In a blog post today, Google owned up to running self-driving cars through all manner of conditions: highway, city, long-distance and on challenging terrain like the steep streets of San Francisco. The experiments were conducted wither no or very limited human interaction and the biggest accident came when a vehicle was rear ended while fully stopped.

The man who made it happen, Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is understandably bubbly about the breakthrough when quoted by the New York Times:

“Can we text twice as much while driving, without the guilt?” Dr. Thrun said in a recent talk. “Yes, we can, if only cars will drive themselves.”

Obviously, this is about as blinding awesome as weird can get. That is, until the robots rebel against us, lock the doors and drive us all off a cliff.

[Google Blog]

[New York Times]

Ladies and gentlemen… please make your introductions to a new species of fruit bat found near Papua New Guinea. He also looks like Yoda.

On a clerical note, this was sent to me within an hour by both of my Weird Things podcast co-hosts Andrew Mayne and Brian Brushwood. For the record, Andrew was first.

[Daily Mail]

If alien life is in our atmosphere, we are going to find it. With a balloon. We are launching from Sweden.

[AOL]

The last time we saw census results this weird, Betty White was talking about swapping out calculator batteries to power a crotch massager.

Marine scientists have announced the 80% completion of a comprehensive ocean census and the results are predictably freaking bizarre. Check out a full slideshow at Discover Magazine’s 80beats blog.

[80beats]

The kids love vampires, the kids love pet fish. Is it any wonder that the World Wildlife Foundation has found a Dracula Fish along with 144 other insanely weird animals surrounding Southeast Asia’ Mekong River in 2009.

Here are a few of the others:

Cuter by far is the lipstick gecko, barely big enough to perch on a finger, with a dark barred pattern across its lips suggestive of cosmetics.

Other featured creatures include a fangless snake, a frog that chirps like a cricket, and a pitcher plant that traps insects and grows to a height of over seven meters.

“This rate of discovery is simply staggering in modern times,” said Stuart Chapman, Conservation Director of WWF Greater Mekong, in a statement.

By random happenstance, we have some more Weird Animals coming your way today. Hold on to your butts.

[Reuters]

Is this a picture of a zombie? Notice the open casket on the bottom right.

Physical deformity? Extremely well-made student horror film? Has hell indeed become too full forcing the dead to walk the Earth?

You can see it now but make no mistake, the Hartley 2 is coming. Not unlike the Hulk, it’s green, it’s unstoppable and it will come very close to destroying the Earth before moving along peacefully.

Comet Hartley 2 will swoop within 11 million miles of Earth on October 20, one of the closest approaches of any comet in the last few centuries.

Hartley 2 is already visible as a pale green streak in the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia. NASA astronomer Bill Cooke caught the comet on September 28 in a 4-minute exposure taken from a remotely-controlled telescope in Mayhill, New Mexico (Cooke himself was in his home in Huntsville, Alabama, according to NASA’s Watch the Skies blog).

Who’s having a Hartley 2 party?

[Wired]

Brian gives sensible, rational parenting advice totally forgetting what podcast he’s on.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: hhttp://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings093010.mp3

Something is in the walls
Travis Lake photograph
Underwater Antarctic super-villain team up

[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings093010.mp3[/podcast]

How hardcore is this?

Drilling into an active volcanic doesn’t sound like the safest idea, but a plan to do so along a volcano near Naples, Italy, could help protect the city from a potentially catastrophic eruption.

Geologists will drill into the volcanic formation, called Campi Flegrei, early next month. The volcano, part of a larger volcanic arc that includes Mount Vesuvius, last erupted in 1538. The ground around the volcano, however, has been swelling for the past 40 years, stoking fears of an eruption that would threaten the roughly 1 million residents of Naples.

“The role of deep drilling at this area is then crucial,” according to the drilling project description by the International Continental Scientific Drill Program (ICDP), which is planning the drilling study.

This is either the dumbest plan ever or the most metal heroic thing ever conceived and executed.

[Live Science]

Even back in the day, Stonehenge was a tourist trap. One of the oldest human remains found near the site was identified as having Mediterranean origins.

The British Geological Survey’s Jane Evans said that the find, radiocarbon dated to 1,550 B.C., “highlights the diversity of people who came to Stonehenge from across Europe,” a statement backed by Bournemouth University’s Timothy Darvill, a Stonehenge scholar uninvolved with the discovery.

“The find adds considerable weight to the idea that people traveled long distances to visit Stonehenge, which must therefore have had a big reputation as a cult center,” Darvill said in an e-mail Wednesday. “Long distance travel was certainly more common at this time than we generally think.”

Of course people travelled long distances, what else where they going to do without internet or TV? Watch each other’s hair grow?

It would be so easy to get me to go on a 2 month boat trip back then. “Hey were going to see a cult center in the north country, you might die and we’ll probably run out of food but at the same time it’s going to be a couple dozen centuries until someone invents an iPhone… so you in?”

[AP]

Those rascally scamps at io9 have issued this artists rendering of what a colony on the newly discovered Earth-like planet could look like. Since one side of the planet is constantly exposed to the sun and the other is frozen like year-old leftovers from Chilis, only the border areas between the two would be hospitable for life.

Meanwhile, there seems to be a dispute about the name. io9 has been calling it Gloaming and the UC Santa Cruz team that discovered it has dubbed it Zarmina. Meanwhile… some people who deliberately called dibs on the planet when it was announced Tuesday are wondering why their chosen name of Bonearth is not being recognized.

Painting by Don Dixon.

[io9]

Seriously, pack your bags. We found a new Earth and I am personally going to wait at Cape Canaveral until someone will sell me a ticket on the first Space Ark to Splitsville.

Our new digs are right in the Goldilocks Zone and according the team that located it, the chances of life are pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.

And the planet’s discoverers are optimistic about the prospects for finding life there.

“Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent,” said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a press briefing today. “I have almost no doubt about it.”

Now if you’ll excuse me I am going to be running up all my credit cards. Try and follow me with that score to space, suckers!

[Space]

Holy crap! That is all.

[Nat Geo]

Ladies and gentleman, the Tailless Whip Scorpion otherwise known as the Whip Spider which is actually neither a scorpion nor spider. Discuss…

[Nat Geo]