Archive page 125
Black Smoke(r) Discovered
A remote controlled vehicle has discovered the deepest hydrothermal underwater vent on record 3.1 miles deep in the Cayman Trough in the Caribbean. Entitled “black smokers” the vents pump a black, iron sulfide compound into the ocean. The...
Podcast: Genocidal omnivores
Weird Things Vs. The Undead: Oscar Picks Official Ballot
UPDATE: Thanks to all who watched the livestream and helped keep score on Twitter. For the first time in this contest’s storied history we reached a dramatic tie when Hurt Locker took home best picture. 12-12. An uneasy stalemate exists...
Want To Be Terrified By The Sound Of Any Animal? Beware The Skinwalker
In European legends, the bite of the werewolf involuntarily turns a hapless victim into a fuzzy-wuzzy killing machine. In American pop culture, zombies prey on the flesh of living innocents who then become skulking face gnawers themselves....
Podcast: The Apocalypse Will Be Clothing Optional
Andrew, Brian and Justin answer some listener scenarios. After revealing Brian’s deep-seated desire that the world go pantless post apocalypse, we find out how shockingly willing Brian is to switch teams and genders without actually being...
Podcast: Monkey Man Begins
Is this what’s left of the Lost City of El Dorado?
Deep in the Amazon researchers are exploring the remnants of a city that dates back to 200 AD. Little is known about the inhabitants and some speculate that this could have been the source of the rumors of El Dorado. Click through for the...
Experts figure out how much time left before robot uprising
The always provocative h+ magazine surveyed the experts at the Artificial General Intelligence Conference to get a grasp of when they though machines would get really smart. The results are very interesting: While the median guess is the...
Newton’s Balls! Teleporting Energy a Possibility!
Researcher Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University has developed a framework by which it could be possible to teleport energy vast distances. The implications for this are pretty amazing. Could we use this to power deep space missions?...
Largest Snake Ate Crocs for Food
What’s more awesome than a giant ancient crocodile? A really giant snake that ate it for lunch. A 60-million-year-old relative of crocodiles described recently by University of Florida researchers in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology...
Weird Things Book Club: Redneck Fireworks Massacre
A list of recommended reading and viewing from Andrew Mayne, Brian Brushwood and Justin Robert Young as mentioned in the episode Redneck Fireworks Massacre. Moon Ayn Rand’s FOUNTAINHEAD Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Complete Season One (TV...
Podcast: Redneck Fireworks Massacre
Are We Missing the Point of Avatar?
Prolific Weird Things scribe Matt just posted his criticism of Avatar’s bioelectric network premise. Basically he feels that director James Cameron is trying to make it a parable of earth and our resource use – and that it’s an unfair...
Beware the Super Snake!
Florida is under attack from giant snakes. If that’s not bad enough, in a turn fit for the SyFy channel, authorities now worry that different breeds of python may be merging together into some new kind of “super snake”. From the...
Can You Have an Ice Age in the Middle of Global Warming?
According to some scientists at the Daily Mail, the answer is yes. A long term global warming trend due to CO2 emissions doesn’t preclude the possibility of nature deciding to flip the bit at least for a few decades and make things cooler....
9/11 Is Responsible For The New Love Robot
Amongst all the hubbub today about Roxxxy the new amorous robot designed to satisfy your carnal desires, comes this little tidbit buried in an article by The Money Times… Hines inspiration for Roxxxy came from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks....
How To Make Crop Circles… By Amtrekker
Brett Rounsaville is special to iTricks. Follow his hobo adventure at Amtrekker.com After nearly two years wandering America as a homeless vagrant I’m no stranger to the weird. Like a bedbug outbreak it jumps quickly from city to city,...
What Happened to the Lost Race of Supermen?
Discover Magazine has a very intriguing story: In 1913 two farmers uncovered a skull in South Africa that still has paleontologists scratching their heads. The so-called Boskop Man was first thought to be a distinct genus while some argued...
Does Our Solar System Have 900 Planets?
After the discovery of Neptune in 1846 astronomers began to wonder if there were other planets beyond its orbit. The discovery of Pluto (now not a planet) seemed to answer the question, but others wondered if even further out a larger...
Military to make flying cars a reality (we hope)
Sphere.com reports that the Pentagon has launched a program called Transformer X with the intent of developing flying cars for the battlefield. Awesome. The objective of the Transformer (TX) program is to demonstrate a one- to four-person...