Zombie Frogs, Soccer Star’s UFO, Blood Snow and More Mysterious News Briefly — June 9, 2021

Mysterious News Briefly — June 9, 2021

That so-called “blood snow” which shows up in the summer on mountain glaciers worldwide is actually caused by green algae and is good for the environment – it causes the snowmelt that feeds rivers – but a new DNA study found that climate change is messing with their systems and that’s not good for the local ecology. Here’s an easy British way to remember this – bloody snow good, bloody climate change bad.

In a new tweet, Elon Musk disses cold hard cash, saying that “goods & services are the real economy, any form of money is simply the accounting thereof.” Sounds like he’s priming the IRS to accept old rockets as tax payments.

A new study of U.S. adults found that only 33% would use a hypothetical life extension treatment that would allow them “to live forever,” even if it were available today, while 42% would refuse it and 25% said they were unsure. The unsure are hoping they live until the next election and get asked again.

Some scientists are warning that those growing megaconstellations of tens of thousands of satellites like the Starlink network will eventually burn up in the atmosphere and release tons of chemicals that could damage the ozone layer and geoengineer the planet in unforeseen ways. We’re doomed if Elon Musk says the solution is a special moonroof only available on Teslas.

Bad news for Michigan beer lovers – a new fungal disease called halo blight is threatening the state’s hop crop and could impact everyone’s favorite India Pale Ales. Get your IPAs while you can as you ponder Hop Crop as a band name and ‘halo blight’ as the top oxymoron for 2021.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the beach, fish researchers report that snowflake moray eels have an extra set of jaws in their throats which allow them to leave the water to catch and eat prey on land. Sure, it will impact your tan, but you may want to leave your sandals on.

Herpetologists in the northern Amazon region discovered three new species of fat, narrow-mouthed ‘zombie frogs’ (Synapturanus zombie) which get their name because the scientist have to dig the rare frogs out of the muddy ground during heavy rainfalls when the males croak their mating calls. Not exactly a good movie plot – unless the females eat their brains after sex.

The ghost of drug kingpin Pablo Escabar haunts Colombia via the four hippos he imported for his personal menagerie, which escaped and quickly grew to 100 and are threatening native wildlife with their prodigious poop which pollutes waterways, fuels algae blooms and deprives fish of their oxygen. Their only hope is a Pied Piper of Medellin or a genetic engineer who can splice hippo DNA with lemmings and get them to jump off a cliff.

An Arkansas angler fishing at Beaver Lake in the Ozark Highlands last week reeled in an extremely rare gold-colored largemouth bass – largemouths are usually green and brown, but this one-in-a-million gold one suffered from xanthochroism, which is the absence of black and brown pigment. He released it after finding out that being gold didn’t make the bass a better singer.

Football (the soccer kind) star Chris Smalling says he and his topless model wife Sam were “gobsmacked” to see a silent UFO that flew low in front of them and then stayed high in the sky for an hour before they had to leave the scene – both swear it was not a drone and they weren’t on magic mushrooms, but both were too “gobsmacked” to take a photo or video. Dealers are now swamped with people looking for an ounce of ‘gobsmack’.

 

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