Podcast: Cuddle Bear Happy Hour
Posted by Editor on November 10th, 2012
A woman has a strange job. It sparks a statistical argument between Brian and Justin to rival the Presidential Election. A new way to tell if Mars is housing a killer plague sets up a scenario involving precursor aliens and bears on a level you never before seen. The boys discuss the place the Water Bears have their picnic.
Also.
Star Wars TALK!!!
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Tales of the Mos Eisley Cantina
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NYU Scientists Create Microscopic Tractor Beam!
Posted by Tony on November 3rd, 2012Star Wars uses tractor beams as frequently as newly graduated college kids use U-Haul trailers.
Imagine if, just like in the movies, you could hook up those U-Hauls with a tractor beam instead of trying to get one of those ball-and-cup trailer hook-ups?
That day might not be as far away as it once was according to research at the Department of Physics and Centre for Soft Matter Research at New York University. Although it’s on a significantly smaller scale than trying to yank the Millenium Falcon into your garage using a flashlight, scientists have recently used a beam of light to pull a particle in a line. While researchers of the ideas surrounding what’s being called ‘soft matter’ have used laser ‘tweezers’ to pull along particles, using light alone to move something verged on magical.
By varying the relative phase of the two beams, this technique traps the particle in a moving hologram they call an ‘optical conveyor’ which allows ‘bi-directional transport in three dimensions’.
New Scientist explains how projecting the beams in this way creates a pattern of alternating bright and dark regions. By fine tuning the beam photons in the bright regions which flow past the chosen particle can be made to scatter backwards, hitting the particle and knocking it on towards the next bright region.
Watch the guy in the video explain it in an endearingly enthusiastic nerdy manner…and then explain what he’s talking about to us.
Object Lands In Active Volcano In Mexico!
Posted by Tony on November 2nd, 2012December 21st of this year is the big party date for the supposed end of our world.
Sure everyone’s already ordering kegs, ordering faux “Danger: Apocalypse In Progress – Do Not Cross” banner tape by the case and prepping for their end-of-the-world get-togethers.
But then again…everyone hasn’t been watching the news coming out of Mexico that clearly shows an active volcano and something entering it from the sky like an old Thunderbirds vehicle.
Falling star? Busted satellite? No one’s sure at this point but seriously…the odds of something as agile (sarcasm, kids…sarcasm) as a giant mountain full of raging lava catching an object from space? Slim.
We’ll let you put all those party supplies back, start handing you some nails and plywood and make sure your shotgun’s loaded.
Archaeologists Find Bilbo Baggins’ House and Hobbiton
Posted by Andrew on October 31st, 2012
Okay, maybe not quite – at least it looks like Bilbo’s house from the photo of the archeological site. What scientists do think they’ve found is the oldest town in Europe, dating back to somewhere around 4500 BC; 1,500 years before the start of Greek civilization.
Located in modern day Bulgaria, the town may have centered around the trade of salt bricks used to preserve meat.
40 years prior, the oldest hoard of gold was found in a cemetary 21 mile away, indicating this area was rife with commerce nearly 7,000 years ago.
Podcast: Gary and The Weasel
Posted by Editor on October 30th, 2012
Gary and The Weasel make their podcast debut to solve a Polish crime. Who would win in a fight: a Neanderthal or a human? Andrew quizzes us on a mysterious man who witnessed something amazing. Can the boys figure out his identity? And what did he see?
The results connect the very fabric of our history through a meld of technology and culture! Prepare friends, for yet another Weird Things podcast!
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DARPA Robot Navigates Obstacles – Strolls Into Your Nightmares!
Posted by Tony on October 30th, 2012Well BigDog just got out-weirded and out-creeped by DARPA’s newest step toward removing the word ‘human’ from ‘humanity’.
Designed as a part of DARPA’s Robotics Challenge, the robot ‘thing’ in the video above, known as the Pet-Proto, will be let loose in a series of environments designed to replicate the conditions of a natural disaster. Several other teams are working on similar robots to compete in the challenge. They will all be competing to gain access to a more advanced version of the Pet-Proto called the Atlas which will be used in the 2013-2014 live disaster-response event.
We don’t know what’s worse…being trapped in a natural disaster or being saved from natural disaster from something that looks like this.
[DARPAtv]
Change You Can Believe In [The Walking Dissection]
Posted by Justin on October 30th, 2012
Leadership is a strange concept.
There are elements of leadership we admire and those we apologize for. At best, an effective leader needs to achieve the goals of his community, make tough decisions when they need to be made and advance the cause. The identification and execution of the methods are up to them.
We’ve slowly seen the toll leadership has taken on Rick. He’s become a shoot first murderer multiple times and felt less and less remorse after each incident. Was he right? We think so, or at least we hope so.
So when it comes to The Governor, the major villain of this series, it’s very important that we understand, and sympathize, with his motivations. His actions can remain diabolical, but his sense of duty must remain pure.
He’s the effective leader you apologize for.
Head into Woodbury AFTER THE JUMP… Read the rest of this entry »
Pleased To Meet You [The Walking Dissection]
Posted by Justin on October 25th, 2012
The overarching story of The Walking Dead in any form or function in the loss of humanity amongst the living while the dead roam the Earth. In the same way that Battlestar Galactica could be set on a submarine and still be awesome, TWD could be about a global political uprising or a world where all the electricity stopped running. Okay, maybe not the second one.
At it’s best, we watch the characters evolve and measure ourselves against their actions. If they succeed, we find redemption in even their darkest moments. At the very least, we understand why they would do something even if we never would.
This episode was one where we continue to understand how this experience has taken a toll on our survivors. After a long Winter, the seeds sown have born strange fruit.
Read more AFTER THE JUMP… Read the rest of this entry »
Meet the Bagel-Heads! Crazy Body Modification Gets Trendy!
Posted by Tony on October 24th, 2012Body modification seemed to root itself into underground culture of the 90s. Since that time we’ve seen our share of modded bods. You’d think that there just wasn’t anything to really mod until low-cost cybernetic parts started popping up on the shelves at WalMart. Wrong.
Check out all the fun these body-moddin’ kids are having!
They’ve sadly been slapped with the descriptive slang-term “BagelHeads”.
The whole ‘BagelHead’ scene has been around for many years already but is only recently getting some serious face-time across the internets after the Taboo show aired on Discovery.
In a nutshell the kids are taking needles, inserting them into their foreheads and then dripping saline into their heads creating what looks like some kind of giant egg under their skin. Once the ‘egg’ is big enough someone then presses slowly into the center of the bloated lump leaving a small indentation in the center. The end result? It looks exactly like a doctor was caught mid-breakfast and just left his bagel under the patient’s skin on her forehead.
Sexy, right? Yeah…that’s a no…we don’t think so either.
[Mtv.com]
Beluga Whale Speaks Crude Human!
Posted by Tony on October 23rd, 2012There are a lot of animals that mimic human vocalization.
But when an animal you’d never expect to develop mimicry suddenly begins doing it? It’s a little disturbing. Imagine if your dog suddenly quit barking and just started asking for his dinner in a crude-sounding human voice? You’d understandably be a little freaked the hell out.
This is exactly what happened recently National Marine Mammal Foundation in California. NOC, a nine-year-old Beluga whale, suddenly began making strange sounds unlike anything his trainers had ever heard. At first, no one could tell that it was actually the whale making the bizarre noises. As days went by and the sounds were more frequent, the trainers realized it was NOC.
There have been reports of this kind of mimicry taking place amongst Beluga whales (who’re often called the ‘canaries of the sea’) but it’s never been recorded until now.
At one point one of the divers actually got out of the pool that NOC was in and asked the other trainers at the facility who told him to get out of the pool. We could only imagine the slack-jawing that took place when they realized that their own whale had just told them to get out of his pool.
Just think…we’ve been looking for signs of a robotic take-over or the zombie apocalypse while these adorable whales have just been swimming around…plotting.