ and cutting open bones to access marrow, and probably also for digging and [preparing] plant foods,” he said. “They might also have been used for processing animal hides.”

Cut marks on the Stw 53 skull hint at darker practices—”that it was de-fleshed, either for ritual burial or cannibalistic consumption.”

There is some really fascinating stuff (including more detail on how primitive tools were used to de-flesh things) in the this article so please read it.

[National Geographic]

The brilliant Phil Plait once penned an epic disemboweling of the film Armageddon which in turn morphed into a hilarious live talk that I was lucky enough to see in person. But it looks like at least one epic of the Michael Bay tour de force would be more of an omen than originally suspected.

Yes folks, Owen Wilson has offered his services to NASA just in case.

Just kidding, but it does look like our best defense from asteroids might be nuclear weaponry.

That’s the opinion of David Dearborn, anyway, who says we may need to tap our nuclear arsenal if a life-threatening asteroid suddenly comes into view. Dearborn, a research physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, laid out the nuclear case in a talk here Tuesday at the semiannual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Dearborn’s research on nuking asteroids is a fairly natural outgrowth of his other work, which has involved weapons development and testing, as well as three-dimensional modeling of astrophysical processes. He has run numerical simulations of how a nuclear detonation either near or on the surface of a threatening near-Earth object could divert or fragment it, and has found that with a little bit of lead time the weapons could do the job rather well.

And cue the music.

[Scientific American]

First the never ending oil slick and now a rare parasitic lung worm has been linked to raw crayfish. Will America ever regain trust in cajon cuisine?

These particular infections were all linked to folks consuming the shellfish from the river of Missouri which scientists now believe is a symptom of living in Missouri and being really bored.

“The infection, called paragonimiasis, is very rare, so it’s extremely unusual to see this many cases in one medical center in a relatively short period of time,” says Washington University infectious diseases specialist Gary Weil, MD, professor of medicine and of molecular microbiology, who treated some of the patients. “We are almost certain there are other people out there with the infection who haven’t been diagnosed. That’s why we want to get the word out.”

Just os everyone knows, if you don’t eat raw crayfish, you should be fine. The more you know.

[Science Daily]