Shrieking Bees, Expanding Black Holes, Sex on the Beach Banned and More Mysterious News Briefly — November 11, 2021

Mysterious News Briefly — November 11, 2021

A new study found that public sex on the beach with strangers – a practice known to Canary Islands tourists as "cruising" – is destroying the Dunes of Maspalomas, one of Europe's last naturally functioning transgressive (moving) dune fields, by eroding the dunes, damaging native plants and covering them with cigarette butts and used condoms. Go have a Sex on the Beach in the lounge and get a room!

A new study found that the pacific fish lingcod or buffalo cod, which has 500 needle-shaped teeth and powerful jaws that can crush crustacean shells in seconds, keep their teeth sharp by losing about 20 each day and replacing them just as fast. Look for some of these in your dentist’s aquarium soon.

Asian honeybees do more than just buzz when they detect the approach of giant Asian ‘murder’ hornets – new research shows they emit a variety of warning signals and shrieks to clear out the hive before the hornets arrive. Asian hornet queens are trying to get their armies to walk softly but carry a big stinger.

Just 60 years after the River Thames was declared 'biologically dead', the Zoological Society of London found it to be thriving with seahorses, eels, seals and various species of shark, such as tope, starry smooth hound and spurdog. It’s still devoid of one species often found in the 1960s – skinny-dippers.

Shortly before a SpaceX Crew Dragon carrying the Crew-3 team of astronauts was to dock with the ISS, the thrusters on board a docked Russian Progress vehicle were fired to move the space station slightly higher and out of the way of a fragment from an old Chinese satellite called Fengyun-1C. If this keeps up, the next space station will be equipped with a crow’s nest and NASA will begin recruiting lookouts.

David Zapico, the CEO of robotics company Ametek Inc., told Bloomberg News that his company’s sales are booming because “people want to remove labor.” If only Charlton Heston were alive to explain that, like Soylent Green, ‘labor’ is people … it’s people!

Astrophysicists studying data from gravitational wave detectors say they’ve identified signs that supermassive black holes are actually expanding just like the universe is and the cause is dark energy allowing them to defy gravity. Who knew that supermassive black holes listened to “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked”?

The largest psilocybin therapy trial ever conducted, involving 233 patients from 10 countries in North America and Europe, found that a single dose of psilocybin generated a rapid response to treatment-resistant depression that lasted up to 12 weeks. What’s next? Go ask Alice … I think she’ll know.

If your dog is acting funny, a woman in England may have the answer – her vet examined the stomach contents of her pooch after it ate something unidentifiable on a walk and found it had gulped down human feces full of marijuana residue and it got the poor dog stoned. Better give your dog Alice’s number.

Fishing trawlers operating in the Gulf of Oman and the eastern Persian Gulf are suddenly catching tentacled butterfly rays – a species that was thought to be extinct because none have been seen since 1986 – and marine biologists say the only thing that will save them is to end trawling. That won’t happen until some country elects the Creature from the Black Lagoon.