Not to be outdone by Germany’s cross-eyed possum, Slovakia’s two-headed turtle and the infamous Paul the Octopus, the city of Kiev is adding a pig to the psychic barnyard.

Hoping to cash in on the excitement these animals illicit from fans, this Ukranian pig will be carted out every day at four o’ clock to make its prediction about which team will be win the European championship matches leading up to the World Cup.

What’s more fascinating about whether or not the pig will accurately predict the upcoming matches, is the statement from Kiev’s city government:

“A unique oracle hog, a real Ukranian pig and a psychic which knows the mysteries of football.”

No. pressure on the pig, right?

Think again… smell that? It’s the smell of failure and delicious bacon.

[The Leader Board]

If Elon Musk and MacGyver had a love child its name would be Emile LeRay.

Emile had left Morrocco and was going to drive across the Sahara in a specially prepared Citreon. His plans came to a grinding halt when he came across a military outpost that would not allow him to continue on. He was then told that he’d have to take someone (military personel) back to the nearby city of Tam Tam to ensure he followed their orders. LeRay states that a provision in his insurance doesn’t allow for him to have passengers. He turns the Citreon around and speeds off back the way he came as fast as he could get the car to go to avoid being followed by the military.

Determined to cross the Sahara, LeRay, now out of site of the outpost and the military, heads the car in large arc back toward the Sahara and around the outpost. On his way back to the road beyond the outpost, the Citreon encountered some serious terrain. Hours and miles later, the Citreon breaks down in the middle of the Sahara.

Calling upon his inner MacGyver, LeRay formulates a plan and begins breaking apart the Citreon.

Over the course of the next twelve days LeRay transforms the Citreon into a motorcycle straight from an apocalyptic future where salvaging is the new couture.

With only a small amount of water left, LeRay’s ‘Desert Camel’ (what the bike’s been nick named) sputtered to life and, after almost two weeks living in the shelled body of the Citreon, Emile continued on his adventure.

Ironically, Emile was pulled over by the military as he neared civilization.

And not for running a military outpost…

But for driving an illegal vehicle.

[Gizmodo]

We’ve seen it time and time again in spectacularly bad science fiction grist ripe for SyFy’s cheesy flick of the week: A chemical spill causes normally docile creatures to mutate into larger-than-life versions of themselves. Sharks mix with octopi and take to land to wreak havoc amongst us soft squishy fleshlings or giant cockroaches will march on Cincinnati.

Sounds like a fun, popcorn-munchin’ night of mindless pop culture.

Too bad it’s actually happening on a small, strange scale.

Something (LSU professors are pinning the blame on the BP oil spill) is causing mutations straight out of a Roger Corman flick.

Recently the biggest piece o’ strange to get snagged in fisherman’s nets are shrimp… shrimp with no eyes or eye sockets (insert dramatic music here)!

Other fun variations on things we all know and love but that’s slowly becoming the basic building blocks of tiny nightmares are crabs with no claws, crabs encased in soft shells, shrimps with tumors on their heads, fish with no gill flaps or sealed eyes and fish with no trace that it ever had eyes at all.

What’s even more fun and waiting for a script-writer to embrace is the FDA ensuring these things are absolutely, perfectly safe for all of us to consume. That is until five years from now when we all start sprouting extra appendages and begin laying eggs to complete the birth cycle of humanity’s new masters.

[The Week]

UPDATE: It’s been determined that the ‘Causeway Cannibal’ was not on any synthetic drugs or bath salts. He was high on marijuana.

Whether we’re ready for it or not, it seems like either someone could no longer contain the T-Virus or simply that the zombie apocalypse may actually have begun….in Miami.

During a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in South Florida, a patrolling road ranger rolled up on something that can only be described as ghoulish.

Two men seemed to be scuffling on the MacArthur Causeway. What he reportedly witnessed is the kind of scene that typically begins a zombie film or opens an episode of The Walking Dead.

One of the men was naked. That same naked man was also chewing the flesh from the face from the other man.

The officer, which has not been identified as of this posting, repeatedly asked the assailant to cease his attack to no avail. Witnesses report at least a half dozen shots were fired by the officer before the attacker stopped his assault.

At the time of this posting the attack is still being investigated. The Miami Herald, which had its own surveillance cameras on a nearby parking garage has submitted the footage to the police. The victim is currently in critical condition.

While most of the news stories coming out about the incident point toward some kind of drug trip gone ugly, putting together a couple shovels, a shotgun and getting in some jogging might not be such bad idea either.

You know…just in case.

[The Miami Herald]

Two mysterious ‘doors’ deep inside Egypt’s Great Pyramid were slowly being explored by tiny robots…until political unrest and paperwork brought everything to a screeching halt.

The Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) has paused what’s known as the Djedi Project and asked them to resubmit their permits in order to continue burrowing into the depths of the Great Pyramid.

Robots began crawling into the Great Pyramid in 1993 in order to explore what was thought to be shafts that allowed the pharaoh’s soul to escape to the afterlife. While two of the four shafts simply led outside, the other two led deeper into the pyramid dead-ending at what’s called “Gantenbrink’s door.”

What lies beyond that will be a mystery until all the proper paperwork clears and the project resumes.

Pretty sure we’re all secretly having nerd-dreams that there’s a Stargate down there somewhere.

[Discovery News]

While everyone’s been busy applauding Space X, nerd-herding our likes to Pinterest and getting anxious over Facebook’s IPO, Russia’s decided to just keep right on working on their latest little science fair project… immortality!

With little buzz or fanfare, a group of Russian visionaries has been quietly tinkering away to ensure that the singularity gets here in a timely fashion.

After the above video started getting some play on YouTube, people’s interest began directing them to something that seems like a viral marketing campaign for the latest summer blockbuster about people being embedded into androids. It’s not.

The Russia 2045 Project is planning on eventually taking YOU (call it what you will…your ‘soul’, your ‘bio-data’ or your ‘Midichlorians’…whatever) and embedding it like a YouTube video into one of their androids.

While this all sounds like a science fiction dream-come-true? Watch the video. Russia 2045’s latest model of android looks like someone is puppeteering him just to get him to nod his head.

Ventriloquist dummies are creepy enough. Having your soul trapped inside one for eternity? Creepier.

Best of luck, humanity.

[The Verge]

Dinosaur archaeologist. Those words conjure up a lot of school and a highly-educated lab-coat-wearing stereotype for most of us, right? Or at the least monologue-spouting dinosaur-loving cast of Jurassic Park, right?

Then there’s 78 year-old Ray Stanford, Maryland’s ‘Dinoman’ who skipped all that.

While all the dinosaur science people and some of the best dinosaur fossil hunters in the country proclaimed that Maryland wasn’t worth their time and has yielded only minimal finds like a few teeth and a couple of footprints, Ray, a self-taught naturalist, has a house FULL of evidence that somehow everyone missed!

Ray’s home, appropriately called the Stanford Museum, houses one of the most significant collections of fossils on the east coast. Even professionals peruse Standford’s collection in awe.

While most of the collection is fairly typical, if you can forget you’re actually in someone’s house, containing footprints and teeth, there are some incredible finds like a footprint that doesn’t even have a matching fossil record at this point as well as the complete skeleton of a baby dinosaur called a Nodosaur (which has been moved to the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum).

Somebody call John Hammond and let him know about Ray so we can get things started on our new theme park.

[The Washington Post]

Tentacle Bento, a MUCH spicier niche game than Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh, made its way onto the crowd-funding project site, Kickstarter. Within one week, Tentacle Bento rocketed past its $13,000 goal by over $17,000!

The game’s objective is to “get your slimy tentacles on as many of the students as you can before time runs out” by assuming the role of a tentacled monster. This has not set well with some critics of both the game and Kickstarter for allowing this project to even be available for funding.

On the other side of the fence are the games creators who included this on Bento Tentacle’s Kickstarter page:

In the long history of horrible combinations of tentacles and school girls, we have taken a cheeky satire look at the genre to create a silly, if not innuendo rich, product. We are firmly against the depiction of violence against women in any regards.

Currently the Kickstarter page simply states, “Funding Canceled”.

Soda Pop Miniatures, the creators of the game, have moved the project to a another site to be privately funded and have already accrued the $13,000 they needed to complete the project.

Mike “Gabriel” Krahulik of Penny Arcade also chimed in on Twitter saying that “It’s okay for things you don’t like to exist.”

While everyone is up in arms about this whole mess, it sounds like Tentacle Bento is going to be about as horrendous and shockingly graphic as that deleted scene from Goonies.

Which is to say, not at all.

[The Daily Dot]

Dragging yourself to your morning coffee just got a whole lot easier. So did our baby steps toward becoming cyborgs.

Two quadriplegic volunteers, a 66 year-old man and a 58 year-old woman, have been part of a study being conducted at Brown University that transmits neural activity into physical movement via a robotic arm.

Cathy Hutchinson, the female volunteer, has been working with the implanted sensor for almost five years now to achieve this seemingly simple task.

Watch the video not just for the load of information it provides but for the kinda heart-warming moment when she actually drinks the coffee without assistance for the first time in fifteen years and both her and the up-until-then stone-faced science guy in the background triumphantly smile at their success…which is EXACTLY how our future robot overlords want us to feel.

Let’s just hope that the male volunteer’s name isn’t Otto Gunther Octavius…because that’s when all this feel-good/man-machine love story will just get ugly.

[YouTube]