Category:
Nature

Music of the Plants

Is your plant a budding Beethoven? From Music of the Plants:

Since the 1970s, Damanhur — a Federation of Communities with its own constitution, culture, art, music, currency, school and uses of science and technology (www.damanhur.org) — has researched communication with the plant world. As part of this research, they created an instrument able to perceive the electromagnetic variations from the surface of plant leaves to the root system and translated them into sound... By deciphering and registering the impulses and interactions of plants, they have developed a device that uses a MIDI interface to transform the plant's resistance from a leaf to the root system into music.


You can listen to the music of your own plants for a price starting at €397 (about $480).

Posted By: Alex - Thu Jan 21, 2021 - Comments (0)
Category: Music, Nature

The Society to Save Rocks Rockathon

One does not generally think of an assortment of random boulders as a heritage site or playground. But the Society to Save Rocks has a mission to promote the use and protection of such places, and celebrates in their annual Hyderabad Rockathon.

Oh, yes: and snakes.







Posted By: Paul - Thu Jan 21, 2021 - Comments (2)
Category: Nature, Parades and Festivals, India

Help, I’m a Rock!



Their Wikipedia page.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Nov 08, 2020 - Comments (6)
Category: Music, Nature, Avant Garde, Surrealism, 1960s

The Snow Beauty of Yakutia

Part of our series on odd beauty contests.

The first (?) contest was apparently held in 2017.

Read about it here.



What appears to be the home page has lots of pix and even videos of the 2018 contest. But I cannot find reference to competitions for 2019 or 2020.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Oct 06, 2020 - Comments (2)
Category: Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Ethnic Groupings, Nature, Natural Resources, Russia

Pronouncing the Scientific Names of Seashells of North America



You can download the MP3 files here. Note: clicking the link does not initiate the download. You choose to do so at the new page.

R. Tucker Abbott begins with a statement sure to dissuade us from listening further. "Actually, there are no official correct pronunciations of these Latin names..."

Source.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Jul 28, 2020 - Comments (2)
Category: Boredom, Languages, Nature, Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, 1960s

The Frank Landslide



The Wikipedia page.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Oct 20, 2019 - Comments (1)
Category: Death, Destruction, Disasters, Nature, 1900s, North America

The Tree-Sitting Fad of 1930



A national craze for a short time.

Article here.

Another article.

Not everyone was cooperative, as seen below.




Source.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Jun 25, 2019 - Comments (1)
Category: Fads, Nature, 1930s

Woodpecker eats brains

Nature is brutal. And apparently, woodpeckers are particularly so.

Smithsonian.com offers some background info:

In 2015, Harold Greeney trained his camera on a mourning dove nest stitched into the crook of a cactus. As an ornithologist, Greeney studies the love lives of birds—cooperative breeding in nightingale-thrushes, parenting strategies of spotted barbtails, breeding biology in speckled hummingbirds, you name it. His goal today was to capture the breeding habits of doves in an urban setting. Instead, he captured perhaps the most horrifying bird-on-bird behavior the world has ever seen...

Greeney has a possible explanation as to what’s happening—but it probably won't make you feel any better. When Gila woodpeckers get thirsty, he speculates, they crack open a couple of nestling heads like you or I might open a six-pack.

Warning: the video is not for the squeamish!

Posted By: Alex - Thu Jun 20, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Nature, Violence

Glacier Rub

I guess you can't keep a good (?) idea down. Particularly poignant product name in an era of climate change.





Posted By: Paul - Sat Jun 08, 2019 - Comments (1)
Category: Body, Head, Business, Advertising, Nature, Patent Medicines, Nostrums and Snake Oil, Twentieth Century, Twenty-first Century

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Alex Boese
Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes.

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Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.

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