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]