“We Hope It’s Random.” Amy Eskridge was 34 when she died from a gunshot wound to the head in Huntsville, Alabama, on June 11, 2022. Officials called it suicide. No public investigation. No follow-up. Case closed. Except Amy had been working on anti-gravity technology — the kind of research that…
Category: Science
Culture
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Fossil Loses “World’s Oldest Octopus” Title After 300-Million-Year Identity Crisis
A 300-million-year-old blob of fossilized tentacles just lost its title as the world’s oldest octopus. Turns out it was never an octopus. It was a nautilus—a shelled cephalopod that decomposed so thoroughly before fossilization that it fooled paleontologists for 24 years. The fossil, Pohlsepia mazonensis, was discovered in the Mazon…
Culture
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The Hurricane Cone Lied to You. Here’s What It Actually Means.
The National Hurricane Center’s iconic “cone of uncertainty” — the five-day track forecast graphic that’s been a fixture of cable news panic coverage since 2002 — is getting its first major redesign this summer. After two years of experimental testing and public feedback, the updated version debuts when the first…
Extreme Weather
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Darker Than Movies Show” — Prof Reveals What Tornado REALLY Looks Like Inside
Tornadoes have always made me nervous. When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Detroit in March of ’76, an F4 touched down in our city, and it was very scary. It was extremely rare for this sized tornado of this size to strike Michigan. So when…
Health
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Nine Blood Molecules Predict Survival Better Than Your Birthday
The piRNA longevity test results came out of Duke University this week, and they’re the kind of findings that make you wonder what else we’ve been measuring wrong. Researchers analyzed blood samples from 1,271 adults aged 71 and older — samples drawn in the early 1990s from five North Carolina…
Culture
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Doomsday Clock 2026: Closer to Catastrophe, Further From Solutions
The Doomsday Clock 2026 announcement landed this week with all the fanfare of a fire alarm in an empty building. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the clock four seconds closer to midnight. We’re now at 85 seconds — the closest humanity has ever been to self-inflicted annihilation since…
Health
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The Harvard Longevity Study Just Killed Your Gym Bro Routine
Thirty years. Over 111,000 people were tracked. Harvard researchers are asking one question: what actually helps you live longer? The answer wasn’t what the fitness industry wanted to hear. Published in BMJ Medicine, the study found that people who mixed different types of exercise — walking, tennis, rowing, stairs, cycling…
Mother Nature
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Just Because You Can Get Close to Lava Doesn’t Mean You Should
There’s something about fire on the horizon that grabs us — especially when that fire is molten rock flowing down the flank of a volcano. Mount Etna in Sicily, Europe’s most active volcano, lit up again this winter with lava flows that have tourists itching to get nearer. But what…
Medical
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A Human Brain Was Recorded While Dying. It Happened More Than Once.
This wasn’t a planned experiment. However, it was not a one-off. An 87-year-old man was being monitored with EEG equipment because of epilepsy. The recording was routine. Continuous. Then he suffered cardiac arrest. The machines kept running. That case produced the clearest data. But it wasn’t the only one. Two…
Culture
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Praying Mantises Have a Reputation — This One Learned a Workaround
I was reading about a newly discovered praying mantis the other day — the kind of thing you stumble on while pretending you’re just “checking the news” — and it turns out one species has solved one of nature’s more awkward problems. Specifically: how not to get eaten immediately after…