Weird News Compilation

[BillTre]

Looks like a pumpkin:

 

[nsaspook]

Looks like a pumpkin:

View attachment 291479

See it when I'm heading back from the casino.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/H...bdee96a5a2926!8m2!3d45.0411966!4d-123.5209048

 

[Keith_McClary]

Looks like a pumpkin

Also with canola:

strijdom van der merwe plants two Earth symbols with canola and wheat in south africa​

 

[jack action]

Looks like a pumpkin:

View attachment 291479

Also with canola:
View attachment 291518

strijdom van der merwe plants two Earth symbols with canola and wheat in south africa​

Well if these fall into the "weird news" category, it cannot get any weirder than this one:

 

[kyphysics]

 

[berkeman]

Well if these fall into the "weird news" category, it cannot get any weirder than this one:

A couple hundred cans of green spray paint or one chainsaw can fix that right up...

 

[Astronuc]

Looks like a pumpkin:

View attachment 291479

The 'larch' trees are specifically Western Larch (Larix occidentalis), which turns a golden color in the fall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_larch
https://www.conifers.org/pi/Larix_occidentalis.php

The oldest crossdated sample, presumably based on living-tree material, spans 493 years (International Tree-Ring Data Bank, chronology WA052, limiting dates 1487-1980). An age of 920 years is reported for a ring count from a stump in a clearcut near Cranbrook, BC (Stoltmann 1993). This may be the same tree reported by Flynn and Holder (2001) as having 915 rings.

I don't know when the conifers.org page was created (it was recently updated in August), but the statement, "It is currently one of the most valuable timber-producing species in western North America, where its close-grained, durable wood is used in framing, railway ties, pilings, exterior and interior finishing work, pulp and as firewood. The bark contains Arabino galactan, a water-soluble gum used for offset lithography and in pharmaceuticals, paint and inks (Parish et al. 1996, Parker 1993)," still holds true.

In some areas, more than 70% of western larch as been harvested. It's not clear how much has been replanted.

 

[fresh_42]

A couple hundred cans of green spray paint or one chainsaw can fix that right up...

Discovered 1992 by chance, on 60 x 60 meters. They assumed it had been a "birthday present" at the time. A chain saw removed 40 trees in 1995 - problem solved.

Btw., it is illegal in Germany to use or display Nazi symbols.

 

[nsaspook]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-...nghai-are-posing-costco-pretending-l-rcna4162

Influencers in Shanghai are posing at Costco, pretending they're in L.A.​

 

[kyphysics]

Realtor who flew to the Capitol riot on a private jet and said she wouldn't go to jail because of her 'blonde hair' and 'white skin' gets 60 days behind bars​

https://www.yahoo.com/news/realtor-flew-capitol-riot-private-181136423.html

 

[Borg]

I guess she'll be taking a limo to jail.

 

[Astronuc]

Science Publisher Retracts 44 Papers for Being Utter Nonsense

The publisher Springer Nature was forced to retract over 40 papers from its Arabian Journal of Geosciences after realizing they were nothing more than garbled jargon. This is just the latest in a series of shoddy research papers getting past the publisher.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...44-papers-for-being-utter-nonsense/ar-AAQmJbm

The journal is intended for geoscience research; discussion of volcanoes, soils, and rocks are par for the course. But these questionable papers’ topics were further afield, with many discussing sports, air pollution, child medicine, and combinations of the aforesaid.

They read a bit like a college student throwing around big words to cover up a lack of understanding. Though purportedly written by humans, the content of each paper definitely reads as if it were put together by a computer that doesn’t quite grasp speech patterns or grammar. The papers are filled with redundancies and generally lack logic.

 

[BillTre]

An Ecuadorian Navy three masted sailing ship (for training) caught a narco sub (actually a low profile surface boat) powered by three outboard motors, off the coast of Ecuador and Columbia.

The 257-foot-long (78 meter) sailing ship, powered by more than 15,000 square feet (1,393 square meter) of sails hung from three towering masks, was on a training cruise when it spotted the drug-running vessel and made the stop, the Ecuadorian military said.

 

[fresh_42]

Science Publisher Retracts 44 Papers for Being Utter Nonsense

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...44-papers-for-being-utter-nonsense/ar-AAQmJbm

Here is a publisher that came my way today:
https://www.hrpub.org/index.php

They claim

Horizon Research Publishing(HRPUB) is a worldwide open access publisher serving the academic research and scientific communities by launching peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines.

... but I had an article that definitely wasn't reviewed. Or if it was, then the reviewers couldn't even use WolframAlpha.

 

[Astronuc]

2011, Marshall Islands - Two men from the Pacific nation of Kiribati who were lost at sea for a month have managed not only to survive, but to unravel a 50-year-old family mystery.

Uein Buranibwe, 53, and Temaei Tontaake, 26, made headlines late last month when they washed ashore in the Marshall Islands after 33 days lost at sea.

They were more than 600 kilometres from home. Their global satellite positioning system had run out of batteries after they left their island on what should have been an 80km trip to get gas.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-12/fishermen-unravel-family-mystery-after-month-at-sea/3727492

one of the men discovered that his uncle, feared drowned at sea 50 years earlier, had also wound up on the same atoll and married into the community.

"[The uncle had] set out, got lost and drifted ashore on Namdrik, there were no communications so [it is] easy to see how he would have merged into the community, settled down and had kids."

The uncle has since died, but his story raises hope about others who have disappeared off the horizon.

Taking a long trip on the ocean? Take extra batteries in a water tight container, or know the sun, moon and stars. And probably take extra water or have a water purifier. And consider a solar power system.

 

[Borg]

First there were lotteries in US cities and now this. Sometimes it doesn't pay to be first in line.
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/worl...ccination-voucher-tgb-nobilo-intl-hnk-vpx.cnn

 

[jack action]

In the category «We love smart people»:

Tougher boxes? Better packaging? Different shipping partners? Nothing worked. Bikes obviously didn’t have the kind of priority flat-screen TVs have for example...

And that was it. The lightbulb moment. Our co-founder Ties Carlier’s simple idea. Our boxes are about the same size as a really big, expensive, flat-screen television. So we put an image of one on every box. We assumed handlers would care a little more about that. And we were right.

That small tweak had an outsized impact. Overnight our shipping damages dropped by 70-80%.

 

[mfb]

But what about theft rates?

 

[Astronuc]

Vicious rain, dust storms, and snow in the southern city of Aswan last week drove out scorpions as well as snakes, Al-Ahram, a government-run Egyptian newspaper, reports. Three people have died from scorpion stings and 450 people have been injured by the stings thus far, BBC News reports, citing an unnamed health official.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/14/1055...injured-after-storms-rouse-scorpions-in-egypt

Scorpion stings can be lethal. The Egyptian fat-tailed scorpion, a species found throughout Northern Africa, in particular has been described by one of the most deadly in the world, according to the Saint Louis Zoo.

 

[Hornbein]

A city overrun by angry scorpions.

 

[kyphysics]

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/boston-man-diagnosed-tapeworms-brain-184647285.html

Boston Man Diagnosed with Tapeworms in His Brain After He Was Hospitalized for Seizures​

 

[kyphysics]

speaking of tapeworms ^^^ is the following story urban legend or possibly true?:

As a kid, I was told by an older kid that he had heard of a story of a guy who got a tapeworm. This man went through a period of not eating much (possibly a diet or fasting). One day, as the man took a piece of bread out to eat and opened his mouth, others at the table saw the tapeworm rise out of his throat to snatch the bread and take a bite out of it (before retracting down his throat).

This is quite possibly the most disgusting story I've ever heard. Seems biologically/medically possible, but has a ring of urban legend to it too. I could never verify the story, but wonder if it's possible and/or a popular urban tale/myth of sorts?

 

[BillTre]

speaking of tapeworms ^^^ is the following story urban legend or possibly true?:

As a kid, I was told by an older kid that he had heard of a story of a guy who got a tapeworm. This man went through a period of not eating much (possibly a diet or fasting). One day, as the man took a piece of bread out to eat and opened his mouth, others at the table saw the tapeworm rise out of his throat to snatch the bread and take a bite out of it (before retracting down his throat).

This is quite possibly the most disgusting story I've ever heard. Seems biologically/medically possible, but has a ring of urban legend to it too. I could never verify the story, but wonder if it's possible and/or a popular urban tale/myth of sorts?

No that doesn't happen. I'm not sure if tapeworms even have mouths. They may just absorb nutrients form the digestive juices inside of intestine through their skin.

On the other hand, there is a fish parasite (an isopod (a crustacean)) that eats a fish's tongue and replaces the function the fish lost when its tongue got eaten and eats some of the food that goes by on the way to the fish's stomach.

 

[gmax137]

When I was a boy, my friend's father told us that when he was a boy, growing up in the Carpathian mountains in the Ukraine, a kid in his village had a tapeworm. So the village wise men held him by his heels, upside down over a bowl of warm milk until the worm came out and dropped into the bowl.

I thought that was the most disgusting story until I saw the photo ^^^ in @BillTre 's post.

 

[PeroK]

No that doesn't happen. I'm not sure if tapeworms even have mouths. They may just absorb nutrients form the igestive juices inside of intestine through their skin.

On the other hand, there is a fish parasite (an isopod (a crustacean)) that eats a fish's tongue and replaces the function the fish lost when it tongue got eaten and eats some of the food that goes by on the way to the fish's stomach.

View attachment 292448

Proof if proof were needed that there is no God!

 

[Borg]

Today is one of those days where I would like to have a time machine to unsee something.

 

[kyphysics]

I should have known not to return to this thread today...my mind is grossed out!

 

[kyphysics]

When I was a boy, my friend's father told us that when he was a boy, growing up in the Carpathian mountains in the Ukraine, a kid in his village had a tapeworm. So the village wise men held him by his heels, upside down over a bowl of warm milk until the worm came out and dropped into the bowl.

I thought that was the most disgusting story until I saw the photo ^^^ in @BillTre 's post.

Okay, suppose my story was urban legend.

Was YOUR story true? If so, that is soooooooooooooooooooooooooo disgusting!

 

[gmax137]

Was YOUR story true?

I don't know for sure, my friend's dad was kind of an exotic guy and he may have been pulling our legs. Or not. But that's the story he told.

 

[BillTre]

I don't know for sure, my friend's dad was kind of an exotic guy and he may have been pulling our legs. Or not. But that's the story he told.

Its not true.

Adult tapeworms don't move much. They don't have much in the line of muscles. They won't be climbing up through the stomach and esophagus, which would require getting through some sphincters and going against the flow of food down the gut. Most of their muscles are in the small head end (scolex) for digging into the gut way to latch onto it as a holdfast. Most of the long body of a tapeworm is a series of body segments that are mostly a bag of eggs with very little musculature. The segments fall off the end of the body or the eggs are released in the gut. They exit the body with feces and infect a secondary host before getting back to some vertebrate host, like a human.
In addition, tapeworms don't have a mouth, so coming out to bite food would not work for them. Such an action would be dependent on having a mouth as well as its associated digestive system.

In much smaller stages of tapeworm (younger individuals, infecting secondary hosts and traveling between hosts before getting to their final vertebrate host) will be much more active. Some burrow through bodies to get to the right place when it comes to locomotion.
I would expect round worms (like ringworm) would be much more active, but they should not be coming out your mouth either.

Wikipedia on tapeworms:
humorous Wikipedia PSA-like information:

There are unproven claims that, around 1900, tapeworm eggs were marketed to the public as slimming tablets.[42] A full-page coloured advertisement, purportedly from a women's magazine of that period, reads "Fat: the enemy ... that is banished! How? With sanitized tape worms. Jar packed. No ill effects!"[34] When television presenter Michael Mosley deliberately infected himself with tapeworms he gained weight due to increased appetite.[43] Dieters still sometimes risk intentional infection, evidenced by a 2013 warning on American television.[44]

 

[gmax137]

Its not true.

well I'm glad that's cleared up. I heard the story in the late 1960s and never forgot it, I guess now I can let it go.

 

[Keith_McClary]

I should have known not to return to this thread today...my mind is grossed out!

You could try Unwatching the thread. Is that like "unseeing" ?

 

[Borg]

For some reason, this topic has me thinking of the movie Alien.

 

[sysprog]

For some reason, this topic has me thinking of the movie Alien.

the mouth within a mouth thing as depicted in that movie

 

[BillTre]

Here's nature's real version:

The normal jaw is presumed to have evolved from the equivalent of gill arches in a primitive prevertebrate. I got teeth for biting etc.
The pharyngeal jaw is thought to have evolved from the first of four gill arches.
Other contemporaneous fish can have teeth on their gill arches so they can crush up things in their mouths without having to open their mouths ("chew with your mouth closed!").
In the morey eel the pharyngeal jaws can move forward, grab something, and pull it further into the mouth. Potentially ratcheting things down the throat.