Bigfoot Tracks, Largest Galaxy, Smallest Battery and More Mysterious News Briefly — February 23, 2022

Mysterious News Briefly — February 23, 2022

New models of a megaflood in the state of Washington caused by glaciers melting at the end of the last Ice Age between 18,000 and 15,500 years ago reveal that the glaciers were so large that they actually tilted Earth's crust beneath them, and the weight that was lifted when they melted moved the land and changed the course of the megaflood. At least that’s what Noah told the crew.

Polish and Russian archaeologists uncovered a 2,500-year-old female skeleton with an iron knife, gold ornament and bronze mirror in Siberia’s so-called “Valley of the Kings" and the artifacts show the woman was possibly a Scythian warrior who guarded a prince buried near her. The archeologists are probably already getting calls from Disney screenwriters.

After the American Meteor Society received dozens of reports of a slow-moving fireball flying over Colorado over the weekend, astronomers speculated it was a large slow bolide traveling at about 60,000 mph that either bounced off the atmosphere and headed back into space or burned up completely. The Slow Bolides is a great name for a band.

The world’s smallest battery is the size of a speck of dust and was created at Germany’s  Chemnitz University of Technology using the Swiss-Roll process (those spongey cylindrical cakes rolled up with thick layers of jam or cream) to layer current collectors and electrode strips made of polymeric, metallic and dielectric materials onto a tensioned wafer surface. Two hindrances to this study – hungry researchers and sneezy researchers.

According to the research published by the Association of British Insurers, four in ten people do not feel confident about using numbers in their everyday lives and often avoid jobs that involve using numbers. When you’re counting down a space launch is the wrong time to tell your boss about this.

Scientists at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology used high-frequency sound waves directed at human stem cells to grow bone cells -- a procedure that uses the body’s innate ability to heal itself and could one day help patients regrow bone lost to cancer or degenerative disease. Regrowing bones – don’t let dogs hear about this.

Photos shared on the Reddit r/bigfoot community show what look like giant frozen Bigfoot footprints in the snow in Illinois, but most commenters say they’re fake or possibly from a bear stepping in its own prints so the claw and toe pad marks meld together. It was Illinois – of course it was Da Bears.

Radio astronomers announced the discovery of the largest galaxy ever – Alcyoneus spans 16 million light-years or 100 Milky Way galaxies laid end – and its enormous size comes from two huge jets emanating from the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. The thought of 100 Milky Ways laid end-to-end makes one snicker.

The idea of universal emotional expressions got a boost with a recent study in Scientific Reports which found that the downwards head-tilt is a “possibly universal” signal of dominance – researchers studied members of a remote community in the forested Bosawas Biosphere Reserve in Nicaragua who had little exposure to television or the Internet and found them intimidated by the downwards head-tilt. Did they respond with the universal hand expression?

New research on sauropods shows the long-necked dinosaurs had even longer necks that commonly believed because most skeletons found are missing vertebrae and the skeletons can’t show the influence of tissue and muscles on length – researchers estimate this could add three more feet to necks already reaching 32 feet (10 meters). Think about that the next time you complain about the price of scarves.