12 Bizarre News Items to Make You Wonder Where It All Went Wrong
Pop quiz: What’s the best-selling non-athlete Topps card of all time?
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For a Split Second, Alchemy Was Real
While collisions of lead nuclei are known to form an amalgam of ancient particles called a quark-gluon plasma, a near-miss of lead nuclei traveling 99.999993 percent of the speed of light very briefly rearranged their protons so that they were technically gold atoms for a few microseconds.
Cats Sometimes Need Gold Teeth
As a viral TikTok has shown, when a cat loses its tooth, it needs a hypoallergenic replacement so it can continue to eat without getting an infection. This particular cat got a $5,000 gold tooth (or technically, an “alloy of gold, silver, palladium, indium, zinc and iridium”).
People Are Using Generative A.I. to Literally Read Tea Leaves
Multiple types of idiocy are converging: People are taking pictures of tea leaves, wine dregs and the like, then uploading them to A.I. programs and asking them to divine the future. One woman reportedly filed for divorce because a chatbot told her that her husband was cheating on her with a younger woman whose name began with E — all based on pictures of his coffee grounds.
Sea Animals Adapted to Land Quicker Than We Thought
Fossilized claw tracks in Australia have been traced back to 358 million years ago, which is 50 million years earlier than previously known. Since the first animals started flopping out of the water about 400 million years ago, we now know it only took them about 48 million years to grow leg-like appendages suitable for walking.
The Dental Floss That Will Monitor Your Stress Levels
Researchers have embedded microfluidic threads into a dental floss device, channeling saliva into a device in the handle that collects and reports on the amount of cortisol molecules in your spit.
A Lifesaving Goop to Slather on Coral Reefs
Scientists have developed a gel that appears to help coral reefs recover 20 times faster.
A Decapitated Dolphin Washed Up in North Carolina. Anyone Got Eyes on RFK Jr.?
Federal authorities are offering a $20,000 reward to anyone who wants to narc on the idiot or idiots who beheaded a bottlenose dolphin on Lea-Hutaff Island.
There’s a Creed Car at the Indy 500
Sponsored by a SiriusXM channel, a fully decked-out Creed-themed car will race in the Indianapolis 500, with members of the band there to watch it.
The Best-Selling Non-Athlete Trading Card
Topps sold 133,353 Pope Leo XIV trading cards during a four-day limited release.
A Capybara Prison Break
A zoo in eastern China has alerted locals that a capybara has been loose for over a month. Capybaras named Doubao, Bazong and Duoduo busted out of a wood panel, and while two of them were quickly captured, Doubao is still out there somewhere.
North America Has Over One-Third of the World’s Billion-Dollar Companies
This pie-ish chart breaks down the locations of the world’s 5,522 billion-dollar companies, and the U.S. is far and away the worst offender with 1,873 of those bad boys. If you close your eyes real tight, you can almost feel that wealth trickling down.
A Multi Billion-Dollar Foot-Dick Merger
Dick’s Sporting Goods is buying Foot Locker for $2.4 billion.
