Wasps take shelter in zombie ladybugs If a ladybug's life were a horror film, this is how it would start: Scary string music. A close-up of the green-eyed face of a wasp. The sudden pierce of a stinger. The screen goes dark. Next, an establishing shot of our ladybug hero, sitting placidly on a leaf. This sordid tale isn't fiction for many ladybugs that fall victim to the parasitical wasp Dinocampus coccinellae. The research, published today (June 21) in the journal Biology Letters, finds that this protection comes at a cost: Larva that cocoon themselves to a living ladybug, as opposed to a dead one or to none at all, can expect fewer eggs of their own when they emerge as wasps. Ladybug horror The wasps' parasitical ways have been long noticed, and they aren't unique in the insect world. Nor is mind control very extraordinary for parasites. To test the idea, the researchers reared more than 4,000 ladybugs in the lab and let wasps lay their eggs in the unfortunate insects. Ladybug bodyguard Related on LiveScience:
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mental_floss Blog » 8 Secrets From the Wonderful World of Disney 1. There Are Human Remains in the Haunted Mansion The Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland is one of the scariest places in the park, but not for the reasons you’d expect. In his 1994 book Mouse Tales , former Disney employee David Koenig tells the story of a tourist group that requested a little extra time on the ride so they could hold a quick memorial for a 7-year-old boy. This wasn’t an isolated incident. 2. Each night at Disneyland, after the sunburned families and exhausted cast members have made their way home, the park fills up again—this time, with hundreds of feral cats. Park officials love the felines because they help control the mouse population. Today, there are plenty of benefits to being a Disney-employed mouser. 3. Just before the final, five-story drop on Splash Mountain, Disney cameras take a snapshot of the riders to catch their facial expressions. 4. Even though Walt Disney had a mustache himself, he wanted his employees clean-shaven. 5. So, that’s what Florida did. 6.
Paranoia: What's it all about? What is Paranoia about? Paranoia is a roleplaying game with a difference. Where as other RPGs encourage players to work together towards a common goal, Paranoia encourages backstabbing, double-crossing and bare-faced lying. The back of the Paranoia rulebook describes the game as follows: Imagine a world designed by Kafka, Stalin, Orwell, Huxley, Sartre and the Marx Brothers... Paranoia is a roleplaying game set in a darkly humorous future. You play one of The Computer's elite agents. Paranoia: A lighthearted game of terror, death, bureaucracies, mad scientists, mutants, dangerous weapons, and insane robots, which encourages players to lie, to cheat, and backstab each other at every turn. Is that fun? Trust us. Suffice to say, Paranoia is fun. Alpha Complex This is where everybody lives. The Computer The Computer runs everything within Alpha Complex. Though deranged, The Computer believes it is doing the right thing. Clones The Computer doesn't make that kind of mistake. Mutations Secret Societies
The destructive culture of pretty pink princesses Girls the world over often go through a "princess phase," enthralled with anything pink and pretty — most especially the Disney princesses. When it happened to Peggy Orenstein's daughter Daisy, the contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine stepped back to examine the phenomenon. She found that the girlie-girl culture being marketed to little girls was less innocent than it might seem, and can have negative consequences for girls' psychological, social and physical development. Orenstein's exploration took her to Walt Disney World, the American Girl flagship store in New York City and a child beauty pageant. LiveScience: How did you get inspired to write the book? Orenstein: I'm a mother, and I think that when you're an adult, you don't really notice what's going on so much in the world of kids' culture. And so I started to go, 'What is this?' A lot of people were looking at issues of eating disorders or depression, or sexuality or culture, and issues in teenagers.
The 6 Creepiest Places on Earth It doesn't matter whether or not you believe in ghosts, there are some places in which none of us would want to spend a night. These places have well earned their reputations as being so creepy, tragic or mysterious (or all three) that they definitely qualify as "haunted." Places like... Aokigahara is a woodland at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan that makes The Blair Witch Project forest look like Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. It probably has something to do with all the dead bodies scattered around. What Niagara Falls is to weddings, Aokigahara is to suicide. More than 500 fucking people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s. The trend has supposedly started after Seicho Matsumoto published his novel Kuroi Kaiju (Black Sea of Trees) where two of his characters commit suicide there. Also skulls. Besides bodies and homemade nooses, the area is littered with signs displaying such uplifting messages like "Life is a precious thing! Winchester Mystery House Oh, bitch...!
allmagic.com LiquidRoam RoamBoards ready for sale Motorized one-, two- and three-wheeled personal transport innovations like the Solowheel and the cheap and cheerful Solaron certainly look like a fun way to get around, but if it's four-wheeled action you're looking for then the new RoamBoard is definitely worth a look. The result of two years of designing, building, testing and tweaking, this stand up transportation solution brings together technologies seen in the electric skateboard, bicycle, snowboard, and automotive industries and merges them into a land-surfing motorized skateboard. View all The RoamBoard story began with a young man's request to his father to build him a motorized caster board. "The RoamBoard carve comes from two innovations," Green told Gizmag. Joining the electronics and responsive 36v/10 Amp-hr Li-Polymer battery pack in the tank is an onboard battery charger that offers individual cell balancing and a four-hour charge time. "With all that speed available, only the best brake would do," says Green.