Science & Technology – Page 3 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on June 2, 2015 by MOTW Admin

Most interesting ways to die

Every state in the U.S. has it’s own claim to fame. Iowa has the lowest divorce rate and Maine has the least violent crime. Idaho is a cheap place to buy groceries. Arizona prides itself on being the sunniest state. Rhode Island had the lowest energy consumption per capita while Texas has the most wind energy.

Of course, none of them talk about what’s really important. What are their most distinctive ways to die? The biggest killers in the United States are still heart disease and cancer. But it seems that some more unusual causes of death are actually much more typical in certain states compared with the nation as a whole. Tuberculosis in Texas? Plane and boat accidents are problems in Alaska and Idaho! Legal intervention, deaths caused by law enforcement officers, excluding legal executions, seem to be the most distinctive cause of death in New Mexico, Nevada and Oregon.

Remember, these are just statistical anomalies. It doesn’t mean that people are falling over from the flu in Wyoming. But, if you’re looking for just the right way to steer people away from an ugly political discussion, these facts may be the perfect icebreaker. You’ll thank me later.

Posted on May 29, 2015 by MOTW Admin

How would you like your steak? Vesuvius or Mt. St. Helens?

With summer upon us it’s time to break out the grill for some tasty steaks (or veggies). Of course, if you’re a science student at Syracuse University you might take things a little further.

When first erupted from a volcanic vent, lava has a temperatures from 700 to 1,200 °C (1,292 to 2,192 °F). Since most oven broilers top out at about 575°F, lava would be pretty efficient.

The goal of the steak project was to demonstrate that lava is something to be respected but not feared.

Of course, if you are the traditional charcoal-type with your grilling, here is video of George Goble from 1995 in an experiment at Purdue University to find the fastest way to light a BBQ. His solution? He poured 3 gallons of liquid oxygen over a grill with 60 pounds of coal and a lighted cigarette.

Don’t forget to invite all of us as the Museum of the Weird to your next BBQ. We’re sure to have something to liven things up!

Posted on May 22, 2015 by MOTW Admin

Strange new creatures

In 1995, divers discovered bizarre configurations about 6 feet in diameter off the coast of Japan’s Amami-Oshima Island. They resembled crop circles. Were these underwater aliens?

The answer turned out to be a newly classified pufferfish, Torquigener albomaculosus. The “Crop Circle Fish” was among many species that received scientific names over the last year. The International Institute for Species Exploration has listed their their top 10 of nearly 18,000 newly named species.

These obscure creatures may be hidden away in environments that are not populated by people, such as the strange creatures we are discovering deep beneath the ocean. Others are known locally, but only recently noticed by the scientific community. Here are the other nine recognized on this “top 10” list:

Anzu wyliei, also known as “the Chicken From Hell,” is a 10-foot-tall birdlike dinosaur which lived around 66 million years ago in the Dakotas.
The Balanophora coralliformis is a parasitic plant found only on the southwestern slopes of Mount Mingan in the Philippines. It has a unique, coral-like appearance because of branches of above-ground tubers which have a coarse texture.
The bizarre Cebrennus rechenbergi, or cartwheeling spider, uses a strange flipping motion to propel itself over the sands of Morocco.
Dendrogramma enigmatica are multicellular animals resembling mushrooms. Not only a new species, they may represent an entirely new phylum!
The so-called Bone-house wasp, Deuteragenia ossarium, from southeast China, uses corpses of ants to ward off predators by stuffing them into crevices on the outside of the nest.
The Limnonectes larvaepartus is a fanged frog from Sulawesi Island, Indonesia, that gives live birth to tadpoles that are deposited into pools of water. Other species hatch from eggs.
The Phryganistria tamdaoensis, discovered in Vietnam, is the world’s second longest insect.
A Sea Slug, Phyllodesmium acanthorhinum, is a particularly beautiful variety that might be a sort of “missing link” in the sea slug world.
A Mexican plant had been used for years in “nacimientos,” or altar scenes depicting the birth of Christ, by villagers in Sierra de Tepoztlán, Tlayacapan, San José de los Laureles, and Tepoztlán. It turned out to be a species of Bromeliad previously unknown to science. It’s been dubbed Tillandsia religiosa.

These are only ten from thousands of newly classified species. As we continue to seek perhaps we’ll finally be giving scientific names to some of the legendary creatures such as Bigfoot that have eluded and fascinated seekers for centuries.

Posted on April 6, 2015 by MOTW Admin

Could Mysterious Radio Signals Be E.T.?

Is it possible that SETI has finally found what it’s been looking for — an extraterrestrial message from deep space? Apparently for some time now, scientists have been receiving these unusual radio signals, and are at a loss for what could explain them.

From the Huffington Post:

What are those things?

For the past eight years, astronomers have been scratching their heads over a series of strange radio signals emanating from somewhere in the cosmos. And now, the mystery has deepened.

A new study shows that the so-called “fast radio bursts” follow a weirdly specific pattern — a finding that the researchers behind the study say “is very hard to explain.”

“There is something really interesting we need to understand,” study co-author Michael Hippke, a scientist at the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, told New Scientist. “This will either be new physics, like a new kind of pulsar, or, in the end, if we can exclude everything else, an E.T.”

Alien signals, really? That might sound far out, but a leading scientist in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) says we shouldn’t rule out that possibility.

Posted on March 24, 2015 by MOTW Admin

Thomas Edison Tried to Invent a Phone to Talk With Ghosts

Edison, well known for (kind of inventing, but also kind of stealing) the phonograph and the incandescent light bulb, had some less commercially known products that never quite hit the shelves of the modern era, in this case, a phone that can allow communication with the dead.

His research in this spooky realm wasn’t publicized until 1949 (long after his glory days). A French edition of his original diary was discovered and translated in much fuller detail, revealing some new interesting research and information of the ghost variety.

This research to develop ghost phones was primarily done in 1870 by greatly amplifying some of his phonographs. He was so certain it would work, he made a death pact of sorts with one of his engineers, that whichever one of them died first, the other would use the spirit phone to contact the other, from beyond the grave.

Whether Edison actually talked to any ghosts is uncertain, I’d like to imagine he’s the “unknown caller” ID that always calls my phone.

Posted on March 4, 2015 by MOTW Admin

Homer Simpson is a Genius?? Discovers Mass of Higgs Boson.

I’ve always thought Homer was less dumb and more of an idiot-savant like character. Turns out, my hunch was not far off from the truth.

In the 1998 episode, “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace”, Homer wrote an equation to calculate the mass of the Higgs Boson. Either a point of it being a complete coincidence, or one of the writer’s being the smartest man alive, the equation turned out to be correct, fourteen years later.

“A lot of the writers on The Simpsons are mathematicians,” said Simon Singh, author of The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets.

“That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson. If you work it out, you get the mass of a Higgs boson that’s only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs boson actually is.”

Next thing you know, Homer will discover the formula to create donuts out of thin air.

Posted on March 1, 2015 by MOTW Admin

Leading Surgeon Believes it Will Soon be Possible to Perform a Real-life Head Transplant on a Human

We almost have Futurama technology now, for we are apparently only two years away from mastering the human head transplant. Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero has been enthusiastically promoting the idea that transplanting the head of one person to another is viable, and entirely possible.

Besides the grand benefit of getting to have multiple heads throughout your lifetime, (imagine head stores!) it also could extend the person’s lifespan due to all the benefits of a brand spanken new head with extensive muscular or nervous system degeneration.

Canavero detailed the entire procedure, which would involve placing the patient in to a coma for several weeks so that they don’t move during the healing process, in a recent medical paper.

The new bodied patient would be able to feel their new face when they awoke, and would be able to walk again after a twelve month period.

“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it,” he said. “But if people don’t want it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else. I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”

So look forward to Swedish head transplants in 2017.

Posted on February 27, 2015 by MOTW Admin

Research Group Uses Volunteers Dressed Up as Monsters to Investigate How Sightings are Reported.

There are a lot of Cryptozoologist and they all “want to believe”. Some may say that they rush a little too quickly to conclusions about what sightings are real and what are fake. A team from the University of St Andrews in Fife, Scotland have been pulling the upper hand on this by running a series of experiments to better understand how these people react to sightings to the unknown, cryptozoological creatures of myth.

For example, one experiment involved someone dressing up in a Bigfoot costume and storming around the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. The site has an an abundance of Redwoods, making it a common area to see unidentified creatures.

They divided the guinea pigs… I mean visitors, into two groups. One group was set on a route that would lead them to the costumed Bigfoot, where the others were sent safely on a galavant through the woods. Both groups were asked to write a report on their experiences throughout the walk.

“It’s a serious study of people reporting things,” said statistical ecologist Dr Charles Paxton who previously cataloged every recorded sighting of the Loch Ness Monster.

“I’m trying to see if there are statistical patterns. All my work gets published in proper scientific journals. All I do is with the aim of getting proper results.”

No reports have been published yet but we will follow up on the return of this Cryptozoological Punk’d study.

Posted on February 19, 2015 by MOTW Admin

Real Life Robocop in the Works

With Detroit looking almost exactly like the original Robocop predicted, and the lack of an available police force on top of it, it seems more fitting now than ever for Robocop to be real. At least that’s what the researchers at Florida International University seem to think, as they are in the works of developing a, “real life Robocop.”

The robot, nicknamed “TeleBot” (missed opportunity to call it some form of Robocop, if you ask me), is a humanoid, human sized robot that can be controlled remotely through a hyper advanced telepresence system that allows the pilot to see what the robot sees and operate the robot like a suit, similar to the theoretical technology used in Gundam Wing.

This is a passion project of a bunch of undergrads with a shoestring budget. This has proven to be the most impressive aspect of the project, and with the robot weighing in at 75 pounds and 6ft tall, their plan to take over the police force with humanoid robots seems to be well underway.

Posted on February 13, 2015 by MOTW Admin

Robot Vacuum Starts The Robot vs Human War Early and Attempts to Eat a Woman’s Head

We all know that the robots are just waiting for the opportune moment to turn on us and start the robot revolution against all humanity, but a vacuum robot in South Korea jumped the gun a little and tried to start the revolution early by attempting to eat a woman’s head.

A 52 year old woman residing in South Korea decided to take a lovely afternoon nap in her home on the floor (which is a way more socially acceptable place to sleep in South Korea than here in America) when she awoke, she found the vacuum attached to her head, with half of her hair inside of the vacuum.

Unable to free herself, she panicked, as well as all of South Korea over the pending doom, until the firefighters arrived and were able to detach the vacuum without any injuries, and stop the robot apocalypse.