Guest Blogger – Page 3 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Guest Blogger

MARS IS, IN FACT, FULL OF WATER!

Turns out the red planet is blue on the inside.

Now, here is some fascinating news!

Scientist have been theorizing that there just might be more to Mars than we think for quite some time now, but lacked the evidence to back themselves up. Well, not anymore.

Smithsonian.com writes:

Despite claims in the 1890s that Mars was filled with canals teeming with water, research over the past several decades has suggested that in fact, Mars has only a tiny amount of water, mostly near its surface.Then, during the 1970s, as part of NASA’s Mariner space orbiter program, dry river beds and canyons on Mars were discovered—the first indications that surface water may have once existed there. The Viking program subsequently found enormous river valleys on the planet, and in 2003 it was announced that the Mars Odyssey spacecraft had actually detected minute quantities of liquid water on and just below the surface, which was later confirmed by the Phoenix lander.

Now, according to an article published yesterday in the journal Geology, there is evidence that Mars is home to vast reservoirs of water in its interior as well. The finding has weighty implications for our understanding of the geology of Mars, for hopes that the planet may have at some point in the past been home to extraterrestrial life, and for the long-term prospects of human colonization there.

“There has been substantial evidence for the presence of liquid water at the Martian surface for some time,” said Erik Hauri, one of the study’s authors. “So it’s been puzzling why previous estimates for the planet’s interior have been so dry. This new research makes sense.”

MEET MUGLY, THE WORLD’S UGLIEST DOG

Meet Mugly, officially, the world's ugliest dog!

Well, if you weren’t sure who had the weirdest looking dog on the block, judges at the ‘World’s Ugliest Dog’ annual competition have put the matter to rest for everyone across the globe because, they have indeed, found the newest ‘winner’ of such a grand title, Mugly.

A few of the other competitors for the title!

The National Post writes:

PETALUMA, Calif. — A Chinese crested’s short snout, beady eyes and white whiskers earned it the title of World’s Ugliest Dog at the annual contest in Northern California on Friday.

Competing for fame, $1,000 and a year’s worth of dog cookies, Mugly won the honour by beating out 28 other ugly dogs from around the world.

The 8-year-old rescue dog from the United Kingdom will also be invited for a photo shoot and will receive a VIP stay at the local Sheraton.

“I couldn’t speak when they announced Mugly’s name,” said Bev Nicholson, the dog’s owner. “I didn’t know which way to look. I was shaking as much as the dog.”

It’s not the first time Mugly has been recognized for his unattractiveness. Nicholson said he was named Britain’s ugliest dog in 2005.

The contest at the Marin-Sonoma Fairgrounds gets worldwide attention, with reporters and camera crews from around the world travelling to Petaluma, about 40 miles north of San Francisco.

Organizers say the competing dogs are judged for what they term their “natural ugliness in both pedigree and mutt classes.”

WOMAN CAN SEE MORE THAN THE AVERAGE HUMAN WITH HER ‘SUPERHUMAN’ SIGHT

More colors of the color spectrum are visible to an English woman than most other humans on earth.

Neuroscientist Gabriele Jordan, and her colleagues from Newcastle University in England, knew that there was someone out there with a little something extra… 2 cones in the eye that allow them to see thousands of more shades of color than most of us ‘normal’ folk, to be exact.

Most people don’t know that this is actually possible, I sure didn’t, and these researchers weren’t even sure they’d ever find somebody with this incredibly rare ability to see beyond what was thought possible, until they did.

Discover Magazine writes:

An average human, utterly unremarkable in every way, can  perceive a million different colors. Vermilion, puce, cerulean, periwinkle, chartreuse—we have thousands of words for them, but mere language can never capture our extraordinary range of hues. Our powers of color vision derive from cells in our eyes called cones, three types in all, each triggered by different wavelengths of light. Every moment our eyes are open, those three flavors of cone fire off messages to the brain. The brain then combines the signals to produce the sensation we call color.

Vision is complex, but the calculus of color is strangely simple: Each cone confers the ability to distinguish around a hundred shades, so the total number of combinations is at least 100³, or a million. Take one cone away—go from being what scientists call a trichromat to a dichromat—and the number of possible combinations drops a factor of 100, to 10,000. Almost all other mammals, including dogs and New World monkeys, are dichromats. The richness of the world we see is rivaled only by that of birds and some insects, which also perceive the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.

Researchers suspect, though, that some people see even more. Living among us are people with four cones, who might experience a range of colors invisible to the rest. It’s possible these so-called tetrachromats see a hundred million colors, with each familiar hue fracturing into a hundred more subtle shades for which there are no names, no paint swatches. And because perceiving color is a personal experience, they would have no way of knowing they see far beyond what we consider the limits of human vision.

Over the course of two decades, Newcastle University neuroscientist Gabriele Jordan and her colleagues have been searching for people endowed with this super-vision. Two years ago, Jordan finally found one. A doctor living in northern England, referred to only as cDa29 in the literature, is the first tetrachromat known to science. She is almost surely not the last.

GIANT WOMBAT FOSSILS FOUND FROM OVER 100,000 YEARS AGO

Giant Wombats once roamed what is now Australia.

Paleontologists in Queensland, Australia have unearthed fossils of what just might be the biggest, cutest thing ever… well, almost cutest. I mean, did you see those mini-mammoths we talked about a few weeks ago?!

BBC News writes:

The find, in Queensland, Australia, of about 50Diprotodons – the largest marsupial that ever lived – has been called a “palaeontologists’ goldmine”.

The plant-eating giants, the size of a rhinoceros, had backward-facing pouches big enough to carry an adult human.

The fossils are believed to be between 100,000 and 200,000 years old.

Lead scientist Scott Hocknull, from the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, said: “When we did the initial survey I was just completely blown away by the concentrations of these fragments.

“It’s a palaeontologist’s goldmine where we can really see what these megafauna were doing, how they actually behaved, what their ecology was.

“With so many fossils it gives us a unique opportunity to see these animals in their environment, basically, so we can reconstruct it.”

The “mega-wombats” appeared to have been trapped in boggy conditions while taking refuge from dry conditions, Mr Hocknull added.

The pigeon-toed animals were widespread across Australia about 50,000 years ago, when the first indigenous people are believed to have lived, but they first appeared about 1.6 million years ago.

It is unclear how or why they became extinct, but it could have been due to hunting by humans or, more likely, a changing climate.

The remote desert site contains one huge specimen, nicknamed Kenny, which is one of the best preserved and biggest examples ever discovered. Its jawbone alone is 70cm (28in) long.

PSYCHIC CLAIMS HIS OWN ISLAND IS UFO HOT SPOT

What are the chances this celebrity psychic is telling the truth?

65 year old, Uri Geller claims that his very own property, the island Firth of Forth, is a real life UFO hotspot with ‘strange lights’ reported flying around over the island by many locals.

News source Scotsman.com writes:

CELEBRITY psychic Uri Geller is hoping to prove that his private island in the Firth of Forth is a UFO hotspot.

The 65-year-old surprised many people three years ago when he bought Lamb Island because he believed it had a connection with the Egyptian pyramids.

He said that since then he has been contacted by members of the public who have reported seeing “strange lights” in the skies above his uninhabited rock.

Geller is now hoping that cameras set up by the Scottish Seabird Centre on Lamb Island to record wildlife can also be used to look for the UFOs.

“I have received a lot of e-mails from local people telling me about strange lights above the area,” he said.

“There definitely appears to be something strange and mysterious going on there.

“Locals have told me they have seen strange objects moving above it. I can’t believe it would be an aircraft or a balloon and they have assured me it is not either of those.

“I know some people don’t believe in UFOs, but there’s many people who don’t believe in my mental powers either.”

UPDATE: BALTIC SEA ‘ANOMALY’ IS A GIANT MUSHROOM!

Rendition of the underwater exploration from vaghauk.deviantart.com

We posted a story a couple of weeks ago detailing the discovery of a strange, underwater anomaly laying at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, while it most certainly looked like the Millenium Falcon had crashed into the sea floor, it turns out it is an absolutely humongous underwater mushroom!

Here’s the very first set of pictures from the team that went down to figure this out:

Huffington Post writes:

The unidentified circular object that has held the world in a viral grip for a year probably isn’t an alien spacecraft after all.

Over the past few days, divers have photographed the unusual anomaly on the seabed nearly 300 feet below the surface.

According to news released Friday by the OceanX treasure hunters who discovered the anomaly on June 19, 2011, “first they thought it was just stone or a rock cliff, but after further observations, the object appeared more as a huge mushroom, rising 10-13 feet from the seabed, with rounded sides and edges.

“The object had an egg-shaped hole leading into it from the top, as an opening. On top of the object they also found strange stone circle formations, almost looking like small fireplaces. The stones were covered in something resembling soot,” reports the OceanX website.

One of the OceanX divers, Stefan Hogeborn, a veteran of more than 6,000 dives in his 20-year career, is completely puzzled by what he saw.

WOMAN BECOMES ‘PREGNANT’ AFTER EATING SQUID

It seems squid never give up and will attempt impregnating anything, even your mouth as you’re trying to eat the little guys, how rude!

The Interntational Business Times writes:

A 63-year-old South Korean woman was shocked to learn she “became pregnant” with 12 baby squid after eating a portion of calamari. The story — definitely giving new meaning to the term “Octomom” — was detailed in a scientific paper authored by researchers at the Kwandong University College of Medicine.

Here’s what happened: The unnamed woman, who we will refer to here as “New Octomom,” said she was eating a portion of whole squid when she felt an extremely sharp pain in her mouth. She told doctors she could feel something in her mouth, which she described as “bug-like organisms.””She did not swallow the portion, but spat it out immediately,” the researchers wrote. “She complained of a pricking and foreign-body sensation in the oral cavity.”

After the woman was hospitalized, doctors discovered “baby cephalopods” — tiny pods covered in a cementlike material to make them stick — attached to the inside of her mouth. The pods, which covered her gums, tongue and cheek, were filled with an “ejaculatory apparatus” and sperm, with the apparatus discharging the sperm very forcefully.

“Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa,” the researchers said. “On the basis of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores.”

16 YEAR OLD BOY SURVIVES 3FT SPEAR IN SKULL

This x-ray shows the harpoon still lodged in this young mans head.

Here’s one fishing trip that will never be forgotten and one big catch no one could have ever suspected.

Metro News writes:

Yasser Lopez was swimming in a lake near his home in Miami-Dade, Florida, when a friend accidentally set off the gun while he was loading it.

The spear entered the 16-year-old’s head just above his right eye, penetrated through his brain, before coming out the back of his skull.

Miraculously, no vital blood vessels in the brain were damaged by the harpoon and the fortunate youngster is now recovering at the Jackson Memorial Hospital (JMH).

JMH Neurosurgeon Ross Bullock admitted it was astonishing that the lodged object had not hit any vital parts of the brain.

‘It’s a miracle the spear missed all the main blood vessels of the brain,’ he said. ‘The most important thing is to resist that temptation to pull that thing out.’

Doctors had to use fire and rescue equipment to cut away a section of the spear so Lopez could be X-rayed.

The rest of the spear was removed by doctors following an extensive three hour operation.

DOES TIME HAVE AN ENDING?

Two Spanish scientists have come together to form a new theory that states that time may, in fact, have an end point.

The Telegraph writes:

The theory of time running out was devised by researchers from two Spanish universities trying to explain why the universe appeared to be spreading continuously and accelerating.

Observations of supernovae, or exploding stars, found the movement of light indicated they were moving faster than those nearer to the centre of the universe.

But the scientists claimed the accepted theory of an opposite force to gravity, known as dark energy, was wrong, and said the reality was that the growth of the universe was slowing.

Professor Jose Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raul Vera from the University of the Basque Country and the University of Salamanca said the deceleration of time was so gradual, it was imperceptible to humans.

Their proposal, published in the journal Physical Review D, claimed dark energy does not exist and that time was winding down to the point when it would finally grind to a halt long after the planet ceased to exist.

‘BUBBLE SKIN MAN’ IS HOPING FOR A CURE SOON

Chandra Wisnu and his wife of 33 years, Nanik Tri Haryani.

We’ve written a story on Chandra before and his amazing strength and will-power to contiue on in the face of severe adveristy. Well now he’s reaching out to people all over the world to help him find a cure but, not so much for him, for his children who have begun to develop the same tumors that have caused his life to be so difficult.

The Sun writes:

Chandra Wisnu, 57, is thought to be one of the few people in the world with a rare skin disease which causes large, bubble-like lumps to develop all over his body.

The married dad-of-four, from Indonesia, rarely leaves his house and when he does he is forced to cover his face with a balaclava and wear sunglasses for fear of frightening or being ridiculed by others.

Lesions began to develop on Chandra’s face when he was just 19.

By the time he was 24 they had spread to his back and by age 32 they almost completely covered his body.

During the early stages of the disease, Chandra’s parents took him to see a number of doctors and dermatologists who were baffled by the severity of his symptoms.

He was told the condition was genetic and may be caused by an abnormality in the nervous system that causes benign tumours to develop on the skin or bone.

He was prescribed a number of creams — but they did nothing to stop the lesions from spreading.

Unable to find a cure and no longer able to afford medical treatment, Chandra was forced to live with the bizarre condition.

…

Chandra has now decided to unveil his face to the world in a bid to find a cure for the disease after discovering his eldest son Martin Ananda, 32, and daughter Lis Candra, 26, have begun to develop it too.

The brave father cannot afford for his children to see a doctor and fears they too will end up looking like him.