Lunar Hamster Ball, Political Bigfoot, Octopus Dreams and More Mysterious News Briefly — March 29, 2021

Mysterious News Briefly — March 29, 2021

California startup Nano Diamond Battery says it has designed a “forever” battery made from nuclear waste that will take up to 28,000 years to run out of charge and, while designed for space travel, may also be available to the public. Prediction: in the year 30020, someone is going to look at a dead flashlight and say, “I thought you said these were 28,000-year batteries!”

The journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence reports on research which found that coffee pulp, a waste product of coffee production, can be used to help tropical rainforests grow on former farmland. Starbuck’s will help as soon as it figures out how to put the rainforest’s name on the side of a truck.

The European Space Agency is funding the development of a 18.1-inch-diameter a “hamster ball” robot which will use a combination of stereoscopic cameras and LiDAR to study and map underground lunar caves. ESA’s will be fully autonomous, but hamsters would be wise to avoid Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for a while.

Bill Lisle, a candidate for a city council position in Plano, Texas, is using giant Bigfoot cut-outs for campaign signs and claims they’re actually generating interest among potential voters. He may regret the move when he sees a real Sasquatch wearing a Make America Bigfoot’s Again cap.

Scientists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) looked at the data on background radiation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s radiation dose calculator for areas near nuclear plants and found that life expectancy is roughly two and a half years longer in areas with high background radiation compared with low background radiation. This gives “healthy glow” a whole new meaning.

Octopuses continue to amaze us with a new study showing that they may have short dreams during their periods of sleep. What do they do when they can’t sleep? Count sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus), of course.

If you don’t have enough to worry about, a new scientific paper reveals that a small stretch of the southern San Andreas Fault is moving much faster than previously thought, making things shakier around Indio, through Desert Hot Springs and into the mountains of San Bernardino. Even more worrisome – it’s moving faster even while carrying the extra weight Southern Californians gained during the pandemic.

Archaeologists in northern Peru have identified a 3,200-year-old mural painted on the side of an ancient adobe temple as a depiction of a zoomorphic, knife-wielding spider god associated with rain and fertility. Why does a god need a knife?

A mysterious jellyfish-shaped object located 340 million lightyears from Earth in the galaxy cluster Abell 2877 is emitting strange ultra-low radio frequencies. Astronomers are calling it the USS Jellyfish, but we may be in trouble if it starts to resemble an Alien o’ War.

President Moon Jae-in of South Korea has vowed to launch the nation’s first robotic lunar lander on a domestically developed rocket by 2030. How long before the site is turned into a Kia dealership?

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