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]

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: WARTS

Old MacDonald had a Wart Fetish

You will need: 1 Farmer

Instructions: Have farmer rub wart with his/her rough, expert hand

Note: Creepy

Cat’s Eye (Not the Stephen King Movie) and Stump Water (Not the Southern Porn Star)

You will need: 1 Cat’s Eye; Stump Water

Instructions: Rub cat’s eye in stump water; Place cat’s eye against wart; Repeat until wart drops off

Tony Roma’s Black Magic Special

You will need: 1 Freshly Cut Steak

Instructions: Hold steak on wart; Spin entire body three times; Tell the wart to leave

Note: I would recommend using a Porterhouse. They contain more tenderloin than your standard T-Bone, and go great with a 2005 Taupenot-Merme Gevrey-Chambertin.

The Savvy Entrepreneur

You will need: A Quicksilver Tongue; Probably Some Sort of Printed Warranty

Instructions: Sell wart to someone

Note: Try farmers. They like warts. You know… like “like” like them…

I Think Kitt Complained About This On “Knight Rider”

You will need: 1 Can; 24 Pebbles; 1 Road

Instructions: Place pebbles in can; Put can in middle of road; Wart will heal five days after first car runs over can

Note: I might be thinking of Air Wolf complaining about the UTI cure where you throw potatoes at helicopters

This’ll Piss Off Vampires AND Loraxes

You will need: 1 Knife; Non-essential Pine Tree

Instructions: Cut the shape of cross into wart; Cut the shape of cross into pine tree; Never return to tree.

Satan

You will need: 1 Cemetery; Unfaltering Allegiance to Dark Lord

Instructions: Visit fresh grave; Call on Satan to remove wart

Note: If he’s unsuccessful in removing your wart, you get a free Satan t-shirt. Last year’s featured a picture of Satan.

If You Know What This Means, You’re Probably Already Doing It

You will need: The Yellow Stuff that Comes Out of a Crushed Fly’s Stomach

Instructions: Rub yellow stuff on wart

Covert Cheese Funeral

You will need: 1 Piece of Cheese; 1 Accomplice

Instructions: Rub wart with cheese; Have accomplice secretly bury cheese

Note: SHHHHH!

…At Least People Will Forget About Your Horrible Wart

You will need: A Powerful Voice

Instructions: Howl at moon; Politely answer all nice policeman’s questions

[Pravda]

Even good old fashioned crop circles are getting totally pwned in the digital age. Corn-stopping shapes are totally old and busted, mysterious digital radar patterns are the new hotness in Australia.

THEY are the digital-age equivalent of crop circles – mysterious patterns appearing on the Bureau of Meteorology’s national radar system without any explanation.

And the random images described as red stars, rings of fire and white doughnuts are sending online conspiracy websites into meltdown.

The anomalies first began on January 15 when an “iced doughnut” appeared over Kalgoorlie in WA.

Satellite imagery showed there was no cloud over the area at the time to explain the unusual phenomenon but farmers’ online comments claimed it was “unusually hot” all day.

It was followed by a bizarre red star over Broome on January 22 and a sinister spiral burst over Melbourne described by amateur radar buffs as the Ring Of Fire Fault.

The Bureau, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has acknowledged the anomalies on its popular website.

Could this be communications with an alien force or just a desperate attempt by regular weather patterns to rustle up a few headlines since Iceland’s drama queen volcano is hogging all the ink? YOU DECIDE!

[News.com.AU via Conspiracy Journal]

Bob Saget is shooting a new show for A&E entitled Strange Days where he hunts down the strangest elements of our society, including Bigfoot, which was the episode he was shooting last week.

“Bob Saget’s Strange Days” delves into weird, wild stuff: biker gangs, partying Amish teenagers, mail-order brides, a survivalist cult — and, of course, Bigfoot.

So out Saget came to the North Olympic Peninsula to peek at the West End woods and interview John Bindernagel, author of two books about the hairy creature supposedly living in the deep forest.

And since Saget wanted a nice spot to meet Bindernagel — who came down from Courtenay, British Columbia — he and his entourage found the George Washington Inn, a replica of the first U.S. president’s estate in Mount Vernon, Va.

[Peninsula Daily News]

New controversial new research suggests that a separate “hobbit” hominid evolved on an Indonesian island after migrating from Africa more than one million years ago. Apparently they had the “There” part down. “And Back Again”? Not so much.

[Science News]

That explains a lot.

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.

Women in the Islamic Republic are required by law to cover from head to toe, but many, especially the young, ignore some of the more strict codes and wear tight coats and scarves pulled back that show much of the hair.

“What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” Sedighi asked during a prayer sermon Friday. “There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made headlines recently that Tehran will suffer an earthquake soon and many of it’s 12 million inhabitants should flee and presumably lose their jorts and halter tops in the process. That being said, if immodest dress does cause earthquakes there is no doubt as to why George Clooney has been so active on the subject.

[Yahoo via Pharyngula]

You know, you see enough bizarre animals and after a while it probably just gets tiresome calling them all proof positive of urban legends. Just ask Adair, Oklahoma. They went and found themselves a mangey raccoon and try as some locals might to cite the frightened critter as an example of the legendary Dry Gulch Chupacapra, most folks just aren’t buying it.

Scheffel says they believe it’s a raccoon that has an advanced case of mange, but that’s not stopping people in the area from calling it something else.

He says it’s known as the Dry Gulch chupacabra, after the legendary animal that supposedly sucks the blood of goats.

The experts at Wild Heart Ranch say the animal will grow its hair back so it will again look like a normal raccoon.

OR the regeneration of hair is proof that they’ve found the legendary Dry Gulch Raccoon That Was Bit By A Werewolf Once.

[News on 6]

The magical Monet-esqe dreamscape where your soul mingles with the realm beyond, only for your Grandmother to pause her game of bridge with your pee wee football coach so she can tell you that your time on earth isn’t over, after all who else will leak a prototype of the new iPhone model? Yeah… all that near-death experience stuff? Oxygen depravation.

People who report near-death experiences have elevated levels of carbon dioxide in their blood and may be suffering oxygen deprivations, according to a new study published in the medical journal Critical Care.

The study, by Slovenian researchers, examined 52 heart attack patients in three large hospitals. Of those, 11 reported having near-death experiences (NDEs), such as movement toward a bright light, feelings of peace and joy, and profoundly spiritual moments during their heart attacks. Studies suggest that between 10 percent and 25 percent of heart attack survivors report NDEs

Boooring.

[Live Science]

If this isn’t the coolest picture ever taken, I don’t know what is.

Santisuk Phromdao is a pig-tailed macaque monkey from Sai Buri district, Patttani province, southern Thailand. Although only five years old, Santisuk patrols the streets of Thailand everyday dressed in a blazer with the words ‘Monkey Police’ laced across it.

According to Thailand’s Nation newspaper, Santisuk was adopted by Pol Col Yutthapol Phromdao Yutthapol, who, after discovering the injured monkey at a local clinic, recruited him into his squad, thereby turning the simple-minded primate into the first-ever monkey cop.

Satisuk’s tour of duty began at a local checkpoint, where Yutthapol taught him how to collect coconuts and other fruits from locals by enticing him with bottles of delectable Vitamilk. Soon afterward, Satisuk’s duties grew from mundane tasks into full-fledged public relations.

Halt citizen!

[Weird Asia News via Derren Brown Blog]

Hey space fans, don’t be blue that Mean Ol’ Obama said we aren’t sending men to the moon anytime soon. Because once we get there… our pad is going to be totally sick thanks to a new 3-D printing technology that could turn boring lunar dust and moon rocks into a bomb ass base of operations.

Future astronauts might end up living in a moon base created largely from lunar dust and regolith, if a giant 3-D printing device can work on the lunar surface.

The print-on-demand technology, known as D-Shape, could save on launch and transportation costs for manned missions to the moon. But the concept must first prove itself in exploratory tests funded by the European Space Agency (ESA)

“We will make very basic printing trials in a vacuum environment to verify if this is possible,” said Enrico Dini, chairman of Monolite UK Ltd and creator of D-Shape.

Dini’s D-Shape has created full-size sandstone buildings on Earth by using a 3-D printing process similar to how inkjet printers work. It adds a special inorganic binder to sand so that it can build a structure from the bottom up, one layer at a time.

Totally sweet.

[Yahoo!]

No one expects to Sget their camera stolen by an octopus. Which makes it the perfect crime…

[Stuff.co.nz via Pharyngula]

Ever pointed out which tooth is killing you to the dentist, only for the smug dong to give you a wide-eyed glance, then shoot a bemused look at the hygienist, then give you a patronizing “suuuuuuuure it’s the back right molar” whilst stifling a giggle?

Well as it turns out, our brains have a really hard time pin-pointing if tooth pain comes from the bottom or the top. Jerk.

The results, which will be published in the journal Pain, help explain why patients are notoriously bad at pinpointing a toothache.

For the most part, humans are exquisitely tuned to pain. The brain can immediately distinguish between a splinter in the index finger and a paper cut on the thumb, even though the digits are next-door neighbors. But in the mouth this can be more difficult, depending where and how intense the ache is.

“We don’t know much about tooth pain,” comments dentist and neuroscientist Alexandre DaSilva of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not part of the new research. The new study is one of the first to address the puzzle of toothache localization, he says.

Also, dentists are the The Back Up Plan of doctors.

[Science News]

From Stone Pages.com.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig recently announced that analysis of DNA from a tiny fragment of bone from the Denisova Cave in the Siberian Altai Mountains indicates that it may belong to a hitherto unknown hominid type.

John Krause and colleagues managed to isolate a complete sequence of mitochondrial DNA from a fragment of finger bone found by Russian researchers in 2008 that weighed only 30mg. This was compared with 54 sequences from modern humans, an early human sequence from Kotenski, Russia, six from Neanderthals, and one each from a chimpanzee and a bonobo. While Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA sequences have on average 202 differences from modern human sequences, the Denisova sequence has almost twice that number.

The director of the Institute’s genetics department, Svante Pääbo said “The results practically blew me away when I heard.” The researchers suggest the Denisova hominid shared a common ancestor with both Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans, and may have lived alongside them as recently as 30,000 to 48,000 years ago. In turn, this completely new mitochondrial DNA sequence might imply a fourth wave of hominin migration out of Africa.

You might remember a similar point being raised by Andrew (with a far darker ending) on the most recent Weird Things podcast.

[Stone Pages]

Panicked cheeseheads across the Quad Cities area of Wisconsin reported seeing a massive fireball light up the night sky on Wednesday. But, was the brilliant streaking light, thought to be caused by a meteor shower, just a repeat of another similar phenomenon that some believe left far greater devastation nearly a century and a half ago?

In short, could a fireball like this be what ignited the Great Chicago Fire?

In 2004 engineer and physicist Robert M. Wood posited exactly that, citing other fires that began at the same time the Chi Town conflagration began in… guess where… the farming towns of Wisconsin!

All of this has happened before and it will happen again. Except now we have modern fire brigades and flame extinguishing foam.

[CNN]