Jingszo !

It's the first time scientists have observed prey behavior inside a predator's digestive tract.

A species of Japanese eel has proven to be a master escape artist, capable of wriggling its way through a predator’s digestive tract to freedom.

While it was known previously that Anguila japonica (which, despite its name, can be found off the coasts of Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and the Philippines, as well as Japan) was capable of escaping from its predators’ insides, it wasn’t clear how they pulled it off.

Now, thanks to some novel camera work, that technique has been documented in a study published today in Current Biology. According to the team, it’s the first time the behavior of prey has been captured while it’s still inside a predator’s digestive system.

The Lyman-α emission line has never been seen earlier than 550 million years after the Big Bang. So why does JADES-GS-z13-1-LA have one?

Key Takeaways

• Since its launch in December of 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted record-setting objects all across the Universe, including at the greatest distances ever seen. 

• Many distant galaxies are energetic, and show signatures of emission lines from specific atoms and molecules, particularly hydrogen. However, the Lyman-α line has never been seen earlier than 550 million years after the Big Bang. 

• Until now. With the discovery and spectroscopic follow-up on galaxy JADES-GS-z13-1-LA, we now have strong evidence for that emission line from a galaxy just 326 million years after the Big Bang. The question is: how?

Psychopathic tendencies may be present to some extent in all of us. New research is reframing this often sensationalized and maligned set of traits and finding some positive twists.

Think of a psychopath and any number of Hollywood villains might come to mind, from charming killers like Hannibal Lecter to Anton Chigurh, portrayed with chilling menace by Javier Bardem in the film No Country for Old Men. But the traits and symptoms of psychopathy run along scales that range from weak to strong. So, someone may be mildly psychopathic or severely so. There could be a psychopath sitting next to you right now.

Some psychologists argue that the focus on violent and criminal psychopathic behavior has marginalized the study of what they call “successful psychopaths” — people who have psychopathic tendencies but who can stay out of trouble, and perhaps even benefit from these traits in some way. Researchers haven’t yet reached a consensus on which traits distinguish successful psychopaths from serial killers, but they are working to clarify what they say is a misunderstood branch of human behavior. Some even want to reclaim and rehabilitate the concept of psychopathy itself.

What specifically do the authors mean when they—as we saw in the epigraph—call the UFO silence in international relations a taboo? They suggest that instead of merely not appearing in research, there is instead an “authoritative disregard of UFOs” that includes “active denial of their object status” through decrying UFOlogy as pseudoscience, active dismissal of public UFO claims, and maintaining intense secrecy around official UFO research and reports....

My suggestion at this juncture is that the UFO taboo is what IR theorists make of it. This was not a necessary outcome of the citational ecosystem that developed around “Sovereignty and the UFO,” as we could have imagined multiple ways in which scholars might have engaged with the piece—true ignorance, skeptic debunking, or UFOlogical engagement.

Scholarly taboos are not fixed and necessary imperatives in the prestige economy of academic publishing, but are instead socially constructed phenomena that are continually (re)produced through the strategies of association that scholars employ in their citation and non-citation of texts.

The UFO taboo example, then, is not only a case that helps us to understand the status of extraterrestrials in challenging the anthropocentrism of sovereignty, but also many other norms in scholarly discourse that are reproduced through citational practice.

Rather than merely a structural category, taboos in scholarly discourse are also mediated by the intersubjective creation of meaning—just as the interaction of states could have created institutions other than self-help, other strategies of scholarly engagement with “Sovereignty and the UFO” might have broadened or undone the UFO taboo instead of the narrowing that we have witnessed.

This recognition of scholarly agency in the construction of meaning is important because it reveals how interpretive scientometrics might be put to work in broader contexts within the field.

A former Pentagon UFO chief has claimed that aliens are real - with "non-human" bodies previously found on earth.

According to Luis Elizondo, a long-time Defence Department researcher, he has handled "alien" technology and claims that "bodies" have been recovered from several sites. In his new book, "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs," the American makes several eyebrow raising claims.

For instance, he claims to have been told categorically the infamous Roswell incident in New Mexico in 1947 involved two flying saucers – and “four deceased non-human bodies” were recovered from the wreckage and examined.

Elizondo said: "We know where they were. We don’t know where they are. I’ve got to be careful what I say here, to not get in trouble – I still have my security clearance." He claims other bodies have also been retrieved from subsequent sites, including Mexico in the 1950s and Kazakhstan in 1989."

Police across America have published the first guide on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena – the new name for UFOs -which details encounters between suspected encounters, and how these incidents should be reported.

The report, which is 11 pages long, warns officers of the ‘significant safety risks to law enforcement air support units’ the unidentified flying objects pose, and urge them to be vigilant when travelling in helicopters.

Officers’ stories of UFO confrontations are also included, with one in 2023 where a law employee saw a ‘trangle craft with green lights gliding through the sky’ before a local resident said something ‘ran’ nearby, the Mail Online reports.

The document has been created by police executive as ‘it’s in the interest of law enforcement to be aware of trends and reporting on UAP due to the unknown threat they may pose.’

Albert Einstein spent the last three decades of his life pursuing a unified field theory that would unify gravity with electromagnetism and the other fundamental forces into a single theoretical framework. However, he was ultimately unsuccessful in this endeavor. This article reviews the major issues and challenges that Einstein encountered in his attempts to formulate a viable unified field theory:

Incompatibility of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

The central problem is the fundamental incompatibility between Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum mechanics, which governs the behavior of matter and energy at the subatomic scale. General relativity treats spacetime as smooth and continuous, while quantum theory is based on quantized, discrete values. The two theories are mathematically inconsistent when naively combined....

On a Sunday morning in late August 2024 a nine-year-old girl named Eli-zé du Toit was sitting on her grandparents’ porch near a small town in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, when she heard a long rumble, then heard a rustling in a nearby fig tree. As she watched, a rock fell out of the tree. When Eli-zé picked it up, she noticed that the rock had a black crust and a grey interior “like concrete”. It was warm on the crust and cold on the inside.

Elsewhere in the Eastern Cape, videos and photographs on social media of a bright light in the sky tipped scientists off to the possibility that a meteorite had fallen in the area.

A meteorite is a piece of rocky space debris that survives after colliding with the Earth.

On 26 August, a day after the event, scientists confirmed that there was sufficient evidence to link the two events to a “likely car-sized” rock fragment having entered Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated over the Eastern Cape.

The rock young Eli-zé found was just one small fragment of that meteorite, weighing in at about 90 grams.

It was unveiled at a press conference involving scientists from Nelson Mandela University, Rhodes University as well as the University of the Witwatersrand, on 3 September. 

Do we know where in space it originated?

It’s likely to have come from one of the larger bodies in the asteroid belt, which is between Jupiter and Mars. After repeated impacts onto that body, one impact will have shot this piece off and sent it on a trajectory towards Earth. We can’t yet say if that happened tens of millions of years ago or thousands of millions of years ago.

OP: @kingsleybugarin@vivaldi.net

The phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” originated shortly before the turn of the 20th century. It’s attributed to a late-1800s physics schoolbook that contained the example question “Why can not a man lift himself by pulling up on his bootstraps?”

So when it became a colloquial phrase referring to socioeconomic advancement shortly thereafter, it was meant to be sarcastic, or to suggest that it was an impossible accomplishment.

Eventually, however, the phrase’s commonly-accepted meaning evolved, and now when we tell people to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” it’s implying that socioeconomic advancement is something that everyone should be able to do—albeit something difficult.

Also: Boots with bootstraps—or at least the shoe parts commonly called bootstraps, since boots with straps are much older—weren’t popularized until ~1870, so the character Bootstrap Bill in Pirates of the Caribbean, which is set in the late 1700s, is an anachronism.

The Knights Templar, renowned for their military prowess and mystique, may have had an unusual companion at their headquarters in Acre—a pet crocodile. According to a newly translated 14th-century German account, this fearsome reptile was tamed by the Templars, adding a curious twist to the legend of the medieval order.

The source of this strange tale comes from Der Niederrheinische Orientbericht, an anonymous German work from the mid-14th century. Recently translated into English, this account describes the Middle East, particularly Egypt, and offers a blend of accurate observations and fantastical details. The author, whose identity remains unknown, was possibly a diplomat or merchant traveling through the region.

While the text mainly focuses on the people and places of the region, it also describes several animals, including lions, elephants, and giraffes. Some descriptions are factual, while others stray into the realm of exaggeration. The author’s depiction of crocodiles is a mix of both:

A crocodile is an extraordinarily dangerous animal; it is very strong and horrifying. It is bigger than an ox in size. Its fur is like that of a wolf; it lives in Egypt in the great river called the Nile, which flows from paradise. The crocodile is a terrifyingly fast and harmful animal.

Published :February 2006

Most mainstream scientists believe that few species of large mammal remain to be discovered. Nevertheless, there are countless unverified reports of a large, non-human, bipedal primate from Asia (the ‘Yeti’) and North America (‘Sasquatch’ or ‘Bigfoot’). Thus far, none of these reports has been convincingly verified by modern scientific methods .

However, new species inhabiting remote areas are occasionally described that were previously known only from local and traditional knowledge. The most recently described large mammal could be the sao la Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, which became known to science in 1992 from three sets of horns found in the possession of hunters in the Vu Quang Nature Reserve in Vietnam . Subsequent surveys and the morphometric and DNA analysis of >20 specimens revealed that the sao la was a previously undescribed 100-kg bovid distinct from all described genera.

More recently, in 2003 a new species of African monkey (Lophocebus kipunji) was discovered in southern Tanzania, based on sightings, photographs and recorded distinctive vocalizations.

Discoveries such as these fuel hope in the cryptozoology community for the existence of more enigmatic creatures, such as the Sasquatch.

Deep beneath our feet, at a staggering depth of over 5,100km, lies Earth’s inner core — a solid ball of iron and nickel that plays a crucial role in shaping the conditions we experience on the surface. In fact, without it we’d be unlikely to even exist.

But despite its significance, it’s a bit of a puzzle how it formed and developed. We don’t even know how old it is. Luckily, mineral physics is bringing us closer to solving the mystery.

The inner core is responsible for Earth’s magnetic field, which acts like a shield, protecting us from harmful solar radiation. This magnetic field might have been important for creating the conditions that allowed life to thrive billions of years ago.

The Earth’s inner core was once liquid, but has turned solid over time. As the Earth gradually cools, the inner core expands outwards at the surrounding iron-rich liquid “freezes”. That said, it is still extremely hot, at least 5,000 Kelvin (K) (4726.85°C).

Published : December 2021

Highlights

• German excavator Robert Koldewey thought Babylon’s dragon was related to dinosaurs.

• Babylon’s dragon appeared in foundational cryptozoology work about living dinosaurs.

• Koldewey’s Germany was gripped by dinomania; dinosaurs came alive in visual culture.

• The reception of ideas is unpredictable; some ideas become canonised on the fringe.

In 1918, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, excavator of Babylon, Iraq, observed that the depiction of the fantastical “dragon of Babylon” on the sixth century BCE Ishtar Gate must reference a real animal whose closest relatives would be dinosaurs like the iguanodon.

Though ignored within archaeology, Koldewey’s comments were taken up in German-American popular science writer Willy Ley’s “romantic zoology” (1941), then by Bernard Heuvelmans (1955), founding figure in the fringe field of cryptozoology.

Their interpretations would ultimately inspire expeditions by the International Society of Cryptozoologists in Central Africa to find the Mokele-Mbembe, a “living dinosaur,” and migrate into Young Earth Creationist and ancient aliens theories.

An analysis of Koldewey’s marginal academic observation serves as a means of considering the process of knowledge formation and canonization and the unpredictable life of scholarly ideas.

China's mysterious space plane has returned to Earth after spending over 8 months in orbit.

The reusable spacecraft landed at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in a remote section of northwest China on Friday (Sept. 6). It launched from the same site atop a Long March 2F rocket on Dec. 14, 2023, on its third mission, and spent 268 days in orbit, according to Chinese state media outlet Xinhua.

It's unknown what exactly China's space plane was doing on this most recent mission  — or on any other mission, for that matter. As with seen in previous missions, spacecraft trackers on the ground observed the space plane releasing a small object into orbit.

For centuries, a mystery has been hiding in plain sight on the surface of the moon: bright, sinuous swirls that sprawl across thousands of square kilometers of the lunar landscape, visible through telescopes on Earth but defying explanation.

Now, at last, scientists are starting to understand them—and it turns out they’re weirder than anyone would have imagined.

These enigmatic “lunar swirls” are the result of ancient underground force fields that shield the moon from barrages of subatomic particles blasted out by the sun. Each swirl is a meandering blanket of pristine rock interlaced with darkened, radiation-zapped material.

Unlike Earth, the moon today doesn’t have a global magnetic field. It had a weak one billions of years ago, when it was still molten, but that died down quickly as the moon cooled. As rocks solidified on the surface, however, they were able to retain some of that ephemeral magnetism, creating more enduring localized regions with a somewhat stronger magnetic field. Given their ancient origin, these are called “relic” fields, and many are associated with lunar swirls.

The actual reason for this association became clear about a decade ago, when scientists published results in Nature Communications that showed that the relic fields around swirls, weak as they are, can still be strong enough to slightly deflect the solar wind impinging on the lunar surface. This wind consists of subatomic particles from the sun, and the trajectories of electrically charged particles such as electrons and protons can be changed by magnetic fields.

Where the relic fields are stronger, the particles veer off to the side, darkening the ground where they fall—and leaving curiously curlicue patterns in the more pristine magnetically shielded surface.

As described in his Philosophical Dictionary in 1764, Voltaire conducted this peculiar experiment to dispel an equally strange, yet persistent, myth dating back to ancient times: that bull’s blood was a deadly poison.

“If a man in his folly tastes the fresh blood of a bull, he falls heavily to the ground in distress, over-mastered by pain,” the Greek physician Nicander wrote in the second century BC.

Nicander was echoing earlier Greek writers like Aristotle, who described bull’s blood as the “quickest to coagulate” of all animal bloods (a claim unsupported by modern research, which has found that the blood of cattle clots more slowly on average than that of some other animals such as pigs and sheep).

However, Ancient Greek scholars believed that bull’s blood solidified rapidly in the throat when swallowed, causing fatal asphyxiation. “The blood congeals easily,” Nicander explained, “and, in the hollow of [the victim’s] stomach, clots; the passages are stopped, the breath is straitened within his clogged throat, while, often struggling in convulsions on the ground, he gasps bespattered with foam.” To treat this gruesome condition,

Nicander recommended several remedies, of which some (fresh figs in vinegar) sound easier to obtain than others (the milk of a hare or deer).

Vultures are not always the most visually appealing birds. But bearded vultures, or lammergeiers, are beautifully done up, with glossy dark wings, long thin goatees, and KISS-worthy eye masks. Their chests, heads, and legs are especially impressive, colored the rich red brown of polished mahogany. They deserve much of the credit for their fashion sense. These vultures turn their feathers red on purpose, covering themselves in iron oxide by bathing in rusty water or rubbing themselves with damp red soil.

They are the only birds known to intentionally color themselves, and exactly why they do is still not entirely settled.

Lammergeiers eat almost exclusively bones—the last remnants of the meals of other scavengers. Bones from anything smaller than a sheep they can eat whole. They’ll fly larger ones high into the air and drop them onto rocks over and over again until they break up into swallowable pieces.

Smith contends aliens have been invading our imagination at least since the ancients. The Greek philosopher Epicurus—who first came up with the idea that the universe is made up of atoms—speculated about other worlds, as did the Roman poet Lucretius.

In the second century CE, Lucian of Samosata wrote what is considered the first work of science fiction, a satire called "A True Story" about inhabitants of the sun and the moon fighting over the colonization of Venus.

Wells' novel was widely seen as a reflection of anxiety over British imperialism. The author once said the story was prompted by a discussion with his brother about the brutal British colonization of Tasmania; he wondered what would happen if Martians treated England the same way.

After taking the long view, does Smith believe in the existence of extraterrestrials? He prefers to defer to the great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. "Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

THIS fighter pilot had a real-life Independence Day moment when he emptied enough 30mm shells into a UFO to “obliterate” it.

After takeoff, Colonel Huerta flew to 2,500 metres and came in for an attack run. “I reached the necessary distance and shot a burst of sixty-four 30mm shells, which created a cone-shaped ‘wall of fire’ that would normally obliterate anything in its path,” he writes.

Just one of those shells would wipe out a car, but they had no effect on the object. “I thought that the balloon would then be torn open and gases would start pouring out of it. But nothing happened. It seemed as if the huge bullets were absorbed by the balloon, and it wasn’t damaged at all.”

The object then shot rapidly skywards away from the base, prompting Colonel Huerta to activate the plane’s afterburner to give chase 500m behind. As they reached the city of Camana, 84km from the base, the object came to a sudden stop, forcing him to veer to the side.

Turning up and to the right, Colonel Huerta attempted to position himself for another shot.

“I began closing in on it until I had it in perfect sight,” he writes. “I locked on the target and was ready to shoot. But just at that moment, the object made another fast climb, evading the attack. I was left underneath it; it ‘broke the attack’.”

He attempted the same manoeuvre two more times, and each time the object escaped by shooting upwards seconds before he could fire.

By this time the object was 14,000 metres above ground. Colonel Huerta decided to attempt an attack from above, so it could not leave his target range, but the object shadowed him all the way up to 19,200 metres — well above his aircraft’s specifications.

Running low on fuel, he realised he couldn’t continue the attack, so decided to fly close to the object to get a better look. It wasn’t until he was 100m away that he realised what it was.

“I was startled to see that the ‘balloon’ was not a balloon at all. It was an object that measured about 10 metres in diameter with a shiny dome on top that was cream-coloured, similar to a light bulb cut in half,” he writes.

“The bottom was a wider circular base, a silver colour, and looked like some kind of metal. It lacked all the typical components of aircraft. It had no wings, propulsion jets, exhausts, windows, antennae, and so forth. It had no visible propulsion system.

“At that moment, I realised this was not a spying device but a UFO, something totally unknown. I was almost out of fuel, so I couldn’t attack or manoeuvre my plane, or make a high-speed escape. Suddenly, I was afraid. I thought I might be finished.”

Colonel Huerta made his return, gliding part way due to lack of fuel and “zigzagging to make my plane harder to hit, always with my eyes on the rearview mirrors, hoping it wouldn’t chase me”.

During a a stormy evening on 23 November, 1953, the two men were stationed at Kinross Base (now known as Kincheloe Air Force Base) in Wisconsin when a report came in of an unidentified flying object (UFO, now known as UAP) over Lake Superior, near the commercial Soo Locks region at the US-Canadian border.

Moncla and Wilson were swiftly dispatched to perform an air defence intercept. However the pair would never return from the mission.

The pair were assisted to the unidentified object by ground radars, who watched as the two blips on the screen collided with each other and all communications and tracking with Moncla and Wilson's aircraft ceased.

The unidentified aircraft would then veer off the radar as well.

Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, we have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the last 1.8 billion years.

It is the first time Earth’s geological record has been used like this, looking so far back in time. This has enabled us to make an attempt at mapping the planet over the last 40% of its history, which you can see in the animation below.

New evidence suggests that billions of years ago, a star may have passed very close to our solar system. As a result, thousands of smaller celestial bodies in the outer solar system outside Neptune's orbit were deflected into highly inclined trajectories around the sun. It is possible that some of them were captured by the planets Jupiter and Saturn as moons.

Trajectory of the stellar flyby that shaped the outer Solar System

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02349-x

"There is no friction. There is no slowing down, and no atoms leaking or scattering into the rest of the system. There is just beautiful, coherent flow."

"These atoms are flowing, free of friction, for hundreds of microns," Fletcher adds. "To flow that long, without any scattering, is a type of physics you don't normally see in ultracold atom systems."

This effortless flow held up even when the researchers placed an obstacle in the atoms' path, like a speed bump, in the form of a point of light, which they shone along the edge of the original laser ring. Even as they came upon this new obstacle, the atoms didn't slow their flow or scatter away, but instead glided right past without feeling friction as they normally would.

Boeing's Starliner capsule will depart the International Space Station without astronauts today (Sept. 6), and you can watch the action live.

A livestream of Starliner's homecoming will begin at 5:45 p.m. EDT (2145 GMT) today, featuring the capsule's undocking at 6:04 p.m. EDT (2204 GMT). You can watch it here at Space.com, via NASA Television.

Money, Mods, and Mayhem

The Turning Point

In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it's a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.

The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it's basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn't mince words: "Reddit's API changes are not just unfair, they're unsustainable for third-party apps."

Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.

The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.

One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”