A New Beginning

The new year is approaching. As it does most of us hold high expectations; particularly that there won't be a year 2013. True, the doom of the human race is a lingering possibility. Massive disease and storms could lead us all to fall to the wrath of the earth. A wide reaching zombie apocalypse could slaughter the remaining survivors. As dramatic as this all sounds, it won't be "The End of the World". And even though it's a satisfying accusation, these zombies aren't "ruining your life". Nay, humans are natural born entrepreneurs. We have learned to survive by coping with our environment and modifying what we are given. Once we've all been transformed to flesh eating monsters, there will be no flesh left to be eaten. So what  will we do? We shall go forward! We will continue to build our civilization in our newly formed zombie society. And given that we're already dead, we will be less vulnerable than ever before. Death will not exist. There will be no use of war or violence. Instead we will all coexist as successful and high achieving dead, in a very much lively way. As ironic as it sounds, the zombie apocalypse will be the calling of world peace. Surely the world won't end. in fact, this is the beginning of something great.

Baby Snatchers

An illegal baby scandal has been coming to light in Spain. Thousands of newborn babies have been stolen directly from the hospital and sold to families apparently desperate for children. There are now groups working with adult adoptees, called Ninos Robados, who were stolen from their birth mothers during infancy. At least 2,000 cases have been filed with Spanish prosecutors, and there are an estimated tens of thousands more dating from the 1950's to 1990's. Many adopted children will forever be unaware of their families and disrupted past. 
Sister Maria Gomez, an 89 year old nun, has become the face of this ongoing crime. She is accused of stealing a baby from their birth mother in 1989 and putting it up for illegal adoption.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/25/world/europe/wus-spain-stolen-babies/index.html?hpt=hp_bn2

Invisible Island Mystery Solved

Sandy Island has been drawn on maps of the southeast Pacific for over a century, but there is nothing but open water where the supposed landmass is located. It has been drawn on most navigational charts and even appeared on Google maps. Australian researches investigated the area last month and found nothing near the coordinates. Now a librarian has unraveled the mystery. The island is a mapping error that has developed over time from a marking drawn on the island's coordinates by whalers in 1876. The crew of the whaling ship The Voyager noticed that the area was a hazard to many ships so took note of the area. Since then, map illustrators have misinterpreted the area as a land mass, deceiving and disappointing map readers worldwide. Even Google believed it. 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/04/sandy-island-maps-whalers_n_2237170.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news 

Illinois Law Rejected by Supreme Court

The appeal of an Illinois law prohibiting the public from recording police officers during duty was rejected on Monday by the Supreme Court. This law makes audio recording an officer on duty a felony, punishable to up to 15 years. The justices passed off the  case to a federal appeals court. Court ruling found that "the state's anti-eavesdropping law violate's free-speech rights when used against people who audiotape police officers." People in Illinois are currently allowed to photograph, film, even quote police officers while they're on duty, but are strictly forbidden from audio recording them. This Illinois law has been especially controversial in the last year. In Auust 2011, a woman was charged with recording Chicago police officers she believed were talk her out of filing a sexual hurasment complain against a patrol officer. Judges later declared the law unconstituational. 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-supreme-court-rejects-plea-to-prohibit-taping-of-police-20121126,0,686331.story?track=rss

Man Stole Chinese Food Delivery Car, Keeps Delivering Orders

A Chinese food delivery driver returned from a delivery only to find that his car had been stolen from where he had left it running. He called the West Hartford police department to inform them of the robbery, then he called his boss so customers could be informed that they wouldn't be getting their orders, which had been stolen with the car. Surprisingly, one of the orders had been delivered after the car was stolen! The thief, Keith Hinds, had kept making deliveries so that he could keep the keep the customers' money. However, he was arrested before he could finish any more of the job. He was held for a $5000 bond on Friday.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/12/keith-hinds-chinese-food_n_2116411.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news

The Good Giraffe

A creative giraffe has been making Scotland a better place for the past six months. The self proclaimed "Good Giraffe" has been carrying out random acts of kindness twice a week in his homemade giraffe costume. He has bought gifts for needy children, cleaned litter and animal cages in animal shelter, and handed out free coffee! Besides being a local superhero, Armstrong Baillie is a normal 32 year old Scotland local. The Good Giraffe gives out cards with his phone number and asks people to text him ideas for ways he can help out. He says the giraffe costume suits his personality; "My head is in the clouds but my heart is in the right place."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/armstrong-baillie-good-giraffe-deeds-kindness-scotland_n_2131311.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news

Endless Bacon, Now A Thing

Apparently some culinary genius got his hands on a 3-D printer! Bacon has now taken a new form; the infinite mobius shape. These bacon strips are technically endless, with no boundaries and half the surfaces. Endless bacon seems like a grand business idea, doesn't it? Nope. 3-D printer cartridges don't have much flavor. Mobius shaped bacon isn't edible! But it still still looks cool so it's being sold online for $19 a strip. If you're too cheap for this kind of investment, just buy some meat glue and twist the ends of your bacon together. You can buy meat glue online too.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/06/bacon-mobius-strip_n_2082341.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news&ir=Weird%20News

Unexplored Opportunity: How to Illiterately Hack Android

Two isolated, rural Ethiopian villages who have never seen road signs or printed material have been visited by alien technology. Taped shut boxes were dropped off in these villages, giving no instructions. The children of these villages quickly discovered the contents of these boxes to be tablet computers equipped with a solar charging system. With no prior knowledge they found the on-off switch, and each were using 47 apps daily within 5 days. The One Laptop Per Student program provided the tablets as part of an observational experiment. The goal? To see if illiterate kids with no exposure to writing could learn to read on their own by playing with multiple medias of preloaded educational programs on the tablet. The results were better than expected from the 40 1st grade aged children. Within two weeks, they were singing their ABC's in the villages,. Within 5 months they had hacked Android, figuring out how to change the frozen desktop settings.
http://mashable.com/2012/10/29/tablets-ethiopian-children/

Miscalculations Cause Manslaughter

An  earthquake in L'Aquila claimed the lives of 309 residents, as well as making an attack on scence. The "victims" of the earthquake supposedly would still be alive had it not been for seven people. Bernardinis, Boschi, Selvaggi, Barberi, Eva, Dolce, and Calvi are local scientists and members of an official risk comity, and are now being accused of playing a role in the deaths of the people who died in the earthquake. L'Aquila has been hit by many small tremors in the past months, so the seven scientist were asked to asses the risk of a dangerous earthquake hitting the town. At a meeting the scientists claimed that the risk was raised, but a more detailed prediction of oncoming earthquakes wasn't possible. The Civil Protection Department then told the public then said that there was no increased risk of a major shock because of the small shocks. The scientists are being persecuted for manslaughter of the people who remained in L'Aquila during the earthquake and were killed in their collapsing homes. They are being sentenced to six years in prison. 
http://www.nature.com/news/shock-and-law-1.11643

The Peril of the Perfect Sandwich

Last Saturday the police department in Palm Bay, Fla., was repeatedly bothered by 911 calls from Christine Lee Brown. In each call, the disputer asked her what the emergency was. Each time, Chris's only response was to continuously talk about the bologna sandwiches she'd been served in prison. Christine, at age 51, has previously been in jail where she experienced these proclaimed sandwiches. She kept thanking the deputy for serving them. During one of the calls, which had been aimed by Christine to be a casual chat, the police came to Christine's home to arrest her while she was still on the phone with the dispatcher.She was charged with six felony accounts of misuse of 911. So at last, Christine got to be reunited with the Bologna Sandwiches in prison that she had been ranting about, in the same place she had been served before!

20 Years of Nostalgia: Cartoon Network's Birthday

October 1, 1992,  a time when cartoon ratings were dropping, is when Ted Turner started his animated entertainment program, Cartoon Network.  His goal was to have programming that could entertain both children and adults, and boy did the network suffice. People were skeptical that the idea of the network would ever be successful. Luckily Ted Turner stuck with his crazy idea, and it took off from there. The network started with shows like "The Flintstones", "The Jetsons", "The Simpsons"; it eventually included the nighttime "trippy" programming Adult Swim, and several shows belonging to Cartoon Network have been largely recognized like the Emmy Award-winning "Regular Show". On October 1, Cartoon Network concluded its birthday celebration of 20 years of animation programming. Cartoon Network is now shown in over 360 million households in 175 countries! For many, these 20 years of entertainment have flourished memories of welcome childhood stories. For these people, Cartoon Network's success story is one we are happy to celebrate with. Classic, hilarious, sometimes even moral cartoons have become a big part of our culture and are definitely worth celebrating. 

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/tv/172327611.html?refer=y

Buddhist Iron Man From Space Found By Nazis

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/09/buddhist-iron-man-found-by-nazis-is-from-space.html

The statue called "the Iron Man" resides in Germany and is said to originate from somewhere in Tibet. The statue certainly holds a mysterious element; nobody quite knows the era or location this unusual figure came from. What it was made of, however, was recently confirmed to be extraterrestrial. It is a 24 inch tall depiction of the god Vaisravana and is made from an unusually hard material. A team tested a sample from the statue to see if it would match that of the Chinga meteorite that was strewn across Russia and Mongolia ten to twenty thousand years ago. The elements it was made of matched up, including iron, nickel, cobalt, and other trace elements. This would have made it an inconvenient material to carve, so the artist probably knew they were working with something special to go out of their way to finish it. The statue is assumed to have been brought to Germany by Nazi's in their return from an expedition to Tibet in 1939; their interest probably invoked by the Buddhist swastika carved into it. The Iron Man is the only known illustration of a human figure carved into a meteorite, and on of the largest discovered pieces of the Chinga meteorite.

Historic Surprise

Imagine walking downstairs from a wine cellar of the mid-20th century and coming out in a room made in the medieval times. Not only is it a strange transition of construction; this buried structure is a completely unique discovery made in Italy. The stare case continues to descend down multiple stories of a pyramid! No pyramids have been found in this area before, so this could be quite an addition to what we know about human culture. The way the the pyramid is built shows it was made by Etruscan people; the most sophisticated civilization in Italy until they were overtaken by Romans. Etruscan culture was very original and influenced other cultures in a lot of areas like art and religion. They still contribute to worldly practices like wine making, building roads, and writing. They don't get a lot of credit in common history. The discovery of these buried pyramids could shed new light to the significance and depth of this ancient civilization.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49088030/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.UFqDH7JlTa4

A Prime Problem Possibly Solved

Across most of our population there is a basic understanding of math. It is used everywhere; every time you stare at the clock, or in your daily purchase at the gas station. From the statistics blared at you in advertisements, to life saving medical calculations, to the ever so precise aerodynamics of rocket science. However, open ended math problems still exist. These are the mysteries taunting mathematicians. The blanks that just can't seemed to bee filled in, regardless of the headache-inducing list of numerical functions already know among the world of math and science. A prime example of this (pun intended) is the connection between prime numbers. It is a hard concept for most people to grasp. Prime numbers have no multiples besides themselves and 1. There's a definite pattern to the numbers, but they haven't been proven to plug into an equation. That is, until last August when mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki completed his proof for the ABC conjecture, "a statement about the relationship between prime numbers that has been called the most important unsolved problem in number theory". The conjecture was created in 1985 by David Masser and Joseph Oesterle, but wasn't proven so hasn't been much use so far. If Mochizuki's 500 page proof holds out evaluation, the math concept could be put to use. Apparently this could be a huge step forward in all areas involving math, opening doors to solving problems far beyond simple prime numbers. The world of math holds infinite possibilities. For years, our culture has progressed because of our advancements in math. Technology has become more and more useful since the beginning of human history thanks to mathematical discoveries, using concepts of astrology, aerodynamics, computer science, etc. We still continue to fit together the complex puzzle pieces of math, or as many call it, "the language of the universe".
http://news.yahoo.com/mathematician-claims-proof-connection-between-prime-numbers-131737044.html

Once In a Blue Moon

The moon; that pearly orb in our night sky which is about as familiar as anything gets. It's common yet notable presence has influenced culture since the beginning of human history. The moon has proven itself to be an object of attraction; through art, religion, even the calendar we coordinate our daily lives on. The waxing and waning cycle of the moon spans the length of one month. Keeping pace with the moon seems like a good way to keep track of things. The presence of the always-changing moon has become a very ordinary phenomenon. However every so often there is a rare happening in our familiar skies. This past August, Friday the 31st, we had a Blue Moon. The name of this event isn't exactly literal. It means that two full moons occur in the same month. This might not be as exciting as the moon changing color (which will only happen during a massive volcanic explosion or after an atmosphere altering bomb has gone off), but a Blue Moon will only happen every few years. Many things you can witness on the planet are dependent on the moon's cycle. For example the tides in water, and even animal behavior. This being said, a change in the moon's natural cycle could imply an odd occurrence among the rest of nature. Or more likely a scheduling fault in the human calendar. Either way, displaced events like this don't happen often. The next Blue Moon is predicted to be on July 2nd of 2015, so remember to take a good look at the sky that night!