In the animal kingdom there are many non-lethal ways of fighting one of your own kind. You could rattle some horns, do some headbutting, a punch to the face, or even slapping necks (yeah, ok, giraffes are weird as hell too). But no. Somewhere along the line the fringehead genes decided its best plan for the future of the species involved expanding faces and pressing mouths. I can’t help but to imagine a scenario of our past where things were only slightly askew and us humans evolved this trait, and at the same time feel an overwhelming sensation of having dodged a bullet.

“I was about to drop a security deposit on that place on Georgia, but then another guy wanted in and he had more face than me so I had to give it up”

- Wolverox

P.S. – Don’t let your spirit get stuck in the sand.

Just a few moments ago, I was looking at a list of non-bird animals that are able to fly, glide, or otherwise become airborne for an extended period of time. Everything was looking in order: ants that could maneuver and glide when they fell off trees, spiders that use web as parachutes to float along in the wind. Then I got to the next header which read ‘Moluscs’. Seems like a strange group to have a flying member, butd hey, they are a pretty diverse group that has everything from limpets to the octopus, maybe there is some strange offshoot species that catches wind as it falls or some nonsense like that. Then I saw it – Flying squid.

Now squid were scary enough when it was just a fast moving cephalopod with grasping tentacles and a powerful parrot-like beak. But now they can use jet propulsion to launch themselves into the air and travel distances up to 50 meters? “Bullshit!” was my initial response (that I probably shouldn’t have yelled out loud, being at work at the time). So I hit some wikipedia pages for flying squid, and while they did mention briefly that a form of squid jet propulsion does exist it didn’t say anything about lifting said squid out of the ocean, not to mention 50m. So I went to youtube and google images to see some visuals of this thing. Nothing. Not one credible image or video. I offer a bounty of $20 + a hug for a video of a squid flying by it’s own power, and a warning to watch yourself when near the ocean (maybe)

-Wolverox

First on the list is Vecna’s BEAR robot. The BEAR, or Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot, was created with the intent on going into areas too dangerous for real people (the example of an area under fire is commonly used) and retrieving injured personnel. Now it might just be me, but the last thing I’d want while being injured on the battlefield is to be lifted into the arms of a mechanical bear and be cradled through an area that is being riddled with enough bullets for a robot to be necessary to come get to me. That being said, it is easy to see it being useful in areas with explosive and biological threats. The interesting part about this robot is the tread design. Each leg has two treads which are located and move in much the same way as a human’s thigh and calf. The BEAR’s normal means of locomotion is a kind of kneeling position where the calf tread is parallel with the ground. It gets crazy when the robot stands up in a manner similar to a man with his feet chopped off standing on his ankles. Not to mention it can do this and maintain it’s balance while carrying up to 500lb loads. It is kind of reminiscent of how a real bear walks around on all fours then stands up on it’s hind legs when it gets pissed. Fortunately for us, the BEAR is remote controlled so it won’t be going terminator on us anytime soon (aside from the human with the remote going wild scenario of course). So where would we go to find a robot made in the image of a bear that can make decisions based on external stimulus?

The hospital of course. Because that is the natural place to put a 400lb metallic bear. It isn’t that big of a problem if someone gets hurt by it because they are already in a hospital! Freaking genius. This brilliant piece of machinery is brought to us by the Riken research center in Japan and called RIBA (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance). Designed to move around patients once the population ages to the point where there is a shortage of young people to help out our old. I would get the purpose of trying to make the robot look friendlier if it were being used for children. However, kids can be picked up easily and are too fragile to be swept up in the big robot arms. Maybe I am just misjudging the average human adult, but I feel like it is almost insulting to try and calm someone with a big happy bear face while a robot lays them on a table beside a tray of knives while someone pumps gas into them until they pass out.

-Wolverox

this makes me really happy

Wait, what? You mean you aren’t from a batshit crazy part of the world (I’m looking at you, Alps) and have no idea what I’m talking about? Id like to introduce you to a friend of mine. Meet the Krampus.

The story goes that Krampus travels around with old saint Nick doing things that range from mischievous to downright evil, but only to the kids on the naughty list. A couple examples include stealing all their presents, and putting them into a bag and kidnapping them(I wish I could tell you where he took them, but the Krampus is a slippery devil and who knows where he goes).

Of course, we as humans couldn’t let Krampus have all the fun. It has become a tradition in the Alpine towns for the young men to don the Krampus masks and furs and raid the town drunk while swinging chains, sticks, and bells. Technically this could happen at any point in December, however the 5th is when it is turned up to full steam and the young women are warned to stay indoors. But as backwards as it all seems, it holds a valuable message: if you don’t want to get messed up by a scary demon, just be nice.

-Wolverox

If you were to walk through the rainforests of New Guinea or northwestern Australia you’d probably never lay eyes on one of these cockatrice-like monsters, since they prefer to work incognito and will stealthily split when they hear a human coming. Well, most of the time they will split. If one chooses to stick around you can consider yourself unlucky enough to see firsthand why the Cassowary is notorious amongst the locals for having a very short fuse. In fact, they hold the world record for being the most dangerous bird alive today (by today I mean 2007). One little tidbit I got from the wikipedia page, where I admittedly got most my information on this bird, says that during WWII, troops stationed in New Guinea were told to stay away from the Cassowaries because of how aggressive they can be. These are fully grown men with guns that are trained to kill other fully grown men with guns, but they better stay away from old crazy eyes over there or shit is going to get real ugly real fast.

The cassowary isn’t just dangerous because it is mean. It is less akin to a schoolyard bully than it is to a highly trained martial artist. You know that crazy master in Kill Bill who had that technique where he would hit someone a couple times and then their heart would explode after they took a few steps? Well the cassowary has a similar technique. What it does is kick you in the stomach, then a little bit later you die of an intestinal rupture.

I would like to drop some more scientific facts, maybe do some comparisons to the other flightless birds of today or gastornis, phorusrhacos, and the terror birds of ancient South America. However, most of the spare minutes I had to research and write this I spent watching this video over and over.

-Wolverox

Then he could exhale in a scream knowing that the true inheritors of Earth are freaking parasite wasps. Habrobracon, a member of the Braconidae family is our current having-your-atoms-ionized-without-experiencing-a-horrible-death champion ringing in at 180,000 rads before dieing. “But wait” you say, “if this wasp is a parasite wouldn’t it’s hosts just die and by proxy the wasp would perish as well?”. Unfortunately, we aren’t off the hook that easily. One of the other insects I’ve been able to find radiation stats on is the fruit fly which can stand up to a respectable 64,000 rads. If you take a look at the favoured hosts of the Braconidae, you’ll notice fly larvae in there amongst many other insects (all of which are reasonable at surviving radiation on account of their cells not dividing constantly like vertebrates).

How do we know that these wasps take this ridiculously high amount of radiation to kill? 180,000 rads is a lot to be throwing around the lab unprotected and making a big lead shield is way too obvious. Pay attention, because this is why I love the human race. What we did was put them inside a screen, put the screen inside a rocket, blasted it into orbit, then bombarded them with gamma radiation, just to see what happened.

Speaking of seeing what happened, imagine being up on the international space station when the nukes start flying and everything on earth is hit almost uniformly with ~170,000 rads. You jump (float) into your space shuttle and head back to earth  to survey the damage. As you step out onto the brown and barren Earth, you can hear nothing aside from the whistling of the wind and the buzzing of the wasps.

-Wolverox

They were speaking about a man named Bob (I use the name as a generic placeholder, having forgotten the original, although I think it might have actually been Bob). Neither of them had really known the man, just heard his name mentioned and occasionally saw him around the docks, as he used the same marina as us. From the little information I have been able to gather about him, I can say that he was pretty much your average middle aged man, and you know what is common for middle aged men? Heart attacks. Just a couple days prior, Bob had been working on his boat alone in the evening when he was struck down by a heart attack. Now, heart attacks aren’t usually instantly fatal, however if you are like poor Bob and you fall into the ocean while having a heart attack you are completely ruined. If the story of Bob ended there it would be kind of sad and unremarkable to the point of not worth sharing. It doesn’t end there however, in fact it only serves to set up the real story.

The next morning the body was found washed upon the shore of Newcastle Island, the very same island that we were now docked at. Even though the remains of Bob were quickly retrieved before the crack of dawn, they were too late to get him before the wildlife could give him a hard time. As the coastguard zodiac pulled into Midden Bay they found the corpse near the shore surrounded by albino raccoons. In the glare of the spotlight the raccoons eye’s flashed red before they ran off into the woods. As Bob was placed into the boat to be brought back into the city, they noticed that a lot of him was missing. The albino raccoons of Newcastle Island had eaten much of the man, and even scarier, had gotten themselves a taste for human.

-Wolverox

So what happens in the warm still waters of the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas is organic matter (both living and not) falls from the surface and congregates near the floor. While this is happening, bacteria are doing their own thing and spitting out exopolymers (basically glue) to whatever piece of sea garbage they are attached to. Eventually, large chains are formed. Large chains that just happen to make a good spot for others critters to come hide out or look for food. Of course that just makes it a better place to hide or eat and we have ourselves a chain reaction.

Now that we have our blob of sea-garbage we can start looking at why people are flipping their lids. I have to admit after you have to start describing the length in miles of one of these things with 4 digits you begin to take notice. This thick mucus structure can also trap fish and cover their gills  until they suffocate and eventually dissolve into part of the blob themselves. What has scientists and the guys at national geographic up in arms though, is the ability for the mucilage to carry bacteria and viruses, the most notable of which being E(scherichia) Coli.

Which brings me to why I don’t care, or more specifically, why this thing fails at being a human killing terror machine. The first is that these things have been reported since the 1700′s and if there was a high rate of infection someone would have noticed earlier that hey, all these guys that have e coli went to the beach and swam in bio-garbage yesterday. Secondly, when will this conversation ever be necessary? “I know the beach is covered with this weird sick mucus, but I am going to swim anyway”    “Don’t do that, there is incredible microbial biodiversity in those, maybe even E Coli”    “oh, well I better not then”.

a link: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091008-giant-sea-mucus-blobs.html

-Wolverox

Recently, in a coal mine in Columbia the miners found themselves digging up something other than coal: snake skeletons. Specifically the fossilized skeletons of what has been named Titanoboa.

The vertebrae on the left is a modern anaconda, the one on the right is titanoboa. Now some stats courtesy of Wikipedia: length 12-15 meters, weight 2,500lbs, diameter 1 meter. If this snake was lying next to you, you could literally touch it with your hand without having to bend down. The cool thing I learned when reading about this monster is that on account of there being a direct correlation between temperature and the maximum size a snake can obtain, scientists are able to determine the average temperature of the era. Until now I couldn’t have cared less about global warming (sorry, ‘climate change’). Fewer polar bears and slightly higher sea levels don’t phase me, but add giant freaking snakes to the table and you’ve got my attention.

I’m going to do a quick round of mathematics here before I sign off. If you look on the internet you can find images/videos of anacondas eating various animals. Going off the one where it eats an alligator I come up with the following:

Largish anaconda: 300lbs.

Large male alligator: 800lbs. Probable alligator: 400lbs

Titanoboa: 2,500lbs

Average male giraffe: 2,630lbs

Alligator to anaconda weight ratio: 1.25

Giraffe to titanoboa weight ratio: 1.052

Verdict: Scary ass snake could eat a giraffe whole.*

-Wolverox

* may or may not be bullshit