So you get a new phone. It has a new number. You email all your friends with the new info. Then you find out the last person who had this number died suddenly in a hail of gunfire and the dude before him croaked the same way. Oh, the the guy before those two? Cancer.

How excited are you to have the admittedly awesome number of 0888 888 888?

The Mobitel number – 0888 888 888 – has proved to be both easy to memorize and deadly for three successive owners.

The first user – the former CEO of Mobitel – died of cancer in 2001. The number then went to Bulgarian mob boss Konstantin Dimitrov who was gunned down in an Amsterdam ambush in 2003. The final owner of the doomed cell number was another gangster, cocaine smuggler Konstantin Dishliev, who was shot to death outside a restaurant in 2005.

The number was on hold while the investigation of Dishliev’s death was underway but now Mobitel has disabled the cursed number.

Please leave a message.

[Examiner]

My bet is on pterodactyl.

[io9]

Phil Plait dissects a recent rumor about the Betelgeuse star. The short version of the rumor? The star is going to go all supernova in weeks or months (not years or hundreds of years) and the brightness could affect crops and cause streaming panic in the streets.

Phil’s rebuttal? Not so much.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start stockpiling canned goods and telling your friends the sky is falling just so in two months when you pal’s newly orphaned children are huddled in your bunker to get away from the blood-thirsty mobs left by a post-apocalyptic society you can say… “I told your pa this was coming, (wistful glance to a bare wall) wish he would’ve listened.”

[Bad Astronomy]

It’s lurking underneath the surface, waiting for little legs rubbery with summer excitement to come across it’s path. It’s the Hardy Lake Monster.

[CNN]

Here is the story thus far:

A little girl disappears into the Cambodian jungle in 1989 where she presumably learned the Bear Necessities for the next 18 years. In 2007 she was discovered and reunited with her family.

But things weren’t all milk and honey, Rochom P’ngieng (now 29 years old) refused to learn English and still crawled instead of walking.

Then…

“Even the day before she fled the house, she still helped the family pick vegetables. She must have gone back to the forest and we still cannot find her.” The dramatic reappearance and attempted reintegration of the “jungle girl” has gripped Cambodia, where she is also known as the “half-animal girl” because of her hunched appearance and the fact she makes animal noises rather than speaking.

Mr Lou blames his daughter’s second disappearance on “forest spirits”. In a society shrouded in mystic beliefs, he has also enlisted a fortune teller to help with the search. He is saving up for an offering of one wild ox, one pig, one chicken and four jugs of wine, which, the mystic assures him, will secure his daughter’s return.

When she was lost the first time, many locals reported seeing her with a naked man wielding a sword. This is said to represent the treacherous forrest spirit which may have lead her back into the brush.

So, be on the look out for that.

[The Telegraph]

PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Perkes

A young Chinese boy who was born with a thick patch of skin on his back had a surgery to remove the reason he’s earned the nickname “Turtle Boy” by school bullies.

[News.Com.Au]

We travel back and forth through time. We are time travelers. So much so we don’t even realize it. Nor do we realize that we are slightly leaning awkwardly while remembering the past or pondering the future.

The ability to mentally meander through time by remembering the past or imagining the future sets humans apart from many other species, helping us to learn from what came before and plan for what lies ahead. However, remarkably little is known about how such mental time travel works.

Past research showed that our perceptions of time are tightly linked with space. For instance, pondering the future makes us lean forward, while recalling the past makes us lean back, experimental psychologist Lynden Miles of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and his colleagues found.

Now Miles and his collaborators have discovered another interesting feat of the mind: Thinking about moving forward prompted speculation about the future, while imagining moving backward triggered reflections on the past.

This explains why downhill skiers are so good at remembering who’s birthdays are coming up.

[Live Science]

So you find a totally sweet cone-shaped rock but can’t shake the idea that it’s somehow special. Where to do you go to get clarity on what the geological oddity really is?

If you are Oregon couple Donald and Debbie Wesson you haul it down to a county fair, which leads you down a path of academic trail to realizing you’ve got your hands on a meteorite.

Wesson finally began asking around after watching a television program about meteorites. He took the rock to a local county fair in Castle Rock, Washington in the summer of 2009, where he spoke with a member of the Southern Washington Mineralogical Society.

The find was referred to Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., where initial sample tests showed it was probably a meteorite. Final confirmation came from the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University, which classified the Morrow County meteorite as an L6 ordinary chondrite that had been highly shocked (S5) but minimally weathered (W1).

The latest find represents a relatively common type of meteorite, according to Melinda Hutson, a planetary scientist at Portland State University who helped make the classification. But, she added that it has several intriguing features.

Also, they got an Elephant Ear and rode the Flying Dutchman.

[Space]

We now know when sharks are most likely to tear us apart.

Shark attacks are most likely to occur on Sunday in less than 6 feet of water during a new moon, a new study finds. And there’s good reason: That’s when a lot of surfers are in the water. Not coincidentally, surfers wearing black-and-white suits are most likely to be attacked.

Saturdays come in second place, and Fridays make a pretty good showing too, “reflective of people skipping work and taking three-day weekends,” explained George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida.

The scribbling you hear is the frantic rerouting of my cousin’s Sunday moonlight water wedding under a new moon.

[Yahoo]