What’s better than a photo? A photo of a ghost. What’s even better than that? Capturing that photo on a friend’s iPhone. Of course the problem is, ghosts are never very cooperative and not likely to show themselves on demand. That’s why we’ve created this handy tutorial for faking a ghost image on a friend’s iPhone.
Mike from the Bigfoot Discovery Project explains on his latest YouTube video an investigation into a recent sighting. Did Bigfoot make the nest they found? Or was it a homeless person?
The US Defense department has green-lit a two-year $10 million dollar program to look for practical applications of the Casimir Effect. This is a quantum of effect with potential in everything from energy to levitation.
It’s the quantum version of the attractive force that pulls two ships at sea closer together when they’re nearby. Hendrick Casimir, discoverer of the effect, speculated that two metal plates held apart from each other in a vacuum could tap into the energy in a vacuum that quantum electrodynamics predicts.
Getting actual energy from the effect has proved quite elusive. Now researchers are exploring the potential of the repulsive and attractive forces created by the Casimir effect. One possibility is levitation. From the Scientific American article, researcher Hong Tang:
Then we’re going to engineer the structure of the surface of the silicon device to get some unusual Casimir forces to produce repulsion,” he says. In theory, he adds, that could mean building a device capable of levitation.
We’re all for device capable of levitation – even on the nanometer scale.
link: Casimir effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
According to Science News, hypnosis is gaining new found respect in the laboratory as experiments indicate that hypnotic suggestions actually have a measurable effect on parts of the brain.
In one experiment, suggestion of a paralyzed hand actually changed the way the brain routed instructions for motor movement differently than those with no instruction or those told to just imagine their hand was paralyzed.
The Mesmerized Mind / Science News
Hans Rollman, professor of Religious Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, writing for the Telegram has shared some details about Newfoundland sea monster lore. The best part? These are amphibious man eaters!
A sea creature of considerable ferocity is also known to the Inuit of Labrador. Nennorluk derives its name from the polar bear (Nennok, nanuk), but the Inuktitut affix “luk” indicates its evil intent. One of the earliest mentions of the Labrador Nennorluk appeared in David Crantz’s “History of Greenland.” Crantz, preserving a 1773 tradition from Nain, says that the legendary amphibious creature “hunted and devoured the seals.” Each of its ears was “large enough for the covering of a capacious tent.” Worse yet, the “beast did not scruple to eat human flesh, when he came on shore.”
link: The Telegram – St. John’s, NL: Columns | Newfoundland and Labrador sea monsters
Check out this video that’s eerily remiscent of the 1980’s TV series V and District 9 (if the aliens spaceships were made from vaporous ice crystals and not actual technology…).
The Sun has an article here on it: Mystery UFO halo in clouds over Moscow | The Sun |News
As the Hollywood and occult hype machines spin into overdrive about the proposed end of the world on December 21st, 2012, at least one person who may or may not know something about it says it’s all bunk. According to an AP story, Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan Indian Elder had this to say:
Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. “I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff.”
Another person who should know points out:
“If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea,” said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. “That the world is going to end? They wouldn’t believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain.”
He goes onto suggest this doomsday thing is a Western concept we’re projecting onto the Maya. So if the Maya say it’s bunk, who should we believe? Them or the folks who remade Godzilla?
Mark your calendars. August 31st, 2009 may have been the day the insects got the upper hand in their war against mankind.
Reportedly, a truck driver for the Minot Air Force Base 91st Missile Wing lost control of his vehicle when a “large insect” flew into the cab and (attacked) landed on his back.
When one solitary bug accomplishes what all of our enemies combined have been unable to do, it’s time to start buying Raid by the bulk.
‘Large insect’ sparked missile truck’s crash – Military- msnbc.com
Remember that time you went to take a photo and when you looked at it your iMac screen mysteriously shown through your body as if you were an ephemeral spirit because deep down your souls are intertwined? I do.
Got a weird photo? Send it to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail with “Weird photo” in the subject line or upload it to Flickr and tag it #weirdthingscom.
I took this photo outside Disneyland. It’s of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. No retouching took place. This is exactly how the photo appeared!
Want to see something spooky? Click on these slideshows and see some various ghost photos on Flickr.
The spirit photographs of William Hope
Vintage Spirit Photography
Seances
Got a spooky photo or video you want to share? Upload it to Flickr and tag it with #weirdthingscom
According to ScienceDaily it turns out those ugly yellow splotches of bug guts on your car can serve science. They use the bug guts to to do DNA sequencing to determine species distribution and other information.
To gather genetic material, they utilized a simple but effective collection method – the front bumper of a moving vehicle. Two samples of bug splatter were collected, the first after driving from Pennsylvania to Connecticut, and the second after traveling from Maine to New Brunswick, Canada.
link: Bug Splatter On Your Car’s Windshield Is A Treasure Trove Of Genomic Biodiversity
Excitement over augmented reality applications for the iPhone and other devices is certainly justified to an extent. But let’s not forget the original augmented reality baring device as imagine by James Cameron, the Terminator T-800.
What we want is Terminator vision like Arnold had, to help us hot wire cars, find appropriate wardrobe and decide who lives and who dies. Hopefully we can use Terminator vision to fight off the inevitable machine apocalypse – instead of it being used to murder us all one-by-one.
In the meantime, maybe we should call a moratorium on any more augmented reality develop for platforms named “android”.
It took 2,500 years but investigators finally cracked the case of out what killed an Egyptian woman. What makes this particularly interesting is how recent DNA extraction techniques made it possible to extract fragments of tuberculosis bacteria DNA. She had been misdiagnosed just a decade earlier as having been killed by ovarian cancer.
After analyzing ancient DNA from tissue samples, Helen D. Donoghue of University College London and colleagues say that the mummified woman, who lived around 600 B.C. and was entombed in Thebes, died of tuberculosis, not ovarian cancer.
link: Observatory – Revising the Diagnosis Behind an Ancient Death – NYTimes.com
Researchers now speculate that an island chain once inhabited by the Minoan’s may have been a much larger island that was wiped out in a volcanic eruption that sent tidal waves as far as Israel.
Speculation has abounded as to whether the Santorini eruption inspired the legend of Atlantis, which Plato said drowned in the ocean. Although the isle is often regarded as just an invention, the explosion might have given rise to the story of a lost empire by helping to wipe out the real-life Minoan civilization that once dominated the Mediterranean, from which the myth of the bull-headed ‘minotaur’ comes.
link: Real Tsunami May Have Inspired Legend of Atlantis – Yahoo! News
link: Google Maps
Technically John P. Holdren wasn’t the science advisor when he made his dire predictions of an Ice Age and Ice Age powered super tidal waves bringing destruction upon us all in 1971. He was just trying to make sense of the data at hand back then (global cooling!) – and maybe give it a teensy tiny Roland Emmerich dramatic effect.
John Tierney over at TierneyLab at the NY Times points out some essays by Holdren and longtime doom and gloomer Paul Ehrlich that have been republished over at Zombietime.
Although they noted that the greenhouse effect from rising emissions of carbon dioxide emissions could cause future warming of the planet, they concluded from the mid-century cooling trend that the consequences of human activities (like industrial soot, dust from farms, jet exhaust, urbanization and deforestation) were more likely to first cause an ice age.
Holdren’s speculation and conclusion that forced abortion and mass sterilization would be viable and Constitutional avenues for population control to stave off environmental disaster are certainly out of box ideas. In his defense, the 1970’s was a scary time for Science Fiction. Logan’s Run, Silent Running and THX 1138 did not present an inspiring view of the future. Then again, outside Star Trek (which also prophesied a 21st Century collapse of civilization), what sci-fi films have a hopeful view of the future?
link: Holdren’s Ice Age Tidal Wave – TierneyLab Blog – NYTimes.com and zombietime
