We’re always making references to the ‘Robot Apocalypse’ or about all of us being enslaved by ‘our future overlords’ when it comes to our slowly evolving erector set-like counterparts. While 30 and 40-somethings stand around and make jokes, robots continue their often awkward baby-steps into being a part of our lives.

But what about the children?

You know…the children forced to oil the joints of the those aforementioned ‘future overlords’ so that they can continue their ‘overlording’ of the humans?

Those children won’t be worried because they’ll have grown up with robot friends at school.

Friends like ‘Robovie’.

Higashihikari (sneeze it and it’ll sound just fine) Elementary School in Kyoto began a 14-month experiment just a few days ago where a new ‘student’ joined the fleshy ankle-biters’ ranks in order to collect data that will help ‘Robovie’ and other tin-men of the future to interact more naturally with various people. That way, instead of speaking atomic-age sci-fi robotic phrases like “You will not be needed” or “Exterminate!”, they’ll be sitting us down quietly and gently breaking the news our enslavement is really for our own good.

Although this isn’t the first time that a robot has been placed in this kind of environment, this will be the longest amount of time that a robot has spent in the harsh, Lord of the Flies-like habitat of the elementary school student.

Good luck surviving that, Robovie.

[The Mainichi]

King Richard III’s body has been missing for several centuries now. Most historians figured the guy was buried near Leicester, England…somewhere. Nobody could figure out where the hell the body ended up after Henry VIII’s people lost the records showing the location of the remains.

Using other records of the day, archaeologists determined that the King’s remains were buried somewhere near the altar of the Grey Friars Church…

The very same Grey Friars Church that was about to become a parking lot.

After construction began and trenches were being dug for the new parking lot, things came to a screeching halt as workers found they’d unearthed a skeleton…a skeleton that had been there for a very long time.

Scientists and archaeologists descended on the future home of another forgettable strip mall to see if they could learn more about the skeleton who’d been chilling just a few feet below the surface of the area for what appeared to be several centuries.

After a lot of testing, retesting and verified tests….there was no doubt as to whose body this was.

Discovered last summer, this story has resurfaced (totally intentional pun) as the lab-coats have determined that this, in fact and without a doubt, King Richard III’s remains.

Makes you wonder what the hell’s under the nearest WalMart.

[Telegraph UK]

OG Lineup Reunited! A mystery that could rewrite cultural, space and political history is revealed. What is the future of television? How about a technology that draws on your flipping eye balls! This triggers Brian to imagine a beautiful world where everyone is forced to wear glasses. Then Andrew and Justin disagree. Then the yelling begins. Oh, the yelling.

Ask Thin Lizzy, the Weird Things podcast is back in town!

BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

– Flowers

FLOWERS is the third feature film from writer/director Phil Stevens. An abstract, surreal horror film centering around six dead women waking up in the crawl space below their killer’s house only to discover that they are trapped in their own limbo and purgatory. A movie that tells it’s story in silence. Without any spoken dialog and surrounded in a cryptic and dark visual atmosphere, FLOWERS is a film that builds on the journey and not the destination. check out the site at flowersthefilm.com or help out by donating to the kickstarter at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manomatul/flowers-a-return-to-the-dark-art-house-underground.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

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Picks:

Brian:

House of Cards

Andrew:

Stone Spring

Justin:

SModcast with Rian Johnson

Dream big kids as you check out this retrotastic video from NASA on building colonies in space. Besides the awesome music, my favorite part is NASA’s recommendation for getting a better growing season from your crops on the space station – just increase the amount of CO2. Oh, the 70’s!

‘Squirrel!’

Ever wonder what it looked like at the inception point of a thought? Like when your watching ‘fail videos’ online and you do that mental cringe at the exact moment that you’re watching someone sledding down a hill on an oil-pan and suddenly the shot pans far enough to see the gaggle of unattentive people about to meet said oil-pan driver?

Wonder no more!

Researchers in Japan have actually filmed that ‘Oh $#%*!’ moment…

In a zebrafish.

Watch the video. That sudden flash of light takes place the moment the fish noticed food being put into the tank. Zebrafish aren’t going to be taking over the world anytime soon with all of their incredible cerebral abilities, but that was the point of this…to record the inception of a thought in a more simple brain simply to see if it could be done.

A double-transgenic larva was embedded in agarose, and a spot was presented on an LCD display placed on the right-eye side. Ca2+ signals were detected on the left tectum upon appearance (ON) and disappearance (OFF) of the spot. The spot was shown for the first 3 s in this 6 s movie. The video is shown at 3x real time.

Experiments are expected to take place on more advanced brains way too soon.

We could sit around all day and come up with scenarios about this stunning breakthrough.

But if you were a zebrafish, we’d already know that.

[Gizmodo]

Not sure about you…but pretty sure that having the ability to create our own bad-ass appendages like He-Man’s Trap-Jaw would take precedence over things like eating…sleeping…everything…well almost everything.

Ivan Owen created a mechanical hand prop and posted it on YouTube. A couple days later he was contacted by Richard Van As, an amputee and craftsman who admired Owen’s work. Once they put their put their brains together, they created a prosthetic finger for Richard. After many more prototypes, the two learned of an awesome kid named Liam who was born missing the fingers of his right hand. The two men decided to help Liam out.

A few more prototypes later and “Robohand” was born. Crafted for Liam, it took only a few days for him to get adjusted to using his prosthetic.

Most bare-bones, low-end prosthetics can easily set someone back $600 and take weeks to go through the fitting, customizing and refitting process.

Using a 3D printer, Owen and Vas As stripped down those weeks into a matter of hours and that $600 for an arm that was nothing more than a stick with a glove on the end was whittled down to a prosthetic with individually moving fingers for the pocket change of $20.

Using a Replicator 2, Ronning created

During the course of a single day and a couple more twenties? Someone’s eventually going to start tossing out ‘what ifs’.
Next day? Someone’s going to be sporting a grappling hook, a flame-thrower, a buzz-saw, a built-in paintball gun, a slingshot or some kind of ridiculously awesome combination we haven’t even imagined yet.

[GizMag]

Sometimes you go out for dinner and wonder whether or not the guys in the kitchen are fixing your meal based on your server’s impression of you and using questionable ingredients like forehead sweat just to teach you a lesson.

At Ne Quittez Pas (which translates to: “Please don’t leave”, a French restaurant located in Tokyo’s Gotanda District, you don’t have to wonder about weird stuff being put in your food behind your back.

Why?

Because Ne Quittez Pas makes it no secret that many of their meals are created using the same thing many of you as a I’ll-stick-anything-in-my-mouth toddler probably taste-tested…

Dirt.

Ne Quittez Pas’ actually has an entire menu featuring dishes made with dirt!

Here’s your list:

Potato Starch and Dirt Soup
Salad with Dirt Dressing
Dirt Ice Cream and a Dirt Gratin
Dirt Mint Tea
There’s also something called “Minerals of the sea and minerals of the land,” an aspic made with oriental clams and the top layer of sediment, and a dirt risotto with sauteed sea bass and burdock root”.

How does gourmet dirt taste? Most of the people partaking of the ground we all walk on have said that it’s a non-issue because the dishes all taste so flippin’ good!

Next time you’re complaining about being hungry? Stop complaining…

Just grab a handful of what’s right under your feet and toss it down.

We’re not responsible for your bad decisions based on our bad suggestions.

Bon Appetit!

[RocketNews24]

BAM!

You’re chillin’ at home in front of the television.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

You hear some kind of resonating thud from outside. You assume it’s thunder or a neighbor and his anvil.

BAM!

You’re about to be REAL wrong!

BAM! BAM! BAM!

You hear this crazy sound coming from your roof so you go to investigate.

What do you find?

Were you a resident of a small neighborhood in Florida (yep…the streak continues), you might’ve uttered a “Aww….Hell no!” at 21 year-old Gregory Matthew Bruni who would’ve been standing on your roof…marching around on it…naked…BAM!..BAM!…BAM!…

That’s what a resident witnessed upon investigating a loud, thundering sound outside…a naked guy bounding around on his roof.

Once Bruni was discovered as the cause of the disturbance and the jig was up, he fly-tackled the owner of the home who’d come outside to investigate the source of the noise.
After leaping from the roof and onto the homeowner, Bruni ran inside the house screaming. In what can only be described as a tantrum, Bruni ran to the large screen television in the living room and pulled it over onto the floor. Bruni then happened upon the family’s vacuum cleaner and, in the weirdest display of a five-year-old not getting the ice cream he’d wanted, Bruni emptied the vacuum cleaner’s contents back onto the floor it had apparently just cleaned. The homeowner’s wife, who was aware things were gettin’ a little crazy, fired three warning shots with a revolver as Bruni finished undoing what the vacuum had done. In a panic Bruni hit the floor…

He didn’t just hit the floor….that would’ve been too easy (and not quite worthy of being ‘Florida-weird’).

He began amorously rubbing himself against the floor.

Once he felt his relationship with the floor had reached its climax, Bruni ran into the handgun-sporting wife’s closet and rubbed her clothing all over his face.

Bruni continued acting like a raging Muppet until the homeowner that’d been fly-tackled was able to get a shotgun and keep Bruni cornered until deputies arrived and constrained him by finally nailing the guy with a taser.

Bruni is being charged with Criminal Mischief, Battery, Occupied Burglary and resisting without violence.

Authorities believe that Bruni had been taking some kind of drug at the time of the incident but aren’t sure what it may have been.

While they all try to find an answer to what Bruni may have been taking….we’ll just quietly gesture back to our posts during the ‘bath-salt-zombie’ craziness that took place early last year and wonder if it’s not quite over just yet.

Or is Bruni just an idiot who’s late to the game…

Poser.

[NBC2.Com]

Sometimes towns and even countries have to stretch to lure potential tourist dollars.
Occasionally the only thing are some strange promises of something unique about a particular area.

We’ve all seen photos of the Giant Ball of (insert something you might make a giant ball out of). You might be surprised just how many will actually drive out to seek these over-the-top and almost accidental attractions.

To celebrate the ‘Year of Natural Scotland 2013’, the ‘Visit Scotland’ website has created something that might possibly cause peoples’ heads to explode in a ball of confetti, sparkles and female anime character giggles.

They’ve taken one adorable thing and one questionable fashion choice of Scottish heritage and combined them into a nexus of weirdly cute by dressing two ponies, Vitamin and Fivla….

…in cardigans.

Most local websites that often state: ‘Come See the Town of _______ where you can sit for hours and see local squirrels bury their nuts or sit by the lake for hours on end while wondering about other towns where something exciting might be happening’ just never seem to help garner enough buzz for you to even consider visiting.

But…two adorable ponies made even more adorable because they’re wearing sweaters?

We think people might notice.

[Design Taxi]

For two decades Eric Warrant has literally had a pretty crappy job. As a student who specializes in optics at the University of Lund in Sweden, he has been passionately studying the last creature on earth that you’d think of when it came to helping Toyota develop a true-color night-vision system…

The dung beetle.

Dung beetles have an uncanny ability to see clearly and navigate in even the darkest environment. Toyota is interested in developing a night-vision navigation system that allows for an optimal, full-color image in those conditions, we all want to avoid a car accident in the dark and Eric Warrant likes spending time with dung beetles. Everybody wins!

Using dung beetles’ abilities as the launching point and inspiration for this idea, Toyota is developing, in the simplest explanation we can give you, an advanced algorithym system that teaches the camera to look at every pixel in a single frame of video, look at the surrounding pixels, any movement in adjacent pixels and basically milk as much image information from the collected data in real-time to create a perfect, true-color image from nothing but a seemingly black image.

The team originally assumed they would have to design a special processor chip to run the algorithm and this would go inside a digital video camera, Malm says. In fact, the processing unit of a conventional PC graphics card was powerful enough to do the job, and they have managed to fine tune the algorithm to analyse images from the camera’s three colour channels – red, green and blue – simultaneously in real time. Three years after starting the project, the team finally have a way of capturing full-colour moving images shot in what to human eyes is almost total darkness.

Exactly how this technology will eventually be used is anyone’s guess.

But when that tech finally saves lives in the dark?

We can all stand up and applaud a crazy dude and his obsession with a crappy little bug.

[New Scientist]

Andrew is back. Brian is gone. And the one and only Veronica Belmont joins us. Goblins overrrun a Zimbabwe clinic, we take Veronica on quite a tour of our continuing goblin epidemic. We contemplate if a woman would have a neanderthal baby. An update on the Python Killin’ Contest in Florida. We try to sex up a SpaceX announcement.

It’s all coming up on a new Weird Things podcast!

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

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Picks:

Veronica:

Old Man’s War

Andrew:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Justin:

Game of Thrones

Clarence Bright passed away at 93 years of age and his corpse was being prepped for burial in his final resting place.

Key word in that last sentence? ‘Was’.

Just hours before being buried, the body of Clarence Bright went missing. After receiving tips from family members, authorities began searching for Clarence’s son, Vincent. Almost immediately their search turned up a van containing a casket but still no Clarence.

When authorities finally arrived at Vincent’s home, they also found out where Clarence had seemingly sauntered off to.

Vincent, who, according to his family, had extreme religious views, had taken his good ol’ Dad home, in a cliche’ rookie move put him in the freezer in the basement and was going to bring him back to life.

Authorities shook their heads, arrested him, plucked his dad-sicle from the freezer and slapped a $75,000 bond on him.

Wayne County Jail arraigned Vincent via video.

In an understatement to the media, Vincent Bright’s lawyer, Gerald Karafa said:

“It’s an unusual case. It’s not something you see every day.”

Obviously Gerald the lawyer isn’t a regular reader of WeirdThings.

[Associated Press]

While we all wait for the scenes in Planet of the Apes to play out in real-life, a female chimp named Gina will give us all a glimmer of hope that at least a small percentage of our future primate overlords will need us for a little sumthin’ sumthin’…

Even if that something’s acting out her favorite love scenes from high-quality fare like ‘Slappin’ Bumpies 2′.

For those still catching up…

Gina is a female chimp at the Seville Zoo in Spain. As part of the zoo’s enrichment program, Gina was given her very own remote control for a television mounted to a wall near her cage.

Not long after Gina began figuring out how to work the remote, she also found that she preferred certain channels over others.

Those ‘certain channels’ were the ones that featured the people that kept her in cages riding one another like pack animals (obviously we’re skirting the ‘P’ word because that tosses red flags).

Pablo Herreros, the zoo’s primatologist wrote in his paper on Gina and her viewing preferences:

“The surprise was when they found that within a few days, Gina was not only using the remote control perfectly well, but that she also used to choose the p**n channel for entertainment, as many of us would have done.”

At least we know there’ll be a few sympathizers we can count on when we end up in cages with bad day-time television blaring at us.

Even if they just want us for our bodies.

We went there.

[New York Daily News]

Ever leave the house knowing you forgot…something?

We’re wondering what it was like when the guy who was supposed to file paperwork for 18 human heads for medical study realized that he’d forgotten to file paperwork for 18 human heads for medical study.

One week before Santa Claus was to descend on the world with a bag of awesomeness, 18 well-preserved human heads showed up at O’ Hare International Airport with no explanation….just a bunch of questions. It wasn’t until an employee from a crematorium came to pick up the heads that things became clear.

Tagged as ‘medical specimens’, the heads had originally shipped from the US to Rome for medical study and were coming back to the states to be cremated.

Brian Bell of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security stated:
“There’s no issue with the transportation of body parts for medical purposes. There’s nothing against the law that says you cannot ship them, provided you have the right documentation. Everybody here is ‘Oh my gosh, you got a box of heads’ and everybody thinks that it’s unheard of. It is a potentially legitimate medical shipment. We’ve seen it at various ports in the nation.”

You can leave all your ‘I’d-forget-my-head-if-it-wasn’t-attached jokes below.’

[Chicago Sun Times]

In our article about the other new toddler robot called Roboy we mentioned Diego-san. Here’s your first look into the robotic wagon-train that’s leaving Uncanny Valley slowly but surely.

When John Connor shows up and SkyNet goes live it won’t be the T1000s we’re worried about.

Why?

We’ll be too terrified by something that’s already been here.

Robot babies.

And you can tear that cute baby robot picture off the wall of your imagination…because robot babies are about as far as you can get from being ‘cute’.

Because we’re not satisfied with making skeletal robots that look like mechanical grim reapers, the University of San Diego has created a ridiculously amazing and disturbingly realistic over-sized one-year-old in order to study the cognitive development of infants.

“Its main goal is to try and understand the development of sensory motor intelligence from a computational point of view. It brings together researchers in developmental psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, computer vision and robotics. Basically we are trying to understand the computational problems that a baby’s brain faces when learning to move its own body and use it to interact with the physical and social worlds.”

As we continue grinning and patting ourselves on the back about our advances in robot technology and march ourselves into our own demise, you can rest assured that the armies of creepy robot babies are just going to keep on smiling that same frightening smile that’ll remind us of ourselves when we were so excited about our accomplishments in robotics.

Until then just keep hitting the replay button and shuddering at Diego-san’s facial expressions.

[Gizmag.com]

Across the globe from the uncanny valley that is Diego-san’s facial expressions, the University of Zurich’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory making another weird foray into the creation of a robot toddler.

Roboy is being developing with the help of crowd-funding,, sponsorships and almost 40 engineers and scientists.

Just like its weaker, fleshy, real-life inspiration, Roboy’s design gestation is going to take about 9 months to full completion.

Roboy is being developed to ease people into actually living with robots and not being creeped out by them. Roboy’s face was chosen during a Facebook contest. Its body is made entirely of plastic and will be covered with a fleshy, rubber-like material to simulate skin. Unlike typical robot movement mechanisms, Roboy will feature elastic cables pulled by motors in order to provide movement more human-like and less bad robot-dance-like.

Part of Roboy’s mission is to help build a bridge across the uncanny valley and get people more comfortable with having robots around and being a part of their lives.

Service robots are going to be a part of our lives in the very near future. As the population ages, new generations will already be more comfortable with having robots around and using them to do menial tasks for us.

Roboy will heading out into the world as part of the ‘Robots on Tour’ event that begins March and will exhibit all sorts of our future replacements.

Then there’s that incessant and nagging subconscious feeling that we might piss them off and see an army more terrifying than anything Hollywood could put in front of our peepers….

[Roboy]