Residents of a building in China heard a wailing ghost, shrugged, counted it up as just another crazy Asian ghost wanting attention and left it alone.

What the residents didn’t know was that it wasn’t a ghost…just a woman with poor judgement and bad spatial awareness trying to take a shortcut home who’d wedged herself between two buildings…for SEVEN HOURS.

It took an emergency crew about half an hour to break enough of the wall to get to her thanks to a passerby who heard her cries and probably thought, “Sure doesn’t sound like a wailing ghost…but it sure DOES sound like an actual wailing person who might need help.”

Meanwhile the building’s residents are probably discussing why the wailing ghost has mysteriously stopped wailing.

[Huffington Post]

Back in 1989 two marine invertebrate biologists were discussing the subject of new species when the both went ‘whoa’ realizing that they’d independently discovered the same creature 1,000 miles apart. One scientist found them in Morro Bay, California while the other scientist discovered them on urchins on Vancouver Island in British Colombia.

Living on the finer spines which rest closer to the body of sea urchins, the Waldo Arthuri, is a small (0.2 inches long) clam-like creature that travels around like a snail. Because the little guys are so fragile it’s been hard for the researchers to really analyze them although they’ve been able to extract DNA which has led them to declare this a new species that’s not documented yet.

Just when you think we’ve come to terms with robots and their place amongst us, they do something else that ruins all those happy-go-lucky feelings we had with them for just a brief moment.

E-David, a robotic arm developed by the University of Konstanz in Germany, is teaching itself to paint.

Using 24 colors and 5 different brushes, E-David takes a photo of its subject and then goes to work recreating it in paint. As E-David paints, it’s constantly checking back and forth between the photo it took and what it’s actually painting. If E-David decides that what’s hitting the canvas isn’t correct, it can change the process on the fly to work toward a better finished painting.

“Our hypothesis is that painting – at least the technical part of painting – can be seen as optimization processes in which color is manually distributed on a canvas until the painter is able to recognize the content – regardless if it is a representational painting or not.”

Just another thing we can all give up doing when the robots take over.

[GeekOSystem]

Elon Musk continues to push our ideas about what’s possible right now at this very moment. Musk’s creations all seem to be geared at moving people faster and more efficiently. Which brings us to his next big idea with a name that any kid of the 90s can appreciate…the Hyperloop.

Hyperloop is Musk’s answer to getting Californians from LA to San Francisco in 30 minutes. Nope. Not a typo. LA to San Fran in 3O minutes. At about 4,000 miles an hour.

Like the stuff of sci-fi a junkie’s dreams, the Hyperloop is a six-person pod the size of a car that will enter a tube and shoot passengers 800 or so miles between the two big cities in about the time it takes you to slam a latte, eat a danish and check your news feeds.

If Musk’s track record of tearing through red tape and just getting the future built already is any indication of whether or not this will happen, California may as well just scrap the multi-billion dollar old-school, dumpy train that the state is planning on building.

[The American Interest]

Finding love with someone who you were compatible with or who shared your interests was a lot harder to do in the pre-internet age. Back in those days you’d probably have a hard time finding someone who liked long walks in the cemetery under a full moon, shopping for raw meat together and drinking one another’s blood (if you’re squeamish and don’t like the sight of people drinking one another’s blood…do yourself a favor and do NOT watch the above video).

But now that we’ve got the internet it’s a heck of a lot easier for people like Lia Benninghoff and Aro Draven to hook up and fall in love.

Thanks, Internet.

[Barcroft TV]

Who hasn’t made fun of old, out-of-sync kung fu movies or Godzilla movies?

But what if you woke up one day and that’s how you actually saw/heard the world?

That’s currently how only one person ever known to science now hears/sees the world.

After surgery for a heart problem, the guy, simply known as PH started noticing something odd:

“I was staying with my daughter and they like to have the television on in their house. I turned to my daughter and said ‘you ought to get a decent telly, one where the sound and programme are synchronised’. I gave a little chuckle. But they said ‘there’s nothing wrong with the TV I told my daughter her living room TV was out of sync. Then I noticed the kitchen telly was also dubbed badly. Suddenly I noticed that her voice was out of sync too. It wasn’t the TV, it was me.”

While there is a TON of medical terminology that we could throw around here to explain in detail what’s going on, we’ll simplify it.

PH actually hears people BEFORE he sees their lips move! Not only that but PH also realized that it’s not just other people he’s looking at as they speak..it’s his own words too! PH hears the words he’s saying BEFORE he feels his jaw move!

Since light and sound move at different speeds from the point of origin our brain is set up to process them so that they all sync. While no one’s really sure how the brain makes all this work, scientists are even more confused now that PH and his unique situation has entered the playing field.

Scientists are continuing to study what’s happened to PH because he’s the only person in the world to ever have this happen…

Unless it’s triggered in all of us while we watch late-night kung fu and Godzilla movies.

[New Scientist]

A small robotics company called Robugtix is about to give everyone something special whether they want it or not…arachnophobia.

One of the company’s newest bots is named, simply and innocently, the T8. All of that simpleness and innocence evaporates quickly when you actually get to see the T8 in action.

3D-printed and housing 26 motors to move its creepy little self around, the T8 doesn’t just have the fact that it’s made to look like a spider going against it. When you see the T8’s movements is when you get to see just how amazingly and eerily realistic it looks.

For about the price of one month’s rent in a metro apartment, you can grab your very own robotic nightmare from Robugtix which can either be controlled by you like your very own spidery, robotic minion or you can program the T8 to step through a sequence you create.

Robugtix mentions how great the T8 is for someone to learn advanced robotics.

About 10 or 15 years from now, super-villains will be sitting around talking about their formative years where they all owned a small, slightly menacing-looking robotic spider they had to send away for.

[Gizmodo]

Seagulls are about the very last animal you’d think of when someone ask you to name something that might kill a full-size whale.

But that would just mean that weren’t keeping up on the events taking place out in the waters off the coast of Argentina.

Because trash isn’t covered or really being recycled on nearby land, the gull population has exploded in recent years. No one’s really sure when it started but with dead whales turning up on shore, researchers began noticing something a little unsettling…peck marks.

Seagulls are opportunists like vultures when it comes to an easy meal. At some point a gull realized that whales are pretty easy targets when they come up for air. Now that behavior has become the norm for thousands of these birds. During the calving season when babies whales are born the problem is exacerbated because baby whales need to stay up longer to feed off their mothers. Routines are changing because of the gulls and their relentless attacks…the calves feeding time is shortened. Calves bodies are washing up on shore suffering obvious effects of malnutrition.

Local government is allowing a cull of the birds within the month and targeting the birds who’ve developed this behavior. It’s been done before with no real change in the birds’ behavior.

Let’s all hope this gets sorted out…because once, and we’re just tossing this out there because we like to get hypothetical this way, we run out of whales…

We’ll probably be next.
[Geekosystem]

Google has a new program where they’re asking hikers who’re willing to strap a on 40lb Google Street View backpack version of the device that’s usually strapped to the roof of a car. They’re asking that, should you be heading off to explore some interesting part of the world, if you wouldn’t mind ‘street-mapping’ it for the rest of us to lazy to get up and do it for ourselves.

Recently a team of willing urban explorers went to Hashima Island (also known as ‘Battleship Island’) with the blessings of the Nagasaki government. While tourists have been visiting the island since 2009 their exploration area is very limited because of dangerous conditions. Google’s team, fortunately for the rest of us, was allowed to explore much more of the island so that all of us can now visit this hauntingly unique place.

[PSFK]

Buttercup is an adorable little duck who was born with one of his feet turned backwards.

Born at a high school as part of a biology program, Buttercup was given to a sanctuary specializing in dealing with ducks.

Software engineer for the sanctuary, Mike Garey, took Buttercup under his wing and began looking for ways to give this little duck a much-less painful method of mobility.

Using photos of Buttercup’s sister Minnie’s foot, NovaCopy, a 3D printing company that Garey had gone to, created and then printed a copy of the foot.

Just last night, Buttercup was given the new foot to test out and the result is something that’ll make even hard-nosed haters of cute stuff smirk a little bit at.

The video above is Buttercup before the new foot. The video below is Buttercup with the new foot.

[Gizmodo and Buttercup’s Facebook Page]

It’s tree-trimming…with a 12-bladed chainsaw…being flown from a helicopter. Not really a whole lot else to talk about…except how we all want to have a helicopter and a 12-bladed chainsaw to tidy up the yard.

[Neatorama]

Since mice aren’t really a nuisance to anyone…600 copies of a single mouse have been created from a single drop of the donor mouse’s blood.

Taking the blood from the tail of a donor mouse, a team of scientists in Japan isolated the white blood cells and used the nuclei for the cloning process.

The process, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, involves transferring the nucleus from an adult body cell – such as a blood or skin cell – into an unfertilized egg that has had its nucleus removed.

The point of the experiments was to see if circulating blood cells could be used to create an easily available source of donor cells to create valuable strains of lab mice.

After 25 rounds and 600 clones? We’re pretty sure they can stop wondering if it would work.

[BBC News]

Instead of just plopping yourself down on the couch with a bag of Doritos, a couple of beers and and living vicariously through a couple of sword and sandal flicks like Troy and Gladiator, you could get yourself up off the couch and enroll in a gladiator school and show people you mean business.

[Viator YouTube Channel]

This bike would’ve been pretty awesome…had they NOT MADE THE FREAKIN’ SEAT A TOILET!

No. Seriously. This bike looks like it could’ve rolled into an oil-punk gathering and been something to gawk about because of what it uses for fuel. But instead…someone decided that it would look better with a bar-joke of a seat mounted on it…Wait. Why stop there? Why not make a mini toilet and mount THAT right on the front of the bike as well?

If you can get past the fact that there are two toilets mounted on this trike, you’ll learn that this 250cc machine runs on gas produced from livestock waste even though if anyone ever saw you on this thing (like the young lady in the photo) they’re going to assume you’re ‘dropping’ the kids off at the pool’ while you’re on it…because IT HAS A TOILET FOR A SEAT.

Called the NEO, this thing took three years to develop. Three years of development ruined by someone’s idea to make the area where you sit a toilet.

According to an engineer:

“The waste and household water are converted to methane gas by fermenting, and the methane gas is converted to bio-gas by purifying.”

SO…while there’s no actual manure in the bike, once you tell people what it runs on they’re simply going to assume that YOU are the one providing the fuel…and that you might possibly be providing it while you’re out driving around on it.

[Neatorama]

Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is one of the many joys associated with getting older. New generations of AMD sufferers won’t have to worry about that in the rapidly approaching future.

DARPA has funded the development of contact lens that operates like a millimeter-thick telescope. Using something along the lines of magic, the wearer of the contact will be able to switch between normal vision and magnified vision with the help of liquid crystals and ridiculously small, precisely engineered mirrors.

Basically you’ll be wearing the mechanical focusing rings of a standard still-photo camera that’s been flattened incredibly thin while retaining its functionality.

It’ll still be a while before these things trickle down to the average consumer but if you were to ask some of the future consumers if it was worth the wait? Pretty sure the answer would be a “Yes”.

[Gizmodo]

Musicians are usually willing to jam with anyone that has some ability at playing an instrument. As we begin walking hand-in-hand with our quickly-becoming-commonplace robotic friends, it only seems natural that musicians and robots would start creating the modern equivalent of their own Wyld Stallyns.

Other bands, like Compressorheads, have tread this road long before Z Machine. It just seems that right now we’re all a little more comfortable with our new metal friends and Z Machine has hit the stage at the right moment because of the reaction that the band’s had overseas.

Z Machine performs a lot like an emo band who’s feet have been nailed to the floor in the video we’ve posted here. That looming alien thing in the background on the left seems to be on a union break.

Despite the feeling that this performance is like we’re watching the result of something that’s been a weekend project between the glee and choir clubs, this is a simple, innocent example of how welcoming a new generation is of their new robotic buddies.

[Oddity Central]