Nopeland Discovery: the Blog

Urban legends are fascinating. These pieces of modern folklore are as creepy as they are entertaining, and provide a wonderful insight into how entirely made-up, far-fetched stories, can be believed and passed on, as long as they sound scary and shocking enough. Of course, they are often told for fun and entertainment, but there are also many people who sincerely believe in some of them and accept them as fact. A big part of their impact comes from their tendency to tap into the widespread fears and beliefs of the place and time they exist in. These cultural context elements, which give birth to the urban tales and transpire through them, can be highly specific to one particular location (such as a particularly creepy and mysterious abandoned building in a specific town) or be more vague, and representative of the concerns and anxieties of an entire demographic. The fear of all things foreign and unfamiliar, and of these foreign threats making an unwelcome intrusion in our world of fa...

  "A black widow's venom is 15 times more toxic than a rattlesnake's"                                                                                                National Geographic documentary   Warning: this article shows some images of medically significant animals near human hands. These animals were not being handled, and this is not something I encourage or condone. The live cone snail being handled is not a medically significant species, and not something that should ever be replicated without the necessary knowledge and experience (handling of medically significant cone snail species is extremely dangerous and potentially deadly)  It's definitely one of the most commonly sh...