Uncategorized – Page 17 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Guest Blogger

FAREWELL, LONESOME GEORGE

The last of his kind, 'Lonesome' George the very last Pinta Giant Tortoise, has died.

Sad news comes from the animal kingdom today, ‘Lonesome’ George, the very last Pinta Giant Tortoise from the Galapagos Islands, has passed away at the ripe young age of 100 years old.

In 1972, at the string of Galapagos islands that helped make Charles Darwin famous by giving him beautiful examples of evolution, George was observed by a Hungarian scientist who thought, along with the rest of the scientific world, that his species of tortoise was already extinct. He was quickly added to the Galapagos National Park and their breeding program to preserve the lineage but, was unsuccessful throughout the 40 years he was with them.

BBC News writes:

Staff at the Galapagos National Park in Ecuador say Lonesome George, a giant tortoise believed to be the last of its subspecies, has died.

Scientists estimate he was about 100 years old.

Park officials said they would carry out a post-mortem to determine the cause of his death. With no offspring and no known individuals from his subspecies left, Lonesome George became known as the rarest creature in the world.

For decades, environmentalists unsuccessfully tried to get the Pinta Island tortoise to reproduce with females from a similar subspecies on the Galapagos Islands. Park officials said the tortoise was found dead in his corral by his keeper of 40 years, Fausto Llerena. While his exact age was not known, Lonesome George was estimated to be about 100, which made him a young adult as the subspecies can live up to an age of 200.

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.”

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.

MAN CHOOSES TO LIVE WITH 100 POUND SCROTUM

Wesley Warren Jr. has an unusual condition that afflicts a certain part of his body that none of us wish to see any harm done to, ever.

The Las Vegas man has recently chosen to live with the extra 100 pounds he has to carry around, rather than having it surgically removed courtesy of the ‘Dr. Oz Show’ saying he’s to scared to do it, and I don’t blame him.

The Huffington Post writes:

A man who made headlines for his 100-pound scrotum now says he turned down an offer for free surgery to get rid of his bulging problem.

GRAPHIC content below:

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports thatWesley Warren Jr. declined an opportunity to have the “Dr. Oz Show” pay for the medical expenses associated with the surgery, partially because they wanted exclusive interview rights.

But Warren bristles at the notion that he won’t get surgery because he doesn’t want to lose the fame he’s garnered because of his condition, which is caused by an excess of watery fluid collecting around his testicles.

“Who would want to live like this?” he said. “I just don’t want to die during the operation.”