Strange & Bizarre News

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'World's Ugliest Dog' for 2024 Crowned​

A Pekinese named Wild Thing is sitting pretty after being crowned the World's Ugliest Dog for 2024. The curious-looking canine, which sports a voluminous coat of unkempt fur and an ever-present protruding tongue, reportedly took home the honor this past Friday afternoon at the annual competition held at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California. The win is particularly bittersweet for Wild Thing as this was his fifth time competing for the title after falling short the previous four years which included three instances wherein he placed second.

The proverbial picture of both repugnance and perseverance, Wild Thing's well-deserved win netted his owner, Ann Lewis, a $5,000 prize as well as a Today Show appearance for the pair. Additionally, for the first time ever, the World's Ugliest Dog competition was sponsored by Mug Root Beer, which may feature the peculiar pooch on a forthcoming special-edition can. The lighthearted annual event, which began back in the 1970s, aims to celebrate the uniqueness of its competitors while also raising awareness about animal adoption.

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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL0N63n15x8

Mystifying Three-Legged Man Filmed at Canadian Railway Crossing​

A strange video circulating online shows what appears to be a three-legged man casually strolling around at a railway crossing in Canada. The peculiar scene was reportedly filmed earlier this month in the community of Peterborough when a passing train caused a motorist to stop their car. While waiting at the crossing, the witness said, "this guy hopped out of his car and it took me a second to notice, but for some reason, he had three legs." As seen in the video captured by the motorist, the mystifying man was even wearing what one presumes were specially-designed three-legged pants and a shoe on each foot.

According to the witness, the odd individual eventually "just casually hopped back in his car and we went on our way," wondering what they just saw. To that end, given the circumstances surrounding how the sighting unfolded, perhaps the most plausible scenario is that the 'three-legged' man was a well-crafted prank that just so happened to wind up going viral because the motorist managed to film their brief encounter with the 'wondrous' individual.

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Five People Drive Into A Hot Acidic Lake In Yellowstone Park​

It wouldn’t be a day ending in “y” without a tourist having a mishap at Yellowstone National Park. The latest snafu comes courtesy of five visitors who accidentally drove their SUV into the Semi-Centennial Geyser – a hot, acidic pond located near the park’s Roaring Mountain, between Mammoth Hot Springs and Norris Junction.

The geyser has been inactive since 1922, when it experienced a series of eruptions so violent that water was reportedly ejected more than 300 feet (91 meters) into the air. Nevertheless, falling into it would not be a pleasant experience: with water temperatures of around 105 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius) and a pH only just above three, it would be more akin to jumping into a hot tub full of vinegar than a nice dip in a pool.

The car was fully submerged under about nine feet (2.74 meters) of this hot, acidic water, park officials said in a statement released on Friday. Thankfully, all five of the vehicle’s occupants were able to get out on their own, and were taken via ambulance to a nearby hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The roadway near the accident was closed temporarily the next day in order to retrieve the car, which was extracted with the help of local businesses. It was reopened after about two hours.

No details have been released about the people involved, and the incident is currently under investigation by park authorities. Meanwhile, the statement reminds tourists to “stay informed about current road conditions” and “please stay safe.”

And with more than 10,000 hydrothermal features in the park – more than anywhere else on Earth – that advice is always welcome. Of course, the water isn’t the only danger in Yellowstone: only this week, the park raised the fire danger to “high”, meaning that wildfires are likely and may be difficult to control.

But if history is any indication, the biggest threat to tourists? It may just be themselves. After all – whether it’s a would-be photographer trying to get to the most dangerous geyser in the world for a sweet pic, or a kindly old lady thinking that a massive angry bison looks huggable, one thing is for sure: those Yellowstone park rangers really have their work cut out for them.

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5 fishermen die after drinking contents of mystery bottles found at sea​

The men had consumed the unidentified contents of some bottles found floating off the coast of Sri Lanka. According to reports, the fishermen - who had been part of a crew of six that had set sail from Tangalle Fisheries Harbor back at the start of June on a trip spanning several days - came across a number of mysterious bottles in the sea around 320 nautical miles off the coast of Sri Lanka.

For reasons known only to themselves, the men not only started to drink the unidentified contents of the bottles, but had even distributed some of them to other fishing boats in the area as well. Before long, several of the men had become extremely ill and four of them died very quickly. A fifth later succumbed to the same fate a few days later. The sixth and only remaining crew member was evacuated to hospital and survived.

It remains unclear what was actually in the bottles or why the men would drink the contents, but efforts are now underway to warn other crews not to ingest whatever is contained inside them. It's possible that the crew believed that the bottles contained alcohol that was still good to drink. Whatever the case, it goes without saying that drinking the contents of random bottles you happen to find floating in the ocean or elsewhere is never a good idea.

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American woman is found chained to a tree and left to die alone in a remote Indian jungle​

American woman is found chained to a tree and left to die in Indian jungle before local

An American woman who was chained to a tree in the Indian jungle and left for dead has been rescued after a local shepherd heard her distressing cries for help.

Lalita Kayi Kumar, 50, was found in a forest near Sonurli village, roughly 280miles from Mumbai, on Saturday morning. She had been tied to a tree with an iron chain.

Kumar, whose right leg was swollen from the chain, was rushed to a nearby hospital in critical condition. She was severely dehydrated, unable to speak and likely had not eaten in several days, the Lokmat Times reported.

It is unclear how long Kumar was in the jungle, as the area experienced heavy rains recently, but according to India TV, she told investigators that her former husband had tied her to the tree. She also claimed to have gone 40 days without food.

Police have launched an attempted murder case against Kumar's ex-husband. He also faces act endangering life or personal safety of others and wrongful confinement charges.

(More on the link)

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Shark Seen Swimming in River Thames?​

A pair of friends walking along Britain's River Thames could not believe their eyes when they spotted what appeared to be a shark swimming in the iconic waterway. The wild sighting reportedly occurred earlier this week as Olivia Kaliszewska and Charlotte Webb were crossing the Hammersmith Bridge in London. To their profound surprise, when they looked down, they caught sight of a peculiar shape resembling a fin that had popped out of the water. Fortunately, Webb managed to capture footage of the odd form and subsequently posted it online, where it has unsurprisingly sparked a debate as to what the two friends had seen.

Webb believes that the fin belonged to a five-foot-long tope shark, that are known to live in the Thames estuary approximately forty miles away. That said, in a testament to the uncertainty surrounding the sighting, fellow witness Kaliszewska was skeptical of that assessment and joked that it could have been an alligator. Similarly split are experts in England as the Port of London Authority told the BBC that it was "unlikely that any sharks would swim that far upstream." Meanwhile, a spokesperson with the London Wildlife Trust agreed with Webb's tope theory and marveled at the duo's "amazing and uncommon sighting of a rare and endangered fish."

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Never-before-seen shapes up to 1,300 feet long discovered beneath Antarctic ice​

Scientists have discovered never-before-seen patterns beneath a floating ice shelf in Antarctica following an expedition to create the most detailed picture ever of the glacier's underside. The strange teardrop shapes were discovered below Dotson Ice Shelf in West Antarctica in 2022, when a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) dove 10 miles (17 kilometers) underneath the glacier and traveled more than 600 miles (1,000 km) along the underside of the ice.

The researchers published the findings of the first-of-its-kind survey Wednesday (July 31) in the journal Science Advances. "In order to understand the ice cycle in Antarctica and how ice gets from the continent into the ocean we need to understand how it melts from beneath, a process that is equally important as calving for moving land ice to the ocean," study lead author Anna Wåhlin, a professor of oceanography at the University of Gothenburg, told Live Science. Dotson Ice Shelf is a 30-mile-wide (50 km) chunk of floating ice seven times the size of New York City, located on the coast of Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica. It is part of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which has dramatically calving glaciers that could cause sea levels to rise by approximately 11 feet (3.4 m) if they eventually drive the entire sheet to collapse.

Much as the scientists expected, the survey showed that the glacier is melting fastest at the points where underwater currents are eroding its base, and fractures running through the glacier are helping the melt to travel up to the surface. But, unexpectedly, they also discovered that instead of being smooth, the glacier's base is flecked with teardrop shapes emerging from peaks and valleys in the ice. Some of these shapes are up to 1,300 feet (400 m) long. The researchers believe these weird patterns are created by uneven melting as water moves with Earth's spin across the glacier's underside.

"If you look closely at the shapes they are not symmetrical, they are bent a bit like blue mussels, and the reason for that asymmetry is Earth's rotation," Wåhlin said. "Water moving on Earth is subject to something called the Coriolis force, which is acting to the left of the direction of motion in the Southern Hemisphere. If we are correct, there is a force balance in the layer closest to the ice where friction is balanced by the Coriolis force."

The result is a spiral flow pattern called an Ekman spiral, which is most commonly seen when winds travel over surface water but can also be created by water traveling over ice. To follow up on the survey, the researchers returned with the ROV in January 2024, but the submersible got lost and disappeared beneath the ice shelf. The team's next goal is to return with a new sub, and continue surveying the uncharted depths beneath. "It takes a lot of energy to melt ice, so all the ice in Antarctica is like a giant temperature stabilizer and an important part of Earth's climate system," Wåhlin said. "If the Antarctic ice sheet were to end up in the ocean at high rates it can potentially influence sea level rise, so if we learn the upper and lower limits we can also put limits on future sea level rise."

Visualization of the sand dune shaped ice structures, with three large and three small curves of dark under the ice

Visualization of the sand dune shaped ice structures found on the underside of the Dotson Ice Shelf.

mussel shaped black shapes on the underside of anatarctic ice

Visualization of an area containing several mussel-shaped ice structures.

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Security Camera Captures Orb Transforming into Pair of People​

A mystifying video out of Mexico shows an orb floating across a field before transforming into a pair of people who subsequently vanish into thin air. The strange footage, which was posted online earlier this week, was reportedly captured by a security camera in the early morning hours of August 22nd at an unspecified location in Mexico. In the video, seen above, the puzzling scene plays on a monitor as a bewildered man details the weirdness that began when an orb appeared in the sky. After eerily floating across a field, the peculiar illumination turns into what initially seems to be a singular person, though they are soon joined by a second individual who almost emerges from their companion.

As if that were not odd enough, the duo then dematerialized, leaving behind an empty field with no sign of their presence seconds earlier. Since being posted to social media, the video has amassed millions of views in just a few days and, unsurprisingly, spawned an array of theories. Serving as something of a supernatural Rorschach test, some suggested that the security captured an otherworldly occurrence, though whether it was the arrival of aliens or the manifestation of ghosts largely depends on one's perspective on the paranormal. Meanwhile, skeptically-minded viewers posited that the wild incident was probably either a camera glitch or a well-crafted digital hoax.

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Miss Switzerland finalist is 'strangled and PUREED in a blender by her husband': 'Killer used a jigsaw and garden shears to dismember victim'​

A former Miss Switzerland finalist was allegedly strangled and dismembered with a jigsaw and garden shears before being pureed in a blender by her husband. The body of 38-year-old model Kristina Joksimovic was found in February in Binningen, near Basel in Switzerland.

Her husband, who was only named by pseudonym Thomas in local media, 41, had an appeal for release from custody rejected today by the Federal Court in Lausanne after admitting to having killed his wife.

An ongoing investigation concluded today there were 'concrete indications of mental illness' underlying the case. Kristina's husband is reported to have claimed he killed her in self-defence after she came at him with a knife. He then reportedly said he dismembered the ex-model - with whom he has two children - 'in a panic'.

Kristina's body was found on the evening of February 13. Investigators determined that Kristina had been strangled before she died. The verdict states the suspect confessed to strangling his wife.

An autopsy concluded that the body was then dismembered in the laundry room with a jigsaw, knife and garden shears. Body parts were then chopped up with a hand blender, 'pureed' and dissolved in a chemical solution, local outlet Blick reported.

A medical-forensic report also 'contradicts his description of self-defence', according to Swiss outlet FM1 Today.

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(More on the link)

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Endurance: Shackleton's lost ship as never seen before



Explorer Shackleton’s lost ship as never seen before​


Rebecca Morelle
Science Editor
Alison Francis
Senior science journalist
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The new 3D scan lifts the veil of darkness and water from the wreck lying 3km beneath the surface
After more than 100 years hidden in the icy waters of Antarctica, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been revealed in extraordinary 3D detail.

For the first time we can see the vessel, which sank in 1915 and lies 3,000m down at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, as if the murky water has been drained away.

The digital scan, which is made from 25,000 high resolution images, was captured when the ship was found in 2022.
It’s been released as part of a new documentary called Endurance, which will be shown at cinemas.

The team has scoured the scan for tiny details, each of which tell a story linking the past to the present.
In the picture below you can see the plates that the crew used for daily meals, left scattered across the deck.
Small white plates lie among the wreckage. They are circled to show up better.

In the next picture there's a single boot that might have belonged to Frank Wild, Shackleton’s second-in-command.
A boot lying among the wreckage. It is labelled 'Explorer's boot'

Perhaps most extraordinary of all is a flare gun that’s referenced in the journals the crew kept.
A flare gun lies among the wreckage. It is labelled to help it stand out.

The flare gun was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition's photographer, as the ship that had been the crew’s home was lost to the ice.
“Hurley gets this flare gun, and he fires the flare gun into the air with a massive detonator as a tribute to the ship,” explains Dr John Shears who led the expedition that found Endurance.
"And then in the diary, he talks about putting it down on the deck. And there we are. We come back over 100 years later, and there's that flare gun, incredible.”

A doomed mission​

Sir Ernest Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish explorer who led the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out to make the first land crossing of Antarctica.
But the mission was doomed from the outset.
Endurance became stuck in pack ice within weeks of setting off from South Georgia.
The ship, with the crew on board, drifted for months before the order was eventually given to abandon ship. Endurance finally sank on 21 November 1915.
Shackleton and his men were forced to travel for hundreds of miles over ice, land and sea to reach safety - miraculously all 27 of the crew survived.
Their extraordinary story was recorded in their diaries, as well as in Frank Hurley's photographs, which have had colour added for the Endurance documentary.
BFI/Frank Hurley A colour photograph of Sir Ernest Shackleton on deck surrounded by ship equipment covered in ice
BFI/Frank Hurley
Sir Ernest Shackleton aboard the Endurance - now in colour

The ship itself remained lost until 2022.Its discovery made headlines around the world - and the footage of Endurance revealed that it is beautifully preserved by the icy waters.
The new 3D scan was made using underwater robots that mapped the wreck from every angle, taking thousands of photographs. These were then “stitched” together to create a digital twin.
While footage filmed at this depth can only show parts of Endurance in the gloom, the scan shows the complete 44m long wooden wreck from bow to stern - even recording the grooves carved into the sediment as the ship skidded to a halt on the seafloor.
The model reveals how the ship was crushed by the ice - the masts toppled and parts of the deck in tatters - but the structure itself is largely intact.

Shackleton’s descendants say Endurance will never be raised - and its location in one of the most remote parts of the globe means visiting the wreck again would be extremely challenging.
But Nico Vincent from Deep Ocean Search, who developed the technology for the scans, along with Voyis Imaging and McGill University, said the digital replica offers a new way to study the ship.
“It's absolutely fabulous. The wreck is almost intact like she sank yesterday,” said Mr Vincent, who was also a co-leader for the expedition.
He said the scan could be used by scientists to study the sea life that has colonised the wreck, to analyse the geology of the sea floor, and to discover new artefacts.

“So this is really a great opportunity that we can offer for the future.”
The scan belongs to the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust who also funded and organised the expedition to find Shackleton’s ship.
The Endurance documentary is premiering at the London Film Festival on 12 October and will be released in cinemas in the UK on 14 October.
Additional reporting Kevin Church
Antarctic
Science & Environment
Ernest Shackleton
 
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Christopher Columbus was likely Spanish and Jewish, study suggests

Columbus probably Spanish and Jewish, study says​

Alex Smith
BBC News
The Print Collector/Getty Images Black-and-white painting of Christopher Columbus arriving on a beach holding a flag in his left hand


The Print Collector/Getty Images
Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, beginning a period of European contact with the region

Famed explorer Christopher Columbus was likely Spanish and Jewish, according to a new genetic study conducted by Spanish scientists that aimed to shed light on a centuries-old mystery.

Scientists believe the explorer, whose expedition across the Atlantic in 1492 changed the course of world history, was probably born in western Europe, possibly in the city of Valencia.

They think he concealed his Jewish identity, or converted to Catholicism, to escape religious persecution.

The study of DNA contradicts the traditional theory, which many historians had questioned, that the explorer was an Italian from Genoa.
Columbus led an expedition backed by Spain's Catholic Monarchs seeking to establish a new route to Asia - but instead he reached the Caribbean.

His arrival there was the beginning of a period of European contact with the Americas, which would lead to conquest and settlement - and the deaths of many millions of indigenous people to diseases and war.

Countries have argued for years over the explorer's origin, with many claiming him as one of their own.
There have been an estimated 25 conflicting theories of his birthplace, including Poland, Great Britain, Greece, Portugal, Hungary and Scandinavia.

These new findings are based on more than two decades of research.

The study began in 2003, when José Antonio Lorente, professor of forensic medicine at Granada University, and the historian Marcial Castro, exhumed what were believed to be the remains of Columbus from Seville Cathedral.

Columbus died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in 1506 but wished to be buried on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. His remains were taken there in 1542 but centuries later were transferred to Cuba before being finally laid to rest in Seville.

The researchers also took DNA samples from the tomb, and from the bones of Columbus' son, Hernando, and brother, Diego.

Since then scientists have compared that genetic information with that of historical figures and the explorer's relatives in order to try and solve the mystery.
The previously widely accepted theory was that Columbus was born in Genoa in 1451, to a family of wool weavers.

But they now believe he lived in Spain - likely in Valencia - and was Jewish. They think he hid his background to avoid persecution.
Around 300,000 practising Jews lived in Spain, before they along with Muslims were ordered to either convert to Catholicism or leave the country in 1492, the year Columbus landed in the Americas.
Announcing the study's results on the television documentary Columbus DNA: His True Origin, Professor Lorente said they were "almost absolutely reliable".
The programme - which aired on Spain's national broadcaster RTVE on Saturday night - coincided with Spain's National Day.
The day celebrates the explorer's arrival in the Americas.
 
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