A one-year-old boy in Bihar's Bettiah village bit a cobra to death after the snake reportedly coiled around his hand while he was playing near his home. The child, identified as Govinda, fell unconscious shortly after and was rushed to the hospital.

Locals said the cobra had slithered too close, possibly agitating the infant. In what they described as a reflexive act, the child sank his teeth into the snake, killing it instantly.

A third of Buddhist monks tested positive for meth during a surprise raid at a temple in northern Thailand.

Six of 18 clergymen were kicked out of the monkhood after failing drug tests at the Wat Prathom temple in Phichit Province on Monday.

Thirty cops stormed the place of worship as the monks were observing the annual Buddhist 'Rains Retreat'. They found meth pills hidden in the monks' quarters, as well as numerous drug consumption paraphernalia, a homemade gun, and a number of bullets.

Deputy Phichit Governor Kitipon Wetchakul who led the raid said: 'The six monks found positive for drugs were immediately disrobed and sent for rehabilitation. The operation was carried out simultaneously in various temples across 12 districts of the province.'

After seeing the pushback, Squid Game director Hwang Dong-hyuk explained that casting a real transgender person could have exposed them to harm in South Korea where LGBTQ+ discrimination is still rife.

Scuffed, scratched and stained, this black leather Birkin bag just sold for €8.6 million ($10 million), with fees, becoming the most expensive handbag to ever sell at auction. The hammer fell at a winning bid of €7 million ($8.2 million).

The first ever Birkin to have been created by Hermès, the bag was designed for the British actor and singer Jane Birkin. The Francophone style icon used it nearly every day from 1985 to 1994, before it became the ultimate symbol of luxury. On Thursday, the rarefied bag was sold by auction house Sotheby’s in an online sale of notable luxury fashion, including designs by Alexander McQueen and Christian Dior.

In September 2004, an extraordinary incident unfolded in Bavaria, Germany. A 23-man Sri Lankan handball team had arrived in the country to take part in a sports exchange programme consisting of friendly matches against local clubs, according to Deutsche Welle. However, the team's performance during a match raised eyebrows. Players seemed to show unfamiliarity with the rules of the sport, and their performance was described as "awful" by the opposing team.

Well, the unthinkable happened the next morning. The whole Sri Lankan delegation of 16 players and nine other members, including the coach, vanished into thin air. Initially, their hosts thought the team members got lost, but a search in the rooms told a different story.

They left all their personal belongings behind, including sports equipment and team jerseys, as well as a thank-you note for local sports authorities showing appreciation for the extended hospitality, indicating that they were leaving for France.

The German authorities were baffled by the sudden disappearance of the entire national handball team. The incident remains a perplexing mystery.

German Sports Exchange Programme organiser Dietmer Doering told the BBC: "We initially thought the team had gotten lost in nearby woods while jogging."

But he said a note had been found saying the 23-strong team had gone to France. "We now know they crossed into Italy," Mr Doering said.

"They even left their dirty laundry," he added.

Mr Doering told Priyath Liyanage of the BBC Sinhala service that the organisers were feeling extremely let down by the incident.

"This will be the last time we will be doing this. I am not planning to invite any more teams from Sri Lanka," he said.

"The entire team of 23 men, including the coach and the manager, has taken off."

The handball team was taking part in a programme in which teams from both countries visited each other for friendly games.

The sports ministry in Sri Lanka said the trip was not authorised.

...

Also this intriguing case of the missing Sri Lankan handball team inspired an Italian-Sri Lankan comedy movie, "Machan," written, directed, and produced by Uberto Pasolini and released in the year 2008.

lol

In spite of cultural variations, cool people were universally perceived as being more extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open, and autonomous, researchers from the American Psychological Association found.

In comparison, “good” people were perceived as more conforming, traditional, secure, warm, agreeable, universalistic, conscientious, and calm.

While there are some overlapping traits, researchers point out that being cool isn’t necessarily considered “good” in a moral sense.

An Australian domestic flight was grounded for two hours on Tuesday after a snake was discovered stowed away in the aircraft’s cargo hold.

Passengers were boarding Virgin Australia Flight VA337 at Melbourne Airport, bound for Brisbane, when the reptile was found. Snake catcher Mark Pelley was called to the scene to remove the unexpected passenger.

The snake was identified as a harmless 60-centimeter (2-foot) green tree snake. However, Mr Pelley stated that he initially believed it could be venomous due to the darkened conditions of the hold when he approached it. The incident led to a significant delay for travellers before the flight was eventually cleared for departure.

“It wasn’t until after I caught the snake that I realized that it wasn’t venomous. Until that point, it looked very dangerous to me,” Pelley said.

Most of the world’s most venomous snakes are native to Australia.

When Pelley entered the cargo hold, the snake was half hidden behind a panel and could have disappeared deeper into the plane.

Pelley said he told an aircraft engineer and airline staff that they would have to evacuate the aircraft if the snake disappeared inside the plane.

“I said to them if I don’t get this in one shot, it’s going to sneak through the panels and you’re going to have to evacuate the plane because at that stage I did not know what kind of snake it was,” Pelley said.

“But thankfully, I got it on the first try and captured it,” Pelley added. “If I didn’t get it that first time, the engineers and I would be pulling apart a (Boeing) 737 looking for a snake still right now.”

A private school pupil killed himself with his father's shotgun after a 'perfect storm' of GCSE stress, breaking up with his girlfriend and ADHD, an inquest heard.

Jairus Earl was found by his father Philip in his office at their Dorset holiday home as they prepared to return to London for the 15-year-old to start his exams.

The family had gone to their cottage near Sherborne for the Easter holidays to destress and took some shotguns with them for clay pigeon shooting.

The inquest heard Jairus, who was feeling anxious and negative about his GCSEs, spent the mornings revising and did shooting and fly fishing with his father in the afternoons.

But as they packed up the car to return home Jairus told his father he was going in to the toilet but instead went into the office where his father had his shotguns in cases.

Mr Earl, a director of a construction company, was listening to music and so did not hear the gunshot but knew something was wrong when the family dog came out and 'looked very stressed'.

Mr Earl, 56, went inside and found his son unresponsive in the office at about 3.45pm on April 14, 2024.

Jairus was pronounced dead at the scene at 4pm.

At his inquest the Dorset coroner Rachael Griffin raised concerns about possible gaps in gun licence laws that she will be making a prevention of future deaths report about to the government.

Crayon Pop’s Ellin has now apologized after being accused of committing a romance scam.

Recently, an anonymous netizen (referred to as “A”) accused a female BJ (broadcast jockey), who was described as a former idol, of scamming him of 1 billion won (approximately $864,070) by pretending to be in a romantic relationship with him. This became referred to as a “romance scam,” which is a form of fraud in which the perpetrator feigns romantic emotion towards a victim to gain their affection and uses the victim’s trust to commit fraud.

Following speculation that the BJ was Ellin, she made a statement on November 3 in which she denied that she’d committed a romance scam and said she’d take civil and criminal action against false rumors.

On November 8, Ellin held an apology broadcast on AfreecaTV in which she apologized for lying.

She said, “A gave me the chance to apologize for a month but I foolishly did not. I wanted to continue working as a broadcaster so I handled it in a rash way by lying. I apologize.”

Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India.

The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs.

But more than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows.

By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal painkiller for cattle that is fatal to vultures. Birds that fed on carcasses of livestock treated with the drug suffered from kidney failure and died.

Since the 2006 ban on veterinary use of diclofenac, the decline has slowed in some areas, but at least three species have suffered long-term losses of 91-98%, according to the latest State of India's Birds report.

And that’s not all, according to a new peer-reviewed study. The unintentional decimation of these heavy, scavenging birds allowed deadly bacteria and infections to proliferate, leading to the deaths of about half a million people over five years, says the study published in the American Economic Association journal.

“Vultures are considered nature’s sanitation service because of the important role they play in removing dead animals that contain bacteria and pathogens from our environment - without them, disease can spread,” says the study’s co-author, Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy.

“Understanding the role vultures play in human health underscores the importance of protecting wildlife, and not just the cute and cuddly. They all have a job to do in our ecosystems that impacts our lives.”

...

They found that after anti-inflammatory drug sales had risen and vulture populations had collapsed, human death rates increased by more than 4% in districts where the birds once thrived.

...

The authors estimated that between 2000 and 2005, the loss of vultures caused around 100,000 additional human deaths annually, resulting in more than $69bn (£53bn) per year in mortality damages or the economic costs associated with premature deaths.

These deaths were due to the spread of disease and bacteria that vultures would have otherwise removed from the environment.

For example, without vultures, the stray dog population increased, bringing rabies to humans.

Rabies vaccine sales rose during that time but were insufficient. Unlike vultures, dogs were ineffective at cleaning rotting remains, leading to bacteria and pathogens spreading into drinking water through runoff and poor disposal methods. Faecal bacteria in the water more than doubled.

“The vulture collapse in India provides a particularly stark example of the type of hard-to-reverse and unpredictable costs to humans that can come from the loss of a species,” says Mr Sudarshan, an associate professor at the University of Warwick and co-author of the study.

Will be on tomorrow on Netflix

She was shot while fucking live streaming dude. It's terrible.

Me: [media pointer="file-service://file-NJMLSkeVhsruo3twk5W88K"] can you make sense of any of this?

Chatgpt: You're looking at a page from the Voynich Manuscript—a famously mysterious and undeciphered illustrated codex. Could you clarify what you're hoping to understand? For example:

• Are you curious about the text (what language or script it uses)?
• Do you want to know about the drawings (e.g., the plants or symbols)?
• Are you asking about theories behind its origin, purpose, or meaning?

Let me know so I can give you the most relevant insight.

Me: I mean the text. is there anything you can decipher?

Chatgpt: Great, I’ll look into what modern research says about the text in the Voynich Manuscript—specifically whether any of it has been deciphered or understood. I’ll review linguistic, cryptographic, and AI-assisted efforts to decode it and summarize current findings.

I’ll let you know what’s known (and not known) about the text as soon as I have a clear picture.

Voynich Manuscript: Decipherment Status and Theories

Figure: Example folio from the Voynich Manuscript’s herbal section, with bizarre plant drawings (Beinecke MS 408, Yale University). The Voynich Manuscript (c. 1404–1438) is an illustrated codex written in an unknown script. It is “filled with puzzling illustrations—unusual plants, constellations, bathing women… and the text itself… is enciphered and yet to be understood”. Despite a century of study, no part of the Voynich text has been definitively deciphered. The underlying language and meaning remain undetermined.

Linguistic and Statistical Evidence

Statistical analyses strongly suggest the Voynich text has real-language structure. Word frequencies follow Zipf’s law (as in natural languages), and words exhibit clustering and morphological patterns uncommon in random strings. Montemurro et al. conclude that the “statistical structure of the text… requires an explanation” beyond random gibberish. In other words, the Voynichese text behaves like an enciphered language. Volunteers asked to write fake Voynich-like text did reproduce some surface features (mixing long/short words, self-repeating “nonce” words), but language models emphasize this alone cannot explain the complex global patterns. In summary, linguistic evidence points to a genuine linguistic or coded message beneath the Voynich script, rather than purely random hoax text.

Cryptographic and AI Approaches

Traditional codebreaking has so far failed. Early 20th-century cryptologists (Friedman, Tiltman, et al.) tried simple ciphers without success. Modern AI and NLP methods have been applied. For example, Kondrak & Hauer (2017) trained algorithms on 400 languages to identify the closest match for Voynichese. The AI surprisingly flagged Hebrew. Assuming an “alphagram” encoding (words written with letters sorted alphabetically), the program found ≈80% of Voynich words in a Hebrew dictionary. A tentative Google-Translate output was a somewhat grammatical sentence (“She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people”). These results are promising clues but not a translation: the researchers note the output is fragmentary and stress that specialists (including medievalists and Hebrew experts) remain “not convinced”.

Other computational analyses (n-gram models, information theory) likewise confirm the text’s language-like structure but have not yielded meaning. No AI has produced a credible full translation. Some scholars propose using advanced deep-learning (e.g. vision transformers) to link Voynich handwriting to other manuscripts, but this addresses authorship or scribes rather than content. In summary, algorithmic methods so far have clarified that Voynichese looks “real” but have not cracked its code.

Theories on Language, Script, and Meaning

Leading hypotheses include:

• Natural language (encoded). Many experts assume Voynichese represents a lost or coded natural language. Proposed candidates include Latin (or regional Romance dialects), Germanic, Hebrew, or even Turkic. For example, Italian context is suggested by plant images resembling 15th-century Italian herbals and by subtle architectural clues in illustrations. The zodiac pages contain zodiac symbols and Latin month names (e.g. abril, octobre) beneath them. The imagery (herbs, astrological charts, nude women) hints at a compendium of herbal medicine, astrology or gynecology, possibly aimed at educated readers. Recent work even argues that the bathing-women diagrams depict medieval sexology and conception. If Voynichese encodes a natural tongue, it may use substitution, nulls or other ciphers – for instance, one model posits each Voynich word is an alphabetized anagram of a medieval Hebrew word.

• Constructed or ciphered script. Another idea is that the author invented a script and language specifically for the text (like a shorthand or artificial language) rather than using a straightforward cipher of a common tongue. The consistency of the script – with five known scribes copying it error-free – suggests they understood it well. Some hypothesize layers of encipherment or steganography. Crucially, no conventional decoding scheme has been confirmed.

• Hoax or pseudo-text. A minority view is that the manuscript was deliberately fabricated as a meaningless hoax. Experiments show it’s relatively easy to mimic Voynich patterns by inventing words with self-similar prefixes/suffixes. However, the text’s detailed statistical structure (e.g. exact Zipf distribution) is hard to engineer; Montemurro et al. emphasize that such patterns weren’t even discovered until centuries later. Moreover, recent imaging work concludes the manuscript is a genuine 15th-century object, not a modern forgery. In practice most scholars consider the hoax theory unlikely given the evidence of intentional organization.

In short, the meaning of the Voynich Manuscript is usually thought to be esoteric knowledge (herbal/astronomical/medical), but no translation of the Voynichese text has been validated.

Prominent Decipherment Claims (and Critiques)

Over the years dozens of “solutions” have been proposed, but all lack independent verification. Notable examples:

• Hebrew alphagrams (Kondrak & Hauer, 2017): Using AI they reported ~80% of Voynich words match Hebrew roots. However, this produced only isolated words/phrases, and the researchers themselves note the results could be “artifacts of the combinatorial power of anagramming” rather than true translation. Scholars caution that without expert verification the Hebrew find remains speculative.

• Proto-Romance (Gerard Cheshire, 2019): Cheshire claimed the text is written in a lost early form of Latin/Romance by Iberian nuns, describing herbal cures and women’s health. He even published in a peer-reviewed journal. But medievalists heavily criticized this: Lisa Fagin Davis remarked “‘proto-Romance language’ is not a thing,” and other reviewers said his “translation doesn’t make sense”. Cheshire’s supposed decoding has not gained scholarly acceptance.

• Latin medical abbreviations (Nicholas Gibbs, 2017): Gibbs (a non-specialist) published a translation in TLS claiming Voynichese was medieval Latin shorthand. Experts point out he patched together existing plant identifications and produced Latin phrases that mostly fail to cohere. Medievalists noted that his translation is speculative and often nonsensical.

• Old Turkic (Ahmet Ardıç, 2018): A Turkish-Canadian amateur claimed Voynichese is an old Turkic dialect written phonetically, and said he deciphered ~300 words. His work was never peer-reviewed and failed to convince the academic community; a journal rejected his submission.

• Other fringe theories: People have floated languages from Nahuatl to Manchu to Old Cornish (some mentioned in media). These lack credible evidence and are not supported by specialists.

In every case the scholarly consensus remains that no proposal has been independently verified. Claims are often speculative and contradicted by other data.

Summary and Outlook

To date, the Voynich Manuscript’s text is still undeciphered. Every part of the Voynichese script – beyond a few Latin annotations and marginalia – eludes translation. Statistical and linguistic analyses make it clear the text is not random gibberish, but rather an encoded message of some kind. Its illustrations suggest subjects like botany, astrology, and possibly medicine or sex, but the exact content is conjectural. Many hypotheses about its language and code exist, yet none has been proven. Recent advances (e.g. multispectral imaging revealing early cipher-attempt notes, or thematic studies of the imagery) offer new clues, but no “breakthrough” solution has been achieved.

In conclusion, the Voynich Manuscript remains a profound enigma. The most credible view is that it encodes real information in a systematic way, but without a key or bilingual text its meaning stays hidden. Future progress may depend on interdisciplinary methods (advanced imaging, computational linguistics, historical context) to chip away at the mystery. For now, claims of having “solved” the Voynich should be met with skepticism – as one review puts it, “the mystery…still remains to be solved”.

Sources: Authoritative analyses and reports from cryptographers, linguists, and historians (e.g. Montemurro et al. 2013; Brewer & Lewis 2024), the Yale Beinecke Library archives, and journalism in The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, etc. (Citations are given in square brackets.)