On June 7th in Denver, Colorado a storm system moving through the area brought hail…a friggin’ massive, omg-worthy amount of hail.
Weather Channel reporter Jim Cantore’s Twitter feed exploded with images from people living in the area showing they weren’t joking about there being a LOT of hail!
Did we mention there being a LOT of freakin’ hail?
During this absolutely over the top demonstration of what Mother Nature’s capable of, several tornados also allegedly touched down to wreak havoc across an area that’s ordinarily not affected by such meteorological nonsense.
You’ve had a long life. It’s time to check out. It’s a peaceful time and you know it’s about to come to a quiet conclusion. Everything’s cool and right. You hear a calming voice, “Don’t be afraid. I am here to comfort you.” You sigh.
“I am sorry your family and friends can not be here for you right now.”
The voice sounds synthetic. No one’s here? Who’s caressing my arm? Your eyes snap open. Then nothing.
Creepy? Seriously creepy.
Created by artist Dan Chen as part of an installation called ‘Last Moment Hospitable’, the ‘Last Moment Robot’ was inspired by Paro – a robotic seal used to comfort people suffering from Dementia. Chen’s goal was to test the idea of replacing human intimacy on an extreme level.
A “doctor” greets the visitors where they’re guided to lie on a table where the robot’s squeaky padded arm begins caressing their outstretched arms.
The robot keeps caressing through its recorded script.
“Your family and friends love you very much. They will remember you after you are gone.”
The caressing continues quietly for several moments until the robot speaks again…
Is this curious pig/dog hybrid creature a runaway from a lab experiment? A new cryptid? A beast of myth and fable?
No to the first, probably to the second and hopefully to the third.
As it turns out, this little fella is actually a very rare, and expensive, breed.
The bizarre looking stray – actually a rare pedigree Chinese crested hairless dog – was spotted wandering the streets in Xinxiang, Henan province, central China, close to several scientific research centres and a local medical school.
One witness said: “The pink skin makes it look just like pig gone wrong in some sort of genetic experiment.”
Police believe it got loose after giving it’s rich owners the slip.
Ever want to experience what it might be to lash out and just bite into another person’s face without taking bath salts or actually biting another person’s face?
Well now you can. But you’ll have to travel to Kittiwat Anarrom’s bakery in Thailand to have that experience.
Anarrom’s taken baking bread to a whole new horrifying level.
Using his Master’s Degree in fine arts and some culinary ingenuity, Anarrom’s family bakery has become something like a gift shop in a Saw film. Mixing food coloring, nuts and various ingredients, Anarrom has crafted arms, feet and even internal organs to add to the heads he originally produced.
As disturbing as all these loaves of bread look? The look on the faces of your kin at the next holiday meal where you’re required to bring a soup bowl will be priceless.
No really…how many of you have been shopping the tool sections of your local hardware stores or hitting up your local big box store for supplies to combat the impending undead parade across the face of the earth?
We’re right there with you.
Just when you thought random face-eating attacks were creepy, a report comes in from Belem, Brazil about a deceased toddler that may have come back to life.
Two-year-old Kelvin Santos had been declared dead at Aberlardo Santos Hospital after pneumonia took him.
An open casket funeral was arranged so that family members could pay their last respects. About an hour before the service Kelvin, sat up, asked his father for a drink of water, then just as quickly as he sat up, he laid back down and went back to being…deceased?
Kelvin’s father Antonio Santos is demanding answers from the hospital and believes that malpractice is to blame for the strange incident.
The zebra spider is unique in that it jumps to kill prey instead of spinning a web. But what happens when you remove gravity. How will the spider adapt. Will it realize it now has amazing John Carter of Mars powers and jump all over the place killing everything?
Thanks to an Egyptian teenager, we will find out for sure later this year. Amr Mohamed of Alexandria won one or two slots for YouTube’s Space Lab competition where anyone was invited to submit experiments that would be carried out on the International Space Station.
It was conceived through Mohamed’s fascination with both science and spiders.
“I’m just interested in how things work, and science seems to answer all my questions,” said Mohamed. “For example, physics can explain the world with just a handful of equations. And biology tells you how your body works. I’m just interested in that stuff.”
Below is Amr’s original video. When space spiders are the scourge of the galaxy, let’s remember who started this.
Just kidding, this kid is awesome. And props to YouTube for providing the opportunity.
Space seems to be the buzz word right now and if you’ve been following this site or its individual members for any length of time, you’ll know how much weight that word has around this place.
On June 5th, the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) on a five-year mission to study the sun, captured these striking images of the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun. Now those images have been compiled into one amazing video.
The event takes place in pairs that are eight years apart. The last time this happened was in 2004. Now, eight years later, it happened again and was caught by cameras with 8x the resolution of standard high-definition televisions to create this incredible video.
Now that it’s over we won’t see it happen again until the year 2117!
And by that time the bath salt epidemic will have wiped us out so enjoy it now, kids.
Robots. They’re already everywhere just waiting for SkyNet to give the word.
Up until now they’ve all been land-based future threats to humanity…up until now.
Besides Bruce, the shark from the original Jaws movie, robots that take to water are about as rare as cats who enjoy a good shower. Specifically humanoid ones.
Swumanoid is about to change that.
Swumanoid, created by Chung Changhyun and Motomu Nakashima at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in order to measure water resistance.
Created using a 3D printer and featuring about 20 waterproof motors, Swumanoid is able to accurately perform a breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, dog paddling and even tread water.
So if you’ve finally gotten over the whole “I’m scared of deep water because I don’t know what’s in there and it freaks me out” craze?
You now have something else to fear in the water besides a mechanical great white shark…
Every time we laugh about a zombie apocalypse another incident bites our lips right off our smiles and reminds us that we should probably stop laughing and start grabbing shovels.
This time around what began as a domestic disturbance call from neighbors turned into something that’s getting a little too familiar right now.
The ‘zombie’ in this case is 43-year-old Carl Jacquneaux. Todd Credeur, the victim who knew Jacquneaux, was outside working in his yard when we was attacked by Jacquneaux. Credeur stated that he was shocked when Jacquneaux bit him on the face. Credeur was able to spray wasp pray on Jacquneaux’s eyes and escape the attack.
Carl Jacquneaux wasn’t quite finished. He jumped into his car and headed to another friend’s where he that friend at knife-point and snagged a handgun.
That was when the law caught up with him.
While no one’s really sure what set Jacquneaux on his zombie-like attack on Credeur, one of the victim’s friends stated that he was, in fact, under the influence of something at the time.
Anyone want to venture to take you know, a big stab in the dark about what the victim’s friend claims he might’ve been taking?
Ever grill during the summer? Ever notice how much more the flames rage when they hit a nice piece of fat?
It’s no different for human beings.
A crematorium in Austria caught fire recently not because of an arsonist, not because of some kid playing with matches and definitely not because some some dude tried to torch another dude who’d done too many bath salts before he went out among the populace searching for his next meal.
No. This particular blaze was caused by burning fat. Human burning fat.
A 440-pound Austrian woman was being cremated when the device became overheated and thick black smoke bellowed out of the machine and into the building. When firefighters arrived and tried to put it out they realized that even the vent had been covered in burning fat and was also on fire preventing them from using it to clear the smoke.
After spraying water through the vents from outside and controlling the fire raging from the cremation machine, firefighters were covered in the thick, oily soot you see in the photo.
While several crematoriums around the world are installing larger machines to accommodate the world’s expanding waistlines, many have yet to jump on board.
While not quite a fashionable ‘Apocalyptic Red’ color, Lake Retba in Senegal, West Africa does something flamboyantly cool… it turns pink… like awesome strawberry-milk pink.
Lake Retba and the Dead Sea were given those names because it they were once thought to not be able to harbor life. Those lakes however are alive with a salt-loving organism called Dunaliella Salina which produce a red pigment that sunlights helps to turn pink.
Workers who harvest the salt often spend six to seven hours in the waters of the lake and cover themselves with shea butter which helps provide skin protection and from having salt crystals adhere to their bodies during their time in the lake.
With Prometheus landing in practically every cinema this weekend and all the renewed interest in the franchise, it’s not surprising that THIS thing popped up.
Gig Goldstein, the artist behind this piece of work, took up carving about 12 years ago. Recently a friend asked him to create an H.R. Giger-inspired piece based on the Alien films…the photos show the result of the 40-50 hours worth of work it took to create it.
How many times when you were a kid did you have to listen to some grown-up telling you, “You better put on sunscreen or you’re gonna get burned out there.”
Now you have some ammunition explaining why you shouldn’t be smothering your body with that greasy slop.
Brett Sigworth of Boston had applied an aerosol sunscreen to his body while grilling. Two minutes later, after he thought that was enough time for the sunscreen to be have dried, he found himself on fire.
While the labeling on the can does day “flammable, don’t use near heat, flame or while burning”, Brett didn’t think that should matter once the sunscreen was applied. The flame from the grill proceeded to follow the sunscreen across his body like that line of alcohol from the bar fight in Raiders of the Lost Ark. His girlfriend and another friend helped put out the blazing chef and get him to the hospital where he was treated for second-degree burns.
Brett’s not seeking any money from Banana Boat, who produces the product, but has attorney and simply wants to include more warning labels and would like more testing done to see why something like this happened in hopes it won’t happen again to someone else.
Spiro and The Fudge are back on the case! This time they have to solve a mystery involving a dead murderer who might have been killed by a vigilante. Will they be able to crack the grisly case? Or will Spiro be too busy full body tanning to find to the clues? Andrew proposes the merits of being swarmed by scorpions instead of spiders. Also, Armageddon is yelled about, the Department of Defense reveals they have two telescopes more powerful than the Hubble just lying around a warehouse somewhere and Game of Thrones has praise lavished upon it.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.
How do you stop a dead man from becoming a vampire? Well, if you lived in Bulgaria during the Middle Ages the easy way to prevent it is to hammer an iron rod through the heart of every corpse before you lay them to their final rest.
Two such skeletons with such percautions taken were recovered near the Black Sea town of Sozopol last weekend.
And yet, the head of the Natural History Museum in Sofia doesn’t quite see why everyone is interested in the findings…
According to Dimitrov, over 100 corpses stabbed to prevent them from becoming vampires have been discovered across Bulgaria over the years.
“I do not know why an ordinary discovery like that [has] became so popular. Perhaps because of the mysteriousness of the word “vampire,” he said.
Also, the idea that corpses regularly got stabbed in the heart with an iron rod to prevent them from during into undead reavers. So yeah… between that and the word “vampire” I’d say that explains the interest.
Automata have been around for a couple of centuries now. Most of the time they’re enjoyably amazing pieces of craftsmanship that cause people to smile.
There’s been a chess-playing automata, an acrobatic automata that does a trapeze act and even animals have been featured as these intricate works of what seems like robotic art.
Then there’s this.
A coin operated bank automata that features a scene guaranteed to wipe whatever smile you had after watching that whimsical tail-wagging, ball-carrying puppy right off your face.
The auction site has the following description for this fun piece of whimsy: “St. Dennistoun Mortuary” Coin-Operated Automaton, attributed to Leonard Lee, c. 1900, the mahogany cabinet and glazed viewing area displays a Greek Revival mortuary building with double doors and grieving mourners out front, when a coin is inserted, doors open and the room is lighted revealing four morticians and four poor souls on embalming tables, the morticians move as if busily at work on their grisly task and mourners standing outside bob their heads as if sobbing in grief…”
Expected to sell for between $4.000-$6,000, this uniquely strange piece of work blew the lid off that price and ended up as a fun conversation piece for the sum of $13,035!
