From how smelly penguins are saving the world to how Dr House got it wrong, your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.
- Fragrant penguins keep us cool -
The whiff coming off penguin poo is helping save us from climate catastrophe, say scientists who have made one of the year’s most unexpected discoveries.
Ammonia wafting from penguin guano is creating cloud cover over coastal Antarctica, blocking sunlight and keeping the continent cool.
The odour generated by a colony of 60,000 Adelie penguins on Seymour Island, off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, is literally strong enough to change the weather, scientists reported.
They found that cloud-seeding aerosols surging from the stink were thick enough at times to generate a dense fog.
“This is just another example of this deep connection between the ecosystem and atmospheric processes, and why we should care about biodiversity and conservation,” Matthew Boyer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Helsinki, told AFP.
- Ships in the night -
A Norwegian man woke up to find a cargo ship had run aground only feet from where he was sleeping soundly in his seaside cabin.
Johan Helberg was woken by a panicked neighbour who rang his doorbell and frantically phoned to warn him that the ship was heading for his home.
The 135-metre (443-foot) NCL Salten rammed into the shore just metres from Helberg’s wooden house in a fjord near Trondheim.
“The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg said.
His neighbour said he was roused at around 5:00 am by the sound of the ship heading at full speed towards Helberg’s house.
Police said the Ukrainian helmsman had fallen asleep, with the seaman saying the ship’s alarms had not gone off.
No one was hurt, and the ship was later pulled from the rocks.
“It’s good to have said hello, but now it’s time to say goodbye,” Helberg told Norwegian TV.
- Treat thyself doctor -
He was the pill-popping maverick medic you loved to confound the medical establishment with his unorthodox diagnoses.
But TV’s Dr House often got it wrong, Croatian researchers have found, with a neurologist working at the wrong end of a patient (doing a colonoscopy) in one episode and an infectologist performing an autopsy in another.
- Carlsen takes on the world -
Two brains are better than one, but 145,000 are not necessarily superior to a single cerebrum, particularly if the grey matter belongs to the legendary chess master Magnus Carlsen.
An army of chess fans was unable to outfox the 34-year-old Norwegian in an online match billed as “Magnus Carlsen vs. The World”.
Carlsen held them to a draw after a six-week contest, with each side allowed 24 hours to make a move.
In fact, Carlsen thought he “was a little bit better” early in the game, but as soon as his opponents got their act together “honestly, they haven’t given me a single chance”.
- No crack in this system -
It was almost the purrfect crime but guards nabbed a drug-running cat breaking into a Costa Rican prison just in time.
The black-and-white moggie jumped the fence of the jail in Pococi with 230 grams of marijuana and 67 grams of crack cocaine strapped to its body in the middle of the night, the justice ministry said.
It may have hoped to catch the guards cat-napping.
Instead it was quickly spotted and is now behind bars itself in an animal sanctuary.
burs-fg/js
