The boys each have to spend $500,000 in the most bizarre way possible leading to robotic carnage, bullets, Bigfoot, mint juleps and a very special visit from a King of Kings. Brian recoils when explained the concept of Necropants. Andrew tells tale of man who flew across the Grand Canyon using a rocket pack.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s new SciFi book The Grendel’s Shadow for only .99 at Amazon.com by clicking the image below!
Residents and officials of Bernards, New Jersey are left wondering what created a coffee table sized hole almost 2 feet deep and scattered debris for 100 feet. The police have ruled out explosives, meteorites, and the weather and of course nobody heard or saw anything.
“It’s just really, really weird,” said Jerry Vinski, director of nearby Raritan Valley Community College’s planetarium, who conducted tests on the site. “We dug around and couldn’t find anything. We used metal detectors because all meteors have metal in them, and we couldn’t find anything, large or small.”
They call them hot Jupiters. A series of gas giant planets in far off solar systems that appear to circle their star in two very peculiar ways. First, it swings perilously close. Second, a quarter of them seemingly do it backwards compared to the normal orbit behavior.
But how the so called “flipped hot Jupiters” come to be is fascinating. In essence they begin like our own Jupiter, as a gas giant further out in the solar system. At some point, they come in contact with a larger planet whose orbit is so similar it eventually begins to “interact tidally”:
This tidal squeezing is like friction, dissipating energy and causing the planet’s orbit to shrink.
Sometimes, while this process is happening, the orientation of planet’s orbit can be shifted so it’s not in the same plane as the other planets. Occasionally, the orbit can be changed so much it completely flips around.
“We saw this for the first time because we did the calculation much more carefully than people had ever done before,” Rasio said. “The basic physics is just Newtonian mechanics. All of that comes out naturally of simply calculating these very tiny gradual changes that build on.”
Residents of Binh Dong Commune of Binh Son District in Quang Ngai, Vietnam have been overrun. Strange, gigantic footprints in the snow. An otherworldly howl piercing the still of night.
The beast, whatever it is, left a grisly calling card for one dog owner.
However, no one has seen the strange creature that could have caused such large footprints measuring almost 12-15cm. Over 20 dogs have also been killed in the area and now around 280 households of the commune are living in panic.
Nguyen Thi Bich Ngoc, a 70-year-old woman was the first to find her dead pet dog on the night of May 7. She said that her dog was found without its head and some body organs.
Meanwhile, a few villages over, a pack of wild dog-like animals are taking their liberties with a local neighborhood. Biting anyone who attempts to interrupt their meals of chickens, pigs, goats or horses.
Here is how they are described:
…in the border districts of Si Ma Cai and Muong Khuong in the northwestern province of Lao Cai, people have repeatedly seen strange species of dog like animals.
The strange creatures have bitten about 15 people in Ban Me, Thao Chu Phin, Quang Than San and Si Ma Cai communes in the two districts.
According to local residents, the strange doglike creatures have slender, long bodies, slanting red eyes and their fur coat is marked with white spots, black and white spots or yellow stripes.
What is happening to Vietnam? Did someone open a hellmouth?
Last week a lightning storm started a chain reaction destroying transformers and leaving 4000 people without power. At least that is the official story; check out the video for three minutes of chain reaction goodness.
The Cold War has just begun. The next several decades will be defined by an escalating race of espionage and technological one-upsmanship. You owe it to yourself to give your nation every advantage. That includes investigating the shadowy world of ESP and the transmission of messages from one brain to another.
So the tests begin. On animals at first. A hypothesis is formed that two bonds would be universally easy to detect changes in: A) the natural relationship between mother and child B) the continuity of life itself. Logical, no?
Comrades, this is the gilded pathway to hell as you blink to reality and find yourself on a Soviet submarine killing baby rabbits.
The document continues: “According to Naumov, Soviet scientists placed the baby rabbits aboard the submarine. They kept the mother rabbit in a laboratory on shore where they implanted electrodes (EEG?) in her brain. When the submarine was submerged, assistants killed the rabbits one by one. At each precise moment of death, the mother rabbit’s brain produced detectable and recordable reactions.”
Experiments like this when on through the 1970s with a particular focus on documenting if other animals could innately sense one of their own kicking the bucket.
Positrons. They are all around us. Specifically if you are standing naked in the middle of the thunderstorm taunting the Old God’s to strike you down if they indeed still hold sway over this earthly realm.
“Take your sacrifice or wallow in a pit of lies, frauds!” you scream while spittle trains down your chin and mixes with the driving sheets of rain.
Or, you could eliminate everything else and just say that anti-matter has been photographed with a Fermi telescope during thunderstorms.
Such storms have long been known to give rise to fleeting sparks of light called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes.
But results from the Fermi telescope show they also give out streams of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.
The surprise result was presented by researchers at the American Astronomical Society meeting in the US.
It deepens a mystery about terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, or TGFs – sparks of light that are estimated to occur 500 times a day in thunderstorms on Earth. They are a complex interplay of light and matter whose origin is poorly understood.
You know else is poorly understood? Tempting the Old God’s on “public property,” by the police.
Since we debuted Weird Things in 2008 we’ve sought to make this a collection of stories, videos and experiences from a certain perspective. A fascination with everything we don’t know matched with the curiosity to follow the rabbit hole where ever it might lead. Singularity, Sasquatch and space elevators mix seamlessly for us. SpaceX’s apparent determination to reach Mars alongside travelers from unknown star systems and their apparent determination to reach us back.
We love this stuff and you do too.
We’ve since added a very successful podcast featuring myself, Andrew Mayne and Brian Brushwood along with a YouTube series. You, the audience, mean the world to us and connecting with you is the lifeblood of this common interest.
Now, we’d like to offer a high profile way that you can connect with each other even further.
Beginning now, we are going to sell slots on the side bar of this website. Each button will be 220 x 25 pixels and live on the right sidebar for every visitor to the site. That includes over a 1,000 unique visits per day and growing. It will link to your blog, Twitter, Facebook fan page, or anything else you’d like to have a regular presence on the site.
Along with any other Weird Things advertisement, we are gearing this to be affordable to you, the average reader. In that spirit, we are going to sell these permanent slots for only $25 per month.
We are providing a subscription link here. If you’d like to sign up, please email your 220 x 25 button to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail. By supporting this site as an advertiser we hope to give you a great value and share our audience as it grows with the people we entrust most… our audience.
The carcass of a strange bird said to inhabit a local cave has been found in Iran. What do you think this it could be?
The dead body of a strange dinosaur-like bird has been reportedly found near the city of Meshginshahr in the northwestern Iranian province of Ardebil.The locals found the feathered bipedal creature, which seemed to have died a few days ago, near a remote village of Meshginshahr, IRNA reported on Sunday. A team of officials of Iran’s Environment Protection Organization (EPO) were dispatched to the region to investigate whether the reports were true. One of the villagers has reportedly hidden the carcass and the EPO team is trying to find it. The team has managed to obtain a photo of the creature taken by one of the locals. The team has also found evidence that confirmed the locals’ claims the bird lived in a cave near the village. The creature has a reptilian skull with long canine teeth and large molars. It has small wing bones like those of flightless birds. The avifauna of Iran includes a total of 527 species, none of which are similar to the found creature; however, the discovery needs ornithologists to verify the claims. Scientists believe that fossil evidence demonstrates birds and dinosaurs shared many features such as hollow bones, gastrolith in the digestive system, nest-building and brooding behaviors. The discovery of fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex soft tissue also suggests that the 68-million-year-old dinosaur and birds are closely related to each other.
I am not even really sure where to start with this one. Apparently, the Holmavik Museum of Scocery and Witchcraft in Iceland contains a gruesome exhibit called the necropants. Let us just cut to the chase – these are pants made from the skin of the lower half of a dead person. When worn, these pants would produce money as long as a coin stolen from a poor widow (!) was placed in the scrotum.
It was believed that the necropants would spontaneously produce money when worn, as long as the donor corpse had been stolen from a graveyard at the dead of night and a magic rune and a coin stolen from a poor widow were placed in the dead man’s scrotum.
Another source claims that you must first gain permission from the man before he dies. Once that is done, just follow these steps:
After he has been buried you must dig up his body and flay the skin of the corpse in one piece from the waist down. As soon as you step into the pants they will stick to your own skin. A coin must be stolen from a poor widow and placed in the scrotum along with the magical sign, nábrókarstafur, written on a piece of paper. Consequently the coin will draw money into the scrotum so it will never be empty, as long as the original coin is not removed. To ensure salvation the owner has to convince someone else to overtake the pants and step into each leg as soon as he gets out of it. The necropants will thus keep the money-gathering nature for generations.
The museum website is mostly in Icelandic and Google translate is really sketchy, but you can also learn all about the Icelandic witch trials of the 17th century. Side note: the witches from Iceland had farting runes (Fretrúnir) that they used against their enemies.
Robots deserve to legally drive in Nevada. Google is fighting for their rights. Will the Silver State agree? Or perpetrate yet another act of human bigotry upon our silicon brothers?
The search giant is currently lobbying Nevada to make self-driving cars street legal on public roads. This would also allow drivers behind the wheels of these vehicles to text message their friends while rolling along the highway legally.
A loud bang shatters the calm of a California morning.
Outside, indulging in her ritual cup of coffee and a cigarette, a local mother simply assumes that a neighbor tied one on a little too tight last night. An evening at the bar turned into a morning on the road and ended with a crash into the community’s gate.
No big deal.
Then, it came from around the house. At first, she assumed by the hurried pace it must have been a thief. A tall, skinny, silver thief. Silver?
It came around the house, still trying to hide. My mother said the figure’s height reached the bottom of the start of the roof, which is around or more than 7ft in height.
She said it was very slender like a pole and silver.
The oddity then ran away from the woman and toward a tree where it disappeared from view.
Questions: was any wreckage found to have caused the loud bang? Did anyone else see the creature? Can we totally rule out that the alien wasn’t, in fact, drunk driving?
Students in the Introduction To Biotechnology (IT220) class at Purdue were instructed for one of their projects to collect soil samples as part of the National Genomics Research Initiative. Most of the students were content to collect samples from around the Purdue campus, but Emilia Czyszczon traveled 3 hours to a remote Indiana cave and then took a boat on an underground river to a spot deep within the cave. The soil sample that Emilia ended up taking turned out to be glacial mud untouched since the ice age and contained a bacteriophage virus that was unknown to science. Scientists think that this virus might be beneficial to humans and could be used to fight diseases like tuberculosis.
Further analysis proved to be even more remarkable. Lurking in the dank sample of cave mud she collected was a virus previously unknown to science — a bacteriophage that attacks bacteria from the same family as those that cause tuberculosis.
In other words, despite the usual connotation associated with the discovery of a virus, this virus is not harmful to humans. Rather, just the opposite: it is a virus that attacks bacterial strains that could be harmful to humans. The discovery has prompted the adventurous young Czyszczon to look ahead in her career; she has already received grant money to probe into the DNA of the virus to help find alternative cures for debilitating diseases like tuberculosis.
An era before time. An era before aquatic decency. An era of totally bitching ichthyosaur fights!
New fossil finds indicate a very violent encounter (most likely) between two ichthyosaurs which left one scarred by deep gouges in the snout. Little is known for sure about the 20-foot-long creatures, since it has no living relatives. Since the bite pattern on the recovered fossil matches that of another ichthyosaur, it is telling that they fought amongst themselves for land and territory.
Either way, it’s a tragedy of epic proportions that these two beasts were fighting and killing each other before YouTube was invented.
The dusky skies of San Juan, Argentina glowed extra bright on April 25th. Beams of light from the peaking moon, normally soft and gentle, a nudging reminder of the coming night pierced through the air with uncommon veracity.
What could make the moon explode with such vibrant spires of light? More specifically: why did whatever was magnifying the moon form a triangle shape as it moved slowly out of it’s direction, returning the familiar orb to it’s muted degree of intensity?
So frames the alleged sighting of Argentina’s translucent UFO…
“I swear that I was petrified!” said Martin Pastor as he pointed at the image that he picked up last Sunday in Calingasta. he said that he thought the recently rising moon had a strange shape to it, and thus began to photograph it. After a while, he was able to see a triangle with three circular vertexes superimposed over the moon. As it moved away from the moon’s glow, it became invisible. “It was a UFO to me,” he said.
Filed under “Things That Maybe Aren’t That Great”, scientists have figured out how to induce schizophrenic symptoms in a computer. In the test, they were able to overwhelm the computer with so much information that it developed crazy delusions, even claiming responsibility at one point for a terrorist bombing. Using a neural network called DISCERN that is able to learn using natural language, they cranked up the rate of learning and instructed DISCERN to forget less, thus causing a mental breakdown.
Telling the computer to “forget less” was akin to flooding the system with dopamine, confounding its ability to discern relationships between words, sentences and events, according to a news release from UT.
“DISCERN began putting itself at the center of fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall,” according to the news release. In one answer, it claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.
