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SALEM, Mass. (AP) — A man will be sentenced to 18 months of probation after pleading guilty to vandalizing the “Bewitched” statue by dousing the Salem, Massachusetts tourist attraction with red paint over the summer.
The 32-year-old resident was originally sentenced to a year in jail, but a Salem district court judge suspended the sentence on conditions the man repay the cost of repairing the damage inflicted on the bronze statue, The Salem News reported Tuesday.
The statue depicts actor Elizabeth Montgomery — as lead character Samantha Stephens in the 1960s sitcom — sitting on a broomstick in front of a crescent moon.
In June, a prosecutor said the man was “going through a rough time and wanted to do something to get arrested,” and was held on bail. His attorney said he had been living in a shelter for two weeks since his marriage ended, and had been looking for a new job.
He was also charged with disorderly conduct, which will be dismissed after 30 days.
The statue was erected in the city famous for the 1692 witch trials in 2005, despite protests from some who said it trivializes the tragedy of the trials.
BOSTON (AP) — The sex lives of constipated scorpions, cute ducklings with an innate sense of physics, and a life-size rubber moose may not appear to have much in common, but they all inspired the winners of this year's Ig Nobels, the prize for comical scientific achievement.
Held less than a month before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced, Thursday's 32nd annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony was for the third year in a row a prerecorded affair webcast on the Annals of Improbable Research magazine's website.
The winners, honored in 10 categories, also included scientists who found that when people on a blind date are attracted to each other, their heart rates synchronize, and researchers who looked at why legal documents can be so utterly baffling, even to lawyers themselves.
Even though the ceremony was prerecorded, it retained much of the fun of the live event usually held at Harvard University.
As has been an Ig Nobel tradition, real Nobel laureates handed out the prizes, using a bit of video trickery: The Nobel laureates handed the prize off screen, while the winners reached out and brought a prize they had been sent and self-assembled into view.
Winners also received a virtually worthless Zimbabwean $10 trillion bill.
"Science is fun. My sort of a tagline is you're not doing science if you're not having fun," said Frank Fish, a biology professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania who shared the physics Ig Nobel for studying why ducklings follow their mothers in single-file formation.
It's about energy conservation: The ducklings are drafting, much like stock cars, cyclists and runners do in a race, he said.
"It all has to do with the flow that occurs behind that leading organism and the way that moving in formation can actually be an energetic benefit," said the appropriately named Fish, whose specialty is studying how animals swim.
He shared the prize with researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, who found that the ducklings actually surfed in their mother's wake.
Eliska Prochazkova's personal experiences inspired her research on dating that earned her and colleagues the cardiology Ig Nobel.
She had no problems finding her apparent perfect match on dating apps, yet she often found there was no spark when they met face-to-face.
So she set people up on blind dates in real social settings, measured their physiological reactions and found that the heart rates of people attracted to each other synchronized.
So is her work evidence of "love at first sight"?
"It really depends, on how you define love," Prochazkova, a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in an email. "What we found in our research was that people were able to decide whether they want to date their partner very quickly. Within the first two seconds of the date, the participants made a very complex idea about the human sitting in front of them."
Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado of the University of São Paulo in Brazil won the biology Ig Nobel for studying whether constipation ruins a scorpion's sex life.
Scorpions can detach a body part to escape a predator — a process called autotomy. But when they lose their tails, they also lose the last portion of the digestive tract, which leads to constipation — and, eventually, death, they wrote in the journal "Integrated Zoology."
"The long-term decrease in the locomotor performance of autotomized males may impair mate searching," they wrote.
Magnus Gers won the safety engineering Ig Nobel for making a moose "crash test dummy" for his master's thesis at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, which was published by the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute.
Frequent moose vs. vehicle collisions on Sweden's highways often result in injuries and death to both human and animal, Gers said in an email. Yet automobile makers rarely include animal crashes in their safety testing.
"I believe this is a fascinating and still very unexplored area that deserves all the attention it can get," he said. "This topic is mystical, life threatening and more relevant than ever."
Anyone who has ever read a terms of service agreement knows that legal documents can be downright incomprehensible.
That frustrated Eric Martinez, a graduate student in the brain and cognitive science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also has a law degree from Harvard.
He, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson shared the literature Ig Nobel for analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand, research that appeared in the journal "Cognition."
"Ultimately, there's kind of a hope that lawyers will think a little more with the reader in mind," he said. "Clarity doesn't just benefit the layperson, it also benefits lawyers."
(NBC) Nurses in the newborn intensive care unit at a New York City hospital are seeing double again, and again, and again, and again.
That's because they are taking care of five sets of twins at once! At Staten Island University Hospital, there are four sets of twin girls, and one set of twin boys. The hospital said all the babies were born between 26 weeks and 31 weeks, and all are said to be doing well.
The five sets of twins is the most the hospital has ever been taking care of at one time. Coincidentally, the twins all arrived just in time for neonatal nurses week.
Sept. 21 (UPI) -- Firefighters responded to a New Jersey wedding reception when the second-story floor began to cave in under the revelers.
The Barnegat Light Volunteer Fire Department said crews responded to the Daymark restaurant in Barnegat when attendees at a wedding on the second floor of the building reported the floor was collapsing.
"The floor did not collapse, but caved in resulting in the structure being unsafe for the meantime," the department said in a Facebook post.
Firefighters credited the DJ at the wedding reception with announcing the issue and making sure everyone safely vacated the building.
Newlyweds Cassidy and Brian Gagliardotto said the reception was just getting underway with about 200 guests when the floor started to cave in.
"Our DJ just kicked it off and we were like three songs in," Brian Gagliardotto told WABC-TV. "Luckily we were able to get all our first dances in, all our speeches in."
Firefighters said Daymark will remain closed until the building is structurally sound.
The couple said the wedding reception continued at a new relocation.
"We knew where my parents were staying and we moved to that location and the party just continued on," Brian Gagliardotto said.
BROOKSVILLE, Fla. (AP) — A Florida highway had to temporarily close Wednesday after a semitrailer carrying cases of Coors Light crashed and turned the roadway into a silver sea of beer cans.
The multi-vehicle crash occurred shortly after 6 a.m. in the southbound lanes of Interstate 75 about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of Tampa, the Florida Highway Patrol said in a news release.
The pileup began when one semitrailer clipped another while changing lanes, officials said. That forced other semis to brake, but one failed to stop and collided with a pickup truck and another one of the stopping semis.
The semi that failed to stop was filled with cases of the Silver Bullet beer.
Minor injuries were reported by the occupants of the pickup truck, the news release said.
The inside shoulder and travel lanes were opened to traffic by 8:30 a.m., and the rest of the roadway was reopened around noon, troopers said.
A Washington woman was arrested after she allegedly drove a stolen car into fresh concrete and became stuck before trying to flee the scene with a child and a bottle of whiskey.
The incident happened Monday in Lakewood as crews were pouring concrete for a stretch of pavement at the North Gate Road and Edgewood Avenue roundabout, city officials said.
"Thanks to a series of poor choices by an individual (including driving a stolen car with a bottle of whiskey in hand) our pavement pouring at the North Gate Rd/Edgewood Ave roundabout is setback," the city tweeted on Monday.
Photos from the scene showed the Mini Cooper stuck in the concrete and a trail of footprints leading away.
The driver, a 32-year-old woman, was driving with her 4-year-old son in the backseat, FOX13 Seattle reported, citing authorities.
After the woman got stuck in the concrete, witnesses reported that she threw a television, an Instant Pot, and a half-empty bottle of whiskey out of the car before trying to leave the scene.
Investigators learned that the vehicle and other items were stolen from the home of the suspect's mother, according to the report.
The woman, whose name was not immediately released, was booked into jail on suspicion of negligent driving, with additional charges of vehicle theft and possession of stolen property pending.
Meanwhile, the city said its contractor team was working to repair the damage.
Lakewood is a city located about 40 miles south of Seattle.
(Fox) The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a statement about the dangers of combining nighttime cold medicine with chicken after a viral "Sleepy Chicken" challenge trended earlier this year.
In a consumer update the agency released on Thursday, Sept. 15, the FDA mentioned the unusual trend as an example of over-the-counter drug misuse.
"A recent social media video challenge encourages people to cook chicken in NyQuil (acetaminophen, dextromethorphan, and doxylamine) or another similar OTC cough and cold medication, presumably to eat," the FDA wrote. "The challenge sounds silly and unappetizing — and it is."
Fox News Digital reached out to NyQuil's parent company Procter & Gamble for comment.
Questionable flavoring aside, the FDA warned that cooking cold medicine could be an unsafe thing to do.
"Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways," the FDA wrote in its release.
The agency noted that even when Sleepy Chicken concoctions aren't ingested, people can put themselves at risk when they inhale the vapors from cooked cold medication.
"It could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body," the FDA wrote. "It could also hurt your lungs."
The FDA continued, "Put simply: Someone could take a dangerously high amount of the cough and cold medicine without even realizing it."
The #SleepyChicken hashtag on TikTok has 1.2 million views and it has been tagged with trending reaction videos where users share their thoughts on the medicine-cooked dish – many of which have expressed shock and disgust.
A few other tagged videos that have added to the view count are from pet owners who have documented their sleepy pet chickens.
Some recent medicine-focused Sleepy Chicken videos have been posted in response to the FDA's announcement. However, it doesn't appear that people are actively cooking chicken with cold medicine and then posting evidence of the act online.
Most users who have commented on Sleepy Chicken with a duet video response have spliced in a clip from mainly one TikTok account that shared a video of the cooked dish.
Earlier iterations from when the Sleepy Chicken hashtag initially trended in January 2022 have been deleted from the video platform.
Online searches for "NyQuil Chicken" have increased on Google in the last week while searches for "Sleepy Chicken" remain low, according to data on Google Trends – a search query analytics platform for Google.com.
The FDA recommends keeping over-the-counter and prescription drugs away from children who might feel encouraged to try dangerous social media challenges or trends.
"Lock up these medications to prevent accidental overdose," the FDA wrote.
The agency advises parents and guardians to discuss the harms that can come from drug misuse, abuse and social media trends.
The FDA acknowledged that the viral "Benadryl Challenge" of 2020 – where people consumed high amounts of allergy medicine (diphenhydramine) to induce hallucinations – led to hospitalizations and death, even though the agency warned the public not to participate.
"Social media challenge or not, it is important to use medications as intended," the FDA wrote. "For over-the-counter drugs, you should always read the Drug Facts Label. The label tells you what the medicine is supposed to do, who should or shouldn't take it, and how to use it."
The FDA said people can find additional drug safety resources from the FDA's Division of Drug Information (DDI) or from a health care provider or pharmacist.
Adverse effects from over-the-counter and prescription drugs can be reported to the FDA's MedWatch Safety Information and Adverse Event Reporting Program on the FDA's website.
In the event of an emergency, the FDA recommends calling 911 or poison control if someone is showing dangerous signs of drug misuse, which could include hallucinations, unconsciousness, seizures, trouble breathing or collapse.
Sept. 21 (UPI) -- A wildlife officer responded to a Colorado home to evict an unwanted guest -- a bear taking shelter under the family's front porch.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife Southeast Region said Officer Corey Adler responded to a Colorado Springs-area home on a report of a bear underneath the home's front porch.
Adler used paintballs and a Taser to "haze" the bear out into the open and he then chased it away from the area.
"Hazing it saved it a critical 'strike' under CPW policy," CPW tweeted.
CPW spokesman Bill Vogrin said the "strike" would have given the bear an ear tag.
"That means, if it ever got in trouble again, it would be euthanized," Vogrin told KXRM-TV.
Sept. 21 (UPI) -- Animal rescuers in Tennessee said they are now caring for an exotic fox that was found scratching at a resident's backdoor to be let inside.
Juniper Russo, the owner of For Fox Sake Wildlife Rescue, said a woman contacted the organization a few days ago to report a silver fox was scratching at her back door on Soddy-Daisy, and Russo arrived to discover the animal was an Arctic fox.
Russo shared photos of the fox on social media, and was soon contacted by the animal's most recent caretaker. The man said the fox, Cooper, had belonged to a friend, but he took the fox to his own home after the pet showed signs of neglect.
"The habitat that he had built for Cooper wasn't really suitable for a fox, and he was able to break out pretty quickly, and that's how he ended up, you know, at a stranger's house pawing at the door," Russo told WTVC-TV.
Russo said the man agreed to surrender custody of Cooper to a sanctuary, and she started him on prescription food to help him gain weight. She said her rescue is only licensed for native species of fox, so Cooper will have a new permanent home at Exotic Pet Wonderland in Knoxville.
Non-native foxes, including Arctic foxes and fennec foxes, are legal to keep as pets in Tennessee without a permit.
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