Rideable 4-Legged Robots, Great Pyramid Secrets, CO2 Diamonds and More Mysterious News Briefly — March 16, 2022

Mysterious News Briefly — March 16, 2022

Paleontologists digging in the 42-million-years-old Santiago Formation in San Diego found fossils of a new species of cat, named Diegoaelurus vanvalkenburghae, whose jaw had saber-teeth in front and slicing scissor teeth called carnassials in the back – making it the first North American cat to eat an all-meat diet. That was the life – plenty of meat to eat and the entire west coast of beaches as your litter box.

The latest photos from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory show a massive x-ray beam made up of both matter and antimatter 40 trillion kilometers long being emitted by a collapsing star barely ten miles across – allowing it to be seen even though it’s 1,600 light years from Earth. A tiny star whose image is huge – sounds like it’s time to name it Peter Dinklage.

The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has approved a plan to surround the Great Pyramid of Giza with very large muon telescopes that will analyze muons -- negatively-charged elementary particles that form when cosmic rays collide with atoms in Earth's atmosphere – passing through the pyramid to determine the purpose of two mysterious voids inside the pyramid. If they find something, who gets the mummy’s curse?

Scientists from Queen Mary University of London have discovered that a new form of fire ant society spread evolved in one species, then a "social supergene" carrying the instruction-set for the new social form spread into other fire ant species through hybridization -- breeding between ants of different species – which made the more successful than if they only had the original social form. That’s nice ... but could these scientists focus on finding a ‘non-biting and fiery burning sensation’ first?

A security camera video from San Vicente Chicoloapan in the State of Mexico appears to show two alleged entities descend from the sky and spook three stray dogs who bark at them and run away. While ghost hunters are impressed, the scrapyard owner fired his junkyard dogs.

A new study found that language did not begin with a few caveperson grunts but instead evolved from hand gestures that were more effective at conveying a message. If that’s true, why are there no cave paintings of early humans playing charades?

At this year's 2022 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, engineers from Kawasaki unveiled Bex, a quadruped robot that can walk, roll around and even carry a human passenger on its back – the name comes from the fact it looks like an Ibex, a type of wild goat. Baby boomers are getting ready to line up and relive childhood memories of putting a quarter in the horse in front of the grocery store.

The luxury jewelry company Aether claims it has figured out a way to make diamonds out of thin air by extracting carbon dioxide – one “carbon-negative” diamond can be made from 20 ton of CO2. Do they vaporize after the divorce? (Asking for a bitter friend.)

While we haven’t heard about Siberian sinkholes lately (for obvious reasons), marine scientists have discovered other deep sinkholes on a remote part of the Arctic seafloor that formed rapidly between 2010 and 2019 and are also the result of thawing permafrost underneath the seabed. No, this doesn’t mean the water is running out, so we still have to be concerned about rising ocean levels.

On 11 March 2022, astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky of Konkoly Observatory's Piszkéstető Station in Hungary spotted a small (2 meters or 6.5 feet across) asteroid named 2022 EB5 just two hours before it entered Earth's atmosphere – making it only the fifth asteroid ever spotted prior to impact. That slow-clapping sound is coming from Leonardo DiCaprio.