September 2012 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on September 30, 2012 by MOTW Admin

LAKE LABYNKYR OF SIBERIA HAS A HIDDEN MONSTER

Could this be the Russian Loch Ness Monster? Is there a Siberian Nessie?

The Siberian times writes:

Known as ‘Russia’s Loch Ness Monster’, the accounts of the creature in Yakutia predate the Scottish claims yet in many ways are similar.

Intriguingly, too, there are theories that Labynkyr – which has unusual cracks on its 60 to 80 metre deep floor – is connected by underwater channels to another lake, Vorota, where monster sightings have also been recorded, including by respected Soviet geologist Viktor Tverdokhlebov, an academician not given to hyperbole.

Associate Professor of Biogeography Lyudmila Emeliyanova revealed to The Siberian Times that on her own scientific mission to Labynkyr she recorded ‘several seriously big underwater objects’ with sonar readings.

She is not the only researcher to have done so.

‘It was our fourth or fifth day at the lake when our echo sounding device registered a huge object in the water under our boat,’ she said.

‘The object was very dense, of homogeneous structure, surely not a fish nor a shoal of fish, and it was above the bottom. I was very surprised but not scared and not shocked, after all we did not see this animal, we only registered a strange object in the water. But I can clearly say – at the moment, as a scientist, I cannot offer you any explanation of what this object might be.’

IS THIS SASQUATCH?

Mark Anders uploaded a video of pictures taken in Ranchita, CA to YouTube in September of 2011.

An anonymous hiker in California has captured what he believes to be a genuine Sasquatch on film. Not wanting to give out his information he gave permission to another man, Mark Anders to publish the photos.

Ghost Theory writes:

Mark was recently going through some photos when he realized that the figure behind a pile of twisted tree limbs was not part of the pile. At first he was upset because this head had ruined his artistic photo….OK, I made that part up. Hmm, I wonder if something else has been made up here *wink* *wink*.

Actually, I don’t know what’s going on with this photo other than what we see in the video below.

GHOST HUNTING ON HAUNTED SHIPS?

Ghost ships seem to be the next 'hotspot' for paranormal activity.

With all the recent ghost ‘investigation’ tv shows and just the overall popularity of the looking into the paranormal right now, it seems all the good spots on land have been taken or debunked. Now, it’s time to go off shore!

The Huffington Post writes:

Trying to make contact with a ghost? The key to getting them to respond may be pie — or at least a question about it.

That’s the surprising claim made by paranormal researcher Matt Schulz, a San Diego-based art director when he’s not exploring old houses, hotels or ships.

“It sounds strange, but a question like ‘What kind of pie do you like? Cherry or Apple?’ actually seems to get a response from spirits,” Schulz told a group of wannabe paranormal researchers during a midnight expedition on the Star Of India, a 149-year-old ship that is harbored down in San Diego.

It’s a technique Schulz learned a few years back from another investigator.

“Asking questions like ”Do you like cherry or apple pie?’ or ‘Do you prefer lemons or oranges?’ seems innocuous,” he told The Huffington Post a few days after the expedition. “But, for some strange reason, the spirits will answer them. Once, we were investigating an adobe house and trying to contact the ghost of a girl and we asked her if she liked chocolate or vanilla better and she said clearly, as if she was in the room, ‘Vanilla.'”

Besides being the second oldest ship still sailing regularly and the oldest iron-hulled merchant ship still floating, the Star of India is also allegedly harboring a lot of ghosts, hence the late night expedition, which was part of the Maritime Ghost Conference, a recent event in San Diego that explored the connection between ghosts and ships.

FAMILY IN NEW MEXICO TERRORIZED BY NIGHT STALKER

A family in New Mexico is plagued by a creature of the night.

A video posted on Youtube by user JC Jhonson shows a small family in New Mexico seemingly plagued by a beast that comes in the night. Some have even compared it to the demon-man of the hollywood movie ‘Jeepers Creepers’.

Ghost Theory writes:

When I do my rounds I usually stop by Youtube and throw in some keywords to see what’s current. Today, I found a new video that seems somewhat interesting, so I thought our readers would enjoy debating about it.

Recently a family in the Four Corners area of New Mexico contacted JC Johnson of Crypto Four Corners with quite a story.

Allegedly the family has been visited by some sort of large creature that torments them at night. The beast is described as resembling the Creeper from the film series Jeepers Creepers and apparently claws at the exterior walls of family home. Other activity includes damage to the family automobile and claw marks on the daughters back while she sleeps.

DID A CAMPER CATCH BIGFOOT FOOTAGE WITH A SMART PHONE?

Is this new footage posted by Find Bigfoot the real thing?

New alleged footage of Bigfoot has been posted on the Find Bigfoot page on the Facebook social network. Could this be the real deal?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ERb55r_VSj0

Check the facebook group out at facebook.com/FindBigfoot and for more insight, updates and breakdowns of Bigfoot and other Cryptid related stories, go to cryptomundo.com

Posted on September 26, 2012 by MOTW Admin

EUROPEAN MUSTACHE AND BEARD OLYMPICS

The first stage of the European Beard and Mustache Olympics were held in Wittersdorf, eastern France.

Quite a weird competition to be sure, the Mustache and Beard Olympics draw a huge crowd to marvel at the facial hair wizardry by competitors that have traveled from all across the continent to show-off and compete.

The Herald Sun writes:

Boasting beards that would make most men blush with envy, more than 100 competitors from around the world have converged on Wittersdorf in France to compare facial hair.

While no rival to the Olympics or European football championships, the event proved a popular opportunity for men to flex their follicle muscles and impress judges and crowds of spectators.

To enhance the effect of their remarkable growths, many participants, who came from across the continent, wore extraordinary costumes and outlandish hats.

While many entrants opted for the self-supporting curly look, other competitors boasted moustaches that were so magnificently proportioned they required sticky tape or grips to keep them in place.

RESEARCHERS WIN IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR SHUTTING PEOPLE UP!

Japanese researchers Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada have invented a way to stop people talking in their tack.s

Everyone seems to have a co-worker or friend that just doesn’t seem to stop talking, ever. Well, two young researchers in Japan have created a literal gun (you point it at someone’s face and pull the trigger) that make even the loudest, most obtrusive talkers, silent.

Science on MSNBC News writes:

BOSTON — For anyone who’s ever been tired of listening to someone drone on and on and on, two Japanese researchers have the answer.

The SpeechJammer, a device that disrupts a person’s speech by repeating his or her own voice at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds, was named Thursday as a 2012 winner of the Ig Nobel prize — an award sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for weird and humorous scientific discoveries.

The echo effect of the device is just annoying enough to get someone to sputter and stop.

Actually, the device created by Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada is meant to help public speakers by alerting them if they are speaking too quickly or have taken up more than their allotted time.

“This technology … could also be useful to ensure speakers in a meeting take turns appropriately, when a particular participant continues to speak, depriving others of the opportunity to make their fair contribution,” said Kurihara, of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan.

Still, winning an Ig Nobel in acoustics for the device’s other more dubious purpose is cool too.

“Winning an Ig Nobel has been my dream as a mad scientist,” he said.

STRANGE ROCK FOUND ON MARS

The strangest thing about this rock is how alone it is. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Curiosity Rover missions are going extremely well, finding and discovering all sorts of new stuff but, here’s something a little unexpected. A strange, pyramid shaped rock out in the middle of nowhere.

NASA writes:

‘Jake Matijevic’ Contact Target for Curiosity

The drive by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity during the mission’s 43rd Martian day, or sol, (Sept. 19, 2012) ended with this rock about 8 feet (2.5 meters) in front of the rover. The rock is about 10 inches (25 centimeters) tall and 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide. The rover team has assessed it as a suitable target for the first use of Curiosity’s contact instruments on a rock. The image was taken by the left Navigation camera (Navcam) at the end of the drive.

The rock has been named “Jake Matijevic.” This commemorates Jacob Matijevic (1947-2012), who was the surface operations systems chief engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory Project and the project’s Curiosity rover. He was also a leading engineer for all of the previous NASA Mars rovers: Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity.

Curiosity’s contact instruments are on a turret at the end of the rover’s arm. They are the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer for reading a target’s elemental composition and the Mars Hand Lens Imager for close-up imaging.

See more pictures from the Mars Curiosity missions at nasa.gov/mission_pages

Posted on September 22, 2012 by MOTW Admin

SCIENTISTS HAVE DEVELOPED CLEAR DIRT!

Clear soil will help researchers track how plants and other things survive in soil.

There’s a whole world of things to learn and discover about this world, some of the unanswered questions lie right below our feet so, scientists have decided to look into and see what they can find, with clear soil!

Discovery Science writes:

The clear soil was developed by theoretical biologist Lionel Dupuy at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, Scotland. It’s is made of a synthetic material known as Nafion. The compound can be modified to mimic the chemistry of natural soils. It’s not transparent at first, but when watered in a customized liquid solution, the particles bend light, making the solution clear.

Dupuy and his colleagues used the soil to analyze how E. coli bacteria, certain strains of which can be harmful to humans, interacts with lettuce roots. By using a genetically modified version of E. coli that carried a green fluorescent protein from jellyfish, the scientists could see through the clear soil how the bacterium formed micro-colonies in the root zone.

“If we understand better the contamination route, then we can develop strategies to limit the transfer of E. coli to the food chain,” Dupuy told Inside Science. “We don’t really understand how E. coli enters the food chain, particularly for fresh produce.”

‘SUPER-EARTH’ FOUND JUST LIGHT YEARS AWAY

Gliese 163c is now the prime local for alien life!

More and more earth-like planets are found daily using high-powered telescopes all over the world but, this one, this one is the closest and most suitable for alien life as we expect to find it!

Live Science writes:

A newly discovered alien planet may be one of the top contenders to support life beyond Earth, researchers say.

The newfound world, a “super Earth” called Gliese 163c, lies at the edge of its star’shabitable zone — that just-right range of distances where liquid water could exist.

“There are a wide range of structures and compositions that allow Gliese 163c to be ahabitable planet,” Xavier Bonfils, of France’s Joseph Fourier University-Grenoble, told SPACE.com by email.

He went on to caution that several possible uninhabitable combinations exist as well. [The Top 5 Potentially Habitable Alien Planets]

A newfound super Earth

Bonfils and an international team of astronomers studied nearly 400 red dwarf stars with the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a spectograph on the 3.6-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Gliese 163c was one of two alien planets found orbiting the star Gliese 163, which lies about 50 light-years from Earth in the Dorado constellation The team found indications of a third planet as well but cannot confirm it at this time.

Weighing in at about seven times the mass of Earth, Gliese 163c could be a rocky planet, or it could be a dwarfed gas giant, researchers said.

“We do not know for sure that it is a terrestrial planet,” Bonfils said. “Planets of that mass regime can be terrestrial, ocean, or Neptune-like planets.”

Orbiting at the inner edge of the habitable zone, Gliese 163c takes 26 days to zip around its parent star, which is considerably dimmer than our sun. The second planet, Gliese 163b, has an orbital period of only nine days, while the third unconfirmed planet circles from a distance.