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A Unified Theory of Weird?

It’s tempting to write all this off. The military collision as a drone mishap. The secret Vatican Church files as religious folklore. But something doesn’t add up. Not when elite fighter jets are grounding themselves because of “unidentified” collisions, and not when the Catholic Church quietly catalogues hundreds of sightings with language that eerily mirrors modern UFO descriptions.

Here’s a question worth asking: What if these phenomena – military, mystical, metaphysical – aren’t so separate? What if they’re parts of the same story?

The difference is how they’re framed. The military calls them security threats. The Church calls them miracles. Scientists call them anomalies. But all agree on one point: they’re real, and no one fully understands them.

Imagine standing on a cracked, ochre plain, the sun beating down, and suddenly noticing the outline of a ribcage the length of a bus. That’s what researchers first encountered in the Atacama Desert—a place that seems as far from the ocean as you can get. This bizarre sight is more common than you’d think: the desert is littered with fossilized remains of whales, dolphins, seals, and even strange, extinct aquatic creatures. It’s a place where bones have lain undisturbed for millions of years, perfectly preserved by the dry, salty air. Each fossil is a time capsule, offering a glimpse into a prehistoric world that couldn’t be more different than the desert of today.

It’s almost comical to picture whales in the Atacama’s barren expanse, but the answer lies in Earth’s ever-shifting nature. Millions of years ago, this region was submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. Over time, tectonic forces lifted the seabed high and dry, turning ocean floor into parched plateau. The Atacama’s lack of rain and slow geological changes have helped preserve these fossils better than almost anywhere else. It’s a striking reminder that the world we see today is just a fleeting snapshot—underneath our feet, the layers of history tell a story of transformation and upheaval.

As humans continue to explore the cosmos, one of the most intriguing questions remains unanswered: Could life exist beyond Earth? While traditional parameters for life are based on Earth’s conditions, recent research suggests that life might thrive in a variety of extreme environments, both on our planet and beyond. These discoveries have expanded our understanding of where life may exist, challenging conventional limits and opening doors to the possibility of life in harsh environments of space.

When exploring the potential for life in harsh conditions, scientists often look to extremophiles, organisms that thrive in the most inhospitable places on Earth. Extremophiles can survive radiation, extreme temperatures, high pressures, and acidic or alkaline environments. Organisms like the tardigrade, which can endure the vacuum of space, and thermophilic bacteria found in hydrothermal vents show how adaptable life can be.

The search for life beyond Earth has redefined the boundaries of possibility, showing that life may exist in places once deemed impossible. As exploration progresses, every mission adds to our understanding, potentially bringing us closer to answering one of humanity’s most profound questions. Life, in its myriad of forms, may be more resilient than we ever imagined, existing in diverse and unexpected cosmic arenas, inviting us to reconsider our place in the universe.

Stories helped Vikings navigate

The Vikings did not navigate by map, compass or sextant. Instead, they used "mental maps" where memories and experiences played a crucial role. They also used myths linked to various coastal landmarks.

"Examples include Viking stories about the islands Torghatten, Hestmona and Skrova off the Norwegian coast. The stories serve to remind sailors of the dangers surrounding these places, or of their importance as navigation marks," explains Jarrett.

These preserved myths are the last remnants of what must once have been a landscape steeped in stories. Jarrett calls this a "maritime cultural mindscape." Small islets, skerries and reefs were all part of a web of stories that helped the Vikings navigate through the landscape, and that were passed down through generations of seafarers.

For instance, a bite from the Brazilian wandering spider can result in serious medical complications, whereas the venom of a giant house spider typically poses no threat to humans, raising the question, what drives such differences in venom potency?

The researchers discovered that diet is one of the most important drivers influencing the potency of spider venom. They found that spider venoms are what is called prey-specific, meaning if a spider primarily hunts insects, its venom is likely to be particularly effective at killing insects in general, such as crickets and flies, but far less effective against other non-insect prey, like small mammals.

Our results show that spider venoms have evolved to be especially potent when tested on animals found in their diet in the wild.

This may explain why species that are known to occasionally prey upon small mammals, such as the Brazilian wandering spider or Black widow, have venoms that can cause medically significant effects in us humans, whereas species that only prey on invertebrates, such as the Giant house spider, have evolved venoms that target invertebrate physiologies rather than our own, posing little threat to us.

According to historical documents, the Utsuro-bune is believed to have washed ashore on the coast of Hitachi province on the afternoon of Feb. 22, 1803, during the late Edo Period (1603-1867).

When locals looked at the strange boat, they saw windows in its upper part and could make out that a woman inside it had red hair and eyebrows and was holding a box, according to the legend.

She did not speak Japanese.

The essay describes the story of the Utsuro-bune and details the boat and the woman. The description mentions mysterious letters, which looked like combinations of triangles and circles.

Some of the historical materials related to the story have only been discovered recently.

Immunofluorescence analysis shows that the external odontodes of extant chondrichthyans and teleosts retain extensive innervation suggestive of a sensory function akin to teeth These patterns of convergence and innervation reveal that dentine evolved as a sensory tissue in the exoskeleton of early vertebrates, a function retained in modern vertebrate teeth.

Middle-Ordovician fossils now represent the oldest known evidence for vertebrate dental tissues.

An ancestral sensory function of dentine reveals that independent vertebrate dental specializations, or autapomorphies, reflect a shared history. Notably, there are numerous reports of modern vertebrates with sensitive external odontodes. Blind catfish have specialized dermal odontodes that have a purported sensory function.

Several mammals, such as narwhals, have specialized dentition that serves a sensory function.

Odontoblasts themselves are widely recognized to be sensory cells.

When viewed through this evolutionary lens, the fact that teeth in the mouth are extremely sensitive is less of a mystery, and more a reflection of their evolutionary origins within the sensory armour of early vertebrates.

OP: @RadicalAnthro@c.im

Clues are emerging about the ghostly clan that settled eastern Asia and left a genetic legacy in people today.

Nine months later came the second bombshell. Krause and his colleagues had obtained the entire nuclear genome from the finger bone, which yielded much more information. It showed that the Denisovans were a sister group to the Neanderthals, which lived in Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. The team also described the discovery of a molar tooth, which, on the basis of its mitochondrial DNA, was Denisovan: it was unusually large, unlike teeth from modern humans or Neanderthals.

Even more surprisingly, the team reported that present-day people living on the islands of New Guinea and Bougainville in the southwestern Pacific Ocean have inherited 4–6% of their DNA from Denisovans, despite the fact that these islands are roughly 8,500 kilometres from Denisova Cave. This implied that modern humans interbred with Denisovans, and that Denisovans were once widespread across Asia.

A new species of flapjack octopus, with massive eyes and blood-red tentacles, has been discovered from a deep-sea canyon off the coast of Australia.

The new species has been named Opisthoteuthis carnarvonensis, or the Carnarvon flapjack octopus, for the location in which it was found.

It's the tenth and latest new species to be described from specimens collected during a 2022 voyage by research vessel (RV) Investigator led by CSIRO, Australia's national science agency.

One factor shaping people’s experiences in public settings concerns where they focus their attention. Since there is more information out in the world than anyone could ever realistically take in, people are driven to conserve their limited mental resources for those things that seem most crucial to navigating the world successfully. What this means is that every person’s attention is finite and selective: By attending to certain bits of information, you necessarily tune out others, whether you’re aware of doing so or not.

More often than not, the information you deem worthy of attention also tends to be self-relevant. That is, people are more likely to engage with information that piques their interest or relates to them in some way, whereas they tend to ignore information that seems unrelated or irrelevant to their existence.

These ingrained tendencies might make logical sense from an evolutionary perspective, but when applied to everyday social interaction, they suggest that people will limit their attention to and regard for other people unless they see others as somehow connected to them or relevant to their lives.

Light is electromagnetic radiation: basically, an electric wave and a magnetic wave coupled together and traveling through space-time. It has no mass. That point is critical because the mass of an object, whether a speck of dust or a spaceship, limits the top speed it can travel through space.

But because light is massless, it’s able to reach the maximum speed limit in a vacuum – about 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second, or almost 6 trillion miles per year (9.6 trillion kilometers). Nothing traveling through space is faster. To put that into perspective: In the time it takes you to blink your eyes, a particle of light travels around the circumference of the Earth more than twice.

As incredibly fast as that is, space is incredibly spread out. Light from the Sun, which is 93 million miles (about 150 million kilometers) from Earth, takes just over eight minutes to reach us. In other words, the sunlight you see is eight minutes old.

Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us after the Sun, is 26 trillion miles away (about 41 trillion kilometers). So by the time you see it in the night sky, its light is just over four years old.

The ZEUS laser facility at the University of Michigan has roughly doubled the peak power of any other laser in the U.S. with its first official experiment at 2 petawatts (2 quadrillion watts).

Research at ZEUS will have applications in medicine, national security, materials science and astrophysics, in addition to plasma science and quantum physics.

According to existing research, the very first land plants emerged in the Ordovician geological period, roughly 485 to 444 million years ago. At first there were mosses, then ferns, ginkgos and conifers. Flowering plants—now the most diverse group of land plants—did not appear until more than 300 million years later.

Researchers have now identified the oldest pollen produced by eudicot flowering plants in sedimentary successions from Portugal. Together with their team, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Heimhofer of the LUH Institute of Earth System Sciences and Dr. Julia Gravendyck of the Bonn Institute of Organismic Biology at the University of Bonn identified fossilized angiosperm pollen from coastal marine sediments deposited within the Lusitanian Basin in Portugal. They dated these deposits to approximately 123 million years ago.

How the flowering plants developed, and from which plants, remains unclear. What is considered fact, however, is that angiosperms had a lasting impact on the development of life on our planet. They significantly enriched the diversity of species on Earth.

Humans have known the Earth is round for more than 2,000 years, but a movement questioning that fact has reached the corners of American politics.

People involved in politics in Alabama, Georgia and Minnesota have attracted attention for their links to the flat Earth movement, although their beliefs and reasoning vary.

To some, the beliefs have a spiritual connection. Others say they have a healthy skepticism of scientific consensus.

Data from a 2021 University of New Hampshire survey shows nearly 10% of Americans believe the Earth is flat, indicating how widespread pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories are emerging in the U.S.

There's a lot of matter around, which ensures that any antimatter produced experiences a very short lifespan. Studying antimatter, therefore, has been extremely difficult. But that's changed a bit in recent years, as CERN has set up a facility that produces and traps antimatter, allowing for extensive studies of its properties, including entire anti-atoms.

Unfortunately, the hardware used to capture antiprotons also produces interference that limits the precision with which measurements can be made. So CERN decided that it might be good to determine how to move the antimatter away from where it's produced. Since it was tackling that problem anyway, CERN decided to make a shipping container for antimatter, allowing it to be put on a truck and potentially taken to labs throughout Europe.

Tall tales such as those told by Malmgren are not innocent fun.

Malmgren hijacked the personas of real people to serve as characters in his self-glorifying fantasies — McNamara, Bundy, Shriver, and LeMay, among others. He put words into the mouths of these men that they never said and imputed to them actions that they never took. Richard Bissell, a leader of the early CIA, suffered the worst misuse at Malmgren’s hands, as Malmgren attributed to him corroboration of various unsubstantiated UFO-alien stories, including a tale of an alien survivor of the 1947 Roswell incident.

Some of the Malmgren claims are now receiving wide exposure in certain quarters. A final interview, issued as a 3-hour, 49-minute video by YouTube channel owner Jesse Michels on April 22, drew over 650,000 views in less than a month. Ross Coulthart of the NewsNation network has repeatedly and enthusiastically promoted Malmgren’s claimed credentials and adventure tales without any evident attempt at serious fact checking. Others are similarly engaged.

In a recent controversy over Malmgren’s Wikipedia profile, Michels suggested that it was “shameless” for editors to challenge Malmgren’s claims because Malmgren “can’t defend himself.” The premise is absurd, antithetical to fundamental requirements of historical research and investigative journalism. Malmgren’s claims, if true, would have the most profound public policy implications, including his claims that the U.S. government gained possession of nonhuman craft in 1933, 1947, 1962, and perhaps other times, with the corollary that the government has lied about this for decades. That would be important, if true. When the allegations are that serious, the credibility of the person making them is the first test — and it deserves serious scrutiny before such claims are publicly embraced and widely disseminated.

If you are sneezing this spring, you are not alone. Every year, plants release billions of pollen grains into the air, specks of male reproductive material that many of us notice only when we get watery eyes and runny noses.

However, pollen grains are far more than allergens – they are nature’s time capsules, preserving clues about Earth’s past environments for millions of years.

Pollen’s tough outer shell enables it to survive long after its parent plants have disappeared. When pollen grains become trapped in sediments at the bottom of lakes, oceans and riverbeds, fossil pollen can provide scientists with a unique history of the environments those pollen-producing plants were born into. They can tell us about the vegetation, climate and even human activity through time.

To better understand the metabolism of what were likely among the first living organisms on Earth, a research team led by Professor William Orsi from LMU’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences conducted laboratory simulations mimicking early Earth conditions, dating back 4 to 3.6 billion years. These simulations replicated aspects of modern hydrothermal vents known as “black smokers” on the ocean floor. However, a key difference was that the ancient oceans contained much higher levels of dissolved iron.

In the laboratory experiment, the researchers produced miniature versions of such “black smokers.” As it happens naturally at the seafloor, iron and sulfur geochemical reactions took place at high temperatures, forming iron sulfide minerals such as mackinawite (FeS) and greigite (Fe3S4) in a process that produced hydrogen gas (H2).

In these “chemical gardens,” the single-celled archaean Methanocaldococcus jannaschii was not only able to thrive, but positively exceeded the expectations of the researchers: “As well as overexpressing some genes of the acetyl-CoA metabolism, the archaeans actually grew exponentially,” explains Vanessa Helmbrecht, lead author of the study, which has now been published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. “At the beginning, we expected only slight growth, as we did not add any extra nutrients, vitamins, or trace metals to the experiment.”

The single-celled organism thus proved highly adept at utilizing the hydrogen gas produced by the abiotic precipitation of iron sulfides as an energy source.

Our Milky Way galaxy is home to some extremely weird things, but a new discovery has astronomers truly baffled.

In data collected by a powerful radio telescope, astronomers have found what appears to be a perfectly spherical bubble. We know more or less what it is – it's the ball of expanding material ejected by an exploding star, a supernova remnant – but how it came to be is more of a puzzle.

David Grusch Briefs Congress in SCIF as New Whistleblower Steps Forward | Sol Briefing, May 2025

Did you know goldfish can learn to drive cars? Have you heard bumblebees can learn to pull on a string? Would you believe some primates can perform calculations with Arabic numerals?

These tasks seem completely irrelevant to these animals in their natural environment, so why are researchers interested in them?

Understanding how animals respond to ecologically irrelevant tasks sheds light on how our own intelligence has evolved. We frequently use comparisons between humans and non-human primates to understand whether a cognitive capacity has evolved in modern humans, or if we observe similar abilities in other primates and animals.

For example, children as young as 24 months old can find a hidden object in a room when its location is pointed out to them in a photograph. This ability is known as representational insight.

Some chimpanzees can also pass this test. Do these results mean a chimpanzee has the same level of intelligence as a two-year-old child?

Furthermore, this test may allow us to estimate when representational insight evolved. It may have been before humans and chimpanzees split into different lineages.

One of the most pressing questions researchers seek to answer is how such a large number of dinosaurs perished simultaneously. According to Prof. Bamforth, the leading hypothesis is that the Pachyrhinosaurus herd encountered a catastrophic event, likely a flash flood. This sudden deluge could have been triggered by a storm that struck the surrounding mountains, unleashing an unstoppable torrent of water that swept through the region.

The evidence collected at Pipestone Creek suggests that the flood was powerful enough to uproot trees and shift boulders, with the sediment patterns revealing the chaos of that fateful day. The top-heavy Pachyrhinosaurus, not built for swimming and unable to move quickly due to their sheer numbers, would have been unable to escape the rushing waters.

A gobsmacked holidaymaker has filmed a video of a "panther-like" large cat traversing a field with a deceased rabbit in its jaws.

Paul Murtha spotted the enigmatic creature whilst enjoying a weekend getaway with his wife in Northumberland.

The footage captured by Paul has been deemed"fascinating" by some experts.

"Granted, the footage ain't the best but 100 percent this did not look like a house cat. It was the size of a small Labrador. I was about half a mile away from it and I don't think you'd even see a house cat from that distance."

Lichens become more than their biology, mainly because they are in situ for such an extensive length of time and even often incorporate their substrate into their main body. Depending on the environment, individuals can colonise rock and stone for decades, centuries, thousands of years even; it’s been proposed that some of the oldest found in northern Alaska are in the range of 10-11,500 years old. And so, they blur the boundary between the biotic (living) and the abiotic (non-living), which occur on a continuum when you escape a species-scale view.

Cultural traditions lacking clear function are exceptionally common in humans, partially explained by our hyper-reliance on social learning. In non-human animals, it is unclear whether the same ecological and social conditions drive the emergence of both seemingly adaptive and non-adaptive traditions. Here, we describe the origins and spread of a tradition of interspecies abduction in the wild.

We documented carrying of eleven different infant howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata coibensis) by five immature male white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus imitator) over 15 months on Jicarón island, Coiba National Park, Panama. All cases occurred in one capuchin group, which has been studied since 2017 for their localized tradition of habitual stone tool-use, unique to Cebus2. We captured the origin of this ‘howler abduction’ tradition, starting with one subadult male innovator, and its spread to four subadult and juvenile males.

We argue that the same conditions which favored adaptive cultural innovations like tool-use on Jicarón also underlie this non-adaptive tradition.