Video games, they are not just for recruiting The Last Starfighter anymore. They can also aide in controlling your dreams, according to science!

That ability to shape the alternate reality of dream worlds might not match mind-bending Hollywood films such as “The Matrix,” but it could provide an edge when fighting nightmares or even mental trauma.

Dreams and video games both represent alternate realities, according to Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. But she pointed out that dreams arise biologically from the human mind, while video games are technologically driven by computers and gaming consoles.

“If you’re spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it’s practice,” said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. “Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.”

Get to it.

[Live Science]

Arguably the most famous haunted house in America. This Long Island Dutch Colonial was ground zero for a horrific haunting in the late 70s when George and Kathy Lutz moved in with their three children.

HAUNTING PHENOMENA

– Ghost ripping doors from hinges
– Ghost slamming doors

– Noxious slime oozing from ceilings

– Demonic faces
– Swarms of insects threatening your family

ADDED BONUS

Lutz family made tens of thousands of dollars in book and film rights. Which in today’s economy, adjusting for inflation, could be tens of hundreds of dollars.

NEIGHBORHOOD

Not too thrilled with the whole ghost tourist industry, so much so that the house number has been changed. Consider your new paranormal experience totally secluded!

ASKING PRICE

$1.15 million OBO

FINAL NOTES

House is not actually haunted. Lutz’ and lawyer admitted to making up the whole story.

[Live Science]

A new breakthrough in dental technology could revolutionize tooth implants for those who happen to take a puck to the mouth in game 4 of the Western Conference final and sprinkle the ice with seven adult teeth.

Dr. Jeremy Mao, the Edward V. Zegarelli Professor of Dental Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, has unveiled a growth factor-infused, three-dimensional scaffold with the potential to regenerate an anatomically correct tooth in just nine weeks from implantation. By using a procedure developed in the university’s Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Laboratory, Dr. Mao can direct the body’s own stem cells toward the scaffold, which is made of natural materials. Once the stem cells have colonized the scaffold, a tooth can grow in the socket and then merge with the surrounding tissue.

It’s the first implant to utilize the body’s own resources in reconstructing a tooth. Paging Mr. Keith.

[Pop Sci]

What’s worse than a brutal killing machine with no remorse? An invisible brutal killing machine with no remorse.

A new study claims that ten percent off all sharks are “luminous,” meaning they produce a light which combined with normal water refraction allows them to appear invisible. Now the inevitable death suffered by loopy drunk hoes in the first five minutes of Jaws can be achieved with heretofore unknowable stealth.

This shark’s shimmer originates from light emitting organs called photophores from underneath its body, “effectively creating a glow from that region,” said Claes, a researcher in the Laboratory of Marine Biology, Earth and Life Institute at the Catholic University of Louvain.

“Since many predators have upward-looking eyes, it is a common method of camouflage in the mesopelagic zone (from 656 to 3,281 feet below the surface), although it is the first time it is demonstrated in sharks,” he added.

Curious to know what folks in regions where these sharks prey thought has happening to hapless halved swimmers who would wash ashore.

“We can’t see any sharks. Maybe the dreaded sea-faring Kevin James has returned!”

[Discovery by way of Gizmodo]

It looks like our Ugly One is really a decaying American Mink.

[Live Science]

In case anyone was worried.

Scientists from the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute, and Boston University suggest that the ribbon of enhanced emissions of energetic neutral atoms, discovered last year by the NASA Small Explorer satellite IBEX, could be explained by a geometric effect coming up because of the approach of the Sun to the boundary between the Local Cloud of interstellar gas and another cloud of a very hot gas called the Local Bubble. If this hypothesis is correct, IBEX is catching matter from a hot neighboring interstellar cloud, which the Sun might enter in a hundred years.

We are unclear on what might happen when the sun passes into the cloud, but if it means this song is relevant again we are willing to deal with the side effects.

[Science Daily]

Welcome to Indonesia, where safety is job one on our construction sites. Make sure you wear your hard hat and goggles at all times and stiffen up that right cross for the occasional lizard attack.

JAKARTA, Indonesia – An Indonesian worker freed himself from an attacking Komodo dragon by punching the reptile’s snout until it released him and ran away, a national park official said Monday.

Agustinus Jenaru, 20, was working inside an unfinished wooden bungalow on Rinca island when the 6.5-foot (two meter) lizard entered and bit onto his left hand on Saturday, said Komodo National Park official Daniel Bolu Ngongo.

Jenaru hit the jaws of the giant lizard for several seconds until it freed him. Jenaru was taken to a clinic for treatment of lacerations and a puncture wound.

…and beyond that, no one is sure if that lizard was even union.

[AP]

A horrific looking animal has been discovered in a Northern Ontario lake. But some locals believe it can only bring bad news…

Some residents of Big Trout Lake, an Oji-Cree community of 1,200 south of Hudson Bay, believe the animal is a rare local creature known as an omajinaakoos, which roughly translates to “ugly one”. Band councillor Darryl Sainnawap said his great uncle spotted one about 50 years ago.

“He says in his younger days he was with his grandfather … and he did see this same creature and that’s the last time he saw it,” he said. “His grandfather called him omajinaakoos.”

Some local elders in the community, which is also known as Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, believe the animal is a messenger of bad news.

“No one knows what it is but our ancestors used to call it the Ugly One. Rarely seen but when seen, it’s a bad omen. Something bad will happen according to our ancestors,” the community’s website says.

Mr. Sainnawap, 25, said the animal lives in swamps and feeds on beavers. Asked how the small critter could eat a beaver, he said: “That’s a good question. How could a wolverine take down a moose?”

Since the photos were posted on the community’s website, they have spread around the Internet, sparking intense speculation about the creature’s origins, ranging from the conceivable to the far-fetched.

Let us know your theories in the comments.

[Globe and Mail]

You know, we tend to lionize our cultural demon hunters: Van Helsing, Simon Belmont, Buffy Summers.

But you want to know when we don’t celebrate those who locate paranormal evil and vanquish it? When the acts of holy vengence look strangely like encouraging a populace to scar and murder their children because they cry too much.

Enter Helen Ukpabio, she is a Nigerian Pentacostal preacher who has made a reputation the world over for identifying children whose souls have been corrupted by Satan. She makes movies like the one you see above and her work is partly to blame for the trend in certain Nigerian villages to identify, beat, torture and sometimes murder children who are thought to be possessed by Satan.

And she’s here in America!

“Do you think Harry Potter is real?” Ms. Ukpabio asked me angrily, in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express where she was staying. “It is only because I am African,” she said, that people who understand that J. K. Rowling writes fiction would take literally Ms. Ukpabio’s filmic depictions of possessed children, gathering by moonlight to devour human flesh.

Still, “Saving Africa’s Witch Children” makes clear that many rural Nigerians do take her film seriously. And in her sermons, Ms. Ukpabio is emphatic that children can be possessed, and that with her God-given “powers of discernment,” she can spot such a child. Belief in possession is especially common among Pentecostals in Nigeria, where it reinforces native traditions that spirits are real and intervene in human affairs.

Such a screwed up story…

[New York Times]

It seemed like the perfect way spend a summer day in Silverton, Colorado.

For a mere $250 registration fee, Silverton-businessman Rick Lewis offered 400 people the chance to win a cool million bucks if they could only get one snapshot of Bigfoot. For your money, you also get to stay at the beautiful Kendall Mountain Resort for the weekend.

The website even boasts sponsorship from companies like Nikon and Kodak as well as government agencies including the U.S. Department of the Interior and Fish & Wildlife Service.

It was also fake.

Silverton town administrator Jason Wells says the Kendall Mountain Resort, which is owned by the town, has never been scheduled to host the $1,000,000 Hunt For Bigfoot. Wells says the resort is booked with a different event that weekend.

“I just want to make sure that we’re not somehow tied into this whole affair,” Wells said. “I don’t want a bunch of people showing up here who have paid $250 for there to be a lack of an event that’s got the town’s name in any way attached to it.”

Wells says Silverton is known for colorful characters, but he said this “dubious” hunt was “bizarre even for here.”

After being confronted by town officials over the false booking claim, Lewis says he was moving the contest to a town in Northern California but refused to say where, according to Wells.

The site is still up for now although registration is closed.

[Cryptomundo]

Sweet Jesus.

[Deadspin]

Launched in 1977 and containing the ultimate Carl Sagan mixtape, The Voyager probes have represented our message in a bottle to alien races and civilizations unknown.

But for the first time, some believe they are talking back.

NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it.

But now the spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer: Signals in an unknown data format.

In late April, the signals sent back from Voyager 2 suddenly arrived in an unknown format. Unable to decipher the data stream and completely baffled by the cause for the shift in how Voyager 2 communicates with its Earth-bound team, NASA scientists have for the time being instructed the probe to send only information on its operational health and status while they get to the bottom of the sudden and strange behavior.

Alien experts are already theorhizing that alien tech has reprogrammed the Voyager and is attempting contact. Then again, what else would alien experts say.

Or as Steve Martin once found out, maybe they just want more Chuck Berry.

[Daily Telegraph]

As it turns out, rolling with the Zoque over 2,700 years ago was pretty touch and go. On the upside, you were an off-shoot of the Olmec and were therefore among the first modern civilizations in recorded history. On the downside, you might end up in a Mexican pyramid with a mouth full of jewels and a face smeared with pigment as you complete your roll as a human sacrifice only be be discovered in 2010 by a Brigham Young University archeologist.

The remains of an elite child and adult were recently excavated, giving researchers a look at how the culture operated.

[National Geographic]

A team led Dr. Craig Venter has successfully created a synthetic organism that dictates action to living cells. This opens the doors to altering cells to produce medicines, fuels and absorb greenhouse gases.

“I think they’re going to potentially create a new industrial revolution,” he said.

“If we can really get cells to do the production that we want, they could help wean us off oil and reverse some of the damage to the environment by capturing carbon dioxide.”

Dr Venter and his colleagues are already collaborating with pharmaceutical and fuel companies to design and develop chromosomes for bacteria that would produce useful fuels and new vaccines.

There’s a predictable backlash to Venter’s efforts claiming that he doesn’t know for sure how the synthetic organisms will react in nature or that he just plain “playing God”. I’d give them more attention in this post if they didn’t read so much like hand-wringing nay sayers.

[BBC]