Offbeat

Trans women face potential women’s rugby ban over safety concerns 0
- Offbeat
- July 20, 2020
World Rugby is considering banning trans women from playing women’s rugby because of significant safety concerns that have emerged following recent research, a decision that would make it the first international sports federation to go down that path. The Guardian can reveal that in a 38-page draft document produced by its transgender working group, it
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Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong 0
- Offbeat
- July 13, 2020
It sounds like a sci-fi movie, or the weirdest series of Big Brother ever. Eight volunteers wearing snazzy red jumpsuits seal themselves into a hi-tech glasshouse that’s meant to perfectly replicate Earth’s ecosystems. They end up starving, gasping for air and at each other’s throats – while the world’s media looks on. But the Biosphere
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Inside Coober Pedy, the Australian mining town where residents live, shop, and worship underground 0
- Offbeat
- November 3, 2019
In the middle of the Australian Outback, there’s a town where chimneys rise from the sand and big red signs warn people of “unmarked holes.” Welcome to Coober Pedy, the town that lives underground. What began in 1916 as perhaps the largest opal mining operation in the world has since expanded into a subterranean community
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Inside Coober Pedy, Australia’s underground mining town – Business Insider 0
- Offbeat
- November 3, 2019
In the middle of the Australian Outback, there’s a town where chimneys rise from the sand and big red signs warn people of “unmarked holes.” Welcome to Coober Pedy, the town that lives underground. What began in 1916 as perhaps the largest opal mining operation in the world has since expanded into a subterranean community
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The ‘zombie fungus’ and the climbing dead 0
- Offbeat
- September 9, 2019
Image copyright Frank Deschandol/WPY2019 It’s just bizarre… and utterly beautiful at the same time. Those aren’t some strange arrangement of antennae on a beetle but the fruiting bodies of a “zombie fungus” that has taken control of the insect. Its conquest complete, the fungus is about to spread its spores to the wind to find
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Scientists Confirm The Discovery of a Mineral Never Before Seen in Nature 0
- Offbeat
- September 2, 2019
It was found along the side of a road in a remote Australian gold rush town. In the old days, Wedderburn was a hotspot for prospectors – it occasionally still is – but nobody there had ever seen a nugget quite like this one. The Wedderburn meteorite, found just north-east of the town in 1951,
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