This treehopper insect has developed an absolutely insane helmet that looks like an aggressive species of ant. There are more of these over at New Scientist.
[New Scientist via io9]
Florida is where the magic happens. Also, don’t turn your back on the wildlife.
[Jalopnik]
Henry Wu: You’re implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will… breed?
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I’m simply saying that life, uh… finds a way.
Scientists looking to create a species of all-female lizards have finally succeeded. An origin of a species like this has never been directly observed.
“It’s recreating the events that lead to new species,” said cell biologist Peter Baumann of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, whose new species is described May 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It relates to the question of how these unisexual species arise in the first place.”
Female-only species that reproduce by cloning themselves — a process called parthenogenesis, in which embryos develop without fertilization — were once considered dead-end evolutionary flukes. But in the last decade, unisexuality has been found in more than 80 groups of fish, amphibian and reptiles. It might not be such a dead end after all.
Peter, the kind of control you’re attempting is not possible. If there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories. It crashes through barriers. Painfully, maybe even.. dangerously, but and… well, there it is.
Imagine an ant so large it could tear your flesh. Now imagine an entire colony of them descending upon you in your sleep.
You wake up almost instantly as the shifting weight of a cadre of insect killers disturbs your dreams. Terror creeps quickly as you come back to the terrifying reality.
You brush off as many as you can, frantically running your hands over your arms and legs while stamping madly on the ground. But your feet can’t crush these resilient bastards. They regroup and circle around your position. This time they try and climb you from the back of your legs.
This is how you die. Cold. Alone. Mutilated by a creature no longer alive in your native time.
Now: be happy you didn’t live 50 million years ago, when these things really existed.
At about 2 inches (5 cm) long, the specimen is a “monstrously big ant,” said Bruce Archibald, a paleoentomologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who reported the discovery today (May 3) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Though fossils of loose giant ant wings have been found before in the United States, this is the first known full-body specimen.
Massive ants of this size have been found before but not in America. It remains a mystery how they arrived there.
A very careful analysis from Loren Coleman says that Sasquatch and Osama Bin Laden were most likely around the same height. Spoiler Alert: they were both a littler shorter than we thought.
Also, Bigfoot survived Osama Bin Laden. That makes me really, really excited.
Hwang, a 66-years-old fisherman living in the near area, said he has never seen anything like this in his whole life and that the fish was tied with ropes when it was first found.
Many people have flocked to see this strange specimen since its discovery, although its rotting corpse already emits a foul smell.
[International Business Times]
Seriously. The whole album. Boom box. Center court at the most famous arena in the world. Sasquatch.
[YouTube]
Andrew describes a harrowing trip into the woods where he comes face to face with a real Chupacabra. The Boys get into an extremely nerdy screaming match about the relative merits of going to Mars or building a Space Elevator. Justin is delighted by the exploits of a human freak of nature whose run up and down Mount Kilimanjaro in only shorts.
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Space X released a video today showing their plans and capabilities for their Dragon space capsule. Besides the ability to ferry crew to and from orbit and to the International Space Station, Elon Musk, head of Space X has said that the capsule itself would be capable of using its built-in rockets to land on any solid planet, moon or asteroid in the Solar System. He described the heat shielding as being rated for “Martian and lunar” velocities.
Landing is one thing. What about a return trip, some have asked? If you look closely at the video Space X released you can get some idea of what they may have planned for a trip to Mars.
In the screen grab you can see the Dragon crew capsule in the foreground. In back of it looks like a crew habitat made from the stage of a rocket. Further in back you can see a platform with what looks like an ascent vehicle perched upright. This solves the ascent question.
Space X has talked publicly and informally about its plans for the future of space exploration. Besides the forthcoming Falcon 9 Heavy lift rocket, that would be the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V, they’ve also talked about a Falcon X Heavy and Falcon XX vehicles with 250,000 pounds of cargo capacity.
From the video it looks like we can see three of the four components you would need for a Mars round trip. The Dragon capsule as a lander for the astronauts. The crew habitat visible in the background and the ascent vehicle on a platform further out. Not shown is the space vehicle that would be used to bring astronauts from Earth orbit to Martian orbit.
If you look at Space X’s plans for future rocket engine technology, there are plans for motors that would be more than capable of the return trip. The one thing we haven’t seen is what their plans are for the spacecraft itself. It’d be curious to see what Elon Musk and Space X think this would look like. Let’s hop for more videos.
Workers unearthed a skeleton from under the floor of an “sinister house” and the first thing that crossed their minds was “Chupacabra”. It apparently has a cat-like head and a rat-like tail and is terrifying the neighborhood.
“In the city of Pucón, Chile, workers were stopped dead in their tracks as they accidentally dug up a bizarre skeleton. The remains are said to be out of this world. Described as having a cat-like head and the tail of a rat, the remains were accompanied by other smaller skulls of local rodents.”
[La Cuarta via GhostTheory]
SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) is out of money and is no longer listening for alien signals. Aliens, you win this round; you may commence snooping around the solar system and broadcasting at will.
In an April 22 letter to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that last week the array was put into “hibernation,” safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate government support.
The timing couldn’t be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized — and some will be in the “habitable zone,” where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it.
Last week we had the very emo Black Eyed Kids which are apparently terrorizing the suburbs of America. Today we hear about a much more flamboyant breed of paranormal beings with seemingly more benign powers of influence.
The Glow Men of Chile. According to Albert Urquiza, a holistic healer, he ran into one of the Glow Men while on the way to meet a client. He described them as being tall, fair skinned and clad in phosphorescent clothing.
He explained that he approached them, thinking these were the patients. He greeted them and they did so in kind. To his surprise, one of them asked him what was his line of work. Urquiza immediately understood that these were not his patients. He explained that he worked in the field of quantum healing. “When I told him what I did, one of them – the speaker – smiled a smile as broad as his eyes. In seconds, [his eyes] began to light up impressively. As his face lit up, he placed his hands on my shoulders, on my head, and a tremendously powerful agency began to emerge. It only took seconds, but was very intense,” he explained, adding: “when he pulled away his hands, he fixed his gaze on me and said: “Welcome to the community.”
Urquiza says the pair then vanished.
Unmentioned is what powers the Glow Man invested him with. If you guys were to guess, what would it be?
Recently declassified documents have stirred up one of my absolute favorite conspiracy crossbreeds: JFK was killed as part of a UFO coverup.
More specifically, a new book claims to have found actual paper trail on communication Kennedy had with the USSR about UFO sightings.
“One of his concerns was that a lot of these UFOs were being seen over the Soviet Union and he was very concerned that the Soviets might misinterpret these UFOs as U.S. aggression, believing that it was some of our technology,” Lester told AOL News.
“I think this is one of the reasons why he wanted to get his hands on this information and get it away from the jurisdiction of NASA so he could say to the Soviets, ‘Look, that’s not us, we’re not doing it, we’re not being provocative. In fact, just to show you that it’s not us, what do you think about us working together on the exploration of space?'” Lester added.
Of course many sightings of UFOs on American soil have been widely rumored to be low-flying Soviet air craft. Assuming the same might be true in reverse, was ol’ JFK trying to throw an alien smokescreen in the eyes of our Cold War nemesis?
[AOL News]
This is from last year, so it is not new information or breaking news, but I am just hearing about this and it is fantastic. There are poisonous birds that are flying around on this planet. The Hooded Pitohui (Pitohui dichrous), Variable Pitohui (Pitohui kirhocephalus), and Brown Pitohiu (Pitohui ferrugineus) birds from New Guinea have a neurotoxin in their skin and feathers which causes numbness and tingling when handled. This neurotoxin is identical to the toxin from poison dart frogs and in high enough doses COULD KILL YOU.
“The community says that the monster changes shape while you are looking at it,” Warrant Officer Zandisile Nelani said.
He said one man had reported it changed from a man wearing a suit into a pig and then into a bat. The creature had been sighted on a number of occasions near a church and only appeared at night, Nelani said.
[i0l]
Thanks to Weird Things reader @BobCalli on Twitter for throwing this our way.