Today’s roundup of odds and ends (mostly “odds”) comes entirely from Fortean Times—the world’s foremost authority on “strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents.” Or, as I prefer to call it, The Greatest Magazine Ever. Here we go…
Neelesh A. Patankar, professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been hard at work doing precisely what one would expect of someone in such an esteemed position: “using the right kind of texture and chemistry to prevent bubbling during boiling.”
From the Things that Go Bump in the Night file: A North Carolina woman learns that what she thought might be a poltergeist is in fact her ex-boyfriend—from 12 years ago—living in her attic.
Fancy a six-inch gastropod in your salad? Giant Spanish slugs are invading the UK, “threatening to wipe out local species with new diseases and parasites or by simply devouring them.”
Think that 32,000-piece Ravensburger puzzle you got for Christmas is hard? Try piecing together 6 hundred million scraps of paper. And when it’s all said and done, we may not want to know what’s on those scraps.