Spies bugged
CUBA has long been a hotbed of improbable US spy games. Fidel Castro was famously targeted by hundreds of creative assassination attempts, including exploding cigars and suicide bomber clams, poison-tipped fountain pens and toxic wetsuits.
In 2017 the boot appeared to be on the other foot, as US officials concluded that hearing loss reported by diplomats in their embassy in Cuba was due to a covert sonic weapon wielded by nefarious agents.
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What strategic goal is served by deafening diplomats is a mystery, unless Cuba is suddenly feeling protective about the relaxing sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club.
However, a pair of scientists has now determined the source of the mysterious high-pitched sounds linked to the ailments to be insects.
An audio recording released by embassy personnel resembles the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket, they report. But the question remains: were the chirping crickets always communist sympathisers, or were they turned? And why crickets? With dormancy periods measured in years, cicadas would have made much better sleeper agents.
鈥淩esearchers have discovered a virulence gene that allows E. coli bacteria to kill caterpillars. The gene has been christened mcf, for 鈥�
Revealing edit
MORE state-sponsored trolling? Russian tech firm has blurred out sensitive Turkish and Israeli military and government facilities on aerial photos it provides to the general public. Governments make such requests of satellite operators all the time, but Yandex blurred only these facilities, very precisely, making it obvious what Israel and Turkey would rather you didn鈥檛 notice.
It is all reminiscent of Barbra Streisand鈥檚 2003 attempt to suppress obscure photos of her home, causing interest in them to spike. But then, maybe that is what they want, and the real secret buildings are hiding in plain sight on the other side of the street.
Horny toads
. What other explanation could there be for a photo of several cane toads, er, 鈥渞iding鈥� on a python in Australia? The five lusty amphibians were snapped holding tightly to the snake after mistaking it for a passing female cane toad.
鈥淚 have personally seen cane toads trying to mate with a rotting mango as it floated in a bit of water,鈥� biologist Jodi Rowley told listeners of Canada鈥檚 CBC radio. 鈥淎nd there was a bit of competition for that rotting mango.鈥�
Long distance call
astronaut Andr茅 Kuipers has confessed a slip of the glove meant he accidentally made an emergency call from space.
Astronauts on the International Space Station can make phone calls via the Johnson Space Center in Houston. First, they must dial 9 for an outside line, then 011 if it is an international call.
But on one occasion, Kuipers missed out the 0. The next day, he got an email from Houston asking if he had called 911. Emergency responders turned up at the Houston centre to check the room where the call came from. 鈥淚 was a little disappointed that they had not come up,鈥� said Kuipers on a radio show in the Netherlands.
Dirty deeds
probably know that in vivo experiments take place in the body and in vitro on the lab bench. But what about materials that are halfway between one and the other?
Aadra Bhatt, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina, found there was no term for discoveries divulged from dung.
Just as the eyes are windows to the soul, droppings are windows into the workings of the gastrointestinal system, and deserving of their own terminology. Bhatt was relieved to find a suitable word, the Latin fimus, one of four terms the Romans used for excrement.
The world didn鈥檛 know it needed one, but now it has a phrase for experiments conducted on faeces: in fimo. Although Feedback can鈥檛 understand why a more obvious choice was ignored, lying just a single letter away from in situ.
Boom and bust
MANY said it wouldn鈥檛 work 鈥� and they were right. A 600-metre-long boom designed to collect plastic from the ocean is being towed to Hawaii after breaking apart.
The Ocean Cleanup, invented by Dutch schoolboy Boyan Slat, is intended to act like an artificial coastline, trapping plastic garbage, while allowing animals to swim free.
But once deployed in the North Pacific Gyre 鈥� a far cry from the placid Dutch waters of the Markermeer 鈥� the boom failed to do much collecting, and ultimately disintegrated into the very thing it was designed to alleviate.
Stories of boys with fingers in dykes may have given the Dutch an unrealistic view of the effectiveness of small-scale interventions. Even if the scheme was ultimately successful, it is still unclear how the operation could be scaled up, how the collection of vast amounts of waste in international waters would be funded and what to do with all the plastic collected.
Having given the matter a great deal of thought, Feedback has a moonshot proposal of our own: a device to collect pieces of plastic-collecting booms that have broken up in the Pacific. We think we will call it a boom boom.
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