Weird news stories

An investigation into the mystery filaments hanging in space around the heart of the Milky Way has turned up an entirely new population of them, aligned along the galactic plane and pointing in the direction of the galactic center. See the research here.

Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness.

A team of theoretical physicists have discovered a strange structure in space-time that to an outside observer would look exactly like a black hole, but upon closer inspection would be anything but: they would be defects in the very fabric of the universe. Read the paper here.

The explosion is more than 10 times brighter than any recorded exploding star – known as a supernova.

An AI-based decoder that can translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text has been developed, in a breakthrough that allows a person’s thoughts to be read non-invasively for the first time.

With the mass of about half an eyelash, a hunk of crystal exists in two distinct states at once. See research here.

The nature of dark matter is a longstanding puzzle. However, a new study by Alfred Amruth at the University of Hong Kong and colleagues, published in Nature Astronomy, uses the gravitational bending of light to bring us a step closer to understanding.

When deprived of water or snipped with scissors, plants emit a flurry of staccato “screams” that are too high-frequency for humans to hear, a study suggests. When lowered into a range that human ears can detect, these stress-induced pops sound like someone furiously tap dancing across a field of bubble wrap.

A peculiarly gruesome artifact has been uncovered during archaeological digs in England, hearkening back to long lost cultural practices that today we can only try to imagine.

Astronomers recently got an up-close look at a “potentially hazardous” asteroid as it whizzed safely past Earth, and what they saw caught them by surprise: The space rock is unusually elongated for an asteroid and is spinning much more slowly than expected.

Scientists rattling normal frozen water around in a jar of ultracold steel balls have discovered a previously unknown form of ice, closer to liquid water than any other ice yet.

Forged in magma and capable of producing the sharpest blades on Earth, obsidian is without a doubt one of the most badass materials ever imagined… The jet-black volcanic glass is also extremely delicate and dangerous to work with and was not mastered by humans until the latter part of the Stone Age… or so we thought.

In giant clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, innumerable stars wander among the galaxies like lost souls, emitting a ghostly haze of light. These stars are not gravitationally tied to any one galaxy in a cluster.

A scientist from Tokyo Metropolitan University has shown that large gamma-ray-emitting bubbles around the center of the Milky Way were produced by fast, outward-blowing winds and an associated “reverse shock.”

Two minerals that have never been seen before on Earth have been discovered inside a massive meteorite in Somalia. They could hold important clues to how asteroids form.