The Mine Kafon (teaser) from Callum Cooper on Vimeo.

Looking like a cross between a Transformer sea anemone robot and a giant 1960s-styled light fixture in some swank space-lounge of that era, this strange-looking object is set to save a lot of lives on the battlefield.

What you’re looking at is the Mine Kafon. Created by Massoud Hassani, the Kafon is made to do something that, if we didn’t tease it in the headline for this article, you wouldn’t expect…it’s a landmine clearer.

Powered by the wind, the Kafon can take quite a bit of punishment before being retired. In the center of the porcupine-like ball is a small core ball containing a GPS sensor to track the Kafon’s whereabouts.

Designed to clear up to up to 4 landmines, Hassani is looking to begin mass-producing the Kafon once a contract is approved. Before that begins, Hassani is about to open a KickStarter to help move production of the Kafon forward. Currently it costs about $1200 (USD) to get rid of a single landmine. The cost of the Mine Kafon? Just shy of $90!

The cost of saving civilians and soldiers’ lives? Priceless.

[MassoudHassani.Com]

Here in the states, Bath-Salt Zombie activity has gone into a lull as everyone following the gruesome trend keeps a wary eye out for the next crazy-looking person who reeks of ‘Blossoming Garden Jasmine’ and keeps eyeballing your body like a slab of ribs.

Meanwhile, over in China, a strange attack has caused hopeful zombie apocalypse fans to perk up with curious dog head-tilt.

During a subway ride, a 67 year-old retiree asked a young man refused to give up the seat to his elder? The 28 year-old whipper-snapper suddenly found himself tackled by the older man. Not only was he being attacked, he was being chewed on! The elder man was literally taking chunks of flesh out of the younger man’s arm and the blood was flowing.

In behavior that resembled a bunch of cornered mice, witnesses scattered to corners of the subway car then someone hit the record button on their phone and caught the whole attack on video for the world to see. YouTube has taken down the video based on their policies but you can still find it online. We’re warning you. It’s not for the squeamish when you do find it.

According to the news covering the story, both men were apprehended, taken to the police station and let go.

Yup. Let go.

Not only that but they both apologized for their behavior and agreed to pay their own medical bills.

Neither of them will be charged with anything.

Anyone else seeing into the near-future now that this precedent’s been set? Us too.

[SINA]

Russia has become a hotbed of Yeti activity over the last couple of weeks. And what’s more awesome than seeing a Yeti?

Seeing a group of Yeti.

In those last couple of weeks the sightings of Bigfoot’s Siberian cousin, two have included multiple Yeti hanging out together.

Sighting #1:

“We shouted, ‘Do you need help?’ They rushed away, all in fur, walking on two legs, making their way through the bushes and with two other limbs, straight up the hill. The person who made the report added: “It could not be bears, as the bear walks on all fours, and they ran on two. Then they were gone.”

Sighting #2:

“We saw some tall animals looking like people. Our binoculars were broken and did not let us see them sharply. We waved at the animals but they did not respond, then quickly ran back into the forest, walking on two legs. We realized that they were not in dark clothes but covered by dark fur. They did walk like people.”

Sighting #3:

A forestry inspector reported seeing a yeti in a national park, a government official said. Sergei Adlyakov, the inspector who reported the incident said: “The creature did not look like a bear and quickly disappeared after breaking some branches off the bushes.”

Are Yeti growing in number? Have they just gotten numb to the whole ‘being spotted’ thing? Only one man may know the answer because he’s Russia’s Yeti expert. Igor Burtsev is the head of the International Center of Hominology and is very excited to learn more about the recent blossoming of Yeti activity. Burtsev also claims that there is an active population of about 30 of the creatures living in the Kemerovo region of Russia.

He said: “We have good evidence of the yeti living in our region, and we have heard convincing details from experts elsewhere in Russia and in the U.S. and Canada.

[Fox News]

Hell’s Canyon is a name where you actually expect weird stuff to happen on a regular basis. Knowing that Hell’s Canyon is in Idaho only makes it worse.

For 36 year-old American beauty queen Jamie Hilton it got worse.

During a fishing trip to Hell’s Canyon with her husband, Jamie stumbled and slammed her head causing severe swelling and other complications.

In an attempt to save her life, doctors removed a quarter of her skull to prevent the swelling from causing any more damage.

When the mother of three, a former Mrs Idaho, woke from the operation she found a lump in her stomach and a large portion of her head missing. Mrs Hilton posted a photo of the skull in her abdomen on her blog entitled ‘Miracles… believe in them’ as well as a photo showing a scar running the length of her head.

That’s where her little skull-friend stayed too…for 42 days!

When Jamie had recovered from the first portion of the surgery, it was time to remove the incubating skull-piece from her belly and return it to her dome. You’d think science and medicine would’ve come up with some kind of awesome adhesive at this point like ‘Gorilla Bone & Organ Glue” but nah…

Using industrial strength staples, doctors stapled the skull piece back into place, sewed her pretty little noggin’s fleshy covering back up and called it a day.

Jamie is currently in recovery, doing well and happy as can be.

Guess who’s going to be the ‘astronaut at the table’ when it comes to her interview at the next beauty pageant? Yup…the chick who carried her own skull in her belly like a baby.

Winning!

[Metro.Co.UK]

[ UPDATE: Giant Eye Mystery Solved! ]

Florida always seems like it’s sitting on some kind of undiscovered Hell-Mouth.

Between Bath-Salt Zombies, giant snakes slithering through your lawn, Night Creepers and lizards eating humans there’s just something…not…quite..right.

Which brings us to Pompano Beach..in Florida.

Some guy’s going for his morning stroll and spots something odd drifting around in the surf. Just like in any other horror film, the dude goes to investigate…and kicks it over…revealing at a huge eyeball staring right back at him.

“It was very fresh,” he said Thursday. “It was still bleeding when I put it in the plastic bag.”

Police referred him to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who, frighteningly couldn’t identify what species the eye came from.

The Fish and Wildlife officers place the eyeball on ice and sent it to the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute for analysis.

In the end who really cares about where the eyeball came from…the Fish and Game Commission people should be looking for the thing that ripped apart the thing with the giant eyeball.

[Sun Sentinel]

It was totally bound to happen.

People have been enjoying the sweet nectar of pork we all afftectionately refer to as bacon on a overly indulgent basis for a long, long time.

Forget the dead rising up to walk amongst us and gnaw on our fleshy parts.

This story might be the first sign that something much more sinister is taking place on farms around the country…

A pig uprising.

On a small farm in Oregon, police have reportedly found the false teeth and a few remains of farmer 69 year-old Terry Vance Garner in the pen where he keeps his pigs.

According to Garner’s old brother, Michael, one of the pigs had apparently bitten Terry last year when he accidentally stepped on a piglet. While no one’s sure what exactly took place the horrific and creepy fact is that a bunch of pigs ate a farmer and had no problem with the taste of man-meat.

District Attorney Paul Frasier told local papers and news media:

“For all we know, it was a horrific accident, but it’s so doggone weird that we have to look at all possibilities.”

[BBC UK]

We’ve seen tissues and body parts grown in petri dishes before. Nothing new, right? Now we’ve seen a human being’s own body used as a petri dish to grow a body part for her own body!

Sherrie Walters, a woman from Baltimore, has become that human being/test subject for an extremely radical and extremely weird procedure. Plastic surgeon and reconstructive surgeon Patrick Byrne has been looking for someone like Sherri Walters for quite a while to basically test a theory he had.

The discovery of a rapidly-spreading basal cell cancer in her ear in 2008 required the removal of part of her ear, part of her skull and her left ear canal. But now, in a groundbreaking and complicated set of surgeries, Johns Hopkins doctors have attached a new ear made from Walters’ own tissue.

Byrne used cartilage from Walters’ ribs to stitch together a new ear matching her right ear. He then implanted it under the skin of her forearm, where it grew for months.

Byrne later surgically attached the ear and its blood vessels. Then surgery Tuesday added shape and detail to the ear.

Walters still has two minor surgeries to go before the whole bizarre procedure is over with and she gets that ‘new’ ear.

And she’s got some sage advice before you ever end up in this situation:

“And it’s a cliche but use the sunscreen and if you are not sure about something, get it checked because that’s what I didn’t do.”

Different parts grown in different places? Hmm.

Every single guy right now is probably thinking about a particular woman in Total Recall.

Knock it off.

[CBS Baltimore (via @ManusFerrea}]

What you’re looking at isn’t the newest trend in ‘crop-circling’. The thing that created this spectacular-looking sand sculpture isn’t an alien trying to communicate with humankind, either.

The master craftsman behind this amazing looking design is something far less scary and almost kind of adorable.

Yoji Ookota, an office worker who left his cubicle life to pursue his love of underwater photography, recently discovered something that no one had seen until his camera caught sight of it.

A six-foot-wide, elaborate geometric shape 80 feet under the surface of the water on the sea floor. Then he began to spot more of them. Ookota dubbed them the ‘mystery circles’.

As Ookota began to study the circles to find out how they were created, he found the culprit.

An adorable little male puffer fish.

In an amazing display of engineering and the need to be loved, the male puffer fish uses its fins and works day and night to create these things in order to attract females to mate with them. Once the puffer fish creates the ridges, males have even been seen filling their mouths with shells and blowing them onto the ridges they created like they were doing some primitive, animal form of bedazzling.

Females, attracted by the final design, join the male in the center of the design and mate. Later on the female returns to the center of the ‘mystery circle’ and lays her eggs.

These ‘mystery circles’ aren’t just for decoration either. Those shells used to ‘bedazzle’ the ridges appear to serve as nutrients to the young fish when they hatch. According to the most recent research, the design isn’t just for decoration and attracting a mate. The design also features a small bit of engineering. Scientists are discovering that the ridges also serve to protect the eggs from predators and currents that could scatter the eggs across the ocean floor.

This fish has more motivation and interior design abilities than most guys we know.

Weirdly amazing.

[Spoon & Tamago]

Because some people just can’t get the job done while locked in a room by themselves with some fun magazines or just some mental photography, some genius in China has developed something to help those people out…

The lonely Chinese scientist who created this was probably suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and couldn’t even hold a tablet that was playing his favorite movies any longer without discomfort.

(Insert your sad-face pervy scientist emoticon here)

Now this once-sad scienstist has solved ALL of his problems! This thing even has adjustable controls and a built-in dvd player so you can watch your favorite ‘films’.

Like the krill in Finding Nemo, there’s nowhere for your little swimming future-yous to go but in the perpetually slurping maw of a robot that looks like the original Pong arcade game’s second-cousin from the hills.

Clicking play on that video above will either bring laughter, what some like to call ‘cringy-I-smelled-poop’ face or a look of awe and wonder and possibilities to your precious little faces.

The director of the urology department at Zhengzhou Central Hospital said the machine was being used by infertility patients who are finding it difficult to retrieve sperm the old fashioned way.
A website which is selling the machine for $2,800 promoting it stating ‘it can give patients very comfortable feeling.’

Is this the end of prostitution? As newer versions of this machine hit the market, will the older ones find their way into dark alleys and those fun-smelling booths in the back of porn shops or will they start showing up in brothels to replace human workers as the recession keeps taking a chunk from EVERYONE’S budget?

Only time and enough oddly satisfied customers will tell.

[DailyMail UK]

Right up there with Geena Davis’ nightmare of giving birth to Jeff Goldblum’s little baby ‘Brundlefly’ comes a story about a woman giving birth…

To a horse.

During a program about prophecy, a female member of the Worshippers of the World Liberation Ministry began screaming during a prayer session and began bleeding from her girl-parts.

Evangelist Silva Wealth, referred to as the General Overseer of the church told journalists that a revelation came that a woman among them had an issue and that something was blocking her womb.

Wealth claimed that as prayers from church-goers became more instense, the unidentified woman started delivering ‘the object’.

A cleric of the church wouldn’t go near the thing:

“I can’t describe the object. We have seen people that vomited several things during our service but not this type of thing. God has been blessing our ministry with prophesies and miracles, “he said.

That ‘object’ was a still-born horse.

As people begin to flock in droves to the church where this event took place, we can only imagine what kind of disturbing swag the inevitable gift shop is going to be pushing.

[The Nation]

Remember when eating bath-salts, slipping into a rabid zombie-like state, getting naked and chewing the faces off innocent pedestrians was kinda trendy and cool?

Apparently 20 year-old Richard Cimino Jr of Doylestown, Pennsylvania hasn’t been paying attention to the bath-salt fount of information that this blog is about such things.

State police responded to a call the other night from two women who reported an assault…an assault by?

We can hear all of you in a weird unison of unspoken nodding…’bath-salt zombie’.

According to early reports, Cimino pulled his car up behind a home early in the morning, stripped to his underwear and tried to break into the home. The resident at that home startled Cimino who fled to another home not far away and proceeded to break in to the second home. No one was home.

Cimino proceeded up to the second floor of the home and, like the erratic behavior exhibited by most of the ‘Bath-Salt Zombies’ we’ve seen so far, parkoured himself from the second-story window severely injuring his arms and legs when he slammed into the ground.

True to ‘Bath-Salt Zombie’ lore (which stretches back in time to the end of January of this year) Cimino got up and walked away while bleeding profusely.

Cimino then approached two women, who once again helped this whole incident slide into the typical ‘Bath-Salt Zombie’ profile when he jumped one of them and, “screaming like a wild animal”, began gnawing on the skull of one of the poor women.

Both women managed to escape Cimino, who police later found covered in blood acting delusional and confrontational.

After lunging at a state trooper and punching a medical technician, Cimino was tasered and taken to Geisinger Community Medical Center in Scranton.

Cimino is charged with two counts each of aggravated assault, criminal mischief, indecent exposure, three counts of burglary and several other charges.

At this time tests regarding what Cimino may have been hopped up on are still pending.

Anyone want to take a stab at what he may have been on? Anyone?

[Times-Tribune]

Yosemite. The word conjures up postcards and beautiful nature photography.

Not anymore.

It’s beginning to conjure up bad horror movie dealing with parasites and viruses.

That’s right, kids…

Yosemite’s hiding something creepy.

Health officials have made an announcement to 22,000 nature lovers that they may have been exposed to something called the Hantavirus.

A park-goer infected with the Hantavirus in July died just last week.

While investigators believed that only a small area in the Curry Village section of Yosemite had been affected, an eighth person infected with the virus spurred health officials into warning visitors of the problem.

Since 1993 only 602 cases of the deadly Hantavirus have been reported. But out of those 602 cases? 216 of those infected have died.

The CDC lists the symptoms of the virus which appears similar to the flu…

Fatigue, fever and muscle aches, especially in the large muscle groups — thighs, hips, back and sometimes shoulders … There may also be headaches, dizziness, chills and abdominal problems, such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain.

Within a week your lungs begin to fill with liquid and it’s practically guaranteed that it’s game over, man.

The transmission of the disease is rare and is typically transmitted by being in contact with infected mice feces or urine.

We’re suggesting that when you’re in the area, you hit a battered gas station, snag a postcard from one of those squeaky, spinning racks and just keep driving past all the fun that those nature-loving hikers are probably experiencing (yes…that’s sarcasm).

[NYTIMES]

We’re pretty sure that some of you have been in a house or a building with sagging floorboards before and just never really gave much thought to what was causing the sagging. Probably just figured,”Meh…old house. Sags.” End of story.

Mr. Steer of Plymouth, England had been wondering the same thing about one such sag in his living room for quite a while. Once he retired, he decided to get down to business and fix the problem.

He decided to repair the joists in the floor that might’ve been causing the sag when he noticed something else.

“I was replacing the joists in the floor when I noticed a slight depression – it appeared to be filled in with the foundations of the house,” he said.
“I dug down about one foot but my wife just wanted to me to cover it back up because we had three children running around at the time.
“I always wanted to dig it out to see if I could find a pot of gold at the bottom, so when I retired at the end of last year that’s what I started to do.”

What Steer found was a well dating back to the 16th century. With the help of a friend, Steer began excavating the well. During the excavation, Steer and his friend uncovered what appears to be a peasant’s sword.

After installing lights in the well and making it the new focal point of his living room, Steer’s research has taught him that the well was built in the 16th century by Sir Francis Drake to carry water from Dartmoor to Plymouth. The well had been covered over sometime around 1895.

Just hope they don’t find that video tape and that creepy little Samara Morgan doesn’t come crawling out in the middle of the night dripping well-water all over the floor.

[ Telegraph.Co.UK]

The bikini debuted in 1946. It’s gone through a lot of variations. There’s been a monokini, microkini, tankini, trikini, pubikini (yes…it’s a real thing) and the mankini. But only occasionally has the phrase ‘nightmare fuel’ ever been associated with the bikini…until now.

Because Chinese culture prefers white, porcelein-like skin to the tan-loving people of the west, women on beaches in China are now sporting what’s been dubbed the ‘facekini’.

It’s basically a fancy name for ski mask worn by anyone up to no good who’d rather have their face NOT show up on YouTube or the local news while getting their hooligan on or doing some burglaring.

Seeing people sporting these on the beach is a lot like David Lynch is shooting an episode of American Horror Story…with the exception that this is real.

Nothing quite like checking out a woman from behind on the beach only to have her turn around sporting one of these things on her face.

Cue the ‘stabby shower music’ from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho!

[Reuters]

“How’d your uncle die?”

“He was dressed like a sad, ghetto version of bigfoot, walked into traffic and got nailed by two oncoming cars.”

True story.

44-year-old Randy Lee Tenley of Montana was struck dead when he was hit by two oncoming vehicles as he attempted to cross several lanes of traffic dressed like more like a topiary at a bankrupt garden attraction than Bigfoot in hopes he’d stir up some sightings of the infamously mysterious legend.

Police are continuing their investigation to see if alcohol played a role in the incident.

We’re going to go with, “Yes. There was a LOT of alcohol that a role in the incident.”

What kind of epitaph would you write for that?
[ABCNews.com]

Who knew? Corn’s a valuable commodity among beef producers. Problem is that because of drought there’s just not enough of it to feed all those cows which has caused the price to skyrocket. Beef producers are now looking to alternatives to corn until the prices drop back down to something resembling reasonable. The alternative to corn?

Candy.

Massive amounts of discarded candy from manufacturers.

If you order a burger at your local fast food joint and it tastes like someone spilled a pixie stick on it? You’ll know why.
[WPSD LOCAL6]