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Welcome to Armageddon Online - Disaster News, Future Scenarios, Preparedness and Survival |
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Weird & Strange
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April 16, 2013 |
After Monday's bombing at the Boston Marathon, many people casting around for an explanation have focused on the date: April 15, a holiday in Massachusetts and the middle of a month with a history of violence. It's not yet known whether the perpetrator or perpetrators of the bombing, which killed three, chose April 15 for its associations with tax day or with Massachusetts' Patriots' Day, a commemoration of the first battles of the Revolutionary War. The month could simply be a coincidence, given that the Boston Marathon, always held on the third Monday of April, was a convenient target.
Nevertheless, some have speculated about the symbolism. On NBC, reporter Tom Llamas told Matt Lauer that "over the last 20 years in this country several terrorist attacks and school shootings have taken place around this time of the year." He cited the Virginia Tech shooting, which took place April 16, 2007; the Columbine school shooting, which occurred April 20, 1999, and the Oklahoma City bombing, which took place on April 19, 1995. |
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April 14, 2013 |
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We humans are all too aware of the scary shit nature likes to pull on us. Whether it's destroying our towns with surging flood waters or setting our drug labs on fire with a well-placed lightning strike, we're constantly reminded that this is Mother Nature's world, and we're only squatting on it until she eventually comes home from vacation with a lingering tequila buzz and a shotgun. But perhaps that's unfair to nature: She's not all petty violence and viciousness ... sometimes she goes for more of a psychological approach to warfare. Here are a few natural phenomena that prove nature is probably just fucking with our heads ... {CRACKED} |
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April 10, 2013 |
A lightning bolt is one of nature’s most over-the-top phenomena, rarely failing to elicit at least a ping of awe no matter how many times a person has witnessed one. With his iconic kite-and-key experiments in the mid-18th century, Benjamin Franklin showed that lightning is an electrical phenomenon, and since then the general view has been that lightning bolts are big honking sparks no different in kind from the little ones generated by walking in socks across a carpeted room.
But scientists recently discovered something mind-bending about lightning: Sometimes its flashes are invisible, just sudden pulses of unexpectedly powerful radiation. It’s what Joseph Dwyer, a lightning researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology, has termed dark lightning. |
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April 05, 2013 |
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. The scientists of 1939 would like to add "moon explosion" and "giant meteor" to that list—and they created some terrifying paintings to show you just what humanity's demise will look like. Popular Science published those apocalyptic illustrations, along with a very upsetting three-page article, in its September 1939 issue.
In the image above, thousands of people run from Manhattan as meteors streak down around them. But their flight is futile, because a city-sized asteroid is about one nanosecond away from obliterating the Eastern time zone. "People that it missed would still be threatened, not only by terrible earthquakes, but even more by a searing air blast of hurricane velocity that would mushroom out from the point of impact," Popular Science explains. [POPSCI] |
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April 02, 2013 |
- Giant space mirror would have concentrated the sun's rays on Earth
- German army would use it to 'burn enemy cities' or 'boil part of an ocean'
- Would also contain a manned space station complete with gardens
It sounds like something only a Bond villain would propose, but the Nazis planned a mile-wide ‘space gun’ powered by the sun. The giant mirror could be used to focus the sun on a target – like the magnifying glasses used by children to create fire. A long-forgotten article from Life magazine in 1945 revealed how ‘US Army technical experts came up with the astonishing fact that German scientists had seriously planned to build a “sun gun”’. [DM] |
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February 20, 2013 |
They've terrorized a shopping mall in "Dawn of the Dead," been folded into classic literature, and even crashed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website. Seriously. What is the deal with zombies?
The shuffling (or quick-as-lightning, depending on your preferred version) hordes are horror-movie staples, but they've lately skyrocketed in fame with humorous takes such as in the book "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" (Quirk Books, 2009) and the movie "Shaun of the Dead" (2004), which follows a sad-sack salesman during the zombie apocalypse. In 2011, the CDC capitalized on zombie fever with a blog post dedicated to preparing for a zombie uprising, driving so much Internet traffic that their servers crashed. |
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February 14, 2013 |
A series of explosions in the skies of Russia’s Urals region, reportedly caused by a meteor shower, has sparked panic in three major cities. Witnesses said that houses shuddered, windows were blown out and cellphones stopped working.
According to unconfirmed reports, the meteorite was intercepted by an air defense unit at the Urzhumka settlement near Chelyabinsk. A missile salvo reportedly blew the meteorite into pieces at an altitude of 20 kilometers.A bright flash was seen in the Chelyabinsk, Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions, Russia’s Republic of Bashkiria and in northern Kazakhstan. [RT] |
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October 28, 2012 |
From "World War Z " to "The Walking Dead" to "Shaun of the Dead to "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and countless brain-dead rip-offs, zombies — re-animated corpses with an unstoppable craving for human flesh, especially brains — have invaded pop culture like never before. For staggering, slow-moving monsters, zombies have become quite a force in the entertainment industry over the past decade. Though George Romero's 1968 film "Night of the Living Dead" is often considered to be the original modern zombie film, the first actually appeared nearly 40 years earlier in "White Zombie ," starring Béla Lugosi as an evil voodoo priest in Haiti who zombifies a beautiful young woman. In the years since, only a handful of zombie films have returned to their Haitian origins — most notably "The Serpent and the Rainbow ." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "zombie" first appeared in English around 1810 when historian Robert Southey mentioned it in his book "History of Brazil." But this "Zombi" was not the familiar brain-eating manlike monstrosity but instead a West African deity. The word later came to suggest the vital, human force leaving the shell of a body, and ultimately a creature human in form but lacking the self-awareness, intelligence, and a soul. It was imported to Haiti and elsewhere from Africa through the slave trade. |
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October 26, 2012 |
Something very strange was spotted high above the skies of Pike County last week leaving those who witnessed the UFO bewildered as to what it could be. The mystery glowing object which has left people wondering what is flying over their heads was watched by amateur astronomer Allen Epling from his Virgie, Kentucky home for over two hours.
Taking video and pictures of the unusual craft, Epling was just one of thousands who saw the cigar-shaped craft across three states and the part-time star-gazer estimated the UFO to be operating at over 100,000 feet - over twice the height a commercial jet flies. |
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October 12, 2012 |
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A huge geoglyph in the shape of an elk or deer discovered in Russia may predate Peru's famous Nazca Lines by thousands of years.The animal-shaped stone structure, located near Lake Zjuratkul in the Ural Mountains, north of Kazakhstan, has an elongated muzzle, four legs and two antlers. A historical Google Earth satellite image from 2007 shows what may be a tail, but this is less clear in more recent imagery. Excluding the possible tail, the animal stretches for about 900 feet (275 meters) at its farthest points (northwest to southeast), the researchers estimate, equivalent to two American football fields. The figure faces north and would have been visible from a nearby ridge. |
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October 01, 2012 |
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It seems a normal commute during a normal, slightly wet day in Russia. But suddenly the ire of the heavens opens up above the highway- and a bolt of lightning slams into the roof of an SUV, leaving the driver stunned, shaken - and perhaps a little shocked. Luckily for the driver, he appears to be left unharmed by the thousand-volt hit and in the footage, uploaded to YouTube this month, he carries on driving for a few seconds, before rolling to a stop. |
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September 18, 2012 |
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Nature's not much for subtlety. Just ask Chris Tangey, the man who watched in awe as a 100-foot-high (30-meter-high) whirlwind of fire tore around a patch of Australian Outback on Tuesday (Sept. 11). Tangey, a filmmaker, managed to capture some very rare footage of the startling phenomenon while out scouting locations near Alice Springs, Australia, according to The Australian. One term for the event he recorded, a fire tornado, is a misnomer, according to Mark Wysocki, New York's state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University. The columns of spinning fire are much more similar to dust devils than tornadoes, Wysocki said. |
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September 10, 2012 |
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South Coast Air Quality Management District spokesman Sam Atwood says investigators are in the field Monday trying to determine the source of a "strong, rotten egg/sulfur odor" that's been reported across much of the district's 10,000 square miles. The district has received 200 calls since midnight. Regional air quality monitors are trying to determine whether a foul odor spreading across parts of Southern California is coming from the Salton Sea. |
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August 25, 2012 |
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People from all over El Dorado County say they’re hearing loud booms several times a week, but there are many theories on what is causing them. “I thought it was thunder,” said one person. “It’s definitely not thunder; too consistent. I thought it was just mining,” said another person. “I always considered them to be sonic booms from flying aircrafts for years,” said Loring Brunius, owner of Sierra Rock Diamond Quarry. People who live near Pleasant Valley say their days have been interrupted by loud booms, shaking the floor beneath them. |
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August 23, 2012 |
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They are one of the most destructive forces of nature on Earth, but now environmental scientists are working to tame the hurricane. In a paper, published in Atmospheric Science Letters, the authors propose using cloud seeding to decrease sea surface temperatures where hurricanes form. Theoretically, the team claims the technique could reduce hurricane intensity by a category. The team focused on the relationship between sea surface temperature and the energy associated with the destructive potential of hurricanes. Rather than seeding storm clouds or hurricanes directly, the idea is to target marine stratocumulus clouds, which cover an estimated quarter of the world's oceans, to prevent hurricanes forming. |
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August 14, 2012 |
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Residents in a Cumberland County community were left wondering Tuesday morning what caused dozens of birds to drop dead from the sky. Residents along Peach Drive in Millville found at least 80 birds -- mostly red-winged blackbirds -- on the ground dead having fallen from trees and the sky. One neighbor even said he saw the birds falling out of the air. "Crazy -- something out of a movie," said resident Michelle Cavalieri who saw the birds fall from the sky. [link ] |
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August 13, 2012 |
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A video taken of the Antarctic research station Neumayer-Station III appears to show what some are calling a UFO over the South Pole. The video posted to YouTube seems to show a round, blurry object floating above the station on Aug. 10. Speculation has run rampant, with conspiracy theorists and UFO buffs swapping explanations ranging from government collaboration with aliens to a top-secret test of some new cutting-edge secret weapon. |
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August 10, 2012 |
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I'm bemused that we are smart enough to land an automobile size payload on another planet, but still live in a culture where a significant percentage of people want to believe in implausible if not impossible things. The reality is that intelligence has nothing to do with believing in "weird things." A recent National Geographic Society poll reported that 36 percent of Americans -- about 80 million people -- believe UFOs exist, only 17 percent do not, and the rest of the people are undecided. The survey did not specifically equate UFOs with flying saucers or little green men, however. |
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July 02, 2012 |
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A new survey finds that 80 million Americans, or 36 percent of the population, believe UFOs are real. One in 10 respondents say they have personally witnessed an alien spaceship. And if aliens were to invade the country sometime in the next four years, 65 percent of survey respondents said President Obama would be better suited for handling the invasion than Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The market research company Kelton Research conducted the survey by polling a random nationwide sample of 1,114 Americans ages 18 and older, who were representative of the demographics of the nation as a whole. The survey was commissioned by the National Geographic Channel to promote its new series "Chasing UFOs." [link]
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June 19, 2012 |
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A bizarre illness affecting nearly 20 students at a Western New York Junior-Senior High school now has an official diagnosis: mass hysteria. The students, almost all of them girls, and mostly friends, began experiencing involuntary jerks and tics. Sometimes their limbs, neck or face would suddenly spasm; other times they would twitch, grunt, or shout. It was strange and troubling behavior, made all the more scary because it had no clear cause. [DISCOVERY] |
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June 18, 2012 |
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An enormous mushroom cloud formed in the sky over Beijing late last week, sparking fears that a cataclysmic, Armageddon-like event was underway. Alas, it was not the end of the world - or worse, the beginning of a real-life movie starring Will Smith: It was just nature. The giant cumulonimbus—which spanned several miles—was accompanied by lightning, swallowing up the capital's skyline for an hour, according to the Daily Mail. |
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May 10, 2012 |
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Scientists have created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in British laboratories. The hybrids have been produced secretively over the past three years by researchers looking into possible cures for a wide range of diseases. The revelation comes just a day after a committee of scientists warned of a nightmare ‘Planet of the Apes’ scenario in which work on human-animal creations goes too far. [DM] |
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April 22, 2012 |
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Astronomers say a loud explosion heard across a large swath of Nevada and California on Sunday morning was likely caused by a meteor. The sound of the explosion around 8 a.m. prompted a flood of calls to law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Sierra Nevada in the two states. The explosion rattled windows and shook houses from Reno to Winnemucca in Nevada, and from the Sacramento to Bakersfield areas in California. [FOX] |
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April 13, 2012 |
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Does Friday the 13th freak you out? If so, hold on to your rabbit's foot extra tight, because there are three of these supposedly unlucky dates in 2012, and today (April 13) is one of them. 1. This year is a special one for Friday the 13ths: There are three of them: Jan. 13, April 13 and July 13. The freaky thing? The dates fall exactly 13 weeks apart. That hasn't happened since 1984. 2. If that scares you, you may have paraskavedekatriaphobia (also known as friggatriskaidekaphobia). Those are the scientific terms for fear of Friday the 13th. Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number 13. |
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April 10, 2012 |
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A great ball of fire streaked across the Texas sky during the daytime last week, much to the surprise of thousands of people who witnessed it. So bright that it looked "like a little piece of the sun falling," as one San Antonio resident told the local news station, the rare daytime meteor event was yet another example of the scientific mystery known as spring fireball season. According to NASA, 30 years of observations show that there's a consistent uptick in the number of fireballs — meteors that glow brighter than the planets as they scorch through Earth's atmosphere — during the spring compared with other times of the year. "There are two peaks: one around February and the other at the end of March and early April," said Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "And this remains a mystery." |
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April 05, 2012 |
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If there's one place where extraterrestrial spacecraft might not seem out of place, it's the Las Vegas Strip, and it just so happens that a new video shows a host of UFOs swarming over Sin City. The video, picked up by a blogger at gather.com, shows what appear to be a triangular group of white lights flitting about the night sky above Las Vegas. As the seven-minute video rolls on, dozens more lights join the action. The astounded and salty-tongued witness, who goes by the YouTube handle NuroNews, narrates the video: "Nobody's paying attention to this [s---] but me... this is absolutely incredible ... Look how they move around, they're attracted to the light." The video was apparently shot March 21. So what is it? Does this video really defy explanation? Or, as is the case with many UFO videos, is the explanation much more mundane? |
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