Giant Freakin Robot

Did you sleep well last night? Good, we hope you enjoyed that, because after being introduced to this newly discovered species of spider, that may very well be a thing of the past. Meet Poecilotheria rajaei, a tarantula native to the Sri Lanka, one that happens to have a leg span of eight inches (20 centimeters) or more. He resembles an Alien facehugger more than your garden-variety arachnid, and definitely has the size to latch onto your face if necessary.

Poecilotheria rajaei is so big that it even gave pause to the people who discovered him, people who have made it their mission in life to study things that creep and crawl. According to Ranil Nanayakkar, who co-founded the Biodiversity Education and Research in SR, “It was slightly smaller than the size of the plate we have dinner on.” That is one big-ass spider. As if the size isn’t off-putting enough, the tarantula is also highly venomous. Its poison can take down mice, lizards, snakes, and small birds.

Who would have known that mankind’s demise could fit beneath a microscope? Well, anyone who ever believed that disease would be the thing to wipe out humanity. But this isn’t about a disease. This is about an otherworldly monster that will feast upon our souls and the very fabric of the universe itself! Or maybe just a little wood, if you’ve got some.

If you’ve ever wondered how termites were able to eat wood at such a steady rate, it’s because their stomachs contain gut microbes that assist in turning the wood into digestible sugars, and two of these little buggers now have the distinction of being named after the cosmic entity from sci-fi/horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The University of British Columbia’s Erick James and his colleagues discovered the tiny, 10mm-long beings and noticed both of them to have heads covered with flagella; the larger of the two had a bundle of more than 20, while the smaller one only had five.

Cthulhu macrofasciculumque CREDIT: University of British Columbia

Cthulhu macrofasciculumque is what you can call that larger one now, and the smaller one has been named Cthylla microfasciculumque, though you might do better to call them Mr. and Mrs. if you see them in public. Let it be known that Cthylla wasn’t a Lovecraft creation, but was imagined up in the 1970s by Cthulhu Mythos writer Brian Lumley to be Cthulhu’s secret daughter. And while it’s great and all that such a unique homage was paid, it’s a very cool discovery in every other way as well.

Have you ever wanted to live inside a video? And even though I’m not talking about that stack of videos at the top of your dad’s closet, it counts as an answer. But in this case, I’m talking about the one seen above.

Photographer Bruce W. Berry, whose website Bruce Wayne Photography doesn’t need any Batman references to be cool, compiled a slew of time-lapse videos taken from the International Space Station and offered to the public. Berry just happened to be the kind of guy who would take the time to spiff them up – he denoised, deflickered, slowed down, stabilized and color graded them – and converted them to 1080 HD for the human eyes’ pleasure.

Perhaps what makes the video so hypnotizing is the complete lack of a human element, even though I greatly enjoy the human aspect of The Cinematic Orchestra, the electronic jazz group who performed the video’s music.

If I saw these sights outside of my window every day for months on end, I would lose my grip on the fact that Earth is a planet that I came from and live on. The ISS isn’t so far away that some of humanity’s details can’t be seen, but it’s far enough out there that the rest of the universe is to be reckoned with, and that’s when the heebie jeebies go down my spine.

It’s that really awkward feeling when you walk into a room where all your friends are, and you think it’s because it’s your birthday, but you can’t even remember when your birthday is due to the rampant drug use you’ve been guilty of. That sudden feeling when you realize you’re actually the subject of an intervention. Rats have that feeling all the time, according to this pamphlet drawn in crayon.

Researchers from Maryland’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the University of California at San Francisco have a study published in the journal Nature that details a process where addictive behavior in rats – in this case, cocaine was the vice of choice – could be eradicated by shooting a laser into their genetically engineered brains. Remember when science was just planetary models and trepanation?

A group of rats were made aware of a lever that dispensed cocaine and then naturally separated themselves into two groups, with a control group hanging out nearby. Once the rats go their taste of the white magic for eight weeks, the researchers introduced a small shock to accompany the dose. Some of the rats didn’t mind the shock, while others did.