Glowing Wombats, Doomscrolling Dangers, Urine UFOs and More Mysterious News Briefly — November 30, 2020

Mysterious News Briefly — November 30, 2020 

Just as mysteriously as it appeared, the Utah monolith disappeared overnight, prompting rumors of aliens returning for it and some reported of it on the back of a truck heading for other parts unknown. If only the rest of 2020 would disappear as quickly.

A team led of Washington State University archaeologists analyzed an approximately 800-year-old turkey feather blanket from southeastern Utah and determined it was made from about 11,500 feathers, or about three turkeys worth. Counting Turkey Feathers sounds like a great name for a band but not something you’d put on a resume.

British astronaut Tim Peake, who spent six months on the ISS in 2015, has finally confessed that a UFO made of three lights he thought he saw out the window was actually frozen droplets of Russian urine that had leaked from a Russian probe vehicle. Looks like crew of the first ship to Mars better include an optometrist.

A 59-year-old man in Zelenograd, Russia, who lived with serious nose breathing difficulties for over 50 years found out recently it was caused by a coin he had shoved up his nose as a child and forgot about. There goes his Customer of the Year award from a nose spray company.

A new study found that rats being helpful to other rats emit a smell that causes nearby rats who breath it in to suddenly have altruistic tendencies as well. Proving once again that no matter how bad things are around the world, you can still get funding to study how rats smell.

A new map of the Milky Way by Japanese astronomers shows that the Earth is actually 2,000 light years closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy than once thought. Something to think about as you dream of becoming a spaceship pilot dependent on galactic GPS.

An international group of entomologists has chosen the Danish Mayfly as its Insect of the Year for 2021. What was the insect of the year for 2020 – the gnat, the giant murder hornet or the dung beetle?

The platypus didn’t have much time to bask in the glow of the announcement that the strange marsupial glow in the dark – researchers now say that biofluorescence is also a trait of wombats, echidna, bandicoots, bilbies, possums and some bats. If all of these animals glow in the dark, why are so many Australians still afraid to go into the bush at night?

Scientists, students and many Puerto Ricans are petitioning the government to save the 57-year-old Arecibo Observatory, which is scheduled to be demolished after experts determined it was too dangerous to fix the damage caused by two broken support cables. Have they considered asking James Bond for help?

Doomscrolling, the act of obsessively reading bad news despite the onset of anxiety, is in the running for the top word for 2020 and the top malady of the year as well. One treatment is to only look at the news once a day, preferably at night, but who really needs more free time during a pandemic lockdown?

A new paper by Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist Jordan Steckloff reveals that comet 2019 LD2 (ATLAS) is currently a Centaur – an unstable icy body beyond Neptune — but is actively transitioning into the more stable Jupiter Family of Comets (JFCs) closer to Jupiter. If this doesn’t get more astronomers from the LGBTQIA community, nothing will.

The post Glowing Wombats, Doomscrolling Dangers, Urine UFOs and More Mysterious News Briefly -- November 30, 2020 first appeared on Mysterious Universe.

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