Even though this footage is from the inferior Disney — the land one — it is from 1957 and looks amazing. It’s as if we hopped in a TARDIS, meant to go somewhere entirely different, then ended up in 1957 California. Today I learned footage from 1957 Disneyland is simultaneously pretty and eerie.

In celebration of the impending destruction of the Earth because some Mayan dude couldn’t be bothered to extend his calendar a little further, Wired has reintroduced Tinfoil Hat Tuesdays to celebrate the best conspiracy theorists have to offer. Today’s is a real gem. I’d write my own lede, but I think it’s best to let the source speak for itself. Let me assure you, it is pure gold. From Exopolitics:

Two former participants in the CIA’s Mars visitation program of the early 1980’s have confirmed that U.S. President Barack H. Obama was enrolled in their Mars training class in 1980 and was among the young Americans from the program who they later encountered on the Martian surface after reaching Mars via “jump room.”

Emphasis ours, to help note when your eyes should jump out of your head.

As awesome as history is, artist Matthew Buchholz felt like it was missing something. Namely monsters from space, menacing tentacles, and dinosaurs. Thankfully, he was able to fix that in his series of alternate history prints. See more, after the break.

Just to remind you about how far we’ve come technologically, this is a 5 MB hard disc from 1956. It weighs over a ton. The hard disc was originally part of the IBM 305 RAMAC, the first commercial computer to feature a hard disc at all. Amazingly, it was not rendered obsolete until 1962 and stayed on the market until 1969. The cost of storing data on this monster was $3,200 per month, which is over $160,000 in today’s dollars. Now, remember how you can get many times that storage space for free on DropBox.

Proving once again that there are still places on our own planet that have yet to yield all their secrets, scientists have discovered a unique eel off the coast of the Republic of Palau in the Pacific Ocean. This eel has been dubbed a “living fossil” due to its unusually primitive features. These features led researchers to create a new taxonomic family to classify the eel in relation to other eel species.

The eel, described in the researchers’ paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is an 18cm-long female, collected during a dive in an 35-m deep underwater cave. The species was named Protoanguilla palau, according to the new family, genus, and species names bestowed by the researchers. According to the researchers from Chiba’s Natural History Museum in Japan, the Southern Marine Laboratory in Palau, and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, the eel likely embarked on an independent evolutionary history millions of years ago.

Palaeontologists in Australia have found a virtually complete skeleton that is the largest known example of a diprotodon, a giant wombat-like animal. This diprotodon is comparable in size to a four wheel drive vehicle and when alive looked similar to a rhinoceros. Researchers say the three-ton monster, known for having massive tusks and a small brain, may have lived approximately two million years ago. Diprotodons were plant eaters, and are believed to have gone extinct around 55,000 years ago as a result of either the arrival of the first indigenous people of Australia, or climate change, or a combination of the two.

The skeleton was found on a remote cattle station near the Leichhardt River between Normanton and Burketown in Queensland. The area has become known for being saturated with the remains of prehistoric megafauna. Led by professor Sue Hand, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales, the researchers found the fossil after they spotted an arm bone sticking out of the ground. Further digging showed that the bone was connected to a shoulder blade, and ultimately the entire skeleton was unearthed. The bones were found next to the tooth of a giant goanna (a type of lizard) that the researchers suspect may have become dislodged while the creature was feasting on the carcass of the diprotodon. The fossil is virtually complete, which makes it one of Australia’s most significant prehistoric discoveries.

(via The Telegraph Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

In 1977, a 20 year old Sam Klemke started filming retrospectives for each year of his life. But that’s not where this video begins, it begins in 2011 and then spirals backwards. Back, through HD, video, cellphones, questionable haircuts, film stock, and astro vans. It’s an amazing journey, and remarkably touching.

A humbling note: I wasn’t born until 3:28 through this 6+ minute video.

(Reddit via Petapixel)