News for Youse: Non-supervillain billionaire consortium Planetary Resources plans asteroid-mining expedition

by Miranda Nelson on April 24th, 2012 at 9:44 AM

1 of 1 2 of 1

Are you a slightly unhinged billionaire tycoon with money to burn, no sense of risk aversion, and Armageddon on both DVD and Blu-ray? Well, you sound like the perfect person to bankroll a mining expedition—in space.

That's right, Planetary Resources, a not-at-all-creepy-sounding group of investors who are certainly not mad scientists and/or diabolically evil geniuses, wants to catch asteroids that whizz past our planet and mine them for water, oxygen, nitrogen, gold doubloons—you know, space stuff. It's apparently not about money in the slightest, but about ensuring humans have a permanent future in space. Which, again, doesn't sound creepy in the slightest.

Why yes, filmmaker James Cameron is one of the financiers. However did you guess?

You know those people in your office who don't seem to know the difference between "reply" and "reply all" in an email? Well, here's a cautionary tale: on April 20, Aviva Investors—which has offices around the world, including in the U.S., the U.K., France, Spain, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Finland, and the Netherlands—accidentally fired every single one of its 1,300 employees. Only one worker was supposed to be dismissed, and fortunately none of the remaining employees were totally offended by the mistake. But keep this tale in mind the next time you need to send out a sensitive email.

Today's unfounded Middle American moral panic: your dumbass children are drinking hand sanitizer. Apparently, thanks to a little thing called the Internet, at least six incredibly stupid California teens have distilled the stuff into 60-proof alcohol, then they drank it and presumably went blind.

Kids these days. If it isn't licking toads or snorting nutmeg, it's smoking banana peels and drinking hand sanitizer. Here's a tip from the callous Darwinist inside of us: if you're dumb enough to do it, well, we're shameless enough to laugh at the consequences.

And to round out the "you thought it was just an urban legend but it actually happens" report, the following video captures what is pretty much our worst nightmare: being swallowed alive by the earth. In China, a girl plummeted six metres after stepping on a weak spot in the pavement. She was quickly rescued and did not suffer serious injury, but the overarching metaphor is truly terrifying.