Dieting Dinosaurs, Terrifying Tightropers, Virtuous Vampire Bats and More Mysterious News Briefly — July 8, 2021

Mysterious News Briefly — July 8, 2021

A mysterious gathering of jellyfish continues to grow in Rhode Island in the coastal Ninigret and Green Hill Ponds, and state officials have only warnings but no explanations for this huge meeting of Atlantic Sea Nettles. Vinegar helps relieve the sting but not even frying makes them taste good.

Russian specialists at the ‘Sensor-Tekh’ laboratory have developed the first Russian neural brain implant which works with a headband camera called ‘ELVIS’ (short for “electronic vision”) which transmits a picture directly into the brain and gives vision to those who lost it and those born without it. For the first time, Elvis can help someone else leave the building.

Chile’s Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications has granted SpaceX an experimental license for non-commercial operations of its Starlink Internet service to provide Internet access to rural and hard-to-reach communities, making it the first Latin American nation to gain access to Starlink. Someone in the Chilean government is about to get a big discount on a Tesla.

From the ‘Duh’ file comes a new study which found that alvarezsaurs, a dinosaur that started out the size of a modern ostrich, shrank to the size of chickens after they switched from a mixed diet to eating nothing but ants. You can find their skeletons in the “Slimmer but still extinct” section of your natural history museum.

The movies depict them as deadly loners, but a new study found that gray reef sharks around Palmyra Atoll, southwest of Hawaii, return to the same communities year after year, forming clear preferences for the company of certain other individuals, with some “friendships” that endured for years. Despite this, don’t look for shark rom-coms anytime soon.

Four German tightrope walkers set a new world highlining distance record by crossing a 2.1 km (1.3 mile)-long valley in Lapporten in northern Sweden on a line suspended at a height of 600 meters (1968 feet). All of a sudden, screaming on the amusement park roller coaster seems embarrassing.

Sir Richard Branson denies he’s in a race with fellow billionaire and space entrepreneur Jeff Bezos to be the first to travel in space, saying he wishes Bezos the best on his trip and looks forward to talking about their rides when he gets back. Spoken like someone who is rich enough to not need Amazon Prime.

Unlike in other animal societies where the dominant member sits on top of the hierarchy, a new study found that female vampire bats establish an egalitarian community where every one has an equal opportunity to rule the cave. There goes Anne Rice’s idea for a novel about the queen of the vampire bats.

Researchers studying seed beetles found that females lay more eggs that hatch into larger offspring when they mate with males with extra-long spiny genitalia, so they’ve developed an ultrathick reproductive tract and a very strong immune system that prevents infections from the inevitable wounds that occur. ‘Spiny Genitalia’ sounds like a great name for your death metal band.

Using satellite images of 1,600 square miles of barren landscape in Sudan, archeologists discovered more than 10,000 funerary monuments or qubbas arranged in galaxy-like clusters, with “parent” monuments acting as “invisible centers of gravity” around which other burials have accumulated. “That will cost you double,” said gravediggers everywhere else.

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