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Having trouble keeping up with the latest events? Don't worry, Mytour has your back. We’ve gathered all the essential stories from the past week. Click here for the most significant, serious news, or continue reading for some bizarre truths and strange facts.
This week's list takes us on a global adventure. We begin in North America, then head to Australia and Japan, with a brief stop in Antarctica for a wild case of attempted murder. From there, we venture to Mars before finally landing in the heart of the Milky Way.
10. AI Artwork Sells for a Fortune
A few months ago, we covered the groundbreaking sale of the first-ever piece of artwork created by artificial intelligence being auctioned at a major event. The painting sold for a price that completely shattered all predictions.
Portrait of Edmond Belamy was created by the Paris-based art collective Obvious and their AI system, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). The artificial intelligence was solely responsible for generating the artwork, while Obvious gave the man in the painting a name and backstory.
The piece was auctioned at Christie’s Prints and Multiples auction in New York. Despite the buzz it generated, no one expected it to sell for much. Obvious anticipated a price around $10,000, and Christie’s appraisers also pegged that as the maximum. However, Portrait of Edmond Belamy ended up selling for a stunning $432,000.
9. The Forest is Alive
A strange and eerie video left online viewers both confused and unsettled, particularly as it surfaced just in time for Halloween. In the footage, a man walking through a forest in Quebec filmed the ground undulating as though the Earth was breathing.
People shared their thoughts on the strange event, often inspired by their favorite fantasy and horror tales. One popular theory suggested a giant turtle, much like the one in The Neverending Story, might be sleeping beneath the earth.
Later, a meteorologist offered a more plausible, though less thrilling, explanation. The phenomenon was the result of several factors coming together to create a rare weather event. Mark Sirois from the Southern Quebec Severe Weather Network explained that the strong winds were the main culprit, moving trees and causing their roots to lift the ground. The soil, covered in moss, made it easier for the roots to shift and create the undulating effect.
8. More Fun Than a Barrel of Monkeys
A group of Australian friends threw a farewell party for one of their own that was completely wild and out of the ordinary.
Around 50 young men from East Fremantle, Western Australia, bonded over their shared love for cycling and drinking. They frequently organized an event they dubbed the “Tour de Fridge,” cycling across town and stopping at each other’s homes for a drink.
Sadly, 23-year-old Sandy Milne had to part ways with the group as he was moving to Japan. To send him off, his friends arranged one final tour, but with a twist—they all wore banana costumes. Milne, the guest of honor, dressed as a monkey. One participant couldn’t get a costume in time, so he got inventive and simply painted his chest yellow.
The group of around 50 banana-costumed cyclists paraded through the streets of East Fremantle, much to the surprise, amusement, and confusion of onlookers. They also caused a stir at the local BWS store when the whole group entered to shop, only to be kicked out by Milne in his monkey costume.
7. How to Visit Japan on a Budget
Since 2014, approximately 160,000 foreign tourists have gained free entry to Tokyo’s Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden. It wasn’t intentional, but one employee, too shy to ask foreigners to pay, just let them walk in without charging them the admission fee.
The retired septuagenarian attendant once had a bad experience with a non-Japanese tourist. The visitor didn’t speak Japanese, and the worker didn’t know any other languages. Frustrated by the communication barrier, the tourist began shouting at the ticket-seller. Since then, the elderly man preferred to allow all foreigners free entry to avoid another confrontation.
The man issued free tickets and persuaded another employee to grant him access to the database so he could erase the records of his actions to prevent discrepancies. He managed to get away with it for two and a half years until another attendant noticed his unusual behavior around foreign visitors. This week, the environmental ministry estimated that the retiree’s actions cost the garden approximately 25 million yen ($220,000).
6. Mysterious Cloud Appears on Mars
Scientists have discovered a mysterious plume of smoke on Mars, which seems to be linked to a volcanic eruption.
A long strip of vapor, roughly 1,500 kilometers (930 mi) in length, stretches over Arsia Mons, one of the three volcanoes in the Tharsis bulge. But since Mars hasn’t experienced a volcanic eruption in millions of years, could this be the sign of a volcano awakening from its long slumber?
No, it's not a volcano waking up. While the white cloud seems to have emerged from the summit of Arsia Mons, scientists explain this as an optical illusion. The actual source of the vapor trail is the elevated peak of the volcano, not its internal chamber.
The phenomenon is an orographic cloud. These clouds typically form on the leeward sides of mountains where dense air rises, expands, and cools enough to allow moisture to condense on dust particles. Mars experiences the perfect seasonal conditions to create such clouds every few Earth years. The Mars Express spacecraft last captured an image of a Martian orographic cloud in 2015.
5. A Really Cold Case
An attempted murder occurred in Antarctica when a Russian researcher stabbed one of his colleagues in the chest with a knife.
Fifty-five-year-old Sergey Savitsky had been working alongside 52-year-old Oleg Beloguzov for some time at the Bellinghausen research station on King George Island. It appears that Savitsky finally reached his breaking point and attacked Beloguzov with a knife. Despite the blade piercing the heart, the victim was transported to a hospital in Chile, where he is expected to fully recover.
The incident occurred on October 9. Savitsky surrendered and was placed under house arrest. He has since shown remorse for his actions. According to Interfax news agency, the altercation resulted from “tensions in a confined space.” Some reports suggest that Savitsky's anger was triggered by his colleague constantly revealing the endings of books he intended to read.
4. The Dust-To-Thrust Factory
Let’s return to Mars for a moment, as NASA’s software development team leader, Kurt Leucht, has revealed plans to create a system that extracts fuel from Martian soil.
This system, known as “in situ resource utilization” (ISRU), but more fondly called the “dust-to-thrust factory” by Leucht, will extract water from regolith, the loose soil that blankets the Red Planet. Using electrolysis, the water will be split into hydrogen and oxygen. Additionally, the system will capture carbon from the Martian atmosphere and combine it with hydrogen to produce methane, a potential rocket fuel.
NASA plans to send the ISRU system to Mars before the first manned mission. Leucht views this technology as crucial for enabling humans to travel to the Red Planet and return to Earth to “tell the story.”
3. Black Hole Confirmed
You've likely heard of the supermassive black hole that sits at the center of our galaxy. For years, scientists have speculated about its existence, but only recently have they been able to confirm it beyond doubt.
It was known that a massive object at the core of the Milky Way was emitting powerful radio waves. We called it Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*—pronounced Sagittarius A-star). While we had long suspected it was a black hole weighing in at four million times the mass of the Sun, now we have the observational data to confirm it.
To prove the presence of the black hole, scientists needed to observe the effect of its gravity on another object passing nearby. Enter S2, a small star that orbits the gravitational pull of Sgr A* every 16 years. Once they identified it, researchers waited for the star to pass close enough to the black hole. When it did, the team at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to track three bright flares traveling around the black hole’s event horizon at nearly 30 percent the speed of light.
This marks the first-ever observation of material orbiting so close to a black hole’s point of no return. It also provides further support for Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which had predicted such an occurrence.
2. Japanese Island Disappears
Japanese authorities recently discovered that one of their islands, located off the northeastern coast, has mysteriously disappeared.
The small island was named Esanbe Hanakita Kojima. Completely uninhabited, it was likely eroded by the wind and drift ice coming from the Sea of Okhotsk. Although the disappearance of such an island might usually go unnoticed, it was significant due to its location. The islet marked an outlying point used by Japan to define its exclusive economic zone. Specifically, it lay west of the disputed Northern Territories region between Japan and Russia.
The island’s vanishing came to light through author Hiroshi Shimizu, who was in Sarufutsu village working on a book about Japan’s ‘hidden’ islands. Strangely, locals hadn't noticed the island's disappearance, even though it was only 500 meters (1,640 ft) away. Fishermen avoided the area as it was marked as an undersea reef on navigation charts, and the Japanese coast guard last surveyed it back in 1987.
1. Sabrina Angers Satanists
Netflix has debuted a darker, contemporary show centered on Sabrina, the teenage witch. The Satanic Temple is upset, threatening legal action over the show’s use of an image that belongs to the organization, which was used without permission.
The dispute revolves around a statue of the goat-headed figure Baphomet that appears in the series. The actual statue is currently housed in the Detroit chapter of the Satanic Temple. The group has displayed it in front of various state capitols as part of protests against the display of the Ten Commandments in government buildings.
Lucien Greaves, co-founder of the Temple, shared side-by-side comparison photos of the two statues, highlighting their striking similarity. Stuart de Haan, the Temple’s legal representative, argued that the image is original, copyrighted, and distinct from any other depiction of Baphomet. The Satanic Temple is upset not only about the unauthorized use of their sculpture but also how it is portrayed, which contradicts their core values.
