Space Screwballs, Glowing Boomering, Uruguay UFO and More Mysterious News Briefly — February 17, 2021

Mysterious News Briefly -- February 17, 2021

For the first time in 11 years, the European Space Agency is recruiting new astronauts and, to resolve its severe lack of diversity, is looking for more women and is open to people with disabilities. Thank you, zero gravity!

The dingo is not always yellow, according to new research which found pure dingoes that had brindle (brown with streaks), black and tan, white, patchy and sable coat colors. No matter the color, it didn’t eat your baby.

If you’re brave enough to get close to a highly venomous wetland tiger snake in the Australian wilds, you’ll find, as a new study shows, they’re full of toxic metals – arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury – from the pollution running into the wetlands from stormwater, urban drainage and groundwater. If the venom doesn’t kill you, the lead poisoning will … unless it kills the snakes and their environment first.

A family in Australia discovered an 800-year-old glowing boomerang near Tanti Creek near Mornington in Victoria. Was the glow for night hunting or trying to find it when it didn't fly home after dark?

Astronomers from the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University discovered an exoplanetary system in which two exoplanets are orbiting backwards around their star and determined that their reverse spin was caused by a second star in this system. In baseball as well as astronomy, this reverse spin is considered to be screwball.

If you’ve ever feared coming upon an alligator that appears to have suffered a heart attack and needs CPR, fear no more – a new study reveals that alligators have built-in antiarrhythmic protection, which means their hearts never stop beating, even in extremely cold conditions. Which means that even an alligator that looks dead will still see you later.

The extreme cold weather, wind and snow in Texas stopped tests of SpaceX’s Starship SN10 at their base in Boca Chica. That slapping sound you hear is facepalming by the ETs watching our progress.

From the ‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong’ department comes news from the Siberia-based Russian state laboratory Vektor that it is launching research into prehistoric viruses by analyzing the remains of mammoths and other prehistoric animals recovered from melted permafrost. Do these scientists want to go from bad virus year 2020 to bad virus year 2020 BCE or 20200 BCE?

An enormous circular lighted UFO was recorded by one person and reported by many recently in Uruguay – a hotspot for UFO activity – that Uruguayan ufologists Gustavo Farías and Richard Karlenbut confirmed as UFOs but most follow-up analyses point to the lights being those Starlink satellites from SpaceX showing up low enough in the sky to make their line look curved. The new curse word among astronomers and ufologists is “Elon!”

An impressive 45-foot-tall ice volcano erupted in southeastern Kazakhstan on top of a hot spring whose waters met the freezing temperatures and kept piling up into an impressive structure that is rarely seen except in extreme weather conditions. Texans are thinking they’d take ice volcanoes over power outages any day.