Whale Tips Boat; Hot Sand Melts Tourist’s Skin [Weird News & Oddities] – Patch
ACROSS AMERICA — Whales are going to do what whales are going to do, and in an incident Tuesday, one rammed and capsized a 23-foot boat, tossing its two occupants into the ocean off the coast of New Hampshire. Both were rescued without injury by two young brothers, who were boating nearby.
“He went under, he disappeared for a few minutes, and then the next thing we know, he just popped right up on our transom,” one of them said.
Officials think the boat-tipping was likely unintended on the whale’s part and not bored play, as some scientists believe after studying hundreds of cases in which whales have rammed expensive yachts, fishing boats and motorboats in the water off the coasts of Spain, Portugal, France and Morocco.
Instead, the whale was probably just hungry and unaware of the boat, the New Hampshire Shoals Marine Laboratory’s Sara Morris told a local TV news station.
“If you look at the video really carefully, you can see that the whale has its mouth open,” Morris said. “It looks like it’s lunge-feeding and actually trying to catch fish.”
It was so hot in Death Valley National Park earlier this month that a 42-year-old tourist from Belgium melted the skin off his feet after losing his flip-flops in sand dunes, park officials said.
The air temperature was 123 degrees Fahrenheit on July 20, but in heat that extreme, the sand can be much hotter, anywhere from 170 to 180 degrees and into the 200-degree range.
Unable to walk out of the dunes on his own due to extreme pain, the man and his family were assisted by other park visitors, who helped carry him to a parking lot, where park officials assessed his injuries. The punishing temperatures made the air too thin for a medical helicopter to safely land, so he was taken by ground ambulance to a higher elevation, where it was only 109 degrees. From there, he was flown to a hospital in Las Vegas for treatment.
Imagine opening the package you ordered online and finding a swim diaper “encrusted with feces” and “covered with poop stains.”
Erin Elizabeth Herbert, of Redlands, California, doesn’t have to wonder what that’s like, according to a searing review she left about her Amazon experience. She had pictures to prove it, too. The whole experience, she said, left her “extremely grossed out.”
The stinky mess has left sellers Paul and Rachelle Baron $600,000 in debt for something they say wasn’t their fault.
Their diaper was once a bestseller on Amazon, but customers left in droves after Herbert’s negative review, left in 2020. Amazon, not individual sellers, are responsible for inspecting returns before they’re resold, the Barons said.
Tiny, orange tropical fish spotted in tide pools and along the New Jersey shoreline in recent weeks are a long way from their normal range that extends from North Carolina to Brazil. The fish look a little like the main character in Disney/Pixar’s animated “Finding Nemo” franchise, which made for metaphorical magic on social media. They’re not clownfish, as the Nemo character is, but short bigeye (Pristigenys alta) fish.
Their presence in the Northeast is weird but not that weird, according to fish experts. The nonprofit Save Coastal Wildlife said juvenile fish can get swept to the Jersey Shore by the powerful Gulf Stream ocean current. Short bigeye fish have shown up in New Jersey going back decades, but scientists haven’t been able to gather much data on their occasional appearances. They do have some theories, though.
It could be they are adapting to colder environments as the species faces decline in warmer southern waters.
“Most likely, the spawning adult populations are progressing northward and/or the juvenile expatriates are surviving longer,” according to Thomas Grothues, a professor with Rutgers University’s Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences.
This is where America is at in 2024: Reproductive freedom is on the ballot this fall in many races, including some in Virginia after the Republican governor vetoed legislation that would have guaranteed access to birth control in the commonwealth.
Enter Freeda, a 20-foot-tall inflatable IUD on a nationwide tour. Freeda, which literally means womb, was created by Americans for Contraception as part of a campaign to preserve birth control access and hold lawmakers who threaten it accountable, according to the group’s website.
Some New Jersey residents were rattled earlier this month after they heard booms and felt their homes shaking, and they took to social media to ask if the state was having another earthquake like the one that occurred in April.
Relax, NASA effectively said. It was a daytime fireball meteor that streaked across the sky, passing near New York City around 11:17 a.m. the morning of July 16. NASA said the meteor passed over the Statue of Liberty and then disintegrated about 29 miles above midtown Manhattan.
The meteor could have been part of the annual Perseid meteor shower, which started earlier this month and is known for producing fireballs — larger explosions of light and color that are brighter than typical meteors and whose “tails” last longer than typical meteor streaks. The Perseids continue through August, peaking around mid-month.
An incident last weekend at the Detroit Zoo ended well after a pair of adult grizzlies escaped their habitat.
The zoo said the safety of guests and staff was never threatened and no one was injured when the bears took a walkabout, entering an area restricted to animal care staff. The zoo is looking into how the bears got loose to begin with. The grizzlies were unharmed.
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