Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Woman Tries to Sell Soul Online

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

Grim Reapers, demons and power-hungry Disney villains sure do have it easy nowadays. Instead of going through poison apples, waiting around near future fatality sites or having to track a particularly important living individual who’s lineage might be of importance, all you have to do is plop down in front of an internet-attached device and ride over to ebay.

A woman, who’s going by Lori N. (or LHumanist on ebay), tried to sell her soul on the mega-auction site.

Lori placed her ‘slightly used’ soul on auction for $2,000. Ebay has removed the auction due to their restrictions about selling this type of thing on their site:

“We don’t allow humans, the human body, or any human body parts or products to be listed on eBay, with two exceptions. Sellers can list items containing human scalp hair, and skulls and skeletons intended for medical use.”

So what’s up with Lori that she’d want to sell her soul so badly for?

Five years ago Lori was a passenger in a car that was slammed into by a drunk driver. She suffered a heart attack, a stroke and was thrown into a coma for three weeks. When she woke up she found that she’d also been dealt a broken hip, pelvis, leg, collarbone, sternum, ribs, had a collapsed lung and she’s also lost a breast.

Lori was a freelance writer and now gets by on part-time work and making jewelry.

Emails have been coming in from everywhere. Some people are connecting with Lori and sharing similar stories. Some people are condemning her for selling her soul and claiming that she’ll burn in hell and live in fear and agony for eternity.

It’s hard for her to take those threats seriously and probably a little hard to believe you’re not getting jacked out of a soul to add to your collection in the basement..

Lori’s also an atheist.

[KOB Eyewitness News]

Jurassic Era Microbes Found Alive, Barely

Friday, May 18th, 2012

Buried Since the Jurassic Era, Ocean Microbes Are Still _Barely Alive_ | Popular Science.jpg

Single cell microbes in the most remote portions of the ocean floor dating back to days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth are indeed alive. But not by much.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaarely alive. Which is a scientific term. Each “a” signifying how much closer to complete nonexistence it is.

Yet still, as Dr. Malcolm teaches us… life finds a way.

Røy and colleagues from Denmark and Germany surveyed red clays buried deep in the Pacific Ocean, along the equator and into the North Pacific Gyre current system. From the research R/V Knorr, they drilled core samples 92 feet into the ocean floor, dating to the time of the dinosaurs, and tested the cores with oxygen sensors. They found that organisms live in the deepest parts of these sediments and that they’re using oxygen for respiration — only incredibly slowly. The deeper the sediments, the less food and oxygen is present, and the less oxygen is used up, too. These organisms have not had access to a fresh food supply since their burial, 70 to 86 million years ago.

The finding could gives new insight into life on other planets. Now that we have an idea of just how durable life in on this particular rock we can have some hope that it could survive in a harsh environment elsewhere across the stars.

[Pop Sci]