Category: Weird

You never know when the Muse will strike you. It could be while you're gazing through the work of great Renaissance artists. Or it could be while you're shitting yourself over rodents eating your fingers. Point is: Inspiration doesn't always need to be a brilliant light bulb. Sometimes it can just be broken glass to a bare foot.

The world is full of shady self-help gurus and workplace seminars telling us how we can turn our lives around just by using the right words ("Don't say the cheese is 'spoiled' -- say it's 'aged'!"), as if language is a form of magic that can alter reality. But here's the thing: The human brain is an odd, glitchy machine that is influenced in all sorts of weird ways you never thought of. This is why politicians and salespeople can trick you into going along with them, just by toying with the words they use. Science is just now catching up to them, and has found that ...

The Venus de Milo's arms are lost to history but that hasn't stopped historians and scholars wondering what exactly she was doing with them when the statue was carved. In order to test out a theory that Venus was spinning thread, Virginia Postrel hired designer and artist Cosmo Wenman to construct a 3D model of Venus de Milo.

Over the years the city of Singapore has been described by many as one of the cleanest on Earth with roads and toilets being “clean enough to eat off“, which is perhaps to be expected from a city where it’s illegal not to flush a public toilet.

A strong dose of LSD is 500 micrograms. Some people are taking daily microdoses of 10 to 15 micrograms, which is not enough to feel trippy, but provides a sense of well-being and mental clarity. A typical microdoser says these tiny doses "increase my focus, open my heart, and achieve breakthrough results while remaining integrated within my routine."

Some of the world’s most priceless artifacts have been lost in war, buried and then forgotten, or simply misplaced without explanation. Many have been missing so long they have transformed from treasure to legend to rumor. Some have made it to the black market. Some have been stowed away in private collections. Some are believed to have been destroyed completely.

Theorists argue that warped space-time prevents quantum superpositions of large-scale objects.

If you intend to do any traveling in a time machine, you'd better invest a whole lot of money in costumes. After all, people in the past looked ridiculous. Why the hell did they, for instance, wear giant white wigs everywhere?

For his new book, Dan Falk followed a group of scholars who argue, unlike most, that the playwright was up to speed with the latest astronomy.

Wormholes — shortcuts that in theory can connect distant points in the universe — might be linked with the spooky phenomenon of quantum entanglement, where the behavior of particles can be connected regardless of distance, researchers say.

Beautifully detailed portolan charts present historians with a puzzle: How were they made? A mathematical analysis offers some clues.

These five languages reveal how information can be expressed in extremely different ways, and how these habits of thinking can affect us.

"The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language." So goes the old chestnut commonly attributed to playwright George Bernard Shaw. One of those separations is in the spelling of words like color (colour), theater (theatre), and realize (realise). But how did this separation occur?

In 1900, the British physicist Lord Kelvin is said to have pronounced: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." Within three decades, quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity had revolutionized the field. Today, no physicist would dare assert that our physical knowledge of the universe is near completion. To the contrary, each new discovery seems to unlock a Pandora's box of even bigger, even deeper physics questions. These are our picks for the most profound open questions of all.

Many world leaders may think that their paths to power were written in the stars, though some born under certain constellations always stood a better chance of wielding influence when they grew up.

This statement is a paradox in itself, demonstrating the complexities of self-referential statements, but it also suggests a crucial insight from one of the founders of Western philosophy: You should question everything you think you know. Indeed, the closer you look, the more you'll start to recognize paradoxes all around you.

We all know that language can affect our behavior. For example, chances are you would react much differently to hearing "Aww, wook at da fuzzy widdle bumblebee!" than you would to "OH MY GOD THERE'S A BEE ON YOUR FACE! RIGHT ON IT!" But language can manipulate you in ways much more subtle than that, and trust us, marketers know it very well. That's why ...

Our readers cracked open the Internet to bring you some stories that your history teacher never had the bulging genitals to tell.

One of the most significant finds of the Antikhythera Shipwreck is an object now known as the Antikhythera mechanism, described as the world’s first analog computer.

Recurring dreams demand more of my attention, than a dream I only had once, often because they are scary or uncomfortable. In fact, most of the recurring dreams on this list below might be more accurately described as nightmares. Perhaps this is because scary dreams are more memorable. They become a more effective way for your subconscious to get your attention about something going on in your life.

Greatly overshadowed by his famous employer, Thomas Edison, Serbian-born inventor and physicist Nikola Tesla is known mostly as the mastermind behind the AC induction motor and the Tesla coil. While Tesla enjoyed a successful career as an inventor, he displayed many asocial behaviors and didn’t have any documented romantic relationships; he ultimately ended up financially destitute and alone. Having become more eccentric with each passing year, Tesla amassed a list of odd behaviors that accompany his legacy of preternatural brilliance; Tesla truly was an archetypical “mad scientist”. Represented here are both sides of one of the most complex thinkers of our time.

The human body is an incredible machine, able to turn all sorts of chaotic sensory data into the reality we see around us, just as a Taco Bell can turn the same four ingredients into 74 different menu items. It's so amazing that it's easy to lose track of the fact that we're still missing 99.99 percent of what's going on in the universe.

Hot water seems to freeze faster than cold water, known as the Mpemba effect. The effect was named after the Tanzanian student who in 1963 noticed that hot ice cream mix freezes faster than a cold one.  The effect was first observed by Aristotle in the 4th century BC, then later Francis Bacon and René Descartes. Mpemba published a paper on his findings in 1969.

Different music encourages different frames of mind.

The word ‘castle’ may conjure up visions of medieval villages in places like Scotland or Romania, but believe it or not, America has its own incredible ruins of vast stone estates. They’re just not nearly as old. From an abandoned cement plant turned amusement park to luxurious private estates that are now claimed as state parks, here are 7 of the nation’s greatest castle-like abandonments and monuments.

Since being recorded in the 1950s, the sound effect -- an overly-dramatic, desperate yelp -- has become a staple in some of Hollywood biggest films. It is the choice cry of Stormtroopers falling to their death in Star Wars; it is emitted by Buzz Lightyear as he is sent careening out of a window in Toy Story; it is cried out as Jafar lifts the palace in Aladdin, and uttered by a man who’s being crushed by a monster in Avatar.

Sharon Crowell-Davis, a professor of veterinary behavior at the University of Georgia, says in New York Magazine's blog Science of Us, that compared with dogs, there are likely many cat behaviors that owners are misinterpreting, because so much more research has been done on canine behavior.

New research confirms what they say about nice guys.

Rick Ross’s most active years were from 1981–1988. Basically a billion dollars worth of crack went through his organization. His connection was from Nicaragua. His distribution were all the gangs that he grew up with in South Central LA.

I was watching an episode of “Band of Brothers” in which the brave soldiers of Easy Company were storming a town in Normandy. While they were scrambling for cover from Nazi machine gunfire, they ran past an upright piano that happened to be sitting in the middle of the street. No one was playing it, no one was lying dead beside it, and it appeared to be undamaged. Had it just been abandoned by some French pianist during a desperate attempt to escape with it? It really bugged me. What the hell was that piano doing in the middle of the street? Then I realized that such peculiar piano placement should neither bewilder nor amaze me, for I have personally seen equivalent ridiculousness within many estates.

General relativity says that energy (in the form of mass, light, and whatever other forms it comes in) tells spacetime how to bend, and the bending of spacetime tells that energy how to move. The concept of "gravity" is then that objects are falling along the bending of spacetime. The path that objects follow is called a "geodesic". Let's begin by looking at the bending side of things, and then we'll come back to look at geodesics.

Here on earth we’re thankful to have the pull of gravity to keep us and our favorite objects grounded to the ground. When you head a couple hundred miles up, all of that changes.

A droplet bouncing on the surface of a liquid has been found to exhibit many quantum-like properties, including double-slit interference, tunneling and energy quantization.

The English language is, quite literally, the greatest language in the world. Great in terms of size - the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains 615,000 entries. Great in terms of scope -- it's an official language in seventy-nine countriesand territories. And great in terms of, well, greatness -- it's just one fantastic mishmash of borrowings, inventions, corruptions, misinterpretations, misspellings, alterations, words you'll never need, and words you never even knew you'll never need.

The study of how often human beings do irrational things was enough for psychologists Daniel Kahneman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, and it opened the rapidly expanding field of behavioral economics. Similar insights are also reshaping everything from marketing to criminology

The technological singularity is a hypothetical moment in the future when artificial intelligence becomes indistinguishable from human intelligence—and capable of creating smarter iterations of itself. Apply the same general idea to simulations and you get the "simulation singularity": when a simulated world is indistinguishable from reality.

Time is seen in a particularly different light by Eastern and Western cultures, and even within these groupings assumes quite dissimilar aspects from country to country. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States and Mexico employ time in such diametrically opposing manners that it causes intense friction between the two peoples. In Western Europe, the Swiss attitude to time bears little relation to that of neighboring Italy. Thais do not evaluate the passing of time in the same way that the Japanese do. In Britain the future stretches out in front of you. In Madagascar it flows into the back of your head from behind.

If a German Shepard puppy were drowning in the ocean, what would you do? I’m betting that you would go out in the ocean to save his  life (well, at least if you have a heart). What if that puppy was now a vicious 400 pound black bear? That’s exactly what happened when a black bear wandered inside a Florida community, shot with a tranquilizer dart, and started walking towards the ocean in a trance light state.   That’s exactly what Adam Warwick, a marine biologist, did in order to save this bear’s life, while risking sever injury or even death.

Do you want to cast love spells? Exorcise demons? Subjugate your enemies? These and other arcane invocations can be found in the Handbook of Ritual Power, an 8th-century, 20-page codex that has been translated and published by two scholars of religion and ancient history.

Stop for a moment and ask yourself if there was ever a time (or times) you’ve arrogantly said or thought: “I’m too smart for this.” If you’re someone who always believed that you’re Mr. Smarty Pants, you may want to take a step back and contemplate. That kind of thinking can work against you in life and in work.

Do you get frustrated when people say “ex cetera” when they should be saying “et cetera,” or “mis-pro-nounce-i-a-tion” rather than “mis-pro-nunce-i-a-tion?” Well don’t get too worked up, because there might be words you’re saying incorrectly, too!

A visitor from 100 years ago would be confused by our selfies and our strange toys — but they would understand the need to show off. Throughout history, people have had status symbols. Sometimes, these things have been gold and jewels. But sometimes, they’re a bit weirder. Here are 10 bizarre status symbols from the past.

Nowadays, we always get the scoop on how our favorite movies are made. But have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of the processes that allow us to live our lives in comfort?

Sometimes a good scare is just what the doctor ordered. (Depending on the doctor.)

Probability rules our entire lives, but our brains absolutely suck at calculating it. The gambling industry thrives off of this fact -- tell someone they only have a 1-100,000,000 chance of winning the lottery, and they'll say, "somebody's got to win!" We can't blame them -- there are all sorts of ways that probability works like freaking black magic. Just try to wrap your mind around the fact that ...

While we go about our busy lives, smoking pipes and seeing things through rose-tinted monocles, we don't ever stop realize how the littlest things tend to make everything we do that much easier.