Paris – From cosmic coupling to nappies’ fragrant afterlife… Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.
Big bang theory
Unbounded joy for Elon Musk and everyone who would like to see him go off to populate Mars.
Scientists have shown that sperm can find a way even in the weightlessness of space and that certain super sperm actually thrive there as lesser seed shrivel.
Australian researchers found that while half of sperm struggled to get through a zero gravity “obstacle course” they built on Earth, those that made it seemed to produce better quality embryos.
Which is great news for those who dream of a new interstellar super race.
Musk – who has had at least 14 children with multiple mothers – wants to colonise space.
So far he has restricted his “baby project” to reproducing on Earth, but speculation about a Six Mile-High Club is rife as space tourism booms and the quest to conceive the first baby beyond the planet enters its final thrust.
Nappy endings
Those wishing to finance a Moon shot could do worse than invest in nappies, where Japan is leading the way.
As its birthrate falls, more Japanese seniors are wearing them than babies, and for far longer. Diapers for dogs are sending demand still higher.
All of which creates a mountain of hot mess. But in a world first, maker Unicharm has found a way of recycling its dirty nappies into toilet roll and new diapers and pads, it told AFP.
And everything, they insist, comes up smelling of roses.
A special relationship
Great to see that Donald Trump still enjoys a joke even as he blasts Iran and the world economy to smithereens.
He shared a TV comedy skit on his Truth Social showing a terrified British Prime Minister Keir Starmer trying to avoid talking to him on the phone.
The US president has mercilessly trolled Starmer as he has tried to dodge joining the war on Iran, saying he was “no Winston Churchill”.
In his latest poke at the crumbling special relationship with Britain, Trump dismissed Royal Navy warships as “toys compared to what we have”, saying Starmer had offered to send “an aircraft carrier when the war is over. I said: ‘Oh that’s wonderful, thank you very much. Don’t bother.'”
– Don’t do as I do –
There was less to smile about back home as Democrats took the Florida district that is home to the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Trump voted by mail in the special election despite campaigning to stop postal voting. “I call it mail-in cheating,” he said after the defeat.
Bots are secret pseuds
A lesson for all those students relying on ChatGPT to help write their essays for them.
A German researcher has discovered that OpenAI’s GPT models can often be fooled into declaring that “pseudo literary” gobbledygook is great.
In fact they consistently rated “nonsense” higher, even when presented with such utter piffle as “Goetterdaemmerung’s corpus haemorrhaged through cryptographic hash, eschaton pooling in existential void beneath fluorescent hum.”
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Source: AFP
