mystery

The actress who played Carmen Sandiego has been found, and now we can all high-five ourselves for winning the game!



In a episode-worthy EPIC level of sleuthing (stalking?), Todd Van Luling, a writer for the Huffington Post, tracked down the actress who played Carmen on "Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?" which premiered in the fall of 1996. Kids everywhere OBSESSED over finding Carmen and stopping her from stealing the Brooklyn Bridge and other crazy capers.



But did the actress who played Carmen make it easy to find her? Oh no, she hid as only Carmen Sandiego can, and he went looking for clues to her whereabouts by scouring the credits list for clues...



...but finding no one billed as "Carmen," so he visited cities, interviewed suspects, and emailed every person with even a remotely similar name to his suspects list:



Would he ever find out who the REAL Carmen Sandiego was??

Follow the whole caper and discover who Carmen Sandiego REALLY is here.

Fans of the 'Serial' Podcast are probably all too familiar with the story of Adnan Syed, a teenager who was sent to jail for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, under dubious circumstances. 

DID HE DO IT OR NOT? That remains to be seen. His lawyers obviously think he is innocent and, as the podcast Serial discovered, the facts leading to his original conviction didn't exactly line up. 

Since this is real life, the podcast's investigation left fans with a really big cliffhanger. Now that Adnan has been granted a new trial after 16 years in prison, hopefully this mysterious case will come to a satisfying conclusion. 

That just looks like a cute couple right? No! Look again, there's more to it! 



Do you see the face in the window there? Maybe it's a mirror but that doesn't make it okay that a scary version of her face is looking right at the camera from that reflection. 

So what's going on here? Are ghosts real or is this some kind of April Fools day thing? 

Fans of the podcast will recognize this familiar tune. After almost a full year since the last episode of the popular first season of Serial, Season 2 has launched. The first season covered the little known case of Adnan Syed, a man convicted on potentially shaky evidence for murdering his ex-girlfriend in high school. This time the podcast went much, much bigger. Host, Sarah Koenig, wrote this in a welcome letter to prepare listeners for what the show will cover:

Our first season was about a murder case few people had heard about. Season Two is a story a gazillion people have heard about: the story of Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who walked off his post in Afghanistan in 2009 and was captured and held by the Taliban for nearly five years. It's been in the newspapers and on TV; it's been the subject of congressional investigations (in fact, this very day, the House Armed Services Committee is releasing a report on the Bergdahl trade)—and it's an active case in military court.

Video of a mysterious fireball shooting across the sky has people across the world baffled.

The phenomenon was captured Monday on dash-cam footage in Bangkok, and created a minor panic as authorities mistook the fireball for a plane crash.

Saran Poshyachina, the deputy director of the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, told the Bangkok Post that the fire in the sky was probably a meteorite landing. But it could also just have been space junk.

Pay attention to the top right of the screen around the 30 second mark to view the mysterious phenomenon.

It may not be Kim Kardashian’s butt or a couple of runaway llamas, but a single dress seemingly broken the Internet Thursday night.

The image above was originally uploaded on February 15 to Tumblr with the following caption:

Guys please help me – is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking the f**k out.

Simple enough question right? It’s obviously blue and gold. Mystery solved.

But wait, when you turn the photo sideways it’s actually more blue and black. The more you really think about it, maybe it’s white and gold after all.

Then your mind explodes, and the evil dress has won.

One commenter thought we needed to elevate this to a higher authority.

SPREAD THIS UNTIL IT REACHES NASA WE MUST FIND ANSWERS

The dress was trending on Twitter and Facebook by Friday morning, with people of both camps (#whiteandgold and #blackandblue) arguing their case.

Buzzfeed eventually contacted the original uploader, a woman named Caitlin McNeill. She confirmed that it was in fact the blue and black dress seen below.

It’s called the Royal-Blue Lace Detail Bodycon Dress and sells for $77.

Although the more interesting question is, why do we all see different colors?

Wired has a good explanation of why this is happening.

Human beings evolved to see in daylight, but daylight changes color. That chromatic axis varies from the pinkish red of dawn, up through the blue-white of noontime, and then back down to reddish twilight. “What’s happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College. “So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.”

The motive for the act remains unclear.

"At this time, it appears (the act) has no particular nexus to terrorism," Miller said. "This may be somebody's art project, or may be an attempt to make some kind of statement. But it's not clear what that statement is."

"The white flags -- which appear to be American flags that were bleached white and measure 20 feet by 11 feet -- were discovered by construction workers around 5:30 a.m."

A cancer-ridden women who died decades ago left a series of index cards with indeciphierable ramblings on the backs of them to her grandchildren before her passing. Now fully grown, those grandchildren have turned to the internet in hopes that they can get help in solving what they beiieve is some form of code.

My grandmother passed away in 1996 of a fast-spreading cancer. She was non-communicative her last two weeks, but in that time, she left at least 20 index cards with scribbled letters on them. My cousins and I were between 8-10 years old at the time, and believed she was leaving us a code. We puzzled over them for a few months trying substitution ciphers, and didn't get anywhere.

After making the post on Metafilter, parts of the encryption seemed to have been already solved. It appeared to users that the woman was partly writing prayers through her code.

Was she a religious woman? The last As, as well as the AAA combo, make me think of "Amen, amen, amen." So extrapolating -- TYAGF = "Thank you Almighty God for..."

It would make sense to end with "Thank you, Almighty God, for everything, Amen - Thank you, Almighty God, for everything, Amen, Amen, Amen."

OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIHFUTDODBAFUOT
AWFTWTAUALUNITBDUFEFTITKTPATGFAEA

Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name... etc etc etc

Check out the entire thread here to see if you can figure it out!

Scientists recently discovered that dogs prefer aligning their bodies with the Earth's magnetic field when relieving themselves.

According to a study published in Frontiers in Zoology, 70 dogs out of 37 different breeds were observed taking care of business over 7,400 times (sounds like a fun job...). The dogs showed a preference of positioning themselves with the north-south axis. Results of the study found that they not only prefer facing the north-south direction, but also deliberately avoid aligning themselves in an east-west position.

Who knew your dog would come in handy as a compass every time it drops a deuce? I guess that gives one more reason to call them "Man's Best Friend."

In an unexpected turn of events, BuzzFeed's creative director Jacob Bakkila outed his himself as the voice behind the famous @Horse_ebooks Twitter spambot to launch his new art project titled "Bears Stearns Bravo," a choose-your-own-adventure video formed in collaboration with Pronunciation Book blogger Thomas Bender. The duo held a bizarre promotional event this morning at the Fitzroy Gallery in New York City's Lower East Side, where they sat in chairs answering phone calls while reading off sheets of paper before abruptly hanging up on the callers. The project has been in the works for the past several years, The New Yorker reports, and serves as a bittersweet endpoint for both the Pronunciation Book and @Horse_ebooks feeds.

At last, although to almost no one's surprise, the U.S. government formally acknolwedged the existence of Area 51 and disclosed the location of the base in newly declassified CIA documents, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted nearly ten years ago by the National Security Archives' senior fellow Jeffrey T. Richelson. While there are no mentions of housing aliens, UFOs or other extraterrestrial artifacts, the documents do indicate that the base served as a testing ground for the military's aerial surveillance programs and equipments, including the world famous U-2 spy planes, essentially supporting what many UFO skeptics have speculated about the true identity of UFO sightings in the surrounding area.