Caterpillar Wars, Dung Battles, Da Vinci Sketch and More Mysterious News Briefly — November 20, 2020

Mysterious News Briefly — November 20, 2020

Italian researchers have discovered a sketch of Jesus with a Mona Lisa smile that they believe was drawn by Leonardo da Vinci because of the smile and its resemblance to a da Vinci self-portrait. Its real value will be determined if Dan Brown can turn it into a novel.

Mushrooms farms generate 3 pounds of waste for every one pound of mushrooms, so farmers are looking for ways to turn deformed mushrooms and discarded parts into food, bioplastics and cosmetics. Because nothing says sexy like having the facial hue of something that spends its life in the dark wallowing in compost.

Astronomers have used data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which is currently outside the solar system and pointed at the pitch blackness darkness of outer space to determine that deep dark space is actually filled with a huge, unexpected amount of unexplained light. ET-run intergalactic motels leaving the light on for us?

South Korean television channel MBN is now using the country’s first ever AI-powered news anchor which looks, sounds and moves exactly like one of its top news anchors. If a fake newscasters can make fake news believable, we’re doomed.

British climate scientists say that emails traveling from wi-fi router to the local exchange to the telecom company to huge data centers and back again consume huge amounts of electricity, and sending just one less email a day would save would save 16,433 ton of carbon a year. Unfortunately, this news itself just generated a huge number of forwards to people you think are sending too emails.

Everybody loves monarch butterflies, but their caterpillars are actually pretty obnoxious – researchers have observed monarch butterfly caterpillars warring with each other over food, with the most popular form of aggression being the head butt. It can get pretty brutal, but it probably won’t result in more schools adopting the caterpillar as their sports mascot.

To celebrate the belief that the god Beereshwara Swamy was born in cow excrement, Indian men are currently in the throes of the annual Gorehabba festival where they roll balls of cow dung and throw it at each other. Was it really necessary to point out that the participants are men?

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered the gene responsible for heat tolerance in coral and will use it to genetically hack heat resistance into the coral in the Great Barrier Reef to help it survive climate change. “What could possibly go wrong?” asked Australia’s cane toads.

A University of Washington School of Medicine bioethicist suggests developing special sex robots to provide care, companionship and, of course, sex to elderly people who are alone or stuck in isolation. Internet sites should start getting ready for an entire new category of porn.

The FBI has acquired 140 robots to manage and retrieve boxes of documents at Winchester, Virginia, warehouse which houses 2 billion pages of sensitive and secret data in 360,000 bins. This job sounds so boring, watch for the robots to start requesting transfers to toll booths.

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