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]

Elon Musk got his close-up beauty shot last night on CBS’ venerable newsmagazine 60 Minutes. His company SpaceX was the subject. Here was our favorite impression.

The biggest geeks about SpaceX work at SpaceX.

Every employee interviewed shared the same Big Sky optimism. They are doing what they are doing because this is a pivotal moment in the history of space and… well… they’d like to go to space and this is the best way to do it.

Which is why we root for them.

The organization really has a dot com start-up vibe to it. Not a shock considering Musk’s background but it is awesome to see in action.

The money quote from Garrett Reiseman, an engineer and astronaut who spent time on the International Space Station now working with SpaceX as a consultant.

“If you had a chance to go back in time and work with Howard Hughes when he was creating TWA. If you had a chance to be there at that moment when it was the dawn of a brand new era, wouldn’t you want to do that?”

Watch the full segment above.

So Penn & Teller create their own show on the Discovery Channel debating the legitimacy of various claims. Now, Jamie and Adam of MythBusters fame are invading P&T’s turf with a live stage show.

See how these things escalate?

The pair begin a 31-city tour this Sunday in Los Angeles’ Nokia theater.

Explains Adam…

We worked hard to port what we like about “MythBusters” onto stage without doing something that was just a big boring science demonstration show. And what we decided to do was to spend a couple of hours messing with the audience, with the way they see things, with the way they see themselves. We’ll demonstrate something where A plus B equals C, and bring an audience member up and show them that even though it looks like that might be the case, we can demonstrate situations in which it’s not. We have a sketch in which we physically manipulate the way people see and their ability to complete actions onstage — so in addition to the general idea of perception as the way we think through things, we’re going to be messing with actual perception.

Hmmm… live on stage, messing with perception. If they end with a bullet catch, things might get ugly.

Andrew Smith was commissioned by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not to create this moving sculpture constructed from found items including railroad lanterns and an old bicycle.

Really amazing looking piece of art.

[YouTube]

Okay, it’s not bigger on the inside but this TARDIS themed door to a DVD closet is the coolest DIY project you’ll see today.

Thanks to Steven Lauren on G+ for tipping us off to it.

Find a few more pictures AFTER THE JUMP…

[TheRPS]

What I wouldn’t give to be in this car.

A Missouri mom was taking her children out trick or treating when she saw what looked to be an unidentified flying object. She followed the craft around for well over an hour with her excited kids cooing in the background.

UFO Casebook has the full video.

Here is her description:

When we first saw it, it was as if it was approaching us with its bottom facing us, (as if on a vertical orientation, and as it retreated, it turned flat (or horizontal), at times moving very slowly, then accelerating very quickly.

It would completely disappear from time to time. We followed it, both of us taking turns videotaping it with our phones. It at times acted as if it was playing a game with us, hiding, then appearing very close so we could see details, including a dome-like appendage on the bottom-center.

Then it would speed off, eventually making a complete circle over our area and winding up hovering over the neighborhood where we had originally been headed. It disappeared again, as we got out of the car to go tell our friends, and many people in the neighborhood came running up asking if we saw it, too!

Check out the full video at Casebook…

[UFO Casebook]

We’ve all heard horror stories about domestic abuse. Husbands hitting wives, and wives hitting husbands. Its a terrible thing, and we aren’t going to make fun of that today.

However, we are going to make fun of this: In Andhra Pradesh, a region of India, a bounty is being offered on spouse abusers. To quote the minister that came up with this brilliant idea…

“Beat your drunken husband blue and black if he touches you. I will pay you a Rs 1,000 reward per slap. The more you beat him the better, because you can win up to Rs 10,000,”

Basically, he’s saying that if your husband hits you, you can beat him 10 times back , and get Rs 10,000 back, which is comparable to about $200.

“Once you do this, your husband will come home early instead of visiting the toddy shop and will also respect you and spend time with the family,” he added.

The minister advised women to carry out the act in front of as many people as possible so that their husbands would be shamed that much more.

This is insane. Its telling people to start brawls for payment, kind of like the Wild West. If you are beaten by your husband, you have the right to hit him back, and get paid Rs 1000 for each slap, up to ten slaps. You’re also told to beat them in public, which is quite frankly, terrifying. It should deter people from spouse-abusing, but to be honest, its a little depressing that its so necessary for this measure.

To get the Rs 1000, you have to make sure that you are beaten with an eye-witness insight, so they can verify that you deserve the bounty. This means that you need to make sure you’re abusing spouse hits you while people can see.

[Telegraph India]

Men are funnier than women, according to a new study out of UC San Diego.

But only barely, a scientist quickly added realizing he still has to go home to his wife.

And men mostly found other men funny which accounts for the slight advantage, added a young lab tech whose blind date arrived awkwardly while the announcement was made.

Although those qualifiers are not true (nor funny) the facts remain that men tested funnier on average than women, if just barely.

…the study’s first author Laura Mickes, a postdoctoral researcher in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology and a Ph.D. graduate of the same department, “The differences we find between men’s and women’s ability to be funny are so small that they can’t account for the strength of the belief in the stereotype.”

Men edged out women by 0.11 points out of a theoretically possible perfect score of 5.0, while about 90 percent of both male and female study participants agreed with the stereotype that men are funnier.

So how do a pack of intellectuals measure what is funny and what isn’t? Why a controlled version of a New Yorker cartoon caption contest, of course! (tea cups cling as pinkies arise) Each volunteer wrote captions for the legendarily erudite scribbles and then had they rated by other test takers. The study also tested to see if funny captions were more memorable.

[Science Daily]

Today, a couple of members of the 4chan forum /b/ pulled a fairly impressive, albeit highly illegal stunt. Due to a use of cross-site scripting, some members of /b/ were able to steal a few hundred passwords off of different computers. Some of these passwords were bank accounts. Now, when bad people get access to other peoples bank accounts, they commit theft. One of these accounts had 22,000 Euros in it, and somebody decided to steel 5,000 Euro of it. Another one of these accounts contained 522,000 Euro, which another /b/ member decided to steal and buy 22,000 copies of Wario games and a unicycle, which he then sent to the White House. This will (hopefully) end up with a life sentence for the thief, and some photos of President Obama riding a unicycle while playing Wario.

Of course, the transaction could end up being stopped by the bank, as it has been flagged for inspection, and the thief would end up paying for this out of his own pocket.  Hopefully cyber-police will be getting onto this case soon, so that it doesn’t happen again.

[Reddit]

Here is world famous mentalist The Amazing Kreskin on why he wasn’t sweating all the Rapture talk by Harold Camping one week ago:

“I immediately checked my predictions for this year, and finding nothing regarding such, went on with my life.

“Of course, if we are to respect for even a fleeting second the pronouncement of this holy man and his conviction, we certainly would expect that he turned over every single solitary penny of his possessions to a charity by the day before the end of the world. Not doing that would label his pronouncements as phony as a $3 bill.

“Of course this holds true as well for all the individuals who were ‘passionately certain’ that the end of the world was definitely coming. Unless they relinquished all of their life savings, the question becomes, ‘Why haven’t they entered politics, where lying through one’s teeth is clearly one of the basic skills of the profession?’”

Someone is predicting the end of the world. Let me open by Trapper Keeper of yearly predictions. Hmmmm…. Hines Ward wins Dancing With The Stars, The Hangover II is boring, Sarah Palin announces she is running for president. Nope, nothing in here about the ascension of all God’s children into heaven. Case closed.

Thanks to Dylan for passing this along.

Weighing in at over 6 billion times the mass of our solar system, astronomers have found the most massive black hole yet at the center of galaxy M87. Three times large than Pluto’s orbit, it’s very, very big.

Not to be outdone, chubby loving astronomers have their eyes on one that may even be even bigger than that one at 19 billion times the mass of our solar system. Woop woop.

Astronomers calculate mass of largest black hole yet

Listen to the WeirdThings Podcast gang talk about this story as well!

If you were discovered in Beirut, as the center of attention making everyone around you laugh it up only to be found by some new friends who insist you travel with them to Brazil, you might think yourself a pretty lucky jet setter.

If you are Omega the chimpanzee, it’s even more impressive. Sure he was nabbed by animal rights workers who were revolted by the idea of him blowing buts in a Lebanon zoo. But still, free trip to Brazil!

“The chimp still regularly smokes … if someone will throw him a cigarette he’d pick it up and go for it straight away,” said Jason Meier, executive director for animal rights group Animals Lebanon.

Organizers of Omega’s evacuation say it marks the first time a chimpanzee has been rescued in Lebanon, a country with virtually no animal rights protection laws.

In his younger years, Omega was used in one of the local restaurants to entertain people and was made to smoke cigarettes and serve water pipes to customers. After he grew stronger, he was locked up and taken to a zoo where for the past 10 years he has lived in a cage measuring 430 square feet (40 square meters).

Hopefully, they packed some Nicorette. Quitting smoking could be quite the monkey on Omega’s back.

[AP]

The beautiful dream of a bionic eye has come one step closer to mainstream reality when three blind patient regained sight after having a microchip implanted in their retina. This method is revolutionary as it doesn’t rely on a camera to transmit images to an artificial retina, but rather uses the eye itself to communicate the images to the brain.

Awesome.

[Independent UK via reader ITNinja]

On April, 11 1980 a Peruvian pilot came across a UFO. They locked into combat and this is what followed:

When the Peruvian Sukhoi was already near the UFO, the object made a sudden stop, violating the laws of inertia. The fighter-bomber flew past it, with both vehicles at an altitude of 11,000 meters (36,000 feet) “the object pulled away quickly, gaining altitude at the same time. Later, it stopped abruptly, and I had to maneuver to avoid colliding with it,” said Santa María.

It was thus that Lt. Santa María and his aircraft went from being hunters to prey. He was being pursued by the UFO at 19,000 meters (62,000 feet), nearly 1000 meters beyond the aircraft manufacturer’s specifications. Furthermore, his fuel supply was running low.

Faced with this situation, Oscar Santa María decided to abandon his mission and withdraw, even as the UFO continued to ascend, losing itself in space. He was eighty-four kilometers away from his base, and 22 minutes had elapsed since his first contact with the UFO.

After landing, the UFO reappeared, remaining visible to the air base for nearly two hours.

AND the UFO showed off for two hours? Glad that on the way to inventing space travel and superior flight technology they stopped to pick up a little good sportsmanship.

This particular story has apparently been repeated for years amongst Peruvian pilots but has only been made public now thanks to government declassification.

[Inexplicata]

This picture was taken in 2007 by a college biology professor simply trying to test the flash during a research project near Lake Travis, TX. The professor and his student wrapped up their business near the creepy lake and left.

It was only after he noticed two points of light that he thought was an animal in the distance. He light blasted the snaps and eventually revealed the lumbering monster you see above.

What could it be? Bigfoot? Ghost? Old Man Withers who wants to scare everyone off the lake so he can buy the land cheap and build an amusement park?

Thanks to Weird Things reader Mike for passing this along.

[Examiner]

A work crew in Edmonton found a huge dinosaur bone while working in a sewer tunnel. What’s amazing is not necessarily the discovery, but the cavalier attitude held by the museum official the crew turned the fossil over to.

Museum officials say finding dinosaur bones in Canada’s Alberta province is a relatively common occurrence.

“I can go out on a hike on a Sunday and find a dinosaur bone. But it’s really a question of how significant the find is,” said Leanna Mohan, the museum’s marketing coordinator.

Okay Indiana Jones, calm down. Let’s not go crapping all over the coolest thing to happen these guys since Larry slipped face first into a pile of human waste because he was trying to reenact a CFL touchdown dance.

Besides, what if it’s weirder than that? Ever seen that movie Relic? What if that monster ate a real dinosaur in the sewer.

It’s early.

[BBC]

In an update to our story from last week (Asteroid Heading For Earth (in 2182)!), NASA is considering sending a probe to the ominous asteroid 1999 RQ36 to collect rock samples so they can more accurately when and if it will collide with earth. The project is being proposed as part of the New Frontiers program, and is competing with a trip to Venus for funding.

Basically, we are choosing between finding out when Earth will be destroyed or finding somewhere else to go before it is. Considering Bruce Willis will most likely not be around when the time comes I think we can safely write off the ‘Armageddon Option.’

[Telegraph.co.uk]

You want dragon? Here is how you’d make one with revisionist evolution…

[Pop Sci]

File this under “Things We Didn’t Know Were Super Cool Until We Heard It Was Real”:

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Researchers have discovered four new species of octopus in Antarctica with venom that works at sub-zero temperatures.

They hope to analyze the venom to see if it has medical uses, said one of the researchers, Bryan Fry, of the University of Melbourne. Their discovery, during a six-week expedition to Antarctica in 2007, was published in the journal Toxicon.

Experts have long known there were octopuses in Antarctica, but what surprised Fry and his colleagues was the sheer biodiversity and how natural selection changed the way they hunted and the nature of their venom.

The question now, does Sub-Zero Venom make a name for a band, album or song?

[Reuters]

Everyday this week…Brett Rounsaville brings us the Weirdest Disasters ever to strike down man or beast.

On January 15, 1919 an enormous, fifty-foot tall molasses tank collapsed, overrunning a portion of the great city of Boston with such sugary goodness that 21 people were killed, 150 were injured and eleventy-billion cavities ensued.

Thanks to the now pervasive colloquialism, “Slow as molasses,” I can’t help but picture this otherwise deeply depressing disaster as a scene out of an Austin Powers movie wherein Boston’s citizens scream and point at a 15-foot tall wave of dark brown molasses without ever making an effort to turn and run as it ever so slowly envelopes them.

The truth, however, is that this terrifying Blob-like blob was flying down the streets of Boston at 35 mph and crashing into structures and people alike with such force that it destroyed buildings, lifted a train off its elevated track and tossed a truck into Boston Harbor.

People and horses were stuck in the gooey tide like flies on flypaper, like flies in honey, like flies in Vaseline. (Why is it that flies get all the good “stuck in” similes?!) Some of the trapped horses were even shot by police rather than watch them struggle. (For the sake of what’s left of BPs PR I’m glad that’s not how struggling animals are handled today.)

Rather than wait for the molasses to ferment and stage the largest rum-fueled street party the world has ever seen, the city elected to begin the cleanup process immediately. It took 87,000 man-hours to clean up the streets and buildings affected by the Great Molasses Flood. That’s almost 20 years of one man working 12 hour days! (OR, to put it in terms you guys might be able to comprehend, that’s roughly the same amount of time it would take to clean the blood from your ears after listening to any given Nickelback album from beginning to end!)

If you had to be killed by a wave of something, what would you choose? Know of any Weird Disasters that absolutely have to make it into this week’s list?

The official Weird Things review of Inception? See it. Now. Stop reading.

You back? How awesome was that movie? I know! Remember that part when (REDACTED FOR SPOILERS)? So awesome. Anyhow, here is where science is in terms of making all that a reality. Or rather, a dream. The dream you might share as a reality. Or something.

[Live Science]

There is no official folder sitting in a dusty basement file room marked “Sea Monsters: CLASSIFIED” containing a hundred years worth of reports from parchment to dot matrix print outs about krakens, giants squid and God knows what else lurks under the waves.

At least that’s the official story after a freedom of information request was filed asking the British Royal Navy about a central record database for sea monster sightings.

A marine biologist inquired whether the Ministry of Defence held records about “abnormally large or dangerous sea monsters hundreds of metres under the sea” that had not been revealed to the public.

In reply an official wrote: ”The RN (Royal Navy), and MoD in general, does not maintain any form of central repository of information purely devoted to sea monsters.

“Personnel might be inclined to record unusual sightings in ship’s logs but there is, as far as we know, no actual requirement for them to do so, and it would be beyond the resource constraints of an FOI request to check every line of every RN log book for any such references since 2005.

“However, the RN does invite people to report sightings of marine mammals, and it’s possible this could include unusual sightings.

“These are forwarded to the UK Hydrographic Office at Taunton.”

Tales of insane sea creatures have been around as long as boats, seems like a real missed opportunity.

[Telegraph]

A breakthrough in how we understand brain development has led a group of researchers to totally change a developing fish brain into one that looks like another species of fish…

In another part of the study, the team wanted to see if they could use chemicals to change the patterns of gene expression and hence the brain development of the embryos. Could they, in fact, alter the brain of a rock-dwelling embryo to that of a sand-dwelling embryo? Turns out they could.

Sylvester treated the embryos with lithium chloride for three to five hours during an early stage of anterior-posterior patterning. After treatment, he returned the embryos to fish water and then took samples for study at different developmental stages. He found that each time he checked, treatment with lithium chloride up-regulated Wnt signaling, which led to a reallocation of brain precursors to the posterior thalamus.

So for those of you with “Playing God” bingo cards, please mark down that square.

[Science Daily]

The Maya people were forerunners on a lot of concepts. You can add piping pressurized water all over the place to that list.

A water feature found in the Maya city of Palenque, Mexico, is the earliest known example of engineered water pressure in the new world, according to a collaboration between two Penn State researchers, an archaeologist and a hydrologist. How the Maya used the pressurized water is, however, still unknown.

“Water pressure systems were previously thought to have entered the New World with the arrival of the Spanish,” the researchers said in a recent issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. “Yet, archaeological data, seasonal climate conditions, geomorphic setting and simple hydraulic theory clearly show that the Maya of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, had empirical knowledge of closed channel water pressure predating the arrival of Europeans.”

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

[Science Daily]

Who needs context?

[@xmasape]

The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers – especially with monster-obsessed whiteys who invariably convert rich oral tradition into airport-ready supernatural thrillers (Tony Hillerman’s “Skinwalkers”) and straight-to-DVD horror flicks (James Isaac’s “Skinwalkers”). That means that, assuming the four or five template-based paranormal blogs that feature excitable Skinwalker posts aren’t written by defecting Navajo tribesmen (a fairly safe bet), it’s difficult to separate the authentic Skinwalker lore from the hyperactive Native American fan fic of cable doc-obsessed Fox Mulder wannabes. For every believable, richly folkloric Navajo Skinwalker legend, there are two or three stories about this one time really late at night when a crazy manimal totally attacked someone (I swear, it happened to my cousin’s friend).

According to some (supposed) Navajo legends, during the Long Walk, when the U.S. government forced over 9,000 Navajos to take a 300-mile trudge to newly established reservation land near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, the Skinwalkers were the first to reach the destination. As Navajo women keeled over in the heat, and exhausted men struggled with unconscious children, Skinwalking witches simply transformed into coyotes and crows, which easily sprinted or flew all the way to the reservation. Despite the Skinwalkers’ traditionally evil nature, they are distinctly Navajo and, therefore, proved vital to the preservation of Navajo heritage in the wake of the cultural upheaval brought on by external forces.

Granted, there are plenty of Navajo tales that portray Skinwalkers in a more traditionally antagonistic light. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find a non-Native Skinwalker story that offered anything but a watered-down cocktail of mystery and terror. They essentially play out like this:

One night a New Mexico state trooper was patrolling the desert around a Navajo reservation. Suddenly, he noticed a strange shape rushing up

alongside his car. The shape resolved into a hideous creature that ran as fast as the officer’s sedan could accelerate. The monster kept pace with the trooper for miles before finally dropping back and disappearing into the darkness. To this day, the officer refuses to patrol that accursed stretch of land.

The same non-native America that repackaged Native American art as kitschy fetish crafts and airbrushed paintings of wolves has turned Skinwalkers, who have a uniquely dynamic relationship with their origin culture, into generic monsters that lurk in the shadows and jump out at passing victims.

And I don’t think that’s a negative a thing.

For decades Native Americans have fought to retain their unique heritage and identities in the face of an ever homogenizing American culture. For most countries – countries with separate and independent geographies – it’s a low stakes game. Germanic tradition, for example, can be assimilated into America’s aggregate culture without losing its physical roots in Germany, or its emotional and intellectual roots in the Germans that still reside there. Native Americans only have America, and most of that was taken from them. The borders they do have – both geographical and cultural – are shrinking. The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers, and so the cable doc-obsessed Fox Mulder wannabes think of the beings as mystical native werewolves – feral and savage, or magic and prescient, or sexy and strong. Cold. Uni-dimensional. Non-dynamic. Inhuman.

The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers, and so the Fox Mulder wannabes are ignorant and xenophobic and maybe even mildly racist. But these things – ignorance, xenophobia, racism – build boundaries between people and cultures. These things strengthen borders.

During the Long Walk, the white men let the Skinwalkers charge on, unmolested, toward Fort Sumner because they saw them as animals. Because they didn’t recognize them for what they truly were – scouts and emissaries; patriarchs and magicians; Navajo. Perhaps today the Native Americans depend on white men to sell cheap headdresses and inauthentic drums and synthetic dream catchers, to make terrible straight-to-DVD horror movies, so all eyes are looking down at cash registers or through camera lenses while, unnoticed, a flock of crows passes by overhead.

In Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel Andromeda Strain (and subsequent film and recent TV mini-series) the premise is about an extra-terrestrial microorganism that threatens to wipe humanity off the planet through truly horrific blood clotting. It was an interesting take on the threat from outer space scenario.

So if we earthbound humans have to worry about space organisms turning our blood into dust, what do astronauts on long term space missions have to stress out about? According to a report in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology (via PopSci): Earthborn bacteria mutating into killer diseases.

It turns out that bacteria that we’ve evolved pretty good defenses for could overwhelm our immune systems if we’re cooped up together on long term space voyages. So add that to the already growing list of space hazards including radiation, zero-g bone loss, space madness and your holodeck trying to kill you.

Mutant Bacteria Are Likely to Threaten Future Space Travelers | Popular Science

Want to meet up with some of the folks behind Weird Things? Plan on being in South Florida on Saturday? Want to pay your respect to Carl Sagan? Meet James Randi, Phil Plait and others?

Then meet us at Carl Sagan day at Broward College this Saturday, November 7th.

Website: Carl Sagan Day

Can’t make it there? We’ll be live streaming it. Details to follow…

We are still unsure of the exact details on where but on the Weirdest Thing in the World chat today at 5:30 p.m. we are going to announce the official final line-up of celebrity word donors for our big Halloween Houdini Seance.

Other than that we’ll go over some of our weirdest stories of the week and maybe even have a little mini-challenge to find the Weirdest Element of Houdini’s Life.

Got a suggestion or a topic you want us to touch on, email JustinRobertYoung@Gmail.

It all goest down today at 5:30 p.m. EST on the Weirdest Thing In The World live chat. Believe…

Smoking Hills of Centralia

How is started is unclear, but one thing is certain: it never stopped. The town of Centralia, PA is now the least populated in all of Pennsylvania, with an estimated population of seven individuals. In 1962, the town boasted close to 1000 residents, and they had their own landfill in the hills above town. Stories vary, but at some point, a fire started in the dump – a fairly common and sometimes desired event. But Centralia is located in the heart of Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region, and an exposed seam in the dump caught fire and spread underground.

While a fire burning underground may not seem like a big deal, it had a big effect. Over the years, people began to notice strange things… basements were warm in the winter, road maintenance was increasing, and there were patches where snow would melt quickly. One gas station attendant was testing fuel levels and was surprised when the dipstick came up hot. He lowered a thermometer and was astonished to find a reading of 171ºF.

In the 1980’s, a boy was playing in his backyard only to have hell open up beneath him. A four foot wide hole some 150 feet deep engulfed him, though he was lucky enough to grab on to some roots where his cousin could reach down and save him. A few more feet, and he would have been overcome by the intense heat and noxious gases. How hot? Hotter than the planet Mercury at over 1000ºF.

When the highway started to buckle and smolder (it is now completely abandoned, with an awkward detour as you travel by Centralia), the state came in and declared eminent domain, forcing residents to move to nearby towns. Though nearly all of the town’s structure were razed, some folks refused to move, claiming that the government was after the estimated $1,000,000,000 in coal beneath the town.

If that was the government’s goal, they’d better hurry. Though an estimated $50,000,000 has been spent trying to fight the fires, they’re still burning strong. There is a constant mist over the town visible for miles, and residents from other towns fear that eventually, the fire will spread to them.

Abandoned PA Route 61 Continues to Burn

You can drive through Centralia today, though you’ll see only empty streets and maybe some smoking pipes sticking out of the ground. The adventurous may even travel down the smoking highway, as Alison Smith and I (foolishly) did last September.

And for you Silent Hill fans out there – it’s true. Centralia is the basis for the video game series, though we found no haunted schools or malevolent ghoulies.

The real stuff was scary enough.

It was June 6, 1822, on Mackinac (Big Turtle) Island, in Lake Huron. 18-year old Alexis St. Martin was working at a fur trading depot, when an accidental musket shot tore a hole through his ribs and stomach, exposing his viscera. Several ribs were broken, his lungs and diaphragm were damaged, and a hole was torn into his actual stomach. William Beaumont, MD was summoned from nearby Fort Mackinac and attended to the boy’s wounds.

It was a serious case. Though the lad was stabilized – bleeding stopped and no signs of infection – there was a very practical problem with digestion: the food he ate came out of the hole in his side. For weeks, he could obtain no nutrition from anything ate, forcing the doctor to give him nutritive enemas in order to sustain life.

In time, the addition of straps allowed the fistula to heal and digestion returned to as normal a state as could be expected. However, the hole though his abdomen and into his stomach never closed fully. In fact, the walls of the stomach fused with the exterior skin, creating a permanent window into Alexis’ digestive system.

At the time, almost nothing was known of digestion. Food went in, waste came out, and somehow in the middle nutrients were extracted. Dr. Beaumont saw an opportunity. In what would certainly be considered an ethical violation in modern times, Beaumont got Alexis to agree to be his servant. His role would include chopping wood, fetching bundles, and allowing Dr. Beaumont to experiment on him in rather unique ways.

The doctor was a man of science, and lost no opportunity to learn as much as he could. He tied bits of string to food, and lowered into the hole in Alexis’ side. After a time, he would pull the food back out and observe its condition. Some food was left in longer or given longer pieces of string. Much probing and measurement occurred, not only with fingers and instruments, but also with the Dr.’s tongue. He would taste the wound to determine it’s “sourness” and thus it’s alkalinity, with a more sour taste indicating a lower pH and higher acid content.

Beaumont would take copious notes, and reflect upon his observations. While they may seem quaint to us now (Beaumont wondered how food was separated into different components, and why animal blood was digested as all, as it should have just been transported to the arteries whole by his logic), his writings formed the basis for all we know about digestion today. Thanks to the wonders of Google, his magnum opus, Experiments and Observations of the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion is available online in full.

In a strange twist of fate, the damaged Alexis St. Martin outlived the doctor by 10 years, finally succumbing not from his wounds, but from old age at 78 years. The good doctor only lived to be 68, having died from a fall on icy stairs. We owe both men a debt of gratitude for furthering modern science. As a side note, similar experiments continue. It is fairly commonplace for such windows to placed in cows to observe the process of rumination, as can be seen in this YouTube video.

The Indian Flying Fox Bat has the largest recorded wingspan in the world, sometimes stretching up to two meters. It was selected as the Weirdest Thing In The Sky during our Tinychat competition last week. Stay tuned for this week’s category.

Thanks to everyone for playing!

Click AFTER THE JUMP for a video of it eating some fruit at the Singapore zoo.

Penn Bullock reports:

George Adamski is one of the original, pioneering Ufologists. In 1946, while watching a meteor shower (when lights tend to streak through the night sky), Adamski and his friends noticed a cluster of lights in formation that they immediately identified as an alien mothership. Again that year, at the same California campgrounds, Adamski purported to take a photograph of a “cigar-shaped” mothership sailing in front of the moon. In 1950, the Caribbean island nation of Grenada put that photo on a stamp commemorating “1950: The Year of the UFO.”

Once a hang-out for flying saucers, the campgrounds where Adamski made the sightings have become a magnet for Japanese tourists.

Before Adamski died in 1962, leaving behind a rich legacy of UFO research, he may have served as a crucial interlocutor between an extraterrestrial civilization and world leaders on Earth. In October 1961, Adamski is purported to have gained access to President John F. Kennedy; he passed on to the President an message from his alien contacts warning of an impending world crisis. Exactly a year later to the month, in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out. Some maintain that the alien prophesy, which Adamski conveyed to John F. Kennedy, prevented World War III.

Even more mysteriously, there have been suggestions that the aliens’ letter to Kennedy also contained an invitation to meet with them in California. According to Phantoms and Monsters, a website that details these matters, “there is important circumstantial evidence that President Kennedy accepted the invitation.”

The burning question Weirdthings is left to ponder: did little green men shoot Kennedy and frame Oswald? They would’ve been camouflaged perfectly on the grassy knoll.

Here is a snippet of a documentary about Adamski’s purported meetings with the pope, in which he delivered a gold medal possibly manufactured by aliens:

Check out this video of British graffiti artist Banksy’s latest New York exploit. The shop keeper actor is a great touch.

Here’s a link to the official site for the shop: Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grille

This is the highest quality video we could find to embed, for a higher quality video visit the BBC.

The Fiandaca family called firefighters to their home in Sicily yesterday as temperatures emanating from the floors of their home reached boiling point. According to Maria Fiandaca, the floors had been heating up all week and suddenly became too hot to handle, the surfaces were steaming.

Italian experts have so far been unable to explain the source causing the house to heat, though Sicily is home to continuously erupting Mt. Etna and plenty of volcanic and geothermal activity, though locals would prefer to think the hot floor has paranormal origins. Did someone smell sulfur?

Acclaimed paranormal investigator Alison Smith, has agreed to join our merry band of ‘Weird Thugs’ as we take on Coral Castle this Saturday, May 9. That’s right, a real, live woman at a paranormal investigation, who would have thunk it?

Read on about Alison and the investigation after THE JUMP…

Alison Smith is the Founder of Skeptical Analysis of the Paranormal Society. She is a former private investigator, and is currently employed as a Research Assistant with the James Randi Educational Foundation. Her articles on the paranormal and ghost hunting have been featured in eSkeptic, Skeptic Report, and the newsletter of the Secular Student Alliance. She has lectured on the paranormal at Dragon*Con, meetings of the DFW Ghost Hunters, and is scheduled to appear at The Amaz!ng Meeting 7. Interviews with Alison have been featured on Darkness on the Edge of Town radio show, the Skepticality Podcast, and the TANK Podcast.

On top of all that, she was the hot chick on TruTv’s ‘Door to the Dead’ pilot ghost hunting show.

-For more information and to find out how you can join us on our Coral Castle investigation click here.

-I have been giving some thought to what to call Weird Things enthusiasts…Weirdthingers? I finally came up with ‘Weird Thugs’ and tried it for the first time in this post, lemme know what you think.

When we were little kids, we all asked the question: If I swallow a seed, will it sprout and start growing inside my stomach? Only to be reassured by our parents that no such thing could ever happen. No one ever thought to ask about inhaling a seed. The above x-ray was taken of Artyom Sidorkin’s lung. Surgeons operated on what they believed was a tumor, when they finally got sight of the cancerous growth, they were shocked to find that it was a 5 centimeter piece of Fir Tree. Estimating that it was far too large to pass through the air passageways leading to the lungs, they came to the realization that he must have inhaled a spore, which germinated and started growing in his soft, spongy lung tissue. Sidorkin was just relieved that it wasn’t cancer.

A previously overlooked planet has been found hiding in an 11 year old Hubble Telescope image. Using new techniques that more accurately gauge the distribution of scattered light given off by close stars, patches that appeared as blank space years ago now could yield exciting results. More hidden planets could be discovered as more old Hubble photos are examined using the new technique.

According to Dr. Valery Bebik, a professor and deputy principal at Ukraine University:

”It is quite possible that Buddha belonged to the Scythian nation of Budins that lived on the territory of Ancient Ukraine during the first or the second millennium BC. The name of the nation is still preserved in the names of Ukraine’s contemporary settlements-Seredina-Buda, Buda, and some others,”

This head turning statement is not the first Bedik has made in recent years. Bedik, who also heads up the All-Ukrainian Association of Political Sciences, claims Jesus for Ukraine as well. Are two of the most popular spiritual leaders of all time actually Ukrainian, or does Bedik have nationalism on the brain?

-An article on Dr. Bebik’s comments.

Sarsen Stones, like the ones pictured above in Avebury, have been found in an unlikely place. A housing development project in Swindon, UK, has unearthed what appear to be sarsen stones. If they do turn out to be the real deal then this is an important archeological find. Are they natural, or are they man made? Find out more at Archaeo News.

-An article about the Swindon Stones.

A big cat, caught on tape, has been attacking livestock in Poland, freaking out local farmers and residents. Poland doesn’t have much in the way of big cat populations, so a mystified group from the Krakau Zoo took hair samples from dead animals to determine the beast’s origins.

Turns out it’s a Snow Leopard. You might recognize the Snow Leopard from the BBC Series ‘Planet Earth’, in which a camera crew spent three months in the mountains of Afghanistan to capture seven seconds of footage of the endangered felid. We bet the BBC team is going to be miffed this week when they find out that some Pole with a camcorder got as much footage as they did without risking life and limb.

photo credit: newagecrap

So how in the world did a Snow Leopard, indigenous to the mountainous Central Asian region, wind up so far away from home?

The above image shows the Snow Leopard’s natural trekking grounds, this particular Snow Leopard is roughly 2500 miles out of its element. So we’re guessing it either walked a very long way without being spotted up until now, or it escaped from somewhere. There are over 230 captive Snow Leopards in Europe and here at weirdthings.com, we’d like to think that someone at an Eastern European zoo is too embarrassed to tell their boss that they lost the leopard.

Our thoughts go out to the frightened farmers of Poland, while local radio continues to give big cat warnings, telling people to stay in doors after dark.

Time for a little weird physics. What makes supersolids weird? Well according to sciencedaily.com “a supersolid, is an exotic state of matter that behaves simultaneously as a solid and a friction-free superfluid.” This means that supersolids are “defined by two seemingly contradictory properties. The atoms inside it are arranged in a crystalline, regular pattern, like any solid, but at the same time, the atoms are able to flow through the supersolid in an unrestricted way.” Meaning we might be able to use them to create all sorts of insane quantum materials previously unknown to mankind. The implications are mind boggling. Scientist Ludwig Mathey invites us to imagine a friction-free supersolid washing machine:

“If you add more clothing to a spinning washing machine, you increase the mass of its rim, and the machine needs to exert a greater force to make the wheel reverse direction…But in a supersolid washing machine, some of the clothes would mysteriously hover in space, staying stationary as the washer spins and making it easier for the wheel to reverse direction. Moreover, these hovering, frictionless clothes would form a predictable pattern—such as frictionless socks alternating with frictionless shirts—just as atoms arrange themselves in a repeating pattern in a crystal.”

We want one. But hold on to your levitating socks, supersolid washing machines are still a dream of science fiction (such a beautiful dream). The latest research going on suggests that the key may lie in ultra cold rubidium atoms. Check out this article from sciencenews.org to find out more.

We are pleased to announce that the 5th World Congress on Urotherapy is coming up in November, 2009! For those of you not in the uriknow, Urotherapy or Urine Therapy is an alternative medicine that uses human and other animal urine as treatment for a wide range of illnesses.

Modern medical science contends that there is no evidence to support the conclusion that Urine has any medicinal or therapeutic application whatsoever. Still, many Uropaths claim that where there’s steam, there’s curative urine. The mission statement page of the World Congress states that Urine Therapy is one of mankind’s oldest medicines:

The word URO comes from the Greek that means urine and Therapy means treatment. The Urotherapy has always existed, is the oldest therapy of humanity and one of the first therapies created by God, it is older than the Chinese Medicine. One of the oldest therapies utilized by man and applied with wisdom by mystic and intuition. The Urotherapy was born in all Countries at the same time. In the Old Testament it is mentioned in Proverbs chapter 5 versus 15 thru 18th. These remedies are written in the oldest written book known as The “Gootour Schastar” from 6000 years B.C., with recopies, medications, treatments based on drinking or applying his or her urine. THE UROTHERAPY has always existed, it is a method commonly known as Urinetherapy to different cultures long times past such as the Egyptian ferrous, Tibet Lamas, Greeks and Romans.

Though humans have been imbibing their own urine and rubbing it on their skin to cure every ailment under the sun for centuries, Urine Therapy still enjoys wide followings in many countries. India, for example, is home to popular medications such as Dr. Jain’s Cow Urine Therapy and former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai credits the regular therapeutic usage of urine with his longevity.

Flying in the face of the conventional medical establishment the site boldly proclaims the scientific principle of Urotherapy:

It is the realization of immunologic test of a fix surface, it revels the simultaneous presence of antibodies in the blood. For the patient that has a determinate disease, at the same time you may find specific antigen in the urine. The antigen is that which the patient eliminates in his urine, it is a protein non-toxic, produced by the body itself. When a daily intake of this urine is taken, the immune system of the body reacts and “learns” to combat the external agents, along with this it is very efficient in the elimination of cancer cells.

…..??????????

According to the site, Urine Therapy can be used to cure everything from Cancer to Diabetes. So if urine therapy sounds like the thing for you go join this years organizer, the appropriately named Dr. Ryosuke Uryu, and his band of merry lecturers in Guadelajara. Or if you can’t afford the trip, apply the experimental method at home and try it out (tell us about it and send pictures). Who knows? Maybe what you need to cure your next hangover isn’t a cold shower, but a golden shower.

Magic inventor and legend Jim Steinmeyer has finally released his book on supernaturalist Charles Fort. I’ve just ordered my copy from Amazon and look forward to reading it. Link

It would appear the recent night time light show that reminded some of Close Encounters of the Third kind may have been the work of a man with some balloons and road flares. Way to go genius. Real UFO fakers use light sticks…
Link

Flickr member meshmar2 took this interesting photo of what would appear to be an unidentified flying object at Walt Disney World’s Epcot….until he went ahead and identified it for us (thanks killjoy!). Link