Ears to the ground

TSA Administrator David Pekoske has an idea to make security checkpoints in airports less intimidating: floppy-eared dogs. Pekoske told the Washington Examiner that the agency believes floppy-eared dogs doing searches are less scary than pointy-eared dogs. “We find the passenger acceptance of floppy-ear dogs is just better,” he said. “It presents just a little bit less of a concern. Doesn’t scare children.” That means fewer German shepherds and Belgian Malinois and more Labrador retrievers, pointers, and Vizlas. There are over 900 detection dogs in the employ of the TSA.

Lack of resolve

Want to avoid the New Year’s crowd at the gym next year? Just wait until Jan. 12. In a report published by Strava, a social networking website for athletes, researchers found most people have abandoned their health-related New Year’s resolutions by Jan. 12. A different study published by scientists at the University of Scranton found that only 8 percent of people were able to fulfill their New Year’s resolutions.

Auto destruction

Google’s bid to bring self-driving cars to the market is running into snags in its Chandler, Ariz., test city. By the end of 2018, local police reported 21 instances of harassment aimed at Google’s Waymo cars during the cars’ 24-month trial. According to Chandler police, incidents include a man flashing a handgun at one of the vehicles, people slashing Waymo cars’ tires, and a Jeep that apparently ran a self-driving car off the road six times. Each Waymo car has a Google employee sitting in the driver’s seat in case safety demands that a human take over.

Flying high

Citizens who observed birds stumbling around a Huntington Beach, Calif., park on Dec. 19 didn’t have to go far to find the problem. Someone had dumped hundreds of prescription medication pills at Carr Park and some of the local birds, apparently believing the pills to be grain, gobbled some of them up. The medication—a mix of antidepressant, anti-anxiety, and insomnia pills—stumbled a Canada goose and left a ring-billed gull on its back. Workers from the local Wetlands & Wildlife Care Center came to rescue the birds. After pushing IV fluids, the center said the intoxicated birds made a full recovery.

Harvard on the prairie

A Kansas teen is set to graduate from his high school at age 16 on May 19. Two weeks later, Braxton Moral will be graduating from Harvard University. After skipping fourth grade, Braxton enrolled in Harvard University’s extension program, which allowed him to take online courses during the school year and spend his summers in Cambridge, Mass., taking live classes. By day, he worked on his normal high-school curriculum at the public high school in tiny Ulysses, Kan. At night, he’d work on college coursework. Braxton told NPR he tried to play it down at his high school: “If I talk about it, it becomes a divide.”

Cramped quarters

Some people go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Jean-Jacques Savin wants to float across the Atlantic Ocean in one. The 71-year-old French adventurer departed from the Canary Islands on Dec. 26 hoping trade winds and ocean currents push his plywood capsule 2,800 miles into the Caribbean. Savin raised $65,000 from crowdfunding for the three-month journey. Most of the money went to constructing his high-tech barrel, which measures roughly 10 feet by 7 feet. On board, Savin has a simple kitchen, a bunk, and a solar panel to charge communication devices. The adventurer told the BBC that he hopes the craft comes to rest on a French Caribbean island like Martinique or Guadeloupe. “That would be easier for the paperwork and for bringing the barrel back.”

An old trick?

The record holder for oldest woman of modern times was actually a 99-year-old fraud. That’s the claim of Nikolai Zak, a mathematician and researcher at Moscow University. Zak told the AFP news service that Jeanne Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at the purported age of 122, was actually 23 years younger than she claimed. Calment’s official biography reports her daughter Yvonne died of pleurisy in 1934. After analyzing vital statistics and poring over photographs and other records, Zak said Jeanne Calment actually died in 1934, and that her daughter Yvonne took her identity in order to evade France’s inheritance tax. She would have been 99 when she died in 1997. A French demographer who helped Guinness verify Calment’s age when she died disputed Zak’s findings.

Rough translations

Officials in a town in Northern Wales have been instructed to stop using Google’s translation tool. In November, Welsh Language Commissioner Meri Huws said she had received more than a dozen complaints about signs in Wrexham that contained misspellings and poor translations of the Welsh language, reportedly due to mistakes by Google. Signs in Wales must carry their messages in both English and Welsh. Just 19 percent of people living in Wales speak Welsh.

Helping hands and feet

A bit of quick thinking—and martial arts—helped one North Carolina woman stave off a would-be kidnapper. The unidentified woman said a man tried to force her into his car on Jan. 3 in Charlotte, N.C. The woman broke free, spotted a nearby karate dojo, and ran inside. “A young lady came through our doors and stated that someone was trying to harm her,” karate instructor Randall Ephraim told WSOC. “Shortly afterward, a big male entered the building.” Ephraim said the man wanted the woman to leave with him. When Ephraim told him to leave, the man began pushing and swinging. The martial arts expert subdued the attacker until police arrived. Officers escorted the assailant to the hospital after placing him under arrest.