Interesting Stuff Sometimes, the strangest things are discovered or invented. Engineers have been able to create plants which can emit light. Not only can they do this, but they can be recharged. The plants were actually invented in 2017, but the newest generation of these plants will put out ten times the amount of light. The plants have particles which absorb light, and then release it gradually. Scientists have said this is a big step in plant based lighting. Imagine you have a room in your home without electric light but it is still lit thanks to the light giving plants you have in it. Egyptian scientists have found something which must have been a bizarre sight in its time. They have found the fossil of a whale which walked on land. Not only was that strange, but where it was found was strange. It was found in the desert. The whale was said to be semi-aquatic. The reason for this was it lived in the ocean and on land. When it was found it was determined to be a new species. The whale had four legs. There is an area in Egypt which is known for whale fossils known as Whale Valley or Wadi Al-Hitan. Whales running around on four legs must have been a strange sight indeed. A new method has been discovered for extracting hydrogen from water. It uses a more efficient electrocatalyst. It has been the dream of science to find a way to make the extraction of hydrogen from water more efficient. The prior method called for the use of expensive platinum and other precious metals. The new system uses nickel and cobalt added to cheap metals. This also has the benefit of lowering the energy requirement to accomplish the process. Hydrogen is a green fuel so scientists would love to substitute it for more polluting fuels used today. If you can create just a few lines on a computer screen using the Nvidia Artificial Intelligence algorithm, it will produce one beautiful photo which looks very realistic. It sort of reminds me of a program that was out years ago I used, but the name escapes me. This one is far better. People have been talking about what they saw or heard when they went to Moore Hall in Ireland. It has a reputation for being haunted and some people claim they could hear the voices of children when no one was there. There have also been claims by people who said they saw shadows or shadow people moving around. There has been another complaint about the area around the place. It is surrounded by woods and people have said they are so quiet; they are too quiet and this is unnatural. A druid king was said to have been killed on the property. Supposedly the druids put a curse on the area. Burkina Faso is a country most have never heard of. It used to be named Upper Volta. The desert was creeping across the plains and yet one man was able to not only counter the desert, he was able to use traditional methods to make the land yield crops and keep trees growing. The man is Yacouba Sawadogo. He is a simple farmer who has managed to do what no one else was. The people who saw what he was doing thought he went nuts, but he taught them a thing or two. He dug many holes in the ground which then collected runoff water. The holes were sort of shallow, none being six feet or more and were less than 20 inches wide. Fertilizer was put into the holes and then crops planted in the holes. The man was a genius. Lately, science has taught us about zombie bugs, where a parasite takes over a insect and makes it do what it wants. Parasites exist throughout nature. It seems plants have their own parasites and they are bacteria. This time the parasites help the plant by slowing down its aging process, but not everything the parasites do is helpful. They make the plant do what they want. They become zombie plants and stop reproducing. It happens on a molecular level. A medical team has developed a new cancer treatment. The therapy uses magnetic seeds to heat and kill the cancer cells. The therapy was developed at UCL. They can use an MRI scanner to guide a magnetic seed through someone’s brain to heat and kill brain tumors. So far it has only been used in mice and is called MINIMA which stands for Minimally Invasive Image-Guided Ablation. It is said this could have uses in many other parts of the body such as the prostate. A new rubber like material has been developed by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. One of the benefits of the material is it can absorb and release large amounts of energy very quickly. One use is said to be in protective clothing where energy can be released very quickly. Another use might be in robotics where robots can get more power without having to add power. Scientists have been able to create insect sized robots which fly by flapping their wings just like the real thing. There were problems in the past with trying to develop tiny wings which would power these pseudo bugs. A new system had to be developed and the scientists succeeded. Spying has just reached a new level of competence. The problem is these things are developed with the best intentions for their use, but inevitably they will get used in ways which affect us. It is said they were being developed for environmental monitoring, but think about it, why do we need tiny robots for that? We have plenty of ways to do that now. These seem to have only one purpose, spying. Crows are one of the smartest animals and in Sweden they want to take advantage of that. They seem to have a big problem with cigarette butts all over the streets so they have decided to train crows to clean up the mess. Scientists are training them to deposit a cigarette but into a certain area where they will be rewarded with a treat. Will the crows cooperate, that is yet to be seen because they may have their own agenda? There are many strange claims about some dolls being haunted. There are some people who are wigged out by creepy looking dolls. One such doll is said to weep tears of acid and tries to set itself on fire. Maybe we are placing to much reliability in what we are being told.
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