Pigeon racing is quickly becoming a hot place for a new generation of wealthy people in China to drop some cash. In fact it’s attracting drops of cash worth millions. One race can net the winning team’s owner upwards of $80,000. There’s even a black market for racing pigeons being fed by pigeon pirates. Who knew?
We were just informed that Mike Tyson apparently knew this’d be hot before all of us.
Because the daily commute in Russia isn’t already the equivalent of driving through a demolition derby on the way to work, several Czech scientists have come together with a Czech bicycle manufacturer to create the next hellish level of obstacles to just getting to the grocery store safely.
For obvious inner-child reasons, this team has created the crudest, loudest version of a flying bike they could piece together.
Ales Kobylik, an engineer involved on the project, stated: “Our main motivation in working on the project was neither profit nor commercial interest, but the fulfillment of our boyish dreams.”
All you Russian commuters can rest easy now.
[Walyou]
Akhibara, Japan is the place to go to get just about anything you want in life…even if that anything includes wanting a creepy doll-like clone of yourself.
Recently a company called “Clone Factory” opened which now allows you to not only have a 3D-printed doll-head of your own mug but your pets as well.
Using several DSLR cameras, Clone Factory captures your face from different angles, puts it all together in the computer, prints it and hands you a bill for $1,300 US bucks.
Clone Factory uses one of the most advanced 3D printers (made by ZCorp) on the market to print out these plastic little mini-selfs of its customers. Disney recently used these same printers during their annual Star Wars Weekends at Walt Disney World where guests could either have their likeness frozen in a slab of carbonite or put onto the body of a Stormtrooper (complete with detachable helmet).
Most of Clone Factory’s customers are actually women. Not only do the women seek to preserve how they look on special days like their weddings, they also have the exact outfits they’re wearing at the time as well as their hair and make-up recreated as well.
Which doesn’t make any of this any less creepy.
[DesignTaxi]
In a case of ‘this is why we can’t take you seriously’, an amateur photographer snapped a couple photos of something that’s currently got the UFO and ‘rod community’ (leave jokes below…we know they’re coming) buzzing. And by buzzing we mean they’re all getting excited by a picture of what’s probably a photo-bombing bug moving across the frame of 43-year-old Corrine Federer’s camera while she was shooting photos of a castle in Amsterdam.
Federer stated that, “It was a tubular-shaped object that had an S-shaped fin on it. If it had been any type of missile, it would’ve had mulptiple fins, but facing the same direction. We heard nothing. It was completely quiet out. The more I flipped through the frames, it was kind of creepy.”
Many people are speculating that it’s a photo of a missile test, airplane or weather balloon.
Federer believes that it could be something more…
“I don’t find it unreasonable that there’s another habitable planet somewhere that has started exploring space. Maybe they’re more advanced than we are and they’ve come by to see what’s going on here.”
While some of us are pointing and giggling at the alleged UFO, many are pointing with serious there’s-all-the-proof-you-need-faces.
[FOX News]
Since Russia is like the overseas equivalent of Florida, news that typically comes out of there is usually skewed toward the weird.
After finding blood splattered near the wheel well of an Airbus passenger plane, authorities moved on to their second what-the-hell discovery…a frozen 22-year-old dead man stuck in said wheel well. This same 22-year-old was not only dead, frozen and stuck in the wheel well of an Airbus…he’d been there for four days and logged at least seven trips before he was discovered!
Giorgio Abduladze’s t-shirt and shorts-clad body underwent an autopsy showing that he froze to death in flight. Crews don’t regularly access the area where Abduladze’s body was found but now everyone’s wondering what he was doing in there in the first place.
3D printng is the ‘it’ thing right now. It seems like nothing can’t be printed. We can print plastic toys, metal parts and even cell tissues using additive manufacturing. So what’s next?
Food…3D-printed food.
A Texas company is partnering with NASA to explore the idea of printing food during long, deep space missions. Systems and Materials Research and
Consultancy, a company in Austin, was recently awarded a Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 contract concerning printing
food for astronauts. Currently astronauts eat foods that lose their micronutrients during the process they go through to become official space-food.
Eventually the prepackaged, off-the-shelf, single-servings the astronauts nom on now will make way for customizable recipes.
Anyone else excited to witness the first live-stream of a 3D-printed Thanksgiving dinner…in space? Us too.
[DesignBoom]
Brian, Justin and Bonnie discuss the brand new Kickstarter by Planetary Resources which seeks to put a publicly available telescope in space. And take selfies amongst the stars. Will Brian make the decision to allow commercial drones in our skies if it will bring him a piping hot pan pizza faster? Also, which 18-century American city was so rife with public sex and prostitution it was dubbed “Sin City” long before Vegas?
It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Knight School just click on the image below.
Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.
Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings060613.mp3
[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings060613.mp3[/podcast]
Would you like to help a Weird Things listener in need? Head on over to GoFundMe.com/andrewsbed
Picks:
Justin:
Off Camera
Brian:
Supergods
Bonnie:
Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child
After a hiatus, Brian and Justin return with Bonnie The Invisible Wife for a new episode of Weird Things. Brian is dead and Bonnie is charged with building a monument for her late husband, will she build something so garish it is rejected by the city? SPOILER: she does. A wave of death that left over 150 injured and over 20 dead is investigated. Also, the holodeck is real.
It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Knight School just click on the image below.
Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.
Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings0520013.mp3
[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings052013.mp3[/podcast]
Would you like to help a Weird Things listener in need? Head on over to GoFundMe.com/andrewsbed
Picks:
Justin:
Star Trek Into Darkness
Brian:
This Machine Kills Secrets
Bonnie:
Zombies, Run!
There’s really not much to talk about here with a bunch of words. They’ll just get in the way of you pressing play and smiling like a little kid as your brain sort of automatically speculates on the possibilities of this in peoples’ homes.
We’ve all dreamed of the Holodeck being a part of our secret lair at home. Microsoft’s new IllumiRoom is a lot like watching a baby take its first steps in the direction of Holodecks becoming a standard part of any man-cave.
Sure we’ve seen mapped projections before like at Walt Disney World’s Magic, Memories and You show at the Magic Kingdom…but nothing on a consumer level and nothing with this kind of customization. Using a Kinect, a couple of cameras and some software, this is something that, while in its newborn stage, could lead to some truly innovative projects and ideas…or just mean that we’re going to be leaving our mother’s basements way less than we already do.
[GizMag]
Someone at Budweiser had apparently just read about Virgin America’s in-cabin, passenger-to-passenger texting service, knocked back a couple bottles and decided that the giant beer-hive should also get in on the act of making social interaction among drunken stalkers and their prey even more uncomfortable.
Using a ‘Buddy Cup’, you scan the cup with your phone, link your Facebook profile to the chip embedded in the bottom of the cup and then, magically, every time you clink cups with someone else who’s gone through the process, you become ‘friends’ on everyone’s favorite social hive.
Buddy Cup! Because there’s nothing like becoming friends with all the people involved in a lot of bad decision-making from the night before.
It wasn’t too long ago that North America’s Hellmouth of a state was calling for people to go out into the wild and bag/kill as many giant pythons as they possibly could.
Now that that’s yesterday’s Nature versus Humankind battle is over, everyone’s favorite birthing place of weird EVERYTHING is taking us back to the good old days of that era of 1970s horror films when piranha, worms, snakes, rats, bears and even tadpoles decided they were tired of sharing the planet with us.
Just what the hell is this new scourge that’s coming to wreak havoc upon us now?
Brace yourselves, people…
Snails.
SNAILS!
And they’re exactly the kind of snails some of you are imagining right now…
Giant African Snails that can grow to 8 inches long, devour 500 different species of plants and (you’re going to slap your face like Maculay Culkin in Home Alone right about now) they are tearing through stucco and peoples’ homes! Not only that but the snails’ shells are big enough to puncture car tires because they’re Frogger-like skills are nonexistent!
Good luck, Florida.
Brian and Justin are brought to the gates of a mysterious cavern. Is it the literal gate to hell? How far would Andrew go for science? We discover the horrifying outer limits. What would you do with your own vigilante botnet?
It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Knight School just click on the image below.
Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.
Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings047013.mp3
[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings040713.mp3[/podcast]
Would you like to help a Weird Things listener in need? Head on over to GoFundMe.com/andrewsbed
Sponsor:
HELP! DONATE NOW!
Picks:
Justin:
The Great Gatsby audiobook with Tim Robbins
Brian:
Andrew:
Recently a group of Japanese scientists at the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference in Orlando, Florida have unveiled
the latest incarnation of…
(sad, loungy drumroll please)
Smell-O-Vision!
That’s right. Scientists have been working hard at making your television smell.
Do we really need to smell the elephants of Africa while watching a beautiful documentary about the animals?
No. Not really.
But advertisers sure would like us to get a whiff of things like the latest addition to the IHOP menu, the latest
colognes and Pilsbury would take the obesity problems in America to a whole new level when that little chubby, animated
chef shows up shoving a tray full of warm, delicious chocolate chip cookies in our faces.
Using gel pellets placed at the four corners of the monitor and small air-streams, scientists are able to get fairly
specific across the face of the monitor where the smell will seem to emanate from. Think of it like 5.1 surround sound but
your nose is the one in the recliner experiencing it.
Modern day theme parks like Universal and Disney often use gel packs or cartridges to send the smell of candy, food or, in the case of Universal’s
Halloween Horror Nights, the smell of rotting meat to add a subtle something to guests’ in-park experience.
What was unveiled at the conference is still fairly primitive but technological developments will continue to improve and
pretty soon you could be smelling the oil and smoking metal of Call of Duty…
Or the sweet, acrid smell of a Well Zombie from the Walking Dead.
Researchers have found the tentacled god Cthulhu at last he shall walk the earth and consume us all. By earth we mean the gut of termites and by consume we mean engage in a symbiotic relationship. Oh, and this Cthulhu as described in the PLOS ONE paper is actually a microorganism. But he does have tentacles and is as scary as the deep dark hell from which he most certainly came from.
Researchers Invoke Cthulhu In Naming Two New Microorganisms : World : Latinos Post.
What’s better than Yeti tracks in the snow? Video of a Yeti. What’s better than a Yeti? Two Yetis! What’s better than that???? A mama yeti and her child filmed by some 12 year old Russian kid. To top it all off, a Russian scientist has even declared the footage is legit, because it’s not like you could fake something like this. Next you’ll have us believing it really was a meteor that slammed into Russia a few months back. Seriously. Science. Yetis.
Two southerners are getting checks each year from the government for $865 a year. The explanation might break your brain. Andrew explains his current obsession with the real life Monkey Island. Also, his hunt to prove that it not only existed, but the hunt to find the mysterious descendants that might still roam the Southern California wilderness. Is the speed of light a constant? Do we even know what that means? NO! Still, we are blown away.
It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Knight School just click on the image below.
Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.
Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings033013.mp3
[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings033013.mp3[/podcast]
Sponsor:
HELP! DONATE NOW!
Picks:
Justin:
Brian:
Andrew: