A mound of tires in rural South Carolina is causing a ruckus as reports claim it can be seen from outer space. Covering more than 50 acres, no one seems to know how the approximately quarter million tires happened to gather there, though authorities have charged one person in connection with the giant mound of rubber.
Via HuffPo

A terminally ill taxi driver in Britain saw an advertisement for a documentary that was soliciting those near death for a very strange request - they wanted to film the mummification process perfected by the Ancient Egyptians. Alan Billis decided to reply to the ad, and after his recent passing, Channel 4 in Britain filmed Mr. Billis being mummified, the first man in 3000 years to be mummified in the manner of the Egyptians. Mr. Billis explained his decision to his wife and three grown children, who subsequently gave their blessing to his desire to leave his body to science.
After his death in January, his internal organs were removed and preserved in jars, with the exception of his brain and heart. The process of mummification then began, where over several months he was wrapped and prepared for what should be a preservation of several millennia. Full story here.
Below are pics of Mr. Billis in the various stages of mummification.

Linguists have long labored to construct a hypothesis about an original, or mother "proto-language" that humans used in East Africa some 50,000 years ago. For quite some time these linguists have believed that this proto-tongue was the original language spoken by humans, and that all language can inevitably be traced back to this place and time. Now two specialists in the evolution of human language argue in a new paper written for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that this original language sound like Yoda. That is to say that the arrangement of the words "I like you" that we are familiar with would have been uttered as "I you like". And while this makes for an imperfect analogy - given the subject and object agreements, for intent I think Yoda would have said "You I like", it is a useful illustration of how we began to speak to each other
More on their discovery about the origins and gradual evolution of language here.

Here is a potential gift for your sweetheart or family should you ever leave them for long periods time, or if you just really, really like to look at yourself: An almost perfect 3D replica of your face! The Japanese company Real-f has developed a process whereby a photo image of your face is taken and then molded over a 3D model to create a new "face". Their technology is so advanced that it can capture tiny blood vessels and skin pores as well.  The end result is the slightly disconcerting 3D mold of your face that you see below - that is, if you have $3,920 to spend.
More here.

Would you like to see a 3D version of events taking place live inside the Large Hadron Collider? If so, you are in luck! The LHSEE app, provided free on Google Android phones and tablets, does just that. It was started by a physicist at Oxford University while he had a moment of inspiration over a cup of coffee. His self-described "eureka!" event has given us this geek-tastic app, which has been approved by CERN. Below is a very short video detailing the LHSEE. More here.

Or the other one is, "Bartender says: We dont allow your kind in here, Neutrino walks into a bar..."

Whats all this about? Recently scientists at CERN Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland have reportedly clocked neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. If these results can be independantly verified to be true, it would mean more than just a speeding ticket for these uber-small particles. The implications would lead to a shake-down of the most fundamental building blocks of modern physics. It would mean that inheritantly and most fundamentally, Einstein was wrong.

Modern scientists disagree on many things when it comes to the universe, such as size, shape, and origins. But one concept has generally been well accepted across the board in the physics community : that the speed of light was the great cosmic barrier that no massive particle can cross. Einsteins second paper, titled "General Relativity", postulated that energy and mass were interchangeably relative to one another. Simply put, it lead to the idea that particles gained mass as they accelerated, and that any mass accelerated to the speed of light would become infinitely massive, and thus would require an infinite amount of energy - essentially making this scenario impossible.

The big question is whether researchers have truly discovered neutrinos going faster than light, or whether they have been fooled by an unidentified error in their experiment, making the time look artificially short. Chang Kee Jung (a neutrino physicist at Stony Brook University in New York) says he’d wager that the result is the product of an unidentified error. “I wouldn’t bet my wife and kids because they’d get mad,” he says. “But I’d bet my house.”


It is still too early to say one way or another, and we are still a long ways off from throwing relativity out of the window. However, the implications are profound, and tantilizing. Basically it means that if were to observe at a great enough distance, we could see the results of our expirement before we start it. These results from the future alone shake the very foundational understanding of how time itself works, and could open the doors to such things as time travel. How friggin cool would THAT be?? For now, we will just have to wait and see, or maybe we can get a sneak peak from the future!