Who’s forgetting a toilet tank lid in an Uber? A Cairo commuter. Uber customers in Cairo have left behind a handful of unusual personal belongings in their Uber cars over the past year, according to Uber’s latest Lost and Found Index (pdf). The most commonly forgotten items are wallets and purses, followed by other bags and boxes, phones and cameras, clothing items, headphones and speakers, and keys. A lot of us in Cairo also tend to forget our phone chargers, glasses, and books. Beyond the run-of-the-mill items, some of the most unusual items in this year’s index include car spare parts, a cooking pot set, an entire shisha kit, a baby shower chair, and — our personal favorite — a toilet tank lid.
There tends to be peak forgetfulness times: It appears that December and January — the stretch of time between mentally checking out of the year and then bringing our brains back online following the winter holidays — are when we are most prone to forgetting our personal belongings, according to the index. The highest number of items forgotten last year was registered on 8 December, followed by 15 December, 17 and 18 January, and 29 December.
Enceladus, an orbiting moon around Saturn, could be habitable — thanks to the recently discovered presence of phosphorus, according to a recent study published in the Nature journal cited by the Wall Street Journal. Researchers have recently detected phosphorus — an element essential for life and is critical for the formation of DNA — in tiny ice particles from the moon’s subsurface ocean. Previous data from NASA missions indicated that Enceladus already had six other elements required to sustain life: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, but hadn’t picked up on the presence of phosphorus, the rarest element in the universe. Researchers working more on the findings of the new study suggest that “the moon’s ocean contains at least 100 times as much phosphorus as oceans on Earth.” The majority of phosphorus on Earth is confined in unusable rocks and minerals but Enceladus ocean’s chemistry keeps the element water soluble and accessible for life.
Future studies to explore Saturn’s moons: A NASA mission named Dragonfly is planned to be released to Titan “Saturn’s largest and richly organic moon” in 2027. Another mission would hit Enceladus by nearly 2050 to revolve around and then land on the moon to search for signs of life.