Weird news stories

Mysterious zones in the deep mantle where earthquake waves slow to a crawl may actually be everywhere, new research finds.

A trio of evolutionary biologists at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology has learned more about the evolutionary history of tardigrades by studying two fossils embedded in amber. Their study is published in Communications Biology.

Researchers using the Gaia space telescope studied some ancient stars near the sun, revealing that our corner of the Milky Way may be billions of years older than once thought. See their findings in the pre-print arXiv server earlier this year.

Chugging quietly away in the dark depths of Earth’s ocean floors, a spontaneous chemical reaction is unobtrusively creating oxygen, all without the involvement of life. This unexpected discovery upends the long-standing consensus that it takes photosynthesizing organisms to produce the oxygen we need to breathe. This research was published in Nature Geoscience.

So much is still unknown about consciousness, nevermind whether brain organoids will achieve it, explains a leading neuroscientist.

It sounds like a scene from a Spielberg film: an injured worker undergoes an emergency amputation, performed by one of her colleagues, allowing her to live another day. But this is not a human story – it is behaviour seen in ants.

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) can leave a significant and lasting impression on those who go through them, and can also boost feelings of empathy towards others, according to a new survey.

Mysterious dark matter could slosh over our planet like a wave. If it does, it may produce telltale radio waves in Earth’s atmosphere, new theoretical research suggests.

Details of the “highly unusual” neutron star’s discovery is published in Nature Astronomy. There have been more than 3,000 radio-emitting neutron stars discovered.  The newly found star’s spin is well outside what astrophysicists predict of neutron star behaviour.

If you search “shrimp Jesus” on Facebook, you might encounter dozens of images of artificial intelligence (AI) generated crustaceans meshed in various forms with a stereotypical image of Jesus Christ. Some of these hyper-realistic images have garnered more than 20,000 likes and comments. So what exactly is going on here?

A colossal structure in the distant Universe is defying our understanding of how the Universe evolved. In light that has traveled for 6.9 billion years to reach us, astronomers have found a giant, almost perfect ring of galaxies, some 1.3 billion light-years in diameter. It doesn’t match any known structure or formation mechanism.

A recent analysis of a sperm whale’s vocalizations suggests variations in ‘clicks’ represent a kind of alphabet that forms the basis of a complex communication system. This research was published in Nature Communications.

For the first time in nearly a century, physicists have identified a brand new type of magnetic material. Physicists have reported a new class of magnetic materials called altermagnets, which could lead to new technologies such as faster, more efficient computer hard drives.

The hunt for the elusive Planet Nine goes on, and new research claims to have the “strongest statistical evidence yet” that there is such a planet orbiting somewhere around the far edges of the Solar System.

From house plants and gardens to fields and forests, green is the color we most associate with surface life on Earth…But an Earth-like planet orbiting another star might look very different, potentially covered by bacteria that receive little or no visible light or oxygen…Instead of green, many such bacteria on Earth contain purple pigments…Cornell scientists report in new research.

New research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution examines the rate at which new species of hominin emerged over 5 million years. This speciation in our lineage, they found, is unlike almost anything else.