Tag archives for Unusual
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In sci-fi books and movies, aliens are continually trying to conquer our planet. But this question is seldom, if ever, answered: why would beings from a distant, advanced civilization go to the expense and effort of journeying to Earth to mount an invasion? After all, Earthlike rocky planets are relatively common on the universe—scientists estimate…
One of the most disturbing science-fiction novels I have ever read is Jack Womak’s 1993 opus Elvissey, which takes place in a dystopian future in which a rising religion is centered upon the worship of the late Elvis Presley, whom the devout believe was a demigod with miraculous powers. A giant multinational corporation, Dryco, decides to co-opt the…
The British National Archives has just made public thousands of pages of documents about UFOs, and even is offering a highlights guide so that readers can sift through the material for the most intriguing–and the wackiest–stuff. And there are plenty of both types of revelations in the UFO documents. Pages 10-34 of this PDF file, for example, detail British diplomatic…
Most countries don’t view the occult as a potential government revenue source, but then again, Romania isn’t most countries. The land that gave us Vlad the Impaler and his fictional descendent, Count Dracula, has always seemed to border Hungary and Serbia on one side and the Astral Plane on the other. If you follow Romanian…
Some people spend their Valentine’s Day… Listening to love songs, While others spend it with their best friend, Or their spouse. And in some cases, that spouse is made of plastic… However you spend yours, we hope you have a Happy Valentine’s Day!
If you feel sheepish about your inability to remember your wife’s birthday or where you left your car keys, don’t fret. We’re all more or less memory-challenged compared to an early 20th-Century Russian named Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky, who could store more data in his head than we’ll ever forget. Pioneering Russian neurologist and memory researcher…
After an article on an Australian website, News.com.au, quoted a physics professor saying that Betelgeuse might go supernova on us and light up the sky like a second Sun, and speculated that it might happen next year, the the MSM and the blogosphere went into a frenzy.“Will the Earth have Two Suns by 2012?” a representative headline on Time.com…
In 1912, in the library of Nobile Collegio Mondragone, a Jesuit college near Rome, an American rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich discovered what may be the strangest and most puzzling book ever created. It consisted the book consists of 234 pages fashioned from animal skin, written in longhand in a bizarre, incomprehensible script, and illustrated…
Along the northern shores of Kwa Zulu Natal in South Africa, there’s a place of constant shift and change: the mangroves. Perfectly positioned between the sea and a series of lakes, this unique place makes it possible for diverse ecosystems to flourish side by side. Within this finely-balanced environment there lives the strange mudskipper, a…
© NGT Photo: Host Dr. Brady Barr holds up a paddlefish, exposing its jaws to the camera. The rostrum, comprised of the large mouth and elongated snout, measures half the length of the entire body of the fish. The sawfish is one of the rarest, weirdest and most endangered fish Brady has ever encountered. Its…
While some of us slept through our modern literature class in college, we couldn’t help but stay awake on the day that our professor gave a stirring reading of T.S. Eliot’s cryptic poem, “The Waste Land.” Scholars have written volumes about Eliot’s torrent of disturbing imagery, which is laden with about as many literary allusions…
We’ve been humming the Foo Fighters’ song “Stacked Actors” all morning, ever since we saw this story from the Daily Mail, via the Huffington Post, in which a past associate of George Lucas claims that the movie impresario behind the Star Wars series is planning to make a movie featuring computer-generated likenesses of various dead Hollywood stars of yesteryear. The Daily…
It’s been three decades since John Lennon’s murder by Mark David Chapman in front of his home in New York City on Dec. 8 1980. And those of us who were devotees of the funniest, most soulful, most protean, and most iconoclastic of the Fab Four have been left to wonder what else he might…
Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-born artist and assistant professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, has developed a name for himself with his provocative experiments in body modification as a means of expression. In March, for example, to remind people of the death of his brother Haji and others, both Iraqi and American, in…
An article from Information Week’s web site reports that the Air Force is keeping a tight lid on its new unmanned space plane, the X-37B. The robotic plane landed in darkness in the predawn hours of Dec. 3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles, after eight months in space. The five-and-a-half ton vehicle…
The hippopotamus might look docile or even dumb to some people, but in reality the hippo is a ruthless killer, a creature once feared by the ancient Egyptians. These three-ton giants communicate like dolphins, scare off crocodiles and have a bite stronger than a bull shark. Research in 1987 revealed that hippos make a cacophony…
Okay, so it isn’t life on Saturn’s moon of Titan, as some had speculated. But this discovery is garnering some gigantic type headlines. Just before today’s 2 p.m. press conference, word leaked out on various news sites that NASA-funded researchers have discovered a new, radically different life form right here on Earth–strain GFAJ-1, a bizarre bacterium…
For a long time, we’ve been perplexed by the weird, other-worldly phenomenon of ball lightning–luminous, usually spherical objects that vary from corn-kernel sized to several meters in diameter, and which usually explode after a few moments, leaving a sulphur-like aroma. Since the first documented ball lightning sighting during a huge thunderstorm in England in 1638, countless…
Newspapers are reporting the passing of Sam Cohen, 89, the nuclear physicist credited with dreaming up the neutron bomb, a low-yield weapon which would kill people with radiation but spare buildings and infrastructure. According to his Washington Post obituary, Cohen was born in Brooklyn but moved as a child to Los Angeles, where he earned a…
We remember reading in Robert Hughes‘ history of Modernism, “The Shock of the New,” that the completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 helped trigger the mass mind expansion that led to Picasso and de Kooning. That’s because the then-tallest structure on the planet allowed people to view reality from a never-before-seen expanse, and to take in…
Just in case you’re not feeling sufficiently on edge, just consider this: There have been five major extinction events in Earth’s history that nearly wiped out life on the planet, and we could be inducing a slow-motion version of one right now. But could you be one of the lucky life forms that emerge relatively…
And no, it doesn’t have anything to do with Bristol Palin’s dancing. Somehow, in the election hoopla a few weeks ago, we neglected to report that Denver voters rejected–by a 5-1 margin, no less–a ballot proposal that would have set up a government commission to track extraterrestrial visitors to the Mile High City. The Washington Post reported the…
Here’s something that will blow your mind. Researchers at UCLA and the California Institute of Technology have proven that the humans can actually regulate the activity of specific neurons in the brain, increasing the firing rate of some while decreasing the rate of others. According to this recent UCLA news release, by employing this ability, study subjects…
You probably missed this story, amid all the hoopla about allegations that Tea Party supporters rigged the vote on “Dancing With the Stars” to keep Bristol Palin in the competition, despite her underwhelming talents as a hoofer. But a little-noticed report by a U.S. commission reveals that for 18 minutes on April 18, 2010, China Telecom manipulated the system…
By Julia Reusch, My Dog Ate What? Producer This season we tried something a little different in My Dog Ate What. We added one story for each episode featuring an animal that wasn’t a dog. While it was a little more difficult to find good stories, it was definitely worth it. I produced the story…
