Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- When Justin Stone returned to his car in Colchester after a gym session he saw that the back was covered in something dark - and moving. A swarm of bees had settled on the vehicle. Assuming they were just
resting he waited 10 minutes before "I just plucked up the courage to run to my car. I didn't want to hurt them, that was the key thing." Once in his car Stone was helped by a passer-by who covered
himself up and scooped the bees off the car. ● A street in Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, had its power cut off briefly on Saturday so firemen and engineers could rescue a cat. "Gryffyndor" had gone
missing earlier in the day when her family realised she had not eaten her food, but it was about ten hours before she was located, sitting on top of a live electricity pole. Western Power Distribution cut the power
to around 100 homes for five minutes while firemen brought her back down to the ground because it was deemed to risky to attempt with the electricity still live. Verity Edwards-Flaherty, Gryffyndor's owner said
that "Nobody seemed to mind. People have been very kind and we're very, very grateful".
- The 530lb (240kg) Chinese Zhurong rover has rolled off its lander on Mars to start exploring part of the Utopia Planetia basin for the next 90 sols (Martian days), about 93 Earth days. ● GPS
(the Global Positioning System) is taken for granted these days, and with plans to return to the Moon, primarily the American Project Artemis, moves are afoot to develop a comparable system for the lunar surface.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has asked two consortia to define what such a system, dubbed Pathfinder, would include. One consortium is led by Italy's Telespazio, which includes satellite communication
specialists Inmarsat, based in London, the other is led by Satellite Technology Limited, based in Surrey, which assembled the EU's Galileo GPS navigation payloads. As well as providing positioning information the ESA
wants to include high-speed data links back to the Earth.
- Archaeologists have discovered a Roman bath complex under sand dunes on a beach near the Spanish village of Canos de Meca in Southern Andalusia. The buildings are spread over around 2.5 acres (10,117m2)
and some red, white and black stucco and marble has survived, showing that the baths would have been lavishly decorated. Together with the discovery of Roman era salting pools at nearby Cape Trafalgar the
find suggests that the location was an important Roman settlement. ● A handwritten letter from Albert Einstein which includes his E=mc2 equation has been sold at auction for $1.2m (£850,000)
in America. There are only three other known examples of the equation in his handwriting. It was originally sent to the Polish-American physicist Ludwik Silberstein in 1946 and was sold to an anonymous document
collector. ● In the late 19th Century mill-owning brothers Alfred and William Law amassed a library of books and a collection of documents relating to literature, which was housed at Honresford
House near Rochdale. After both brothers died it passed into the hands of Alfred's nephew, also called Alfred, and was lost to obscurity when the younger Alfred died in 1939. The Honresford Library of 500 items, which
includes first editions of Jane Austen's Northangar Abbey, Persuasion, Emma and Pride and Prejudice, a copy of Tennyson's poems annotated by the poet, the manuscript for Sir Walter
Scott's Rob Roy, letters written to and by Elizabeth Gaskell, publisher George Smith (who championed the Brontë sisters while they were adopting their Bell pseudonyms), works by the Grimm Brothers, Ovid,
Mary Wollstonecraft and Dickens, a Brontë family copy of Bewick's History of British Birds annotated by Charlotte Brontë, a first edition of Wuthering Heights and handwritten poems by Emily
Brontë will go on display around Britain before being auctioned. ● Novice metal detectorist Charles Cartwright thought he made the find of a lifetime on his first detectoring search when he
discovered a hoard of almost 300 Roman and Viking items in a field in Worcestershire, until he discovered that some of them were inside an Aldi plastic shopping bag. He contacted West Mercia Police who confirmed
that the items, together worth around £5,000 ($7,079) had been stolen from a collector in Ludlow four years ago. The man, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that he had given up hope of recovering them
and was "extremely grateful" to Mr Cartwright, who had declined a reward, but the collector hopes to meet him one day and "buy him a pint or two".
- When traffic police on the M65 near Burnley on Tuesday pursued a speeding driver he left the motorway in his Mercedes and ran two red traffic lights before being brought to a controlled stop. Initially lying
about his identity, the man stunned the officers when he got out of the car because they saw he had been driving while wearing studded football boots. When his real identity was ascertained they found that he had
been disqualified from driving in 2020. The man, who claimed to have been taking the car for a test drive, was charged with speeding, failing to stop at red lights, driving without insurance, driving while
disqualified and driving while not in a position to have proper control of a vehicle. ● A county lines drugs gang have been caught after hiring a taxi to transport themselves and their drugs. The taxi
had dashboard and rear-facing cameras which recorded them boasting about their crimes as they recruited a teenager to deliver crack cocaine and heroin, in the back of the cab. After police realised that the
gang had been using the taxi they arrested the driver and seized several hours of camera footage. ● A man is suing the police in Illinois after they stopped his car for speeding and searched it for drugs.
Dartavius Barnes told the officers that he had some marijuana in car - almost 2.8oz (80g), three times the legal limit, was found, but then an officer showed him a finger-sized metal canister from the car and told
him it had tested positive for meth or ecstasy. The canister actually contained the ashes of his baby daughter, who had died of neglect and starvation in 2019, for which her mother was sentenced to 20 years in
prison, and some had been spilled during the test. The officers eventually declined to retest the contents and returned it, but Barnes is seeking compensatory damages and a trial by jury. Roadside drugs tests
used by police in America are notorious for giving false positives. ● A woman in Sonora, Mexico, was arrested after trying to stab her husband because she saw a photograph of him with a younger woman on his
phone. The younger woman was, in fact, herself, and the picture was from when they were dating and both were "young and slim" according to her husband, who had had the photograph digitised.
- Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have developed a concept model for a rechargeable battery made of cement with embedded metal-coated carbon fibres. Powered by solar
panels the brick batteries could monitor the condition of structures including bridges or power mobile phone networks in rural areas. ● Scientists at the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (Mast) nuclear fusion
experiment in Culham, Oxfordshire, have released their initial results of an experiment that could solve one of the biggest hurdles to commercial fusion power. Unlike current nuclear power stations, which create
energy by breaking atoms apart fusion reactors replicate the Sun by merging atoms in a charged gas field, or plasma, contained by magnetic fields. Replicating the sun creates a lot of heat - the Mast system
reaches temperatures of 100 million degrees centigrade (180,000,000oF), and without a workable exhaust system fission reactors would need the constant replacing of key parts. The Mast scientists claim
to have developed a "game changer" exhaust system which provides a tenfold reduction in the heat their reactor's components are subjected to, which could pave the way for cheaper, safer, power generation.
- Death Valley in California has long been famous for two things - the moving stones and being the hottest place on the surface of the Earth with temperatures reaching 56.7oC (134.1oF). The
mystery of the stones was solved some time ago [TFIr passim] and now it is no longer the hottest place on Earth. Satellite data collected over the last 20 years has found that the Lut Desert (Dasht-e Lut)
in Iran and the Sonoran Desert near the Mexican border in North America reach higher temperatures, with the Lut Desert narrowly hotter at around 80.8oC (177.4oF).
- Mullet haircuts and skinny jeans are frequently mocked in the West as symbols of outdated fashion, but they have both been banned in North Korea for fear that they could corrupt the younger generation and
lead to capitalist urges. Other banned fashions include ripped jeans, slogan t-shirts, piercings and spiked or dyed hair. North Korean men can choose from just fifteen "proper" state-approved haircuts
[which reminds us of in-game character customisation -Ed] because "history teaches us a crucial lesson that a country can become vulnerable and eventually collapse like a damp wall regardless of its economic
and defense power if we do not hold on to our own lifestyle", according to Rodin Sinum, a state-owned newspaper.
- A 200-tonne fatberg in sewers underneath Liverpool has been cleared using a newly-devised technique. Until now fatbergs, accumulations of grease, fat and "unflushable" items, have had to be broken up
and dug out by hand, taking weeks, but the new method, involving feeding a steel rope through the fatberg then cutting it with jets of water halved the time needed. The 820'- (250m)-long Liverpool fatberg, beneath
Bankhall Lane, Birchall Street and Foster Street was removed in two weeks, and a new liner was fitted to the sewer.
- A dispute between two counties has been settled in a most English manner. The 90-mile (150km) River Nene rises in Northamptonshire then runs along the Cambridgeshire-Norfolk border before entering Lincolnshire
and emptying into sea at The Wash. For hundreds of years the people of Northamptonshire have pronounced its name as the "Nen" while Cambridgeshire residents pronounce it the "Neen". Last Sunday
the matter was settled with a croquet match between clubs in Northampton and Peterborough. Northampton won 7-2 so the river's official pronunciation is the "Nen", as least until the rematch in twelve
months' time...
- Bartram Trail High School in Florida has been widely criticised and mocked after it emerged that yearbook photos of 80 female students had been (mostly badly) edited to cover bare shoulders and the slightest
hint of décolletage. The school defended its actions by saying the changes were made to ensure that the photographs met their dress code which calls for "modesty", but critics pointed out that
no photographs of male students which violated the same standards were edited. None of the students were informed of the image editing or consulted over it before publication. An online petition criticising
the school's dress code for being "clearly based on the sexualisation of young women" started before the yearbook debacle now has more than 5,000 signatures.
IN BRIEF: The British Police has been revealed still to be using a 1974 mainframe computer for background checks on suspects' characters. ● A driver of a Japanese bullet train is facing punishment
after leaving the cockpit in the charge of a conductor unlicensed to drive the train as it travelled at 93mph (150km/h), while he went to the toilet. ● A new iceberg, dubbed "A-76" has calved off the Ronne
Ice Shelf in Antarctica. At 109 miles (175km) in length and 16 miles (25km) width - larger in area than the island of Majorca, it is the largest iceberg recorded, surpassing the "A-86" iceberg which
calved off the Larsen C ice shelf in 2017. ● The body of a 39-year-old man has been recovered from inside a large papier-mache dinosaur sculpture in a town near Barcelona; police think he had climbed in head-first
to retrieve his phone and became stuck in a leg. ● The Mount Nyiragongo volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo has erupted for the first time since 2002, prompting the evacuation of thousands of people.
Lava reportedly headed to one side of the city of Goma and stopped short of the airport. ● The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in America has advised people to stop hugging or kissing ducks
and chickens after an outbreak of salmonella across 43 states. ● A Japanese drill ship has set a record for the depth at which a core sample has been drilled after retrieving a 121'- (37m)-long sample from
the Japan Trench at a depth of more than 5 miles (8km) below sea level.
CORONAVIRUS ROUND-UP: The Indian government has ordered social media companies to remove all content that refers to the COVID-19 B.1.617 variant by its common name, the "Indian variant"; the
more transmissable variant was first detected in India last year, where there are more than 26 million people infected with COVID-19. ● The Medical Detection Dogs charity is training sniffer dogs to
detect COVID-19 in people, using more than 3,500 items of clothing provided by members of the public and the NHS. The dogs, two of whom are rescue animals, have an accuracy level of up to 94.3% and show that
trained detector dogs could be deployed at airports for fast scanning of passengers.
UPDATES: Astronomers have traced the sources of eight "fast radio bursts" (FRBs), intense but brief radio signals first discovered in 2007. Five of them came from the outer arms of spiral
galaxies suggesting that they might be linked to star formation. ● Following the relocation of a number of Tasmanian devils into an Australian sanctuary north of Sydney last year the first of the endangered
marsupials to be born on the Australian mainland since they died out there thousands of years ago have been delivered.
