Good News Friday: Elephant CPR, Archaeological Finds, and Absolutely No Doom & Gloom

If you would like to peruse some news reports but don’t want to come across words like “inflation,” “conflict,” and “repeat the line,” then look no further.

With the current global situation being what it is, today may be a good day to take a break from news about politics and the economy – after all, who would want to ruin their mood when the weekend is about to begin?

So why not take a gander at reports of some of the intriguing discoveries and peculiar developments that arrived this week?

For example, have you heard about that poor baby elephant that fell in a pit in Thailand and had to be rescued by local wildlife authorities? The rescue mission was complicated by the presence of the elephant’s concerned mother, who had to be sedated and then resuscitated in order to prevent her from interfering. Fortunately, all’s well that ends well, and both the mama elephant and her child ended up returning to the jungle, with the rescue effort being a success.

This handout photo taken and released on July 13, 2022 by Thailand's Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation shows an infant elephant standing next to a sedated adult elephant, following a rescue operation to recover the younger elephant after it fell into a hole, in Nakhon Nayok province in central Thailand.

© AFP 2023 / Thailand's Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation/HANDOUT

Next, another piece of good news comes from Scotland, where a previously unknown work of Vincent van Gogh was discovered on the back of another one of his paintings. The newly found picture, which appears to be a self-portrait of the legendary painter, had remained hidden on the back of the “Head of a Peasant Woman” until an X-ray examination brought the secret to light.

For those who are awaiting the release of the upcoming “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” streaming TV series, a new trailer – a main teaser, in fact – was recently unveiled. Fair warning, though – while the visuals seem to be rather impressive, quite a few people on social media wondered aloud whether the writing will be on par.

Meanwhile, a rare find was made in Belgium, where the remains of a soldier slain during the legendary Battle of Waterloo over 200 years ago were unearthed. This is the second-ever full skeleton discovered at Waterloo, as for some reason very few remains and no mass graves have been found at the site.

Off the coast of Chile, a group of fishermen managed to catch a massive 16-foot-long fish that had to be hoisted with a crane as it was unloaded from the boat. Known as a giant oarfish and sometimes referred to as the “king of herrings,” these creatures usually dwell pretty deep in the ocean and are definitely not something you see every day – so feel free to take a look.

Giant oarfish

© Photo : Twitter/@CriticalCupcake

Social media users are debating the nature of a strange shape that was caught on camera in California this week, just hanging in the air for minutes before “ascending vertically,” as the person who filmed the “sphere” put it. Was it a UFO? A weather balloon? A glitch in the matrix? You decide.

The Archaeological Museum in the Norwegian city of Stavanger obtained a trove of Viking-era artifacts in an unusual manner when an unknown benefactor simply left the objects at the museum’s entrance. The items include several dress buckles, two bracelets, and a pearl necklace, and appear to be jewelry typically worn by housewives during the Viking Age.

Those of you who fancy astronomy might want to check out the new images of Jupiter obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The pictures were snapped by the space telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera while the JWST was being tested, and depict the gigantic planet and three of its moons - Europa, Thebe, and Metis.

These, however, are far from the only pictures obtained by the JWST recently, as the US unveiled what NASA touted as “the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far,” procured with the space telescope. The image shows a distant galaxy cluster known as SMACS 0723 as it appeared some 4.6 billion years ago.

And scientists at the AI research laboratory DeepMind achieved a feat of a different kind, developing an AI system with a thinking pattern similar to that of a human infant. This achievement may potentially help us gain new insight into human cognition, not to mention that it is yet another step made by humanity on the road of AI development.