A Georgia official planned to defraud the state by taking leave during multiple pregnancies. The ordeal started in October 2019, before COVID, and carried on through May 2021. Her scheme unraveled when a coworker noticed her wearing a fake pregnancy costume. When asked about the fake pregnancies, her friend said that she was “astounded” at the […]
Researchers at the University of Oxford made a family tree spanning 100k years using genetics. It includes over 3.6k people. In theory, someone could use the information to figure out who their ancestors were and their relations to everyone today. The team that created the family tree is a part of the Big Data Institute. Their big […]
Peloton has released a new feature on their stationary bikes: gaming. Instead of pumping legs with a celebrity trainer, users can play a game and try and earn points for hitting specific targets. From a tester: “I’m pedaling to hit specific beats, fill up breakers by pedaling furiously, or keep up a stream by maintaining […]
An American hacker who goes by the moniker P4x was hacked by North Korean spies. He’s a security researcher and hoped the US would have his back. After a year without a response from the US for the attack, P4x retaliated. Since he struck back, North Korea’s internet has suffered from persistent blackouts. The exceptions are […]
Soviet researchers abandoned an Arctic weather station in 1992, leaving behind the island village that was their home. Decades later, a photographer went looking for polar bears after two years of preparation. Unfortunately, on his way to a known polar bear hotspot, the expedition had to stop at the abandoned weather station’s island because of […]
In late 2021, Customs and Border Patrol pulled over a jeep with 60kg of meth in the fuel tank. The driver? An American girl from Arizona. According to her, she met someone while playing Grand Theft Auto 5 earlier that year. They got to know each other in the game, then transferred their conversations to Snapchat. Then, […]
A surgeon in the UK lost his medical license after authorities discovered he had branded his initials into two patients' livers using an argon beam machine. The grisly signatures were exposed when another surgeon operated on a failed transplant. Turning this into a story, what if a state coroner discovers a series of messages etched onto transplanted […]
A woman in China went viral with simple videos from her time in lockdown. They included cooking food, doing household chores, and working from home. The kicker? She’s stuck on a blind date that just won’t end. It all started when she went to her date’s house for a home-cooked meal. While she was there, Chinese authorities […]
Manuel was talking with a friend outside a fruit and vegetable shop in Spain when Google Street View snapped a photo of him. Then, he was arrested. In truth, Manuel was the former Italian mafia boss Gioacchino Gammino, on the run for twenty years. The scar on his face gave him away. From the article […]
A paper titled Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic? puts forth a rather weird conclusion: that comets seeded life on Earth. Published in 2018, it says: “life may have been seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and […]
