Shocking illusion - Pretty celebrities turn ugly!

Prepare to be freaked out, again. You've seen "Pretty girls turn ugly" now try the celebrity version!

It won second place in the Best Illusion of the Year Contest, 2012!

It's a new scientific finding called the "Flashed Face Distortion Effect". You can read more about it here

http://mbthompson.com/research

Flying Cigar UFO appears and vanishes say New York witness

A New York witness reports a cigar-shaped UFO on 19 May 2012 according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

The witness indicated at the time of the UFO sighting, that he or she was with a group of friends at an urban location.

"We were all out in front of the Cherry Bar on Cherry, smoking, when we saw this red shiny glowing but perfectly outlined cigar shaped thing in the sky."

The witness further recalled the lack of movement of the "cigar thing", and also recalled its illumination.

“It was not moving, but blinking, not doing anything; and then it darted to one side, and after that appeared to move downward.”

The witness then observed further movements.

“The thing then darted to another direction; and then totally vanished.”

Abandoned town is setting for more paranormal chills in Chernobyl Diaries

“Anything that’s unknown, unexplainable, unseen — to me, that’s scarier than actually seeing the monster in front of you.”

Oren Peli should know: The 41-year-old filmmaker born in Israel has cornered the market on invisible-monster movies and TV shows by “making things I think would scare me.”

He wrote, directed and edited the surprise hit Paranormal Activity (2009), which famously cost only $15,000 to make and caught the eye of Steven Spielberg, who championed it. Peli went on to produce Paranormal Activity 2 (2010); Paranormal Activity 3 (2011); Insidious (2011), another surprise hit; and the short-lived series The River (2012).

Now, he’s back with Chernobyl Diaries. The thriller — written by Peli, directed by Bradley Parker and set for release Friday — follows six young vacationers on an extreme-tourism trip to Pripyat, Ukraine, once home to the employees of the fated Chernobyl nuclear-power plant.Pripyat has been a ghost town for more than two decades, and, when the group ends up stranded there, they promptly come to learn — with lots of pain, crying, screaming and death — that real ghosts, or creatures of some kind, inhabit the place.

Can Coffee Kill You?

Scientists toil for months—presumably in windowless labs full of microscopes and pipettes—to collect, sort, and interpret mountains of data about the health effects of the world’s most popular drug and publish the results in meticulous detail in a peer-reviewed journal. And, after downing probably a little more than our share of the 400 million cups of coffee Americans drink every day, we spring into action, or at least sit down and type out pandering headlines like:

• “Coffee—A Cancer Culprit?” (Newsweek, 1981)
• “Is Caffeine Bad for You?” (Newsweek, 1982)
• “Grounds to Give Up Coffee?” (Los Angeles Times, 1990)
• “Demon Coffee Bean?” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1995)
• “The Latest on Coffee? Don’t Worry. Drink Up” (New York Times, 1995)
• “Jittery? Peevish? Can’t Sleep? What Are You Drinking?” (New York Times, 2004)
• “Coffee as a Health Drink?” (New York Times, 2006)
• “Too Young for Coffee? (Boston Globe, 2007)
• “Can Caffeine Help Prevent Diabetes?” (Montreal Gazette, 2010)
• “Can Coffee, Tea Lower Brain Cancer Risk?”(USA Today, 2010)
• “Ah, Good for You to the Last Drop?” (Washington Post, 2011) … wouldn’t you like to know.

Woman with flesh-eating disease takes own breaths (necrotizing fasciitis)

The father of a young Georgia woman fighting necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh-eating bacteria, says his daughter is now breathing on her own.

Andy Copeland says his daughter Aimee was taken off of a ventilator for a period of more than 10 hours, representing a milestone in her recovery. He said she's been able to breathe "completely on her own."

Copeland shared the development late Sunday on his Facebook page, where he's been providing regular updates on the 24-year-old's condition.

The University of West Georgia student developed a rare condition called necrotizing fasciitis after cutting her leg in a May 1 fall from a homemade zip line.

She's since had a leg amputated. Her father said she was told late last week that her hands and remaining foot would also need to be amputated.

[sfgate.com]

Rare "ring of fire" solar eclipse dims skies

(Reuters) - The sun and moon aligned over the Earth in a rare astronomical event on Sunday - an annular eclipse that dimmed the skies over parts of Asia and North America, briefly turning the sun into a blazing ring of fire.

As the eclipse reached its peak, a crowd of several thousand viewers gathered in a Utah field took a collective gasp and erupted into applause, cheers and even some howling.

"The wonder of it, the sheer coincidence that this can happen, that totally amazes me," said Brent Sorensen, a physics professor at Southern Utah University, who brought a half-dozen telescopes to the rural town of Kanarraville for the public to peek through. "It never ceases to amaze me."

Eclipses of some type occur almost every year, but stargazers have not seen an annular - shaped like a ring -eclipse on U.S. soil since 1994, and the next one is not to occur until 2023. That is because the phenomenon requires a particular set of orbital dynamics, NASA Space Scientist Jeffrey Newmark said.

Rabies Evolves Slower in Hibernating Bats

The rate at which the rabies virus evolves in bats may depend heavily upon the ecological traits of its hosts, according to researchers at the University of Georgia, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

Their study, published May 17 in the journal PLoS Pathogens, found that the host’s geographical location was the most accurate predictor of the viral rate of evolution. Rabies viruses in tropical and sub-tropical bat species evolved nearly four times faster than viral variants in bats in temperate regions.

“Species that are widely distributed can have different behaviors in different geographical areas,” said Daniel Streicker, a postdoctoral associate in the UGA Odum School of Ecology and the study’s leader. “Bats in the tropics are active year-round, so more rabies virus transmission events occur per year. Viruses in hibernating bats, on the other hand, might lose up to six months’ worth of opportunities for transmission.”

Understanding the relationship between host ecology and viral evolution rates could shed light on the transmission dynamics of other viruses, such as influenza, that occur across regions, infect multiple host species or whose transmission dynamics are impacted by anthropogenic change.