Voting opens for new Monopoly pieces

If you are an avid player of Monopoly, the big news is Rhode Island-based game maker Hasbro is asking the internet to vote on new game pieces for the latest edition of Monopoly.

The company launched voting last week on VoteMonopoly.com, allowing internet users to vote on which eight game pieces that will make it into the next edition of the game.

The company said none of the current eight pieces — Scottie dog, top hat, car, thimble, boot, wheelbarrow, battleship and cat — are safe in the voting, which also includes 56 potential new pieces.

The proposed new pieces include emojis, a dinosaur, a hashtag, a flip-flop, a TV, an early-1990s-style cellphone and a desktop controller.

The voting is scheduled to last through January 31, and the winning pieces are expected to be announced on March 19 for World Monopoly Day.

Tarantula eats snake in first documented case in nature

Researchers in Brazil detailed the first documented case of a tarantula found killing and eating a snake in the wild.

A study published in the journal Herpetology Notes details what Leandro Malta Borges, a graduate student in biology at Brazil’s Federal University of Santa Maria, and his colleagues found when they went searching for tarantulas in the Serra do Cavera region on October 23, 2015.

The researchers said they flipped a rock to discover an adult female tarantula — Grammostola quirogai — feeding on the vanquished corpse of a 12-inch Almaden ground snake.

“Predation of such a large snake in relation to the size of the spider was extremely surprising to us,” Borges told LiveScience.

The researchers said other Grammostola tarantulas, close cousins of the spider found feeding on the snake, have been induced to eat snakes in captivity, but the behaviour had never before been documented in the wild.

Pie ‘literally’ in the sky!

A meat and potato pie has been sent sky high ahead of the World Pie Eating Championships.

The humble comestible was attached to a weather balloon by a team from Sent Into Space — and sent on an upward journey reaching about 100,000 feet. It was launched last week from a car park near the place where the pie-eating championships are to be held in Wigan, England.

Video footage shows the pie making its glorious journey, soaring way above the clouds in a flight which lasted about three hours.

After it crashed down back to Earth it was sent for testing to see whether its molecular structure had changed. Those involved in its trip said it would have been frozen as it made its ascent — before being cooked as it hurtled back towards the ground.

Published in Dawn, Young World, January 21st, 2017