High-speed video has revealed that the incredible variety of fantastic forms taken by fungal spores helps them catapult themselves into the air.

For hundreds of years, scientists have described the spectrum of spore shapes — a different one for each of 15,000 known varieties of fungi, an assortment so astounding as to have sprung from the mind of Willy Wonka rather than Charles Darwin.

But for all their observations, they’ve known relatively little about why spores took those shapes. Some mycologists suspected it was merely evolutionary noise. But the first comparative analysis of fungal spore form and reproductive dispersal shows that shapes are no evolutionary accident.

“What people have done for 200 years is volume after volume of taxonomic work with descriptions of spore shape and size, without reference to why it’s there. You’ve just got these weird and wonderful forms, but nothing about why,” said botanist Nicholas Money of Miami University in Ohio.

Read More Here: The Magic of Mushroom Spores | Wired Science from Wired.com.

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

moogaloop.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

This documentary film by Michael Tsarion and Henrik Palmgren explores humankind’s future and the post-human world. Will the perfect human be a dumbed-down, regimented inhabitant of a cyber purgatory created by unseen elites? Will the children of tomorrow be smiling depressives of technocratic dystopia?

www.architectsofcontrol.com

Gralien Report » Strange Audio: American F-15 Pilots Chase “Small Black Rock”.

Hat tip to Greg Bishop at UFOMystic » Contactee Film Clip.

“Out of this World” did a good take on the Wem Town Hall “ghost” that we mentioned as an impressive example of pareidolia. They present videos of the actual fire, present the case and myth, and the latest information I had that analysis by Vernon Harrison on the negatives didn’t find any evidence of tampering. Thus, it seemed it was either a real ghost or a simulacrum.

The second-best pareidolia… a hoax? | forgetomori.