Forbidden Toys
Bizarre
Tennessee Passes Geoengineering “Chemtrail” Ban
Tennessee House lawmakers last week passed a ban on geoengeering – or the process of impacting the climate by injecting chemicals or other substances into the atmosphere – after the Senate passed the bill the previous week. Geoengeering has been suggested by some as a solution to global warming; for instance, by injecting small reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect some sunlight and heat back into space before it can reach the Earth’s surface. The Tennessee bill specifically focused on the “intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, (or) substances,” into the atmosphere.
Critics of the move, though, say there are no large scale plans to do so by local or federal governments, and that the legislature is wasting time better spent on other issues; like economic development, job growth and creation, and reducing the cost of living. Some opposition politicians mocked it by linking it to protections for “Yetis, or Sasquatch, or Bigfoot.” But the bill’s sponsor, Monty Fritts, said the bill was a “common-sense” approach, stating, “Everything that goes up, must come down, and those chemicals that we knowingly and willingly inject into the atmosphere simply to control the weather, or the climate, are affecting our health.”
It was this language, and language from other supporters of the bill, which linked it directly to ideas about chemtrails. While some used the term to make fun of the legislation, tying it to conspiracy theories, others were sincere in their belief that chemicals are being purposely injected into the atmosphere for any of various reasons, and that doing so should be regulated.
Senator Frank Niceley, during a hearing for the bill last month, told colleagues, “This will be my wife’s favorite bill of the year. She has worried about this, I bet, ten years. It’s been going on a long, long time.” Niceley referenced the criss-cross of contrails that could be seen in the skies on some days, adding, “For years they denied they were doing anything.
WORLDS COLLIDE
THE tallest man in the world met up with the shortest living woman and their antics really put their size into perspective.
Sultan Kosen, 41, and Jyoti Amge, 30, were photographed together in California on Monday and their height difference is staggering.
7World’s tallest man, Sultan Kosen, 41, and world’s shortest living woman, Jyoti Amge, 30, reunited in California on Monday.
Kosen, of Turkey, is the tallest man in the world at 8 feet 3 inches tall. He’s one of only 10 confirmed cases in history of someone growing 8 feet or taller.
Amge, of India, is the shortest living woman in the world at just above 2 feet tall, which is smaller than the average 2-year-old.
Both Kosen and Amge earned their titles in 2011 from the Guinness World Records.
Amge’s small stature is the result of achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism that caused her growth to stop at her present height.
Kosen’s size is because of a tumor that caused him to develop a medical condition called pituitary gigantism.
His shocking growth spurt didn’t come until he was 10 years old.
The pair first met in 2018 through an invitation by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture and Tourism to visit various historic sites.
In Egypt, they toured the sites before attending a conference at the Fairmont Nile City Hotel in Cairo.
In his acceptance interview with Guinness World Records, Kosen said that one of the struggles associated with his stature is finding clothes and shoes that fit him.
He once held the record for the largest feet in the world with each foot coming in at around one foot long.
Kosen also said that he struggled to finish school as a result of his size and once signed to the Galatasaray basketball team but ended up being too tall to play.
After his world record helped catapult him to fame, he underwent life-saving surgery free of charge which stopped his growth.
He has said he finds it very difficult to fit inside normal-sized vehicles.
Amge also has to be creative with clothing, leading her to develop a love for fashion and step foot into a world of creativity.
Her clothes, jewelry, and even plates and utensils are custom made as average silverware is too big for her to use.
‘UFO’ Clouds Mystify Florida Fishermen
A group of fishermen in Florida were left scratching their heads at the sight of several strange-looking clouds that appeared to be alien in nature. The peculiar incident reportedly occurred last week off the coast of Key West. Capturing the curious scene on film, one of the witnesses can be heard exclaiming “look at these clouds, what is going on” as he spans across the sky showing around seven of the circular formations that somewhat resemble classic flying saucers.
The group subsequently posted the footage online in the hopes that someone could identify the puzzling phenomenon that they witnessed that day. While many viewers jokingly suggested that the anomalies were cloaked extraterrestrial craft, the fishermen were not actually in danger of being abducted by aliens as there is a meteorological explanation for what manifested in the sky. What the group witnessed was, in fact, a weather phenomenon known as a ‘punch hole cloud’ which occurs when planes passing overhead distribute ice crystals that interact with the atmosphere and create the alien-looking formations.
A fallstreak hole (also known as a cavum, hole punch cloud, punch hole cloud, skypunch, cloud canal or cloud hole) is a large gap, usually circular or elliptical, that can appear in cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds. The holes are caused by supercooled water in the clouds suddenly evaporating or freezing, and may be triggered by passing aircraft.
Because of their rarity and unusual appearance, fallstreak holes have been mistaken for or attributed to unidentified flying objects.
Inside ‘ambulance to the future’ where people are frozen in hope of life after death
The UK has the highest number of cryogenics members outside of the US according to the latest data from an organisation offering the process (Picture: Cryonics Institute, cryonics.org)
Suspended in a deep freeze, the growing number of ‘patients’ at the world’s biggest cryo-preservation facilities are taking a dice roll at another life.
Some have been there for nearly 50 years.
Despite the current odds being vanishingly small, they represent an increasing number of people opting for an indefinite existence at -196C after their legal deaths.
The sleek white vats that stand in rows at the Cryonics Institute (CI) storage facilities in Michigan represent an increasing number of bodies, body parts and pets from around the world – all opting for an indefinite existence at -196°C after their legal deaths.
Frozen in liquid nitrogen, they await possible future technological advances to revive them.
Among those ‘living in this ‘living’ in this arctic limbo are chefs, students, secretaries and professors. And it turns out that Brits are the most keen takers outside the US.
CI president Dennis Kowalksi tells Metro.co.uk that he regards the centres as a place of ‘awe and responsibility’.
But it’s more of a waiting game than a place worthy of a sci-fi imagining.
The longest-running patient, Rhea Ettinger, has been in her sub-zero waiting room since 1977.
Her son Robert C. W. Ettinger, a decorated World War Two veteran regarded as the founding father of cryonics, is also in indefinite storage, along with his first and second wives.
Mr Kowalski conjured the visions of Leonardo da Vinci as he spoke of his conviction that humankind will one day be able to reverse engineer nature, and achieve the CI’s holy grail of reanimating the clinically dead.
He said: ‘Ironically, while the number of members is growing, I’m only surprised that we’re not more popular.
‘What we are doing is pretty rational when you think about it. Cryonics is like an ambulance ride to a future hospital that may or may not exist some day.
‘While we give no guarantees, if you are buried or cremated your chances of coming back are zero.
‘We are therefore a Pascal’s wager, or a gamble with little to lose and all to gain.’
The body is placed in ice immediately after death under the protocol for transport to long term storage in the US (Picture: Cryonics Institute, cryonics.org)
‘Responsibility and awe’
Inside the main, hangar-like facility, ‘cryostats’ housing around 250 patients stand in neat rows.
The 7,000 square foot centre in Clinton Township, otherwise known as a farming community, is now at capacity so newcomers who have paid for full-body preservation at prices starting at $28,000 (£22,000) are being stored at a new facility nearby. Around 10 or 20 places have been taken up so far.
‘While we are the largest cryonics company in the world with the most patients in suspension, our two centres in Michigan are not as sci-fi as you might imagine,’ Mr Kowalski explains.
Alan Sinclair is part of a UK cryonics group which helps to transport people to the US in accordance with their wishes (Picture: James Clarke for Metro.co.uk)
‘It’s more practical. We are affordable to the average person through life insurance and we are non-profit, with all of our records open to public scrutiny.
‘I guess if anything, when I walk between the cryo-stats, I feel a sense of responsibility and awe.
‘We don’t know if this will work but we believe life is precious and that there is no greater value than the love of our family and friends who we wish to save.’
Of the living 1,975 CI members around the world, 128 who are interested in having their bodies, body tissue or pets deep frozen are British.
Only the US is better represented, with 1,374 residents signed up, according to figures released in December by the institute.
The process for cryo-preservation starts after death with the desired end being at an unspecified time in the future (Picture: Cryonics Institute, cryonics.org)
‘A chance at the future’
Once they are declared clinically dead, members’ bodies are placed in ice and transported to the new facility, where a perfusion takes place to replace the body’s blood and water with a special cryo-protection mixture which stops ice forming. The solution acts as a form of anti-freeze for ultra-low temperatures.
The patient is then placed in a computer-controlled unit and cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature at –321F over five and a half days before being carefully lowered into the cryostat.
Scientific advances — particularly in the field of nanotechnology and its potential to work at the level of the human cell structure — are helping to make the case for the journeys.
Even if the elixir becomes reality, however, the science would, in many cases, also need to reverse the ageing process and the condition which caused a person’s medical death.
Mr Kowalksi is clear that his organisation only offers a gamble, albeit with the odds increasing with rapid development in fields also including artificial intelligence and stem cell treatment.
‘We offer a chance at the future,’ he says.
The storage vats contain the bodies of people who have signed up for a possible future revival (Picture: Cryonics Institute, cryonics.org)
‘We were founded in 1976 and everything we’ve said is going to happen is starting to come true. Advances in fields such as genetic engineering, stem cell regeneration and artificial intelligence are being used in conventional science and medicine where they didn’t exist before.
‘A hundred years ago if I said there was a technique for bringing back the dead I might have been run out of town, even if I had explained how to use CPR or a defibrillator to revive someone.
‘These days they are recognised techniques. The same thing can be said with heart or liver transplants, which would have been seen as Frankenstein-like in the past. Another example would be Leonard da Vinci and his visions of flying machines, which he produced more than 500 years ago.
‘The same thing is starting to happen with cryonics, we just haven’t worked out how to fully reverse-engineer nature yet. Advances are also being made in stem cell treatments that may one day be able to reverse whatever killed you as well as the ageing process.’
The Cryonics Institute has members around the world who have placed their faith in future technology to revive them (Picture: Cryonics Institute, cryonics.org)
Critics of cryonics view the process as fanciful pseudoscience, with Dr Miriam Stoppard, a journalist and doctor, previously saying the process ‘robs the dying of their dignity’.
Her comments appear to have had little impact on the future-proofers, with one of the best-known British members, Alan Sinclair, telling Metro.co.uk last year that he hopes to outlive his grandkids.
The 85-year-old granddad, from East Sussex, acknowledged that there is ‘no guarantee’ of a second life but said that ‘coming out of suspension at 185 or 1085 is a good idea’.
Mr Kowlaski, who is also signed up to go into a frozen stasis, also has a strong conviction that the bodies stowed away inside the giant vats will one day be reawakened.
‘The ambulance is there, and if technological trends continue, the hospital will be too,’ he says.
Dream on you gullible fools.
Polar bears and Husky dogs together
The dogs are chained up and therefore totally at the mercy of these big fair tempered bears. This happened at Churchill, Manitoba.
Underground Lizard Being Bases! Anything’s Possible?
The UFO researcher known as the “Crypto Hunter,” John Rhodes discusses Reptilian humanoids and the secret underworld empire, which consists of alien cultures and lost civilizations. Rhodes reported on an extensive network of underground bases constructed by various nations, emphasizing their use for safety and security in case of cosmic disasters or other threats. He believes these bases are inhabited by small groups of advanced cultures, both human and non-human, living underground to preserve themselves.
Rhodes delved into the concept of reptilian beings, describing their physical attributes as approximately 6.5 to 8 feet tall, muscular, with scales covering their bodies. These beings have a large head, almond-shaped eyes with vertical slit pupils, three fingers with an opposing thumb on their hands, and no lips or ears. He suggested these beings have evolved differently from humans, with distinct brain types and different ways of perceiving science and learning. Rhodes mentioned that reptilian beings might be coexisting with humanity underground, possibly for their own safety and to monitor human activities.
He shared the story of the Lizard Man of Bishopville, South Carolina, as an example of encounters with reptilian creatures. This story involved a young boy’s encounter with a creature that matches the physical description of reptilian beings. “When he got back home, he was so scared he couldn’t talk… he started going into a fit,” Rhodes said. The local sheriff, a who investigated the case, emphasized that the swamps in the area are difficult to access, making it possible for unknown creatures to reside there.
Here is a very big one attacking the capital of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
Addressing Trump supporters in Sioux City, Iowa.
New App to help prevent people who are texting from walking into things
Avoiding the pitfalls of texting and walking
BBC Health Check
Walking and texting is leading to a spate of collision-related injuries. Could a new app be the answer?
We’ve all done it. You’re walking down the street and the familiar beep of an incoming text becomes too tempting to resist. As you start to fire off a quick reply – bam! You clash shoulders with a fellow pedestrian doing exactly the same.
Alex Stoker is a Clinical Fellow in Emergency Medicine at Frimley Park Hospital, Surrey. “If it’s a tall object like a wall or a lamp-post that someone walks into, then one might expect facial injuries such as a broken nose or fractured cheekbone,” he told the BBC.
“If on the other hand the collision results in falling over, then they’re much more liable to things like hand injuries and broken wrists. There’s a complete spectrum but it is possible to sustain a really serious injury.”
Man hole avoidance
A new app called CrashAlert aims to help save people from themselves. It involves using a distance-sensing camera to scan the path ahead and alert users to approaching obstacles.
The camera acts like a second pair of eyes – looking forward while the user is looking down.
CrashAlert is at prototype stage
Just as a Nintendo Wii or Xbox can detect where and how a player is moving, CrashAlert’s camera can interpret the location of objects on the street.
When it senses something approaching, it flashes up a red square in a bar on top of the phone or tablet. The position of the square shows the direction of the obstacle – giving the user a chance to dodge out of the way.
“What we observed in our experiments is that in 60% of cases, people avoided obstacles in a safer way. That’s up from 20% [without CrashAlert],” says CrashAlert’s inventor Dr Juan David Hincapié-Ramos from the University of Manitoba.
What’s more, the device doesn’t distract the user from what they’re doing. Hincapié-Ramos’s tests showed it can be used alongside gaming or texting without any cost to performance.
Despite designing CrashAlert, Hincapié-Ramos accepts that the best solution of all is for people to stop checking their phones in the first place.
“We should encourage people to text less while they’re walking because it isolates them from their environment. However people are doing it and there are situations where you have to do it. It’s for situations like this that CrashAlert can have a positive impact.”
But Dr Joe Marshall, a specialist in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Nottingham, says that it’s not necessarily people who are to blame – but the phones themselves.
“The problem with mobile technology is that it’s not designed to be used while you’re actually mobile. It involves you stopping, looking at a screen and tapping away.”
Dr Marshall believes that if we want to stop people being distracted by their phones, then designers need to completely rethink how we interact with them. But so far, there is no completely satisfactory alternative.
“Google glass solves the problem of looking down by allowing you to look ahead. But you still have to pay attention to a visual display,” he told the BBC.
So for now at least, it seems vigilance is the key to avoiding lamp-posts and unexpected manholes.
But as mobile technology continues to dominate everyday life, it might not be too ludicrous to expect to rely on smart cameras to steer us in the right direction.
Nightmarish deep-sea footballfish washes up on California beach in rare stranding
A deep-sea Pacific footballfish found on Moro Beach in Crystal Cove State Park is the second of this species to wash up in recent years, but the reason behind the strandings remains a mystery.
A ghoulish, pitch-black fish with a long stalk on its head recently washed up on a beach in Southern California — the second of its kind to end up onshore there in recent years, Crystal Cove State Park officials announced Oct. 17.
A ghoulish, pitch-black fish with a long stalk on its head recently washed up on a beach in Southern California — the second of its kind to end up onshore there in recent years, Crystal Cove State Park officials announced Oct. 17.
Experts identified the bizarre-looking animal as a female Pacific footballfish (Himantolophus sagamius), a species of anglerfish that lives in the Pacific Ocean at depths of 2,000 to 3,300 feet (600 to 1,000 meters). It follows an earlier stranding in May 2021, when a visitor at the state park discovered another fish of the same species on the shore.
“To see an actual anglerfish intact is very rare and it is unknown how or why these fish ended up onshore,” Crystal Cove State Park officials wrote in a Facebook post. “Their teeth, like pointed shards of glass, are transparent and their large mouth is capable of sucking up and swallowing prey the size of their own body.”
Pacific footballfish are one of more than 300 species of anglerfish living in the deep sea worldwide, according to the California Academy of Sciences. Female anglerfish can grow up to 24 inches (61 centimeters) long — about 10 times as large as some of their male counterparts, which have evolved to latch onto females and act as lifelong parasitic providers of sperm on-tap.
“Only females possess a long stalk on the head with bioluminescent tips used as a lure to entice prey,” park officials wrote in the post. The males of some species merge their bloodstreams with their host’s, “eventually coalescing with the female until nothing is left of their form but their testes for reproduction,” they added.
That is definitely one very Ugly fish.
A seasonal lifeguard discovered the dead anglerfish on Moro Beach close to the lifeguard headquarters, “just in time for Friday the 13th,” the officials wrote. It was later picked up by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for analysis.
The specimen measured about 14 inches (36 cm) from mouth to tail fin, Michelle Horeczko, a senior environmental scientist supervisor with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the Los Angeles Times. Only 30 or so specimens of this species have been collected globally, she said, so the discovery will provide valuable information about the life of Pacific footballfish.
After examining the fish, scientists handed it over to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, where the Pacific footballfish discovered in 2021 is also housed, “so that the specimen can be preserved and available for scientific research,” Horeczko said.
While the reason for the stranding remains a mystery, “seeing this strange and fascinating fish is a testament to the curious diversity of marine life lurking below the water’s surface in California’s marine protected areas,” the Facebook post said.
The MarkoZen Blog 