Not sure about you…but pretty sure that having the ability to create our own bad-ass appendages like He-Man’s Trap-Jaw would take precedence over things like eating…sleeping…everything…well almost everything.

Ivan Owen created a mechanical hand prop and posted it on YouTube. A couple days later he was contacted by Richard Van As, an amputee and craftsman who admired Owen’s work. Once they put their put their brains together, they created a prosthetic finger for Richard. After many more prototypes, the two learned of an awesome kid named Liam who was born missing the fingers of his right hand. The two men decided to help Liam out.

A few more prototypes later and “Robohand” was born. Crafted for Liam, it took only a few days for him to get adjusted to using his prosthetic.

Most bare-bones, low-end prosthetics can easily set someone back $600 and take weeks to go through the fitting, customizing and refitting process.

Using a 3D printer, Owen and Vas As stripped down those weeks into a matter of hours and that $600 for an arm that was nothing more than a stick with a glove on the end was whittled down to a prosthetic with individually moving fingers for the pocket change of $20.

Using a Replicator 2, Ronning created

During the course of a single day and a couple more twenties? Someone’s eventually going to start tossing out ‘what ifs’.
Next day? Someone’s going to be sporting a grappling hook, a flame-thrower, a buzz-saw, a built-in paintball gun, a slingshot or some kind of ridiculously awesome combination we haven’t even imagined yet.

[GizMag]

Sometimes you go out for dinner and wonder whether or not the guys in the kitchen are fixing your meal based on your server’s impression of you and using questionable ingredients like forehead sweat just to teach you a lesson.

At Ne Quittez Pas (which translates to: “Please don’t leave”, a French restaurant located in Tokyo’s Gotanda District, you don’t have to wonder about weird stuff being put in your food behind your back.

Why?

Because Ne Quittez Pas makes it no secret that many of their meals are created using the same thing many of you as a I’ll-stick-anything-in-my-mouth toddler probably taste-tested…

Dirt.

Ne Quittez Pas’ actually has an entire menu featuring dishes made with dirt!

Here’s your list:

Potato Starch and Dirt Soup
Salad with Dirt Dressing
Dirt Ice Cream and a Dirt Gratin
Dirt Mint Tea
There’s also something called “Minerals of the sea and minerals of the land,” an aspic made with oriental clams and the top layer of sediment, and a dirt risotto with sauteed sea bass and burdock root”.

How does gourmet dirt taste? Most of the people partaking of the ground we all walk on have said that it’s a non-issue because the dishes all taste so flippin’ good!

Next time you’re complaining about being hungry? Stop complaining…

Just grab a handful of what’s right under your feet and toss it down.

We’re not responsible for your bad decisions based on our bad suggestions.

Bon Appetit!

[RocketNews24]

BAM!

You’re chillin’ at home in front of the television.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

You hear some kind of resonating thud from outside. You assume it’s thunder or a neighbor and his anvil.

BAM!

You’re about to be REAL wrong!

BAM! BAM! BAM!

You hear this crazy sound coming from your roof so you go to investigate.

What do you find?

Were you a resident of a small neighborhood in Florida (yep…the streak continues), you might’ve uttered a “Aww….Hell no!” at 21 year-old Gregory Matthew Bruni who would’ve been standing on your roof…marching around on it…naked…BAM!..BAM!…BAM!…

That’s what a resident witnessed upon investigating a loud, thundering sound outside…a naked guy bounding around on his roof.

Once Bruni was discovered as the cause of the disturbance and the jig was up, he fly-tackled the owner of the home who’d come outside to investigate the source of the noise.
After leaping from the roof and onto the homeowner, Bruni ran inside the house screaming. In what can only be described as a tantrum, Bruni ran to the large screen television in the living room and pulled it over onto the floor. Bruni then happened upon the family’s vacuum cleaner and, in the weirdest display of a five-year-old not getting the ice cream he’d wanted, Bruni emptied the vacuum cleaner’s contents back onto the floor it had apparently just cleaned. The homeowner’s wife, who was aware things were gettin’ a little crazy, fired three warning shots with a revolver as Bruni finished undoing what the vacuum had done. In a panic Bruni hit the floor…

He didn’t just hit the floor….that would’ve been too easy (and not quite worthy of being ‘Florida-weird’).

He began amorously rubbing himself against the floor.

Once he felt his relationship with the floor had reached its climax, Bruni ran into the handgun-sporting wife’s closet and rubbed her clothing all over his face.

Bruni continued acting like a raging Muppet until the homeowner that’d been fly-tackled was able to get a shotgun and keep Bruni cornered until deputies arrived and constrained him by finally nailing the guy with a taser.

Bruni is being charged with Criminal Mischief, Battery, Occupied Burglary and resisting without violence.

Authorities believe that Bruni had been taking some kind of drug at the time of the incident but aren’t sure what it may have been.

While they all try to find an answer to what Bruni may have been taking….we’ll just quietly gesture back to our posts during the ‘bath-salt-zombie’ craziness that took place early last year and wonder if it’s not quite over just yet.

Or is Bruni just an idiot who’s late to the game…

Poser.

[NBC2.Com]

Sometimes towns and even countries have to stretch to lure potential tourist dollars.
Occasionally the only thing are some strange promises of something unique about a particular area.

We’ve all seen photos of the Giant Ball of (insert something you might make a giant ball out of). You might be surprised just how many will actually drive out to seek these over-the-top and almost accidental attractions.

To celebrate the ‘Year of Natural Scotland 2013’, the ‘Visit Scotland’ website has created something that might possibly cause peoples’ heads to explode in a ball of confetti, sparkles and female anime character giggles.

They’ve taken one adorable thing and one questionable fashion choice of Scottish heritage and combined them into a nexus of weirdly cute by dressing two ponies, Vitamin and Fivla….

…in cardigans.

Most local websites that often state: ‘Come See the Town of _______ where you can sit for hours and see local squirrels bury their nuts or sit by the lake for hours on end while wondering about other towns where something exciting might be happening’ just never seem to help garner enough buzz for you to even consider visiting.

But…two adorable ponies made even more adorable because they’re wearing sweaters?

We think people might notice.

[Design Taxi]

For two decades Eric Warrant has literally had a pretty crappy job. As a student who specializes in optics at the University of Lund in Sweden, he has been passionately studying the last creature on earth that you’d think of when it came to helping Toyota develop a true-color night-vision system…

The dung beetle.

Dung beetles have an uncanny ability to see clearly and navigate in even the darkest environment. Toyota is interested in developing a night-vision navigation system that allows for an optimal, full-color image in those conditions, we all want to avoid a car accident in the dark and Eric Warrant likes spending time with dung beetles. Everybody wins!

Using dung beetles’ abilities as the launching point and inspiration for this idea, Toyota is developing, in the simplest explanation we can give you, an advanced algorithym system that teaches the camera to look at every pixel in a single frame of video, look at the surrounding pixels, any movement in adjacent pixels and basically milk as much image information from the collected data in real-time to create a perfect, true-color image from nothing but a seemingly black image.

The team originally assumed they would have to design a special processor chip to run the algorithm and this would go inside a digital video camera, Malm says. In fact, the processing unit of a conventional PC graphics card was powerful enough to do the job, and they have managed to fine tune the algorithm to analyse images from the camera’s three colour channels – red, green and blue – simultaneously in real time. Three years after starting the project, the team finally have a way of capturing full-colour moving images shot in what to human eyes is almost total darkness.

Exactly how this technology will eventually be used is anyone’s guess.

But when that tech finally saves lives in the dark?

We can all stand up and applaud a crazy dude and his obsession with a crappy little bug.

[New Scientist]

Clarence Bright passed away at 93 years of age and his corpse was being prepped for burial in his final resting place.

Key word in that last sentence? ‘Was’.

Just hours before being buried, the body of Clarence Bright went missing. After receiving tips from family members, authorities began searching for Clarence’s son, Vincent. Almost immediately their search turned up a van containing a casket but still no Clarence.

When authorities finally arrived at Vincent’s home, they also found out where Clarence had seemingly sauntered off to.

Vincent, who, according to his family, had extreme religious views, had taken his good ol’ Dad home, in a cliche’ rookie move put him in the freezer in the basement and was going to bring him back to life.

Authorities shook their heads, arrested him, plucked his dad-sicle from the freezer and slapped a $75,000 bond on him.

Wayne County Jail arraigned Vincent via video.

In an understatement to the media, Vincent Bright’s lawyer, Gerald Karafa said:

“It’s an unusual case. It’s not something you see every day.”

Obviously Gerald the lawyer isn’t a regular reader of WeirdThings.

[Associated Press]

While we all wait for the scenes in Planet of the Apes to play out in real-life, a female chimp named Gina will give us all a glimmer of hope that at least a small percentage of our future primate overlords will need us for a little sumthin’ sumthin’…

Even if that something’s acting out her favorite love scenes from high-quality fare like ‘Slappin’ Bumpies 2′.

For those still catching up…

Gina is a female chimp at the Seville Zoo in Spain. As part of the zoo’s enrichment program, Gina was given her very own remote control for a television mounted to a wall near her cage.

Not long after Gina began figuring out how to work the remote, she also found that she preferred certain channels over others.

Those ‘certain channels’ were the ones that featured the people that kept her in cages riding one another like pack animals (obviously we’re skirting the ‘P’ word because that tosses red flags).

Pablo Herreros, the zoo’s primatologist wrote in his paper on Gina and her viewing preferences:

“The surprise was when they found that within a few days, Gina was not only using the remote control perfectly well, but that she also used to choose the p**n channel for entertainment, as many of us would have done.”

At least we know there’ll be a few sympathizers we can count on when we end up in cages with bad day-time television blaring at us.

Even if they just want us for our bodies.

We went there.

[New York Daily News]

Ever leave the house knowing you forgot…something?

We’re wondering what it was like when the guy who was supposed to file paperwork for 18 human heads for medical study realized that he’d forgotten to file paperwork for 18 human heads for medical study.

One week before Santa Claus was to descend on the world with a bag of awesomeness, 18 well-preserved human heads showed up at O’ Hare International Airport with no explanation….just a bunch of questions. It wasn’t until an employee from a crematorium came to pick up the heads that things became clear.

Tagged as ‘medical specimens’, the heads had originally shipped from the US to Rome for medical study and were coming back to the states to be cremated.

Brian Bell of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security stated:
“There’s no issue with the transportation of body parts for medical purposes. There’s nothing against the law that says you cannot ship them, provided you have the right documentation. Everybody here is ‘Oh my gosh, you got a box of heads’ and everybody thinks that it’s unheard of. It is a potentially legitimate medical shipment. We’ve seen it at various ports in the nation.”

You can leave all your ‘I’d-forget-my-head-if-it-wasn’t-attached jokes below.’

[Chicago Sun Times]

In our article about the other new toddler robot called Roboy we mentioned Diego-san. Here’s your first look into the robotic wagon-train that’s leaving Uncanny Valley slowly but surely.

When John Connor shows up and SkyNet goes live it won’t be the T1000s we’re worried about.

Why?

We’ll be too terrified by something that’s already been here.

Robot babies.

And you can tear that cute baby robot picture off the wall of your imagination…because robot babies are about as far as you can get from being ‘cute’.

Because we’re not satisfied with making skeletal robots that look like mechanical grim reapers, the University of San Diego has created a ridiculously amazing and disturbingly realistic over-sized one-year-old in order to study the cognitive development of infants.

“Its main goal is to try and understand the development of sensory motor intelligence from a computational point of view. It brings together researchers in developmental psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, computer vision and robotics. Basically we are trying to understand the computational problems that a baby’s brain faces when learning to move its own body and use it to interact with the physical and social worlds.”

As we continue grinning and patting ourselves on the back about our advances in robot technology and march ourselves into our own demise, you can rest assured that the armies of creepy robot babies are just going to keep on smiling that same frightening smile that’ll remind us of ourselves when we were so excited about our accomplishments in robotics.

Until then just keep hitting the replay button and shuddering at Diego-san’s facial expressions.

[Gizmag.com]

Across the globe from the uncanny valley that is Diego-san’s facial expressions, the University of Zurich’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory making another weird foray into the creation of a robot toddler.

Roboy is being developing with the help of crowd-funding,, sponsorships and almost 40 engineers and scientists.

Just like its weaker, fleshy, real-life inspiration, Roboy’s design gestation is going to take about 9 months to full completion.

Roboy is being developed to ease people into actually living with robots and not being creeped out by them. Roboy’s face was chosen during a Facebook contest. Its body is made entirely of plastic and will be covered with a fleshy, rubber-like material to simulate skin. Unlike typical robot movement mechanisms, Roboy will feature elastic cables pulled by motors in order to provide movement more human-like and less bad robot-dance-like.

Part of Roboy’s mission is to help build a bridge across the uncanny valley and get people more comfortable with having robots around and being a part of their lives.

Service robots are going to be a part of our lives in the very near future. As the population ages, new generations will already be more comfortable with having robots around and using them to do menial tasks for us.

Roboy will heading out into the world as part of the ‘Robots on Tour’ event that begins March and will exhibit all sorts of our future replacements.

Then there’s that incessant and nagging subconscious feeling that we might piss them off and see an army more terrifying than anything Hollywood could put in front of our peepers….

[Roboy]

Giant squids are legendary.

They’ve taken on Moby Dick, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus and even a bunch of Goonies.

While giant squids have been captured in the past and alleged parts of them have surfaced here and there…seeing one in the wild has been something of a Holy Grail moment that misty-eyed scientists and cryptozoologists have dreamt about forever.

Everyone can prepare to drop your jaws because there is now video of one of these mysterious monsters going about its business deep in the Pacific Ocean.

A team of three Japanese scientists spent over 400 hours crammed in a 31 foot submersible over the course of 100 missions about 150 miles north of Iwo Jima.

At a depth of 2,066 feet, the lights from the submersible reflected onto the creature’s silver skin as it eyeballed the sub curiously before it swam off.

The Discovery Channel’s new branch, Curiosity, is keeping the footage secret until the season finale later this month when they’ll unveil it to the world for the first time…

Up until then? A lot of “Release the Kraken!” headlines.

[Discovery.com]

We’ve all heard the expression ‘something old is new again’. Well that, and the fact that Florida was apparently created on top of an ancient Hell Mouth of some sort, brings this creepy discovery coming out of Miami.
Residents of a fancy-shmancy resort on the waters of Biscayne Bay in South Beach had been smelling something ‘unique’ in their building.

It wasn’t the uniquely fancy-shmancy food.

Three chickens and one goat washed up together on the sidewalk behind the resort. They were all missing one important thing…their heads.

After phone calls were made to the police regarding the animals, a spokesman for the department said that they weren’t going to get involved because “the dead animals didn’t appear to be sacrificed as a threat directed against any particular individual.” So instead? They just let them rot there for a couple of days.

Eventually Richard Couto, an investigator of the Animal Recovery Mission, stated that the animals seem to have been killed as part of a Santeria or Palo Mayombe ritual. Everyone involved, with the exception of those living in the nearby luxury condos, simply shrugged the event off as something that happens all the time because of the mixture of Afro-Caribbean cultures in the area. Animal sacrifice for religious purposes is also not against the law and is protected under first amendment rights.

Where the animals actually came from is still a mystery. Other reports of animal sacrifices in the area have been quietly popping up in the local news but those too are being ignored as just something that happens in the area.

Is there something else going on in South Florida?

We’ll be watching…but we’ll be locking up our pets…you know…just in case.

[Miami Herald]

Christmas has come and gone. Statuses everywhere are lit up with the swag given by friends and family.

Someone’s aunt got them this. Someone’s brother got them that.

Big flippin’ deal.

Why?

Because a group of scientists have been given gifts from freakin’ dolphins since 1998!

Dolphins!

Dolphins that offer gifts to humans!

Though the dolphins at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia haven’t been dropping PS3s or brand new iPhones they have been presenting gifts of food to human recipients. Scientists that have been studying these particular dolphins on a regular basis and in frequent contact with them have received everything from eels to tuna to squid.

Animals sharing food is a rare occurrence and typically takes place when an animal can’t fend for itself so others of its own kind help out. Most of the time it’s more ”you rub my back and I’ll rub yours” kind of a thing where the animal doing the giving expects something it can’t get for itself in return.

When they start offering up empty coffee cups they’ve found floating in the surf for Starbuck’s gift cards, though? THAT’S about the time we should all start questioning our place in things.

[Discovery.com]

Spiders are a little creepy to most people, right?

Well that other percent that didn’t think they were creepy? You can come join the rest of us now.

You’re walking through the woods and notice an interesting looking spider in the middle of its web from a distance. You decide to go in for a closer look. You make that ‘quizzical dog face’ because it’s a pretty weird-looking spider.

As you get closer, something seems a little ‘off’ about the ‘interesting’ spider…which begins to throb and shake in the most un-spider-like movement you’ve ever seen.

That’s about the time when your fear meter begins to spike as you realize the ‘spider’ you’ve been staring at is actually comprised of dead insects, debris and leaves and is being puppeteered by the real spider hiding just out of sight.

The ‘decoy spider’ is being looked at to see whether or not it’s a new species of spider or, in a step leading to total nightmare material, if it’s an already known spider that’s taught itself this behavior.

While scientists continue to determine what’s going on with this horrifying development in the spider kingdom, we’ll just keep hoping that human flesh is completely unpleasant to their terrifying little tastebuds.

[PeruNature.Com]

Harry Potter had one. Frodo Baggins had one. Even Max from Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place had one.

In fact, just about every single geek on the planet at some point in their life has probably hypothesized about how cool it would be to have some kind of a cape or blanket that you could cover yourself in and become instantly invisible.

Right?

Well that might soon become a reality.

While we’re still going to have to keep to our hypothetical invisible scenarios in our grinning heads, it won’t be long until soldiers, special ops agents and even….uh…submarines…begin using something called ‘Quantum Stealth’ to get all Predator-like.

Guy Cramer, the president and CEO of Hyperstealth Biotechnology in Canada, is vaguely but loudly declaring that he’s developed an invisibility cloak-like material!

After checking his site and looking at the ‘mock-up’ photos on display, we’re secretly hoping this is a serious technology that’s about to put old-school camouflage in the closet. Poking around online to see if there was ANY hint at what Cramer is developing turned up nothing that actually shows off the technology. He’s claiming that if a soldier were wearing his top secret material you wouldn’t know he was there until you tripped over him.

Pretty bold claims considering we’ve seen this kind of promise before.

But if we know our audience? We’re guessing you’re all crossing your fingers, doing some kind of little victory dance and hoping it’s true too.

[HyperStealth.com]

People in Blackfoot, Idaho are reporting something weird in their skies.

Local Tara Pagan, who stated that her whole family is comprised of skeptics, witnessed a strange group of orange balls of light in the sky that kept changing formation.

Pagan snapped the typical blurry ufo photo while her cousin called the first people we’d call if something like this were to happen…the fire department. Expectedly they claimed to have nothing to do with what they were witnessing.

Going online, Pagan found a phone number for Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center.

Davenport told Pagan he’d already received two other calls about the same anomaly.

By the end of the night six calls about the same object had been reported.

“They were not aircrafts, to the best of our knowledge,” Davenport said. “They were not hot air balloons … They were not crash dummies, swamp gas, weather balloons or any other item of pedestrian or terrestrial origin that I can imagine.”

The mystery of why you’d call the fire department to report a UFO continues to baffle only us apparently.

[LocalNews8.com]