Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- Australian farmer Brad Hocking has grown the world's largest blueberry, weighing 0.7oz (20.4g) and measuring 1½" (39.31mm) across, about the size of a table tennis
ball. ● A quarter-final match at the Indian Wells Open tennis tournament in California, between Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev, had to be temporarily halted for
one hour and forty minutes after a swarm of bees descended on the court. The tournament's official beekeeper safely removed the insects with a vacuum device before play
could resume. Defending champion Alcarez, who had been stung on the forehead, won 6-3 6-1. ● In a once-in-a-lifetime event billions of cicadas are due to emerge from
underground across 17 US states. Unlike annual cicadas, which can be found worldwide during the summer these 'periodical' cicadas spend most of their lives underground,
feeding on sap from tree roots, emerging only to breed, and are only found in North America. There are several broods, each consisting of thousands, possibly millions, of
the insects, which emerge on either 13 or 17 year cycles. Brood XIII and Brood XIX last emerged in the same year over two centuries ago. ● Chester Zoo staff are
celebrating the birth of a rare Rothschild's giraffe. Camera footage showed the birth, as the 6' (1.8m) tall calf fell from its standing mother onto straw. ● New
Orleans police superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick has told the city council that the police headquarters are so old and out-of-date that infrastructure like lifts and
air conditioning is broken, mould and cockroaches are common and rats have got into the evidence room and eaten confiscated marijuana. "The rats [...] they're
all high," she said. ● A campaign has been launched by the Royal Horticultural Society and the Wildlife Trust to rehabilitate the image of slugs and snails in
Britain. As well as being a food source for hedgehogs, thrushes and other animals, the gastropods feed on rotting plants, fungi and carrion, recycling nitrogen, nutrients
and minerals back into the ground. ● Workers at a wildlife centre in Richmond, Virginia, caring for an orphaned fox kit brought in at less than a day old, wear a
full-face fox mask and rubber gloves while syringe-feeding it, so it does not become imprinted on humans and will be able to be reintroduced into the wild at a later date.
- Astronomers have spent decades trying to measure the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding, but although techniques have become more precise they
have also given considerably different results. Now data collected last year from the James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed earlier results using the Hubble Space
Telescope. ● Engineers at the Deep Space Network have a plan to try and restore the Voyager 1 space probe, which has been returning gibberish for the last
few months. After sending a unique command they retrieved a complete memory dump from the probe which they can compare with one from before the problem started to hopefully
locate the fault and devise a solution. Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and is over 15 billion miles (24bn km) away, probably in the interstellar medium outside the
Solar System, and it takes 22.5 hours for a message to pass between the probe and Earth, so engineers have to wait almost two days to get a response to any commands sent.
- Archaeologists excavating a site in El Caño Archaeological Park in Panama have found the grave of a religious leader who was buried over 1,200 years ago with
a lavish cache of gold items and the bodies of several sacrificial victims. ● Next month a team will start searching the seas off Cornwall for the wreck of The
Merchant Royal, a ship which sank 400 years ago carrying gold and precious metals worth around £4bn ($5bn) at today's prices. The search, using autonomous
underwater vehicles (AUVs) and sonar mapping, will go on until the end of the year, if the ship is not found sooner. Because of laws concerning treasure finds in British
waters the team will not become instant millionaires, but for leader Nigel Hodge the lure is finding answers about the ship. There are thousands of shipwrecks around the
Cornish coast so the team will not be able to simply send down an AUV and claim the first wreck they see. ● Marine explorers who spent four years searching the
waters off the Greek island of Kasos, guided by Homer's Iliad have discovered ten significant wrecks, ranging from the Classical period (~460 BCE) to a wooden ship
sunk during World War II. ● The world's earliest-known lipstick has been found in southern Iran. The deep red paint, probably applied with a brush, in a small stone
vial was found in an ancient graveyard in 2001 but has only recently been identified. It is up to 5,000 years old. ● A manager at a Cancer Relief charity shop in
Enfield who spotted what she thought might be a rare Beatles record worth a few hundred pounds in her shop passed it to the charity's online trading team who posted it on
eBay with a starting price of £1,499.99 ($1,900). It was not just rare, it was an "incredibly rare" first pressing of the original masters of the group's
debut album Please Please Me and sold for £4,211.89 ($5,344). ● The first ever bank note issued by the Manx Bank on the Isle of Man has sold at auction
for a world record price for the bank's notes, of £24,000 ($30,450), 24,000 times its face value. The banknote, serial number '00001' was issued in November 1882.
● One of the Star Wars C-3PO robot heads from actor Anthony Daniels' private collection has sold at auction for $843,750 (£660,000). The three-part
fibreglass head with eyes that light up at the flick of a switch was worn in several scenes during the Battle of Endor in Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi.
- A second man has been arrested in connection with the 2005 theft of one of the pairs of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. Terry John Martin,
76, pleaded guilty last year to stealing them as "one last score" to end a lifetime of crime, and was sentenced to time served due to poor health. Now Jerry Hal
Saliterman, 76, has been charged with theft of a major artwork and witness tampering after he "received, concealed and disposed of an object of cultural heritage"
and allegedly threatened a woman who knew he had them, with the release of a sex tape if she did not keep quiet. The slippers' market value, according to prosecutors, is
around $3.5m (£2.8m). ● A Montana farmer who illegally imported tissue samples and testicles from Marco Polo argali sheep, the largest breed of sheep in the world,
in Kyrgyzstan is facing a jail time. Arthur Schubarth planned to develop an even bigger sheep, which he could sell to up to $10,000 (£8,000) each to hunting groups.
The species is endangered and protected; in 2019 the elder son of the twice-indicted 91-times-charged seemingly broke former president faced condemnation worldwide when he
went hunting for the species in Mongolia.
- Last year's global ocean surface temperatures broke daily records every day from mid-March. ● Solar-powered boats have been given to indigenous Achaur people in
the Amazon River Basin to give them an alternative to diesel-powered boats while maintaining their use of the river for transport and communication. The technology is also
being used to power radio equipment and lighting. ● Iceland has seen the fourth volcanic eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula since December, with lava erupting from
a 1.8 mile (3km) fissure, prompting another state of emergency to be declared. ● This year's hurricane season could be worse than usual as a La Niña event
appears to be developing, cooling Pacific waters and leading to more instability. La Niña is the cyclical counterpart to El Niño, which warms the Pacific.
● The Maritime Conservation Society's annual beach clean last year saw more than 480,000 items of rubbish removed from UK beaches, with single-use plastic bottles and
caps among the most frequent finds. ● Never mind the Chicago River on St Patrick's Day, a river in the Danescombe Valley, Cornwall, turned bright green last weekend.
It was not a St Patrick's Day thing, though; according to the Environment Agency the "completely harmless" dye was used to trace drainage routes. ● Data
from the Pyxis Ocean, a cargo ship retrofitted with 123'- (37.5m)-high rigid sails made of the same material as wind turbine blades, has shown that during six months
of testing it has used three tonnes less fuel and reduced emissions by 11.2 tonnes of CO2 every day that the sails were in use. ● Wealthy homeowners who
spent $565,000 (£441,000) to truck in 14,000 tonnes of sand to build dunes to protect their fifteen beachfront homes in Salisbury, Massachusetts, saw the dunes washed
away by a storm three days after they were completed. They are now appealing to the state for help re-fortifying the beach. ● In 2015 world leaders agreed to work to
limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5oC. Between February 2023 and January 2024 the average global air temperature was 1.52oC above
pre-industrial levels for the whole period.
IN BRIEF: After Cambridge University academic Dr Krisztine Ilko became trapped in the bathroom of her rooms in a medieval tower where she lives (rooms once
occupied by Desiderius Erasmus, the C16th philosopher) after a plumber broke the lock, and facing potentially four days without food until a cleaner was due to
do her rooms, she summoned her inner MacGuyver and used her eyeliner and a cotton bud to push down the latch and make a hook to unlock the door. ● In the UK fast food outlet
McDonald's, supermarkets Tesco and Sainsbury's and bakery chain Greggs were all hit by software glitches over the last week that affected their ability to trade. In
Ethiopia, meanwhile, the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, the country's biggest bank, was hit by a software glitch that allowed people to take more money out of its cash
machines or transfer via app than they had in their accounts. More than 2,200m Birr (£31m; $40m) was withdrawn or transferred to other banks before transactions
could be frozen. ● A metal detectorist using faulty equipment has found the largest gold nugget ever found in England. Richard Brock discovered the 2.3oz (64.8g)
nugget, worth at least £30,000 ($38,150) in Shropshire. ● Anna Wells, 34, has become the first woman to summit all of Scotland's 282 Munros (mountains more
than 3,000' (914m) high) in one winter season. ● A judge has ruled that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not the man who invented the Bitcoin
cryptocurrency, who goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto; Wright has claimed to be Satoshi since 2016 and aggressively sued anyone who said he was not, but failed to
produce solid evidence and was accused of forging documentation during the court proceedings. ● Dan Dafydd, owner of a shop on the Orkney island of Sanday, thought he
had ordered 80 Easter eggs but accidentally ordered 80 cases, a total of 720 eggs. Sanday has a population of about 500 people with just 60 children. He is now raffling off
100 eggs to one winner, with proceeds going to the RNLI. ● A team at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland working with the English moulding company Great Central
Plastics has developed a means to produce lateral flow test (LFT) sticks from recycled plastics including fridge parts and used chewing gum. About 160,000 tonnes of plastic
is produced every year to make four billion LFTs for a range of illnesses and conditions.
UPDATES: Scientists who compared clinical, auditory, visual, balance, neurospsychological and blood tests as well as MRI brain scans of US government workers
suffering from "Havana syndrome" and adult relatives with healthy volunteers found no significant differences, so are no closer to finding a cause. The syndrome,
in which victims report nausea, ringing in the ears, dizziness, loss of balance, sensitivity to light and sound, memory problems and a sense of vibration inside the head
was first reported by staff at the US embassy in Havana, Cuba, then at other locations around the world, and were at first attributed to a microwave weapon or directed
energy device, but no proof was found.
It was break time at school and the teacher was watching Little Jennifer, Little Mary and Little Simon running around, each waving an arm in
front of their faces. "That looks fun", she said to Little Simon, "What are you doing?"
"We're playing at being elephants in the zoo, Miss!" he answered.
"Would you like to join in, Miss?" Little Mary asked.
"OK, what do you want me to do?"
Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "You can be the lady that feeds us peanuts, Miss!"
