The World - Nov. 8, 2012

THURSDAY

An Asian elephant named Koshik can imitate human speech, saying words in Korean that can be understood by speakers of the language, according to researchers from the University of Vienna. It is unclear why Koshik started mimicking human speech but cognitive biologists Angela Stoeger and Tecumseh Fitch suggest in research published in the journal Current Biology that it might be related to his experiences as a juvenile.

A prehistoric town unearthed in eastern Bulgaria is the oldest urban settlement found to date in Europe, a Bulgarian archaeologist said today. Vasil Nikolov, a professor from Bulgaria’s National Institute of Archaeology, said the stone walls excavated by his team near the town of Provadia are estimated to date between 4,700 and 4,200 B.C. He said the walls, which are 10 feet high and 6 feet thick, are believed to be the earliest and most massive fortifications from Europe’s prehistory.

FRIDAY

A Polish firm that makes coffins has angered the Catholic church by trying to drum up business with a calendar depicting topless models posing next to its caskets. One image from the 2013 edition of the calendar has a blonde model, wearing only a skimpy thong and with a snake draped around her neck, reclining on a coffin. In another, a woman wearing a crimson corset is depicted pulling out the heart of a man lying on a casket. The Catholic church condemned the calendar as inappropriate, saying human death should be treated with solemnity and not mixed up with sex.

Britain’s Foreign Office spent 10,000 pounds ($16,100) to re-stuff the corpse of a giant 120-year-old snake, at a time when government departments are being told to rein in spending. The huge reptile hangs in a Foreign Office library and is regarded as a departmental asset in a country whose former empire once ruled over vast swaths of the planet.

WEEKEND

An Idaho scientist, shrugging off skeptical fellow scholars in his quest for evidence of Bigfoot has turned his sights skyward, with plans to float a blimp over the U.S. mountain West in search of the mythic, ape-like creature.

Idaho State University has approved the unusual proposal of faculty member Jeffrey Meldrum, an anatomy and anthropology professor ridiculed by some peers for past research of a being whose existence is widely disputed by mainstream science.

Now Meldrum is seeking to raise $300,000-plus in private donations to build the remote-controlled dirigible, equip it with a thermal-imaging camera and send it aloft in hopes of catching an aerial glimpse of Bigfoot, also known as sasquatch.

The belatedly crowned winner of a $23 million California lottery jackpot says she had stuffed the lucky ticket in her car and left it there forgotten for months, until a surveillance camera photo of the ticket’s purchase surfaced on the Internet. Only when she recognized her daughter in the picture, which state lottery officials had publicly circulated in a desperate attempt to locate the missing winner, did Julie Cervera, 69, realize to her amazement that she was a multimillionaire.

MONDAY

The world’s rarest whale has been spotted for the first time, in New Zealand, where two of the whales stranded themselves. The two spade-toothed beaked whales, a mother and calf, stranded and died on Opape Beach on the North Island of New Zealand, in December 2010. The mother was 17 feet long and the calf was 11 feet long. A report describing the whales and the analysis of their DNA appears in the Nov. 6 issue of the journal Current Biology.

A prominent astrophysicist has pinned down a real location for Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton. Krypton is found 27.1 light-years from Earth, in the southern constellation Corvus (The Crow), says Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York City. The planet orbits the red dwarf star LHS 2520, which is cooler and smaller than our sun.

Finance minister George Osborne is the public figure that most often appears in British nightmares, a recent study has found.

Ruling Conservative party member Osborne, whose official title is Chancellor of the Exchequer, was booed during a medal ceremony at the Paralympics this summer in London and has been the focus of public criticism for austerity measures which have seen cuts to welfare budgets and a freeze in public sector pay.

Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister, came second in the survey conducted by hotel group Travelodge, which asked 2,000 people about their nightmares.

Former glamour model Katie Price, also known as Jordan, beat a number of other politicians to come third.

TUESDAY

A crocodile on the run from a Gaza zoo for the past 18 months has finally been captured. The 6 foot-long reptile was spotted several weeks ago in sewage pools in the northern Gaza Strip, and villagers complained he had been eating their livestock. Police called in fishermen, who netted the crocodile on Monday.

Compiled by Gazette staff from a variety

of sources.