Steve Hornsby lives in Bournemouth, England, and as a former aircraft engineer he’s probably not the type to get swept up in weirdo speculation. Which is good, because after a freak hailstorm he discovered a bunch of blue, gelatinous spheres in his yard. The balls, which were little more than an inch wide, have no smell, do not dissolve in water, and aren’t particularly sticky. The one thing people don’t seem to know about them is what exactly they are, or how they got in Hornsby’s yard.

A report released by Cuadrilla Resources confirms that hydraulic fracturing, called “fracking,” triggered a series of minor earthquakes in northwest England. The report found that the earthquakes set off by the fracking, which is used to extract natural gas from shale, were between 1.5 and 2.3 on the Richter scale. This would place the seismic events in the category where they would be large enough to be recorded, but unlikely to be felt.

Like something out the evil lair of a steampunk Bond villain, this amazing glass and iron dome has been quietly sitting underneath a lake in Surrey, England for nearly 100 years. The stuff of urban legends, the massive dome was intended as a billiard room, though it has come to be known as “the ballroom under the lake.”

The dome was part of a sprawling 9,000 acre palatial estate at Witley Park built by the immensely rich J. Whitaker Wright, whose downfall was almost as spectacular as his mansion.

And while impressive, the dome is just part of a larger underground complex that snakes around the lakes of Witley Park. Other notable sites include a boathouse, marble walled pools, serpentine hallways, several ornate entrances, and innumerable haunting skylights. The dome itself is topped with a statue, enigmatically placed in the middle of the lake.

Be sure to take a look at the Flickr streams of intrepid urban explorers LargePig, paolo999, and cybergibbons. A few more choice pictures follow below.

Contested ref calls are a part of the game, but this past Sunday, soccer fans watching the World Cup were treated to two major displays of referees’ incompetence: First, when England played Germany, England was down 2-1 when they got the ball into the goal, as seen in the above picture — but because the ball bounced out before the referee ‘saw’ it, they didn’t get the goal. Arguably, had they finished the first half tied 2-2, they might have played the second half differently and not lost 1-4. That afternoon, when Argentina played Mexico, Carlos Tevez scored Argentina’s first goal when he was wildly offsides (see below), but the ref didn’t overturn it. Argentina went on to win 3-1.

Now, FIFA president and arch-traditionalist Sepp Blatter has announced his plans to reconsider the tech solution that had long been out of the question for him: Video replays.

Yes, we know Hoover wasn’t British.

On Monday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will announce a four year initiative to go paperless. That is, to make every possible interaction between British citizens and their government into something you can do online.

From the Times:

The aim is that within a year, everybody in the country should have a personalised website through which they would be able to find out about local services and do business with the Government. A unique identifier will allow citizens to apply for a place for their child at school, book a doctor’s appointment, claim benefits, get a new passport, pay council tax or register a car from their computer at home.

The savings on paper, postage, and physical government offices are expected to be in the billions.

Read on...

Add another item to the list of why England is cool.  On Saturday, at precisely 12:59 Greenwich Mean Time, more than one hundred people took the central court of Cabot Circus in Bristol by shiny, buzzing, laser storm.  The mob was organized by Tom Merchant-Locke, Daniel Morgan Jones and Liam Penn, using Facebook.  The clock ticked over, a whistle was blown, and the mayhem began.

/Film has no less than four videos of the event, but our favorite is below.  Is it because of the music?  Yes.  Yes it is.