DAVID ADAMS writes about the odder side of life…
PICTURE: Renden Yoder/Unsplash
• News this week that Vodafone and Nokia are joining forces to create a 4G mobile network on the Moon. The move is not as strange as it may at first sound – it is reportedly being made in support of the first privately funded mission to land on the Moon. German space company PTScientists intends to land two rovers on the satellite next year and then use the 4G network to stream video footage of what they see back to Earth. The network will also enable scientists to control the two vehicles which are being developed by Audi. The rovers will be visiting the landing site of NASA’s Apollo 17 mission which in 1972 was the last time humans set foot there.
• A stolen Impressionist painting has turned up on a bus in France more than eight years after it disappeared. The French Culture Ministry reportedly said late last week that the painting, signed by Edgar Degas, was found inside a suitcase in the vehicle’s luggage department in Marne-la-Vallee. None of the passengers claimed the suitcase. Experts have since identified the work as Les Choristes (The Chorus Singers) which depicts a scene from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni and which was stolen from a Marseille museum in 2009 while it was on loan from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Cue smiles all round.
• The cold snap in Britain has had an unexpected casualty – a charity snail race. Organisers cancelled the race – to be held at the Dartmoor Union Inn in Holbeton in England’s south-west – after it sent the snails into hibernation. The inn promises to hold the race – billed as the “1st Annual International Snail Grand National” and being held in aid of a local air ambulance service – once the weather warms up.
