M.J. Rose

Prediction: These photographs are going to be an elixir for your imagination for the the entire day at least…

From Design You Can Trust,

Bodies Of Strange Creatures Were Found In The Basement Of An Old House In London

“In 1960 in London at the time of clearing the site for construction of a new residential neighborhood, the old long-abandoned mansion belonged to Thomas Theodore Merlin was sent for demolition. In the basement of the home builders have discovered several thousand small wooden boxes tightly sealed. Imagine their surprise when they began to find inside the bodies of strange mythical creatures, which seemed to have been living only in fairy tales.

Thomas Theodore Merrylin was known as Crypto-naturalist, Fringe Zoologist and Xeno-Archeologist. Creatures and artifacts thought to be nothing more than myth. It is a mystery that challenges our understanding of biology, chemistry and the very laws of physics. But this is no fairytale, for he was a scientist, and empirical evidence and rational thought hold sway here. There is a lot to see and read, so please take your time to peruse the website (The Merrylin Cryptid Museum)…”

For more, click here.

As all sleep paralysis or night terror sufferers will tell you, there’s nothing more real than their nightmares…

From Buzzfeed, an excellent piece on the mystery and the terror:

Can You Die From A Nightmare?

by Doree Shafrir

“It is the middle of the night, and there is something very wrong in my apartment. I leap up from my bed and rush to the closet and crouch down and throw aside my shoes, which are arranged on a rack on the floor. I know I must work quickly; I am breathing fast and hard. There?—?there, behind the shoes, I see it: I don’t know what it is, but it needs to come out, or I am going to die. I pull and pull and finally get it out.

But something is still wrong. I am now completely panicked, and I jump back onto my bed and lean over the half-wall that my bed is up against, overlooking the hallway. There, I see what’s causing all the problems, and I push it downward and off the wall with all my might. It shatters loudly, glass flying everywhere.

Then, finally, I wake up. My two dogs are cowering in the corner, and I put on shoes to sweep up the glass. I am confused and embarrassed, though there is no one besides the dogs there to see that I just pushed a framed poster off a wall and broke it. I clean up the glass and go back to sleep, and it is not until the morning, when I see my shoes scattered everywhere, that I look into the closet and realize that I have also ripped the TV cable completely out of the back wall of my closet.

These brief but incredibly vivid nightmares happen for years: they’re never quite so violent as that first one, which happened around 2003, but almost always as scary. I don’t know what to call them, but they become a familiar part of bedtime, and there are times when I am afraid to go to bed because I know that just as I start to fall asleep, I will be jolted aware in a state of sheer terror. Then, just as suddenly as they start, they ebb for a time, and I wonder if I’ve gotten better. But they always come back.

Here are some other things I’ve believed in the middle of the night:

They are monitoring my breathing. If I don’t hold my breath and stay completely still, I am going to die. I am not allowed to move at all, or they will know, and they will kill me…”

For the rest, click here.

What could possibly go wrong?

From IFLS,

Biotech Company Granted Ethical Permission To Attempt To Use Stem Cells To Reactivate The Brains Of The Dead

“A biotech company in the U.S. has been granted ethical permission by an Institutional Review Board in the U.S. and India to use 20 brain-dead patients for what is sure to be a highly controversial study: From next year, they plan to stimulate their nervous systems in order to restart the brains. Bioquark is hoping that its part in the groundbreaking ReAnima project will reveal if people can at least partly be brought back from the dead.

It is important to note that at this point, there isn’t much evidence to suggest how genuinely realistic or even serious this endeavor is; however, the panel of experts working on the initiative does include Dr. Calixto Machado, a well-known neurological researcher and a member of the American Academy of Neurology who has written extensively on brain death.

The team will test a combination of therapies on the participants, who have been medically certified as being brain dead and are only kept from decomposing by life support machines. Injecting the brain with stem cells, giving the spinal cord infusions of beneficial chemicals, and nerve stimulation techniques – which have been shown to bring people out of comas – will all be tried out…”

For the rest, click here.