Another sinkhole has opened in Guatemala, right under a woman’s bed. While she was sleeping. The sound of a gateway to hell being opened under her bed is what woke her up.
About a million things are terrifying about this. A few feet to the side and poor Inocenta might have plunged into the sinkhole as she stepped out of bed. A few feet wider and it could have swallowed her whole bed. Or just the fact that in Guatemala, you could be walking down the street or eating at a nice restaurant one moment and find yourself devoured by the earth the next.
Wired has catalogued the worst diseases you can catch underground. They are, in no particular order:
Histoplasmosis – also known as Cave Disease or Spelunker’s Lung, is caused by the fungus Histoplasma capsulatum and primarily affects the lungs. It is fatal if untreated, and hey, it grows in soil contaminated with bat droppings.
Rabies – Bats make up a quarter of the rabid animals reported to the CDC. Enough said.
Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever – Found in equatorial African caves, this cousin of Ebola incubates in fruit bats that live in caves and mines.
Leptospirosis – Also known as Rat Catcher’s Yellow, this is caused by infection with bacteria of the genus Leptospira which grows in water contaminated with the urine of bats and rats. Do not drink cave water.
Cave Fever – Also known as relapsing fever, this disease comes from getting bitten by infected ticks.
I think the real lesson here is that bats are filled with disease.
For a casual tourist, like the 500,000 annual visitors to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, walking through a cave is essentially as safe as walking down the street. It is the sport cavers, those who crawl through muck and mud into little-explored crevices, that must protect themselves from things living on bats, rodents, ticks and other bugs, Igreja said.
Igreja surveys the classic and emerging cave-borne diseases in the June 10 Wilderness and Environmental Medicine. We’ve collected a gallery of the offending cave fauna, along with tips about how to keep sickness away next time you’re slithering among the stalagmites. Note: None of these diseases are exclusive to caves. Strange bugs can strike almost anywhere.
‘It’s like nothing we have ever seen, it almost looks pre-historic,’ he told the Sun.
Curled up by the foot of sand dunes was the 30ft-long body of the unidentified animal with head, tail and teeth all discernible.
Experts are now examining the pictures with one suggesting it could be the body of a whale.
A spokesman for the Natural History Museum said: ‘We have spoken to one of our mammals curators, and they have confirmed the animal is probably a long-finned pilot whale – Globicephala melas.
Scientists have announced the discovery of an entire new order of insects that has recently been excavated in South America dating from the Lower Cretaceous period, between 146 and 100 million years ago. Both adults and larval stages of the fossilized insects were found and they have been named Coxoplectoptera.
“They are believed to be a type of mayfly that is now extinct, but their appearance is perplexing as the adult wing shape is more like that of a dragonfly while the legs resemble those of a praying mantis.
Meanwhile, the larva looks like a freshwater shrimp with large antennae and multiple legs, and probably lived as ambush predators in river beds, partly buried in the mud.”
71-year-old stonecutter / bamboo weaver Chen Dejun drinks gasoline. And he isn’t dead. Apparently, he drinks it because it helps his chest pains from emphysema. Doctors theorize that he must have developed an immunity to gasoline.
71-year-old stonecutter and bamboo weaver Chen Dejun has been guzzling the stuff for half his life to quell his chest pains. But he hasn’t died.
Can we just break that down for a second? Dejun says he drinks about 3 to 3.5 liters of kerosene and/or gasoline a month. Over 42 years, that means he’s sucked down around 1.5 tons of fuel in his lifetime. That’s about 535.5 gallons, enough to fill up a Corvette almost 30 times, according to calculations by Jalopnik’s editor Ray Wert.
That is not a ghost owl. Apparently an owl hit a window so hard that it left a perfect owl print behind. Authorities state the owl survived but that the experience was “uncomfortable”.
“This would have been very uncomfortable for the bird but thankfully it looks like it survived as Mr and Mrs Arnold couldn’t find it anywhere close by. Sadly, many birds aren’t so lucky.”
Residents near Gainesville, GA have reported loud booms and streaks across the sky. Dobbins Air Force Base said they do not know anything about it, but they are looking into the issue.
AccessNorthGa.com received calls between 10:00 and 11:00, the first about 10:40 from the McEver Road/Browns Bridge Road area. The caller said it shook her house and wondered if it might have been a sonic boom, caused by a jet breaking the sound barrier.
A second caller, a few minutes later, said he was sitting by his pool on Mountain View Road, which is off McEver, and saw a “streak across the sky,” followed by the loud noise, leading to some speculation that it was a sonic boom caused by a meteor entering the earth’s atmosphere.
Lt. Col. James Wilson, a spokesman for Dobbins Air Reserve Base, said the noise was probably not caused by a plane approaching or leaving the base, which is in Marietta. He said the Dobbins flight schedule does not indicate any aircraft would have been passing through the area at that time.
This video from the 2009 NHL Western Conference finals was just recently posted and even though there must be some explanation for what is going on here, I have yet to figure out how he did it. I am pretty sure this is why Chicago lost.
A tomb containing several Stone Age generations of human remains dating back up to 5,000 years, along with a few otter skeletons of the same era, have been located on an island in Northern Scotland. The Tomb of the Otters, signifies the most important neolithic find this region has seen in over 30 years.
So, why are there otter bones amongst the final resting place of so many humans? Apparently the tomb wasn’t used very often and someone forgot to close the door when they left.
“It suggests the tomb was not entirely sealed and that otters were trampling in and out a lot” throughout the tomb’s use, (county archaeologist for Orkney, Julie) Gibson said.
“For that to occur, you must think there was a gap of a year or two” between grave visits or burials.
The site was discovered when a resident attempted to level an area of his property to give himself a better ocean view. You know, to see the otters.
Bolungarvik, Iceland is under attack by unexplained dirt and rocks that is raining from the sky. While government officials are looking for a rational explanation, the locals are convinced that a recent project that used dynamite on the land has thrown nature, and the elves out of balance. The townspeople are trying to appease the elves with songs and prayers.
The town of Bolungarvik has been experiencing a rash of unexplained rocks and dirt that rain from the sky, bombarding the town and scaring its residents. Although the local government believes a rational explanation can be attributed to the falling debris, locals believe that supernatural forces are behind the attacks. Elves and “hidden folks” are to blame.
Recent construction of a new avalanche defence barrier required the dynamiting of local land, something said to be a big no-no in the land of elves. In the folklore, any disruption to the harmony of nature must be balanced out and carried out respectfully. I know that in Iceland, some people believe in the powers of ley lines and they are said to be used by elves, gnomes and fairies. Obstruction to these lines or paths could bring havoc to a person’s life.
A California hunter is fearing for his livelihood after killing a mother Sasquatch and one of her children on a desolate road. According to web rumors culled by BigfootSightings.com, the man is worried that the killing violates his California hunting license which strictly regulates what can and cannot be killed. Bigfoot is nowhere to be found on the list of animals appropriate to kill. Furthermore, new DNA evidence about the elusive Bigfoot could prove the animals to be partially human which could open him up to murder charges.
The story is that a hunter in Plumas County, CA was threatened by a female Bigfoot, old enough to have gray hair. She was, according to him, blocking the road and making gestures that made him feel threatened, so he got out of his vehicle and shot her.
Then he says there were two young Sasquatches in the forest nearby, obviously upset by the female’s death. The hunter is reported to have shot and killed one of them.
The story continues that there were two other hunters with him. One became hysterical and they took away the rifle and wouldn’t let him shoot the third Bigfoot.
Oleg Kirzhakov began November 2nd, 1989 as a Soviet-era, long-haul trucker in Mother Russia. He ended it as best friends to a race of aliens that shared his love for Bigfoot and promised to never be farther than 15 seconds away from him should he ever get into trouble.
En route from the northern territory of Arkhangelsk to capital city Moscow, he and his partner Nikolai stumbled upon what looked to be roadside construction equipment. What they found was something far more important. It was a UFO, complete with a sheen metal exterior, a electronic field that cut off electricity to Oleg’s rig and a telekinetic bond that projected a screen into Oleg’s field of vision so they could communicate.
After a bizarre request for matches, which Oleg fetched only to have a black “mass” come off the ship to retrieve, the curious truck driver decided it was time to get some answers. He boarded the ship.
The recess was a three- dimensional information screen, on which I was shown the interior of another sister ship, with the same moving ‘masses’ (during the demonstration, the two ‘masses’ in our ship were motionless).
Then, they showed a ship in space, among the stars, and at the end of the demonstration, they showed the presenter of a Soviet television program called Vremya.
Oleg couldn’t help but ask a few more questions:
“I asked question after question. The answers I received were heard in my head before I saw them on the screen. I asked, ‘What kind of ship am I on now? What kind of propulsion system do you use to make it fly?’
In response I was told that this spacecraft was a scout ship and used electromagnetic fields to fly. I was also told that they were studying our planet, which they need as a springboard to the future.
In response to my question ‘Do you have any connection with Bigfoot?’, they said, ‘Yes’ and added that they watch Bigfoot continuously.
You love Bigfoot? I love Bigfoot! We totally need to hang out more! When… will… I see you guys again…?
“Then I asked, ‘Is it possible to see you once again?’ They said, ‘If you are in danger we will find you within 15 seconds’.
Oleg de-boarded and got back in his truck while the ship enveloped itself into a ball of light and silently shot to the stars.
A mutated bull shark was recently captured off the coast of Mexico in the Sea of Cortez. As if regular sharks aren’t bad enough. Actually, I really kind of hope that this is fake.
Lots of odd creatures come from the sea, and add to the list a one-eyed bull shark fetus that was removed from the body of its captured mother recently off La Paz, Mexico, in the Sea of Cortez.
A brief story about the shark is on the Pisces Sportfishing blog. Pete Thomas Outdoors shared the top image with two shark experts in California and both were skeptical at first, suggesting it was some kind of hoax.
One of them jokingly identified the species as a “Cycloptomus” because of a single eye — if it is, in fact, an actual eye — located just above the mouth.
But Tracy Ehrenberg, general manager at Pisces Sportfishing, has been in touch with renowned shark expert Felipe Galvan, who has seen the shark and has even produced a paper on the discovery.
A woman in Kazan, Russia was rushed to the hospital by her husband after reportedly suffering chest pains and collapsing. Doctors soon told her devastated husband the sad news, his wife was dead.
Family was called and preparations were made for the funeral.
But there was one very special guest in attendance: Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, the woman who had earlier received the death diagnosis and was currently surrounded by mourning family and friends praying for her soul to go to heaven.
Devastated husband Fagili Mukhametzyanov, 51, had been told his wife had died of a heart attack after she’d collapsed at home suffering from chest pains.
Mr Mukhametzyanov said: ‘Her eyes fluttered and we immediately rushed her back to the hospital but she only lived for another 12 minutes in intensive care before she died again, this time for good.
‘I am very angry and want answers. She wasn’t dead when they said she was and they could have saved her.’
Fisherman found a 23-foot long, dead squid floating about 12 miles off the Florida coast near Port Salerno. The fisherman hauled it ashore and donated the body to the Florida Museum of Natural History.
“We pulled up… thought it was something to fish on, a pallet or something like that. We looked at it, all three of us were like ‘holy mackerel,’ ” recalled Benz.
It turned out to be a 23-foot long giant squid. It’s a rare find in our waters. The main part of the body was about 11-feet long, but with its two long tentacles, it barely fit in the 23-foot boat Benz was riding in. But he knew they had to bring it ashore.
“Nobody believes a fisherman,” said Benz. “It didn’t seem it had been dead long, the tentacles were still moving and it was sticking to you when we got it in.
