• In minus 20C, they play one metre thick ice which has a distinctive sound
• The 25 million year old lake is the deepest and oldest in the world
• Released musical potential of ice when a member of the group fell on it

A group of Siberian percussionists have become an internet hit with an exhibition of ice drumming on frozen Lake Baikal.

In minus 20C, they found by pure chance that the one metre thick ice has a distinctive and haunting rhythm all of its own, reported the Siberian Times.

'I felt like we were playing on the drums that Nature has left out for us, alone under the sun on the frozen waters of the world's most magnificent lake,' said Irkutsk architect Natalya Vlasevskaya, 31, a mother-of-one and organiser of Etnobit percussion group.


The 25 million year old lake, which freezes in winter, is the deepest and oldest in the world.

Footage of an unknown creature was found on a camera left in the woods

Bangor's local newspaper speculated that it could have been a...

cat
fox
Or a "chimichanga"

A mysterious deep-fried burrito?

Composer Jim Wilson has recorded the sound of crickets and then slowed down the recording, revealing something so amazing. The crickets sound like they are singing the most angelic chorus in perfect harmony. Though it sounds like human voices, everything you hear in the recording is the crickets themselves.

The recording contains two tracks played at the same time: The first is the natural sound of crickets played at regular speed, and the second is the slowed down version of crickets' voices.

"I discovered that when I slowed down this recording to various levels, this simple familiar sound began to morph into something very mystic and complex........almost human."

Hollywood, Florida - A chair that mysteriously appeared in West Lake Park at the end of the walking trail is getting lots of attention.

Local 10 photographer Bob Palumbo said it appeared one morning. He figured it was a new public art display the county was trying out.

"A couple of hours later, I got a call from property manager of my development here, and she said the park had contacted her to see if I knew anything about where the chair might have come from," said Palumbo. "They thought I had something to do with it."

Many of us testicle owner/operators have often claimed that we'd happily donate our (usually left) testicle for something, usually some kind of car. So it shouldn't be so shocking to hear that some loon is actually doing just that. One nut for $35,000. Which he's using to buy a Nissan 370Z.

As much as I'd like to picture the scene where this ashen-faced man stumbles into a Nissan dealership, plonks a jar with a floating, solitary testicle on the counter, and points to a red 370Z before collapsing, the reality is much more orderly.

The man, Mark Parisi, is donating his nut to a medical research organization for a sum of $35,000. Parisi has previously announced his intention to let the nut go to TLC's Extreme Cheapskates show, though it wasn't until his upcoming appearance on CBS' The Doctorsthat his intention to buy a 370Z was revealed.

The clip shows a van driver who has been pulled over by police who suspect him of using a mobile phone while driving.

Two policemen who keep their cool and have a laugh with a cheeky motorist who refuses to give his details have become an internet hit.

The officers pulled over a van driver suspected of using his mobile phone at the wheel.

The YouTube video, which has been viewed 73,000 times, shows 20 minutes of banter which wouldn't be out of place in a Chewin' the Fat sketch.

The driver, who will only tell the officers he is "John, son of David", repeatedly denies the road traffic charge.

The man claims he was going to get a banana and said: "I'm not driving today, at this point in time I am simply travelling."

Even when he is threatened with arrest for obstruction, "John" refuses to give his date of birth because he "can't remember coming out my mother's water".

Odd things happen to Nathan Baron. One of his teachers at Madawaska High School says it's true. Nathan himself admits it.

Like the time he bought a new riding mower ... put in a battery ... cranked it up ... and watched, alarmed, as the battery exploded and his mower burst into flames.

"I thought I was going to die," he said with a chuckle. "I wasn't burnt or anything, but I was afraid I was going to light some trees on fire."

That teacher, Maine hoop legend Matt Rossignol, said that every time he sees Nathan, the teen has another story to tell. The one he told on Monday was particularly memorable, and Rossignol had what you'll shortly agree was an understandable reaction.

"I told him, 'We've got to get this in print,'" Rossignol said.

I agreed (although I expected at first that the story was part of some school project titled "See What Kind of Crazy Story You Can Get a Newspaper to Print.')

So here's Nathan Baron's tale:

Nathan said Saturday didn't start off as an extraordinary day. In fact, it was pretty low-key: He was sitting in a chair in the woods, hunting, watching as a doe crossed in front of him.

After the doe left, he ate his lunch. Then nature called.

Speaking jointly at a press conference after coming to a unanimous decision at this year's Skepticon, held at Missouri State University, representatives of the New Atheist movement condemned sleep and sex for being irrational.

"Religious faith is clearly unreasonable," said author Sam Harris, "but so are your unconscious dreams and so is your sex life. If we're going to survive the coming technological advances, we've got to smarten up and cut all ties to our primitive ancestry. We've got to become posthuman."

Asked how Harris handles his biological needs for sleep and sex, he told reporters that he expects we'll soon develop the technology to allow the brain to cope without the input of the irrational subconscious and with a permanent state of insomnia. Until then, he said rationalists should keep a journal of their dreams and "berate and flagellate" themselves each morning if the dreams they recall having had "descend into the fantastic."

"As for sex," biologist Richard Dawkins cut in, "it helps to be British. Puritanical prudishness and the effeteness following the decline of your country's empire go a long way to making you sufficiently embarrassed about sex's animalistic aspects to learn how to repress your wayward lusts."

Reminded that Dawkins has written about the need to appreciate nature's beauty, he said that poetry and a sense of wonder are alright "as long as one employs the deflationary technique of understatement and keeps a stiff upper lip."

The biologist PZ Myers pointed out that the problem isn't just irrationality; it's when irrationality becomes dangerous. "People kill for God, but they also kill for sex," he said. "Families break apart due to affairs. When we're overcome by sex hormones we may not wear protection and so we transmit diseases. Moreover, we set a terrible example, hiding our degrading sex life, keeping that skeleton in the closet even as we rightly ridicule religious folks for their lunacy."

What do you get if you give musical instruments to a group of elephants? Just a loud noise, or an orchestra? One elephant ensemble in Thailand demonstrates - according to its creators - that animals can really make music.

Classical purists might find its percussion section a bit heavy and not all performers pay attention to the conductor. But then this is the orchestra that literally plays for peanuts.

This week UN delegates opened the current Warsaw Climate change Conference with hopes of engineering a renewed agreement to curb human-driven global warming just as effective as the last, however a new and catastrophic issue is emerging which threatens to derail the impressive progress made to date. Having reviewed the models of CO2 driven global warming from the First Assessment Report (FAR) IPCC scientists have discovered that General Circulation Models attribute most of the warming not to CO2 but to water vapor in the atmosphere. While it was initially understood that any rise in water vapor was directly attributable to a rise in CO2 it now appears there are many other human activities driving a rise in atmospheric water vapor, by far the most important greenhouse gas. IPCC Scientists expressed significantly increased certainty that their 95% confidence intervals include the plausibility that natural processes play no role.

A Mannian statistical analysis of growth rings harvested from wooden hockey sticks in the Sports Hall of Fame confirms the role of rising water vapor as it clearly demonstrates a strong correlation between the rise of professional ice sports and the attendant increased use of artificial ice with the rise in global temperatures. The changes are described as unprecedented since the keeping of official hockey statistics began. The presumed mechanism appears related in part to the high humidity emissions of Zamboni ice conditioning equipment and an excess of spilled beer. The new information substantially changes some of the FAR conclusions such that an amended document, the First Assessment Report Two, is expected within months. (The summary for policy makers was published last May.)