Welcome. The True Strange News Archives is a 20+ year grab-bag of generally positive news and interesting stuff. Discover and explore unusual science breakthroughs, odd ideas and unlikely true events from around the world. Purposefully ad free, pure education/entertainment, because that’s the way the Internet began.
As Susan sits chatting to a nurse in a London clinic, a light tapping sound by her head signals that parts of her brain are being zapped by thousands of tiny electro-magnetic pulses from a machine plugged into the wall. The 50 year-old doctor is among growing ranks of people with so-called treatment-resistant depression, and… Read More »
The French artist and photographer paints geometric shapes onto abandoned walls, giving the three dimensional spaces the guise of two dimensionality when captured on film. The photos couple the surreal qualities of painting with the truth-telling promise of photography, depicting, in a single image, art’s ability to create the impossible. “You can only see these… Read More »
Hundreds gather in Texas to discuss Sasquatch sightings. “… there have been more than 2,550 seemingly credible Bigfoot sightings reported in North America the past century, according to Christopher L. Murphy’s 2004 book ?Meet the Sasquatch.? … Colyer and others estimate that about 2,000 are in North America today, reclusive nocturnal animals living in thickly… Read More »
You may think you’re doing nothing at night, but to your brain, sleep means finally having some spare time to take stock of the day’s events. Freed from the distractions of recording new experiences, a deeply sleeping brain can organize and strengthen memories, especially emotional ones. For Katherina Hauner, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University Feinberg… Read More »
The Neolithic passage tomb of Seefin stands on top of a 650m high mountain in North Wicklow. It appears to be part of a series of tombs, as a number of other peaks in the area like Seefingan and Seahan also have similar large cairns covering passage tombs. This would have been an incredibly difficult… Read More »
The world’s most popular grain is also the deadliest for the human metabolism. Modern wheat isn’t really wheat at all and is a “perfect, chronic poison,” according to Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist, author and leading expert on wheat. … Approximately 700 million tons of wheat are now cultivated worldwide making it the second most-produced… Read More »
Mark Twain once said: “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.” He was making an unknowing reference to the , which drives the weather over North America and Europe like a high-altitude conveyor belt. But increasingly, the jet stream is taking a more circuitous route over the… Read More »
The overgrown ruins of a 2,300-year-old Mayan Temple in Belize were partially destroyed by contractors who wanted to use the limestone bricks for gravel to build a village road, according to the National Institute of Culture and Heritage. “There was massive destruction and there’s very little we can do about it now,” John Morris, an… Read More »
You never know when a monkey is going to steal your hubcap. I’m not sure what they do with them, but this is proof that they do take them.
One Maryland city is considering an amendment to lower its voting age to 16, which would make it home to America’s youngest voters. The proposal [PDF] would permit Takoma Park residents who are 16 years old on or by election day to register to vote and cast ballots. It applies only to local elections, such… Read More »
Wild fires turn millions of hectares of vegetation into charcoal each year. An international team of researchers led by Thorsten Dittgar from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and Rudolf Jaffâ© from Florida International University’s Southeast Environmental Research Center in Miami has now shown that this charcoal does not remain in the… Read More »
The best way to understand something–such as life–is to build it yourself. That’s why, determined to understand the way groups move, a team of New York University physicists set out to create particles that could imitate the way flocks of birds, schools of fish and even colonies of bacteria organize and move together. What… Read More »
Weather conditions were “looking real good” for NASA’s Friday night launch of a small robotic spacecraft on a mission to investigate the mysterious moon dust that Apollo astronauts encountered decades ago, a spokesman said. The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer spacecraft, known as LADEE, is scheduled for launch at 11:27 p.m. EDT on Friday… Read More »
“Exceptionally rare” conjoined whale twins have been found dead in a lagoon in Mexico. Fishermen found the grey whale calves in the Ojo de Liebre lagoon in the Baja California peninsula, which opens up to the Pacific Ocean. The four-metre (13 feet) long creatures, which weighed nearly half a tonne, were linked at the mid-section.… Read More »
To combine these images, a simple cutting and pasting job would not suffice. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had… Read More »
Waterproof fabrics that whisk away sweat could be the latest application of microfluidic technology developed by bioengineers at the University of California, Davis.The new fabric works like human skin, forming excess sweat into droplets that drain away by themselves, said inventor Tingrui Pan, professor of biomedical engineering. One area of research in Pan’s Micro-Nano Innovations… Read More »
Narcolepsy is a chronic disorder of the central nervous system that affects the ability of brain cells to regulate sleep cycles as normal. The swine flu vaccine, Pandemrix by GlaxoSmithKline, is believed to trigger an immune response that may cause the onset of narcolepsy in rare cases. This reaction likely occurs due to the… Read More »
A report appearing in the pro-regime China Times brags that China’s launch of the Long March-3B rocket earlier this week is part of a long term plan to turn the moon into a Star Wars-style “death star” from which the PLA could launch missiles against any target on Earth. It all sounds like something straight… Read More »