Strange Crop Circle, Jet-Powered Flying Motorcycle, Fountain of Youth and More Mysterious News Briefly

Is a jagged line of small circles in a field a crop circle, crop circles or crop W? Whatever it is, it’s the latest crop circle reported and photographed near White Horse Hackpen Hill in Wiltshire. Is this experienced crop-circling aliens messing with our minds or young ones standing up to tradition with new designs?

A new study found that just like dogs, wolves have distinct personalities that manifest themselves in in predation and hunting behavior – a discovery which could cause changes to entire ecosystems in areas where the wolves have the calm, patient personalities to sit and wait for beavers, slowly wiping out these ecosystem engineers and changing the course of rivers, creeks and irrigation channels. That old sitcom was a warning to wolves about ecosystems – leave it to beavers.

The royal family of Saudi Arabia is investing $1 billion per year in a new non-profit called the Hevolution Foundation that will research the biology behind aging and looking for ways to expand the number of healthy years in a person's life. Does this mean the fountain of youth is an oil well?

NASA announced it is adding five additional flights to the Commercial Crew contract with SpaceX in order to provide redundancy and continued reliable access to the International Space Station now that the Russian space program Roscosmos is no longer providing trips for American astronauts. Will this ultimately force NASA to switch from ISS-to-Earth video to tweets?

Here’s proof that primates, including humans, are different than non-primates: a new study on the architecture of neuron cells in the brain found a key structural difference in the cortical neurons that are part of the cerebrum -- axon fibers that carry electrical impulses can originate from dendrites, extensions that connect nerve cells together, which are a lot more common in non-primates like cats and pigs than they are in primates. The researchers aren’t sure what this means but we should be worried if cats and pigs figure it out first.

According to the journal ACS Central Science, researchers have developed a smart, silk-based tag that drinkers can use to scan and authenticate their whiskey with their smartphones in order to catch bartenders trying to substitute counterfeit alcohol for the expensive top-shelf stuff – this will also be used to test medications which contain alcohol. While we wait for the tags, it’s a bad sign when the label on the syrup bottle you buy says “Cauf Medisin.”

The South China Morning Post reports that researchers at the University of Nankai's College of Artificial Intelligence have developed a fully-automated pig-cloning in which robots facilitated the birth of seven piglets via a surrogate sow without any human involvement — a process that could revolutionize pork production, prevent contaminations, and reduce shortages. “What could possibly go wrong?” asked people living in places not overrun by wild boars … yet.

PhD physicist Tom Hartsfield writes in Big Think that massive particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland aren’t worth the money spent to build and maintain them, and scientists planning a new particle collider that will be almost four times as large and cost $25 billion to build should forget about it and spend the money on something else – like solving a real world problem with fusion energy. what fusion energy needs to get that funding way from a particle accelerator is something that has the word “God” in it like the God particle.

JetPack Aviation unveiled a prototype of its upcoming P2 Speeder flying motorcycle or Air Utility Vehicle (AUV) which features eight jet engines that will allow it to lift 1,000 pounds, cover 400 miles, and reach speeds of over 500 mph once it gets certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. What would help is if the FAA hired less pilots and more bikers.

Sad news from Mars -- NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, after completing 28 successful flights in over a year on the Red Planet, has lost the use of one of its navigation sensors which help control its pitch and roll … fortunately, mission control engineers say Ingenuity’s inertia measurement unit can take over the job, albeit with slightly less accuracy. Will Martians monitoring its activities think Ingenuity has been taken over by another drunk airline pilot?