Thread: Strange News

Jeeesuz. You must be when you’re already quoting yourself.

Originally Posted by DrWilly

Jeeesuz.

^Pissed and roaming the forum, looking for an argument.

Things OK at home?

New York dog gets City Council citation for rat kills in war against vermin

A New York City dog named Luna received an award Thursday for killing rats.

City Council Member Chi Ossé posted on the social platform X awarding Luna a City Council Citation for the work she’s done.

“We just presented an official @NYCCouncil citation to Luna the Dog for being New York’s strongest solider in our war against the rats,” Ossé posted.

“With over 200 confirmed kills, including over 60 this year alone, Luna is holding the front line and making us proud,” he said.

He shared a photo with Luna and of her citation, which said it’s given to individuals who give “exemplary service” to their communities.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has said he hates rats and would hire a rat czar to help rid the city of its vermin. It’s been a years-long effort for Manhattan leaders to try to tackle the city’s rat problem.

In April, Adams announced that Kathleen Corradi, a former elementary school teacher, would lead the city’s efforts to battle the potentially millions of rats in Manhattan.

In both New York and Washington, D.C., a group of dogs and their owners head out late at night to catch rats.

They walk in dark alleyways and behind restaurants to unleash their dogs, trained to bite, rip and efficiently kill rats, which the owners say is more humane than traps or poison, The Washington Post reported last year.

Workers remove marijuana plants from Wisconsin Capitol

Up in smoke: Workers remove dozens of apparent marijuana plants from Wisconsin Capitol tulip garden

Someone’s plans to harvest dozens of apparent marijuana plants grown on the Wisconsin state Capitol grounds have gone up in smoke.

The plants sprouted in a tulip garden outside the Capitol, WMTV-TV reported Thursday.

Tatyana Warrick, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Administration, told The Associated Press in an email Friday that workers had removed the plants, but that her agency couldn’t determine if they were marijuana or hemp. Both are forms of cannabis, but only marijuana has the compound that gets people high.

Warrick didn’t respond to questions about how the plants might have made it into the garden.

University of Wisconsin-Madison botanist Shelby Ellison, who examined the plants for WMTV before they were removed, told the station that they were cannabis plants. But she told The Associated Press on Friday that she couldn’t say for certain whether they were marijuana or hemp.

She said there were dozens of the plants in the garden, suggesting someone planted them intentionally.

“It was just a large number of plants for it to be anything accidental,” Ellison said.

Marijuana remains illegal in all forms in Wisconsin. Assembly Republicans introduced a bill last session that would have legalized marijuana for medical purposes, but they couldn’t muster support among their state Senate counterparts and the measure never got a hearing.

Originally Posted by DrWilly

clog up the forum just like a toilet in a teenage boys boarding house.

Finally, you've outed yourself.

Originally Posted by cyrille

Finally, you've outed yourself.

Wait, what!?


Bastard.

Drawings depicting gladiators among latest discoveries at Pompeii

Charcoal graffiti believed to have been sketched by children uncovered at ancient Roman city

Drawings of gladiators believed to have been made by children inspired by watching battles at Pompeii’s amphitheatre are among the latest discoveries in the ruins of the ancient Roman city.

The charcoal drawings were found during excavations at I’Insula dei Casti Amanti, a cluster of homes in Pompeii’s archaeological park that opened to the public for the first time on Tuesday.

Other drawings found on a long wall include the outline of three small hands, two figures playing with a ball, a hunting scene of an animal that appears to be a boar, and a scene that depicts two boxers lying on the ground.

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of Pompeii’s archaeological park, said the drawings were probably done by one or more of the children who played in what was a courtyard before the city was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.

He said: “Together with psychologists from the Federico II [university of Naples], we have come to the conclusion that the drawings of gladiators and hunters were made based on a direct vision, and not of pictorial models. They had probably witnessed battles in the amphitheatre, thus coming into contact with an extreme form of spectacularised violence.”

Archaeologists also discovered the remains of two victims of the eruption that were found by the door in the House of the Painters at Work, named as such because the home is believed to have been undergoing a repaint at the time of the disaster.

‘Enormously exciting’ fossils found in NSW opal field suggest Australia had ‘age of monotremes’

Some time about 100m years ago in what is now an Australian opal field, a weird, furry, egg-laying, rabbit-sized mammal was gliding through a waterhole across a massive polar floodplain.

This mammal – Opalius splendens, but which scientists have thankfully blessed with the nickname “echidnapus” – was among the ancient descendants of one of the planet’s most unique orders of animals, the monotremes.

New scientific research released on Monday showed the echidnapus had characteristics of the last two remaining members of their tribe.

Modern Australia is the stronghold for the only monotreme species – the supremely odd platypus, a nipple-free Aussie mammal with a duck-like bill, and the spiky echidna with its over-stretched snout, which also lives in Papua New Guinea.

But the discovery of echidnapus and two more ancient monotremes in the opal field fossils means at least six monotreme species existed in what is now the far north New South Wales outback.

“It’s like discovering a whole new civilisation,” said Prof Tim Flannery, the lead author of the research, published in palaeontology journal Alcheringa.

“Today Australia is known as the land of the marsupials, but discovering these new fossils is the first indication that Australia was previously home to diversity of monotremes.

In the region where the fossils were found, “there are no other kinds of mammals. It suggests Australia experienced an age of monotremes when they were the dominant mammal.”

The discovery of the opalised jawbones in an area known as Lightning Ridge almost never happened. Elizabeth Smith, of the Australian Opal Centre, and her daughter Clytie found the specimens about 25 years ago while going through the tailings heap of an opal mine.

“It was largely luck that I found the pieces,” Elizabeth Smith said. “But I immediately knew it was a mammal and therefore really significant.”

She donated the specimens to the Australian Museum at about the turn of the millennium but they’ve only been described now in the Flannery research. These days her finds and those that are sent to her by opal miners stay at the not-for-profit opal centre.

“These specimens are a revelation,” Smith said. “It’s enormously exciting. They show the world that long before Australia became the land of pouched mammals, marsupials, this was a land of furry egg-layers – monotremes.”

The three species are described in the journal from opalised jaws dating back to an age of the Cretaceous period between 102m and 96.6m years ago.

Very strange news

Jawless human skull padlocked to a dumbbell fished out of New Orleans waterway

A human skull padlocked to an exercise dumbbell has been fished out of a New Orleans waterway, leaving police with a mystery on their hands.

The skull was found earlier this month by a man using a red rope and a magnet the size of a hockey puck on a bridge to pull things out of the water below, police said in a report.

The report was recently released and obtained by The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate. The fisherman also found a handgun and a gun barrel in the water on May 18, police said.

The 15-pound dumbbell was padlocked around the skull, which was "fully decomposed, lacking a jaw or the top row of teeth," according to the report.

The magnet fisherman flagged down a passing police officer after making the find off the Bayou St. John Bridge.

New Orleans police did not have any further updates on the case this week, and the coroner did not say whether he had confirmed the victim's identity, the newspaper reported. A spokesperson told the newspaper identifying the victim could take months.

A police dive team and two cadaver dogs searched the shoreline and the area under the bridge last week, the newspaper reported.

Police have been seeking tips from the public as they investigate the case.

In 2018, kayakers discovered the skull of a missing New Orleans woman in a watery marsh near a boat launch, CBS affiliate WWL-TV reported at the time.

Man finds safe with $100 bills while magnet fishing

James Kane has used a magnet to fish all manner of junk from New York City waterways, but stacks of $100 bills he pulled from a safe were something else entirely.

Kane’s girlfriend, Barbi Agostini, 39, thought he was joking when he said their life was about to change, she told The Associated Press on Monday. She was filming as Kane, 40, pulled a slimy safe out of a lake in Flushing Meadows Corona Park and extracted bags of waterlogged Benjamins from inside it.

“Oh, that’s money,” Kane said Friday in video he posted online. “Oh, it is! Stacks of bills, dude!”

“Oh, my God!” Agostini said in the video.

The couple estimates that the safe contained $100,000 in damaged currency.

The bills featured the 3D security ribbon that indicates recent vintage, but the safe bore no clues to a rightful owner.

Kane and Agostini said they called the police to report their discovery and the police said there was no evidence of a crime.

“They gave it to us, as, I guess you call it a finders keepers thing,” Kane said.

The New York Police Department did not respond to requests for confirmation of Kane's discovery.

Kane said he and Agostini plan to take their soggy money to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington to redeem it.

Some portion of the bills will likely be too damaged to recover, he said.

The pair have ideas for spending whatever they end up with, including a new vehicle and upgrades to the equipment they use to produce content.

Kane is far from the only magnet fisher who has made a mark in recent years. All it takes is a powerful magnet, a body of water and a rope.

A magnet fisher found a human skull padlocked to an exercise dumbbell in New Orleans last month, and someone fishing in a creek in Georgia in April pulled up a rifle and some belongings of a couple who were killed nine years ago.

As magnet fishing videos rack up views on YouTube, skeptics grumble on Reddit that some of the finds must be fake.

Kane may just be lucky. He's hauled up bicycles, guns, grenades, and jewelry from New York City waterways, promoting his exploits on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

“I have seen and worked with other magnet fishers that can hit a spot for three months, and I’ll come along and throw the same magnet and get and find something that they’ve been trying to get the entire time,” he said. “I personally can’t explain that.”

Fossil-hunting diver says he has found a large section of mastodon tusk off Florida's coast

At first, fossil-hunting diver Alex Lundberg thought the lengthy object on the sea floor off Florida's Gulf Coast was a piece of wood. It turned out to be something far rarer, Lundberg said: a large section of tusk from a long-extinct mastodon.

Lundberg and his diver companion had found fossils in the same place before, including mammoth teeth, bones of an ancient jaguar and parts of a dire wolf. They also have found small pieces of mastodon tusk, but nothing this big and intact.

“We kind of knew there could be one in the area,” Lundberg said in an interview, noting that as he kept fanning away sand from the tusk he found in April “it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I'm like, this is a big tusk."

The tusk measures about 4 feet (1.2 meters) and weighs 70 pounds (31 kilograms), Lundberg said, and was found at a depth of about 25 feet (7.6 meters) near Venice, Florida. It's currently sitting in a glass case in his living room, but the story may not end there.

Mastodons are related to mammoths and current-day elephants. Scientists say they lived mainly in what is now North America, appearing as far back as 23 million years ago. They became extinct about 10,000 years ago, along with dozens of other large mammals that disappeared when Earth's climate was rapidly changing — and Stone Age humans were on the hunt.

Remains of mastodons are frequently found across the continent, with Indiana legislators voting a couple years ago to designate the mastodon as its official state fossil. Mastodons are on exhibit at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, one of the most significant locations in the world for fossils of the bygone era.

The age of the tusk Lundberg found has not yet been determined.

Under Florida law, fossils of vertebrates found on state lands, which include near-shore waters, belong to the state under authority of the Florida Museum of Natural History. Lundberg has a permit to collect such fossils and must report the tusk find to the museum when his permit is renewed in December. He's had that permit since 2019, according to the museum.

“The museum will review the discoveries and localities to determine their significance and the permit holder can keep the fossils if the museum does not request them within 60 days of reporting,” said Rachel Narducci, collections manager at the museum's Division of Vertebrate Paleontology. “This may be a significant find depending on exactly where it was collected.”

Lundberg, who has a marine biology degree from the University of South Florida and now works at a prominent Tampa cancer center, is optimistic he'll be able to keep the tusk.

“You don't know where it came from. It's been rolling around in the ocean for millions of years. It's more of a cool piece,” he said.

Elephants call each other by name, study finds

Elephants call out to each other using individual names that they invent for their fellow pachyderms, according to a new study.

While dolphins and parrots have been observed addressing each other by mimicking the sound of others from their species, elephants are the first non-human animals known to use names that do not involve imitation, the researchers suggested.

For the new study published on Monday, a team of international researchers used an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyse the calls of two wild herds of African savanna elephants in Kenya.

The research “not only shows that elephants use specific vocalisations for each individual, but that they recognise and react to a call addressed to them while ignoring those addressed to others”, the lead study author, Michael Pardo, said.

“This indicates that elephants can determine whether a call was intended for them just by hearing the call, even when out of its original context,” the behavioural ecologist at Colorado State University said in a statement.

The researchers sifted through elephant “rumbles” recorded at Kenya’s Samburu national reserve and Amboseli national park between 1986 and 2022.

Using a machine-learning algorithm, they identified 469 distinct calls, which included 101 elephants issuing a call and 117 receiving one.

Elephant make a wide range of sounds, from loud trumpeting to rumbles so low they cannot be heard by the human ear.

Names were not always used in the elephant calls. But when names were called out, it was often over a long distance, and when adults were addressing young elephants.

Adults were also more likely to use names than calves, suggesting it could take years to learn this particular talent.

The most common call was “a harmonically rich, low-frequency sound”, according to the study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

When the researchers played a recording to an elephant of their friend or family member calling out their name, the animal responded positively and “energetically”, the researchers said.

But the same elephant was far less enthusiastic when played the names of others.

Unlike those mischievous parrots and dolphins, the elephants did not merely imitate the call of the intended recipient.

This suggests that elephants and humans are the only two animals known to invent “arbitrary” names for each other, rather than merely copying the sound of the recipient.

“The evidence provided here that elephants use non-imitative sounds to label others indicates they have the ability for abstract thought,” the senior study author George Wittemyer said.

The researchers called for more research into the evolutionary origin of this talent for name-calling, given that the ancestors of elephants diverged from primates and cetaceans about 90m years ago.

Despite our differences, humans and elephants share many similarities such as “extended family units with rich social lives, underpinned by highly developed brains”, the CEO of Save the Elephants, Frank Pope, said.

“That elephants use names for one another is likely only the start of the revelations to come.”

Wreck of Shackleton’s ship Quest found, last link to ‘heroic age of Antarctic exploration’

The vessel, which sank off the coast of Canada in 1962, was used by the explorer on his final voyage to the continent

The wreck of the ship on which renowned Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton died has been found off the coast of Labrador, Canada, searchers have announced.

Locating the Quest – a schooner-rigged steamship which sank on a 1962 seal hunting voyage – represents a last link to the “heroic age of Antarctic exploration”, said search leader John Geiger.

“Finding Quest is one of the final chapters in the extraordinary story of Sir Ernest Shackleton,” said Geiger, who heads the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

Geiger was speaking from the bridge of Leeway Odyssey as the oceanographic research vessel returned to port in St John’s, Newfoundland, after locating the Quest in 400 metres of water 15 nautical miles from shore.

Quest’s final resting place was 7,500 miles (12,000km) from where it was anchored when Shackleton died of a heart attack onboard in the harbour at Grytviken, South Georgia, on 5 January 1922.

The explorer was just 47 and was returning to Antarctica seven years after his previous ill-fated expedition had ended in near catastrophe.

Coming three years after the expeditions of the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the Englishman Robert Falcon Scott first reached the south pole just weeks apart, in 1914 Shackleton hoped to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. Instead, his doomed expedition became one of the most gruelling – and miraculous – survival ordeals of all time.

The mission went awry when his ship, the Endurance, became trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea, forcing Shackleton and his men to camp on unstable ice floes. After months adrift, the Endurance sank and Shackleton sailed with his crew in lifeboats to the desolate and uninhabited Elephant Island.

Realising their chances of rescue remained slim, Shackleton took five of his men in an open boat on an 800-mile odyssey across perilous oceans to reach the whaling station at Grytviken on South Georgia. Four months later, Shackleton succeeded in rescuing his crew from Elephant Island.

All 27 members of Shackleton’s crew survived the ordeal, establishing their leader as a lion of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, with his care for his men distinguishing Shackleton in an era when polar explorers often died in the extreme conditions due to rudimentary equipment and insufficient supplies.

In a further testament to Shackleton’s leadership, eight of the Endurance crew would return with him on his next expedition. This despite the Quest being smaller than the Endurance with a design apparently ill-suited for polar expedition. A wooden-hulled former sealer built in Norway in 1917, the Quest was “small, poorly fitted and reckoned exceedingly uncomfortable by those who sailed in her”, according to an exhibition on the ship at the South Georgia Museum.

But journalists at the time marvelled at its modern gadgetry, which included wireless radio equipment, electric lights, an electrically heated crow’s nest, an instrument for plotting a ship’s course called an odograph, and even an Avro Baby seaplane.

After Shackleton’s death, Frank Wild took command and the Quest continued towards the Weddell Sea but the underpowered ship struggled in icy conditions and its men returned despondent to the UK months later.

The journey marked the end of the so-called heroic age, which was followed by a new “mechanical age” which relied less on the derring-do of its leaders and more on technological advances including tracked motor vehicles and aircraft.

But the Quest continued sailing for decades in various capacities. When Norwegian polar explorer Amundsen disappeared while flying on a rescue mission over the Arctic in 1928, the Quest was sent to help in the unsuccessful search for his remains.

British explorer Gino Watkins then used the Quest on his 1930 British Arctic air route expedition, which sought to survey an air route from the UK to Winnipeg.

During the second world war the Quest served as a minesweeper in the Caribbean.

After the war, the ageing vessel returned to her original purpose and it was while hunting seals in the Labrador Sea that the Quest struck ice and sank in May 1962, though all her crew were rescued.

This year marks 150 years since Shackleton’s birth in County Kildare and more than a century after his death, the Anglo-Irish explorer’s story continues to make headlines.