WEEKLY WEIRD NEWS – Page 41 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Guest Blogger

SET PHASERS TO “SHUT UP”, SPEECH-JAMMING GUN CREATED!

A new 'gun' has been invented that stops your conversation cold. Photo courtesy Kazutaka Kurihara

Ever been at the office, library or park enjoying the peace and quiet when, all of a sudden, an incredibly rude person decides to shatter the silence and start talking on their phone annoyingly or, continues to attempt conversation with others over and over again besides being told to ‘shh’ or ‘please, be quiet’ a thousand times?!

Do you want to shut their mouth without ever touching them or getting into an argument? Of course you do!

Well have no fear, for the Japanese Speech-Jamming gun is here!

Wired writes:

What inspired Japanese researchers Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada to create a prototype for a speech-jamming gun? J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick novels? Dystopian art-house cinema? The Muzak Corporation? German avant-garde electronic experiments? The LRAD sound cannon? The answer, it turns out, was the friendly local science museum.

Kurihara, a research scientist at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, broke it down in an e-mail exchange with Wired. “One day I just came by a science museum and enjoyed a demonstration about Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) at [the] cognitive science corner,” says Kurihara. “When I spoke to a microphone, my voice came back to me after a few hundred millisecond delay. Then, I could not continue to speak any more. That’s fun!”

Kurihara soon realized his adventures in the science museum could be applicable to other fields. He was already interested in developing a system that “controls appropriate turn-taking at discussions.” The science museum visit was his “a-ha!” moment. “Then I came up with the gun-type SpeechJammer idea utilizing DAF,” says Kurihara. “That’s the destiny.”

VIOLIN STRINGS MADE OF SPIDER SILK!

Dr Osaki with his one of kind, spider-silk strung violin.

More cool news coming from the spider-science world!

Adding to the list of incredible and awesome uses for spider-silk, a scientist of Japan’s Nara Medical University, Shigeyoshi Osaki, has developed a set of violin strings woven from the ‘dragline’ silk spiders use to hang themselves from.

It’s apparently stronger and resonates brighter than the usual, aluminum coated, string traditionally used on violins and other stringed instruments! Researchers have been studying the pros and cons of using spider-silk for quite some time now and have been making breakthrough after breakthrough. Hopefully we’ll see some more incredible stuff very soon!

BBC News writes:

A Japanese researcher has used thousands of strands of spider silk to spin a set of violin strings.

The strings are said to have a “soft and profound timbre” relative to traditional gut or steel strings.

That may arise from the way the strings are twisted, resulting in a “packing structure” that leaves practically no space between any of the strands.

The strings will be described in a forthcoming edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.

95 YEAR OLD WOMAN CLIMBS OUT OF COFFIN…FOR BREAKFAST!

This is why you should, at the very least, double-check to see if the person you just laid to rest in a coffin, is actually dead.

95 year old, Li Xiufeng, was presumed dead by neighbors when she was found lifeless and non-responsive in her home. They laid Li in a coffin for a few days while they made funeral preparations, and so friends and relatives could come visit and pay respects.

The day before the funeral was set to happen, Mr. Qingwang, the man making the plans, came to check and prepare the coffin, only to find it empty!

Apparently, being dead for a few days works up quite the appetite, because they found Li Xiufeng doing just fine in her kitchen and making herself some breakfast. She’s quoted as saying “I slept for a long time. After waking up, I felt so hungry, and wanted to cook something to eat.”

Again, just double-check.

Daily Mail writes:

A 95-year-old Chinese woman thought to have passed away stunned her neighbours – after waking up six days after she had been placed in a coffin. Li Xiufeng was found motionless and not breathing in bed by a neighbour two weeks after tripping and suffering a head injury at her home in Beiliu, Guangxi Province.

When the neighbor who found her could not wake the pensioner up, they feared the worst and thought the elderly woman had passed away. She was placed in a coffin which was kept in her house unsealed under Chinese tradition for friends and relatives to pay respects.

But the day before the funeral, neighbours found an empty coffin, and later discovered the 95-year-old, who had since woken up, in her kitchen cooking. Neighbor Chen Qingwang, 60, who originally found Mrs Xiufeng, said: ‘She didn’t get up, so I came up to wake her up.

‘No matter how hard I pushed her and called her name, she had no reactions. ‘I felt something was wrong, so I tried her breath, and she has gone, but her body is still not cold.’

As Mrs Xiufeng lived alone, Mr Qingwang and his son made preparations for her funeral, and the ‘dead’ woman was left in her coffin two days after she was discovered. The day before she was due to be permanently laid to rest, however, Mr Qingwang arrived at his neighbour’s property and found her ‘corpse’ had disappeared.

GIANT ‘TREE LOBSTER’ ONCE THOUGHT EXTINCT, FOUND ALIVE!

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.

DOG-HEADED PIG MONSTER ATTACKS!

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.

WORLDS FIRST MAN THAT LIVES WITH NO HEART

X-ray showing dual turbine-like blood pumps that have a 'continuous flow'.

Doctor’s here in Texas have a made a huge break-through in medical science and surgery. They have successfully replaced a heart with a dual turbine-like blood pump that has a ‘continuous flow’ to it, so it hums like a hard-drive instead of having the traditional “pum-pump” you’re used to hearing.

Thousands of people around the world already have something similar to this installed in their bodies, the difference in this case being that most of them have a device that helps an already beating heart, this one just replaces it all-together.

There has even been a documentary made about the incredible process the 2 doctors and patient went through called “Heart Stop Beating”.

Heart Stop Beating | Jeremiah Zagar from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Heart Stop Beating is the story of Billy Cohn & Bud Frazier, two visionary doctors from the Texas Heart Institute, who in March of 2011 successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a ‘continuous flow’ device they developed, proving that life was possible without a pulse or a heart beat.

The Daily Mail writes:

In March of last year, Craig Lewis, 55, was dying from a heart condition that caused build-ups of abnormal proteins, and not even a pacemaker could help save his life.

But two doctors from the Texas Heart Institute proposed a revolutionary new solution – install a ‘continuous flow’ device that would allow blood to circulate his body without a pulse.

Dr Billy Cohn and Dr Bud Frazier installed the device after removing Mr Lewis’ heart. Within a day, the patient was up and speaking with physicians.

The two doctors had developed the device some time before and had tested it on nearly 50 calves.

They removed the animals’ hearts, and by the next day, the calves were doing everything they were the day before – eating, sleeping, and moving – but this time, without a heart pumping blood through their bodies.

MUSEUM OF THE WEIRD ON THE NEWS!

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!

Head on over to YNN (Your News Now) to check out our feature under their “Local Wonders” section and leave some feedback with them about any experiences you may have had with us! <–click here

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!

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Guest Blogger

MYSTERY MUSIC FLOATS THROUGH YELLOWSTONE

Mystery music floating along the shores of Yellowstone Lake has puzzled many hikers and park goers for over a hundred years now, and doesn’t seem like it’s going to stop anytime soon.


Imagine going on vacation from the hum drum of 9-5 life, to the majestic wonder of the Yellowstone National park! Now imagine, being at one with nature amongst the mountains, plains, and valleys. Then, coming to rest on the egde of Yellowstone Lake after an exhausting morning hike through the wilderness.
As you sit there, enjoying your ham and cheese sandwich with a little baggie of granola mix, a feint humming begins to tickle your ears. First distant, then slowly growing closer. Just a buzz of noise from far away but as it comes nearer, you begin hearing notes, then a melody!
Crystal clear harps harmonizing on the wind with trumpets and horns serenading you from the skies! Growing louder and more intense! How wonderful! …and strange.Where is this amazing music coming from? You search the clear blue, cloud dotted sky for any signs of, well… anything.
Nothing.
As quickly as it came, it begins to slowly fade away. The hum trails off in the distance as the mysterious sound disappears into the breeze.You’re left with a half-eaten sandwich in your hand and a half-chewed bite in your mouth that’s hanging wide open as you sit, perplexed at what just occurred.


THAT is basically what has actually happened to a few people visiting the park!


Be it natural wonder or something more extraordinary, we may never know, but we can imagine all the different possibilities of this mystery music that seemingly comes from the heavens. Give us some of your thoughts on what it could be in the comments below!

Yellowstone Gate writes:

Yellowstone Lake and the rugged backcountry that surrounds it is a place where millions go seeking solitude and silence. Yet it in a well-documented but rarely discussed phenomenon, some visitors to the Lake area have experienced remarkable celestial sounds of unknown and unexplained origin.

“They resemble the ringing of telegraph wires or the humming of a swarm of bees, beginning softly in the distance, growing rapidly plainer until directly overhead, and then fading as rapidly in the opposite direction,” wrote Hiram M. Chittenden in 1895 in his book, “The Yellowstone National Park.”

Chittenden’s description is one of several in the historical record — as well as many more from popular anecdotal accounts — of strange sounds or “lake music” coming from the skies around Yellowstone Lake and Shoshone lake.

GOVERNMENT “X-FILES” RELEASED TO PUBLIC

New Zealand releases real life 'x-files' to the public.

New Zealand has compiled and made public 9 books and over 50 years worth of government papers documenting ufo sightings and activity.

You can even browse the documents in pdf form right in your web browser!

Ghost Theory writes:

Here we go again. Another government takes a step in the right direction. New Zealand has just released official UFO reports from the years 1952 to 2009. In a digital library collection, the UFO reports fill up nine volumes of civilian and military reports on the little green men.

Read more and browse the official documents over at ghosttheory.com

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Guest Blogger

298 MILLION YEAR OLD PREHISTORIC FOREST FOUND!

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.