Mystery balls of debris prompt closure
of 9 beaches in Sydney, Australia
Once again, small ball-shaped debris have washed up along the shores of Sydney, Australia, forcing the closure of nine area beaches while experts try to figure out what they are and where they’re coming from.
The grey and white balls, most about the size of a marble, come months after mysterious black balls washed up, prompting the closure of eight beaches in October. When authorities tested those balls, they determined they were likely the result of a sewage spill.
Now, Northern Beaches Mayor Sue Heins says the latest balls “could be anything.”
“We don’t know at the moment what it is and that makes it even more concerning,” she told The Guardian.
“There’s something that’s obviously leaking or dropping… floating out there and being tossed around.”
In a statement, the Northern Beaches council said it was working with the New South Wales Environment Protection Authority (EPA) to clean up the mystery balls and have them sent for testing.
Meanwhile, they advised beachgoers to avoid Manly, Dee Why, Long Reef, Queenscliff, Freshwater, North and South Curl Curl, North Steyne and North Narrabeen beaches until further notice.
According to the BBC, the debris that washed up in October was widely reported as “tar balls,” but testing found they contained everything from pesticides and hair, to cooking oils, soap scum, veterinary drugs, methamphetamine and more.
Scientists said they resembled fat, oil, and grease blobs — often called fatbergs — which are commonly formed in sewage systems from human-generated waste and can form when substances pile up and stick together.
The EPA has advised the public not to handle the balls of debris and to report them when they are found.
US company wants to ‘resurrect’ mammoths
Texas-based Colossal Biosciences aims to bring back from extinction the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger and the dodo bird, and has just raised another $200 million for the projects.
What? $200 million! That could have extended the Ukraine war for 3 or 4 more days!
The startup is headed by AI entrepreneur Ben Lamm, who told Bloomberg that Colossal is on track to have a mammoth calf by 2028.
“We’re not going to do anything until we get the genomes right,” Lamm said in an interview with Bloomberg Technology on Wednesday.
The company is currently in the “editing phase” of the project, with the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, “actually ahead of schedule,” Lamm said.
A team of 17 is working on artificial wombs, the first of which ought to be ready within two years, he added.
Colossal has a market valuation of over $10 billion and has raised a total of $435 million in cash, including the most recent injection, $200 million from investor TWG Global.
TWG was impressed by Colossal’s “significant technology innovations and impact in advancing conservation,” the investor’s CEO Mark Walter said in a statement.
Lamm told Bloomberg that his project was inspired by forecasts that the earth would lose 15% of its biodiversity by 2050, which have since been updated to a 50% loss.
“It would be better to have a de-extinction toolkit and not need it than to need a de-extinction toolkit and not have it,” he said.
Critics have pointed out the project’s similarities to Michael Crichton’s cautionary tale ‘Jurassic Park,’ which involved re-creating dinosaurs.
In December 2023, Russian billionaire Andrei Melnichenko said he was partnering with Colossal to develop a ‘Pleistocene Park.’ At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, Melnichenko described it as a way to reduce methane emissions from Siberian permafrost by re-creating Ice Age fauna, as a “cost-effective method to mitigate climate change.” US sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict put the project on ice, however.
Lamm co-founded Colossal in 2021, with Harvard University geneticist George Church. Among the company’s backers is the CIA affiliate In-Q-Tel.
Scientists believe that the woolly mammoths suffered a population collapse around 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last major Ice Age, with the last members of the species dying out around 4,000 years ago.
Which would be about the time of the Biblical global flood.
Colossal’s other two projects deal with more recent extinctions. The dodo, a flightless bird, disappeared in the late 1600s, after European explorers introduced invasive species to its native Mauritius, while the last known thylacine died in 1936 at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania.
European explorers were the invasive species that eliminated the Dodo, I suspect!
Why not the saber-tooth tiger?
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