You are here

Category: Odds and Ends

Odds and Ends 

You Can Now Purchase Some Of The Most Famous Original Images Of Alleged UFO Sightings

NewsEditor

One of the most notorious groupings of alleged UFO images can be yours for the cool price tag of just a few thousand dollars. The images were captured by self-proclaimed prophet and UFO religion founder “Billy” Eduard Albert Meier in the spring of 1975 in Switzerland. Born in 1937, Meier is one of the most well-known “believers” in modern history and claims that he was contacted by extraterrestrials in childhood and on-and-off throughout the decades. He also claims to be the seventh reincarnation after six prophets that feature in Judaism,…

Read More
Odds and Ends 

Modern Apes May Be Smarter Than Our Australopithecus Ancestors

NewsEditor

Four million years ago our ancestors had brains larger than modern apes, but they were probably less intelligent than gorillas or chimpanzees new research indicates. When attempting to estimate the intelligence of extinct species anthropologists have relied on measuring brain case size. Bigger brains are assumed to mean greater thinking power, a theory that generally holds up today after some allowance for body size, at least among mammals. However, Professor Roger Seymour of the University of Adelaide has called that into question. He argues energy consumption, not size, is what…

Read More
Odds and Ends 

Uniform Teeth raises $10 million for its teeth-straightening operations

NewsEditor, , ,

Uniform Teeth, the teeth straightening startup that helped me figure out I needed a root canal, has just raised a $10 million round of funding led by Canaan Partners. This brings Uniform Teeth’s total funding to $14 million. With the new funding, Uniform Teeth plans to open two more locations, one in Seattle and one in Chicago, early next year. Uniform Teeth currently operates two locations in San Francisco. By the end of next year, Uniform Teeth plans to open more locations throughout the U.S. The startup takes a One…

Read More
Odds and Ends 

Terminally-Ill Scientist Aims To Become “First Full Cyborg”

NewsEditor

Dr Peter Bowman Scott-Morgan is an English-American roboticist suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This degenerative condition pushed Scott-Morgan into a daring approach to counteract it and become, in his words, the “world’s first full cyborg”. The roboticist took to Twitter in October to announce that he was undergoing four medical procedures to improve the quality and length of his life. He claims that he’s now Peter 2.0. Doctors inserted a feeding tube directly into his stomach, a catheter directly into his bladder, and a colostomy bag into his colon.…

Read More
Odds and Ends 

Pig Embryos Injected With Monkey Cells Successfully Brought To Full-Term For The First Time

NewsEditor

Scientists in China have successfully brought to term piglets injected with monkey stem cells for the first time, bringing researchers one step closer to one day growing human organs inside of animals. The pig-monkey chimeras – an organism derived from two or more zygotes, or the eukaryotic cell formed during fertilization that contains essential DNA – were born in the Chinese lab Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology and looked otherwise normal. Scientists derived embryonic stem cells from crab-eating macaques, or cynomolgus monkeys, a species commonly used in and…

Read More
Odds and Ends 

A Missing Piece Of The “Insect Apocalypse” Puzzle Has Been Highlighted

NewsEditor

Mounting evidence is suggesting that street lamps and city lights could be the missing piece of the “insect apocalypse” puzzle.   A new meta-analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, has sifted through over 150 studies looking at the effect of light pollution on insect populations across the world.  Habitat loss, insecticides, invasive species, and climate change are frequently cited as the prime suspects behind the global collapse of insect populations. However, the new study has suggested the constant hum of artificial light could also be a hugely overlooked factor in the world’s rapid decline…

Read More
Odds and Ends 

Holiday shopping suggestion sites will cut your stress in half

NewsEditor

Organized people are great at giving gifts during the holidays. They keep carefully curated lists of what their loved ones like and pick stuff up here and there over the course of the year so that when the holidays come around, theyre all set. Or they are so totally prepared for Black Friday and Cyber Monday that theyre done shopping by the first week of December. But if youre here reading this, chances are youre staring down the end of November with a hint of panic. But dont worry: There…

Read More