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.
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.
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.
As one of his last acts as pope, retired Pope Benedict decreed that Italians should be given a special look into the Turin Cathedral and the Shroud it’s known for. Sealed inside it’s climate controlled case, viewers will get a glimpse of this controversial artifact that some say was the shroud used to bury Jesus. Through some kind of divine Polaroid intervention, his image was supposedly fused into the shroud.
While the scientific evidence says it dates from the medieval times and researchers have shown how easily the shroud could have been made, it’s still a source of inspiration and fascination for millions.
NASA plans to put a line for $100 million in an upcoming budget for an asteroid snatching mission with a total expected cost of $2.6 billion. The goal is to grab an asteroid and move it into a lunar orbit so we can get a closer look.
What do you think? At a starting cost of $2.6 billion (and that’s the floor) would we be better off with an X-Prize style initiative? Given the success of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, is there something to the idea of getting commercial enterprise to offset the costs?
It’s green and came from outer space. While scientists haven’t completely ruled out a Kryptonian origin, they think this rock may in fact be the first piece of the planet Mercury ever found on earth. Sheared away in a collision billions of years ago, further tests will be required to tell us if it came from the first planet, but right now prospects look good.
The folks at NextBigFuture via Rocketeers.co.uk are reporting the rumor mill has SpaceX planning to send their reusable Grasshopper test rocket to a height of 300,000 feet in the near future with an eye towards trying a controlled re-entry of the primary stage sometime this year.
The first high-altitude test flight would see the first stage going to the edge of space (the actual edge, not the make-believe-one whenever the media sees a photo from a high altitude balloon) and returning to the launch pad (ideally) at White Sands Missile Range.
If that proves successful, they plan to bring a first stage back down to earth via a rocket controlled descent into the ocean.
Either mission would be a huge, groundbreaking (only figuratively, hopefully) event in space travel. A successful return of a first stage takes us dramatically closer to the dream of a rocket as reusable as a commercial airplane. This would bring the cost of putting things into orbit low enough to create a boom in aerospace development.
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We don’t know who Chief Njelele is, or who elected him, but by the accounts were hearing, he’s got a real problem in his region of Zimbabwe. We’re talking a Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates and Bono level solve-this-crisis. On of his villagers is being plagued by too many goblins to count according to the Zimia Dispora:
“I asked her how many goblins she had been given and she told me she could not quantify them because they were too many. She hysterically told me that these goblins were haunting her and making her life a living hell,” said Chief Njelele.
Next time you fret about your first world problems, be glad you don’t have to worry about a bunch of thieving goblins stealing women’s underwear and hiding it in your house.
So notorious is Chief Njelele’s area that last year another villager’s goblin allegedly stole panties belonging to 26 women. Another villager later apologised after a tsikamutanda reportedly fingered him as the owner of the thieving goblin. Reporters has it in good authority that the goblin was also found wearing an underwear belonging to a village headman’s wife.
Panties go missing and they find them in some dude’s house who says those damn goblins are to blame.
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Bonnie “The Invisible Wife” joins Brian and Justin to discuss the Week of Weird. A school in Maryland begin instituting a series of outlandish new regulations. Can Bonnie and Brian force themselves and their children to adapt? With all the Pope talk, Justin reveals the most closely guarded papal secret of all time. Meanwhile, the Brushwoods imagine a past where they become teenage super heroes named Blow and Hoe.
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.
SpaceX launches does a new rocket test that reminds Justin of a CGI future where humans roam the stars. A new digital scam is fleecing business men our of scads of cash, Justin and Andrew discuss the future of such villainy. Are we climbing out of the uncanny valley? There is life on Mars, and we will Kickstarter ourselves there. What does this mean for our favorite Sci Fi shows and movies?
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.
Yesterday at the SXSW keynote, SpaceX’s Elon Musk showed the first footage of their most recent test of their reusable rocket system. In what has to be a new record of some kind, the Grasshopper, a rocket 10 stories tall, flew 268 feet in the air and then landed back down on the pad without incident.
Next Grasshopper rocket test is called the Johnny Cash Hover Slam (yeah baby!). Might be our first smoking crater…
Even Elon Musk was publicly unsure of the success of the test, suggesting on Twitter this might leave a ‘crater’. The name, “Johnny Cash Hover Slam”, doesn’t inspire confidence in a happy landing. Watch the video accompanied by Cash’s Ring of Fire and remind yourself of the scale of what you’re watching. 268 feet is tall enough to clear the crown of the Statue of Liberty. It’s also probably the heaviest object in the world to ever VTOL.
What’s next for the Grasshopper program and their goal of rapidly reusable rockets? At SXSW, Musk said they’d like to go hypersonic before the end of the year. Any song suggestions for that one?
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Quadcopters are the new must-have toys of the tech-headed kids. They’re showing up everywhere and there are thousands of them out ‘in the wild’.
For those frightened that these things will eventually be controlled by SkyNet, this latest advancement in their abilities is only going to reinforce that paranoia.
For the rest of us who believe our robot friends would never hurt us based on a set of laws thrust into existence by an author of science fiction novels? This is pretty awesome to watch.
For a more detailed description of how exactly this whole process works, you can check out RoboHub for a more educational explanation than anything you’re ever going to find here.
Those that just want to be amazed at a serious demonstration of how organized, responsive, agile….
Know what? Forget we ever called those people paranoid.
Fans of The Walking Dead know that if you cover yourself in the leftovers of friends, neighbors and family, zombies will just stroll right on by you…until it begins to rain and things go to hell real fast.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if someone would just come up with a scented…oh wait…it’s happened..
Demeter Fragrances has added two new perfumes to their line-up:
‘Zombie for Him’ and ‘Zombie for Her’.
Now there’s no need to don protective wear and hack away for hours when only a butter knife is available in order to smother yourself with the innards of a hapless stranger…or a not quite zombie-apocalypse-prepped friend.
‘Zombie for Him’ is described thusly:
Think forest floor. Zombie for Him is a combination of dried leaves, mushrooms, mildew, moss and earth. A definite must-have for any Man’s scent collection.
‘Zombie for Her’ is:
A slightly lighter version of the Men’s fragrance with a touch of Dregs from the bottom of the wine barrel for that feminine touch.
Now you can protect anyone in an instant by just spritzing them and blending in socially amongst the walking dead…
For a LOT of the more nerdy kids out there, we’re placing bets that many of you pretended you had the ability to throw fireballs, move objects by waving your hands and occasionally even tried in vain to channel the Force.
That was all fun, lots of pretending and wishful thinking…wasn’t it?
Not any more.
Thalmic Labs, the creators of Myo is a company that, with the help of a special armband, could make a lot of those things a reality.
‘As a company, we’re interested in how we can use technology to enhance our abilities as humans – in short, giving us superpowers,’ Stephen Lake, co-founder and CEO of Thalmic Labs said.
Using gesture control, Myo is an armband that registers the electrical activity in your muscle movements that will produce a signal that’s interpreted and sent wirelessly to your phone, television, kitchen or even your personal drone instantly.
At that price why waste time running around in a swamp with an 800 year-old, green, raisin-skinned, wizard clinging to your back and nagging at you or visiting some weird old desert hermit when you can just drop a little cash and skip the middleman?
Let’s just hope people remember to remove it when they’re doing…uh…private stuff involving a lot of gesturing.
We’re pretty sure that this thing can’t help us ‘unsee’ things yet.
