Category: Weirdness
"Deepest ever" living fish has been found and filmed – Celebrity Fish Big Brother reportedly in the works
A team from the UK and Japan has managed to track down and film the deepest ever living fish. They found the 17-strong shoal chillin’ (literally) in a trench in the Pacific, 7.7km down from the surface. One of the scientists, Monty Priede from the University of Aberdeen, described the fish as “surprisingly cute”.
Oyster card hack released to the internet
Back in July, some researchers at the Radboud University in Holland discovered a way to hack the RFID chip used in a number of mass transit cards worldwide, including London’s Oyster card…
Midori-san – the world's highest-profile blogging houseplant
A company called KAYAC has developed a kind of “botanical interface” that allows plants to speak and emote with us little humans. And, as is any sentient life form’s right, the plant has now started up a blog to air its inner angst.
Midori, as the plant is known in the Japanese blog-o-sphere, has an auto-generated blog which can be found here. It’s in Japanese, so won’t make much sense, but should you have an understanding of the squiggly language you’ll be able to read Midori’s feelings…
Mail Goggles for Gmail – preventing email disasters since 2008
Gmail’s “Labs” functionality has been underutilized a little, of late. Since the big fanfare when it was released, there haven’t been too many new plugins released. That’s why I’m delighted to reveal that Google has enabled a “Mail Googles” feature, designed to stop you sending emails when drunk…
Do policemen dream of electric sheep?
A traffic jam caused by a runaway sheep in North Wales was solved by police using a Taser. The police offer in question, when faced with the problem of how to move a sheep out of the road, inexplicably decided the best course of action was to pull out his “non-lethal” electricity stun gun, zap the poor beast, and carry it to the side of the road, still twitching…
eBay Nutcase of the Week: Woman buys house she hasn't seen for $1.75
No, that is not an error. We didn’t mean $1.75m. We really do mean $1.75, as in about 90p at today’s rapidly-plummeting exchange rate. Less eBay fees and PayPal commission, of course, but they won’t be that crippling considering the buyer’s getting an entire house.
The woman in question is mature student Joanne Smith. She was browsing eBay for “PlayStations,” when she noticed an alert for a house on sale with no starting price. So she placed a bid of $20 – eventually winning the auction for $1.75…
Mathematicians discover the largest prime number… EVER!
Scientists claim to have discovered the largest prime mumber yet – it’s 2^43,112,609-1. That’s just a short way of typing it – it’s actually 13 million digits long. It nets them a prize of US$100,000 from the Electronic Frontier Foundation…
Drum Kit Tshirt lets your chest rock out
This awesome shirt, from ThinkGeek blows the headphone jack t-shirt and the Wi-Fi t-shirt out of the water. It features seven drums, and an inbuilt speaker. Each drum has a different sound….
Third Eye skull pinhole camera – how Hamlet took his holiday snaps
This is a pinhole camera or Californian designer Wayne Martin Belge’s version of one anyway. It’s pretty simple stuff really. All he needed to make it was some aluminium, a little titanium, brass, silver, a few precious gem Stones and the 150-year-old skull of a 13-year-old girl…
eBay Nutcase of the Week: Any American trying to sell Yankee Stadium cup holders
If you’re (a) American or (b) Japanese and are into baseball, you may be tempted to get yourself a “vial of actual infield soil taken from Yankee Stadium” – yours for around $70.
If you’re too worried to buy unofficial dirt, plenty of official dirt – with certificates of authenticity – is also available…
