7 Useful Genetic Experiments That Are Creepy As Hell. Reviving Extinct Animals Bringing back prehistoric animals has been a trope in science fiction for a very, very long time. So far, none of these efforts have come to fruition. Scientists have been trying to clone the wooly mammoth for over 10 years, and despite continuous reassurance that we're on the brink of a major breakthrough, no one's pulled it off yet. The only prehistoric creatures we've successfully revived is bacteria -- and even they weren't really dead, just suspended inside a salt crystal or in the stomach of a fossilized bee. This is the scientific equivalent of winning a bag of Skittles in the lottery. Still, though. Most recently, a scientist announced his intention to reverse-engineer a dinosaur from a modern chicken by systematically removing DNA, because that makes nothing but sense. Otherwise known as "the saddest Sean Connery-related moment of our childhood.
" That's right: Science injected a mouse with Tasmanian tiger genes just to see what would happen. No. 5 Ham-Fisted Religious Websites. The Evangel Cathedral website has an introduction animation with a "Skip Intro" option, but I'm fairly confident that no one has ever used it in the history of the site's existence. The sequence looks like Jesus Christ himself sat over the shoulder of the designer and shouted out ideas to make it more spectacular. What it lacks in message it makes up for in lightning bolts, spinny shooty things and heaps of kick-ass sound effects. It's not until the final scene of righteous souls firing into the air that you're reminded this is a website for a church and then the sequence abruptly stops just as quickly as it started before redirecting to the homepage.
The introduction as a whole is hands down the most ambitious effort I've ever seen to hold the attention of someone without making anything close to a point. Who needs a point when there's a courtyard with a fountain?! Some boxes are smaller than others. Faith is more viscous than you would imagine. 6 Terrifying Ways Crows Are Way Smarter Than You Think.
Mankind has a long and checkered past with crows and ravens: They have been feared as symbols of death, because they're all black and scary, revered as creators of the world because, well, it was either them or the seagulls, and worshiped as trickster gods, because of their baffling intelligence. Intelligent enough, in fact, for us to start worrying ... #6. They Can Remember Your Face Next time you see a group of crows, look closely. Try to remember which one is which, and see if you can tell the difference between them the next time you pass. OK, so the scientists weren't just playing out horror movie fantasies -- they were testing whether the crows could recognize human faces or not. "Wow. Pretty soon, every single crow on the campus knew which masks meant trouble, and wanted the guys wearing them dead. Oh, and also none of the scientists were ever seen again. #5.
I say, is that a west London accent I detect in that screaming gibberish? #4. One. They'll be back any minute now. Weird World The Funny Stuff that Didn t Quite Fit Anywhere Else. 5 Unexpected Downsides of High Intelligence. You're More Likely to Believe Bullshit Getty We're sure that at some point, someone has told you that you can't get anywhere without an education, and for the most part, they're right. And you're much more likely to pursue that education if you're starting out with a high IQ. According to renowned intelligenceologists who painstakingly measured every goddamn thing that you can associate with IQ, test scores were "the best single predictor of an individual's years of education. " Photos.comThough some measurements were admittedly questionable. Why? So What's the Problem? It turns out that all this book learnin' is teaching you more than just the Pythagorean theorem -- it's also making it easier for you to believe some laughably wrong and even seriously weird stuff.
Via Mastermarf.com One problem is that education leads to one overall inaccurate belief: You think you're smarter than you are. Via Smartiq.comWhoa! You're More Likely to Be Self-Destructive Makes sense. Photos.com"Duuuuude. 5 Shocking Ways You Overestimate Yourself. We Think Our Problems Are the Worst We've all read interviews with celebrities, or maybe even friends' blogs, in which they go on and on about how great their lives are, and we wonder what horrible shit we must have done in a past life to be dealt the hand we've got now. Bills, relationships, family, jobs ... everything just sucks. Meanwhile, everyone else in the world is running around with their sex and money and interesting hobbies.
Sure, those people might have some minor inconveniences from time to time, but not like you. Getty"My hands are so full of prostitute I can't put my winnings away. " Studies have found that our pain, our unhappiness, the things that bother us, etc., we perceive as much, much worse than anything that others go through. We also assume that our lives are worse and that we are unhappier than those around us. Part of this self-pity is due to the fact that it's a social norm for everyone to project only the good things about their lives. GettyGod is great! Getty. 6 Natural Disasters That Were Caused by Human Stupidity. We like to mark-up natural disasters to everything from The Weather Channel to a large, invisible bearded man who hangs out on clouds and doesn't wear pants (the ghost of Ernest Hemingway). And while these things may be true, there's no avoiding the fact that we ourselves are responsible for many of the planet-murdering buttfucks that befall our delicate population.
The Draining of Lake Peigneur The Disaster In carpentry there's a saying: "Measure twice, cut once. " Oil drillers used to have a similar saying: "Fuck measurements, let's rock. " "If there's not a hole in the ground by the time I finish this pipe, someone's getting a mustache headbutt. " In 1980, a Texaco oil rig was drilling for petroleum at Lake Peigneur, a Louisiana lake that sits directly on top of a salt mine, and has an average depth of six feet.
At first the water simply trickled down below. Fortunately no workers were killed by the whirlpool. Probably something like this. The Boston Molassacre "Get it? The Disaster: 5 Reasons Pro Wrestlers are the Best Actors in the World. Keep Acting, Even After Being Fired! Keeping up the kayfabe illusion with fans takes multiple layers of fiction and reality, Inception-style. So you get the practice known as a "worked shoot. " This is when it appears that the wrestler has broken out of the script and everyone acts like he's broken the sacred code of kayfabe, when in reality even that was scripted.
So you wind up with some truly ridiculous, convoluted stories like this one: At the height of its popularity, there were several competing wrestling organizations. That's Pillman, and I will provide no context for that picture. In 1996, it was decided that they were going to stage a fake firing of his character. The story goes that Pillman suggested that the firing would be more believable to the public if they released an actual termination document. The next day, he was working for the competing ECW, and later the WWE. The face of one cruel, ruthless, badass ... businessman? Someone Dies in the Ring? 4 Romantic Books to Disgust and Annoy Your Lover. Romantic Mischief The Playful Side of Love Oh no you are not about to, Godek!
This works best if you're dating Batman because it's something a lunatic super villain might already be doing. Warning: filling a briefcase with chalky candy is the kind of gesture that gets your lover to look up the state's laws about how wide a stick he's allowed to swing at his wife. I don't see any way this could backfire. I'm not surprised that this nutbag's idea of naughty is buying too much candy.
If Godek ever gets his brain CAT scanned, the technician will be arrested for child pornography. You stupid fuck, Godek. If I left my woman a stretched human face and attached a note: "I am the Night Hunter. I think Godek learned to write by reading Thundercats Valentines and gay pornography titles. This idea marked the ninth occasion I was almost killed since I started dating a girl named Martin Luther King. Imagine your girlfriend calling her friends to tell them what the lamest thing she ever saw was. Oh, good. 8 Creepy Video Game Urban Legends (That Happen to Be True) EarthBound -- All About Abortion For most people, their only experience with EarthBound (also known as Mother 2 in Japan) is the characters and levels that also appear in the Super Smash Bros. games: little kids with bats and yo-yos in bright, colorful environments.
And that's a pretty accurate representation of about 95 percent of the game, where you run around with four little kids who are trying to save the world by fighting things like bugs and robots and taxicabs. Via WikipediaIt's like Pokemon, but less flashy. But the last hour of the game is something really different from everything that comes before it. First the kids have their souls ripped from their bodies and put into robots. When you finally reach the final boss, Giygas, an evil alien entity who is trying to destroy the world, things start to take a turn for the truly disturbing.
Via screwattack.comTake a look at Giygas' lair, The Devil Machine. The middle part looks remarkably like an endoscopic image of a woman's cervix. 9 Absurd Movie Premises That Actually Happened. The Guy Who Can't Say No From Yes Man The Ridiculous Premise Jim Carrey, never afraid to go back to the same well twice, made two movies about the wacky hijinks and life changes of a guy who arbitrarily can't say certain things. First there was Liar Liar, about a divorced lawyer who couldn't lie because of a magic spell accidentally cast by his son.
Then, 11 years later, there was Yes Man, about a divorced banker who couldn't say the word "no" because ... a seminar told him not to? Could you say no to General Zod? Yeah, the second one kind of makes less sense than the one that had the magic spell. The Reality The film is actually based on a guy in England named Danny Wallace who vowed to spend six months without saying "no" to anyone, all because he ran into a random guy on the bus who told him, "Say yes more.
" GettyBut after a while, it didn't seem to matter somehow. Via SherlockstooshiHe also rules over a small kingdom. The Juror Who Takes Over the Investigation From 12 Angry Men. The 6 Greatest Battlefield Mindfucks. Hernan Cortes Sinks the Boats... His Own In 1519, Hernan Cortes led an exploratory expedition from Cuba into Mexico, which was largely unexplored at the time.
But what Cortes did know was that the mainland supported a gold-rich empire responsible for the disappearance of many of their previous expeditions. This was because of the Aztecs who, as they would soon find out, were cannibalistic warriors who wore the skins of their defeated enemies as trophies. And there were a shitload of Aztecs--about half a million. But Cortes intended to conquer them... with 500 men. Hernan Cortes. The fact that this plan was probably suicide did not escape his men once they were in Mexico. Cortes, in a mindfuck played on his own men that in retrospect probably did little to quell the rumors of insanity, sank his own boats, trapping himself and his men in an Aztec-infested wilderness. "Yes, I sank your boats. "Join me, and you too can sink your own boats with reckless abandon. " They were gone. Savages? 6 Insane Stories of a Magician Who Helped Win WWII. The Suez Canal and the Ol' Razzle Dazzle Maskelyne's next trick would be tougher -- hiding the Suez Canal itself.
And if you're thinking that building a dummy canal a mile away was an option, it wasn't. The landmark was too well-mapped and too bloody huge. Also not an option: turning off its lights, covering it with a tarp or staging a Broadway-style musical on its banks in hopes of charming the Germans to death. Say what you will about the Nazi high command: They appreciated the shit out of Rodgers and Hammerstein. No, what this operation needed was some razzle dazzle. Specifically, the A-Force used revolving tin mirrors with spinning searchlights, which created light cones that stretched nine miles across.
Via Maskelyne MagicYou just got Maskelyned! Oh, we almost forgot to mention that other sources say absolutely none of this happened. Via Maskelyne MagicMaskelyne, moments before stealing the pyramids and replacing them with replicas. Seriously, the man was goddamn Keyser Soze.