Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- A volunteer group in West Cheshire is celebrating the recovery of the county's barn owl population over the last 30 years. Dot and George Bramall founded the Broxton Barn Owl group in 1995, after
moving to the area and finding that a survey of barn owls showed there were just six breeding pairs. Thanks to the group's work there are now about 160 pairs. ● Scientists at the Warnell School
of Forestry in Athens, Georgia, have found that bats glow green when exposed to ultraviolet light. They studied six different species from varying habitats to rule out environmental factors. Their
hypothesis is that the trait is a remnant of a time when bats needed to find each other before they developed echolocation. ● Four hundred years after they were hunted to extinction beavers
have been reintroduced to the wild in the Glen Affric national nature reserve in the Scottish highlands, after a trial release in Argyll in 2009 and elsewhere across Britain. ● The Columbus Zoo
in Ohio has welcomed its second elephant calf to be born this year. ● Astralian conservation scientists have announced that the Christmas Island shrew, once widespread across the island, its
only habitat, is now extinct. ● Christmas Island's most famous native species has begun its annual migration. Tens of millions of red crabs are moving from their forest burrows to the Indian
Ocean shoreline to breed, and the island's human residents are, as usual, helping them. ● Conservation efforts in Alberta, Canada, to save the northern leopard frog which was first noted to be
in decline in the 1970s, have been hailed a success. ● Stone crabs, a tropical species, have been found in the waters off Virginia for the first time as sea temperatures rise. ● In another
indicator of global warming, mosquitos have been found in Iceland for the first time. ● Dogs of Chernobyl, a group which cares for the stray dogs around the former nuclear plant, has released
video showing that some of the dogs have suddenly turned bright blue. A spokesman told reporters that they do not know why, but presumed that they had become coated in a chemical that should wash off.
● A male Eastern black rhino has been born at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. There are fewer than 600 Eastern black rhinos left in the wild. ● A Subalpine Woolly Rat, previously only known
through dead specimens in museums, occasional sightings by research students and the stories of tribespeople in the grassland mountains of Papua New Guinea, has been caught on camera for the first
time. The rat grows up to around 2.5' (85cm) in length, including its tail and can weigh 4.4lb (2kg). ● Thousands of sea cucumbers, gelatinous creatures that normally live burrowed into the
sand from the low tide line out to sea, have been washed ashore along an Oregon beach. It is thought that a combination of an unusually low tide and heavy surf brought them ashore. Unfurtunately
most of them were fated to dry up and die as they have no means of returning to the sea, unless another tide washed them back out. ● A trail camera in Tajung Puting National Park in Borneo has
recorded a female Bornean clouded leopard and her two cubs, the first sighting of a breeding female and cubs in the park.
- 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar object passing through the Solar System continues to interest astronomers. A couple of months ago it developed an "anti-tail", a third tail seemingly pointing
directing at the Sun. Normally this is an optical illusion caused by the relative position of the Earth, and the third tail is, like the dust and ion tails, really pointing behind the comet's nucleus,
but 3I/ATLAS' anti-tail was actually pointing towards the Sun, a rare occurrence firt recorded with Comet Kohoutek in 1974. The anti-tail has now moved around to the other side of the object.
- The Ministry of Defence, the US Department of Defense's PoW/MIA accounting agency and Cotswold Archaeology are excavating in a field near Great Bardfield, Essex, where a P-47 Thunderbolt crashed
on a wartime training exercise in January 1944. Witnesses saw the plane burst into flames and crash, but did not see the pilot, 2nd Lt Lester Lowry, bail out. So far they have found the
engine's cyinder heads, pistons, valves and fuel pipes, as well as fragments of the fuselage and wings, part of one of the plane's machine guns, instrument panels and buttons and the harness clips
for Lowry's unused parachute. Lowry had been thought an inexperienced pilot by historians, but the archaeologists also spoke to Peter Morris, 90, who witnessed the crash and told them that he thinks
Lowry did not bail out in order to steer the falling plane away from a busy school. ● Archaeologists in Egypt's Sinai, near the border with Israel, have unearthed a massive fortress dating to
the New Kingdom era (1550-1077 BCE). ● A team of archaeologists in Bavaria have discovered an extremely rare circular Roman grave, some 39' (12m) across. Intriguingly it was completely empty -
neither skeletons or grave goods were found inside it, suggesting that it might have been a cenotaph, or symbolic grave, serving as a memorial to someone buried elsewhere. ● Hours after the
theft of some of France's crown jewels from the Louvre - for which two people were arrested earlier this week as they waited to board aircraft at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport - around 2,000 gold
and silver coins worth £78,000 (€90,000; $78,000) were stolen in a raid on the Maison des Lumières (House of Enlightenment) museum, dedicated to philosopher Denis Diderot, in
Landres, 160 miles (260km) east of Paris. ● A man digging outside his summer house on the edge of Stockholm found a copper cauldron containing rings, pendants, beads and up to 20,000 silver
coins, weighing about 13lb (5.9kg). Early analysis has dated the hoard to the late 1100s; it is thought that it was buried in haste, possibly to hide it from invaders. ● Last December the
Overfield Tavern Museum in Troy, Ohio, was destroyed in a fire. Before it is rebuilt, archaeologists are taking advantage of the opportunity to dig the ground below the 1808 log building, and have
discovered Native American artifacts, ceramics and an 1817 50c coin, amongst other things. ● A metal detectorist from Cheshire has discovered what could be the largest hoard of coins yet found
in Wales, up to 15,000 Roman coins in two clay pots. The location is being kept secret. ● Archaeologists in Azerbaijan have discovered a headless sandstone figurine dating to 6,400-6,100 BCE
in Damjili Cave. Microscopic and CT analysis of the Mesolithic item shows intricate engraving, including hairlines and a belt. ● New analysis of the Maya calendar has shown that it could be
used to predict eclipses with considerable accuracy for centuries.
- A 16-year-old student at a Baltimore school found himself surrounded by armed police officers, ordered to kneel and was handcuffed after an AI security system flagged that he was carrying a gun.
Human reviewers found no threat but the school principal missed their response and the school's safety team called the police. The 'gun' was a packet of Doritos he had finished eating and crumpled up
to put in his pocket... Once officers had discovered the truth the boy was released without arrest. ● Police in Bavaria have seized hundreds of forged paintings, of works by Rembrandt, Picasso,
Kahlo and others, in an operation stretching from Germany through Switzerland and Lichtenstein. Eleven people are facing charges of conspiracy and fraud. ● Dutch far-right political candidate
Kevin Nuijten was embarassed after guards at a TV studio where he was due to be interviewed dragged him outside and put him in a police van. They had mistaken him for Peter Janssen, a protester who
is known for popping up behind TV presenters wearing just a pair of black underpants and with pro-vegan slogans written on his body. The two are remarkably similar. ● Police in Spain have
arrested seven people, suspected of stealing more than a thousand chairs from restaurants' and bars' outdoor seating areas in Madrid and nearby Talavera de la Reina, in the dead of night. They are
alleged to have sold the chairs in Spain, Morocco and Romania. ● Police in London are searching for a man caught on home CCTV footage removing manhole covers in Orpington. He is believed
to have taken 21 of the heavy metal covers in a single night. ● Gloucestershire Constabulary have issued a warning that people flying St George's flags outside their homes, increasingly a sign
of right-wing anti-immigration views, should ignore letters they receive telling them that as households that are clearly patriotic "we know you would be proud to assist your country" by
housing Muslim refugees of the "Pha Rage" tribe, and that families agreeing to house them would receive a commemorative mug bearing the flag, from "King Charles himself". The letter
also gave a phone number to call "if you are unable to house a Pha Rage refugee family at the moment." The number was for a sex line. Pha Rage is, of course, a play on 'Farage', the surname
of the divisive Reform UK leader and theoretically Clacton MP...
- Fine particles in smoke from Diwali fireworks pushed the air quality index of Delhi, India, over 1,000 - more than twice the level of "hazardous" - at several monitoring stations around
the city. ● Cornwall Wildlife Trust has begun a 50-year project to revive a temperate rainforest near Looe. More than 30,000 trees will be planted. Less than 1% of Britain's temperate rainforests
are left. ● The longest lightning flash ever reliably measured has been confirmed by satellite imagery. Lightning flashes more than 62 miles (100km) long are classified as 'megaflashes'; this
one, in October 2017, was 515 miles (830km) long and stretched across five central US states. ● October heat records in Australia have been broken, with extreme fire risk warnings in several
states and Birdsville, Queensland, setting a new state record of 46.1oC [115oF] last week. ● NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite has shown that the takeup of
carbon dioxide (CO2) by the Amazon rainforest, the largest land-based CO2 absorber, is slowing and could stop, or reverse. Unfortunately the funding cuts imposed on NASA by the
current anti-science US administration mean that the satellite could be decommissioned.
IN BRIEF: Walkers in Eryri (Snowdonia), Wales, have been baffled by the sudden appearance of a ring of 22 large standing stones next to Llyn Crafnant, a lake and former reservoir that can
only be reached via a steep twisting lane. The 'stones' were found to be hollow and made of plywood. It is thought that they are scenery props for an upcoming TV drama series being filmed in Eryri.
● The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that took down a significant proportion of sites on the Internet for more than 12 hours last week has been blamed on a DNS issue caused when two automated
systems tried to update the same record, leaving it blank, which snowballed across AWS' systems. DNS (Domain Name System) is analogous to a telephone directory; it holds the addresses of servers and
resources - when you tell your browser to go to a web site, it consults DNS to find the address. The reason it took so long to fix was that Amazon had laid off hundreds of jobs in its cloud computing
division, including the people with the expertise to diagnose and fix the issue, replacing them with, yes, you guessed it, AI agents... ● As Halloween approaches headless horsemen have been
seen riding around various parts of Utah. To be strictly accurate they are headless horsewomen, a group of women who don headless costumes (the neck is just above their heads) to ride around for
children. ● Almost 35 years ago a unique sculpture was installed at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The sculpture, Kryptos, is shaped like an unrolled scroll and has four
sections, each containing an encrypted text. Three of the texts have been decoded and recently, when its creator Jim Sanborn was preparing to auction off the solution to the last part, two writers
presented him with the solution. They had not, however, solved the code. While searching the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art they had stumbled upon the plaintext, or decrypted,
code. The Smithsonian quickly locked down the files and the writers are not making the solution public, partly because they could face legal action from the auction house due to sell it. Sanborn has
revealed that there is a fifth message hidden on the statue, which requires all four of the sections to be decoded. ● Last week Birmingham council put up their 65'- (20m)-tall Christmas tree
in Victoria Square, to much mockery from citizens. It was, after all, more than two months to Christmas, with both Halloween and Bonfire/Guy Fawkes Night still to come. As one resident, Richard
McQuaid, told reporters, "It would be nice if the council came and collected my bins this early - they need to get their priorities right" (refuse collectors in the city have been on strike
since March), while another humorously said that when they saw the tree they "nearly choked on a hot cross bun."
The teacher was discussing Halloween with the class. "OK, children," she said, "who can tell me something scary?"
Little Mary put her hand up. "Ghosts, Miss!"
"Very good. Who else?"
Little Simon put his hand up. "Count Dracula, Miss!"
"Vampires, yes, very scary. Any more?"
Little Jennifer put her hand up. "Spiders, Miss!"
"Oh, Little Jennifer, spiders aren't really that scary."
Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "They are if they're hairy and as big as your hand and hanging from the ceiling over your head like that one above you,
Miss!" The class erupted in giggles as their teacher hastily stepped back and looked up to see... nothing.
^ ...end of line
