Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- As part of a multi-million pound renovation the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh are relocating more than 40,000 plants. Unfortunately one plant they cannot move is a 200-year-old Sabal palm tree, which is too
tall to be dug up and moved intact so it is due to be felled next week. ● Glastonbury Festival goers are being urged to use the provided toilets in future after researchers found dangerously high levels of
Class A drugs including MDMA and cocaine in the river running through Worthy Farm where the 5-day music festival is staged, and the blame is being put on attendees relieving themselves in the fields instead of the
portaloos. ● A decade after it was abandoned by humans following a tsunami-triggered nuclear incident the area around the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan is teeming with wildlife including both rare and
threatened species as well as the infamously aggressive wild boar/pig hybrids. ● Google parent company Alphabet's Australian trials of using drones to deliver groceries and medicine to customers in a suburb of
Canberra have been suspended after magpies and ravens repeatedly swooped on the drones, causing them to crash. ● Schipol airport southwest of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, like swathes of the country, sits on
relaimed land below sea level. An area of land between the two main runways is used for growing sugar beet, but after harvesting the scraps and freshly turned-over soil attracts birds which creates a risk to aircraft.
To deter the avian intruders a herd of pigs has been brought in to eat the remains of the crop. ● Five flights taking off from Tokyo's Narita international airport last week were delayed after a pilot spotting a
turtle crossing the runway prompting a search of the area. One of the planes delayed was an All Nippon Airways aircraft painted with a sea turtle design. The turtle was recovered safely and returned to the airport's
retention pond. ● Firefighters were called to the Ship Inn in Folkestone on Monday to rescue an iguana called Ronnie who had escaped from a neighbouring house and climbed onto the roof for a spot of sunbathing.
● A six-month-old wallaby is on the loose in Aberdeenshire after escaping from a petting zoo near New Deer a day after arriving there.
- The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is spinning faster, getting smaller and becoming more circular, and nobody knows why. ● NASA will lose contact with its rovers on Mars for two weeks in October and Mars as the
Earth are temporarily on opposite sides of the Sun, an event that occurs every two years. The InSight Lander will continue to monitor and record any seismic activity, the Perseverence rover will record weather
measurements and sounds as well as performing preset experiments and the Curiosity rover (still active after over 9 years) will continue to record weather and radiation data but the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will remain
grounded until contact can be restored. ● Texan mother Shaakira Brandon recently posted a video online of her five-year-old daughter Nala-Joyce accusing her of being an alien because there is a picture of the
Earth in her passport. She explained that she had let her daughter see the film Men in Black in which aliens visiting Earth have passports. Men in Black screenwriter Ed Solomon replied to her tweet
"My Bad. I apologize". ● It has emerged that the SpaceX tourist flight did not pass without any problems - partway through an alarm was triggered - by the toilet. Zero gravity toilets use fans to draw
waste into them, and the Crew Dragon toilet's fans suffered "issues" according to mission directors, which the amateur crew were able to resolve with directions from the ground.
- Analysis of fossilised egg shell fragments found in New Guinea has suggested that the first birds to have been domesticated by man could have been cassowaries. The large flightless birds are considered to be the
world's most dangerous birds because of their dagger-like toes, bony crests and aggressive behaviour when they feel their territory is in danger. It is speculated that early humans could have collected their eggs and
raised them to adulthood thousands of years before chickens were domesticated. ● A team of paleontologists in New Mexico has found human footprints dating to between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago. It had been
thought that humans did not reach the Americas before 16,000 years ago. ● Workmen repairing a ceiling at March Railway Station in Cambridgeshire discovered a forgotten attic containing a Great Eastern Railway
sack, three logbooks, British Rail Red Star consignment notes, goods train documentation and a ledger dated to April 1885, detailing all passenger luggage and parcels sent from the station. ● Items sold at
auction this week include a cassette tape recording of an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and an unreleased song, made by four Danish teenagers interviewing the couple for their school magazine in January 1970
(sold for £43,000 ($58,300)), and a walking stick owned by Irish republican leader Michael Collins (sold for £52,000 ($70,110)).
- Officers of India's Central Industrial Security Force have arrested a man at Imphal airport after a handheld metal detector picked up a strong signal from his abdomen. An X-ray then found "some metallic items
in a body cavity". He was found to have four packets of gold paste weighing just over 32oz (907g) in total, worth £41,800 ($56,350) in his rectum. The man, who was trying to board a flight to New Delhi
told officers that he did not own the gold but was just carrying it. ● Two French Capuchin monks have been arrested and charged with setting fire to 5G phone masts. They told the investigating magistrate that
they had wanted "to warn the population against he harmful effects of 5G". The World Health Organization reported last year that "after much research performed, no adverse health effect has been
causally linked with exposure to wireless technologies." New technology always brings predictions of danger; the first trains prompted fears of suffocation from travelling at speed and the first printing press
was almost destroyed after a copy of 50 Shades of Grey fell through a wrinkle in time and revealed what it would be used for [One of these may not be entirely true... -Ed].
- Last week temperatures across the central Plains of the U.S. neared 37.8oC (100oF) in some places, the highest seasonal temperatures for over 100 years. In Utah the foundations of the town of
Rockport, abandoned in 1957 to make way for the Rockport Reservoir created by the building of the Wanship Dam, reappeared as the reservoir capacity shrank by 26% in drought conditions.
- The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, gave artist Jens Haaning 537,725 kroner (£62,300; $84,000) in cash to incorporate in updated versions of his 2010 works "An Average Danish
Annual Income" and "An Average Austrian Annual Income" which showed the incomes in actual cash. As the delivery date for the pieces neared the exhibition curator received an email from Jennings
saying that he had instead created a new piece of artwork titled "Take the Money and Run". Sure enough, when the crates containing the art arrived they were found to contain the frames, completely empty.
Museum Director Lasse Andersson told reporters that he had laughed when he saw them. "Jens is known for his conceptual and activistic art with a humouristic touch. And he gave us that - but also a bit of a
wake up call as everyone now wonders where the money went." The museum's contract with Haaning stipulates that the money will be returned to them on January 16th; it remains to be seen if he honours it.
- One of the limits to lithium ion rechargeable batteries is the energy density of the material used. Most commercial batteries use graphite anodes despite graphite having a tenth the energy density of
silicon. As batteries are recharged silicon anodes expand and contract making them took risky to use. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have found that replacing liquid electrolytes with
sulfide-based solid ones allows them to safely use silicon anodes, which will enable battery makers to producer higher energy-density batteries at cheaper costs and better safety, particularly for grid storage
applications. Although the focus of research is currently on large scale uses, the technology could enable electric cars to charge faster and run for longer between charges. ● Researchers in Korea have developed
a wearable battery inspired by snake scales that bends and stretches with each 'scale' containing a power cell. ● Samsung and Harvard University have announced plans to replicate the structure of the human brain
on computer chips. Given that the brain contains an estimated 100 billion neurons and over a thousand times as many synaptic connections it is, perhaps, just as well that the joint 'perspective paper' does not give a
time frame.
- The UK is currently in the grip of a mostly-fictitious petrol shortage, started by oil company BP claiming there is a shortage of tanker drivers and calling for easier access for foreign drivers (because BP do not
want to pay decent wages to British drivers) and exasperated by the media including on-site reports from a petrol station by BBC reporter Phil McCann ("fill my can") which went viral thanks to his name, and
people panic filling up their cars. There is no shortage of petrol stock but that did not stop long queues forming at pumps and limits having to be introduced (the Editor saw one driver leaving the pumps at his local
supermarket after putting the allowed £30 ($40.45) worth of fuel in his car then rejoining to queue to get more...). When Lily Potkin found herself in "the mother of all queues" at a petrol station in
Kingsbury, northwest London, on Tuesday lunchtime she was getting hungry, so after an hour she used her phone to order a Nando's takeout delivery. The queue was going over a roundabout and moods were getting impatient
and angry, but, as she told reporters "It was really funning. The people behind me saw him delivering it and the mood changed. Everyone was really aggy and then I could see the people behind me cracking up. They
were just in hysterics."
- U.S. televangelist Kenneth Copeland is pleading with his 'faithful' viewers to give him money, not to build churches or support foreign religious communities or charitable causes. He wants a private jet because
that will enable him to fly without having to bother with coronavirus vaccine mandates which he has called "the mark of the beast". The Book of Revelation states that "No one can buy or sell who does not
have the mark" on the forehead or right hand. As far as we know, nobody is vaccinated for anything in the forehead or hand... Copeland, whose wife previously told their
victimsflock not to get
innoculated against the 'flu, already owns a fleet of private jets and an airport... During one of Copeland's fundraiser broadcasts evangelical preacher Jesse Duplantis told viewers that the reason Jesus has not
returned is because people are not giving money "the way God told them to give"... Reporters could find no records of multimillionnaire Duplantis donating any money for Copeland's salvationjet.
- There is a new high-flier in the world of cryptocurrency trading. His name is Mr Goxx, and his trading performance is nearing the the 20% profit mark, more than many trading funds and professionals. Mr Goxx is a
hamster. He has a small 'office' extension to his cage with a motion-triggered camera recording him every time he 'goes to work' by entering it. In the office is a hamster wheel with the names of various cryptocurrencies
written around it. When he stops running on the wheel, a pointer indicates which currency will be traded, and there are two tubes in the office, one marked "buy", the other "sell". Both the wheel
and tubes have sensors and trades are triggered every time he runs through one of the tubes.
IN BRIEF: The much-demanded (by the twice-indicted former guy [TIFG]) audit of votes in Arizona, carried out by a company with no experience of election auditing and openly supportive of the TIFG, filmed by
the TIFG-supporting right-wing OANN TV station has found that Joe Biden won by a wider margin than initially reported... ● After a charter bus for a Massachusetts high school field trip fell through the students
had to go on the trip on a different bus - a party bus with neon lights and a stripper pole. ● The Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma continues to erupt, and its lava to near the sea, but aerial footage this week
showed what has been called a "miracle house"; unlike all the neighbouring properties now buried under lava, the house, built and owned by a retired Danish couple, has been left intact as lava flowed
a short distance to either side of it. ● Cavers have descended into Yemen's "Well of Hell" for the first time. The 98' (30m) wide, 367' (112m) deep sinkhole has been avoided by locals who believe it to
inhabited by evil jinns (genies), but all the cavers found were stalagmites, cave pearls (formed by dripping water), snakes and animal skeletons. ● Former marine Dave Bell has completed a solo row across the
Atlantic, from New York to Newlyn, Cornwall. He took 199 days. ● Indian farmer Syed Ghani Khan grows more than 100 varieties of mango, several of which he developed including ones that look like apples and taste
like bananas. ● North Yorkshire County Council has apologised after contractors painting zig-zag and "keep clear" markings outside a school that closed 18 years ago and is now a private home. ●
Iceland briefly became the first European country with a female-majority parliament after initial election results showed 33 of the 63 seats in the Althing won by female candidates, but the results were later confirmed
as only 30 seats going to women.
CORONAVIRUS ROUND-UP: A future therapy for COVID-19 may be thanks to Fifi the llama. Llamas - and camels - produce 'nanobodies', a smaller, simpler form of antibodies. The treatment, given as a nasal spray,
has not yet been tested on humans but early results on lab rats show promise. ● Vaccination rates in Charlotte, Carolina, have increased thanks to a fictitious funeral home's advertising campaign. A lorry drove
around bearing the message "Don't get vaccinated" followed by "Wilmore Funeral Home" and a web address. Visitors to the site saw details of how to get vaccinated.
UPDATES: The UK Court of Appeal has confirmed an earlier ruling that an AI cannot be the inventor of new patents. The case, reported on in an earlier issue, was originally brought by Stephen Phaler who
named his Dabus AI system as the inventor in patent applications only for the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) to deny the patents to it. He sued the IPO in the High Court which ruled against him, and has now lost
his appeal against that ruling.
One morning Sandra came downstairs and said to her mother, "I'm not going to school today."
"Why not?"
"Little Simon is always showing off that he knows all the answers and Little Jennifer keeps making me feel like an idiot."
Her mother took a sip of her coffee. "I do think you ought to go. You are their teacher, after all, dear..."
^ ...end of line
