"A diet of corn is turning wild hamsters in north-eastern France into deranged cannibals that devour their offspring", explains the Guardian and some researchers. The picture is quite Gothic:
The cannibal mothers showed other signs of abnormality. The usually cute-and-cuddly hamsters ran in circles, “climbing and pounding their feeders,” when scientists entered the room...
What was most disturbing is how they perished. “Females stored their pups with their hoards of maize before eating them,” the scientists reported. “Pups were still alive at that time.”
While normal hamsters will wean about 80% of their children into adulthood, only 3% of these monsters' babies survived.
The world is always Gothic, if you look at it the right way.
The sinkhole opened up along Brooke Road near Argyle Road in Glenside, Cheltenham Township, before 4 a.m. Wednesday, gobbling up the yards of at least two homes, leaving a pickup truck teetering on the edge and creating fears that the homes could sink.
No casualties so far.
One Gothic note:
"We always wondered what was going on with the water table underneath... there was some water in the basement every now and then," Forster said. "Now we know."
A group of artists is making art using human blood to protest Donald Trump. "The creators stressed that blood and watercolor paint are identical, except one "smells a little weird.""
The collective used some nice Gothic language to describe their goals: "We will be the shadow that follows Trump and provides the checks and balances our government fails to."
A new instance of bats enjoying human blood has surfaced in Brazil. Scientists examining local bat diets found the blood is the life indeed:
Researchers from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco found evidence of human-blood consumption in hairy-legged vampire bats (Diphylla ecaudata)... Our results suggest that the diet of D. ecaudata is more flexible than expected.
Flexible indeed.
These bats are known for feeding on bird blood, so the presence of human blood as seen in a DNA analysis of bat feces was a surprise. "This species isn't adapted to feed on the blood of mammals," researcher Enrico Bernard told New Scientist.
Until now.
We at Infocult approve of the researchers' next steps: "Bernard and his team are now looking into how the bats access humans at night, whether it's by finding people sleeping outside or by entering homes."
The Hypnotic Eye boasted a “new audience participation thrill” dubbed “HypnoMagic,” and enlisted real-life celebrity hypnotherapist Gil Boyne as technical consultant to lend an air of credibility to the hokum. In several scenes we see the murderous hypnotist Desmond (Jacques Bergerac) perform his act in its entirety, wherein he hypnotizes both on-stage volunteers and the entire seated audience, while his focus gradually orients towards the camera and directly at the viewer. When the electric eye gadget is introduced, its flashing concentric rings fill the frame in several shots, suggesting its influence is working directly through the screen and on the viewer, as well as the on-screen audience.
And a trailer boasting of its movie's hypnotic effects, while reassuring you they're just for fun:
This is just delightful:
In 1962, K. Gordon Murray, an American producer who built a career on redubbing and repackaging foreign B movies for American matinee audiences, rereleased two 1958 Spanish horror films, The Vampire’s Coffin and The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy, as a double-feature entry in his “Young America Horror Club” series. The films were presented with a new innovation added by Murray called “Hypnoscope,” a gimmick in which costumed crew entered the theater at some point during the film to menace the audience, their presence explained as “a trance of hallucinations” caused by mass hypnosis. In a four-minute filmed introduction preceding the show, a disembodied voice speaking over an endlessly looping hypnotic spiral explains that “you may feel yourself changing from the gentle person you are, to a monster, with dark green blood running through its veins… or you may become a vampire, with a deep urge within you for a refreshing drink of blood. Of course, these changes will happen to only a few of you, while others will remain as themselves.”
A beach in New Jersey has developed an intriguing way of killing people. The sand under shallow waters can sometimes just collapse, and suck people down to their demise. "[A] man [was] swept out to sea when the sand collapsed underneath him":
In July 2012, Brad Smith, of Horsham, Pennsylvania, was walking in ankle-deep water at the beach with his daughter when the sand collapsed, plunging them and a friend into the swirling waters. A passer-by on a personal watercraft rescued the girl, who was being held above the waves by her father before he drowned...
Domonique McNeil and Tasha Hart also lost relatives to a similar drowning there in 2009. The accident claimed the lives of Jamila Watkins, 27, and Shayne Hart, 15.
Is this another one of Gaia's attacks on the human race?
(thanks to Steven "resisting Jersey Shore puns at all costs" Kaye)
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