Do asteroids passing near Earth have minerals worth mining for?
A new investment from famous director James Cameron and friends, Google’s chief executive Larry Page and its executive chairman Eric Schmidt have given themselves the lofty goal of mining asteroids that come near Earth for precious minerals.
BBC News writes:
Details have been emerging of the plan by billionaire entrepreneurs to mine asteroids for their resources.
The multi-million-dollar plan would use robotic spacecraft to squeeze chemical components of fuel and minerals such as platinum and gold out of the rocks.
The founders include film director and explorer James Cameron as well as Google’s chief executive Larry Page and its executive chairman Eric Schmidt.
They even aim to create a fuel depot in space by 2020.
However, several scientists have responded with scepticism, calling the plan daring, difficult and highly expensive.
“From time to time people on boats see unusual images on their fish-finder sonar screens, and if they are on Loch Ness there is always the possibility of accidental misinterpretation.”
But perhaps truly damning, this year “Cruise Loch Ness” are running special monster hunting trips with underwater cameras on the boat skippered by…Marcus Atkinson – the man behind all the publicity of this new “discovery.”
Therefore, some locals are questioning Atkinson’s big splash in the media this week. Is it a marketing move?
This is just one of the many reasons I will not go into any amount of water I can’t see the bottom of.
A giant prehistoric whale that was capable of eating other whales has been discovered by Paleontologists in Peru, with teeth that are over a foot long used to eat whales the size of some of the biggest ones alive today!
Discovery News writes:
The massive skull and jaw of a 13-million-year-old sperm whale has been discovered eroding from the windblown sands of a coastal desert of Peru.
The extinct cousin of the modern sperm whale is the first fossil to rival modern sperm whales in size — although this is a very different beast, say whale evolution experts.
“We could see it from very far,” said paleontologist Olivier Lambert of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France, who led the team which found the fossil.
The giant 3-meter (10-foot) skull of what’s been dubbed Leviathan melvillei (in honor of the author of “Moby Dick”) was found with teeth in its top and bottom jaws up to 36 centimeters (14 inches) long. The discovery is reported in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature.
Has the best and clearest photo of bigfoot finally been released?
Are the skeptics finally going to admit the truth?
Why can we only see his back?
Whether you believe in Bigfoot or not, this photo makes you take a moment to think hard about what exactly the creature in this photo could be.
Ghost Theory writes:
A blogger by the name of Melissa Hovy has been maintaining a Bigfoot blog for quite some time now. It wasn’t until recently that the Sasquatch community caught wind that Melissa could be holding the ultimate photo of all ultimate photos depicting the big guy.
The story goes that four years ago Melissa was contacted by someone who claimed to have a clear picture of Bigfoot on a trailcam. The witness sent Mellisa the picture but wouldn’t allow her to publish it….until now that is.
A message released from the blogger herself:
This witness asked for my (Melissa Hovey) help in seeking protection for what he/she claimed was a Bigfoot that had been coming onto his/her property.
The witness broke contact after becoming concerned for his/her privacy and the safety of the animal. He/she was concerned people would discover who he/she is and that he/she would be called, “crazy”. The witness also expressed concern that if his/her identity were discovered the alleged animal would be in danger of being killed…
The photo has been examined…But, rest assured I have no desire to “string this out” any longer than I must – and that is only to make sure the information and the opinions given are published properly.
A giant Tyrannosaur covered head to tail in feathers has been discovered in China.
Some pretty exciting news is coming our way from the dinosaur world!
A huge Tyrannosaur has been unearthed in China with evidence that it had an entire body covered in feathers!
Fossil evidence of the Tyrannosaurus skull.
Wired Science writes:
It’s not your father’s tyrannosaur: Yutyrannus huali, a newly discovered ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, was covered from head to tail in downy feathers.
At 30 feet long and weighing 3,000 pounds, Y. huali wasn’t so large as T. rex, which came 60 million years later, but it’s the largest feathered tyrannosaur yet found. That such a big creature was feathered suggests its iconic descendant could have been similarly plumed.
The discovery provides “direct evidence for the presence of extensively feathered gigantic dinosaurs,” wrote paleontologists led by Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in their description of the new dinosaur, published April 5 in Nature.
A strawberry-blonde haired woolly mammoth, dubbed 'Yuka'.
A newly discovered woolly mammoth in Siberia is the first to be found by scientists to not only have strawberry-blonde hair but also, the first proof of ancient humans interacting with the behemoths, stealing them away from Lions for an easy dinner, after being mauled and seriously wounded a bit, of course.
April 4, 2012: A newly discovered frozen mammoth, which is thought to have been approximately two and a half years old when it died, appears to have been cut open at some point.
The Telegraph writes:
The juvenile mammoth, which was found in a frozen cliff in Siberia, gives an important insight into the unknown secrets of the animal including hair and eye colour.
An examination of its body, described by scientists as having “huge significance”, is even said to show human beings “stole” their food from hunting lions, with wounds consistent with attack from both predators.
In found to be true, it will be the first evidence of interaction between mammoths and ancient humans ever found in the area.
The well-preserved mammal, which has been named Yuka, is thought to have been between three and four years old when it died and still has its foot pads and ginger hair in tact.
It may have lain unnoticed in its icy tomb for more than 10,000 years, experts said, with its injuries being perfectly frozen in time.
Nick Carlile, seen here with the Lord Howe Island stick insect, discovered the thought-to-be extinct phasmid in 2001 on Ball's Pyramid. -Daily Mail
Here’s a cool little story about a not-so-little bug that was once widely accepted as extinct, only to be discovered 80 years later, hidden from the world on a huge, lonely rock out in the middle of the ocean.
The giant stick bug or ‘tree lobster’ that was once found on Lord Howe Island near Australia, was believed to have gone extinct over 80 years ago when a grounded ship allowed black rats to escape from it’s cargo and subsequently find their new favorite meal, huge phasmid insects called, easily enough, stick bugs. Just a few years later, the bugs were nowhere to be found… and the rats had gotten fat.
A couple of researchers thought they may have some luck finding these guys still alive after some info came down the pipe-line about a possible sighting on another island just a few miles away called Ball’s Pyramid.
Ball's Pyramid, the giant rock jutting out of the ocean all by itself, where the giant stick-bug was found.
Sure enough, they were there, clinging to the one plant that survived on the lifeless island. The researchers quickly made a plea to the Australian government to take some specimens and attempt to build a population large enough to re-introduce back to the island it once inhabited, after the black rats are taken care of, of course.
The Daily Mail writes:
A narrow and forbidding rock that stands higher than the Empire State Building, it does not look like the most welcoming place to set up home.
But that did not stop an insect which was thought to be extinct for 80 years from building its last known colony on the 1,844ft high Ball’s Pyramid.
Scientists have discovered 24 of the creatures living 500ft above the South Pacific Ocean around the single plant that had survived on the rock.
The ‘tree lobster’ insect, which is as large as a human hand, had somehow made its camp despite the lack of food and the harsh conditions.
Nobody could say how they got there in the first place – but four have now been taken off and have bred thousands more to ensure their species survives.
A dog-headed pig monster has began to terrorize villagers in northern Namibia, which is on the southwest coast of Africa, and seems to have caused quite a bit of trouble by attacking dogs, goats and anything else that gets in its way.
People of the region just beyond the Kalahari desert have never seen anything like this creature before and say it must be the work of aliens or ‘black magic’.
Although there are no photos of said monster, it has worked it’s way into the headlines of major news outlets around the world.
Yahoo News writes:
Residents in northern Namibia, on the southwest coast of Africa, have reported being terrorized by a bizarre dog-pig hybrid creature.
The animal is said to be mostly white and unlike anything the villagers have ever seen, with a doglike head and the broad, round, nearly hairless back and shoulders of a giant pig. The beast was spotted chasing and attacking dogs, goats and other domestic animals in this arid region not far from the Kalahari desert.
As often happens when rumors of monsters spread in rural areas around the world, some locals have taken extra safety precautions, such as traveling in groups and arming themselves with weapons.
In 1995 and 1996, some Puerto Ricans armed themselves against the vampire beast el chupacabra; last year, Malaysian residents patrolled the streets searching for the mysterious orang minyak, or “oily man” creature that had recently terrorized them.
A section of the front of the shop as seen from the world famous 6th Street in downtown Austin, Tx.
Hey there fellow weirdos, just a bit of neat info for you!
We’ve been featured on a local news station here in Austin and we would like to share it with you. This town is super great to us and seems to support what we got going on full-heartedly, and we couldn’t be happier!
Thanks again Austin, and all the other folks from cities across the world that visit our website and make the trip in to see the Museum of the Weird. We certainly appreciate your support and will continue to keep Austin, and the rest of the world, weird!
New discoveries and revelations happen daily about everything, from our past to our future, that are astonishing and profound, just like this one made recently.
A prehistoric forest that dates back 298 MILLION years has been disocovered INTACT below a coal mine in China after being perfectly preserved under volcanic ash this whole time. Wow, just wow!
The forest is so perfectly preserved that researchers can literally recreate the forest exactly as it was almost 300 million years ago.
Their findings are so precise they have created images of what it would have actually looked like to our eyes, how fantastic!
Here is exactly what we would have seen, had we been around 298 million years ago.
Gizmodo writes:
American and Chinese scientists are flabbergasted after discovering a giant 298-million-year-old forest buried intact under a coal mine near Wuda, in Inner Mongolia, China.
They are calling it the Pompeii of the Permian period because, like the ancient Roman city, it was covered and preserved by volcanic ash.
Like Pompeii, this swamp forest is so perfectly maintained that scientists know where every plant originally was. This has allowed them to map it and to create the images above. This extraordinary finding “is like Pompeii”, according to University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn, who characterized it as “a time capsule.”
“It’s marvelously preserved. We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That’s really exciting.”
They are in fact finding entire trees and plants exactly as they were at the time of the volcanic eruption, just like archeologists in Pompeii found humans, animals and buildings at the base of Mount Vesuvius, near Naples, in the Italian region of Campania. Except Pompeei was buried in AD 79 and this forest was covered in ash 298 million years ago, during the Permian period.
