See nature? This is what happens when you leave your oil laying around the ocean floor of 35,000 years!

California scientists found two massive asphalt domes on the sea floor, most likely the result of oil deposits made thousands of years ago.

“It was an amazing experience, driving along…and all of a sudden, this mountain is staring you in the face,” said Christopher M. Reddy, director of WHOI’s Coastal Ocean Institute and one of the study’s senior authors, as he described the discovery of the domes using the deep submersible vehicle Alvin. Moreover, the dome was teeming with undersea life. “It was essentially an oasis,” he said, “almost like an artificial reef.”

What really piqued the interest of Reddy — a marine geochemist who studies oil spills — was the chemical composition of the dome: “very unusual asphalt material,” he said. “There aren’t that many opportunities to study oil that’s been sitting around on the bottom of the ocean for 35,000 years.”

This is why we can’t keep anything nice on this sea shelf!

[Science Daily]

Good morning to you too! Bugs. Dew. Camera. Many more where this came from. Hello Monday.

Thanks to Weird Things reader Marty.

[Daily Mail]

Stephen Hawking is a world renown thinker and a one of a kind personality. Now, he’s also the guy who can flop the “told ya so” card when we are enslaved by a nomadic race of aliens.

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” the award-winning British scientist said in a series for the Discovery Channel, “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.”

To drive the point home, Hawking argued that aliens visiting Earth would likely be the same as when explorers first arrived in the New World.

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said.

His solution: stop trying to talk to aliens. Our solution: welcome our new wise and just overlords with open arms.

[National Geographic via Boing Boing]

[Oddly Specific via pharyngula]

Thomas Morton of VBS.com takes the sewers of Bogota, Columbia where he experiences the lives of children living a subterranean life style fleeing the police, getting high on crack and trying to forget that they are waist deep in feces.

[VBS.com]

Pretty self-explanatory. Big ups to Atlas Obscura!

We reported a few days ago an edict laid down by an Iranian cleric claiming immodestly dressed women were a contributing factor for earthquakes. Specifically intimating that ladies hoeing it up this year has been the root cause of the high profile quakes in Haiti, Chile and Mexico.

But if he thinks it was bad before, just wait until this coming Monday. A Facebook group entitled Boobquake is looking to shake things up, cleavage-style.

The movement calls for all women to really shake what their mother gave them in an effort to tip the cleric’s Islamic espers and spur the tectonic plates somewhere on the earth. If it doesn’t cause an earthquake, then surely the “halter top=earthquake” theory has some ‘splaining to do.

Ladies, get ready to bring the mountains to Mohammed!

[CNN]

Apparently, the larger head has attacked the smaller one. Sleep with one eye open, smaller head.

[BBC via BoingBoing]

HEADLINE: Wilmington blue laws help block Satan’s progress

Wilmington Morning Star: Friday May 18th, 1984

[Google News Archives]

Cryptomundo is rightly ticked off by the name dropping of Sasquatch on the new “Adventure’s of Bobby Bigfoot” website designed to teach kids about sustainability and green living. See, we leave a carbon footprint, Bigfoot has a big footprint, so you shouldn’t be a Bigfoot when it comes to carbon emissions. Blah, blah, blah.

But Sasquatch isn’t some tip-toeing green poster boy. Hell no! He’s mean mother loving devotee to the Earth.

When will Earth Day organizers look to the family bands of Sasquatch out there trying to survive in the environment for the logical icon? Actually, damn, Sasquatch are protectors of the environment, aren’t they?

The Earth needs warriors, as well as educators, but certainly not neurotic kids!!

It is time for the Sasquatch to be promoted as the ultimate Earth Day symbol.

There is a cause we can get behind!

[Cryptomundo]

[Adventures of Bobby Bigfoot]

Want to know one way to not get blown up by Improvised Explosive Devices? Fly around in a totally sweet flying car!

The Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) has cleared the Transformer (TX) program for takeoff. If it flies, by 2015 U.S. soldiers will be able to ride into battle aboard a four-person flying car that can cruise in the air like an airplane, drive on the ground like an SUV, rove 250 miles on one tank of fuel and not require a runway to get airborne.

DARPA, the Department of Defense office that is tasked with exploring futuristic technologies that may have military applications, held an industry day workshop for companies earlier this year to solicit proposals for developing a prototype vehicle. Proposals are due May 27.

The budget for the project? $54 million with a projection of four years before a prototype is expected.

[Live Science]

When the cuddly little bugger is not actually a hybrid between the two animals but rather an (adorably) hairy version of a regular ol’ hog. That hasn’t stopped some media outlets from referring to the beast as a half-breed between the two different species.

Read up on all things Mangalitsa here on the Wikipedia.

[Daily Mail]

Talk about a morning after… You roll over and realize that exhilarating night of grunting, running and grunting had led to you totally doing it with a Neanderthal. What scandal! What ever will the neighbors think?

Archaic humans such as Neanderthals may be gone but they’re not forgotten — at least not in the human genome. A genetic analysis of nearly 2,000 people from around the world indicates that such extinct species interbred with the ancestors of modern humans twice, leaving their genes within the DNA of people today.

What’s next? Proof that we french kissed those weird Hobbit people?

[Nature]

From Scientific American.

The largest trial to date of “brain-training” computer games suggests that people who use the software to boost their mental skills are likely to be disappointed.

The study, a collaboration between British researchers and the BBC Lab UK web site, recruited viewers of the BBC science program “Bang Goes the Theory” to practice a series of online tasks for a minimum of ten minutes a day, three times a week, for six weeks…

“There were absolutely no transfer effects” from the training tasks to more general tests of cognition, says Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brian Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, who led the study. “I think the expectation that practicing a broad range of cognitive tasks to get yourself smarter is completely unsupported.”

Take that, rest of the body!

[Scientific American]

A space plane designed to demonstrate the sustainability of a reusable, military-operated vehicle designed to orbit the earth will launch soon from Cape Canaveral, Florida. What happens after that is not of your GD business.

But whether the X-37 space plane is merely showing off nearly two decades of research and development or is actually a precursor to militarizing the final frontier, is far from clear since the vehicle’s payload is classified. An Air Force official won’t even say when it will return to California or where it will land. But it can “loiter” over the globe for more than nine months.

“In all honesty, we don’t know when it’s coming back,” said Gary Payton, deputy undersecretary for the Air Force’s space programs, in a conference call with reporters Tuesday.

Is there anyone conspiracy-prone enough to craft an idea of what this launch means?.

[Yahoo]