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.

[Daily Mail UK]

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.

[Walyou]

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.

[NY Daily News]

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!

[Morbid Anatomy]

Cats. They power the internet. They’re always chasing birds and most of the time they fail at it.

Birds. They make a lot of noise and mimic/mock everybody including cats that chase them. They have the advantage of flight.

That’s all about to change…behold Orville! The CopterCat!

[YouTube]

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.

[Discovery News]

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]

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!

[Atmospheric Optics]

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.

And maybe a Kickstarter account.
[YouTube]

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]

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.

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]

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!