Black Hole Fuzzballs, Fish Driving Cars, Stiff Human Syndrome and More Mysterious News Briefly — January 5, 2022

Mysterious News Briefly — January 5, 2022

Recent excavations in northeastern Sweden uncovered ancient furnaces and fire pits that hunter-gatherers used for metalworking more than 2,000 years ago, revealing that they ran ironworking operations to make tools as advanced as those of farming societies far to the south. Of course they did – you can’t remove snow with wooden shovels.

An amazing viral video from Kuwait City shows a woman carrying a struggling young lion in her arms down a street to the place it had escaped from. That should stop the lion from escaping and her husband from coming home late after a night out with the guys.

Utility workers laying pipes under the pavement of the Via Luigi Tosti in Rome uncovered a set of underground rock tombs, one of which held a funerary urn containing a unique terracotta dog statue which may have been a decoration used on Roman drainage systems installed on sloping roofs. It may have been good for hiding downspouts but was no match for gargoyles in protecting buildings from evil spirits.

NASA says the massive boom felt in the Pittsburgh area on New Year’s Day was a one-ton meteor about a yard in diameter traveling at a speed of 45,000 mph and exploded with the force of about 30 tons of TNT. Grand goodbye to 2021 or a bad way to start 2022?

A team of scientists from Ben-Gurion University designed a “Fish Operated Vehicle” (FOV) topped with a plexiglass fish tank with controls that allowed goldfish to navigate the movement of the tank-on-a-tank around obstacles to get a food pellet reward. If this was a movie, it’s time to say “We’re gonna need a bigger anti-FOV gun.”

Infectious disease historians have determined that the Omicron variant has surpassed the bubonic plague known as the Black Death – which was deadlier but took years to spread — to become the fastest-spreading, most transmissible disease ever. Someone please let Black Death know this is not a competition.

A 52-year-old woman in Japan who claimed loud noises caused her to experience a severe, sudden stiffness in her back and thighs that would cause her to tumble to the ground has been diagnosed with the one-in-a-million autoimmune disease known as Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS), which fortunately can be treated with a sedative that helps relieve muscle stiffness. Besides less pain and falls, she no longer dances like Elaine on “Seinfeld.”

A new study of a stone toilet in what was once a magnificent 2,700-year-old private estate in Jerusalem shows that the rich inhabitants suffered from the intestinal parasites roundworms, tapeworms, whipworms and pinworms – which caused abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea, itching and even death. The most popular reading material in this bathroom must have been medical scrolls.

A string theory study by physics researchers at The Ohio State University concluded that black holes are more like giant fuzzballs than all-consuming wormholes because the mass sucked in is squeezed to a point, but then the particles are stretched into strings that expand into a “fuzzball” that eventually fills up the entire black hole. Somewhere in the afterlife, Stephen Hawking is thinking about facepalming.

Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, found an unexpected link between melting Arctic ice and western US wildfires – while ice reflects solar heat back into space, open waters absorb it and hold it until autumn, when the heat rises to create a long-lived low-pressure system that alters the flow of the polar jet stream, pushing it southward to form the hot, dry high-pressure systems over Washington, Oregon, and Northern California that produce wildfire conditions. Bottom line … it’s still our fault.

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