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The study looked at hypervelocity stars, ones that are screaming through space at speeds far higher than stars around them. Some of these stars are moving so rapidly that they have reached galactic escape velocity; the Milky Way’s gravity can’t hold them. In the coming eons, they’ll flee the galaxy entirely. And we have good reason to believe these runaway stars were launched by SMBHs—but how?

The findings offer unprecedented insight into early Arabian therapeutic and sensorial practices, revealing that native plants were already being deliberately used for their bioactive and psychoactive properties nearly 2,700 years ago.

Earth's largest gold reserves are not kept inside Fort Knox, the United States Bullion Depository. In fact, they are hidden much deeper in the ground than one would expect. More than 99.999% of Earth's stores of gold and other precious metals lie buried under 3,000 km of solid rock, locked away within Earth's metallic core and far beyond the reaches of humankind.

A group of fossils of elasmosaurs—some of the most famous in North America—have just been formally identified as belonging to a "very odd" new genus of the sea monster, unlike any previously known.

Long-necked and measuring in at 12 meters, Traskasaura sandrae—as it is officially named today in this new study—possessed heavy, sharp, robust teeth, ideal for crushing.

Its unique suite of adaptations enabled this plesiosaur to hunt prey from above. The findings suggest that the fierce marine reptile was perhaps one of the first plesiosaur taxa to do so.

The 85-million-year-old fossils are not new to science, though, far from it.

The first (now known to be) Traskasaura fossil was discovered from Late Cretaceous rocks in 1988 along the Puntledge River on Vancouver Island.

Full paper:

A name for the Provincial Fossil of British Columbia: a strange new elasmosaur taxon from the Santonian of Vancouver Island

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14772019.2025.2489938

Emotional lives

Corvids show cognitive biases, similar to humans. They have negative moods and show signs of pessimism after observing similar states in others.

But they also show positive moods after successfully using tools – just like humans. And they can also show neophobia – wariness of new objects.

Even if you come with treats to give them, corvids are reluctant to fly close to someone they haven’t met before, but are confident with humans they know well – another common human trait.

It is common for people to only attribute emotional lives to mammals, but corvids show that we should study the emotions of birds in more detail.

A rich sense of self

They not only recognise themselves in mirrors, but also understand other minds. Research has shown corvids go back to remove cached food and hide it elsewhere if they know they have been observed – but only if they have stolen from others in the past.

The researchers say this combination of a dynamo plus a large impact, coupled with the impact's shockwave, is enough to explain the moon's highly magnetized surface rocks—particularly on the far side. One way to know for sure is to directly sample the rocks for signs of shock and high magnetism. This could be a possibility, as the rocks lie on the far side, near the lunar south pole, where missions such as NASA's Artemis program plan to explore.

Two recent scientific studies estimate that more than 1 billion birds – and as many as 5.19 billion – die from collisions with sheet glass each year in the United States alone, sometimes immediately but often from their injuries.

In fact, window collisions are now considered the top human cause of bird deaths. Due to window collisions and other causes, bird populations across North America have declined more than 29% from their 1970 levels, likely with major consequences for the world’s ecosystems.

The Iron Age ‘war cemetery’ of Maiden Castle hillfort, Dorset, England, is one of the most internationally celebrated of British archaeological discoveries, levels of trauma recorded on skeletons found there being interpreted as evidence for a Roman massacre. A new radiocarbon dating programme and reanalysis of the burial patterning, presented here for the first time, shows that the inhumations actually fall into temporal clusters of lethal violence, plausibly spanning multiple generations, spread mostly between the early and middle decades of the first century AD. This is suggestive of increasing societal stress in the decades leading up to, rather than as a product of, the Roman invasion of AD 43.

Meet The Startup Summoning UFOs: Skywatcher Interview

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.