A letter found in the ruins of a collapsed Spanish colonial church in Peru could be the key to a heretofore undiscovered language. Awesome.

“Even though [the letter] doesn’t tell us a whole lot, it does tell us about a language that is very different from anything we’ve ever known—and it suggests that there may be a lot more out there,” said project leader Jeffrey Quilter, an archaeologist at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

The letter was preserved because the caved in structure protected the relatively unharmed library and offices of the facility.

[Nat Geo]

Stop me when you’ve heard this one. A Thai national is trying to smuggle a two-month old tiger cub to Iran, so she drugs the cute little buggers and tosses them into a carry on bag filled with stuffed tigers so as to throw off security.

And then she’s arrested.

You hadn’t heard it? Okay, well now you have.

[Nat Geo]

Researchers have found that Mayans protected their drinking water by installing a layer of ceramic shards. Pretty crafty…

If so, that would be a minor sensation — merely due to the quantity of ceramics required. The aguadas in Uxul were each as large as ten Olympic-size pools. Maybe there used to be even more artificial lakes. After all, the precious commodity had to be enough to last a population of at least 2,000 through the 3-month dry season.

Mayans! What will they have thought of next!

The dream is real! Marty McFly’s self-lacing shoes could become science fact as Nike filed a patent for the tech in 2009.

[Nice Kicks]

Cut off from nature! Fenced in by the sea! The only recourse? Rob the humans blind! This summer… they’re not monkeying around. They are South African Baboon Thieves!

[BBC]

Okay, it’s really the most detailed picture of a sun spot ever taken. Still…

[Pop Sci]

Is the secret X-37B space plane going rogue? Or is this part of the plan for the Air Force’s mystery vessel?

Either way, amateur sky watchers found the reusable space plane had boosted itself into a different orbit last week. This might be because it will now come into contact with a few Air Force Satellite Control Network facilities it would not have otherwise. Or because someone got bored. Since the military is disclosing any details, we have no way of knowing.

No landing date for the X-37B has been set.

[Space]

A work crew in Edmonton found a huge dinosaur bone while working in a sewer tunnel. What’s amazing is not necessarily the discovery, but the cavalier attitude held by the museum official the crew turned the fossil over to.

Museum officials say finding dinosaur bones in Canada’s Alberta province is a relatively common occurrence.

“I can go out on a hike on a Sunday and find a dinosaur bone. But it’s really a question of how significant the find is,” said Leanna Mohan, the museum’s marketing coordinator.

Okay Indiana Jones, calm down. Let’s not go crapping all over the coolest thing to happen these guys since Larry slipped face first into a pile of human waste because he was trying to reenact a CFL touchdown dance.

Besides, what if it’s weirder than that? Ever seen that movie Relic? What if that monster ate a real dinosaur in the sewer.

It’s early.

[BBC]

How did folks describe UFO phenomenon before we had the science fiction constructs to fill in the blanks of interstellar travelers from deep space? Probably a lot like 12-year-old George Campbell of Sherman, Texas in 1898.

“Last night papa and I were riding along the ‘Eighty-foot Road’, about two and a half miles [4km] north of town, when all at once everything got very bright. We saw a great ball of fire coming down toward the ground. It got within about three feet [90cm] of the ground and seemed to rest for a while and then it went back up until it got clear out of sight. There was a buzzing sound all the time.”

George described the ball as 10 feet wide and not emitting any heat.

[Fortean Times]

The trio discuss how polite you should be at a dinner part that goes horrifically awry. They then offer some practical advice in dealing with an impending mole people invasion.

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Blurbtastic!

[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings081310.mp3[/podcast]

Who hasn’t dealt with a psychopath? You offer to help them put a sofa in the back of a van one moment, badda bing badda boom you’re putting the lotion on your skin or else you get the hose again…

A new report by Scientific American’s MIND magazine looks into the new research being done into the area of criminally crazy people. Included among the findings on the studies of sociopaths:

• Aided by EEGs and brain scans, scientists have discovered that psychopaths possess significant impairments that affect their ability to feel emotions, read other people’s cues and learn from their mistakes.

• These deficiencies may be apparent in children who are as young as five years old.

• When you tally trials, prison stays and inflicted damage, psychopaths cost us $250 billion to $400 billion a year.

• Psychopaths have traditionally been considered untreatable, but novel forms of therapy show promise.

A cure for psychopaths! Rejoice, Great Big Fat People the world over!

[Scientific American]

For artist Tervor Paglen, the truth is out there. Seriously, it’s like 60 miles away and you’re standing in front of his shot. Can you move? Thank you.

Paglen has become famous for compiling very long range, grainy photos of the the most secretive elements of our national defense. Rendition programs, codenamed projects, secret identities, redacted or misleading budget items, these are the leads he capitalizes on. He talked to Wired about his new monograph Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes.

“I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology,” said Paglen in a recent interview with Joerg Colberg, “The politics of how we know what we think we know. [An exploration] filled with all the contradictions, dead ends, moments of revelation, and confusion that characterize our collective ability to comprehend the world around us in general.”

Awesome stuff.

[Wired]

They even see colors, those lying little vermin. Impostors!

[Live Science]

If this is an elaborate viral campaign to promote the upcoming Thor movie, color me impressed.

Long dismissed as accidental additions to Viking graves, prehistoric “thunderstones”—fist-size stone tools resembling the Norse god Thor’s hammerhead—were actually purposely placed as good-luck talismans, archaeologists say.

Using fire-starting rock such as flint, Stone Age people originally created the stones to serve as axes. But the Vikings, whose Iron Age heyday lasted from about A.D. 800 to 1050, saw the primitive tools as lightning repellent.

As yet unreported, the underside of the hammerhead features a picture of Natalie Portman and a prequel comic that leads into the events of the film. Not really.

[Nat Geo]