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The Mary Sue: “Google Maps Quashes Rumors That They’re a Bunch of Remorseless Donkey Killers”
Google was in the news yet again this past Monday when the [I]nternet community bore witness to a disturbing picture of what appeared to be a donkey that was struck by a roving Google Maps Street View car in the Kweneng region of Botswana, Africa. News of the donkey-related vehicular homicide spread quickly and caused quite the uproar on various social media outlets—despite what others may say, the Internet truly does care for the welfare of pack animals—demanding that Google stop hiding behind its money piles and explain itself. Caving from the heat brought down on them, the company made a statement today to deny any and all allegations that they’re a bunch of monstrous donkey slayers.
The Mary Sue: “Early Land-Dwelling Animals Moved About Like Seals, Probably Didn’t Balance Balls on Their Noses”
One of the greatest nemeses of any paleontologist, aside from scarce government grants and scant paychecks, is the very rock they chip away at to reach the fossils within. Most of the time it shatters with the well-placed strike of a hammer and chisel, but there are frustrating occasions when rock decides to be an impenetrable jerk for the day and hold fossils hostage. That’s an especially frustrating result when the fossils in question could potentially reshape an entire field of study. New applications of technology are making it possible to get around—or at least inside—stubborn rocks that refuse to yield their fossilized secrets.
The Mary Sue: “IBM Scientist Once Taught Watson Supercomputer Urban Dictionary, Made the Best Mistake of His Life”
Parrots and supercomputers are pretty similar despite one being a living organism and the other an artificial intelligence destined to subjugate the human race, especially when it comes to teaching them new things that they’ll retain and repeat back verbatim. The Watson supercomputer, hailed at one point as perhaps the most sophisticated and intelligent piece of hardware known to man, more than proved this unlikely correlation when IBM scientist Eric Brown decided back in 2010 that what Watson needed more than anything was the kind of youthful street savvy that only the Urban Dictionary can deliver.
The Mary Sue: “Yeah! Shake It, Baby: Feathered Dinosaurs Shook Tail Feathers in Courtship Rituals”
There’s a reason why, despite even the best of efforts, us human males egregiously fail at trying to attract the attention of our female counterparts—and evolution’s to blame. Lacking the colorful and hypnotic menagerie of feathers that our avian friends are fortunate to be sporting, humanity’s male population has only succeeded in sealing its own fate in unrequited love, while birds continue to rub this sad fact in our faces on a regular basis. As if our situation couldn’t get any worse than it is now, recent fossil evidence has shown that feathered dinosaurs known as Oviraptors—hailing from Mongolia—had nearly the same kind of tail end plumage akin to their modern cousins, even going as far as having the ability to shake them about and get a potential mate to notice the exotic dance number.
The Mary Sue: “Oh Me, Oh My, Rare Tumor Causes Hair to Grow on Man’s Eye”
Human hair has that unique quality of being both a blessing and a curse. While it gifts us with luscious locks that can make others swoon, hair also has the inconvenient habit of sprouting out of places we’d rather not have it grow—typically resulting in the reluctant use of tweezers that leaves us whimpering like a child. Still, perhaps we should be fortunate that rogue strands of hair aren’t growing on more sensitive parts of our face, like, say, our very eyes. A 19-year-old man from Iran learned in the most startling way possible that, thanks to a rare tumor known as a limbal dermoid on the surface of his eyeball, hair can grow wherever it damn well pleases.
The Mary Sue: “Mom Buys Her Son New iPhone, Channels Inner Moses and Presents Him with 18 iPhone Commandments”
Parents can be understandably hesitant to purchase smartphones and the like for their children. Not wanting her child to become an unsocial techie, a woman named Janell Burley Hofmann bought her 13-year-old son Gregory an iPhone as a Christmas present. “Gee, thanks, Mom,” you can hear little Gregory delightfully say, but that was before Mrs. Hofmann went biblical and blindsided her son with a litany of 18 commandment-like responsibilities to be mindful of now that he has a new phone.
The Mary Sue: “No Warrant, No Problem: U.S. Senate Drops Amendment Requiring a Warrant to Search Private Emails”
Just when you thought it was safe to send your friends funny chimpanzee videos. Recently, the U.S. Senate presented President Obama with an amendment to the Video Privacy Protection Act that would allow Netflix to override the act’s prohibition of disclosing one’s video rentals without expressed consent and automatically posting them to the individual’s Facebook timeline—essentially letting the world know you rented Battlefield Earth on more than one occasion. In addition to this was a second amendment to a different act that, if signed, required the federal government to obtain a warrant before searching email and other content stored in the cloud. Approved not too long ago by the Senate Judiciary Committee, this amendment was cut from the legislative package, granting the feds carte blanche to continue to rummage through your private messages should it prove conducive to an investigation.
The Mary Sue: “Archaeologists Unearth Remains of Man That Tried to Reason With Volcano, Turned Out About Like You’d Expect”
The expression “don’t negotiate with terrorists” certainly didn’t exist in sixth century Japan, but something more along the lines of not trying to reason with volcanoes is a likely possibility. Archaeologists uncovered the preserved remains of a man clad in armor, at a site they’ve dubbed the “Pompeii of Japan,” who they believe died attempting to beseech an erupting volcano to maybe, y’know, not rain down fire and ash on his people. Going by what he was wearing at the time of his death, analysts guess that the man counted himself among the upper castes of Japanese society, though they’re still debating whether he was an incredibly brave soul or just one of the many people throughout recorded history that have made huge mistakes.
The Mary Sue: “Man-Made Swirling Vortexes of Doom Can Be an Eco-Friendly Power Source”
Whenever we think of tornadoes, more often than not the image of an unstoppable natural engine of destruction wreaking havoc on unsuspecting farmers in rural America typically comes to mind—that and the 1996 Bill Paxton vehicle Twister. Canadian entrepreneur and engineer Louis Michaud, on the other hand, sees a potentially eco-friendly new source of energy. Meddling with the most primal forces of nature, Michaud has outlined a method to create and harness these swirling vortexes of doom as a means of powering turbines that generate useable energy. The plan may sound like the dastardly machinations of a comic book super villain, but the project has actually piqued the interest of a high-profile financial backer.