Ghost Talking Gear, Dead Relative Metaverses, NASA's Secret Plane and More Mysterious News Briefly

Mysterious News Briefly

SpiritShack, a well-known provider of ghost hunting equipment, unveiled the Hexcom – a word bank designed to allow spirits to communicate by using the built-in EMF meter to select words from a database of over 2,000 words which are then displayed on a screen and spoken out aloud by the built-in speaker. Is it slime-proof?

For $50 per year, VR video game company Somnium Space allows loved ones to interact with dead relatives in a metaverse based on a massive amount of personal data -- body language, movements, speech, and other character traits recorded and stored on Somnium’s servers – allowing the deceased to achieve a form of immortality in avatar form. It’s the perfect gift for the person who has everything except voices of dead relatives in their head.

Despite their reputation as loners, a new study found that some great white sharks hunt in pairs and have a basic social interaction that can increase the success of both animals’ hunting – although why only some do this is still a mystery. Do they end a successful hunt by heading to the nearest sand bar for adult shark beverages?

For those challenged by mechanical devices, engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts that converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency -- a rate better than traditional steam turbines – using a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell and a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius (4,300 degrees Fahrenheit). Does this mean you could someday power your electric car with the heat from a fast-food hot apple pie?

A strange aircraft covered in blue plastic that was recently seen being hauled by a semi down I-10 near Citrus Road in Arizona has been tentatively identified as NASA's secret experimental X-59 aircraft that is allegedly capable of breaking the sound barrier without a sonic boom. Right now, it’s only capable of braking drivers with an annoying traffic jam and the boom of car horns.

Poor little Mercury was blasted this week by a gigantic coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun that created a geomagnetic storm that potentially created a temporary atmosphere, scoured material on its surface and added matter to Mercury's comet-like tail. And to think we’re worried about losing our cell phone connections during solar storms.

A new study cracked the secret to ‘working memory’ which allows people to temporarily remember and manipulate information for short periods of time, like when you look up a phone number and briefly remember the sequence of digits until you dial them – scan data showed simple brain activity patterns in the visual cortex, where the brain receives and processes visual information, and the parietal cortex, a key region for memory processing and storage. They could sell millions of these once they identify the brain patterns of lost keys.

Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute compared the genomes of 16 species, including humans, mice, lions, giraffes, and tigers, and found that animals with a slower rate of genetic mutations have longer lifespans – explaining why humans can live to 80 while giraffes die at 24 and naked mole rats at 25. The numbers change when humans, giraffes and naked mole rats meet lions and tigers.

Pot-loving Elon Musk managed to hide a reference to his favorite weed in his attempt to buy Twitter – that $43 billion offer breaks down to $54.20 per share – a figure which contains Musk’s favorite number … 420. If he keeps spending money like this, he’s going to run out before he can build 420 marijuana greenhouses on Mars.

A massive simulation of the past two million years of Earth’s climate running on a supercomputer for six months uncovered evidence that climate change and other planetary conditions influenced early human migration and possibly contributed to the emergence of the modern-day human species around 300,000 years ago – the simulation shows how H. heidelbergensis in southern Africa started losing livable habitat during an unusually warm period and evolving it into H. sapiens by adapting to the hotter, drier conditions. Did it show what the heat from running a supercomputer for six months is turning us into?