photo credit: trodel_wiki

You thought that one natural disaster was bad enough, scientists have now concluded from a five year study on the island of Taiwan, that the typhoons wreaking havoc from the sky, are also responsible for earthquakes on the island.

Not to worry though, the tremors are a specific kind of quake known as slow earthquakes. According to Breitbart News:

Slow quakes entail a slippage in the fault that unfolds progressively over hours or days, rather than a sudden, violent release of the kind that destroys buildings and lives.

So these quakes are actually a good thing, dispelling potential energy over a long period of time that could have been unleashed in a short, devastating earthquake. Out of a total of twenty slow quakes detected by underground sensors in Taiwan, eleven of them coincided with typhoons, confirming that, at least in Taiwan’s case, natural disasters come in pairs.

Speaking of Richard Wiseman, we almost forgot to give you the results of the great twitter ESP experiment we posted on a couple of weeks ago. Watch this video that explains it all. Results were negative for proof of ESP.

Read Wiseman’s write up on it here.

Super-heavy element 112 is now on the scene, more than ten years since it’s creation at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Germany. And it needs a name. Internet sensation Professor Richard Wiseman believes it should be called Kryptonite, and has started a campaign on his blog to make it so.

If you ask us, it’s about damn time someone put kryptonite on the periodic table. To get on board with the campaign please post your support on his site, and together we can make our universe a little more like the Superman universe.

Note: This won’t change much for the majority of the population, who always thought that kryptonite was an element anyway.

This video was taken on June 6th by a couple of guys who were lounging around at their Maryland apartment complex.

The Ishikawa region of central Japan has been receiving downpours of baby frogs this month. A number of cities, including Nanao and Hakusan have experienced hundreds of tadpoles falling from the sky.

The bizarre rain is a rare meteorological phenomena that has occurred before in many parts of the globe. The animals are usually fish or frogs and are often alive when they fall to the ground. Scientists have yet to explain the cause of this baffling occurrence, but one hypotheses suggests that the fish and frogs are swept up in strong winds from waterways before being dumped on the cars of unsuspecting Japanese businessmen.

Image Cedit: AP

The future of robotics is here and it has never looked so tasty. The star of the International Food Machinery and Technology Exhibition in Tokyo was the Okonomiyaki Robot, pictured above flipping pancakes on the griddle. The robot operates autonomously from mixing ingredients to serving up the hotcakes.

photo credit: phoenixlily

Portobello Aquarium, New Zealand: Sid the Octopus is finally set free after several successful escape attempts from his tank. An article in The Independent reports on his daring escape attempts:

Octopuses are some of the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom, it’s what makes them such good escape artists. Not having a spine doesn’t hurt either.

Somhlolo National Stadium, Swaziland

Muti is the Zulu word for lucky charms used in traditional tribal rituals. Swaziland soccer players often use them to curry the favor of the gods and increase their team’s chances of winning. At Somhlolo National Stadium, the football players have gone too far with their muti making ways, even stuffing muti underneath the artificial turf.

Things have gotten so bad that Swaziland’s sports minister is now filing criminal complaints and considering banning any team that defiles the $600,000 turf. Most of the holes, burned or cut into the turf are, unsurprisingly, close to the goals or towards the center of the pitch. Police are tepid with their pursuit, claiming that since most muti stuffing incidents happen at night, there is little they can do about it.

Now that we’ve learned that the police force of Swaziland doesn’t operate after hours, we anticipate the muti stuffing problem will continue to grow unrestrained. Also we are strongly considering throwing a Weirdthings party on the turf sometime in the not so distant future.

Penn Bullock reports:

Look at these silver pinpricks soaring through the sky. The videos were reportedly recorded on June 4 and 7 over Kariong, New South Wales, Australia. Are they spaceships? One of the videos, kindly brought to light by Phantoms and Monsters, seems to be shot from the beach; the other from an airplane or even a military jet.

These pictures were purportedly taken by a Hungarian military pilot of a clearly-outlined white disc hovering in the clouds. Whether the videos and pictures are authentic or not, we at Weirdthings can’t verify.

Penn Bullock reports:

photo credit: Markusram

Last week an Air France flight disappeared over the ocean on its way to Brazil, while flying into an electrical storm.

UFOlogist Michael Cohen believes that the plane may have vanished into one of two UFO vortex exits over Brazil. Following this line of reasoning, the plane’s disappearance into the vortex portends much worse in humanity’s near future. Rumblings in the ether indicate that the aliens are planning an imminent invasion. Phantoms and Monsters reports:

It appears a race in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy has ‘discovered’ us. These ‘unmanned’ surveillance discs have made their way home at some point and reported back on our existence. The floodgate has opened.

South-West China as well as Siberia are areas where the vortex is tipped to move to shortly.

Let me predict: Sightings of UFOs by will be unprecedented over the next few weeks. We are at a minute to midnight in terms of ending our isolation. Open unilateral contact is months, weeks, days or even hours away.

We are about to meet our universal brethren: are you ready?

And when Michael Cohen provides the “highly credible sources” he claims confirms any of his theory, then set your phasers to kill.

Tony Iommi, iconic lead guitarist from Black Sabbath is sixty one this year. He has waited many moons to impart his personal belief that ghosts exist upon us rock mortals, based on an encounter he had at Clearwell Castle when he was touring with Ozzy back in the day. Though he can’t recall whether he was with Ozzy Osbourne or guitarist Terry Butler at the time of the sighting.

The band had come to Clearwell Castle in Gloucestershire seeking inspiration for their new album in 1973. According to Iommi, a cloaked and hooded figure approached him and his companion in the dungeons of the castle, before turning into a room and miraculously disappearing. Spooky stuff, at least they managed to pull the acclaimed rock album ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ out of the dungeons of Clearwater Castle, along with themselves and their gear after the sighting.

We were scanning through the interwebs today and realized that for all the great ghost-based horror movies that come out of Japan, we almost never cover Japanese ghost stories. So we hit up youtube to find a Japanese ghost video, and this is what we came up with. Enjoy.

A Witch’s Bottle is a 17th century device believed to absorb and retain evil. Of course it was not the bottle itself that attracted evil, it was the witch’s potion held within it. When British researchers uncovered the most intact bottle ever discovered, they were sure to do a CT scan to identify its contents.

It seems British witches of 400 years ago liked to concoct a golden Witch’s brew. As was revealed by the CT scan, the contents were: pins, nails and urine. Hooray! This gives contemporary witches and wizards historical precedent for using human urine in their homemade potions today. MSBNC reported lead researcher Alan Massey as saying:

“the objects found in witch bottles verify the authenticity of contemporary recipes given for anti-witchcraft devices, which might otherwise have been dismissed by us as being too ridiculous and outrageous to believe.”

Score one for all you witchcraft urine masters out there!

You can run Penguins, you can hide, but we will always know where you are, because you are swimming birds that poop a lot. We think we can count this as another unconsidered negative effect of being a flightless bird.

photo credit: Tom Scholes

The Loch Ness Monster and other dino-cryptids have captivated the imaginations and hopes of millions of people all over the world. It would be really cool if dinosaurs were still alive today. But how much truth is there to this claim? Are there really prehistoric giants currently roaming the earth or have they all gone the way of the fossils above? Benjamin Radford, renowned paranormal investigator tackles this very question in a Live Science article.

Penn Bullock reports:

George Adamski is one of the original, pioneering Ufologists. In 1946, while watching a meteor shower (when lights tend to streak through the night sky), Adamski and his friends noticed a cluster of lights in formation that they immediately identified as an alien mothership. Again that year, at the same California campgrounds, Adamski purported to take a photograph of a “cigar-shaped” mothership sailing in front of the moon. In 1950, the Caribbean island nation of Grenada put that photo on a stamp commemorating “1950: The Year of the UFO.”

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