Jingszo !

Altruistic behaviors such as prey sharing are prosocial acts that can instigate and perpetuate various forms of reciprocity. Subsequent relationship dynamics provide a foundation for the evolution of societal norms and associated encephalization in social taxa, like primates and dolphins. Some cultures within these families benefit from interactions with other mammal species but accounts of any wild animals attempting to provision humans are extremely rare.

In this article, we present 34 cases of both sexes and all age classes of killer whales (Orcinus orca) offering prey and other items to people who were on boats (n = 21), in the water (n = 11), and on shore (n = 2) in four oceans.

A total of 18 species were offered—six fishes, five mammals, three invertebrates, two birds, one reptile, and one seaweed.

In almost every case the whales awaited a human response before subsequently reacting.

The occurrence of these events suggests a limited cost to exploratory behaviors in some populations of this species. We suggest these apparently nonrandom cases may be representative of interspecific generalized altruism.

This behavior may represent some of the first accounts of any wild predator intentionally using prey and other items to directly explore human behavior and thus may highlight the evolutionary convergence of intellect between highest order primates and dolphins.

The light that the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope collected to create this image reached the telescope after a journey of 250 million years. Its source was the spiral galaxy UGC 11397, which resides in the constellation Lyra (The Lyre). At first glance, UGC 11397 appears to be an average spiral galaxy: it sports two graceful spiral arms that are illuminated by stars and defined by dark, clumpy clouds of dust.

What sets UGC 11397 apart from a typical spiral lies at its center, where a supermassive black hole containing 174 million times the mass of our Sun grows. As a black hole ensnares gas, dust, and even entire stars from its vicinity, this doomed matter heats up and puts on a fantastic cosmic light show.

The International Network Against Witchcraft Accusations and Ritual Attacks was formed in 2022 to connect the different groups and initiatives working on this issue across the globe.

It seeks to raise awareness about the human rights abuses taking place as a result of beliefs in witchcraft or sorcery and encourage action by states and individuals to end them. 

The International Network aims to raise support for the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Resolution on the Elimination of Harmful Practices Related to Accusations of Witchcraft and Ritual Attack (July 2021). 

The members of the International Network fully support the right of freedom of religion and belief and recognise that activity related to belief in witchcraft and sorcery can be positive. Our mission focuses solely on the harmful practices that are related to such beliefs, such as attacks, tortures and stigmatisation of those accused of witchcraft and those individuals who are ritually attacked as a result of such beliefs. We use the terms witchcraft and sorcery as general categories to include all the terms used across the world to describe the belief that a person has the power to cause harm using supernatural means.

The scientists who precisely measure the position of Earth are in a bit of trouble. Their measurements are essential for the satellites we use for navigation, communication and Earth observation every day.

But you might be surprised to learn that making these measurements – using the science of geodesy – depends on tracking the locations of black holes in distant galaxies.

The problem is, the scientists need to use specific frequency lanes on the radio spectrum highway to track those black holes.

And with the rise of wifi, mobile phones and satellite internet, travel on that highway is starting to look like a traffic jam.

Why we need black holes

Satellites and the services they provide have become essential for modern life. From precision navigation in our pockets to measuring climate change, running global supply chains and making power grids and online banking possible, our civilisation cannot function without its orbiting companions.

To use satellites, we need to know exactly where they are at any given time. Precise satellite positioning relies on the so-called “global geodesy supply chain”.

This supply chain starts by establishing a reliable reference frame as a basis for all other measurements. Because satellites are constantly moving around Earth, Earth is constantly moving around the Sun, and the Sun is constantly moving through the galaxy, this reference frame needs to be carefully calibrated via some relatively fixed external objects.

As it turns out, the best anchor points for the system are the black holes at the hearts of distant galaxies, which spew out streams of radiation as they devour stars and gas.

These black holes are the most distant and stable objects we know.

This is a viewpoint expounded by influencers in various online subcultures, such as the manosphere, pick-up artist culture, and other male-dominated spheres, and is quickly absorbed by the audience, drawing them deeper within these spheres and instilling more and more of the subcultures’ ideologies.

The speed at which the ‘nice guys finish last’ worldview can get internalised makes sense from a scientific perspective. It is a universal desire among people to be liked, respected, and considered attractive. Many who frequent these online spaces are people – often teenagers – who haven’t received guidance on how to be perceived in the way they desire. Schools generally do not teach their pupils about how to meet basic needs like being liked and having status: in short, how to live.

Studies show that the average attention span is now only eight seconds. That's about as much time as it takes to read a few sentences before being distracted.

A new national survey of 1,000 American adults commissioned by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine finds that stress and anxiety contribute most to a short attention span (43%), followed by lack of sleep (39%) and digital devices (35%).

Other contributing factors include boredom or lack of interest (31%); multitasking (23%); lack of physical activity (21%); poor diet/hydration (20%) and medical conditions such as ADHD (18%).

Only 25% of survey respondents said they don't have trouble with their attention span.

The world's most advanced AI models are exhibiting troubling new behaviors – lying, scheming, and even threatening their creators to achieve their goals.

In one particularly jarring example, under threat of being unplugged, Anthropic's latest creation Claude 4 lashed back by blackmailing an engineer and threatened to reveal an extramarital affair.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT-creator OpenAI's o1 tried to download itself onto external servers and denied it when caught red-handed.

These episodes highlight a sobering reality: more than two years after ChatGPT shook the world, AI researchers still don't fully understand how their own creations work.

No rules

Current regulations aren't designed for these new problems.

The European Union's AI legislation focuses primarily on how humans use AI models, not on preventing the models themselves from misbehaving.

In the United States, the Trump administration shows little interest in urgent AI regulation, and Congress may even prohibit states from creating their own AI rules.

Goldstein believes the issue will become more prominent as AI agents – autonomous tools capable of performing complex human tasks – become widespread.

"I don't think there's much awareness yet," he said.

All this is taking place in a context of fierce competition.

During February to June 2024, we carried out four surveys regarding the likely existence of basic, complex and intelligent extraterrestrial life. We sent emails to astrobiologists (scientists who study extraterrestrial life), as well as to scientists in other areas, including biologists and physicists.

In total, 521 astrobiologists responded, and we received 534 non-astrobiologist responses. The results reveal that 86.6% of the surveyed astrobiologists responded either “agree” or “strongly agree” that it’s likely that extraterrestrial life (of at least a basic kind) exists somewhere in the universe.

Less than 2% disagreed, with 12% staying neutral. So, based on this, we might say that there’s a solid consensus that extraterrestrial life, of some form, exists somewhere out there.

Scientists who weren’t astrobiologists essentially concurred, with an overall agreement score of 88.4%. In other words, one cannot say that astrobiologists are biased toward believing in extraterrestrial life, compared with other scientists.

When we turn to “complex” extraterrestrial life or “intelligent” aliens, our results were 67.4% agreement, and 58.2% agreement, respectively for astrobiologists and other scientists. So, scientists tend to think that alien life exists, even in more advanced forms.

These results are made even more significant by the fact that disagreement for all categories was low. For example, only 10.2% of astrobiologists disagreed with the claim that intelligent aliens likely exist.

Newly leaked video of flashing, triangle-shaped objects that flew over a U.S. warship is real, the Pentagon said, after UFO investigators released the clip and several other puzzling photos online.

The photos and videos were distributed by documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp, a Las Vegas-based reporter who has covered UFO-related stories for decades. The leaks include a night-vision video at sea, a series of grainy infrared images and smartphone photos captured from the cockpit of an FA-18 fighter, which had previously been posted online.

The Pentagon confirmed in a statement this week that the leaked photos and videos were captured by U.S. navy personnel, though it declined to label them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) — the government’s official term for a UFO.

A groundbreaking study suggests that the famous Cambrian explosion—the dramatic burst of diverse animal life—might have actually started millions of years earlier than we thought. By analyzing ancient trace fossils, researchers uncovered evidence of complex, mobile organisms thriving 545 million years ago, well before the traditionally accepted timeline. These early creatures likely had segmented bodies, muscle systems, and even directional movement, signaling a surprising level of biological sophistication. Their behavior and mobility, preserved in fossil trails, offer new insight into how complex life evolved, potentially rewriting one of the most important chapters in Earth’s evolutionary history.

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the 4 billion years of our history.

But scientists are still puzzling over why we evolved into this particular form. Why do humans uniquely have a chin, for example? And why, relative to body weight, is a human testicle triple the size of a gorilla’s but a fifth of that of a chimpanzee?

A surprising discovery from a tiny grain of asteroid Ryugu has rocked scientists' understanding of how our Solar System evolved. Researchers found djerfisherite—a mineral typically born in scorching, chemically reduced conditions and never before seen in Ryugu-like meteorites—inside a sample returned by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. Its presence suggests either Ryugu once experienced unexpectedly high temperatures or that exotic materials from other parts of the solar system somehow made their way into its formation. Like discovering a palm tree fossil in Arctic ice, this rare find challenges everything we thought we knew about primitive asteroids and the early mixing of planetary ingredients.

From October 2023

We human beings may be near the end of Darwinian evolution – no longer required to become the fittest to survive – but technological evolution of artificially intelligent minds is only just beginning. It may be only one or two more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence. If this happens, our species would have been just a brief interlude in Earth's history before the machines take over.

That raises a profound question about the wider cosmos: are aliens more likely to be flesh and blood like us, or something more artificial? And if they are more like machines, what would they be like and how might we detect them?

Understanding how atoms form is a fundamental and important question, since they make up everything with mass.

The question of where atoms come from requires a lot of physics to be answered completely – and even then, physicists like me only have good guesses to explain how some atoms are formed.

Occurrence rates of Earth-like planets around very low-mass stars

To put our results in context, we compared the currently known planets around the stars within our stellar sample with predictions from state-of-the-art planet formation models. We simulated mock observations of planets drawn from a synthetic planet population around M dwarfs based on the standard core accretion scenario (Burn et al. 2021), and weighted them by our estimated detection probabilities. The observed orbital periods are shorter and the minimum masses are smaller than predicted. In the framework of standard core accretion, such a deviation could in principle be explained by a reduced planetesimal surface density in models. While such a correction was not needed based on previous occurrence rate studies, we probed here the very low-mass star regime. Therefore, the dependency of available mass in planet building blocks on stellar mass needs to be further investigated. Apart from that, the observed lower masses could also be explained by alternative formation scenarios such as accretion of dry pebbles within the snowline or mass loss during giant impacts.

Altogether, our results and the discussion show the importance of differentiation in stellar masses when discussing planet occurrences and, ultimately, planet formation processes. Once the CARMENES survey of M dwarfs is completed and at least 50 RV epochs have been obtained for all targets, we will conclude our analysis of occurrence rates on the entire sample.

The researchers found that the changes in climate didn't explain the changes in the rodents' skulls, but the degree of urbanization did. The different ways the animals' skulls changed may be related to the different ways that an increasingly urban habitat affected them.

"Over the last century, chipmunks in Chicago have been getting bigger, but their teeth are getting smaller," says Feijó. "We believe this is probably associated with the kind of food they're eating. They're probably eating more human-related food, which makes them bigger, but not necessarily healthier. Meanwhile, their teeth are smaller -- we think it's because they're eating less hard food, like the nuts and seeds they would normally eat."

Voles, on the other hand, had smaller auditory bullae, bone structures associated with hearing. "We think this may relate to the city being loud -- having these bones be smaller might help dampen excess environmental noise," says Smith.

Results indicated that Ophiocordyceps likely emerged during the Early Cretaceous, about 133.25 million years ago, earlier than previously proposed estimates of ~100 million years. Ancestral state reconstructions suggest that the genus initially parasitized beetles before undergoing host shifts to Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera during the Cretaceous. Researchers inferred that these transitions coincided with the diversification of moths and ants, which offered new ecological opportunities for fungal specialization.

The authors concluded that the fossils not only document some of the oldest evidence of insect-pathogenic fungi but also support the view that Ophiocordyceps diversified in tandem with its insect hosts.

The two fossils are the first ever hominin fossils from submerged Sundaland and demonstrate that Homo erectus populations extended beyond Java onto the exposed lowland plains during the Middle Pleistocene.

It is likely that other hominin populations migrated south in a similar manner; however, limited fossil evidence complicates the understanding of the evolution and migration of these species. It is likely that more fossils are to be found on the submerged Sundaland seabed.

In the outer reaches of our Solar System, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, lies one of the most mysterious objects ever discovered, Sedna. This reddish dwarf planet follows such an extreme orbit that it takes over 11,000 years to complete a single journey around the Sun. Now, scientists are proposing a new mission to reach this distant world using a revolutionary propulsion technology.

Sedna represents far more than just another distant rock, though. It's a new orbital class of object, the sednoids, and its extreme orbit suggests it may be the first known member of the inner Oort Cloud. Understanding Sedna could unlock secrets about the early Solar System's formation and the gravitational influences that shaped it.

A new feasibility study has examined two cutting-edge approaches to technology that would reach Sedna within this narrow window of opportunity. The first involves the Direct Fusion Drive (DFD), a conceptual nuclear fusion engine, designed to produce both thrust and electric power. For the DFD, researchers assume a 1.6 MW system with constant thrust and specific impulse, representing a massive leap beyond current propulsion technology.

The second approach involves an ingenious variation on solar sailing technology. Rather than relying entirely on solar radiation pressure, this concept uses thermal desorption instead. This is a process where molecules or atoms that are stuck to a surface are released when that surface is heated up, and it's this process that produces the propulsion. It would be assisted by a gravity assist manoeuvre around Jupiter, using the planet's immense gravitational field as a gravitational slingshot.

With an object in geostationary orbit, you could run a cable down to the Earth. Boom—there's your space elevator. But wait! There are some problems. Can you imagine a cable that's 36,000 kilometers long? That's a LOT of cable. It's so much that you’d also have to counterbalance the weight of the cable with some big mass a little past the geostationary level. This system would require a tension in the material that exceeds the maximum value for the strongest steel cables. It could only work with something like a carbon nanotube cable—which we don't have (yet).

Corpses under the floor

The people of Çatalhöyük buried their dead directly underneath their homes. Previous studies into hereditary anatomical features of the skeletons had thrown up a surprising finding, namely that most of the people buried in a house were unrelated, while those who were most similar to one another were spread out across the whole settlement.

In other words, households appear to have been formed according to rules other than kinship. Did cultural, economic or social factors have a hand in this? Says Rosenstock, "Ever since it's been possible to study DNA that's this old, therefore, we've been using archaeogenetics to try and see how the occupants of a particular house were related."

The two skeletons of newborns that Rosenstock's team dug up were likewise found inside the same building, and they were not closely related either, as the study recently published in Science shows. What is more, they belonged to the same gene pool as the bodies found on the East Mound.

Kepler 538-b is larger than Earth, and has a much higher temperature, but it still falls within the realm of potentially habitable. But that rarity points to another important finding from the paper - Earth is a statistical rarity in terms of planets, but not one that requires some miraculous confluence of planetary and stellar characteristics. Using a statistical technique called the Mahalanobis distance analysis, the authors found that Earth is around 69.4% different in terms of “statistical unusualness”, making it rare, but not too rare.

As the science of astrobiology and exoplanets moves forward, continuing this type of statistical analysis will provide valuable context that could otherwise mislead or obfuscate the areas that have the most potential to answer one of the most important questions to humanity - are we alone? With increasingly powerful observational equipment pointed in the right direction, we might soon have a definitive answer to that question.

Squids are rarely preserved as fossils because they don't have hard shells. Their origin and early evolution are the biggest questions in the 500 million-year history of cephalopods, which have been model animals for long-term evolution. Squid beaks, hard mouthparts that have a high fossilization potential, are therefore important clues for studying how squids evolved.

One of the study's most striking discoveries was how common squids were in ancient oceans. The team found that squid fossils far outnumbered those of ammonites and bony fishes. Ammonites are extinct shelled relatives of squids and have been considered among the most successful swimmers of the Mesozoic era.

Britain is set to hold public hearings at which military personnel can disclose their close encounters with UFOs. The US-style hearings will allow RAF, Army and Navy whistleblowers to tell all about experiences they have been previously banned from revealing under military non-disclosure rules and for fear of ridicule.