Guest writing by Brett Wollam

Science....well theres not much to say. Science can be a very disturbing topic espically when it comes to biology, like why do they make us learn that stuff in school is GROSS we are just kids we dont need to know about DNA and what the technical term for my leg is cuz personally i really dont care a leg is a leg. Dont even get me started on physics. What is up with those formulas?!?! Its like 4993-4345*5433*67475%&#8599008(*(*&^%5 Ridiculous!!!! WHO CARES!! Thank you for your time..

Some Of The All Around Crepiest Places On Earth...

Aokigahara Forest

Aokigahara is a woodland at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan that makes The Blair Witch Project forest look like Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. It probably has something to do with all the dead bodies scattered around.
What Niagara Falls is to weddings, Aokigahara is to suicide. How many suicides does it takes for a place to get that reputation? A dozen? Fifty?
More than 500 people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s.
The trend has supposedly started after Seicho Matsumoto published his novel Kuroi Kaiju where two of his characters commit suicide there. After that-always eager to prove they are bizarrely susceptible to suggestion-hundreds of Japanese people have hanged themselves among the countless trees of the Aokigahara forest, which is reportedly so thick that even in high noon it's not hard to find places completely surrounded by darkness.

The Overtoun Bridge

Located near Scotland's charming little village of Milton in the peaceful burgh of Dumbarton, the Overtoun Bridge is a local arch construction where no human beings have ever died in any suspicious circumstances whatsoever over the last few decades.
However, during that span, for reasons we can't begin to possibly understand, hundreds and hundreds of dogs have killed themselves there. It appears that dogs have been plunging off of Overtoun since the early 60s, at a rate of one animal a month... bringing the total number today to around 600 mutts, who for some reason, decided to end it all.
And we're not talking about a series of unfortunate accidents that could have been avoided with a simple guard rail. People who actually witnessed the reported dogs willingly climbing the parapet wall and leaping to their doom with dumb doggy grins on their faces. Whether they were crying blood remains to be confirmed.
...
To further drive the point home, it has been observed that certain dogs that jumped off the bridge and survived, climbed back up and THREW THEMSELVES TO THEIR DEATHS ALL OVER AGAIN.

The Sedlec Ossuary

Remember when we said Aokigahara was the Niagara falls of suicide? Well, for centuries the abbot in the small Czech town of Sedlec has been the Niagara Falls for dead people, regardless of cause of death. Ever since someone sprinkled soil from the Holy Land on the local cemetery in the 13th century, people from all over Europe started demanding to be buried there and the Sedlec graveyard kept growing until 1870, when the priests decided to finally do something about all those surplus bones lying around. Something insane.
Today, the Sedlec Ossuary is a chapel famous for being decorated with tens of thousands of human bones. This macabre style of interior design was the work of Czech woodcarver Frantisek Rint who, for some reason, was hired to organize the church's extensive skeleton collection. The results were huge mounds of human remains in the four corners of the chapel, a terrifying chandelier built from every bone in the human body, and a massive skull coat of arms adorning the entrance.

Prypiat

Prypiat is in the northern Ukraine and once housed the workers and scientists of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant. Founded in the 70s, it held as many as 50,000 people. Then in 1986, according to a footnote in the official Soviet records, there was a small malfunction in the Chernobyl reactor, so for safety reasons the city was evacuated.
...
The city is located in what is known as the Zone of Alienation, the 30-kilometer radius directly affected by the Chernobyl "minor technical difficulty" over 20 years ago. Despite that, Prypiat is now opened to the public because the radiation levels have apparently went down significantly over the years. We guess we have a different view on radiation than the government of Ukraine. They obviously have a scale for it, while we consider any radiation a very bad thing.

Aside from the inherent risk of getting bit by a radioactive snail and becoming the lamest superhero ever, there is another reason why you will never see us among the tourists occasionally visiting Prypiat.
The nursery. We told you this was a place built for families and wouldn't you know it, they have a nursery, which according to certain claims is currently paved with baby shoes and abandoned dolls. So, Prypiat is basically an abandoned radioactive ghost Soviet baby amusement park.


Source: http://www.cracked.com/

The Creepiest Things Hiding in Your DNA

In my free time, there is little I like to do more than search the internet for all of the bizarre happenings that haunt as well as amaze us all. Science, life, and the world are true joys, and when I find something that really hits my interests, I absolutely love to share it with the world.

Here is a small part from one of my most recently struck goldmines of interest;

Ancient Diseases

In the distant past, retroviruses picked up by our ancestors would occasionally find their way into the sex organs, and the newly virused-up DNA was passed along to their children. As a result of all this virus-laden boning, we modern humans have about 100,000 of these microscopic gate-crashers cluttering up our DNA. When you add in the assorted genetic trash they've left behind, more than 40 percent of human DNA is made up of ancient, sinister and almost certainly cursed viruses.
But these viruses can't do much harm today, right? Oh, how we love your unflinching optimism, rhetorical question, but you're wrong again: Tests on the cerebrospinal fluid of schizophrenic patients (that's science-talk for "the brain juice of crazies") have revealed unexpectedly high levels of a particular endogenous retrovirus. This suggests that the misunderstood mental illness is, in fact, a long-term side effect of a retrovirus that we all have inside us already. It's no good locking the doors, people; that crazy is calling from inside the house.

In people who are genetically inclined, this retrovirus can be "switched on" by a separate viral infection that occurs around the time of birth -- herpes, toxoplasmosis (aka Cat Zombie Disease) or even plain old influenza. Studies have found that babies born in winter months -- around flu season -- are at greater risk of developing not just schizophrenia, but bipolar disorder and multiple sclerosis later in life, suggesting that all three conditions might just be different reactions to the same retrovirus. Basically, if you catch a cold as a baby, you could end up building bombs in a shack to combat the lizard people who've infiltrated our government, and it's all thanks to the insanity that lives in everybody's blood.

Grandparent-Based Death Time Bombs

A study in Sweden revealed a strange pattern in a rural community that had gone through periods of both famine and abundance in the 19th century. The study found that the grandsons of men who'd had childhoods coinciding with abundant years -- i.e., the ones who had stuffed their faces with grain for a season or two -- had a life expectancy of 32 years less than the grandsons of those who had experienced famine, with the deaths caused mainly by diabetes, heart disease and presumably the shame of having extremely fat grandparents. Daughters with gluttonous grandmothers suffered a similar fate.

The Twin That You Murdered as a Fetus

In 2002, a woman named Lydia Fairchild submitted DNA tests for her three children as part of a welfare claim, only to have the results prove that genetically, she wasn't the mother. Since DNA is considered the gold standard of medical evidence, she was accused of somehow stealing the children, even after the poor woman gave birth to another "nonrelated" child right in front of a social worker. Finally, more extensive testing unlocked the mystery: Her ovaries had a different set of DNA than her bloodstream. In other words, she'd given birth to her dead sister's children. And then, presumably, she never stopped screaming.

Again, that's no fluke: In another case, a woman getting typed for a kidney transplant found out that one son was genetically hers, while two more belonged to her similarly dead sibling. A teenage boy being treated for an undescended testicle turned out to be carrying an ovary on that side from a twin sister -- as if an undescended testicle wasn't going to get him made fun of enough, now he's half ghost-woman as well? Jesus, screw you too, genetics. Chimerism is thought to be rare but also massively underdiagnosed, since it's undetectable outside of DNA testing, which doesn't happen to normal folks all that often. Potential symptoms can include slightly different-colored eyes, uneven skin pigmentation and waking up at night to find 'YOU KILLED ME' written on the bathroom mirror just before being strangled by your own reflection.

Article Source: http://www.cracked.com/

Irvine Welsh- Trainspotting - The First Day Of The Edinburgh Festival

Original Passage: "An auld boot gies us the evil eye as ah pass her oan the wey doon the bus. No doubt ah'm ****** boggin n look a real mess. It doesane bother us. Nothing exists in ma life except masel and Michael Forrester and the sickening distance between us: a distance being steadily reduced by this bus."

Notable Elements/ Style:

• Written in an accent for exaggeration
• Personal account, first person

Context:

• Anxious, making their way towards something they want

Imitation Passage: "Ahm si'n down n ah can't keep my fee from dancin roun n my knees from shakin, only three more weeks n tha days are shrinkin already. June forf is commin on quick n aftr tha, aftr tha is all home free. Nah more papers nah more wurk, jus fresh air n lovely people."

Irvine Welsh

 Irvine Welsh is without a doubt a unique writer. From Trainspotting to Glue to Skagboys, his works have caused a cult like uproar in admiration for his stories. People have described him as the best thing to happen to British literature in decades, and have even claimed his books deserve to sell more copies than the bible. His stories are grand and his style truly unique. In Trainspotting, he uses a series of loosely related short stories, focusing on the struggles of young people living in run down housing schemes, jumping back and forth from first person to third, and even switching between a formal style of writing and writing in a Scottish accent. Not only has he written 8 novels, but he has also released 4 short story collections, written 3 play scripts, directed music videos, short films, and multiple full-length motion pictures. He has even spent time as a DJ.


I find a strange beauty in his writing that I have not been able to find with any other writer in the countless books I have read. His story lines are marvelous, and his style is something no person could copy. He is a truly a unique and amazing writer, and the inspiration for much of the writing I do myself.

Werner Karl Heisenberg

Werner Karl Heisenberg, (Born 1901, and died in 1976)  a name most of you probably don't know, is truly a revolutionary in science. He is known as the Father of Quantum Mechanics, a study of subatomic particles that rocked the world of science out of its foundation. Quantum Mechanics is a section of science many find controversial, it leads to theories such as String Theory and Chaos Theory. Science is a field that is always developing, always changing, but when a change comes along that seems too drastic, too other-worldly, it is often looked down on. Even though his idea was one of the ones surely to be looked down on, Heisenberg went forward with is work. Today Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Physics are still widely researched, constantly being developed, but this amazing part of science would not be so if Heisenberg didn’t stand strong by his idea and fight against the minds that were too scared to accept this beautiful phenomenon.

10 Rare Cloud Formations.

1. Nacreous Clouds

2. Mammatus Clouds

3. Altocumulus Castelanus

4. Noctilucent Clouds

5. Mushroom Clouds

6. Cirrus Kelvin-Helmholtz

7. Lenticular Clouds

8. Roll Clouds

9. Shelf Clouds

10. Stratocumulus Clouds