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!
On July 2, 1937 Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan set out in Earhart’s plane, the Electra, to circumnavigate the world at the equator…and vanished.
Their disappearance has been mentioned in everything from historical documentaries on plane crashes to shows about the paranormal where conspiracies abound about shadowy government projects and even alien abduction.
While most people agree that the Electra simply ran out of fuel, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has spent the last twenty-four years and nine expeditions to Earhart and Noonan’s last known location in an attempt to find out exactly what happened on that historic journey around the world.
In 1940 artifacts surfaced, renewed interest in the search and were then subsequently lost leading to rumors of a government cover-up and a slew of conspiracy theories.
Recently, pieces of a significant artifact, an anti-freckle cream jar (Earhart had freckles and it was well known that she wasn’t happy about it) turned up. Now, armed with new technologiy, preparations are underway and another expedition is about to commence. TIGHAR is hoping that this search will reveal all of the missing pieces to this seventy-five-year-old mystery.
As of this writing, TIGHAR is in the midst of a three day symposium discussing the flight, its disappearance and what may have actually happened in the final days of a trip that’s still yet to reach its conclusion.
During an early WeirdThings podcast, Brian and Justin were put into one of Andrew’s scenarios involving ‘flying’ snakes in Russia. Neither of them were happy with the idea of snakes launching themselves from trees onto their prey.
Here’s another frightening evolutionary mash-up that was probably fun in a comic book or horror story. In real life? Total fun-suck.
Meet Mecoptera, a tiny nightmare combination of a wasp-like fly with the tail of a scorpion.
Commonly referred to as a ‘scorpionfly’, Mecoptera isn’t a threat…yet. The male’s tale resembles a scorpion’s stinger but is only used for mating purposes…for right now. If you had seen one in the wild and had no idea what the thing was? You’d probably just assume that it was what it looked like, steer clear of the thing and walk briskly away knowing that nature’s working on a game plan to take back the planet.
While Mecoptera looks menacing, it’s not harmful to us squishy humans.
Let’s just hope that nature decides to keep it that way.
[TYWKIWDBI]
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Rainbow? Lame. Double Rainbow? It had its time and people sang its praises.
Fire Rainbow? You have our attention.
A naturally occuring optical phenomenon, the ‘fire rainbow’ or what’s called a circumhorizontal arc is something that requires being in the right place at the right time to witness.
A lot of conditions have to be in place in order for you to witness what happens when the leprechauns decide to pull a Bridge on the River Kwai maneuver in a panic.
Fire Rainbows (we just made it a thing…circumhorizontal arc is never going to trend) take place only in a cirrus cloud which contains very little moisture. Inside the cloud, the ice crystals have to align horizontally just right in order to refract the light perfectly because of the angle of the sun on the horizon. On top of all that, you have to be in the right place on the earth or your angle will be off and your little peepers won’t get to witness the power of the Fire Rainbow!
Along with the jet packs we were supposed to be sporting by now and the hover cars easing our commute was the military’s Flying Platform.
In 1955 a film was shot showing one of the airborne Seqway-like contraptions in operation. Originally developed by the Navy, the US Army deemed them impractical and development halted.
Looking at this now, after six decades have gone by? All we’d need is some PVC, a lawn mower engine, an arduino controller and one of those mini-trampolines.
In an amazing scientific feat, a paralyzed rat was taught to walk again.
First, Courtine and colleagues injected the rats with a chemical cocktail that binds to dopamine, adrenaline and serotonin receptors on the spinal cord’s neurons. This replaced the neurotransmitters that would normally be released in healthy spinal pathways. A few minutes after priming the neurons, the team stimulated the rats’ spinal cords through electrodes implanted into the spinal canal. This sent electrical signals to the roused neurons. Then the rats needed to be trained to use their limbs again. Within a week of their injuries, the rats were on treadmills, forging new neural connections.
Although a human application for this solution is a long way away, clinical trials are on the horizon.
