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
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.
Read more at heraldsun.com.au
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.
Read more at msnbc.msn.com
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
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.”
Read more at news.discovery.com/tech
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.
Read more at livescience.com
I keep saying the future is here folks, and some more proof has just arrived in the way of a robot that works closely with humans, literally. Read on to see what I mean.
Laughing Squid writes:
Baxter is a new manufacturing robot that is designed to work closely with human coworkers (video). Sonar and cameras allow the robot to detect humans and avoid colliding with them. The robot uses behavior-based intelligence to adapt to changing surroundings and tasks. It does not need to be programmed. Instead, humans can train the robot by moving the robot’s arms directly to demonstrate a new task.
The robot is designed to perform repetitive tasks normally done by unskilled labor. Due to its relatively low cost ($22,000), it is hoped the robot will be an alternative to offshore manufacturing. Baxter is being developed by Rethink Robots, a Boston-based firm founded by roboticist Rodney Brooks (you may remember him from the Errol Morris documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control). The robot is being built in New Hampshire and will be released in October.
Read more at laughingsquid.com
A new invention from Japan could save the world from bad teeth. Scientist’s have come up with a thin sheet of film that, when applied to teeth, can prevent decay from outside forces and even cure sensitive teeth!
Yahoo News writes:
Scientists in Japan have created a microscopically thin film that can coat individual teeth to prevent decay or to make them appear whiter, the chief researcher said.
The “tooth patch” is a hard-wearing and ultra-flexible material made from hydroxyapatite, the main mineral in tooth enamel, that could also mean an end to sensitive teeth.
“This is the world’s first flexible apatite sheet, which we hope to use to protect teeth or repair damaged enamel,” said Shigeki Hontsu, professor at Kinki University’s Faculty of Biology-Oriented Science and Technology in western Japan.
“Dentists used to think an all-apatite sheet was just a dream, but we are aiming to create artificial enamel,” the outermost layer of a tooth, he said earlier this month.
Researchers can create film just 0.004 millimetres (0.00016 inches) thick by firing lasers at compressed blocks of hydroxyapatite in a vacuum to make individual particles pop out.
These particles fall onto a block of salt which is heated to crystallise them, before the salt stand is dissolved in water.
The film is scooped up onto filter paper and dried, after which it is robust enough to be picked up by a pair of tweezers.
“The moment you put it on a tooth surface, it becomes invisible. You can barely see it if you examine it under a light,” Hontsu told AFP by telephone.
The sheet has a number of minute holes that allow liquid and air to escape from underneath to prevent their forming bubbles when it is applied onto a tooth.
Read more at news.yahoo.com
The more time we spend in space, the more we realize we have got to get around a little faster than our current means allow. Well, we just might be moving faster, a LOT faster.
Gizmodo writes:
With our current propulsion technologies, interstellar flight is impossible. Even with experimental technology, like ion thrusters or a spaceship’s aft pooping freaking nuclear explosions, it would require staggering amounts of fuel and mass to get to any nearby star. And worse: it will require decades—centuries, even—to get there. The trip will be meaningless for those left behind. Only the ones going forward in search for a new star system would enjoy the result of the colossal effort. It’s just not practical.
So we need an alternative. One that would allow us to travel extremely fast without breaking the laws of physics. Or as Dr. White puts it: “we want to go, really fast, while observing the 11th commandment: Thou shall not exceed the speed of light.”
The answer lies precisely in those laws of physics. Dr. White and other physicists have found loopholes in some mathematical equations—loopholes that indicate that warping the space-time fabric is indeed possible.
Working at NASA Eagleworks—a skunkworks operation deep at NASA’s Johnson Space Center—Dr. White’s team is trying to find proof of those loopholes. They have “initiated an interferometer test bed that will try to generate and detect a microscopic instance of a little warp bubble” using an instrument called the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer.
It may sound like a small thing now, but the implications of the research huge. In his own words:
‘Although this is just a tiny instance of the phenomena, it will be existence proof for the idea of perturbing space time-a “Chicago pile” moment, as it were. Recall that December of 1942 saw the first demonstration of a controlled nuclear reaction that generated a whopping half watt. This existence proof was followed by the activation of a ~ four megawatt reactor in November of 1943. Existence proof for the practical application of a scientific idea can be a tipping point for technology development.’
By creating one of these warp bubbles, the spaceship’s engine will compress the space ahead and expand the space behind, moving it to another place without actually moving, and carrying none of the adverse effects of other travel methods. According to Dr. White, “by harnessing the physics of cosmic inflation, future spaceships crafted to satisfy the laws of these mathematical equations may actually be able to get somewhere unthinkably fast—and without adverse effects.”
He says that, if everything is confirmed in these practical experiments, we would be able to create an engine that will get us to Alpha Centauri “in two weeks as measured by clocks here on Earth.” The time will be the same in the spaceship and on Earth, he claims, and there will not be “tidal forces inside the bubble, no undue issues, and the proper acceleration is zero. When you turn the field on, everybody doesn’t go slamming against the bulkhead, which would be a very short and sad trip.”
Read more at gizmodo.com
Have we finally found signs of alien life? And on Mars of all places, the place we actually suspected we’d find something? How weird!
Gizmodo writes:
NASA claims that new mysterious spheres discovered by the Mars Opportunity rover are puzzling researchers to no end. According to Opportunity’s principal investigator, Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, “this is one of the most extraordinary pictures from the whole mission.”
Soon after Opportunity landed, it discovered similar spheres. The scientists nicknamed them blueberries and soon they discovered that they were rich on hematite. Those were evidence of a Mars’ past full of water. But these spheres—which are 3 millimeters in diameter—are nothing like that.
Found in the Kirkwood outcrop, in the western rim of Endeavour Crater, these spherules’ composition is completely different from the old Martian blueberries. Scientists still don’t know how they got there and what they are supposed to be, says Squyres:
“They are different in concentration. They are different in structure. They are different in composition. They are different in distribution. So, we have a wonderful geological puzzle in front of us. We have multiple working hypotheses, and we have no favorite hypothesis at this time. It’s going to take a while to work this out, so the thing to do now is keep an open mind and let the rocks do the talking.”
In the image you can also see spheres that have been eroded, showing a concentric internal structure. Researchers are now conducting more tests, trying to come up with an explanation on what these may be and how they got there.
Read more at gizmodo.com
