A One-Way Ticket to Mars, Apply Now (+video)

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Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Step right up and prove why you should get a one-way ticket to Mars! Well, wait — you might want to know a little more about the venture first.

A Dutch company called Mars One began looking Monday for volunteer astronauts to fly to Mars. Departure for the Red Planet is scheduled for 2022, landing seven months later in 2023.

The space travelers will return … never. They will finish out their lives on Mars, representatives from the nonprofit said.

“It’s likely that there will be a crematorium,” said CEO Bas Lansdorp. “It’s up to the people on Mars to decide what to do with their dead.”

Still, the company said it has received more than 10,000 e-mails from interested would-be spacefarers.

Watch video here:

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Hubble Telescope Takes Stunning New Nebula Photo for 23rd Birthday

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Photo Credit: AURA/STSCI

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a spectacular new image of an iconic nebula to celebrate its 23 years of peering deep into the heavens.

The Hubble observatory, which launched on April 24, 1990, captured the Horsehead Nebula in infrared light, peering through obscuring veils of dust to reveal the object’s hidden features.

“The result is a rather ethereal and fragile-looking structure, made of delicate folds of gas — very different to the nebula’s appearance in visible light,” mission officials wrote in an image description today (April 19). The new observations allowed astronomers to create a dazzling video of the Horsehead Nebula based on Hubble’s photos.

The Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, is located about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion (The Hunter). The Horsehead is a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust, like other nebulae, and the light from a nearby star gives it a beautiful glow.

The object is a popular observing target, and Hubble has taken numerous Horsehead photos over the years — including in 2001, to celebrate the telescope’s 11-year anniversary.

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A Dog-Eat-Dog World

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Photo Credit: Vanderlei Almeida

If the package of dog food that you regularly purchase for your dog had a picture of a dead dog on the front accompanied by the words, “Fortified with 100 percent natural dog meat!” would you still buy it? Probably not. And yet this might very well be what you are scanning at the grocery store checkout and scooping into your dog’s bowl.

Dog food is made from many strange things, only a few of which are evident in the list of ingredients. The packaging tends to depict fat, healthy chickens; vegetables that look like they ought to win a ribbon at the county fair; and either thick, juicy steaks or sedate-looking cows. But at around $15 for a 15-pound bag of dry food, nobody is spending enough money to turn a T-bone into dog food. The stuff that ends up in dog food is material that can’t be sold as food for humans. We have different standards for what our animals eat from what we would put in our own mouths, but where should we draw the line?

Under Food and Drug Administration regulations, only about 50 percent of a cow can be sold for human consumption. The hide, bones, digestive system and it contents, brain, feces, udders, and various other undesirable parts are all left over after a cow is slaughtered and butchered. The stuff that can’t even go into hotdogs gets consolidated and shipped to rendering plants. Slaughterhouses that handle pigs and chickens also send their leftovers to rendering plants. So do many other facilities that find themselves with large volumes of otherwise unusable dead animal parts, including animal shelters and veterinary clinics that euthanize a lot of animals.

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Oregon Juror Jailed for Texting During Trial

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Photo Credit: Joi

A judge in Oregon noticed an unexpected glow on a juror’s chest while the courtroom lights were dimmed during video evidence in an armed-robbery trial.

The juror, it seemed, was texting.

Marion County Circuit Judge Dennis Graves cleared the courtroom and excused all jurors except 26-year-old Benjamin Kohler…

Graves held Kohler in contempt, and Kohler spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday in the county jail. He was released Wednesday night.

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Reuters Accidentally Publishes George Soros Obituary

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Publications often prepare obituaries for famous living individuals, particularly ones who are near death. Publications don’t, however, generally prematurely publish them.

Thursday evening, Reuters accidentally published its obituary of the wealthy liberal business magnate and political financier George Soros, who is alive and well at 82.

“George Soros, who died XXX at age XXX, was a predatory and hugely successful financier and investor, who argued paradoxically for years against the same sort of free-wheeling capitalism that made him billions,” his obituary reads. It went live at 5:41 p.m. EST and was up for about 10 minutes.

The obit continued to say that Hungarian-born billionaire was known as the “man who broke the Bank of England” for “helping force the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which devalued the pound,” but put $1 billion in Soros’ own bank account in 1992.

He was also blamed for the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when Soros Fund Management sold the Thai baht and Malaysian ringgit short.

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Man Witnesses Boston Marathon Bombings – then Watches Deadly Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion after Returning Home

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Photo Credit: AP

People keep asking Joe Berti if he feels unlucky.

A bomb exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon moments after Berti finished the race. Two days later, he was in his home state of Texas when he saw a fertilizer plant explode near Waco.

“I was just like, ‘I can’t believe this!’” said Berti, who said he had never witnessed an explosion before. Then he thought: “I just want to get out of here and get away from all these explosions.”

But Berti, as it turns out, is far from unlucky. Instead, he feels fortunate. He left both tragedies unscathed, while members of his running group and his wife – who was closer to the Boston explosion than he was – were also unhurt.

“It’s a miracle,” he said Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press. “People keep saying, ‘Don’t you feel unlucky?’ and I was actually the opposite – saying not only do I not feel unlucky, but I feel blessed that my wife could be 10 yards from the explosion and not have a scratch.”

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Elephant Dung Beer Sells Out in Minutes

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Photo Credit: The Drink Business

The beer, which is called Un, Kono Kuro, is made using coffee beans that have passed through an elephant.

The Sankt Gallen brewery called the beer a “chocolate stout”, despite it not containing any chocolate. The coffee beans used in the beer come from elephants at Thailand’s Golden Triangle Elephant Foundation, which cost over US$100 per 35 grams. The beans are so expensive as 33kgs of beans in the mouth yields 1kg of useable coffee beans.

The beans are definitely a candidate for one of the top 10 weirdest beer ingredients.

Mr Sato, from Japanese website RocketNews24.com, tasted the beer and said: “After taking my first sip there was an initial bitterness that got washed over by a wave of sweetness. Following that, a mellow body rolled in and spread out through my mouth.

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Global Warming? Honey Bees Dying Due to Record Cold

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Photo Credit: Reuters

The cold winter hasn’t just upset retailers trying to sell spring clothes.

The freezing temperatures have also led to shrinking honeybee populations in the U.S., according to George Hansen, president of the American Beekeeping Federation. This may seem like small potatoes – if not for the fact that honeybees pollinate $15 billion of U.S. crops, according to the USDA.

“We’re probably looking at 40% losses of colonies over this winter,” says George Hansen, the president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

Who’s Getting Stung?

Beekeepers and honey producers say they’ll be the first to get stung by poor honeybee health. Declining colony numbers are thought to be caused by a number of factors, including pesticides and the mysterious “Colony Collapse Disorder,” which Hansen says causes bees to suddenly disappear from the hive.

“I’ve seen a 65% loss over the winter … generally the loss would only range from 5% to 15%,” says Cathy Wolko of the Connecticut-based Humble Honey Bee Honey Company.

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Police: Stolen Diamond Engagement Ring Swallowed By Thief

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Photo Credit: Facebook

A Manchester, N.H., man was arrested Thursday after he attempted to steal a diamond engagement ring by swallowing it at Bellman’s Jewelers, reported WMUR-New Hampshire.

52-year-old Ronald Perley allegedly attempted to flee with a $2,000 white gold and diamond ring but was stopped by employee-controlled safety door looks.

“The gentleman walks in and says, ‘I’m looking for an engagement ring,’ so she brings him over to the showcase and she starts showing him a few rings,” said owner of Bellman’s Jewelers, David Bellman.

“While she’s doing that he takes one of the rings and says, ‘Thank you very much,’ and then goes to run out the door,” he said.

Perley can be seen on the store’s surveillance footage quickly putting the ring in his mouth, but according to employees, Perley refused to admit to any wrongdoing and waited peacefully for police.

See this hilarious video for what happened next:

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Montana Man Asks Feds to Reimburse $500 Eaten By Dog

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Photo Credit: Eliza Wiley

The saga of Sundance, the $100-bill-eating dog, apparently appealed to a lot of people.

A Google search Wednesday turned up 34,600 results for Wayne Klinkel’s story of his dog Sundance, who ate five $100 bills last Christmas, and his tale of woe in trying to pick up the digested remnants to recoup some of his loss…

The gist of his story is that Klinkel and his wife traveled to Denver last Christmas to visit their daughter, and when they stopped for dinner they left Sundance in the car, along with five $100 bills and one $1 bill. When they returned, the $1 bill was untouched and the $500 was gone.

Klinkel immediately guessed that his chew-loving dog ate the bills, so while in Denver he donned rubber gloves and followed Sundance around the yard as he conducted his “business.” Klinkel retrieved quite a few fragments, but it wasn’t until his daughter visited Helena recently that she was able to give him enough remnants for him to piece together a large portion of all five bills.

He washed and bleached them, taped them back together and submitted them to the Federal Treasury, hoping to be reimbursed. That could take up to two years; a spokesperson said that if more than 51 percent of the bills are there, Klinkel may get at least some of his $500 back.

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