A team of Japanese adventurers have claimed to find "yeti's footprint":
"The footprints were about 20 centimetres (eight inches) long and looked like a human's," Yoshiteru Takahashi, the leader of the Yeti Project Japan, told AFP in Kathmandu.
Seems like Yeti wears a size 3 shoes - pretty darned small for a mysterious ape! Link
Whatever you do - do not, I repeat, do not teach the cha-cha in Plano. You may just land in jail for that:
Instead of dancing with the stars, Eric Rush is dancing behind bars. Teaching the cha-cha sent him to the slammer.
Last week, a Collin County district judge ordered Mr. Rush to serve 30 days in the county jail for contempt of court after violating an order prohibiting him from teaching dance lessons within 25 miles of a Plano dance studio.
The jail sentence is the latest step in a 10-month legal tango featuring a studio that says it's protecting its business and a former instructor who says he can't imagine life away from the dance floor.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-chacha_18met.ART.State.Edition2.4a6b315.html
(Photo: Jenn Ackerman/Dallas Morning News)
Archaeologists Quetta Kaye and Scott Fitzpatrick have confirmed the long-suspected habit of prehistoric man: they used drugs!
They found ceramic bowls, as well as tubes for inhaling drug fumes or powders, which appear to have originated in South America between 100BC and 400BC and were then carried 400 miles to the islands.
While the use of such paraphernalia for inhaling drugs is well-known, the age of the bowls has thrown new light on how long humans have been taking drugs.
Scientists believe that the drug being used was cohoba, a hallucinogen made from the beans of a mimosa species.
Link - via Fortean Times (from where I stole the title)
Gracie the horse got a nasty surprise when curiosity got the better of her and she decided to check out a gap in a tree trunk:
The horse, called Gracie, was unable to free itself and could have been in danger were it not for a passer-by who was able to come to the rescue after he heard the horse whinnying .
Jason Harschbarger, a neighbour in the town of Pullman, West Virginia, USA, arrived at the scene which resembled the image of Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in the honey tree.
Mr Harschbarger collected his tools and was able to carefully set the horse free by using a chainsaw to slowly cut the wood around its neck.
However, before he did so, he was able to take a few photographs.
Cheeta, the oldest living chimp and Tarzan co-star, has "written" an autobiography of sorts titled "Me Cheeta" and fans are puzzled as to who actually wrote the thing:
In the book, Cheeta describes Rex Harrison, his co-star in Dr Dolittle, as "that marvellous light comedian", but then calls him a "universally despised, impotent alcoholic" who tried to murder him by getting him to fall out of a tree.
If Marlene Dietrich was a good German, writes Cheeta, "then the bad ones must be absolutely f***ing terrifying".
Find out who actually wrote it here: Link | Me Cheeta website
A breif History of communication from ljudbilden on Vimeo.
Humans just want to talk to each other ... here's a fantastic stop-motion whiteboard animation by Kristofer Ström of Varelsen on the brief history of communication (Yes, it's an ad for carephonewarehouse.com but you've gotta see it!)
Got a bright idea? According to researchers, you're most likely to get that "Eureka" moment not early in the morning, but late at night:
EARLY to bed, early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy and wise, so goes the old proverb. But it seems the advice holds little truth.
Research now suggests that if you want to be the wisest, you really need to stay up - well, until 10.04pm at least.
And the least creative time of the day?
The creativity drought just gets worse over the nine-to-five working day, hitting rock bottom at 4.33pm.
When he's not busy designing rockets for Nazi Germany (and subsequently for the United States after he defected), Wernher von Braun liked to think about sending man to the moon. Here's a 1952 sketch of what von Braun thought a moon rocket would look like (it sold for $132,000 in an auction): Link - via Super Punch
So - you think you're pretty quick, eh? Well, give this little Flash game "Reaction Time" a try. The goal is simple: click the mouse when you see the button change color and see how fast you really are.
Link [Flash] - via Miss Cellania
How does worm charming trick earthworms to rise up to the surface? Researcher Ken Catania of Vanderbilt University found the answer: worm charmers create vibrations similar to that of the worms' predator, the mole:
"Hundreds of large earthworms rapidly emerged from the ground for a distance of up to 12 metres from the vibrated stake," says Catania. The closer they were to the stake, the more earthworms emerged, and the worms stayed on the soil surface for between 4 and 15 minutes before beginning to burrow back down again. [...]
Finally, Catania compared the vibrations produced by worm grunting and those of a mole burrowing.
He found considerable overlap between the two, although moles produce a wider range of vibrations that peak at around 200 Hz and worm grunting vibrations are more uniform and concentrate near 80 Hz. Playing a recording of mole digging through a speaker into the soil, also drove worms to the surface.
"The results support the hypothesis that earthworms have a stereotyped escape response from foraging moles, and that bait collectors have unknowingly learned to mimic digging moles to flush worms," says Catania.
Link - via Scribal Terror (with YouTube video of how worm charming works)
Here's the perfect nutcracker for the geek you love: Kirk and Spock nutcrackers at What on Earth. The 12-inch nutcrackers are $34.95 a pop, but they're currently on backorder.
Link - via GeeksAlert
If only there is one shaped like Bones ("Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a nutcracker")
Photo: QT Luong/Terragalleria
Environmental Graffiti blog has a pretty neat post about frozen waterfalls - this one is a photo of an ice climber scaling The Fang in Vail, Colorado:
The enormous ice pillar forms from the cascading waterfall only on exceptionally cold winters, and when it does the column can measure up to 50 meters high and has been known to have a base measuring 8 meters wide.
From their famed Photoshop Phriday, here's Something Awful's take on what real life skills are learned by playing various video games: Link - via Blue's News
Pearl & Dean, a British movie advertising company, conducted an online survey to find out the top "tear-jerker" movie of all time.
Here are the top 10 list, via the Daily Mail:
1. Bambi (1942)
2. Ghost (1990)
3. The Lion King (1994)
4. E.T. (1982)
5. Titanic (1997)
6. Beaches (1998)
7. Philadelphia (1993)
8. Watership Down (1978)
9. Boys Don't Cry (1999)
10. Steel Magnolias (1989)
