Something straight out of a science fiction story is becoming a reality in Yokohama, Japan right now: regenerative organs.

There have been tons of attempts, theories and even a small handful of groundbreaking work concerning regenerating new organs, veins, tissue and even blood using stem cell research. It often sounds almost fantastical at times considering the small amount of work that’s actually been produced from the field.

Japanese researchers revealed at the International Society for Stem Cell Research last week that they’ve reproduced a liver-like tissue in a dish.

Their findings have yet to be published but there is a lot of buzz taking place on the internet this morning about this news release.

Our imaginations and the media will probably go crazy talking about the possibilities of this breakthrough. The reality is that this is about as crude an example of a regenerated as one could possibly get. It’s still got a long way to.

Using various cell types and what reads like a hipper, less late-night grave-diggy version of Frankenstein, researchers have basically taken human skin cells back to an ’embryonic state’, reprogrammed them, let them begin to grow, added various other cells to the process and created a very primitive ‘liver bud’, a very early stage of liver development.

As primitive as this ‘liver’ is right now, the tissue does contain blood vessels that worked when the tissue was transplanted under the skin of a mouse.

There’s no doubt where this amazing technology is headed and that its goal of recreating human organs is going to happen given time.

And, George Daly, the director of the stem-cell transplantation program at the Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts in charge of last week’s session, said:

“It blew my mind.”

[Nature]

Like a padawan who just learned about the force, 20 year-old newbie hypnotist, Maxime Nadeau was hired to put on a year-end show for the all-girl College du Sacre-Coeur in Sherbooke, Quebec.

People were having a great time, the show went well, everyone enjoyed the demonstrations of making fools out of half-asleep friends, show ends and everyone leaves…

Except for the girls apparently who were still in some kind of trance-like state.

According to witnesses, several girls who’d been sitting at nearby tables watching the show had also been ‘put under’, had their heads lying on their tables and seemed a little out of it.

One girl seemed to be in a trance-like state for five hours when the 20 year-old hypnotist decided to call his mentor who lived about an hour away.

Some girls were complaining of nausea and headaches. One girl even claimed it was like an out-of-body experience.

Nadeau’s mentor Richard Whitebread, showed up to wake the girls from their hypnotic state.

In an excerpt from one article, we learn why the girls went into such a deep trance (probably the best reason ever and will become a great blurb for future shows):

“After travelling for one hour, Whitbread used a stern voice to awaken the girls, blaming his trainee’s good looks for the students’ hypnotic states.”

All of the thirteen girls affected by Nadeau’s good looks and his show were brought out of their stupors and returned to normal. School principal Daniel Leveille told reporters:
“We also wish to gather all relevant information before talking to the media about this unfortunate event which, fortunately, did not leave any consequences.’

Next time, Principal Leveille? Just hire an ugly hypnotist and everything’ll be just fine.

[Global News]

Zombie-like activity keeps rearing its ugly, face-biting head.

Once again the Sunshine State is reporting another flesh-biting incident. This one, however, is just a faux zombie inspired by the ‘Causeway Cannibal’ case in Miami from a couple of weeks ago.

After getting pulled over by police for running a red light while doing 60 mph in a 45 mph zone, 21 year-old Giovani Martinez then proceeded to fail a sobriety test given to him when officers noticed the open beer can and spilled beer on the front seat. He was arrested and take to the Naples jail where he became unresponsive.

Martinez was then transported to a nearby hospital where he suddenly went ballistic.

During the transition from the gurney to the hospital bed, Martinez began punching and kicking whoever was in range. After biting into the arm of one of the attending nurses and spitting the blood in their face, Martinez said that not only would he eat their faces like the guy in Miami but he’d also rape their wives.

More punches and flailing followed for the next twenty minutes before officers were finally able to get Martinez secured.

Our sad little ‘wannabe’ zombie attacker now faces three counts of felony battery and a DUI.

[WPTV Miami]

Seven-year-old Charlotte Neve was in a coma. A brain hemorrhage and several horrific strokes due to an aneurysm brought on by a rare disease no one knew she had put her there.

Doctors told her mother, Leila Neve, saying goodbye was the next step.

Before this ugly turn of events, Charlotte and her mother would sing Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” together when they’d hear it on the radio.

Here’s where it gets weird.

After the news from doctors that Charlotte wouldn’t make it, Leila sat down on the bed and began singing “Rolling in the Deep”.

A faint smile suddenly spread across Charlotte’s face. Doctors were astonished. When her mother stopped singing? Charlotte would return to her previous state. Nurses in the room at the time excitedly told her to keep singing. Almost as soon as Leila did, Charlotte’s smile returned. Everyone in the room was stunned.

Two days later Charlotte had started speaking and sitting up in bed. She recovered so quickly that doctors decided to remove the plug from her head that had allowed them to remove excess blood to see if she could function without it. She could.

Since then Charlotte has made a drastic recovery and left doctors scratching their heads.

While she has suffered memory loss and partial blindness in one eye, Charlotte continues to rebound, is taking speech therapy, has returned home and is getting back to doing what she loves…dancing.

Did Adele’s song actually trigger a ‘reboot’ because of her memory of her and her mother? Was it just a coincidence of timing? Who knows. Medical staff in the room are calling it a miracle.

Whatever the case, an awesome little girl’s getting a second chance at being an awesome little girl.

Still would’ve been cooler to wake up to ‘The Eye of the Tiger’ or maybe the theme from the Olympics.

[Telegraph UK]

Grappling hooks are so 1985.

Check out this thing.

Looking a LOT like some kind of steampunk version of Spiderman’s climbing apparatus circa 1944, the vacuum-powered gear in this video was developed by students at Utah State University for an Air Force competition in order to secure a $100,000 grant to continue working on this contraption.

Their next step is to use the money they won during this competition to develop a much stealthier version that doesn’t sound like your mother’s coming for your room with a Dyson.

[YouTube]

Black Plague. Wiped out over a third of Europe back in the day. Everyone’s happy it’s gone and we’ve all moved on to live happy lives without any more talk of this contagion nick-named ‘Black Death’…or have we?

About a week ago, in Oregon, a good samaritan to mice attempted to rescue one such rodent from the jaws of a cat instead of just leaving the food chain unbroken. Guess what he got for breaking the rules?

The Black Plague.

It’s still out there lurking around just biding its time. Apparently it turns out that people still get the plague more than you think. One of the most feared contagions in history still affects between 1,000 and 3,000 people EVERY YEAR..WORLD-WIDE!

‘The Plague’ still hangs out in fleas and rodents where it just waits to get into your system when said animals decide to taste-test your precious skin.

Symptoms sound ridiculously enjoyable…chills, delirium, rotting flesh, broken blood vessels, meningitis, respiratory failure, coma, oh…and death. According to even more fun stats on the plague, only 1 out of 7 people afflicted with it end fatally.

Currently our ‘patient zero’ from Oregon is listed in critical condition with an 86% chance of being able to get back to normal.

Hopefully we’ve all learned a lesson: Cats eat mice. Let them.

[Death + Taxes]

“Hello world. I am tony nicklinson, I have locked-in syndrome and this is my first ever tweet.”

With the exception of a mention of something called ‘locked-in syndrome’ this isn’t a ground-breaking or particularly interesting tweet, right?

But after doing a search to find out what ‘locked-in syndrome’ is? It gets very interesting.

The Twitter post came from Tony Nicklinson (@TonyNicklinson), a 57 year-old man who suffered a major stroke seven years ago that left his body completely paralyzed with one small exception…his eyes.

Using special hardware and software that follow his eye movements, Nicklinson is able to use only his eyes to construct his posts to Twitter.

Nicklinson’s main purpose in learning to do this is somewhat heartbreaking and precedent setting…he wants to die.

Before his stroke, Nicklinson was a doer. He now believes his life is “dull, miserable, demeaning, undignified and intolerable”. He began using Twitter to appeal to the high court that a doctor should be allowed to lawfully end his life.

In less than three days, Nicklinson’s Twitter account has gained over 12,000 followers who are watching this heart-wrenching yet inspiring story unfold.

While many people are still haters of the insanely sky-rocketing advancement of technology right now? Watch the video to see how advanced tech is doing something awesomely weird that simply couldn’t be done before… giving a human being in this condition a voice.
[The Guardian]

Because Florida isn’t already weird enough now that they’ve added bath salt-created, face-eating zombies to the list, a literacy teacher at Lealman and Asian Neighborhood Family Center in St. Petersburg has been jailed for performing what appears to be some kind of strange ritual involving seven children!

Just before sunrise on a Saturday morning, Danielle Harkins was with these seven children around a small fire near the St. Petersberg Pier. Harkins told the children their bodies needed to be rid of demons by cutting their skin open. Once they’d let the supposed demons out, they’d have to burn their wounds closed to prevent the demons from returning.

Police were tipped off when one of the teens sent a text message to a friend. That friend showed the message to the parents of the teen that sent it.

While none of the teens that attended the weird ritual are really opening up as to why they gathered that morning, some details have emerged. One teen suffered a cut on the neck from a broken bottle which had been cauterized by a heated key. Another teen suffered second-degree burns when the flame from a lighter Harkins was using to burn a hand-wound kept going out. Harkins then doused the teen’s hand in perfume and ignited it.

At this point no one knows the reasons behind the gathering or the bizarre ritual except for Harkins and the teens who were there.

[Miami Herald]

Where do you begin this.

Let’s get some science stuff out of the way first.

Spermatophores. Your brain’s already spinning with possibilites because of the word ‘sperm’. Spermatophores are like little cups of sperm complete with a timer device built-in. Sperm-bombs. It’s how squids do their biz and propagate.

Here’s what sounds like the start of a lame joke and ends in a fairly disgusting punchline that I’ll ruin with the next sentence: A 63-year-old South Korean woman walks into a bar and orders Calamari.

A couple of you are WAY ahead of the story by now.

While enjoying her plate of calamari the woman reported feeling a painful “pricking, foreign-body sensation in her tongue, cheek and gums.”

In Korea, calamari is parboiled in certain places which means that, unlike here in the non-sperm-exploding-in-your-mouth dining experience we prefer, the organs are all still intact.

Doctors removed all the spermatophores from the woman’s mouth.

She’ll be fine…until the squid/human babies are born.

[Gawker]

One year ago Swedish Ocean Explorer Team (Ocean X), using sonar, came across something buried under the ice in the Baltic Sea. Tons of hopeful theories have been tossed around as to what it may be. Ufo? Sunken ship? Arctic Stonehenge? No one could guess from the sonar imagery.

Now, a year later, Ocean X is actually on site and beginning a deeper investigation into what this thing is that has even them baffled.

As they continue to uncover the mystery, pictures are starting to emerge from the site causing even more speculation and excitement.

There is definitely something down there. While the research team from Ocean X, a company that finds sunken ships and sells what they find for a substantial profit, explores the site their finds are not making this discovery any less fascinating.

Pictures and video are beginning to pop up online as the divers explore the strange anomoly. While the team has stated that it could be anything including a strange geological formation, they’ve also said that, due to funding, they don’t have much interest in spending too much time exploring it and need to get back to work on more profitable ventures.

“The object appeared more as a huge mushroom, rising 3-4 meters/10-13 feet from the seabed, with rounded sides and rugged edges. The object had an egg shaped hole leading into it from the top, as an opening. On top of the object they also found strange stone circle formations, almost looking like small fireplaces. The stones were covered in something resembling soot.

First we thought this was only stone, but this is something else. And since no volcanic activity has ever been reported in the Baltic Sea the find becomes even stranger. As laymen we can only speculate how this is made by nature, but this is the strangest thing I have ever experienced as a professional diver.”

We just want them to watch a copy of John Carpenter’s The Thing before they start messing around too much…oh…and to put their dogs away.

[Gizmodo]

New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research recently led an exploration of the Kermadec Ridge. Reaching depths of up to 4,100 feet and spanning 3,800 square miles that included everything from continental slopes and canyons to hydrothermal volcanic-vents.

Setting out to prove that, based on underwater terrain, undersea biological communities would be different, the expedition came back with not only new imagery of known species but new imagery of things not yet seen.

The polychaete worm pictured above is not only new but also a ferocious predator featuring a jaw set-up just like everyone’s favorite HR Giger-designed aliens.

Other species include the demonic-looking Black Dragonfish and a very hairy-looking crab.

Oh…and I think someone snapped a pic of James Cameron waving as he drove by in his privately owned submersible…he’d already been there for weeks.
[National Geographic]

Twitter began buzzing that something straight out of a UFO conspiracy film was taking place late at night on a freeway in Washington D.C. Pictures were being uploaded and retweeted of a large flatbed truck, a military-looking escort and some kind of strange craft being transported along the Capitol Beltway.

Arm-chair conspiracy posts were lobbed in response to the Twitter photos.

Now for the still cool, but really not-so cinematic truth….it’s a drone.

Built by Northrup Grumman, the drone was being transported from West Virginia to Patuxent Naval Air Station in Maryland.

That’s it…just a drone…being transported to a base…right?

[Fox News]

Bigfoot slipped up earlier this year and may have been caught on video by a group of High School students and then apparently either forgot his crutches or hop-scotched away since we keeping being shown the same footprint over and over.

“It just didn’t look human-like. I don’t know what that is, it’s not a bear, it’s not a moose or anything. It was big and bulky and black,” said the student who captured everyone’s favorite furry icon.

After the students shot the video, they climbed the ridge where the creature was spotted and found footprints in the snow.

Even thought the incident occurred a few months ago, the story is suddenly getting some spin.

Animal Planet’s Show “Finding Bigfoot” is on their way to the area in hopes of finding what may be the ever-elusive and camera-shy creature.

Our favorite part of the above new story? That awkward torso shot of the teen describing what he saw.

[ABC News]

For all of our WeirdThings fathers. A male seahorse…doing something you don’t have to…giving birth.

You’re welcome.

Happy Father’s Day
[YouTube]

Carnivorous plants are as sneaky as they are creepy. What they lack in speed, they make up for in shady tactics to attract and snag prey.

The standard ‘Pitcher Plant’, shaped like something you’d pour Evil Nectar-flavored Kool-Aid from, draws its intended prey into the bell portion of it’s diabolical design. Once the prey slips on the wax-like coating covering the interior of the plant, it falls into the bottom of the pitcher and the plant’s digestive enzymes begin the horrific process of breaking down its latest victim. Some of the bigger species of Nepenthes Gracilis (the Pitcher Plant’s fancy latin moniker) have even been seen luring, trapping and digesting small birds.

Why are we rehashing something a lot of our readers might know about?

Evolution.

Something unique is happening to help keep trap more prey into the Pitcher Plant. The thing is developing a new trick.

On top of the large ‘bell’ portion of the plant is a lid. Up until this new discovery, Pitcher Plants have only used the lid for keeping out rain. Now the underside of the lid has developed its own advanced waxy coating that potential food feels securely attached to. The trick is that the feeling of security that an insect feels clinging to the underside of the lid is a sham! A raindrop hitting the top side of the lid will cause most insects clinging underneath to be knocked down into the Pitcher Plant’s sweet death-nectar.

Let’s just hope that these things don’t decide that developing legs might be something fun to do.

[Discovery News]

Bigfoot news is ripe now that Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot” is reinvigorating the hunt for the apparent ninja-trained mysterious icon of cryptozoology.

On the other side of the world from Idaho’s recent sighting, comes reports of Australia’s version of the creature..the Yowie.

Fresh tracks and sightings of the creatures appearing near the city of Lismore have caused Rex “The Yowie Man” Gilroy (best name ever for a crypto-hunter/adventurer) and his wife Heather, who founded the Australian Yowie Research Centre back in 1976, to leap into action in hopes of capturing evidence that the creature exists.

Lately hikers in the Lismore area have claimed to see what appears to be a male and a female creature along the trails. Reaching out to locals and heading out this time with a team of cryptozoologists, Gilroy is set on collecting new evidence to show people that this strange and elusive creature is absolutely real.

We can’t wait to hear about the further adventures of Rex Gilroy: Yowie Hunter.

[Northern Star Australia]