Over the last several decades, small pockets of people have begun taking up residence on the fringes of society.

Almost three generations of ‘mole people’ live beneath the city of New York. A floating island of lashed together debris is home
to a small village of people in Mexico. In Vegas, individuals and even entire families have started living in the aqueducts and waterways criss-crossing the neon desert oasis.

While most of the fringe populations have made a choice to move into these environment because of poverty and drug addiction, for
almost 30 years the sewers below Bogota, Colombia have been a hellish sanctuary of sorts for these same types of people. In Colombia,
death squads are sent out to perform ‘social cleansing’ of people deemed ‘undesirables’ by the wealthier classes.

Denizens of the Colombian sewer system have been subjected to being burned alive, opened fire on and generally harassed and beaten.

Vice’s Thomas Morton takes you into the dark, horrific and life-threatening conditions that people endure beneath the city of Bogota.
[CNN WORLD]

In my country there is problem. And that problem is dead antelope.

Three major die-offs of the antelope population have occurred in the past three years due to mysterious causes. In fact, each death boom happened almost exactly one year apart from the previous one. Some suspect overuse of fertilizer, others believe they ate too much “wet” vegetation.

But reasonable minds agree: it’s probably a space disease brought down by the Soyuz capsule.

But some ecologists in Kazakhstan and Russia are instead blaming the fatalities on the April landing of a Soyuz capsule from the International Space Station. At least 120 dead saigas were found near the village of Sorsha, where the Soyuz landed last month. Others see a possible link to the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in central Kazakhstan. “It could be from chemical elements left from space rockets that fly over this place,” ecologist Musagali Duambekov, leader of the For a Green Planet political movement, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).

Throw the space disease down the well! So my country can be free!

[Scientific American]

Remember how we were all joking a couple of days about that crazy incident that resembled a zombie attack in Miami?

Remember all the fun conversations about prepping your boomsticks and role-playing what you’d do if the zombie apocalypse actually took
place?

You may want to take some time to stop laughing and head to the garage for that boomstick.

It seems that even more news regarding a change in humanity’s diet is surfacing.

First up? Twenty-one-year-old Alexander Kinyua, who is currently in jail without bond, admitted to detectives that not only did he kill his roommate, but cut up his body with a knife and ingested the victim’s heart and part of his brain.

Yup…part of his brain. Ring any bells?

This comes on top of a report of man in New Jersey, who, upon being cornered by police after neighbors called saying that he was threatening to harm himself with a knife, disemboweled himself in front of officers and begin throwing pieces of intestines and bits of skin at them.

Depending on how far you want to post-date this trend in California, cage fighter Jarrod Wyatt was convicted for the murder of his training partner. After consuming hallucinogenic tea, Wyatt ripped his training partner’s heart and tongue out before tearing off a substantial amount of his face. A friend found him sitting in his apartment covered in blood with body parts scattered around the room.

On the other side of the globe, a man in Sweden catches his wife cheating on him and cuts off her lips…and then eats them.

Is the human race is suddenly developing a taste for its own or is it just our brains out looking for connections?

It’s like if someone mentioned that there sure were a lot of red cars on the road today… you’d look around for red cars and would tend to agree.

Now we know what secret cargo SpaceX had included…

Nothing kicks off a summer of fun like the first commercial space craft hitting the waves. Minutes ago, SpaceX’s Dragon Capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, ending a historic trip from GD space to the International Space Station.

Welcome home!

A derelict, abandoned hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia has attracted hundreds of rookie ghost hunters for years.

Riyadh’s Iraq Hospital, a now abandoned building which treated Gulf War soldiers beginning in 1991 has become the focal point of young ghost hunters determined to rid the site of malevolent Jinn.

According to the Koran and Arabian mythology, Jinn are spectral beings that supposedly tempt people into doing the wrong thing.

Recently, via text messages, dozens of teen ghost hunters broke into the hospital causing massive damage to left-behind facilities before setting it ablaze in order to remove what they believed to be Jinns living within the building.

Local press complained about the unsafe condition of the building. The Healthy Ministry simply shrugged and replied that the building is on private property, cannot function as a working hospital and that it’s basically not their responsibility.

Meanwhile YouTube videos continue to surface showing young ghost hunters exploring the eerie location looking for evidence of the Jinn.

[Reuters]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. In a week when the boundaries of humanity’s role in space may have been redefined forever we also got the possible beginning of a zombie outbreak when a naked man was shot dead eating the face of another poor soul. Meanwhile, Andrew alerts the boys to the existence of a flesh eating bacteria that has claimed the limbs of a young Georgia woman.

Also, Justin and Brian are told of a land where dinosaurs exist. After they were built by prison labor.

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

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SpaceX and Intellisat, the world’s largest provider of satellite services, have issued a press release announcing that Intellisat has signed up to be the first customer for SpaceX’s next generation rocket, the Falcon Heavy. The most powerful rocket in the world (capable of delivering 117,000 pounds to low earth orbit) and the largest since the Saturn V rockets, the Falcon Heavy is expected to take flight next year.

The previous attempt at trying to build the world’s most powerful rocket was the Soviet Union’s Energia. On its first mission the rocket failed to get the payload to orbit. The second, carrying the Soviet Space Shuttle variation, the Buran, reached orbit, but actual payload capacity was a third less than the Falcon Heavy’s planned capacity.

Consisting of three modified Falcon 9 cores, the Falcon Heavy involves an innovative fuel strategy that’s never been attempted before in this kind of rocket. As the rocket gains altitude, the two outer cores will fuel the main core’s engines, so when separation occurs, the primary stage will be fully fueled and carrying no dead-weight.

Based upon proven Falcon 9 technology, the Falcon Heavy brings about radically lower launch costs of approximately $1,000 per pound, where previous cost to low earth orbit (LEO) was around $10,000 and as much as $30,000 onboard the Space Shuttle when you factor in the total program cost.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said a manned lunar mission on the scale of the Apollo would be capable with two launches using the Falcon Heavy. SpaceX has also proposed using a Falcon Heavy and a modified Dragon capsule to perform an unmanned Mars mission called Red Dragon, for about $450 million – oddly enough the budget and marketing cost of the film John Carter (of Mars).

While SpaceX is preparing the Falcon Heavy, engineers and scientists at their McGregor, Texas test facility will continue developing the technology for their long range plan of making a full reusable Falcon Heavy rocket by the end of this decade. Accomplishing this could bring launch costs to under $10 per pound. For more on the impact of that, check out our article Space Boom.

Andrew Mayne is a science fiction and thriller author. His website can be found at AndrewMayneBooks.com

Over the last year or so we’ve seen a lot of news about people “planking”, “owling”, “horsemanning” and the less than stellar introduction of “snailing”. What most people aren’t aware is that things like the above mentioned fads have been around for a long time.

Which brings us to “castelling”.

The word “castell’ is actually Catalan for “castle”. The concept of “castelling” began sometime in the late 1800s in Valls, Spain.

So what is “castelling”? Much like “planking” and “owling” it’s pretty self-explanatory….castles…made with people.

From Wikipedia:

A castell is considered a success when stages of its assembling and disassembling, can be done in complete succession. The assembly is complete once all castellers have climbed into their designated places, and the enxaneta climbs into place at the top and raises one hand with four fingers erect, in a gesture said to symbolize the stripes of the Catalan flag. The enxaneta then climbs down the other side of the castell, after which the remaining levels of castellers descend in highest-to-lowest order until all have reached safety.

After watching some of these tenuous “castles” collapse in on themselves?

We’re pretty sure we’re going to try to make “snailing” happen.

[Wikipedia]

Very quietly and very slowly older neighborhoods and strips are making way not for new highways and public spaces but for the creeping, crawling onslaught of nature. Case in point? A small five-block neighborhood between Brooklyn and Queens that’s come to be affectionately referred to as ‘The Hole’.

Used by the mafia to dump bodies and almost completely forgotten about the busy denizens of a bustling city just blocks away, there are only a handful of people living there who continue to call it home.

Being thirty feet below sea level and part of a water basin doesn’t help either. Most of the structures are saturated with water damage from years of rains that flood the entire ‘town’.

Recently two documentary filmmakers, after learning of the location from a well-known urban explorer’s blog, visited ‘The Hole’ to tell its story and talk with the inhabitants still hanging on to their lives there.

What’s interesting is that this scene is repeating the industrial world over as yesterday’s buildings become the future’s archeological dig sites.

[Web Urbanist]

They’re featured in the title of practically every documentary or television show dealing with mysterious places. Their heads have adorned everything from coasters to keychains to books to backyard statuary. Heck, one of them even made it in Hollywood and nailed a part in Night at the Museum with Ben Stiller.

But now a fairly recent investigation called the EISP (Easter Island Statue Project) is uncovering something relatively new about the heads of Easter Island…they have bodies.

While experts have known about the bodies for several decades now, it’s only recently that tourists have been able to really see the dig sites up close and have seen that the enigmatic heads actually sit on shoulders of a complete figure down to the feet.

Because tourism to the islands is limited, it’s taken a while for this pictures and this information to begin circulating.

There are over 1,000 Moari heads scattered across the island and most of their bodies have simply been covered up by time.

Why is this such a big deal if experts knew about the bodies the whole time? As the bodies are excavated, petroglyphs once hidden on the statues backs and other artifacts which laid at the feet of the statues on what used to be the top layer of soil are uncovering more and more clues about the mysterious islanders who once called Easter Island home.

[Daily Mail]

Across North America various species of adorable little salamanders get ‘oohs’ and ‘awwws’ get talked to like babies.

In Japan, home of fun little critters like Godzilla, things are a little different.

For a while the giant salamander population has been in a severe decline due to dams being built in their spawning path. That’s all changing as a new’ environmentally-minded generation has taken to protecting the species.

While North America does have a ‘giant’ salamander species known as the ‘hellbender’, its ‘giant’ status is misleading. At 9 inches, the North American salamander is laughable compared to its Asian cousins which can reach five feet in length and weigh in at around 80 lbs!

Not to be outdone by Germany’s cross-eyed possum, Slovakia’s two-headed turtle and the infamous Paul the Octopus, the city of Kiev is adding a pig to the psychic barnyard.

Hoping to cash in on the excitement these animals illicit from fans, this Ukranian pig will be carted out every day at four o’ clock to make its prediction about which team will be win the European championship matches leading up to the World Cup.

What’s more fascinating about whether or not the pig will accurately predict the upcoming matches, is the statement from Kiev’s city government:

“A unique oracle hog, a real Ukranian pig and a psychic which knows the mysteries of football.”

No. pressure on the pig, right?

Think again… smell that? It’s the smell of failure and delicious bacon.

[The Leader Board]

If Elon Musk and MacGyver had a love child its name would be Emile LeRay.

Emile had left Morrocco and was going to drive across the Sahara in a specially prepared Citreon. His plans came to a grinding halt when he came across a military outpost that would not allow him to continue on. He was then told that he’d have to take someone (military personel) back to the nearby city of Tam Tam to ensure he followed their orders. LeRay states that a provision in his insurance doesn’t allow for him to have passengers. He turns the Citreon around and speeds off back the way he came as fast as he could get the car to go to avoid being followed by the military.

Determined to cross the Sahara, LeRay, now out of site of the outpost and the military, heads the car in large arc back toward the Sahara and around the outpost. On his way back to the road beyond the outpost, the Citreon encountered some serious terrain. Hours and miles later, the Citreon breaks down in the middle of the Sahara.

Calling upon his inner MacGyver, LeRay formulates a plan and begins breaking apart the Citreon.

Over the course of the next twelve days LeRay transforms the Citreon into a motorcycle straight from an apocalyptic future where salvaging is the new couture.

With only a small amount of water left, LeRay’s ‘Desert Camel’ (what the bike’s been nick named) sputtered to life and, after almost two weeks living in the shelled body of the Citreon, Emile continued on his adventure.

Ironically, Emile was pulled over by the military as he neared civilization.

And not for running a military outpost…

But for driving an illegal vehicle.

[Gizmodo]

We’ve seen it time and time again in spectacularly bad science fiction grist ripe for SyFy’s cheesy flick of the week: A chemical spill causes normally docile creatures to mutate into larger-than-life versions of themselves. Sharks mix with octopi and take to land to wreak havoc amongst us soft squishy fleshlings or giant cockroaches will march on Cincinnati.

Sounds like a fun, popcorn-munchin’ night of mindless pop culture.

Too bad it’s actually happening on a small, strange scale.

Something (LSU professors are pinning the blame on the BP oil spill) is causing mutations straight out of a Roger Corman flick.

Recently the biggest piece o’ strange to get snagged in fisherman’s nets are shrimp… shrimp with no eyes or eye sockets (insert dramatic music here)!

Other fun variations on things we all know and love but that’s slowly becoming the basic building blocks of tiny nightmares are crabs with no claws, crabs encased in soft shells, shrimps with tumors on their heads, fish with no gill flaps or sealed eyes and fish with no trace that it ever had eyes at all.

What’s even more fun and waiting for a script-writer to embrace is the FDA ensuring these things are absolutely, perfectly safe for all of us to consume. That is until five years from now when we all start sprouting extra appendages and begin laying eggs to complete the birth cycle of humanity’s new masters.

[The Week]