Strange But True: AI Diabetes

By Lucie Winborne

• From 1953 to 1959, the Cincinnati Reds baseball team went by a different moniker, the Cincinnati Redlegs, in response to America's fear of communism during the McCarthy era, when the term "Reds" could be problematic.

• The word "whisky" comes from the Gaelic phrase "uisge beatha," or "water of life."

• According to researchers at Japan's Nagoya University, electric eels can use their shock to transfer genetic material to nearby fish larvae, altering the larva's genes in the process.

• An AI program using merely 10 seconds of human speech has been able to identify whether someone has diabetes with 89% accuracy.

• Workers at an Akron, Ohio, auto wrecking company creatively stopped a potential car thief by using a forklift to raise him, while inside the vehicle, 20 feet into the air until (no doubt amused) police arrived on the scene.

• If you make a visit to Iceland, you might run across a tiny, intricately designed house known as an alfhol. But it wasn't built for a family of dolls. Rather, such structures are created for the "hidden folk" of Icelandic folklore, creatures often invisible to humans but who are believed to lead lives similar to ours.

• Smokers with better math skills are more inclined to quit smoking.

• When Reza Baluchi, a 44-year-old man from Florida, aspired to cross the Atlantic on a visit to London, he didn't take a plane or boat, but a floating contraption much like a giant hamster wheel! Unfortunately, his mode of transportation was deemed "manifestly unsafe" by the Coast Guard off the coast of Georgia's Tybee Island, and after a three-day standoff, Baluchi's mission was aborted.

Thought for the Day: "What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals." – Zig Ziglar

(c) 2024 King Features Synd., Inc.