Chupacabras for Kids, Haunted Sanitoriums, Musical Spiders and More Mysterious News Briefly — March 24, 2022

Mysterious News Briefly — March 24, 2022

If the metaverse isn’t painful enough for you, H2L Technologies in Japan has developed a wristband that delivers small electric shocks that inflict pain to help convey “weight and resistance feeling to users and avatars on the Metaverse.” What could possibly go wrong … or get fried to a crisp by evil hackers?

The material brought back by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission to the asteroid 'Ryugu' has convinced scientists that Ryugu is actually an extinct comet whose spinning top shape developed after its ice melted. Something to think about while stuck in traffic on a hot day?

Good news, Stonehenge fans – part of a ceremonial approach to the stone circle and an area where ancient hunter-gatherers shared feasts with the first British farmers have been saved from being turned into farmland and will instead be restored as chalk grassland that will hopefully attract the flora and fauna that will make look like it did to pilgrims thousands of years ago. All it needs is a sign that reads “Keep off the grassland” in various Neolithic languages.

It’s not just corals that are bleaching due to climate change -- a new Australian study found that fish communities on Australia's famed Great Barrier Reef are also becoming less colorful in order to better hide in the coral from predators. Yet another reason why we can’t have nice things.

If you walked out of the latest Spiderman movie wishing you could be a spider, some scientists housed a tropical tent-web spider (Cyrtophora citricola) in a rectangular enclosure, let it fill the space with a three-dimensional web, then joined with artist Tomás Saraceno to create an interactive, virtual reality musical instrument called Spider's Canvas which allows users to enter and play strands of the web like a spider does when it uses vibrations to build the web, walk along it or locate captured prey. This could be the replacement for going to a planetarium to listen to Pink Floyd.

A ghost tour at Waverly Hills Sanatorium in southwest Louisville, considered to be one of the country's most haunted buildings, ended in a different scary manner recently when a tornado warning hit and the ghost hunters had to shelter in a body chute used to get the corpses of tuberculosis victims out quickly and discretely. Sounds like the perfect opening scene for “Nightmare at the Waverly.”

Meanwhile, another abandoned and allegedly haunted tuberculosis hospital is for sale -- the 100+-year-old Pokegama Sanitorium near Pine City, Minnesota, is for sale with an asking price of $75,000 – that’s mostly for the land since the building has been unused since 1944. It’s a good time to remember that there was little sanity in sanitoriums.

The dinosaur-killing Chicxulub asteroid continues to get worse – a new study shows it lifted a lot of sulfur into the atmosphere by hitting in the sulfur-rich limestone of the Yucatan Peninsula, putting the amount much higher than estimated and causing a greater temperature-cooling climate change. If they had survived, male dinosaurs could have turned to females and said, “See, I told you that smell wasn’t me.”

If you’re looking for a fun way to introduce your children to cryptids, comedian George Lopez signed a contract with Viking Children’s Books to write a four-book middle-grade series called Chupacarter whose star is the famous Puerto Rican cryptid, a Chupacabra. It may sound strange, but it’s better than learning about monsters by having your parents describe what’s hiding under your bed.

A DGR Engineering employee performing construction observation on property owned by Northwest Iowa Community College (NCC) in Sheldon, Iowa, discovered what he says he knew immediately was a 11”x7”x4”, 11.2 pound woolly mammoth tooth because he’s a dinosaur “nerd” like his two young sons. Nothing makes you a hero to your kids like finding a prehistoric tooth.