Mysteries of Montreal

The weather here over the last week has been atrocious. First a heavy snow fall, followed by a thaw, freezing rain, then the temperature plummeted to -24 o C. Yesterday, everything was frozen solid, then today, we're having another couple of feet of beautiful powder, which is great for the skiers amongst us, but loathsome to the drivers. One thing to come out of this, was my learning of this wonderfully strange phenomenon, frost quakes , or cryoseisms , or as I now rename it, Ithaqua's footprints. Or maybe even ice shoggoths on the move. Ice shoggoths, now there's an idea...

Tiny octopus-like microorganisms named after science fiction monsters The subheading says it all. Some researchers at UBC (University of British Columbia) found some new micro organisms in the saliva of termites. They named them  Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque. They were named so after they were though to swim in an octopus like fashion, although that seems a little bit of a stretch, my instinct is someone in that lab has been itching to name something after Cthulhu since he started grad school, and you don't get to name new species often these days. This is, however, the first time I have ever heard mention of Cthylla . Maybe I'm not so well versed in the mythos as I would like to think (although she is one of Lumley's, and Source Original Paper .

Source Dr. Benjamin Tippett, a physicist at the University of New Brunswick, looks at the short story, 'The Call of Cthulhu' from the viewpoint of Science! In what he calls his 'unified theory of Cthulhu' with his tongue firmly in his cheek. He examines the 'eyewitness accounts' as written in 'The Call of Cthulhu' from a physics point of view. He then states: In proving the Johansen wasn’t crazy I accidentally figure out that cthulhu is probably real, responsible for the island… and I also figure out what he’s doing down there. Of course, as a brave man of science, I can’t go and admit that Cthulhu exists… Link to the pdf of the article 'Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific' here. Via the Miskatonic Museum .