Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- A jawbone discovered during a dig in Cheddar Gorge in 1920 has been reanalysed using DNA techniques and found to be from a domesticated dog species. It dates to some 15,000
years ago, far earlier than it was previously thought that dogs became domesticated. ● Researchers studying 947 hours of audio recordings of giraffes in zoos across
Europe has found that they hum to each other at night, at an average frequency of 92 Hertz, just audible to humans. ● A study published in February has reported that
of blood samples taken from 85 sharks around Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas a third tested positive for drugs including caffeine, painkillers and cocaine. ● A sperm
whale birth has been filmed in detail for the first time, and showed that other female sperm whales, both related to the mother and unrelated, assisted, some helping lift
the mother's body so she could breathe, others guiding the newborn calf to the surface for it first breath.
- NASA's Artemis II mission to fly humans to the Moon for the first time since 1972's Apollo 17, although they will not be landing, is still intended to launch in April.
There are seven possible dates, April 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 30. ● With later Artemis missions planned to return humans to the surface of the Moon NASA has revealed its
plans for a permanent base on the Moon, although with an estimated cost of $20bn (£15bn) and budgets stretched to breaking point in a US economy heading into recession
it remains to be seen how it could be funded, even if parts of a planned-but-dropped new space station are repurposed.
- The Mersey ferry Royal Iris has retired after 66 years of crossing between Liverpool and Wirral. Among her passengers over the years have been The Beatles and
Gerry and the Pacemakers, whose song "Ferry Cross the Mersey" is still played on every crossing. Her replacement, a £26m ($34m) vessel called Royal
Daffodil will enter service later this year; in the meantime the Snowdrop, nicknamed the Dazzle Ferry because of its painted design by Sir Peter Blake, designer
of The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album sleeve, will fill in. ● Curators at the Condé Museum, 25 miles (40km) north of Paris, have
rediscovered one of Napoleon's famous bicorne hats. It had been acquired in the early 20th Century, but forgotten about once it had been archived. It was one of
four bicornes that Napoleon took with him to Saint Helena, where he died in exile in 1821. ● A skeleton discovered during restoration work at the Church of St Peter and
St Paul in the Dutch citty of Maastricht could be that of the real-life d'Artagnan, the spy and musketeer for King Louis XIV of France, immortalised in fiction by Alexandres
Dumas. D'Artagnan, or Charles de Batz de Castelmore to give him his real name, died in the 1673 siege of Maastrict and was said to have been buried under a church altar; the
grave is located under the former site of the altar. The skeleton had a late 17th-Century coin in the grave, and a bullet at chest level; de Batz de Castelmore was
killed by a bullet to the chest. The skeleton has been removed for DNA testing. ● A light-up C-3PO head used in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back has
sold at auction in Los Angeles for just over $1m (£760,000). In the same auction a fishing rod used in Jaws sold for $240,000 (£180,000), the Shards of Narsil
(broken sword) from The Lord of the Rings sold for $252,000 (£190,000) and a Wilson volleyball from Cast Away fetched $81,900 (£62,000).
- A woman who claimed more than £23,000 ($30,450) in benefits because she said she was too ill to go outside has been jailed for 28 weeks, suspended for 18 months,
after being filmed surfing and ziplining in Mexico. She admitted to also spending the money on manicures, tanning and private dentistry. ● Police in New York's Central
Park, searching for a pickpocket who had stolen several mobile phones, were stunned when they saw the culprit at work. It was a raccoon who snatched a woman's phone from her
back pocket as she sat on a bench. They followed the raccoon back to its lair where they found a stash of stolen phones. They have requested anyone who has had a phone stolen
in the park recently to contact their station to claim their mobiles. ● Nestlé revealed late last week that thieves had stolen a lorry carrying about 12 tons of
their chocolate-covered wafer bars, over 400,000 of them. The bars, from a new official Formula 1 line, were destined for shops across Europe. ● On the night of March
22-23 thieves broke into the Magnana Rocca Foundation's museum in the countryside 12 miles (20km) from Parma, Italy, and stole three paintings, Renoir's Fish,
Cézanne's Still Life with Cherries and Matisse's Odalisque on the Terrace. The operation took less than three minutes. ● For the last few months
someone has been dumping dozens of empty Sauvignon blanc wine bottles on grass verges between the East Yorkshire villages of Hotham and North Cave. One resident told reporters
that villagers were considering setting up trail cameras to identify the culprit and if they were successful "we'll have a drink to celebrate - but it won't be white
wine." ● A Michigan judge has made a default judgement in the case of a woman who was allowed to join a hearing to discuss her unpaid debt of almost $2,000
(£1,510) via a remote video call, after it became clear that - despite her denials - she was making the Zoom call while driving her car. ● Australian Amelia
Vanderhorst, 20, has been sentenced to 60 hours of community service and must pay AU$2,025 (£1,050; $1,394) in compensation to the city of Mount Gambier, South Australia, after
she pleaded guilty to a graffiti charge. She had got drunk and stuck large googly eyes on the public sculpture Cast in Blue, depicting a mythical local creature, damaging its
surface.
- After reed-covered mounds started appearing in dried-up parts of the lakebed of Utah's Great Salt Lake scientists used airborne electromagnetic surveying equipment to investigate. They
discovered that underneath the - as the name suggests - saltwater lake, perhaps reaching up to 2.5 miles (4km) below the lakebed, is a massive system of freshwater conduits.
The mounds were caused by the groundwater swelling. ● Scientists at the University of Kentucky have discovered a way to recycle the waste grain sludge from making
bourbon, the state's best-known product, into supercapacitor electrodes, used in everything from power grids to consumer electronics. ● Researchers at the US Department
of Energy have discovered a potential way to shorten the life of nuclear waste using particle acclerators. If it can be scaled up it will reduce the radioactive decay of
unprocessed fuel rods from 100,000 years to about 300. ● Workers dredging the seafloor for a construction project in Indonesia have found fragments, including a jawbone,
from the skull of a Homo erectus. The early human species was first called Java Man, after being discovered on that island, and was thought to have been confined to it,
but the discovery shows that, during the glacial period of the Middle Pleistocene sea levels were low enough for land bridges to exist between the now-islands of Indonesia and
beyond.
IN BRIEF: There have been many cases over the years of library books returned decades after being taken out, but a book recently returned to Bairnsdale Library in
East Gippslan, in the Australian state of Victoria, was not overdue. It was 10,500 miles (16,898km) from the library it had been borrowed from, in Dudley, in the the West Midlands
of England. It is not known how it came to be handed in to an Australian library but Stephanie Rhoden, a manager for Dudley Libraries, told reporters that "We've now
withdrawn it from our collection so it can stay where it is." ● American broadcaster NBC has had to issue an apology to golfer Tiger Woods for its reporting of his
recent car crash, in which it mistakenly reused footage from his car crash in 2021 as being the most recent. ● Scientists at CERN have successfully transported about 100 antiprotons in a lorry,
on a half-hour test drive around their site. Antiprotons, the antimatter equivalent of protons, are highly sensitive and will be destroyed in a quick flash of energy if they
come into contact with normal matter. For the trial they were suspended in a vacuum and held in place by supercooled magnets inside a specially designed 1,000kg (2,200 lbs)
box. ● The Tesco store in Kirkwall, on the Scottish Orkney archipelago, recently made a mistake in its wholesale fruit order. Instead of ordering 380kg (750 lbs) of
bananas they ordered 380 boxes - about 38,000 bananas, almost double the population of the islands. Normally they would have been able to return them but bad weather and high
winds disrupted ferry services to the mainland, so instead they gave boxes away to community groups, local organisations and clubs, and schools [Ook! -Ed]. ● Scientists
working on the ALICE project at CERN, smashing lead atoms together at ultra-high speeds to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, have done something mediaeval
alchemists only dreamed of - converting lead to gold. Not much gold, mind you, just about 29 trillionths of a gram...
ADDENDUM: With reference to two of this week's stories, kudos to Orkney Library & Archive
for posting on Bluesky that "Think we've had enough bananas now. Still wondering where all those KitKats came from though." Meanwhile, with respect to the late Margaret
Rule [On This Day, above], who was the lead archaeologist on the discovery and raising of the wreck of the Tudor warship Mary Rose in the Solent in 1982, the
Mary Rose Museum posted "OFFICIAL STATEMENT We would like to share our thoughts and
condolences with Kit Kat following their recent sad news. On an unrelated note, we've decided that are going to rebuild the other side of the Mary Rose, using a
surprising new building material - more info soon..."
The class were having a maths lesson. "OK, children," the teacher said, "suppose there were five of you and you only had four apples.
How would you divide them up?"
The class thought for a moment, then one hand went up. "Yes, Little Jennifer?"
"Miss, I would ask someone to get a knife."
"Very good. Then what?"
Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "Then while they're gone the rest of us would get an apple each, Miss!"
^ ...end of line
