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1890: Man riding a goat Man riding a goat, 1890 (Initiation into fraternal group). Photographer: Chas.v. Hamer, Columbus O, USA

August 23, 2014 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - In 1200 A.D., a Swedish man named Frederik Ugarph found a hard wood statue only about six inches (15 cm) high of a little person wearing a conical hat in what is now Trondheim, Norway. The statue was standing on a pedestal engraved with the words: “NISSE Riktig Storrelse.” That means, “Gnome, actual height.” Owned and housed today by the Oliv family in Uppsala, Norway, X-ray tests indicate the wooden statue is more than 2,000 years old, perhaps carved from a tree that is no longer known. Another historic account of a “miniature person”...

The US military has yet to offer Pte First Class Chelsea Manning sex change treatment despite medical recommendations, her lawyer has said. Defence secretary Chuck Hagel approved treatment for a condition known as gender dysphoria in July. But lawyer David Coombs says her requests for hormone therapy and other accommodations have been "ignored". The soldier formerly known as Bradley Manning is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking secret files to Wikileaks. "This time last year I publicly asked that I be provided with a treatment plan, to bring my body more in line with my gender identity," Pte Manning said...

WILKES-BARRE, Pa., Aug. 22 (UPI) -- A stolen life-sized statue of United States President Barack Obama was has been returned to its Northern Pennsylvania owner after being discovered on a nearby picnic bench with an empty six-pack of Twisted Tea and a cigarette butt hanging from its mouth.The statue was a staple of the Wilkes-Barre, Pa., neighborhood it was stolen from, where owner Tiffany Bruce prominently displayed it on her porch and decorated it for holidays."I peeked my head out the door and Obama's gone and I kind of went into a panic," described a distressed Bruce when the statue...

Chinese chef Peng Fan died after the severed head of a spitting cobra bit him 20 minutes after being cut off A chef cooking a soup dish from cobra flesh died in China after he was bitten by the snake's head – 20 minutes after it was cut off. Peng Fan was preparing the rare Asian delicacy from the Indochinese spitting cobra when the snake's severed head bit him with venom as he was throwing it into the bin, The Mirror reported. Peng died before he could be treated in hospital with life-saving anti-venom, police said. "It is a highly...

However, scientists claim there is no cause for concern because the hundreds of years of warning could allow for a method to divert itResearchers studying a huge asteroid that is hurtling towards earth say there is a possibility of it striking our planet on March 16, 2880! They say the rock rotates so quickly that it should break apart, but it remained intact on its Earth-bound trajectory, according to a report in Dailymail.co.uk Though studies have revealed that Asteroid 1950DA is held together by cohesive forces called van der Waals, scientists still have no clue on how to stop it....

On June 20 Metro-North's New Haven Line was shut down for nearly three hours as a result of a junior high student's cardboard robot having been left on an overhead bridge near the Metro-North station at Fairfield, CT. At About 5:30 a.m., a town street sweeper saw it and alerted the Fairfield police who, in turn called in MTA police and a State Police bomb squad and helicopter to seal off nearby streets and investigate; this action also caused M-NR to suspend service. It took the investigators nearly three hourse to realize that the "suspicious object" was merely a homemade...

A Russian official claims that samples collected by cosmonauts show evidence of sea plankton on the outside of the International Space Station, news agencies are reporting. Cosmonauts on the orbiting outpost have allegedly discovered trace amounts of sea plankton and other microscopic organisms living on the outside of the station, exposed to the vacuum of space, according to a news story quoting space station official Vladimir Solovyov. ... It's possible that the plankton, if confirmed, could be a contaminant launched into space with the space station module, said NASA scientist Lynn Rothschild. Previous studies have found that microorganisms can survive...

We are all mature adults, so I’m sure you can handle the news that the No. 1 most expensive coffee in the world first passes through an elephant as a No. 2. That, and we’ve all heard of those civet cat coffee beans, so now we can just move on and talk about expensive caffeine. And poop. Poop. The stuff’s called Black Ivory, and it’s made by a Canadian businessman in Thailand’s Golden Triangle region, reports Michael Sullivan on All Things Considered.

Bill Clinton enjoys a Gurkha cigar, "the Rolls Royce of the cigar industry." "The cigars are close to $1,000 each," says the cigar boss.

Not everyone is great with home improvement projects, as evidenced in this video. Check out what just may be the worst garage door installation, ever. Sure, the garage now has a power door, but the lengths the installer has gone to seem a bit absurd.

Sri Lankan maid in custodyA housemaid who is accused of harassing her old Emirati employer has been arrested. The 70-year-old woman, named Aisha, lives alone in Sharjah. Her son, Omar, had arranged for the maid, who hails from Sri Lanka, through an agency last month, since his mother refused to live with him. In the beginning she was extremely helpful, kind and looked after the old lady as if she was her own mother. “She was almost like a sweet angel,” said Aisha. “ I was so happy with her that I gave her one of my mobile phones. Later,...

An owner of two Dobermans thought it would be amusing to take the dogs to a playground and see what happens when he put them on a slide there. Somewhere in the end, a lesson was learned. Maybe. Don’t worry, no one was hurt — neither human nor canine — in making this video, which is going viral today. But it does show that a Doberman can exercise basic common sense. Well, sort of. “It was my stepson 23 yrs old that went up the steps & had the dogs follow him up and PERSUADED THEM TO SLIDE,” wrote Sherry...

Engineers in the United States have developed an innovative new system of camouflage based on the color-changing abilities of cephalopods, namely octopus, cuttlefish, and squid. The mechanism used by the animals was emulated to a high degree by the researchers, who even utilized a similar layering pattern in their work... In cephalopods, the colors surrounding it are sensed, and then the animal uses its muscles to change color, using cells containing pigment, known as chromatophores to change color. In their work, which is published in the journal PNAS, the engineers used photosensors to detect light levels, and then deliver this...

Presley Smith is a baseball player, but he's also, like, an actual player. During last night's Little League World Series game, Smith did what any enterprising adolescent boy might do: He used a national television broadcast to let all the ladies out there know he's down. When the chyron flashed on the screen displaying Smith's hobby, it wasn't comic books or video games or volunteering at the soup kitchen. It was "talking to girls." Unfortunately for Smith, though he hit the ball, he was out at first base.

<p>As GWAR's annual GWAR B-Q carried on over the weekend, it was with a somber note of remembrance to band leader Oderus Urungus who died of a heroin overdose in March.</p> <p>Though friends and family of David Brockie (the man behind the gnarly thrash metal monster mask) laid him to rest on April 1 at a private April Fool's Day service, as Consequence of Sound reports, his alter ego had not yet received a send off. So, in a tribute true to form for the outlandish band and its fervent fans, the Oderus costume was laid out and lit aflame Friday on a small viking ship floating amid Hadads Lake at the Richmond, Va. event.</p>

German national put on flight back to TurkeyAuthorities at Dubai International Airport put a German national, named as Rolf Buchholz, back on a flight to where he had come from, preventing him from entering the country. According to a report in Emarat Al Youm, Rolf was sent back to Turkey. Sources quoted in the report said the man was covered in piercings, holes in his faces and also had two ‘horns’ protruding from his forehead. People at Dubai International Airport were horrified by his appearance, the report stated. The man was reportedly coming to Dubai to make an appearance at...

YouTube has known its fair share of dangerous, destructive and ill-advised trends, but even by those standards, the “fire challenge” hits new lows. The so-called challenge consists of pouring rubbing alcohol on oneself, lighting it on fire, and putting the resulting blaze out before you sustain third-degree burns and/or burn your house down. Needless to say, not everyone succeeds — a 15-year-old in Kentucky sustained second-degree burns this week. Why, precisely, would you do such a thing? In the words of one enraged YouTube vlogger, whose rant against the trend has earned almost 10,000 views: “Are you dumb? No, seriously...

A red 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO Berlinetta, which was once involved in a fatal accident, has set the world record for a car sold at auction, going for $38.1 million at a sale in California, auction house Bonhams said. The price offered on Thursday by a bidder whose identity was not disclosed surpassed the $30 million (all figures U.S.) paid last year for a 1954 Mercedes Benz W196 race car, also sold by Bonhams, the auctioneers said in a press release. “We’ve always maintained that we would exceed the current world record and that the car would bring between $30-$40-million...