DO NOT WANT!

If the end of the world, whether by robots, zombies, meteors or cute and fuzzy bunnies happened tomorrow, I would NOT eat this!

I for one welcome our future ursine robotic overlords

Aw, isn't it cute? A robot bear, designed to help nurses lift patients in hospitals. Now the panicky out there will say, oh great, more soldiers for the future robot uprising. I think perhaps these cuddly bearbots will be the ones to carry us to our battery pods and plug us into a power plant. Either that or there are fierce mandibles beneath that cute exterior. Let's just hope their creators have programmed them with at least #1 of Asimov's Laws of Robotics!

"Icicle Deaths Eliminated By New Ice Melting Technology Gutter Guard"

Please note the first two words of the above headline from a new press release out today: Icicle deaths. Now I am not trying to make light of what is obviously a very real danger where there is snow, but having never lived in such climes, I had never really given much thought about it, till now. And frankly, hearing about it and seeing pictures like this made me think: icicles should be wiped out! Well fortunately, the good people at Gutter Glove can do just that, with their new ice-melting gutter guards! Whew, that was close. No need to panic. At least till it snows. And now I am going to go out and be a Svengali for a new death metal band I'm forming called Icicle Death. I think they could very easily open for Slayer and Megadeth. Just sayin'. (Thanks to John of You Are Hated for the inspiration!)

Carnivorous Plants Capable of Eating Rats

Yes, you read that right. Giant, freaking, carnivorous plants, large enough that they are able to trap and consume rats. Rats. Ok, last time I checked, rats are bigger than most people's hands, so really, what the scientists who found this new breed of pitcher plant in a little jungle of horrors in the Philippines should really be saying is: "hey, maybe you shouldn't stick your hand in there." Ok, at this point, I think I would rather be on the losing side of a robot uprising than the possibility of a killer plant uprising. Thank you to reader Moxie for the lead on this particular panic inducing story!

"We Are 10 Years Away From a Functional Artifical Human Brain"

Oh yes, this will go over well. An artificial human brain? Um, helloooo? Did any of the smart people out there who think this stuff up ever watch Terminator? Blade Runner? I, Robot? Or hell, Saturn III? (That right there folks is the first mention of Saturn III in 2009). I mean, yes I get the altruistic aspects of this idea, but seriously people, creating robotic intelligence is one thing, but messing with our own organic hard drives to make something artificial out of them? Did none of you watch Deep Blue Sea?? I for one would prefer to achieve immortality the old fashion way: by using a Sorcerer's Stone! ; )
Inspiration for this post goes to this guy, whose blog you should also be reading.

Twitter is Down! Again! Go to Defcon 1!

NOOOOOOOO!!! Screamed the Twitter-pated Twitterverse. It was as if millions of voices tweeted out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. Even the Fail Whale has failed! Great Caeser's Ghost! What does this mean?? Um, well, let's see. No updating on what lunch trucks we are eating from. No shooting off 140-characters-or-less missives about cats sleeping on our keyboards. Whatever shall we do??

UPDATED!

It's back up. Whew. That was a close one.

When worlds collide!

EVERYBODY IN THE PAVO CONSTELLATION SYSTEM PANIC!

In the words of Leeloo, "Boom! Big badda boom!" Smart people with telescopes have found that one planet got too close to another in the recent stellar past. Well, no, lets be accurate. One planet smacked the holy living heck out of another in a planetary collision that not even Michael Bay could possibly commit to film. Those same scientists say this is similar to how our Moon formed, when something the size of Mars smacked little baby Earth upside its newly formed noggin. My favorite quote from the article above is the description of the collision: "a huge fiery blast, over in the blink of an eye and full of fury," which reads like a Twitter-review of a rock concert.

The Large Hadron Collider Turns on in November

Sweet! They are going to turn this thing on in a couple months. Get your "sucked into a man-made black hole" insurance policy ready. Blah blah blah, yes, yes, they say its safe, but don't we have better things to drop the kind of coin that has been spent on what is essentially a giant metal doughnut buried under Europe? Personally I think training ninja kittens to repel the zombie and robot uprisings that are coming soon is one way. But that's just me. I am going to laugh if the thing blows another fuse.

TWITTER IS DOWN! EVERYBODY PANIC!

RED ALERT! PUT THE KETTLE ON!

ZOMG! It's the end of the world as we know it and I can't tweet! Twitter has been down since 6am Pacific time this morning. Good grief! What are we to do! How will we tweet about lunch plans? Or Michael Jackson? Or even, #irememberthefirsttimeidrankbeeratanamusementparkwithablindfold hashtags? It sounds like it is a denial of service attack. Nice. Why don't the people who do this grow up, move out of their parents' basements and kiss a girl. Just sayin'.

UPDATED

Looks like Twitter is back up or at least is running better. Stand down, no need to panic.

Russian Subs off the Coast - Sean Connery Unavailable for Comment

Ok, not sure how panicky I feel about this one, but it appears that we've got Crazy Ivans off the East Coast. At least two Russian subs were tracked to withing 200 miles of the coast. Not the really bad ones with things that go boom in large fireballs mind you, but still, they have things that could sink ships. This is both kind of scary and kind of cool, in a Jack Ryan sort of way. I would like to think they are just cooling their heels out there, listening to our rock & roll before sailing to Havana. One thing is for sure, the Cold War gave us much better movie villains.

Science Resurrects Prehistoric Spiders

That intentionally "whip you into a needless frenzy" headline is on purpose. Because in truth, the smart people who do things like this have only done so by way of 3D X-Ray technology. Which, looking at these evil looking monsters, is already crossing the line. These things are gone for a reason (and thank goodness too).
The article about these 8-legged nightmares doesn't say how big they got, but putting the words pre-historic and spider together conjures images I would much rather not think about. Fortunately, no one is trying to clone one of these. Yet.