In 1961, ten scientists - including Frank Drake, Melvin Calvin and Carl Sagan - met in a secret meeting at a rural observatory in West Virginia to discuss how they would find, and talk to, aliens. This meeting later set the foundation for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI.

But what most people don't know is that during the meeting, a neuroscientists named John C. Lilly enthralled the scientists with his attempts to communicate with dolphins, and how that could help us communicate with aliens. The scientists were so excited with Lilly's research that they called themselves the Order of the Dolphin:

Drake would write that, “Much of that first day, he regaled us with tales of his bottlenosed dolphins, whose brains, he said, were larger than ours and just as densely packed with neurons. Some parts of the dolphin brain looked even more complex than their human counterparts, he averred. Clearly, more than one intelligent species had evolved on Earth.”

Lilly told the attendees he also heard signs of language, and empathy, in recordings of the dolphins. “In fact, if we slowed down the playback speed of the tape recorder enough, the squeaks and clicks sounded like human language,” Drake wrote. “We were all totally enthralled by these reports. We felt some of the excitement in store for us when we encounter nonhuman intelligence of extraterrestrial origin.”

Lilly’s research generated so much excitement that, by the end of the conference, the attendees called themselves the Order of the Dolphin. Calvin, in his post-Nobel joy, even went on to send commemorative pins to the attendees. “He caused to be made these little pins which had silver dolphins on them, which he sent to all of us,” Morrison told David Swift, author of the book SETI Pioneers.

Read the rest of the story at The Crux.

Photo: SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array/SETI Institute

Sphen and Magic are a gay penguin couple at Sea Life Sydney Aquarium in Australia. During breeding season, aquarium staff gave the couple a dummy egg to practice incubating ... and the gay penguins turned out to be so good at it that they've been given real eggs to hatch!

Air India Express Boeing 737-800 slammed into a wall at the end of the runway during takeoff and ripped a large part of the undercarriage ... but the pilots didn't notice and continued flying!

NDTV explains:

Miraculously, none of the 136 passengers and crew onboard IX 611, an Air India flight bound for Dubai, were injured though pictures of the jet after it made an emergency landing in Mumbai show severe damage.

A large gash along the belly of the jet and multiple perforations on the engine nacelles and parts of the fuselage clearly indicate that the passengers onboard the jetliner had a miraculous escape.

According to a statement made by Air India Express, ''after flight IX 611 from Trichy to Dubai had taken off from Trichy at about 1.30am today, it was reported by local Airport officials at Trichy, that they have observed that [the] aircraft might have come in contact with the airport perimeter wall.''

When you think of burial, usually you'd think of being buried in the ground - but not in certain parts of Tibet and Mongolia. There, according to Vajrayana Buddhist traditions, bodies are disposed of in a sky burial.

More details from Tibetpedia:

Villagers take the body to the sky burial site by horse or car. The master of the sky burial ceremony performs rituals over the body. He then burns incense and tsampa to summon the vultures. In no time, birds begin to circle over the site. The master then proceeds to chop the body into small pieces.

And makes way for the feasting to happen.

If the vultures consume the entire body, it’s a good sign. Tibetan folk custom believes that even vultures will not want to consume a human’s body if he or she has done evil deeds in life.

Photo: Bundesarchiv/wikipedia

In 2013, Chris Reynolds briefly became the world's richest man when a Paypal glitch caused his account to swell to a whopping $92,233,720,368,547,800

Unfortunately, Paypal giveth and Paypal taketh away. When Reynolds logged into his Paypal account, he discovered that the error was corrected.

When asked by CNN what the quadrillionaire would have done with all that money, he replied "I probably would have paid down the national debt."

When he was twelve years old, Andres Ruzo was told a strange story by his grandfather: Spanish conquistadors that went deep into the Amazonian rainforest in search of gold found a river so hot that it boiled from below.

Years later, as a graduate student in geophysics, Ruzo wondered if the legend of the Amazonian boiling river could be true.

But when he approached his senior colleagues, Ruzo's idea was dismissed as crazy - the Amazon was hundred of miles away from any active volcano. There couldn't be such a thing ... or could there?

Rizo himself couldn't quite believe that a boiling river in the Amazonian rainforest could exist ... until he saw it himself:

The river turned out to be no legend at all, but the sacred geothermal healing site of Mayantuyacu, nestled deep in the Peruvian rainforest and protected by a powerful shaman.

Up to 82 feet (25 meters) wide and 20 feet (six meters) deep, the river surges for nearly 4 miles at temperatures hot enough to brew tea or cook any animals unfortunate enough to fall in. And yes, a small portion of it is so hot that it actually boils. There are documented hot springs in the Amazon, but nothing nearly as large as this river.

Read the rest over at Gizmodo | The Boiling River website

Photo: @theboilingriver

The "Sruth in Aghaidh an Aird" waterfall (translated as "stream against the height", AKA the Devil's Chimney waterfall) in Ireland is not only that country's tallest waterfall, it's sometime also its weirdest.

During certain weather conditions, where the wind blows from the South, the waterfall is actually blown upwards and back over the cliff (hence the name "Devil's Chimney").

Maybe they should just call it the "waterrise."

Meet the Pacu fish, a South American freshwater fish related to the piranha. But unlike the piranha, which has pointed razor-sharp teeth, the Pacu fish has straight teeth that looks very much like human teeth!

Photo: Nisamanee wanmoon/Wikipedia

Okay, the armadillo technically can't shoot you back - but its tough shell can cause the bullet to ricochet right back at you.

That's what happened to a Texas man who discovered an armadillo outside his house early one morning and decided to "shoo" it away with his .38 revolver:

From CBC.ca:

"His wife was in the house. He went outside and took his .38 revolver and shot three times at the armadillo," Rowe said.

The animal's hard shell deflected at least one of three bullets, which then struck the man's jaw, he said.

Photo: Hans Stieglitz/Wikipedia

The 1992 animated movie Aladdin by Disney was so good that I'm kind of hesitant to want to like the upcoming live-action version.

Will Smith as the Genie? He's got some big shoes - or technically pointy toed slippers - to fill (RIP Robin Williams, he'll always be Genie for me).

Be safe this Halloween! The scariest thing out there on Halloween Night might just be the lawmen enforcing city codes.

For example, did you know that in several small towns in Virginia, you're breaking the law and could be thrown in jail if you're out trick-or-treating if you're older than 12 year old? Or if you're out trick-or-treating after 8 pm?

Image: Trick or Treat by machmigo

From hrScene:

London designer duo Glithero created an interactive lamp that uses a row of conductive copper dominoes. In order to turn the light on, the user has to arrange the dominoes and then topple them to complete the electrical circuit.

Take this as a modern version of the old saying "beating swords into plowshares": Yemeni blacksmiths turned shrapnel from exploded missiles into traditional daggers called jambiyya.

Sometimes, the raw material of Ali Ghomari's work comes screaming from the sky.

Missiles fired by Saudi-led coalition jets rain down on militiamen and civilians alike, killing and maiming thousands. Children, farmers and others collect shrapnel from their farmlands, from dirt alleys in impoverished neighborhoods, and offer it for sale to Ghomari and other artisans.

From missiles, they do not make ploughshares. They make knives — jambiyya (jam-BEE-yah), the ornamental daggers Yemeni men wear for prestige and as a show of courage.

Photo: Hammadi Issa

Think that your brain stays motionless inside your head? Think again!

Using a special magnetic resonance imaging technique, researchers discovered that our brain actually jiggles with every heartbeat. This rhythmic motion is caused by blood and cerebrospinal fluid pumping in and draining out of the brain as the heart beats.

Meet Cretoparacucujus cycadophilus, a new species of beetle that is the earliest direct evidence of an insect pollinating an ancient plant group nearly 100 million years ago.

From Dead Things blog post by Gemma Tarlach:

Found in a piece of amber from Myanmar along with several grains of cycad pollen, the wonderfully preserved animal is the earliest proof of an insect adapted to pollinate cycads. The beetle has specialized mouthparts and legs that researchers believe were used to collect and spread the particular variety of cycad pollen found with it.

Further analysis of the new beetle suggested it’s most closely related to species from South Africa and Australia, some of which are not only still around today but also still pollinating modern cycads.

The wide distribution of the cycad-beetle partnership suggests to researchers that it evolved earlier than previously indicated by the fossil record, and makes these leggy little guys possibly the very first pollinating insects.

Image: Chenyang Cai