Need light? Can’t afford electricity? Here is a novel solution being implemented in the slums of the Philippines. WARNING: it does involve cutting a hole in a roof.

Above is a clip of a 1979 victory for the Pittsburgh Steelers over the Dallas Cowboys. However, pay attention to the final few frames where what seem to be flashing objects are seen before the awesome 60 Minutes promo about a church in Florida encourages getting high on weed.

It is apparently a new conspiracy theory tying in two of my favorite subjects, UFO sightings and Pittsburgh Steelers football.

Click AFTER THE JUMP for a super slowed down version of the glimpse.

[Pittsburgh Sports and Mini Ponies] (more…)

An era before time. An era before aquatic decency. An era of totally bitching ichthyosaur fights!

New fossil finds indicate a very violent encounter (most likely) between two ichthyosaurs which left one scarred by deep gouges in the snout. Little is known for sure about the 20-foot-long creatures, since it has no living relatives. Since the bite pattern on the recovered fossil matches that of another ichthyosaur, it is telling that they fought amongst themselves for land and territory.

Either way, it’s a tragedy of epic proportions that these two beasts were fighting and killing each other before YouTube was invented.

[Cryptomundo]

Make no mistake: this is an intricate, delicate work of art no matter if it’s a commercial or not. A Japanese telco built a massive wooden gravity marimba operated by a single ball through a gorgeous woodland area.

The moral of the story? The woods are so boring you get ideas like this. Thanks to @Sandtiger on Twitter.

[YouTube]

The amazing music video for Alex Metric & Steve Angelo’s new tune Open Your Eyes finds us visiting a man who looks not unlike a young Rocky Balboa working over bums in the Philly underground boxing scene. However, instead of Apollo Creed looking for a new opponent, we find a fearsome boxing mech who has a habit of murdering his sparring partners while his sadistic creator laughs maniacally at the bloodshed.

Our rocky character is played by the hilarious Peter Serafinowicz from Shaun Of The Dead as well as the insanely funny UK TV sensations Look Around You and Spaced.

The song is ‘salright but the video is must see. SPOILER ALERT: not unlike the end of the Rocky, this story finds Balboa’s opponent wishing for no rematch, however, in this version our villain takes decisive action to reach his goal.

Thanks to Minion5051 for the tip via Twitter.

[YouTube]

Although this is barely within our news coverage area, we thought bringing you footage of this amazing machete slingshot/rifle hybrid would prove that this beautiful dream is indeed science fact.

Favorite moments in video:

• The sound of an oncoming car while our host is explaining his contraption. If you’re just randomly driving down the road and see this giant bald dude wielding such an insane weapon, what is your first thought? I’m glad I updated my will? What is Uncle Fester doing with a knife gun? I always knew this is how I would go?

• The startling accuracy of the weapon. Granted, we don’t know how many takes this took to edit down to the handful of successful attempts but still…

• He’s shooting a box for a home treadmill. A nation of overweight YouTubers express a tsunami of catharsis.

• He follows up a video of the most badass DIY weapon in a decade with a video spotlighting two tiny hand slingshots. As the old adage on genre writing goes, your monster movie is over when the gigantic bald dude stops firing machetes into a treadmill box with pants peeing velocity.

Only two elements that could have made it better:

• Slow motion

• Death metal

[BoingBoing]

That is all.

[Adventure Journal]

Students at the University of Toronto have built the first succesful human-powered Ornithopter (a machine that generates lift through the flapping of its wings). Dubber ‘The Snowbird,” the flying machine achieved. The flight lasted a scant 19.3 seconds, but it is still longer than any other attempt. You can find more info about the project here.

A POV trip for a engineer working on a 1,768 foot high transmission tower.

Thanks to Weird Things reader Alan for passing this along.

William Allen Barnes is a man on a mission. His journey to find and track the creature known as Bigfoot (although he is loathe to use that particular term) began on a fateful night camping in California.

But his story, begins with the best lede we’ve ever read while editing this site:

On a warm summer night in 1997, local Bigfoot researcher and part-time gold-mining enthusiast William Allen Barnes was plunged headlong into the world of cryptozoology.

His story is well worth reading. Including this incredible line:

“After it left, the adrenaline hit me and I just sat there and shook,” Barnes said. “I got up the next morning and left. It took me four years to go back out there into the canyon by myself, and my gun got bigger every year.”

A part-time gold-mining enthusiast rolling through the Cali campgrounds strapped like Duke Nukem? Hail to the king.

[The Union]

Pretty hardcore. Granted, the publisher of this site, Andrew Mayne has been known to gargle the stuff but this is awesome just the same.

Get way more detail on why this works at the man’s blog, including one of the most bad assed pictures you will see today.

Thank to Weird Things reader Mitzula for the tip.

[Pop Sci]

The dream is real! Marty McFly’s self-lacing shoes could become science fact as Nike filed a patent for the tech in 2009.

[Nice Kicks]

The FDA has given a biotech tech firm the A-OK to start embryonic stem cell therapy trails. First up? An Iraq war vet who was paralyzed from the chest down in 2005.

Yesterday it was announced that Iraq War veteran and Marine Matt Cole, paralyzed from the chest down since a 2005 insurgent attack in Iraq, has enrolled as the first patient in the first FDA clinical trial of adult stem cells used to treat spinal cord injuries.

The procedure involves removing a couple of thousand adult stem cells from Cole’s bone marrow, multiplying them in the lab and injecting them into his spinal cord. That should happen later this month. Nine other patients have also been enrolled for this phase of the trial, which is being undertaken by TCA Cellular Therapy in Covington, La.

Is that super serum enough for you? Me too.

Now who wants to send Matt a shield… just in case.

[Business Wire via Pop Sci]

My feeble brain can’t process how this could be used, but I’m pretty sure it’s awesome.

“It’s kind of surprising that we’ve been using lasers for 50 years or so, and only now somebody noticed something pretty fundamental,” says Marin Solja?i?, a physicist at MIT who was not involved in the work.

Instead of amplifying light into coherent pulses, as a laser does, an antilaser absorbs light beams zapped into it. It can be “tuned” to work at specific wavelengths of light, allowing researchers to turn a dial and cause the device to start and then stop absorbing light.

“By just tinkering with the phases of the beams, magically it turns ‘black’ in this narrow wavelength range,” says team member A. Douglas Stone, a physicist at Yale University. “It’s an amazing trick.”

The option remains on the table to create a dual laser/anti-laser combo. Which is pretty much the coolest thing we’ve heard of today.

[Wired]

Not only will Austrian stuntman Felix Baumgartner attempt to redefine the official limitations of which height a human can fall from without dying immediately he also hopes to break the sound barrier on the way down.

Starting in the stratosphere at 120,000 feet above the ground, Baumgartner will leap from a capsule suspended by a helium balloon near the boundary of space.

Sponsored by the energy drink company Red Bull, Baumgartner’s mission — called Red Bull Stratos — seeks to extend the “safety zone” of human atmospheric bailout last set in 1960 by diver Joe Kittinger. This limit defines the uppermost altitude a human being can safely jump from.

Awesome. Also, he’s already leapt off the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. Double complete rainbow.

[Space]

Here is one paragraph for you to read:

“Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe.” So concludes Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University in a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time.

If that doesn’t make you want to read the rest of this post, you’re a real silly goose.

[Technology Review]