OBAMA, BARACK▶
Tuscan authorities banned boar hunting within 3 miles of Barack Obama.
When Obama went to Tuscany in May, Italian officials prohibited hunting within 3 miles of where he was staying to avoid him being accidentally shot. This wasn’t the only treat that was laid on for him. As he landed in the country, six Eurofighter jets escorted his plane into the airport before he headed to a Tuscan retreat with a 13-car motorcade.
Since stepping down, Obama’s been making up for holidays he missed out on during his presidency. He started by visiting Richard Branson’s Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands within two weeks of leaving the White House.* He and Branson competed to see whether Obama could learn to kitesurf before Branson learned to foilboard (foilboarding is similar to kitesurfing, except the rider is suspended above the water on a foil – see Yachting). The former president won the competition, successfully travelling 100 metres on his board before his host could do the same.
He also got to surf at Necker Island – something he hadn’t been allowed to do for eight years. He’d last indulged just a few weeks before taking office, but security guards had then informed him that, for safety reasons, he’d have to take a break until he’d finished governing America.
Another island that Obama visited was Tetiaroa, an atoll in French Polynesia that was once owned by Marlon Brando. According to the Washington Post, Obama started writing his White House memoir while there. By an odd coincidence, Obama’s first memoir was called Dreams from My Father, while Brando’s was called Songs My Mother Taught Me.
OBESITY▶
Instant noodles led to the first obese Siberians.
The Western lifestyle appears to be permeating the whole world. Even in the far north of Russia, the nomadic herders of the Yamalo-Nenets region now prefer to stay in and have noodles for dinner rather than head out to catch the fish that they used to subsist on. They walk a lot less, too; owing to oil and gas companies encroaching on their land, they herd their reindeer over a much smaller area. All of this has led to the first cases of obesity in this area of the Arctic being documented by researchers.
Further west, a researcher in Latvia came up with an innovative way to fight obesity. Nauris Cinovics from the Art Academy of Latvia has invented a plate that has crinkles, as well as bulging upwards in the centre, making a relatively thin layer of food look like a large pile. Cinovics suggests people should eat from it with his special cutlery: a knife, fork and spoon that weigh 1.3 kilos each, forcing diners to slow down, and making a meal that usually takes seven minutes last for eleven. Eating slowly is a useful tactic because the brain takes at least 20 minutes to receive the message that we feel full.
Given that there are now 2.2 billion overweight people on Earth, and that one in ten people on Earth is clinically obese, Cinovics’s innovation seems timely. Obesity is killing more people than traffic accidents, Alzheimer’s and terrorism combined. And it’s not just humans: one in three American pet cats and dogs is overweight. In Thailand, an obese monkey called Uncle Fat hit the headlines when he was caught and put on a diet. He might as well have been called Uncle Lazy, as he didn’t even bother getting food himself, instead persuading minion monkeys to collect it for him.
OCEANS▶
Deep-diving scientists found a penis-shaped worm that shrinks when threatened.
Australian researchers looked into the abyssal area of the ocean (between 3,000 and 6,000 metres below sea level), searching for new creatures. As well as the worm, they found more than 300 species never before seen, including a faceless fish (which does have a face, it’s just not where you’d expect it to be) and giant anemone-sucking sea spiders. They also came across a herd of sea pigs, a shark whose teeth look like a steak knife, and a shortarse feelerfish (the unflattering name derives from its short anal fin). Their scariest discovery, however, was trash: 200 years’ worth of bottles, PVC pipes, tins of paints and discarded beer cans. (For more rubbish in the ocean, see Plastics.)
Also to be found in the abyss this year was one of the stars of 2016, Boaty McBoatface.* The remote-controlled underwater vehicle, which lives aboard the altogether less interestingly named RRS Sir David Attenborough research vessel, went on its first ever mission. It dived into the abyssal zone of the Antarctic, testing the currents found in the area known as the Antarctic Bottom Water.
OLD AGE▶
Scientists can now predict that an elderly person is going to fall over three weeks before it happens.
Scientists at the University of Missouri have discovered that by monitoring an elderly person’s gait, they are able to prevent dangerous falls. It’s all to do with walking speeds. When someone starts walking, or getting up from the sofa, more slowly than normal, it indicates something is wrong with them and that the chance of them falling over has increased. If someone slows down by as little as 5.1 centimetres a second, the chances of a fall within three weeks are 86 per cent higher. So the Missouri team came up with a camera sensor system that can be fitted in the homes of the elderly. When the system detects any change in walking patterns it texts relatives and support workers, allowing them to intervene before any mishaps occur.
If the idea of fitting an elderly person’s house with cameras seems a bit creepy, researchers in Switzerland and Italy have been working on an alternative option – fitting your loved one with a robotic exoskeleton. The prototype device, called the Active Pelvis Orthosis, increases older people’s leg force by 20 to 30 per cent. The device straps on around the waist and thighs, and is designed to measure the wearer’s gait. By doing so it can detect an oncoming fall, and use a motor to adjust their leg position to a non-slip stance. The devices may be in use in nursing homes within 10 years.
OLDEST AGE▶
The last person to have been born in the 19th century died this year in northern Italy. She lived through 90 Italian governments.
Emma Morano, the world’s oldest person, died aged 117. The secret of her long life seems to have been ‘routine’: she spent 42 years of her life sewing potato sacks. For almost 100 years she ate two raw eggs a day, had pasta and raw meat for lunch, and had a glass of milk for her dinner. She said her longevity was due to two things: firstly, the raw eggs, and secondly, staying single after kicking out her abusive husband in 1938.
She was replaced as the world’s oldest person by Jamaica’s Violet Brown, who turned 117 in March. A former cemetery record-keeper, she is the last surviving person to have been a subject of Queen Victoria. Her son, Harold Fairweather, 97, was the oldest child in the world who had a parent still alive, but sadly died just a couple of days after his mother was declared the world’s oldest person. Brown died in September and was replaced as the world’s oldest person by Nabi Tajima of Japan, who is also 117.
Meanwhile, in Indonesia, a man who claimed – slightly implausibly – to have been the world’s oldest human died, ‘aged’ 146. Supposedly born in 1870, Mbah Ghoto was regrettably unable to confirm his age as Indonesia only started recording births in 1900, just as he was hitting his thirties. He claimed to have been 70 at the start of the Second World War.
According to an interview Ghoto gave last year, he had been expecting his death for some time: 25 years, in fact, having had his gravestone made in 1992. When interviewed about his life in 2016, he told the reporter, ‘What I want is to die.’
OLIVE OIL▶
Olive oil supplies are decreasing on Earth and increasing in space.
In Italy, a million olive trees have been killed by a disease called ‘olive quick decline syndrome’. It’s caused by a bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, that insects carry on to the trees. It led to a 30 per cent fall in olive oil production this year and the highest prices for a decade. And worse is to come. Spanish officials confirmed that the disease, dubbed ‘the ebola of olive trees’, had arrived in Spain – and Spain makes more than half of the world’s olive oil. In August, an EU report suggested that the island of Mallorca chop down all its olive trees, and all plants within a 100-metre radius of infected plants, to combat the disease. Opponents say that if they do that, there will be virtually no vegetation at all on the entire island.
Meanwhile, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos (see Amazon) announced that his Blue Origin space-flight start-up would be sending olive oil into space ‘to examine if olive oil will maintain its liquid shape once it has left the Earth’. Olive Oil Times reported that the experiment would help the Mediterranean diet become the ‘food for astronauts for many years to come’ – provided, of course, there’s any left on Earth.
ON TOUR▶
For a diplodocus see Dinosaurs; for a block of ice, see Icebergs; for Santa, see Saints; for a troupe of Zulu dancers with terrible GPS, see Sat Nav; for a giant crayon, see Yellow; and for a Facebook founder, see Zuckerberg, Mark.
OPIUM▶
Heroin-addicted parrots threatened Indian farmers’ livelihoods.
In India, the farming of opium is legal so long as the end product is sold to the government (which regulates its use in medicine). Parrots, however, have started consuming it recreationally. One farmer estimates that they’ve stolen 10 per cent of his crop. To avoid capture, the parrots have learned not to squawk as they steal the opium. Attempts to deter them by beating drums and exploding firecrackers have proved fruitless.
If it’s bad news for humans, it’s not that great for the birds either. Parrots swoop when the pods are ripe, chew on the morphine-rich stalks and return to their branches in an opium-addled stupor. They then fall into a deep sleep, which means they sometimes fall off their perches and die. Worse still, when the opium season is over they suffer from extreme withdrawal, losing their appetites and energy, and many of them die as a result.
Farmers in Afghanistan, meanwhile, are replacing opium with pomegranates and mulberries. The project was started by a former heroin addict from Swindon who, on a visit to the country, worked out that mulberries could be more profitable per hectare than opium. He campaigned to replace one with the other, erecting placards across the countryside, appearing on Afghan TV and holding meetings for farmers, one of which was attended by 14,000 people. He’s persuaded 22,000 growers to swap poppies for mulberries, and the resulting Plant For Peace fruit bars went on sale in the UK in June.
Parrots aren’t the only ones stealing opium. In Australia, poppy theft increased 24-fold within a year in Tasmania, which supplies half the world’s legal opium. Five hundred and sixteen poppy heads were stolen from its fields in the 2015–16 financial year, rising to 12,239 in 2016–17.
ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK▶
Scottish prisoners beat the system with a trick stolen from Netflix.
More than 100 inmates at Saughton Prison in Edinburgh successfully got better food by claiming to be Jewish, after seeing the same trick performed on Orange Is the New Black. Officials were not happy, as a kosher diet is four times as expensive as the regular one on offer in the prison. If all those prisoners had actually converted to Judaism, the Jewish population of Edinburgh would have increased by approximately 12 per cent.
Fittingly for a drama about a bunch of criminals, episodes of Orange Is the New Black were stolen. A group of hackers called The Dark Overlord stole and leaked episodes and threatened to release other stolen episodes unless they were paid £57,000 in bitcoin.
The hack came just days after the papers reported an even more ironic case of hacking: the pirating of Pirates of the Caribbean. As it turned out, this was a hoax, but weeks later The Dark Overlord struck again, leaking eight episodes of a TV show called Funderdome online. It was widely viewed as The Dark Overlord’s ‘difficult second leak’, as very few people had heard of, or were interested in, Funderdome.
ORANGUTANS▶
The Indianapolis Colts announced their pick in the NFL draft using a trained orangutan.
The publicity stunt, in which Rocky the orangutan pressed a touch-screen that named offensive lineman* Zach Banner as the American football team’s newest player, was widely enjoyed by fans, but commentator Mike Mayock thought that it made a monkey of the whole thing, and threatened to walk off set.
It wasn’t the only time orangutans and touch-screens came together this year. A Dutch animal sanctuary introduced what they called ‘Tinder for orangutans’, whereby their orangs were shown pictures of other apes, and researchers evaluated their responses. The plan was to discover whether females can show a preference for potential mates by looking at pictures on a tablet, before the suitors are flown all the way from South East Asia to the Netherlands.
Back in the apes’ native home, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation rescued a rare albino orangutan – the first albino encountered by the foundation in its 25 years of existence. Taking something of a risk, they asked the Internet to name the white-furred animal, but for once the public came up with a decent name: Alba, meaning white. The foundation sensibly ignored other suggestions such as Meringue-utan, White Walker and Orang No-tan.
OSBORNE, GEORGE▶
The new editor of the Evening Standard managed to miss a scoop even though he was the sole source for it.
After being sacked in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, George Osborne – the former chancellor and architect of ‘Austerity Britain’ – did his bit for employment statistics by taking on six new jobs.
The biggest surprise was the announcement that he’d be the new editor of London newspaper the Evening Standard. He explained he could edit the newspaper in the morning and pop over to the House of Commons for parliamentary votes in the afternoon. Some people said he lacked journalistic experience, which is unfair – as a student at Oxford he edited the now unfortunately named student magazine, the ISIS, and even printed an edition about cannabis on hemp paper. His further experience is limited to being rejected for graduate traineeship at The Times and the Economist, although as a freelancer he briefly worked on the Telegraph’s diary column and managed to get two articles published in The Times.
Osborne racked up more post-chancellorship jobs thick and fast. They included a fellowship at a US think tank (for an estimated £120,000 a year), a one-day-a-week job advising US fund management firm Blackrock (£650,000 a year), a role at the Washington Speakers Bureau (earning £786,000 in about nine months), an unpaid position as chairman of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, and, of course, he kept his minor role as MP for Tatton (£76,000 a year).
The strain of juggling all these jobs may have proved too much, and eventually Osborne decided to stand down as an MP. This was a big news story, which naturally he wanted to give to his own newspaper. Unfortunately, he told the Evening Standard too late for that afternoon’s deadline, with the result that it didn’t make the first edition and was all over the Internet before anyone read it in the Standard. Soon, however, he tired of having only five jobs, and announced that he would be taking an extra, unpaid sixth gig as an honorary professor of economics at the University of Manchester. The students’ union described the news as ‘distasteful’ and ‘upsetting’.
ÖTZI▶
A private detective was hired to solve a 5,300-year-old murder.
Ötzi the Iceman is the oldest intact human ever found. He died 5,300 years ago, after being shot in the back with an arrow, and was found in 1991 by hikers in a high mountain pass in the Northern Alps.
This year the museum where Ötzi is on display hired a professional detective – Chief Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Police Department – to solve the mystery of his death. ‘The usual cold case that we have is 20 or maybe 30 years old,’ Horn said, ‘and now I was asked to work on a case 5,300 years old.’* He determined that ‘it looks a lot like a murder’, that Ötzi had been shot from 30 metres away, and that he was taken by surprise, as his own bow wasn’t strung.
Horn said the body was in better condition than some he has had to work on, but, disappointingly, failed to pin down the killer’s motive. He said it was probably caused by ‘some strong personal emotion’, but also conceded, ‘I don’t think there is a high likelihood we will ever be able to solve that case … I don’t like the fact that we have an unsolved homicide here.’
Recent examination of Ötzi’s stomach contents revealed that among the final things he ate was goat bacon. It’s a discovery that has rocked the bacon world, since it shows that bacon is twice as old as was previously thought.
OZONE▶
Decaf drinkers discovered they are killing the planet.
The ozone layer had a good year – there’s now strong evidence that the hole in it is shrinking, thanks to the 1987 ban on dangerous CFC chemicals. But there’s bad news, too. It turns out that a previously obscure chemical called dichloromethane (DCM), used to extract caffeine from coffee and tea, is very bad for the ozone layer. In fairness, it should be noted that it’s not only used for decaffeination – it’s also used in paint strippers, hairspray and deodorant, so coffee drinkers aren’t solely to blame. There’s currently twice as much DCM in the atmosphere as there was in 2000. If current trends continue, the recovery of the ozone layer will take 30 years longer than it otherwise would have.
Ozone gas caused a brief hoo-ha this year when it emerged that some medical centres are now offering women the chance to pump it into their vaginas to induce ‘wellness’. There are various problems with the procedure: for one, ozone gas is toxic to humans. Consequently, not only could the treatment easily kill a patient if a gas bubble got into her bloodstream, but it could even harm patients accidentally inhaling it while in the treatment room. As expert Dr Jen Gunter put it, ozone gas may be ‘natural’, but only ‘in the way that cyanide is natural. It has some uses in nature but it’s really, really bad for people.’ There is, also, no evidence that it promotes ‘wellness’.