Who needs The Watcher? According to radio astronomers at the University of Manchester, a “baffling new object” in a nearby galaxy is unlike anything they’ve seen before.

But those who know better sure recognize that color scheme, that stature…

The object appeared very suddenly last May at radio wavelengths and has persisted ever since, showing no signs of going away. It was originally thought to be a young supernova, as M82 is a known star nursery. But most of M82’s stars die quickly in massive stellar explosions — a new supernova generally occurs once every two or three decades — at which point their radio wavelengths begin a slow decay. The mystery object has shown no such signs of dimming.

I for one welcome our new world eating overlord.

[PopSci]

From CNN:

European countries shut their airspace one after the other Thursday as a cloud of volcanic ash wafted over from Iceland and posed a danger to flights.

Airspace over the United Kingdom was due to be closed for six hours from midday but air authorities later extended the closure until at least 7 a.m. BST (2 a.m. EDT) Friday…

In all, around 3,000 flights across Europe were expected to be affected by the closures, according to Eurocontrol, the intergovernmental body that manages European air travel.

Many airports were already shut and flights were grounded across the United Kingdom on Thursday because of the ash, which came after an eruption under an Icelandic glacier early Wednesday, airport authorities said.

The ash cloud came from an eruption of a volcano beneath Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull glacier early Wednesday.

…just as you were getting used to paying for checked baggage, this happens.

[CNN]

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a.) Said to prowl the dry air above the deserts of the American Southwest, these winged creatures appear to propel themselves using jets of flame that light up the night sky.

b.) During the 1980s, two American carnival owners spent countless hours trying to hunt and capture this legendary 8-foot-tall avian monster.

c.) Usually sighted in the vicinity of swamps and rivers, this African pterosaur-like beast is known for sinking boats and attacking locals.

Answer AFTER THE JUMP…
Read the rest of this entry »

What has sharp teeth, is the size of a pinkie finger and slides up the noses of Peruvians? Tyrannobdella rex! The Tyrant Leech King!

The beast has teeth five-times larger than other leeches and has most recently been found in the noses of recent swimmers in the Amazon river.

[Wired]

Cryptomundo tells the beautiful love story of actress Maria Bello (you might remember her from THAT scene in A History Of Violence) and her new fiance Bryn Mooser, one that was cemented by a mutual interest in the search for cryptids.

Other common interests? Politics and Africa.

[Cryptomundo]

Release all the Krakens you want. One of popular cinema’s most notorious nuts, Werner Herzog took a 3D camera into a cave and is planning doing a documentary about the paintings he saw.

[Guardian via Boing Boing]

Do you want to study UFOs through college? Niagra County Community College just became your number one application.

The studing of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena from space should be a legitimate university subject, an American professor, Philip Haseley, has claimed….

The Niagara County Community College, a state university in New York, lecturer said due to the high amount of sightings every year, it should follow that students should be able to investigate phenomenon.

(A sighting) happens to millions of people (around the world),” he said.

“It’s about time we looked into this as a worthy area of study.

“It’s important that the whole subject be brought out in the open and investigated.”

Let’s be honest, it makes more sense than a philosophy degree…

[Telegraph via Derren Brown blog]

The above picture is from a 1910 issue of The Strand Magazine in a feature entitled “If Insects Were Bigger.” In a pre-World War society, I can empathize that this could be seen as humanity’s biggest threat.

Click AFTER THE JUMP for a couple more.

[Futility Closet] Read the rest of this entry »

As per Popular Science:

Until recently, radio astronomers have concentrated almost exclusively on the high-energy radiation streaming in towards Earth from exotic stellar bodies like pulsars, quasars, and super-massive black holes. But now, a new European observatory called the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) has begun releasing data on the low-energy radiation that permeates the Universe.

While seemingly less sexy than high-energy research, low-energy radiation actually allows scientists to look even deeper into the past, to within 500,000 years of the Big Bang, and will provide a much more detailed account of some of the most mysterious periods of the Universe’s earliest days of existence. LOFAR is also going to be used by SETI to search for faint signs of extraterrestrial life.

Heavy, Doc.

[PopSci]

As chronicled in yesterday’s New York Times a new wealth of heroes conceived by one of the fathers of modern comics, Jack Kirby, have been unveiled by California animation company whom he worked for later in his career. The firm that owns them, Ruby-Spears Productions, is planning of making them into new comics, cartoons and films.

But which are we most interested in? Golden Shield of course. According to the article:

Among the unrealized projects that Mr. Kirby helped create or contribute to were “Golden Shield,” about an “ancient Mayan hero seeking to save earth in the apocalyptic year 2012.”

Ever the visionary…

You, me and the rest of the school. Run home, grab any knife you can and meet at the cemetery. We are looking for someone seven feet tall with iron teeth. He already kidnapped and ate two kids, so be careful.

Let’s go kill us a vampire.

Or so was the logic for 400 Scottish kids in late September 1954 when a local constable had to break up the armed youth mob repeatedly after word got out that a massive vampire was picking off students one by one. Of course now it’s just a(n awesome) story that aged schoolmates can tell each other but while it was happening, it caused quite a stir in Glasgow and beyond.

“I think somebody saw someone wandering about and the cry went up: ‘There’s the vampire!’

“That was it – that was the word to get off that wall quick and get away from it.

“I just remember scampering home to my mother: ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ‘I’ve seen a vampire!’ and I got a clout round the ear for my trouble. I didn’t really know what a vampire was.”

There were no records of any missing children in Glasgow at the time, and media reports of the incident began to search for the origins of the urban myth that had gripped the city.

Unfortunately, outside forces seized on the story as a rallying cry to push through legislation regulating comic book content sold to minors. Instead of, I don’t know, lauding and rewarding these brave kids for knowing that brutal mob violence was the safest most efficient way to take down a child-murdering denizen of the undead.

[BBC via Conspiracy Journal]

According to a study by the Human Speech Research Laboratory: Both.

[Improbable Research]

Here on Weird Things, we’ve talked quite a bit about the strange history of animal (and human) experimentation for the benefit of medical science. But it would be silly to suggest that there aren’t strange trails that persist to this day.

For example, Taser International is seeking to test how harmful their products are when law enforcement uses them on subjects with elevated heart rates after methamphetamine intake. The solution? Find a bunch of sheep, jack ’em up on speed and taze them ’till they bleet.

Because of the prevalence of methamphetamine abuse worldwide, it is not uncommon for subjects in law enforcement encounters to be methamphetamine-intoxicated. Methamphetamine has been present in arrest-related death cases in which an electronic control device (ECD) was used. The primary purpose of this study was to determine the cardiac effects of an ECD in a methamphetamine intoxication model.

The results? Smaller animals saw more of an effect when zapped while high but larger sheep did not. None died.

However, this surely won’t stop someone from writing “Don’t Taze Me, Baaaaaah!” on a sandwhich board and while handing out literature in front of Taser International HQ in the next two weeks.

[Academic Emergency Medicine]

[io9]

Who needs context?

[@xmasape]

Many mistaken cryptids are actually just fugly animals with a bad case of the mange. So what does that have to do with our planet’s current case of global warming driving and increase in sightings of potential Yetis, Bigfoots and Chupacabra?

Everything.

LiveScience spoke to Mike Bowdenchuck, state director for Texas Wildlife Services, who explained why mysterious, hairless animals are more common in Texas and the southwest than other areas:

“Down here, animals don’t die of mange, because the temperatures are warm enough,” Bowdenchuck said. Rather, the animals live with mange.

“Mange is very common in colder areas, in fact wolves are getting it in Montana right now, and in North Dakota foxes get it,” he said, noting a big difference: “Up there it’s fatal, so you never see animals with the severe cases that we see in the southern climates, because they don’t live long enough for the mites to get that bad to cause the hair to fall off. They die of hypothermia first.”

Animals that have lost their fur are more vulnerable to the cold, so in warmer climates they live longer (and be more likely to be seen). Thus one might conclude that sightings of hairless animals will become more common as the climate warms. The extended forecast calls for more non-Bigfoot, non-Yeti, and non-chupacabra mangy monster sightings.

Why wasn’t this the poster for An Inconvenient Truth?

[Live Science]

Western scientists have officially catalogued animals on the islands of the Phillipines for over a century and a half and yet, a 6-foot-long, gold flecked, colored lizard just happened to escape their attention. Until last summer.

Rumors of the lizard’s existence floated among biologists for the past 10 years, Brown explained.

“People had taken photographs of hunters from the resident tribespeople as they were carrying the reptiles back to their homes to feed their families in 2001,” Brown said.

In 2005, two different groups procured juvenile specimens. “However, both of those efforts didn’t collect genetic samples, so we couldn’t yet prove that it was genetically distinct and didn’t just look different,” Brown said. “Also, we wanted a full-sized adult to see how big it got in life.”

A team went on a two month expedition to track the animal down in 2009 and only found one adult male after all of their food and money had been exhausted. One possible theory while the particular lizard is scarce? Local tribesman prefer their meat to other monitor lizards.

Yummy.

[Live Science]