This is actually a really horrible story. A vervet monkey was killed and burned in South Africa by a mob who was convinced it was a witch. Bonus awful points – the police helped out by shooting at the monkey.

It reported that the monkey wandered into the settlement last week Monday, May 23, and was pelted with stones, shot at by police, and then burnt to death.

Moswetsi was woken up by friends on Monday morning and told about the monkey. They said it was going around Kagiso “talking to people”.

Hopefully this is not foreshadowing for the monkeys if they ever actually do develop the ability to speak.

[Times Live]

Reindeer have developed the ability to see the world in ultraviolet light since migrating to the Arctic 10,000 years-ago. Most mammals, aside from rodents and some species of bats, can only see the visible spectrum and the shorter wavelength ultraviolet light remains invisible. Also, aside from being unable to see ultraviolet light, it is also damaging to most eyes, causing snow blindness.

In dark conditions, they shone LED lights of different wavelengths, including UV, into the eyes of 18 anaesthetised reindeers while recording with an electrode whether nerves in the eye fired, indicating that the light had been seen. The UV light triggered a response in the eyes of all the reindeer.

The eyes of most mammals cannot cope with UV light because it carries enough energy to destroy their sensitive photoreceptors, permanently damaging vision. To prevent this happening we experience “snow blindness”: our corneas respond to UV light by becoming temporarily cloudy, preventing excess amounts of UV reaching and burning the retina.

“Why don’t reindeer, arctic fox, polar bears or arctic seals get snow blindness?” asks Jeffery. “Arctic mammals must have a completely different mechanism for protecting their retinas.”

[NewScientist]

A team of archaeologists from the University of Alabama in Birmingham used infra-red satellite cameras to locate evidence of 17 lost pyramids and thousands of ancient structures not visible to the naked eye. In addition to the pyramids, they also identified 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements.

Archaeologists on the ground have excavated several sites and confirmed there is something on them.

Ancient Egyptians used dense mud bricks to build their homes and temples, and the cameras were able to differentiate between that and the regular soil surrounding them.

[NY Daily News]

After somebody spotted what they thought was an escaped tiger through a camera zoom lens near a country club, police in Hampshire scrambled a helicopter equipped with thermal imaging and a tranquilizer take down team from the local zoo. It was only after the downdraft of the helicopter blew the tiger over that everybody realized that it was just a toy. Whoops. Police are treating the incident as lost property and looking for the owner.

Golfers at County Golf Club were also escorted from the course and Saturday’s cricket game between Hampshire Academy and South Wilts was suspended for about half an hour.

Tony Middleton, Hampshire Cricket Academy director, added: “Rumours came round that there was a tiger on the golf course and we just carried on playing until a policeman came over and told us to clear the area.

“I assumed there was [a tiger] with everything that was going on, but we felt quite safe here.”

[BBC via Gizmodo]

Ivan, 6, is purported to posess an extraordinary and seemingly magical talent: the ability to attract metallic objects — from spoons to heavy frying pans — to his body. He is said to be able to carry up to 25 kg of metal stuck to his torso. Ivan’s family also claims that his hands can emit heat and his mysterious ability has also given him healing powers. “Medical checkups so far have reaped inconclusive results,” reports Reuters. More images follow, in which Ivan “attracts” cutlery, cookware, an iron, and other metallic objects.

[boingboing]

[Space]

A mysterious ripple on Lake Washington has locals scratching their heads. I love how the reporter throws NOAA under the bus at the end.

[King5 via The Mysterialist]

Check out these awesome 3D images of a 49 million-year-old huntsman spider that was trapped and preserved in amber.

[The Epoch Times]

The CDC has published a plan in case of a zombie outbreak. I am disappointed that their emergency kit does NOT include any weapons at all. That does not sound like a valid plan to me and I will definitely be upgrading the proposed kit with some additional items.

“If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a zombie infestation. This assistance might include consultation, lab testing and analysis, patient management and care, tracking of contacts, and infection control (including isolation and quarantine). It’s likely that an investigation of this scenario would seek to accomplish several goals: determine the cause of the illness, the source of the infection/virus/toxin, learn how it is transmitted and how readily it is spread, how to break the cycle of transmission and thus prevent further cases, and how patients can best be treated.”

[CDC via Geekologie]

A snapshot of what is being called the “Morganza Snake” has been making it’s rounds on Facebook causing an uproar as people argue whether it is “real” or “fake.” We have heard from all the city and government officials that with the opening of the Morganza Spillway, that we may see animals (snakes, gators, bears, deer, hogs) in places that we don’t normally see them as they seek higher ground from the water pouring into areas designated to relieve the swelling Mississippi.

[WAFB via Cryptomundo]

In a release, the Petoskey Department of Public Safety said officers pulled the man back onto the roof and found a baton type striking weapon, a can of chemical irritant spray, and a pair of lead lined gloves.

The suspect, a Harbor Springs resident, was arrested for trespassing and possession of dangerous weapons.

I like to think he wears lead-lined gloves in case his buddy Superman needs help with any Kryptonite.

[Click On Detroit via Phantoms and Monsters]

“It’s just really, really weird,” said Jerry Vinski, director of nearby Raritan Valley Community College’s planetarium, who conducted tests on the site. “We dug around and couldn’t find anything. We used metal detectors because all meteors have metal in them, and we couldn’t find anything, large or small.”

[Daily Record]

Last week a lightning storm started a chain reaction destroying transformers and leaving 4000 people without power. At least that is the official story; check out the video for three minutes of chain reaction goodness.

[dallasnews]

[Star-Telegram]

The carcass of a strange bird said to inhabit a local cave has been found in Iran. What do you think this it could be?

The dead body of a strange dinosaur-like bird has been reportedly found near the city of Meshginshahr in the northwestern Iranian province of Ardebil.The locals found the feathered bipedal creature, which seemed to have died a few days ago, near a remote village of Meshginshahr, IRNA reported on Sunday. A team of officials of Iran’s Environment Protection Organization (EPO) were dispatched to the region to investigate whether the reports were true. One of the villagers has reportedly hidden the carcass and the EPO team is trying to find it. The team has managed to obtain a photo of the creature taken by one of the locals. The team has also found evidence that confirmed the locals’ claims the bird lived in a cave near the village. The creature has a reptilian skull with long canine teeth and large molars. It has small wing bones like those of flightless birds. The avifauna of Iran includes a total of 527 species, none of which are similar to the found creature; however, the discovery needs ornithologists to verify the claims. Scientists believe that fossil evidence demonstrates birds and dinosaurs shared many features such as hollow bones, gastrolith in the digestive system, nest-building and brooding behaviors. The discovery of fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex soft tissue also suggests that the 68-million-year-old dinosaur and birds are closely related to each other.

[IRNA vis Cryptomundo]

I am not even really sure where to start with this one. Apparently, the Holmavik Museum of Scocery and Witchcraft in Iceland contains a gruesome exhibit called the necropants. Let us just cut to the chase – these are pants made from the skin of the lower half of a dead person. When worn, these pants would produce money as long as a coin stolen from a poor widow (!) was placed in the scrotum.

It was believed that the necropants would spontaneously produce money when worn, as long as the donor corpse had been stolen from a graveyard at the dead of night and a magic rune and a coin stolen from a poor widow were placed in the dead man’s scrotum.

Another source claims that you must first gain permission from the man before he dies. Once that is done, just follow these steps:

After he has been buried you must dig up his body and flay the skin of the corpse in one piece from the waist down. As soon as you step into the pants they will stick to your own skin. A coin must be stolen from a poor widow and placed in the scrotum along with the magical sign, nábrókarstafur, written on a piece of paper. Consequently the coin will draw money into the scrotum so it will never be empty, as long as the original coin is not removed. To ensure salvation the owner has to convince someone else to overtake the pants and step into each leg as soon as he gets out of it. The necropants will thus keep the money-gathering nature for generations.

The museum website is mostly in Icelandic and Google translate is really sketchy, but you can also learn all about the Icelandic witch trials of the 17th century. Side note: the witches from Iceland had farting runes (Fretrúnir) that they used against their enemies.

[Tywkiwdbi and Mental Floss]

Students in the Introduction To Biotechnology (IT220) class at Purdue were instructed for one of their projects to collect soil samples as part of the National Genomics Research Initiative. Most of the students were content to collect samples from around the Purdue campus, but Emilia Czyszczon traveled 3 hours to a remote Indiana cave and then took a boat on an underground river to a spot deep within the cave. The soil sample that Emilia ended up taking turned out to be glacial mud untouched since the ice age and contained a bacteriophage virus that was unknown to science. Scientists think that this virus might be beneficial to humans and could be used to fight diseases like tuberculosis.

Further analysis proved to be even more remarkable. Lurking in the dank sample of cave mud she collected was a virus previously unknown to science — a bacteriophage that attacks bacteria from the same family as those that cause tuberculosis.

In other words, despite the usual connotation associated with the discovery of a virus, this virus is not harmful to humans. Rather, just the opposite: it is a virus that attacks bacterial strains that could be harmful to humans. The discovery has prompted the adventurous young Czyszczon to look ahead in her career; she has already received grant money to probe into the DNA of the virus to help find alternative cures for debilitating diseases like tuberculosis.

[Chicago Tribune via MNN]