SpaceX keeps coaxing their Grasshopper rockets into longer jumps as they continue to develop their reusable rocket program.

In the latest test, shown in this video, SpaceX’s Grasshopper rocket takes another leap into the history books by making a longer jump away from and safe return to the dead center of its launch pad. Seriously. Watch it!

For those who’d like to know why all the space nerds and getting so excited? Think of the two little rockets attached to the giant fuel tank that the shuttle would piggyback on. Two minutes into the flight they detach, deploy multiple parachutes and land about 150 miles off the coast where a small army of a recovery crew retrieves the boosters, using two specially designed boats. During this whole process motors inside the boosters are used to basically blow-dry the interiors from all the ocean they gulped during their time at sea. Turnaround time is a long process.

Along comes Elon Musk with the idea of a booster that’s like a homing pigeon. It goes up, does its job and then instead of helplessly landing in the middle of the ocean like Bambi on an ice pond, it flies itself back home, landing on its own little pad like a puppy playing frisbee and waiting for the next throw.

The Grasshopper eliminates a lot of space taken up in an old-school booster for chute deployment systems, allows for quicker turnaround time and stops about a hundred people from having to towel off a couple of giant booster rockets.

SpaceX is getting closer to their first take-off/recovery ‘landing’ where they’ll be substituting the ocean for dry land to see how the Grasshopper returns back to the ‘ground’. Once those tests are completed, it won’t be long before the Grasshopper does what Musk hopes it’ll do…

Move us into space faster and more frequently than ever before.

[GeekOSystem]

Everyone! Stop EVERYTHING! Right NOW!

Our government, who is always up front on just about every issue you can think of, has just pulled the tablecloth from under our dinners by announcing that some place called Area 51 exists in the Nevada desert!

Beside the eardrum-bursting sound of millions of people facepalming all at once there’s nothing but the sound of crickets and a whole lot of blank stares followed by just as many shrugs as everyone returns to doing whatever the hell they were doing before this announcement hit the wire.

Sure it’s a ridiculous admittance of a place that most people who enjoy weird things hold near and dear to their little, strange hearts. No one’s really sure why it’s happening at this moment. Many of the UFO conspiracy theorists are already beating their chests that they moved the government to take this step because of the big UFO forum that took place in Washington, DC in early spring of this year.

Others are already speculating that the government is prepping us for some kind of announcement that the alleged extraterrestrials often associated with Area 51 are already living among us.

Right now everyone worth their salt in the conspiracy theory and UFO communities are poring over every word in the 407 page document (you can find the links right here) that’s been released and is basically the origin story of the infamously mysterious test site.

Today’s a great day in government transparency!

Who knew there was even a place mysteriously called Area 51?

Oh..wait…
[The Atlantic Wire]

Recently a company called Legend Tracker, that’s created an augmented reality adventure application, put out a call for video submissions to anyone who had footage of what they thought might be everyone’s favorite, but annoyingly elusive, cryptid…Bigfoot.

They’ve done this before…but this time, after sifting through hundreds of submissions, two crazy videos have come out on top.

The first video is from a couple hiking in the area of Mission, British Columbia. While shooting some scenery, they noticed something moving on a hilltop nearby. Is it bigfoot, Rob Zombie on a nature walk or just a feral Kardashian?

That first video is your typical “I spotted Bigfoot!” video…however…the video below, shot by a group of tourists, is probably the weirdest video of an alleged sasquatch because we’re not sure what’s going on in it.

It was sent in as a submission for Bigfoot footage but it looks more like someone’s drunk, hairy, mountain-man uncle who just dropped his moonshine jug or possibly Chaka from the original Land of the Lost. At the end of the video the alleged bigfoot appears to threaten or make a move toward the tourist because everyone starts running around like frightened Muppets. This video was also shot in the Mission, British Columbia area.

[Metro Co UK]

USA Today has posted a story about a mysterious priest who appeared at the site of a car crash where firefighters were having a difficult time removing a girl from the wreckage.

After the priest told firefighters not to worry and that she’d be okay, the girl was freed from her twisted vehicle. Multiple witnesses reported seeing and even speaking with the priest…then they all reported that he seemed to just vanish.

Those involved in the story, including the news crew are continuing to search for the priest so that they can thank him for…uh…being a creepy rubbernecker?

Let’s just hope it’s not Preacher Kane…

[USA Today]

Three girls have assembled into a team of exorcists led by the father of one of the girls. It’s Charlie’s Angels meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets the Exorcist.

Well…there’s that…click play.

[Vice]

Security cameras in a small store in Whitestable, England has captured something interesting on video. We’re not here to judge (okay…maybe we are on certain occasions).

The video hit YouTube and began getting views…but after Fox News put the video in their feed it went viral and has been dubbed ‘The Ghost of Earl Grey’ because it’s floating tea…way to go for the easy joke, internet.

Here’s the video. Now it’s in YOUR hands….

Ghost or the guys behind THIS iconic moment (skip to 1:18 in the video)…

[Daily Mail]

SpikeTV has announced that they are offering $10,000,000 for Bigfoot.

The channel that’s usually running background noise in every COPS episode has tagged Bigfoot as the target of a new reality show centered around the elusive cryptid’s capture.

Hosted by Dean Cain, “Ten Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty” show’s premise consists of sending nine teams of cryptid hunters into the wild to go “squatchin'” in the Pacific Northwest, an area often considered a hotbed of alleged sasquatch activity. While ten million dollars seems like a lot of money, Lloyd’s of London is the outfit putting up the money and they seem to be pretty confident that they’re going to be keeping those ten million bucks.

The show is about to begin shooting and will air on the SpikeTV network some time in January of 2014.

[UPI]

What is going on in this video? Are these UFOs just meeting up like cops in cars often do ala window-to-window and talk about stuff like how they need to mutilate at least a few cows on the way home? Is this, like some of the comments on the video suggest, some kind of advanced helicopters parked in the sky like high schoolers after a football game? What is going on with these lights in the sky over Russia?

Originally you could’ve tossed this off as a single triangle-shaped experimental plane or flares from a jet. But check the video at about 1:35 into the video. Also check the video at about the 6:12 mark. Did a cheap light bulb burn out on some mysterious government aircraft?

We’ll leave all the speculation in your hands because we’re really not sure what we’re looking at.

[Who Forted?]

Commonly referred to as ‘The Corpse Flower’ or ‘Stinky Plant’, a Titan Arum is about to bloom at the United States Botanic Conservatory and you can watch it bloom via streaming video.

The Corpse Flower doesn’t have a regular blooming cycle but the impending bloom can be seen in changes in the plant itself. When it does finally bloom it’s only for 24-48 hours and that’s when you fully understand where this bizarre, Day of the Triffids-looking thing gets its name.

Once the plant blooms it, unlike other plants which smell pretty, gives off the smell of rotting flesh. Not only that, the plant generates its own heat which cause the smell to linger and reach further into the surrounding area so that it can attract pollinating creatures like dung beetles. The more it reeks, the more its chances of survival.

Now you can watch via video both the amazing blooming of this sci-fi-looking thing and you can smirk at all the people smelling it and plugging their noses as they cruise by.

[United States Botanic Garden]

Residents of a building in China heard a wailing ghost, shrugged, counted it up as just another crazy Asian ghost wanting attention and left it alone.

What the residents didn’t know was that it wasn’t a ghost…just a woman with poor judgement and bad spatial awareness trying to take a shortcut home who’d wedged herself between two buildings…for SEVEN HOURS.

It took an emergency crew about half an hour to break enough of the wall to get to her thanks to a passerby who heard her cries and probably thought, “Sure doesn’t sound like a wailing ghost…but it sure DOES sound like an actual wailing person who might need help.”

Meanwhile the building’s residents are probably discussing why the wailing ghost has mysteriously stopped wailing.

[Huffington Post]

Back in 1989 two marine invertebrate biologists were discussing the subject of new species when the both went ‘whoa’ realizing that they’d independently discovered the same creature 1,000 miles apart. One scientist found them in Morro Bay, California while the other scientist discovered them on urchins on Vancouver Island in British Colombia.

Living on the finer spines which rest closer to the body of sea urchins, the Waldo Arthuri, is a small (0.2 inches long) clam-like creature that travels around like a snail. Because the little guys are so fragile it’s been hard for the researchers to really analyze them although they’ve been able to extract DNA which has led them to declare this a new species that’s not documented yet.

Just when you think we’ve come to terms with robots and their place amongst us, they do something else that ruins all those happy-go-lucky feelings we had with them for just a brief moment.

E-David, a robotic arm developed by the University of Konstanz in Germany, is teaching itself to paint.

Using 24 colors and 5 different brushes, E-David takes a photo of its subject and then goes to work recreating it in paint. As E-David paints, it’s constantly checking back and forth between the photo it took and what it’s actually painting. If E-David decides that what’s hitting the canvas isn’t correct, it can change the process on the fly to work toward a better finished painting.

“Our hypothesis is that painting – at least the technical part of painting – can be seen as optimization processes in which color is manually distributed on a canvas until the painter is able to recognize the content – regardless if it is a representational painting or not.”

Just another thing we can all give up doing when the robots take over.

[GeekOSystem]

Elon Musk continues to push our ideas about what’s possible right now at this very moment. Musk’s creations all seem to be geared at moving people faster and more efficiently. Which brings us to his next big idea with a name that any kid of the 90s can appreciate…the Hyperloop.

Hyperloop is Musk’s answer to getting Californians from LA to San Francisco in 30 minutes. Nope. Not a typo. LA to San Fran in 3O minutes. At about 4,000 miles an hour.

Like the stuff of sci-fi a junkie’s dreams, the Hyperloop is a six-person pod the size of a car that will enter a tube and shoot passengers 800 or so miles between the two big cities in about the time it takes you to slam a latte, eat a danish and check your news feeds.

If Musk’s track record of tearing through red tape and just getting the future built already is any indication of whether or not this will happen, California may as well just scrap the multi-billion dollar old-school, dumpy train that the state is planning on building.

[The American Interest]

Finding love with someone who you were compatible with or who shared your interests was a lot harder to do in the pre-internet age. Back in those days you’d probably have a hard time finding someone who liked long walks in the cemetery under a full moon, shopping for raw meat together and drinking one another’s blood (if you’re squeamish and don’t like the sight of people drinking one another’s blood…do yourself a favor and do NOT watch the above video).

But now that we’ve got the internet it’s a heck of a lot easier for people like Lia Benninghoff and Aro Draven to hook up and fall in love.

Thanks, Internet.

[Barcroft TV]

Who hasn’t made fun of old, out-of-sync kung fu movies or Godzilla movies?

But what if you woke up one day and that’s how you actually saw/heard the world?

That’s currently how only one person ever known to science now hears/sees the world.

After surgery for a heart problem, the guy, simply known as PH started noticing something odd:

“I was staying with my daughter and they like to have the television on in their house. I turned to my daughter and said ‘you ought to get a decent telly, one where the sound and programme are synchronised’. I gave a little chuckle. But they said ‘there’s nothing wrong with the TV I told my daughter her living room TV was out of sync. Then I noticed the kitchen telly was also dubbed badly. Suddenly I noticed that her voice was out of sync too. It wasn’t the TV, it was me.”

While there is a TON of medical terminology that we could throw around here to explain in detail what’s going on, we’ll simplify it.

PH actually hears people BEFORE he sees their lips move! Not only that but PH also realized that it’s not just other people he’s looking at as they speak..it’s his own words too! PH hears the words he’s saying BEFORE he feels his jaw move!

Since light and sound move at different speeds from the point of origin our brain is set up to process them so that they all sync. While no one’s really sure how the brain makes all this work, scientists are even more confused now that PH and his unique situation has entered the playing field.

Scientists are continuing to study what’s happened to PH because he’s the only person in the world to ever have this happen…

Unless it’s triggered in all of us while we watch late-night kung fu and Godzilla movies.

[New Scientist]

A small robotics company called Robugtix is about to give everyone something special whether they want it or not…arachnophobia.

One of the company’s newest bots is named, simply and innocently, the T8. All of that simpleness and innocence evaporates quickly when you actually get to see the T8 in action.

3D-printed and housing 26 motors to move its creepy little self around, the T8 doesn’t just have the fact that it’s made to look like a spider going against it. When you see the T8’s movements is when you get to see just how amazingly and eerily realistic it looks.

For about the price of one month’s rent in a metro apartment, you can grab your very own robotic nightmare from Robugtix which can either be controlled by you like your very own spidery, robotic minion or you can program the T8 to step through a sequence you create.

Robugtix mentions how great the T8 is for someone to learn advanced robotics.

About 10 or 15 years from now, super-villains will be sitting around talking about their formative years where they all owned a small, slightly menacing-looking robotic spider they had to send away for.

[Gizmodo]