Titanoboa - the largest snake

Titanoboa snake was discovered by a team of North American scientists at the University of Toronto. It's the latest fossil to emerge from Colombia's Cerrejon coal mine in 2005.

The giant serpent is closely related to today's boas and anacondas, snakes that kill their prey with suffocating coils. Titanoboa's fossilised vertebra showed that it was a whopping 13 metres (42 feet) long. It was also a hefty creature and weighed in at over 1.3 tons. That's almost thirty times as heavy as the anaconda, the bulkiest species alive today. Its superlative measurements mean that Titanoboa was not only the largest snake in history, but also the largest land-living vertebrate following the demise of the dinosaurs.

It lived some 58-60 million years ago, when the Cerrejon basin was a giant floodplain, criss-crossed by rivers and nestled within a large tropical rainforest. This is exactly the type of habitat that anacondas thrive in today, and it's likely that Titanoboa shared a similar lifestyle. It may well have been aquatic and hunted similar prey, like crocodiles. Indeed, other fossils from the Cerrejon pit include early relatives of fishes, turtles and crocodiles - all suitable prey for Titanoboa.

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Longest Wedding Dress

The Guinness World Record for the wedding dress with the longest tail in the world was made in Bucharest on March 20, 2012. The 2,750 meter long train broke a previous record of 2,488 meters. It is made of 4,700 meters of material using 1,857 needles, taking 100 days to make.

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Malaysia’s first upside-down house.

                  Photo: Rumah Terbalik

Imagine walking down an ordinary street and coming upon an upended house balanced on a front gable. From the outside, it looks exactly like its neighbors, traditional Sabah village residences. A wheelbarrow leans against a wall and a sedan is parked in the adjacent carport. All typical except they are upside down.

Inside, a TV, microwave, tables, chairs and sofas dangle above visitors who navigate the home’s ceilings, steering around light fixtures and ceiling fans. Playing cards and comic books strewn along the floor, a cigarette in an ashtray, make it seem as though the family has just left the room. Even the washing machine and sewing machine hang overhead. Literally everything in the 1,500-square-foot, two-bedroom home is topsy turvy. But in this house it is the visitors who feel they are ones turned on end.

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Mosquito Laser

The mosquito laser is a device invented by astrophysicist Lowell Wood to kill large numbers of mosquitoes to reduce the chance of people being infected with malaria. Although originally introduced in the early 1980s, the idea was not substantially researched until decades later. In 2007, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation requested Intellectual Ventures LLC to find a way to fight and eventually end malaria. Intellectual Ventures resurrected the idea of using lasers to kill mosquitoes and now has a working prototype.

The device works by using infra-red Light Emitting Diode (LED) lamps on a fence post to create a field of light. This field of light reflects from retroreflective material on another fence post, much like that used on roads and highway signs, and bounces back to its source. This field of light is monitored by charge-coupled devices (CCDs) similar to the ones used in consumer digital cameras. These cameras are situated on both fence posts and detect shadows in the light between the posts. Once an insect is detected, a non-lethal laser is fired at it. This non-lethal laser is used to determine the size of the insect, and the frequency at which its wings are beating.

The information gathered by the non-lethal laser can be used to determine the type of insect and even its gender because wing beat patterns are unique to each species and gender. This is important in preventing malaria because only female mosquitoes bite humans.

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