• Rush balanced the skateboard for 1 hour, 1 minute, and 36 seconds to claim the never-before-set title.
• He squeezed the attempt in between rounds of pickleball at the YMCA in Boise, Idaho.
• The feat adds to a personal collection of more than 350 Guinness World Records titles.

A Sharp Edge and a Steady Chin

The Idaho man with more than 350 Guinness World Records titles added another to his tally by balancing a skateboard on his chin for over an hour. What made this attempt different from the dozens of chin-balancing feats he’s already pulled off? The category was brand new. Rush, who has previously broken several records involving balancing objects on his chin, said he decided to attempt the skateboard record after learning the category had been created but not yet set.

If you’ve ever flipped a skateboard upside down, you can probably guess the issue. Skateboards aren’t designed to rest gently on anything, let alone a human chin. The trucks, the tail, the kicktail edge, none of it is friendly to soft tissue. Rush has hinted online that even short stretches of practice with a standard board were rough going, which forced him to rethink his equipment.

A friend with a large skateboard collection let him borrow one that had a flatter edge but still met size and weight requirements. That small detail mattered. Guinness keeps strict specs on the objects used in record attempts, so a flatter underside was the most help he could get without disqualifying the run before it started.

Pickleball, Then Pain, Then a Plaque

The setting for the record is almost as funny as the record itself. Rush took on the attempt during a break from a pickleball session at the YMCA in Boise, and he managed to balance the board for 1 hour, 1 minute and 36 seconds, enough to take the title. Picture the scene. Paddles set aside, sneakers still on, neck tilted skyward for over an hour while members trickle past the basketball court.

The YMCA has become something of a home arena for Rush. He used the same Boise location in late 2024 when he reclaimed the longest chair-balancing-on-chin record, a feat he eventually stretched past the 80-minute mark.

How One Man Stacked Up 350+ Records

Rush isn’t a casual hobbyist. He started setting Guinness World Records in 2015 to promote STEM education and to talk about the power of having a growth mindset. He holds an electrical engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Boise State, and he uses his record attempts as a hook to get kids excited about science and math.

His range of titles is genuinely strange. He’s been recognized as the world’s fastest juggler, the world’s slowest juggler, and holds the record for the furthest distance traveled with a running chainsaw on his chin. He’s balanced ladders, chairs, lawnmowers, and bikes on the same patch of jawline. The skateboard slots right into that catalog of oddball achievements.

He also keeps grinding because rivals keep coming. Rush passed Italian serial record-breaker Silvio Sabba’s total of 180 by earning the title for the most vinyl records smashed in 30 seconds, breaking 55 albums in the allotted time and becoming the holder of the most concurrent Guinness World Records titles. Holding that crown means constantly defending old records while inventing reasons to break new ones.

What’s Next for the Chin Champion

With the skateboard now checked off, the pattern suggests Rush will keep hunting for unclaimed categories or ones somebody recently swiped from him. He’s gone three rounds on the ladder-balancing title alone, losing and reclaiming it more than once. If history is any guide, somebody, somewhere, is already eyeing the skateboard mark and wondering whether 62 minutes is doable.

For now, Rush gets to walk back to the pickleball court with another plaque on the way and a fresh anecdote for his next STEM talk. Not bad for a Tuesday afternoon at the Y.

• Caught April 16 by Wellfleet Shellfish Company aboard the Timothy Michael fishing vessel
• Weighs roughly 3 to 4 pounds, with a clean color line from antennae to tail fan
• Donated to Woods Hole Science Aquarium and currently housed at the Marine Biological Laboratory

A Catch You Don’t See Every Day

A lobster with a perfectly split shell in two different colors was caught off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on Thursday, April 16. Wellfleet Shellfish Company shared news of the highly improbable find in a Facebook post on April 21. The Eastham-based company donated the rare beauty to the Woods Hole Science Aquarium, sparing it from any seafood pot.

The shell is divided evenly between orange-red and dark brown. The lobster weighs between three and four pounds, with a clean color split running from its antennae to its tail fan. Picture a lobster that looks like two different lobsters sharing one body, and you’ve pretty much got it.

Most American lobsters wear a drab green-brown coat that helps them disappear into the seafloor. That mottled palette lets them blend in and avoid being eaten by predators. By contrast, the split-color lobster’s bold pattern would have made it an easy target, so experts are a bit surprised it survived this long.

The Genetics Behind the Color Split

So how does a lobster end up looking like a Halloween costume? “When two eggs absorb one another, they develop into one animal with two different sets of genes,” aquarium biotechnician Julia Studley told the Cape Cod Times. The result is a chimera, an animal carrying two distinct genetic blueprints in a single body.

Studley also told Popular Science that split coloration happens when two fertilized, unlaid eggs contact each other, causing one to absorb the other. That creates a lobster with two sets of genetic information and the ability to store color pigments differently on either side of its shell.

The same biological quirk sometimes produces gynandromorphic animals, where one side of the body is male and the other female. In 2015, a half-male, half-female common archduke butterfly emerged from its chrysalis at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. Three years later, a researcher identified a gynandromorphic sweat bee. And in 2021, ornithologists found a sex-split green honeycreeper.

From Boat Deck to Aquarium Tank

Once the crew realized what they had, they started making calls. Wellfleet Shellfish Company reached out to local aquariums to find a home where the public could see the lobster up close. They donated her to the Woods Hole Science Aquarium in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, which is owned and operated by NOAA Fisheries.

There’s a small twist, though. Woods Hole is undergoing renovations right now, so the lobster is being held at the Marine Biological Laboratory, a partner of the aquarium and NOAA Fisheries. She’s in a quarantine period to make sure she doesn’t carry any diseases, parasites, or illnesses that could spread to the aquarium’s other animals.

By all accounts, she’s doing really well. She’s settling in, eating, and staff are getting to know her personality. Her favorite food right now is live blue mussels.

How This Stacks Up Against Other Rare Lobsters

Lobsters with funky colors pop up now and then, but each level of rarity gets steeper. Last summer, a fisher caught a one-in-two-million blue lobster, later nicknamed Neptune, who was donated to Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center in Nahant, Massachusetts. Also last year, a fisher hauled in a 1-in-30-million calico lobster with a bright orange shell speckled with bits of black and blue. And in 2024, a fisherman caught a 1-in-100-million cotton candy lobster off the coast of New Castle, New Hampshire.

Albino lobsters, which don’t have any shell pigmentation, are the rarest in the ocean and show up in roughly 1 in 100 million lobsters, according to The American Oceans Campaign.

When Visitors Can See Her

Patience pays off if you want a peek at this two-tone celebrity. The nation’s oldest public aquarium will reopen in early 2027, giving visitors a close look at the unusual lobster. She’ll be one of the first animals going back into the aquarium once the doors swing open. Until then, she’s enjoying her mussel buffet in peace, a living reminder that genetics still has a few surprises left in the deep.

• A researcher at King’s College London found a 1668 floorplan that reveals the exact spot of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars house.
• The building was an L-shaped dwelling measuring 45 feet across, carved out of a former medieval friary.
• The find challenges the long-held story that the Bard quietly retired to Stratford after 1613.

A Chance Find in a Box of Old Deeds

Lucy Munro, a professor at King’s College London, had been studying the Blackfriars theater, the playhouse where Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men, once performed, when she found the map in a box of centuries-old property deeds. She wasn’t hunting for Shakespeare’s house at all. As with so many discoveries, it was partly down to luck. “I came across it in the London Archives when I was looking for other things,” Munro said.

Munro noted there’s sometimes an assumption with Shakespeare biography that everything has been gone over again and again, when actually there are still pieces of the jigsaw puzzle out there. This piece turned out to be a big one.

What the Map Actually Shows

A plan of the Blackfriars precinct found by Munro shows in detail Shakespeare’s house, a substantial L-shaped dwelling carved from a former medieval monastery, including its gatehouse. The 13th-century Dominican friary had been redeveloped for more secular uses after the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII in the mid-16th century. The precinct included the Blackfriars playhouse, which Shakespeare part-owned.

The part of the property that spanned the gate does not appear in the post-fire plan because it had no foundation, but the other part measured 45 feet from east to west, 15 feet from north to south at the eastern end and 13 feet at the western end. That’s a serious footprint for central London. The plan doesn’t show its internal layout or rooms, but it was big enough to have been split into two houses by 1645.

Goodbye “Near This Site”

If you’ve ever wandered around Blackfriars looking for traces of the Bard, you’ve probably passed a small blue plaque that hedges its bets. Historians have long known that Shakespeare bought property in 1613 near the Blackfriars Theatre, but the exact location was a mystery. A plaque on a 19th-century building records only that the playwright had lodgings “near this site.”

It can now be said with confidence that the blue plaque on 5 St Andrew’s Hill is not merely “near” the site of Shakespeare’s London house, but actually on the spot. The plan tells us that the property covered what are now the eastern end of Ireland Yard, the bottom of Burgon Street and parts of the late-nineteenth-century buildings at 5 Burgon Street and 5 St Andrew’s Hill.

Why This Changes the Shakespeare Story

For ages, the tidy narrative went like this: Shakespeare made his fortune, bought a London investment property in 1613, then rode off into the Stratford sunset to live out his days as a country gentleman. Munro’s find complicates that ending.

Munro said that the size of the house and its location a five-minute walk from the Blackfriars Theatre suggest he may have spent more time in London toward the end of his life than is widely assumed. She said that he may have worked here on his final plays, “Henry VIII” and “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” both co-written with John Fletcher.

Shakespeare left the property to his daughter Susanna, and it stayed in the family for another half-century. Munro also found two archival documents detailing its sale by the playwright’s granddaughter Elizabeth Hall Nash Barnard in 1665. A year later, the building burned to the ground in the Great Fire of London, which wiped out much of the medieval city. Talk about bad timing.

The Bard’s Reach, From Blackfriars to the Boroughs

It’s funny to think about a small L-shaped house in 17th-century London sparking news stories four centuries later. Shakespeare’s grip on pop culture hasn’t loosened one bit. Tourists still flood Stratford-upon-Avon, actors still audition for Hamlet in community theaters from Dublin to Queens, NY, and every spring Central Park hosts free productions that draw lines around the block. A real address, with real dimensions, gives all that modern fandom something concrete to anchor to.

A Tidy Ending to a Messy Historical Puzzle

What makes this story so satisfying is how neatly it wraps up. A researcher wasn’t looking for it. A 1668 draftsman had no idea his plan would matter 358 years later. A plaque that cautiously said “near this site” can finally drop the hedge. Sometimes history rewards patience and a willingness to dig through one more box of old papers. And sometimes the Bard, even after 400 years, still has surprises left in him.

• Two crows ripped clumps of hair from the Rapunzel animatronic, reportedly for nesting material
• Disney removed the figure from her tower at the Fantasy Springs expansion while repairs were made
• Rapunzel has since returned with what appears to be crow-resistant hair, but the birds have moved on to a new target

The Hair-Raising Incident That Went Viral

It started on April 1, when an X user posted footage from inside Tokyo DisneySea showing something no Imagineer ever planned for. Two crows perched directly on the head of the animatronic Rapunzel figure, methodically ripping out clumps of her long golden hair while she sang from her tower, as parkgoers watched in horror below.

In the original video, the figure kept swaying and singing as the birds plucked clumps of hair from her head. The contrast between Rapunzel’s serene performance and the very real bird attack happening on her scalp gave the clip an unsettling, almost surreal quality. Viewers couldn’t look away, and the post spread fast across social media in Japan and abroad.

The animatronic was targeted by the birds at the top of her tower, where she gazes down at guests during the early stages of the land’s Rapunzel’s Lantern Festival boat ride. That perch, exposed to open air, made her an easy mark for any crow with an eye for soft, stringy material.

Why Disney Pulled the Animatronic

Within days, park crews removed Rapunzel entirely. She was hauled out of her tower, leaving a hole in the skyline of the $2 billion Fantasy Springs expansion, brought down not by a mechanical glitch but by a pair of neighborhood crows with an eye for high-end nesting material.

The fix isn’t simple. Replacing seventy feet of animatronic-grade hair isn’t a quick repair, and technicians have to re-thread the fibers and make sure the crows can’t treat the tower like a local hardware store again. Even with the figure missing, the rest of the ride kept running for guests who had already booked their visits.

Tokyo DisneySea, just like its neighbor Tokyo Disneyland, is owned by The Oriental Land Company, which works with The Walt Disney Company through a licensing agreement. Walt Disney Imagineering designs the attractions while OLC operates them. That split responsibility means both companies have a stake in solving the bird problem before more footage goes viral.

Tokyo’s Crows Are Smarter Than You Think

If you’ve ever spent time in Tokyo, you know the local crows aren’t your average city birds. They’re famously smart and aggressive, having spent years outsmarting city planners and trash collectors, and now they’ve found a way into Fantasy Springs. Researchers have documented Tokyo crows using cars to crack walnuts, opening latched bins, and recognizing individual humans by face.

Disney’s challenge now is keeping them off the ledge without breaking the storybook look of the attraction. The team has to figure out how to shoo the birds away without ruining the look of the 17th-century masonry. Decorative spikes or netting could clash with the carefully designed facade.

Rapunzel Returns, but the Crows Find a New Victim

About a week after the incident, guests spotted Rapunzel back where she belongs. The animatronic was temporarily removed, and when she reappeared in her tower a week later, she sported what appeared to be new, crow-proof hair. Disney never released the technical details, but the fibers reportedly look slightly different up close.

The crows, however, haven’t given up. Tokyo DisneySea’s murder of crows has returned and resorted to attacking the Maximus animatronic on Rapunzel’s Lantern Festival in Fantasy Springs. Apparently the horse’s mane is just as appealing as a princess’s braid when you’re shopping for nest supplies.

Lessons Learned From a Feathered Invasion

The whole episode is a strange reminder that even the most advanced theme park technology has to share space with wildlife. Rapunzel’s Lantern Festival, the Tangled-inspired ride located in the Fantasy Springs land at Tokyo DisneySea, opened in June 2024 and celebrates the love story between Rapunzel and Flynn Rider while taking guests through the story of Tangled. It cost a fortune, took years to build, and still got upstaged by two birds with good taste in fiber.

For Disney, the lesson is clear. Any animatronic exposed to the open sky needs more than great engineering. It needs a plan for the locals who don’t read the rulebook. And for guests, the saga has added an unexpected new chapter to the Tangled story, one the screenwriters probably never saw coming.

• Michael David Hicks, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist, died in 2023 with no public cause of death initially disclosed, becoming the ninth name on a growing list of deaths and disappearances among U.S. experts in space, defense, and nuclear fields.
• Representative Eric Burlison, a Missouri Republican, has requested the involvement of the FBI, calling the disappearances “deeply concerning.”
• Authorities have not established any concrete connection among the cases, but some lawmakers have called for closer scrutiny as incidents continue to draw attention.

Who Was Michael David Hicks?

Michael David Hicks, a longtime research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), died on July 30, 2023, at 59 years old. He worked at JPL from 1998 to 2022 and contributed to over 80 scientific papers, including roles on NASA’s Deep Space 1 mission and the DART asteroid-deflection project. His death went largely unnoticed at the time. Nearly three years later, news outlets began revisiting the case after noticing that Hicks is connected to three other scientists on the list who also worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab or participated in NASA missions there.

Men’s Journal determined that the Los Angeles County Coroner does list a cause of death for Hicks, stating he died of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease in his residence, with morbid obesity listed as a contributing condition and the manner of death listed as natural. Even so, the coroner’s case reportedly remains open.

The Full Timeline of Cases

The list of dead or missing scientists spans from 2023 to early 2026 and includes people from NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, and the military.

Frank Maiwald, a NASA JPL researcher, died in Los Angeles on July 4, 2024, at age 61 with no cause of death disclosed. Daily Mail reported that an autopsy was not performed.

Anthony Chavez, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory employee, vanished on May 4, 2025. Monica Reza, a NASA scientist, went missing during a hike in the Angeles National Forest on June 22, 2025, reportedly disappearing just yards from others in her group. Melissa Casias, a Los Alamos administrative assistant, disappeared from her residence on June 26, 2025, and her mobile devices had been wiped.

Nuno Loureiro, the head of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was fatally attacked at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts on December 15, 2025. Police believe Loureiro was shot when he answered the door by Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the suspect in the Brown University mass shooting, who later died of suicide. Investigators said Loureiro and the suspect knew each other from attending the same university program in Portugal.

Carl Grillmair, an astrophysicist, was shot on his front porch during the early morning on February 16, 2026. William Neil McCasland, a retired Air Force general, left his New Mexico home on February 27, 2026, and has not been seen since.

Congress Pushes for FBI Action

Following several high-profile disappearances, Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO) is demanding a federal investigation, citing the “deeply concerning” ties these individuals share with advanced research and requesting FBI involvement to determine if the incidents are connected or represent a targeted threat.

McCasland, 68, is said to have known about secret government programs that included information about “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs. McCasland’s wife has pushed back against speculation from the UFO community that his disappearance is related to classified information.

The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office, which has been investigating McCasland’s disappearance, told Newsweek there had been no new developments but that his case remained a top priority.

Should We Expect Answers Anytime Soon?

The concentration of deaths and disappearances among researchers in sensitive fields is newsworthy and worth investigating, as lawmakers and reporters have urged. The available reporting, though, does not establish a verified, systematic campaign. The strongest factual takeaway is that a series of troubling incidents has prompted alarms from politicians and commentators. Without autopsy reports, investigative files, or official statements linking the cases, the claims of a coordinated campaign remain unproven.

What is clear is that public pressure isn’t going away. Members of Congress have held classified briefings. Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett told multiple outlets that the concentration of incidents in specific research fields is too high to ignore. The cases have generated discussion far beyond Washington, with people in communities like Lexington, KY and Albuquerque tracking developments online and questioning whether federal agencies are doing enough. Whether these cases turn out to be an unsettling coincidence or something darker, the families of these nine individuals and the broader American public deserve clear and transparent answers.

• Tumbleweeds, also known as Russian thistle, are native to Russia and eastern Europe and arrived in the U.S. during the 1870s as stowaways hidden in imported crop seeds.
• A single tumbleweed can scatter upwards of 10,000 seeds as it rolls across the flat terrain of western Kansas.
• Tumbleweeds pose a real fire risk because they can ignite and then be blown to new locations, spreading wildfires across the region.

An Accidental Invasion That Started With Wheat

You’d think something so tied to cowboy culture would have been here forever. But tumbleweeds are actually a fairly new arrival on the Plains, and they weren’t even established in the U.S. during the early days of the cowboy.

The plant is native to Russia and eastern Europe. In the 1870s, immigrants from that part of the world arrived in western Kansas and surrounding states, bringing flaxseed and hard red winter wheat with them. That wheat later became Kansas’ claim to fame and a major part of the state’s economy.

Those grains took well to Kansas prairie soil, but the crop seeds also came with a hitchhiker: seeds of the Russian thistle. The plant’s first known appearance in North America was in Bonhomme County, South Dakota, in the 1870s. From there, the Russian thistle found wide-open ground perfectly suited for rapid spread. It’s an expert at taking over loose, disturbed soil with little competing vegetation, which is exactly what it found in the ploughed land of the Great Plains. As pioneer farmers cut down prairie grasses to make room for crops, they created the perfect conditions for the weed to take root and spread fast.

A Weed That Drinks Your Crops Dry

For farmers, tumbleweeds aren’t some charming piece of Western lore. They’re a constant headache. A single Russian thistle plant can soak up 44 gallons of water, and that has a direct effect on the yield of crops like corn or milo the following year. When the weeds spread, a farmer’s crops end up competing for already limited water.

They’re so well adapted to the High Plains that they keep Kansas State University weed scientist Patrick Geier pretty busy. They do well in dry conditions with little moisture. If there’s an empty patch of ground, these plants will find it and fill it.

And the way they spread is wildly effective. Tumbling across flat terrain is actually the plant’s dispersal strategy. As it rolls, upwards of 10,000 seeds shake loose and sprout new tumbleweeds. Some plants can produce up to 250,000 seeds depending on their size. That’s a staggering reproduction rate that explains why they’re so hard to contain.

Tumbleweeds were also the first documented case of herbicide resistance in Kansas, according to Kansas State University, making them even harder for landowners to control.

Fire Hazards and Buried Neighborhoods

Away from the fields, tumbleweeds cause serious problems in towns across western Kansas. Residents tell stories, with both annoyance and amazement, of tumbleweeds blocking their driveways or stacking against their homes. In some areas, walls of tumbleweeds have reached over six feet tall.

Tumbleweeds can be a big factor in wildfires. After a wet fall, they grow and spread quickly. Then they dry out just in time for wildfire season in late winter and early spring. Kole Johnson of the National Weather Service in Dodge City said his agency works with fire officials to monitor the buildup of dry fuels, including weeds.

With tumbleweeds flying around and stacking up on each other, they can cause real fire hazards because their tumbling nature makes for quick-moving kindling. Kelly Kirk, the fire chief in Liberal, Kansas, says the ironic solution to preventing the fire risk is to burn the tumbleweeds safely before they become an uncontrolled threat.

Some years when tumbleweeds get particularly bad, the city loans out special “burn dumpsters,” which are dumpsters on trailers designed for weed disposal.

Still Part of Growing Up on the Plains

Despite all the trouble they cause, tumbleweeds have woven themselves into the culture of the Great Plains. Even though they have a real effect on western Kansans, the tumbleweeds are still culturally accepted. They’re sometimes used as decorations, sold as small town souvenirs, or simply considered part of everyday life.

Geier acknowledges that despite all the hassles, tumbleweeds have also helped some native species. They create habitats for certain bird species and produce food for wildlife. So while they’re a massive nuisance for farmers and fire departments alike, they’ve also become a small piece of the local ecology in a region they weren’t originally meant to call home.

Russian thistle arrived on the American prairie by accident about 150 years ago. It found open, dry country that felt a lot like the steppes it came from. And since then, it has been rolling, spreading, and stubbornly refusing to leave. Love them or hate them, tumbleweeds are as much a part of modern Kansas as the wheat fields they hitchhiked in with.

• A trove of 100-year-old sketches by Prussian-born artist Charles Dellschau has reignited speculation that Trump and his son Barron may have connections to time travel.
• In the 1890s, author Ingersoll Lockwood wrote stories about a boy named Baron Trump who lived in the lavish Castle Trump and was guided by a wise mentor named Don.
• Trump’s uncle, MIT professor John G. Trump, once reviewed Nikola Tesla’s papers, which conspiracy theorists claim could have included secret time travel technology.

The Dellschau Drawings That Started It All

Charles Dellschau was a Prussian-American born in 1830 who gained posthumous fame after the discovery of his large scrapbooks filled with drawings, collages, and watercolors of airplanes and airships. His creations often depicted fantastical, futuristic airships called “aeros” which stayed aloft thanks to a fictional anti-gravitational fuel he called “NB Gas.”

So far, so normal for a 19th-century artist with a big imagination. But things get weird. Some of his illustrations contained strangely coincidental references to Donald Trump’s presidency. Some of the machines he drew had the word “Trump” emblazoned on them, while another showed a man who looks like Trump alongside the number “45.” Trump is the 45th and 47th President of the United States.

One of Dellschau’s drawings also included a golden-haired person using a device bearing the number 45, which is another connection to Trump’s role as the 45th President. Conspiracy enthusiasts, naturally, ran with it.

The 1890s Novels That Went Viral

The Dellschau sketches aren’t the only piece of this puzzle. The Baron Trump novels are two children’s novels written in 1889 and 1893 by American author and lawyer Ingersoll Lockwood. They remained obscure until 2017, when they received media attention for perceived similarities between their protagonist and U.S. President Donald Trump and his son Barron.

The novels recount the adventures of the German boy Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian Von Troomp, who goes by “Baron Trump,” as he discovers weird underground civilizations and repeats this pattern until arriving back home at Castle Trump. He boasts of his big brain and follows a wise mentor named Don into bizarre underground worlds.

Donald Trump’s youngest son’s name is Barron Trump, and Donald Trump used the pseudonym “John Barron” in the 1980s. A boy named Baron, a wealthy family, and a mentor called Don? You can see why people started paying attention.

Lockwood also wrote another book, 1900; or, The Last President, in which New York City is riven by protests following the shocking victory of a populist candidate. In the author’s tale, President Bryan picks a “Pence” for his cabinet, just like Trump’s former VP Mike Pence. That little detail alone has been enough to keep message boards buzzing for years.

The Tesla Connection

Every good conspiracy theory needs a mad scientist, and Nikola Tesla fills that role perfectly. John G. Trump, a well-known electrical engineer and physicist, worked on radar and advanced technology for the US government during World War II. After Tesla died in 1943, he was tasked with reviewing Tesla’s papers to assess their potential for national security. While there’s no evidence that John G. Trump discovered or built a time travel device, some theorists suggest these papers could have contained secrets lost or hidden from public view.

Trump himself has remarked on several occasions, “I know things that other people don’t know,” words that have circulated endlessly online. For believers, that’s practically a confession. For everyone else, it’s a politician being a politician.

Why This Theory Keeps Coming Back

Humans have a tendency to look for patterns anywhere they can find them. A forgotten children’s story with a character called Baron Trump is bound to invite connections, whether or not they were ever there to begin with.

Although these books contain some seemingly bizarre coincidences, they aren’t evidence that Donald Trump has access to a time machine. Time travel conspiracy theories like this one pick and choose material that supports their conclusions while ignoring everything else. These same books also contain giant turtles, alternate dimensions, a battle with a big white crane, a dog named Bulgar, and a little smiling man frozen in time. Since those details have no clear connection to the Trumps, they’re left out of the conspiracy theory entirely.

Whether it’s actual time travel or just another case of humans connecting dots that probably shouldn’t be connected, one thing’s certain: the Trump family continues to inspire theories that would make even Doc Brown from “Back to the Future” raise an eyebrow. Whether you’re scrolling through TikTok in South Bend or debating it over coffee in Brooklyn, this one isn’t going away anytime soon.

• The mechanical butt birth rhino from the 1995 film Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls is being sold through Propstore Auction with bidding ending March 25, 2026.
• The prop measures over 10 feet long, is made from fiberglass and foam, and originally came from the Planet Hollywood collection.
• Bidding started at $2,000, with the final price expected to land somewhere between $4,000 and $8,000.

The Scene That Launched a Thousand Memes

In Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, the 1995 sequel to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the pet detective is sent to Africa to track down a missing sacred bat. During his investigation, Ace uses the mechanical rhino to spy on a suspect. But things go sideways when his cooling fan breaks down, and the African heat turns his hiding spot into an oven.

Trapped inside, he has to find another way to escape, poking a hole in the back of the rhino and climbing out of its butt in front of a horrified family on a safari tour. The result? One of the most quoted, rewatched, and memed movie moments of the entire decade. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls was a box office hit, raking in over $212 million, and that rhino scene became one of the most recognized comedy bits of the 1990s.

What Exactly Are You Bidding On?

The actual full-size prop measures over 10 feet from tip to tail and was built for exterior shots of the giant mammal. The rhino is constructed from fiberglass with hard-coated Styrofoam legs, and it features a removable latex sheet backside, foam latex tail, and a side hatch door with hydraulic hinges. It’s also got a padded interior chair, so yes, you can technically sit inside this thing.

It originates from Planet Hollywood, where it was displayed for years before making its way to the auction block. Propstore noted in the listing that distinctive patterning on the bolts and the placement of holes drilled into the top of the hatch door screen-match the prop to the moment Ace climbs out of the rhino’s rear in the film. So there’s no question about authenticity here.

That said, the prop still carries the battle scars of production, including chipped paint, surface grime, and some stiffening in the foam latex tail. The prop has no articulation whatsoever. The neck does not move, nor do the legs. The latex “butt skin” has been replaced since filming because the original tore, which honestly adds to the charm.

The Price Tag and Auction Details

Bidding opened at $2,000, with Propstore estimating the final sale price will land between $4,000 and $8,000. For a full-size, screen-matched Ace Ventura rhino prop from a film that made over $200 million at the box office, that number has turned a lot of heads in the collecting world. Bidding on the prop had reached $5,500 as of early afternoon on Thursday, March 5.

The rhino is heading to the Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction in Los Angeles, Spring 2026. Bidding ends March 25, 2026, during the live auction event, so interested buyers still have time to get in on the action. This particular sale is part of Propstore’s broader spring auction, which features a wide range of movie and TV memorabilia from beloved films.

There are some practical concerns worth mentioning, though. The prop measures roughly 128 inches long and around 80 inches tall. That’s a lot of rhino to fit through your front door. Shipping arrangements will need to be worked out with the auction house. And while sitting inside it would make for an incredible photo op, do not attempt to recreate the scene by crawling out of the butt. It looks like the rear end may give way.

A Piece of 90s Comedy That Still Gets Laughs

After the massive success of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, When Nature Calls proved an even bigger hit, earning more than $212 million at the global box office as well as an MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance for Carrey. The butt birth scene became a cultural touchstone, and three decades later, it still makes people laugh.

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• Mitchell Fairbarn, 33, of Ontario, Canada, faces four counts of felony animal abuse, according to court records.
• Surveillance footage showed Fairbarn entering the bird habitat around 5 a.m. and grabbing a bird named “Peachy,” while also injuring other animals in the process.
• Caesars Entertainment, which owns the Flamingo, said the flamingos are in the care of their veterinary team and they’re hopeful the birds will make a full recovery.

What Happened at the Flamingo Wildlife Habitat

According to an arrest report, surveillance video shows Fairbarn entered the habitat around 5 a.m. Tuesday, grabbed the flamingos, dragged them, and cornered them. The first flamingo he targeted eventually escaped and swam away.

About seven minutes later, police allege Fairbarn went after a second flamingo. Investigators say he waded into the water, chased several birds and eventually grabbed one, dragging it across the habitat and holding it by its legs and neck while it tried to break free. Fairbarn was then seen walking into a hallway with the flamingo wrapped in a grey shirt before entering an elevator and travelling to the 14th floor.

The bird he took was a Chilean flamingo named Peachy. Whether you’re visiting Las Vegas, Indianapolis, or any city with protected wildlife, the idea of someone physically snatching an animal from its home and bringing it into a hotel room is hard to fathom. And the evidence police gathered painted a grim picture of what happened next.

What Police Found on His Phone and in His Room

Investigators obtained a search warrant for Fairbarn’s hotel room later that day. Police say the warrant allowed officers to seize items including bedding, blood samples, feathers, clothing and his cellphone. A large bloody feather along with multiple small pink colored feathers were found in the room.

Fairbarn’s cellphone contained photos and videos of him with the flamingo in his hotel room, including footage of him choking it and throwing it to the floor while laughing. In one video, he choked a flamingo’s neck as the bird screamed and cried, records indicated. Fairbarn was also seen laughing in the video, reportedly saying he planned to take the bird home as he walked back to his room.

Animal control advised that Fairbarn injured the bird when he allegedly pulled the wing out of the bird’s body. He also clipped the wing of a bird he was chasing and trying to pin down in the habitat, causing the bird to suffer pain and require stitches.

The Suspect’s Explanation and Arrest

Fairbarn allegedly admitted to police that he trespassed into the bird habitat after seeing a flamingo in distress. He told police he “popped” the bird’s wing into place, stating he knows that popping the wing back into its place is a common practice for birds, such as ducks. Police said he told them that he was drunk and couldn’t remember chasing birds.

Fairbarn was arrested on March 3 at about 6 a.m. Court documents list Fairbarn’s residence as Sutherland, Ont., though no such town exists. Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Suzan Baucum ordered at a Wednesday hearing that Fairbarn’s bail would remain at $12,000, the booking amount for his charges. The judge ordered him to have no animals in his possession and to surrender his passport.

Fairbarn, who was ordered to stay away from the Strip after he posted bond, is scheduled to appear in court on March 9.

A Troubling Pattern at This Famous Attraction

Flamingos are federally protected birds and can live for decades. The Flamingo resort’s Wildlife Habitat opened in 1995 and features streams, waterfalls, turtles and fish in addition to exotic birds.

This isn’t the first time an animal has been harmed at the Flamingo’s wildlife habitat. In 2012, Justin Teixeira beheaded an exotic bird at the property while drunk. Teixeira, then 25, was convicted and sentenced to six months of boot camp after completing 190 days in a program at the Indian Springs Correctional Facility. He apologized for killing Turk, a helmeted guinea fowl that was part of the hotel’s wildlife habitat.

Caesars Entertainment condemned the incident, saying the company is cooperating with law enforcement. Peachy and the other affected birds are currently in the care of veterinarians and the Flamingo animal care team, and the company remains hopeful they’ll make a full recovery.

Why Cases Like This Matter for Animal Protection

Animals in public-facing habitats are vulnerable to abuse, even in heavily monitored locations like the Las Vegas Strip. The charges Fairbarn faces are serious. Four felony counts of animal abuse in Nevada can carry steep penalties, and Caesars Entertainment has made it clear they intend to push for the harshest possible punishment. For Peachy and the other birds, recovery is the focus now. For everyone else, it’s a gut-wrenching story that shows why wildlife protections and habitat security need to be taken seriously, no matter where the animals live.

• Scientists are investigating Lanmaoa asiatica, a mushroom native to parts of Southeast Asia and China that causes consistent hallucinations when eaten undercooked.
• Hospital records show that 96 percent of patients affected by this mushroom report seeing crowds of “little people” or “elves,” often dancing, jumping, or marching around their environment.
• Chemical and genomic analyses performed on Lanmaoa asiatica have turned up no traces of any known psychoactive compounds, suggesting that something entirely new is waiting to be found.

A Dinner Staple With a Strange Side Effect

The mushroom is a popular food in China’s Yunnan Province, sold in markets, featured on restaurant menus, and known for its savory flavor. Locals call it Jian shou qing, which roughly translates to “turns blue in the hand,” a reference to its rapidly changing colors when touched. The mushroom is also served in household dishes during peak mushroom seasons between June and August.

Locals know the rules: cook it thoroughly, or you’ll pay the price. Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah, traveled to Yunnan to study Lanmaoa asiatica firsthand. Domnauer said the side effects of the mushroom seem “like very common knowledge in the culture” in Yunnan Province. At a mushroom hot pot restaurant, a server reportedly set a timer for 15 minutes and warned diners not to eat until the timer went off, or they might see little people.

Doctors in Yunnan Province are treating hundreds of cases a year of people having visions of small, pint-sized, elf-like figures crawling around and climbing up walls. The hallucinations can stick around for up to three days after a 12-to-24-hour onset, and they often result in hospitalizations.

Why Scientists Are Paying Attention

What makes this particular hallucinatory mushroom so unusual is that it causes the same kind of hallucinations in different people, across cultures. That consistency is practically unheard of in the world of psychoactive substances. Psilocybin, the active compound in typical magic mushrooms, produces wildly different experiences from person to person. Domnauer has determined that L. asiatica mushrooms do not contain psilocybin, and the main thing that sets them apart is that the experiences don’t vary greatly depending on the individual.

One professor in the region recalled eating stir-fried mushrooms and then lifting a tablecloth to find hundreds of tiny figures marching underneath like soldiers. The visions are often very realistic, three-dimensional figures said to be colorfully dressed, very mobile, and interacting with the physical world. They’ve been reported clinging to spoons, climbing furniture, and squeezing under doors.

This edible mushroom that makes you see tiny people has a history stretching well past modern Yunnan restaurants. Although Lanmaoa asiatica is a recent scientific name, its use may have much deeper ancient roots in Chinese culture. A prominent Daoist text from the 3rd century CE refers to a “flesh spirit mushroom” that, if consumed raw, allows one to “see a little person.”

Tracking the Mushroom Across Continents

The Yunnan cases aren’t isolated. A missionary first reported in 1936 that some bolete mushrooms consumed by natives in Papua New Guinea caused “madness.” The phenomenon was later described in more detail by anthropologist Marie Reay in the late 1950s, who reported that the mushrooms caused lilliputian hallucinations.

Indigenous communities in the Philippines’ remote Northern Cordillera were also collecting and consuming a wild mushroom which, according to local knowledge, occasionally brings on visions of little people, which they call the “ansisit.” The discovery of this Filipino mushroom’s identity surprised researchers: it was none other than Lanmaoa asiatica, the exact same species as in Yunnan.

The fact that the same peculiar hallucinations are independently reported across such distant cultures points to a shared chemical and neurological cause, rather than cultural fabrication or coincidence. Researchers in the 1960s had previously dismissed the Papua New Guinea accounts as ritualistic “acting out.” That conclusion makes more sense knowing the species wasn’t formally described until 2015.

A Chemical Mystery Still Waiting to Be Solved

Domnauer and his team are still trying to identify the chemical compound responsible for the hallucinations. Based on tests already conducted, it is most likely not related to any known psychedelic compounds. Whatever compound triggers these visions, it appears to be something science hasn’t catalogued yet.

The “trips” caused by this mushroom are unusually long, lasting from 12 to 24 hours. In some cases, patients remain in the hospital for up to a week. The trip can last so long that it’s impractical as a recreational drug, which is why no culture seems to use the mushroom intentionally as a psychedelic.

Understanding L. asiatica could help uncover the cause of spontaneous lilliputian hallucinations in people who haven’t consumed the mushroom. This is a rare condition: until 2021, since the first description in 1909, only 226 such cases not linked to mushrooms had been recorded. Researchers believe less than 5% of Earth’s fungal species have been described, so Lanmaoa asiatica could be just the beginning of a much bigger story. For now, though, the best advice for anyone visiting a Yunnan mushroom market is simple: cook it well and wait for the timer to go off.