10Hot Sauna Leads To Naked Arrest
An interesting arrest took place in the Swedish capital of Stockholm last Friday. An off-duty policeman apprehended a wanted fugitive while both were sharing a sauna completely naked.The officer in question used his day off for a nice, relaxing visit to a Swedish sauna called a bastu. He was, of course, nude, as were all the people around him in the crowded room. He soon recognized one of his fellow sauna sweaters as a convicted criminal wanted for multiple drug offenses. Despite being ill-equipped, the policeman arrested the fugitive without a major incident.[1]Rinkeby Deputy Police Chief Christoffer Bohman found the situation comical but also commended the officer for keeping his head cool and taking control of a potentially dangerous situation.
9Skrillex vs. Mosquitoes
That is the song that scientists used in a recent experiment to see what kind of effect it would have on the behavior of adult Aedes aegypti, also known as yellow fever mosquitoes. They chose that particular song because it has a good blend of very high and very low frequencies.Insects rely on sound to explore a good deal of their environment, so the belief was that music might interrupt their regular behavior patterns. Indeed, female mosquitoes attacked hosts later and less often than their control counterparts.Not only that, but they also had less sex. Of course, researchers only used one track in their testing so it’s hard to say if music, in general, works as a deterrent or if Skrillex, specifically, has an effect on mosquitoes.[2]
8The Tallest Politician In All The Land
There is a new political row over who holds the record of being the tallest politician in the world.Last week, New York City councilman Robert Cornegy Jr. was officially recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s tallest politician. A former basketball player for St. John’s University, Cornegy stands at 208 centimeters (6’10”). The measurements were provided by three doctors from a Brooklyn medical center.It did not take long for other people to come forward to contest the title. Jon Godfread, an insurance commissioner from North Dakota, says that he is 212.7 centimeters (6’11.75″). He also used to play basketball for the University of Northern Iowa and for a professional team in Germany. Even taller is Brad Sellers, the mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio. He is listed at 213 centimeters (7’0″) and was drafted by the Chicago Bulls back in 1986. If we are also counting inactive politicians, then NBA Hall of Famer Yao Ming would take the title. After his retirement from basketball, the 229-centimeter (7’6″) Chinese athlete served as a delegate in the advisory body of the National People’s Congress.[3]
7What Moon Poop Could Tell Us
Humans might return to the Moon one day soon. If they do, scientists would like them to bring back the poop that has been sitting there for decades.There are over 181,000 kilograms (400,000 lb) of man-made garbage on the Moon. Of that, almost 100 bags are filled with human waste from the astronauts who landed there. That was simply a by-product of human biology. It was never intended to be some long-term experiment. For astrobiologists, though, those bags are now probably the most interesting thing on the entire Moon.Researchers would like to take a look at the feces and other human waste to see if there is anything alive in it. Under normal circumstances, poop is around 50 percent bacteria from over 1,000 different species. On Earth, this microbial life is so resilient that it can be found in every environment, no matter how harsh the conditions.[4] Considering that the waste has been sitting on the Moon for decades, this would be, by far, the most extreme environment yet. That is why scientists are not getting their hopes up but are also not dismissing the idea outright.Given ideal conditions, microbes could still be alive or at least revivable. Even if the microbes are all dead, researchers still consider the bags worth studying to try to determine how long the bacteria lasted and if they made any adaptations to their environment or not.
6The Pacific Mastodon
For the first time in over 80 years, scientists announced the discovery of a new species of mastodon.Mastodons are the extinct cousin of elephants. They belong to the genus Mammut which, despite the name, does not include mammoths. They are part of the similarly-named genus Mammuthus. Mastodons were common throughout most of North and Central America and disappeared around 11,000 years ago. Until recently, the scientific consensus was that North America was primarily populated by one widespread species simply called the American mastodon. According to a new paper published in PeerJ, a team led by Dr. Alton Dooley suggests that all the specimens recovered in California actually belonged to a different species named the Pacific mastodon.[5] There are some telltale differences. The Pacific mastodon has narrower teeth, a thicker femur, and a sixth sacral vertebra compared to the American mastodon. Most noticeably, though, the former had no mandibular tusks. Dooley noticed that no fossils were recovered from the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts as well as the Sierra Nevada. He speculates that they acted as natural barriers that kept the two species apart.
5The Parade Of Silly Walks
Hundreds of Hungarians made their way through the streets of Budapest in a parade of “silly walks.” It was both a way to mark April Fools’ Day and pay homage to...
