Iron Man in Space, Deepfake Bank Robbery, TikTok Tics and More Mysterious News Briefly — October 18, 2021

For the first time ever, researchers at Technical Research Center (VTT) in Finland, the country that consumes the most coffee per capita in the world, brewed a pot in a lab from cultured cells derived from the leaves of coffee plants. Was this a real experiment or did they return to the lab after months of coronavirus shutdown and scrape out what had been growing in the office coffeemaker?

Doctors in multiple countries report a rise in teen girls developing tics from the anxiety and depression caused by watching TikTok videos of people who said they had Tourette syndrome. Bad news – you can’t get rid of the tics by watching TikTok videos of people with Tourette syndrome getting therapy.

Danny Lee "Butch" Smith caught a 4.5-foot, 39.5-pound alligator gar -- a "living fossil" that dates back 100 million years -- in the Neosho River where the fish has never been seen before. Wildlife officials are asking for information on a person with a very large hole in their aquarium.

Russian actress Yulia Peresild and film director Klim Shipenko returned to Earth Sunday after spending 12 days on the International Space Station (ISS) shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit. Before you go searching your favorite porn site, it’s not called “Debbieshka Does Outer Space.”

A photographer took a picture of a pickup truck at SpaceX’s “Starbase” testing facilities in South Texas and the object in the bed looked suspiciously like Tony Stark’s first version of his Iron Man suit in the Marvel movie series. First Captain Kirk, then a Russian sci-fi film crew and now Iron Man – it won’t be long before NASA installs a Hollywood sign on the ISS.

While everyone else is looking at deepfake photos and videos, a United Arab Emirates bank is looking for criminals who used the deepfake voice of a company executive to fool a bank manager into transferring $35 million into their account. Right now, the best security against having your voice deepfaked may be inhaling helium from a balloon.

The University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute astronomer Dr. Jennifer West has discovered that our solar system may be surrounded by what she describes as a magnetic tunnel that can be seen in radio waves. We’ll know the end of the solar system is near when this magnetic tunnel starts pulling open our refrigerator doors.

Anonymous sources revealed that the Chinese military launched a hypersonic missile test in late August that allegedly circled the globe in low-Earth orbit before missing its intended target by only two dozen miles. The ‘U’ in UFO now stands for ‘Uh-oh’.

According to a paper published in the journal BMJ Case Reports, an octogenarian woman who smokes a pack of cigarettes per week refused treatment for her lung cancer claims she shrank the tumor on her own with multiple daily doses of CBD oil. Snoop Dogg just applied for a medical license.

The World Health Organization is finally honoring Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer more than 70 years ago, because her live tumor cells were taken without her consent and have led to a number of scientific breakthroughs, including creating the polio vaccine, developing in-vitro fertilization methods, and research in cancer and AIDs. Awards are nice, but a cut of the profits made by drug companies would show they really cared.