Pac-Man Supernova, Movie on the Moon, Real Tricorder and More Mysterious News Briefly — October 20, 2021

Mysterious News Briefly — October 20, 2021

If you find yourself remembering more stressful events than pleasant ones, a new study reports it’s because the brain closely links memories created under stress – the event itself, the room, objects, faces, etc. – and that large grouping pushes out small non-stressful memories. Is getting paid to be in a stress-inducing test a good memory or a bad one?

Astronomers are going gaga over Hubble telescope images of a supernova that look like a star-sized Pac-Man gulping down stars. Now their bosses want to know how they have time on the job to play Pac-Man.

A 2018 photograph of Kim Kardashian standing next to an ancient Egyptian coffin at that year’s Met Gala in New York City helped investigators solve a $4 million antiquities looting case and return the 1st century BCE gold coffin of Nedjemankh to Egypt. This may be the pilot episode of “Catching Crooks with the Kardashians.”

After wrapping the first-ever feature film with scenes shot in space onboard the ISS and returning successfully to Earth, Russian director Klim Shipenko says he’s ready to shoot a sequel on the Moon or Mars. Don’t get in the way of Bezos and Musk rushing to Russia yelling, “Mr. Shipenko, I’m ready for my closeup!”

From the “Duh!” file coms a study from MIT of mobile phone data from over 14,000 people which found that, even though humans a great at designing cities, we’re terrible at calculating the shortest route through city streets because our brains want us to face the direction we are going in, even if it’s not the fastest way to our destination. It’s no wonder the person behind the GPS voice is in therapy.

A trailcam video uploaded on TikTok by Connor Flynn @bigfootanonymous shows a dark shape with a wolflike muzzle and asks the question: “Werewolf or sasquatch?” Werewolves and sasquatches are getting tired of blurry alleged photos showing their bad side.

Kyoto police arrested a man for posting and selling pornographic videos online with the pixelated images unblurred using artificial intelligence. Werewolves and sasquatches would like his number.

Durham University scientists developed a specially equipped helmet which they used to beam invisible waves of infrared light into healthy brains and found it improved people’s memories and thought processing – a discovery that may also help increase dementia patients’ memory and muscle control. Can someone send one to each of our world’s leaders?

Scientists from the University of Leicester used NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in Hawaii to look at the mysterious auroras and weird magnetic field of Uranus and created the most detailed map to date of the entire planet. They still know very little about the auroras, the magnetosphere of Uranus or its interaction with the solar wind, but watching it is still more entertaining than staring off into space.

In another example of Star Trek inventions becoming real, plant biologists in Alaska are using a kind of tricorder to record how plant leaves on different Alaskan mountains reflect light and it shows that different populations of plants of the same species reflect light differently – making it a non-invasive way to identify genetic variations. It also shows plants are relieved it’s not a phaser.

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