CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

“Rick Sheridan was working in his garage when he heard gunshots. He went around the back of his house to a pond, where he saw three police officers. The three officers had spotted the gator and were lined up on the bank, shooting at the large reptile.”

No words.

[Fox 4 KC]

Brian demanding child wants a petting zoo to remember for a birthday party, with dangerous results. Andrew and Justin act the parts of Nazi researchers promising a dynamic new army which would only require training… and chew toys. Meanwhile, Brian debates getting gene therapy to appear manlier and the smartest computer in the world goes back to college.

PLUS! The first two chapters of Andrew Mayne’s new book Public Enemy Zero, as read by Justin is FREE at the end of the podcast!

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s new book Public Enemy Zero for only .99 at Amazon.com by clicking the image below!

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Conlangery

Picks:

Brian-

• The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin

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• In The Plex by Steven Levy

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• Contact (1997 film)

That bad mother above is the DEVIL WORM. CUE MUSIC

It was once thought that life could not live more than a few dozen feet below the ground. Those non-believers are now proven to the be foolish mortals the DEVIL WORM always knew them to be. CUE MORE MUSIC

The new nematode species—called Halicephalobus mephisto partly for Mephistopheles, the demon of Faustian legend—suggests there’s a rich new biosphere beneath our feet.

Before the discovery of the newfound worm at depths of 2.2. miles (3.6 kilometers), nematodes were not known to live beyond dozens of feet (tens of meters) deep. Only microbes were known to occupy those depths—organisms that, it turns out, may be the food of the 0.5-millimeter-long worm.

Evidence has even be found the DEVIL WORM has existed for over 12,000 years! Bow you dogs! Bow to DEVIL WORM! CUE THE MOST METAL MUSIC EVAR

[National Geographic]

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] Read the rest of this entry »

It’s called the Safe House. You get in via a retractible concrete drawbridge. All guests must be buzzed in from a safety zone before entering the home itself. It is the perfect humble abode for the young family terrified of being torn apart by zombies.

Built between 2005 and 2009, the house features Rubik’s Cube-type movable parts and folds in on itself completely at the end of the day to seal against outside threats.

“Every day the house acts in a similar way — it wakes up every morning to close up after dusk,” says architect Robert Konieczny of KWK Promes.

Wait? It’s on the outskirts of Poland? Even when it comes to a zombie holocaust you can’t violate the three rules of real estate: location, location, location.

[Fox News]

The wizards at Martin Aircraft are on the bleeding edge of commercial jet pack technology and they’ve broken yet another milestone: sending a jet pack a mile into the air.

In this remarkable video an unmanned unit takes off from the ground while being controlled by a helicopter. It reaches 5,000 feet before coming back to Earth on a parachute.

We’ve previously chronicled the badassery from Martin when they announced a waiting list for personal jet packs and when they first tested the remote controlled models.

[Kurzweil AI]

The lights have amazed enthusiasts and confounded researchers for decades. Many swear they are evidence of UFOs emerging from an underground facility in the mountains. One hypothesis posits it might be a cluster of macroscopic Coulomb crystals in a plasma produced by the ionization of air and dust by Alpha particles during radon decay in the dusty atmosphere.

Either way, it’s pretty odd. Here is an hour-long documentary talking about it. Thanks to Weird Things reader Ben from Norway.

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Part 5]

The origins are understood. The players are all of terrestrial stock. Yet if you don’t look at a picture of a young lady riding a stick pony around a professional rodeo course while be scored by grim faced judges and cheered by nervous parents and say to yourself, “that is weird,” you should probably stop reading the site.

The Davis County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse Junior Queen Contest of Farmington, UT was the victim of a rare equine herpes outbreak which has affected many Western states and cancelled all horse related activities in Utah. For those curious, equine herpes is spread through nasal secretions when horses nuzzle together.

So these young women to the track with their own gallop astride stick horses. Giddy-up.

[KSL.com]

This is actually a really horrible story. A vervet monkey was killed and burned in South Africa by a mob who was convinced it was a witch. Bonus awful points – the police helped out by shooting at the monkey.

It reported that the monkey wandered into the settlement last week Monday, May 23, and was pelted with stones, shot at by police, and then burnt to death.

Moswetsi was woken up by friends on Monday morning and told about the monkey. They said it was going around Kagiso “talking to people”.

Hopefully this is not foreshadowing for the monkeys if they ever actually do develop the ability to speak.

[Times Live]

As reported by KXLY in Spokane, WA. A woman going by the name Samantha caught the visual on her iPhone camera in Downriver Park.

On a scale from 1-10 with one being Total Fraud and 10 being Proof Positive, where do you rank the video above?

Reindeer have developed the ability to see the world in ultraviolet light since migrating to the Arctic 10,000 years-ago. Most mammals, aside from rodents and some species of bats, can only see the visible spectrum and the shorter wavelength ultraviolet light remains invisible. Also, aside from being unable to see ultraviolet light, it is also damaging to most eyes, causing snow blindness.

In dark conditions, they shone LED lights of different wavelengths, including UV, into the eyes of 18 anaesthetised reindeers while recording with an electrode whether nerves in the eye fired, indicating that the light had been seen. The UV light triggered a response in the eyes of all the reindeer.

The eyes of most mammals cannot cope with UV light because it carries enough energy to destroy their sensitive photoreceptors, permanently damaging vision. To prevent this happening we experience “snow blindness”: our corneas respond to UV light by becoming temporarily cloudy, preventing excess amounts of UV reaching and burning the retina.

“Why don’t reindeer, arctic fox, polar bears or arctic seals get snow blindness?” asks Jeffery. “Arctic mammals must have a completely different mechanism for protecting their retinas.”

[NewScientist]

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.

Andrew Mayne is one year older today, officially.

Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time with Mayne knows two emotions: an amazement that one man can be so multi-talented and a staggering frustration that one man can be so multi-talented. This year, he decided he wanted to be an author, more specifically a fiction author since he already has a robust library of non-fiction and instructional magic books.

So he sat down on a flight from Houston to Fort Lauderdale and on his iPad wrote out the beginnings of a story.

That story is the first chapter in his first fiction novella, The Grendel’s Shadow. It has been a fixture on the Amazon.com Science Fiction Adventure Top 100 since it’s release. The only reviews for it that aren’t five stars are four stars. Which is pretty cool.

Until you find out that he’s written four more books. Since the release of Grendel. On March 28th. Four of them. In less than two months. The two of them that I’ve read are very good.

Also, in his spacious downtime from that he put in the research and development to create and release a brilliant new utility Photosynthesis. For which there are only eight left to pre-order.

It’s not human.

Yes, Andrew is a year older. But does it really matter? He’s just going to conquer death anyway then write 60,000 words about it in 48 hours.

In all seriousness, this site doesn’t exist without him. In this context as a writer, I do not either.

Happy birthday, old friend.

A team of archaeologists from the University of Alabama in Birmingham used infra-red satellite cameras to locate evidence of 17 lost pyramids and thousands of ancient structures not visible to the naked eye. In addition to the pyramids, they also identified 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements.

Archaeologists on the ground have excavated several sites and confirmed there is something on them.

Ancient Egyptians used dense mud bricks to build their homes and temples, and the cameras were able to differentiate between that and the regular soil surrounding them.

[NY Daily News]