Life can be found virtually everywhere here on Earth. You can find it on polar ice sheets, in scalding hot springs, and even kilometers underground. But life reaches its limits in some spots here on Earth — spots that, according to scientists, are too hostile for even the toughest microbes, like the briny lakes of Africa’s Rift Valley and the cold, dry soil of Antarctica’s Shackleton Glacier Valley.
Together the two projects “contradict the current wisdom that life is really everywhere,” says Nathan Smith, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California who was not involved with either project. “Both, in their own ways, in different types of environments, are homing in on what might be real barriers to life.”
In the Rift Valley lakes, in Ethiopia, volcanic gases venting from below acidify the water, which is also rich in salts from brines created by the evaporation of ancient and modern bodies of water. Add the heating effect of the volcanic activity, and the lakes represent an environment more extreme than any found in Yellowstone National Park or even in the Atacama Desert.
Humans can see faces in pretty much everything, like power outlets, or car headlights, or two circles and a line. This delightful quirk is called pareidolia, and this also applies when we look up into the cosmos.
You may be surprised to learn that the image above isn't actually a giant spooky head floating in space, but two galaxies undergoing the process of merging. The picture was released by the Hubble Space Telescope team in time to celebrate Halloween.
The system is called Arp-Madore 2026-424; located around 704 million light-years away, its sports an unusual head-shaped appearance because of the turbulent effects of two galaxies colliding.
More details about this galaxy over at Science Alert.
(Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and M. Durbin/University of Washington)
Jezebel held a contest for the best scary stories. The only rules were that the story had to be scary, and it had to be true. I'm not sure how they determined whether a story is true, but the winners sure are scary. The top ten are in this post. They range from a few paragraphs to the equivalent of a few pages, so you might want to bookmark it to read in small doses. Here's a snippet of one titled Bees:
Sometimes, when I was upstairs, I’d hear movement in the kitchen. If I was in my room painting, I’d swear I’d hear someone come up the stairs and onto the second floor landing, where they’d stop. If I was in my loft, I’d hear what sounded like footsteps move up the stairs, onto the landing, and into my room, stopping underneath the overhang just where I couldn’t see them. Occasionally, I would see a figure out of the corner of my eye, a woman, I assumed. And, more than once, I’d hear the footsteps or see the figure and start talking to it. “Hey Ally, how was your night?” Or “What’s up?” Before realizing, Ally wasn’t back. A couple of weeks in, having never mentioned it, I started talking about to Ally about the feeling I got in the house. And, without missing a beat, she says “So you think we have a ghost too?” She relayed similar experiences.
After that, having finally spent some time there, Ally painted her bedroom a bright yellow in contrast to my navy blue. She then asked if I would draw something on her light switch cover as a finishing touch. I, seeing her cheery yellow, decided to draw bees believing that to be a fitting theme. That evening, we reinstalled the etched cover to her wall. And the very next day, Ally’s loft was swarming with bees. It didn’t make sense, we didn’t have a hive nearby and they weren’t building one. We often hung out on the roof outside the window and checked again today, no hive there either. They also weren’t even the more common wasps, they were proper bees and a lot of them. Mostly though, the timing was eerie, the morning after I adorned her room with bees, it was filled with them. From then on, it became a running joke that the ghost gave us bees. But what became more apparent was that whatever it was, for whatever reason, was keeping an eye on me.
Julienne Grey, an artist in Brooklyn, NY, hand paints 1-inch pet portraits using extra fine brush pens and super-sharpened colored pencils. She specializes in cats, dogs, rabbits, and birds. You can see more at Bored Panda and Instagram.
The city of Detroit has its own legendary demon known as Nain Rouge, or the red dwarf. He's the star of an annual parade in the spring, because he's not always to be feared. The Nain Rouge is a michievous sprite who can confer status and riches if he pleases, or bring disaster if you cross him. He shows up just before Detroit suffers a calamity, and while some welcome his appearance as a warning, others think he might be the one causing the suffering. The legend goes back 300 years, to the founding of Detroit by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.
To hear Hamlin tell it, the trouble began at a party in Québec one March evening in 1701. At the castle of St. Louis, she writes, the French explorer Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac—who would soon depart to claim Detroit for the French and their fur traders—and other officials gathered around a table, “resplendent with costly silver and sparkling glass,” their heads swimming with wine from the building’s “noted cellars.”
Into that shimmering scene burst a “swarthy,” fortune-telling crone with a scrawny black cat on her shoulder. She called herself Mère Minique, La Sorcière, and she came bearing a warning. Things would work out well for Cadillac, she promised, but if—and only if—he appeased the Nain Rouge, or “Red Dwarf.”
It was a while before Cadillac encountered Nain Rouge, but when he did, his fortunes turned rapidly. Read that story and learn how Detroit embraces Nain Rouge today at Atlas Obscura.
The Shining is often hailed as the ultimate in horror. Stanley Kubrick doing a Stephen King story? How could that go wrong? Screen Junkies takes a look back at the masterpiece and sees things we have forgotten about the 1980 movie that make it seem not quite so horrifically perfect. Oh yeah, Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, opens November 8.
It's been 50 years since ARPANET got one computer to communicate with another computer on October 29, 1969, laying the foundation of communications that would eventually give rise to the internet. It was quite a few years before that method of communication became available to the general public in the form of the World Wide Web, and engineers had no clue as to how we would use it. In celebration of the milestone, we get a condensed history of websites. These are not the most popular or the longest-lived, nor are they ranked, but a timeline of the websites that changed the way we live, work, and communicate. The first is CERN.
December 20, 1990 didn’t feel historic at the time, but it was the day a British computer scientist in the Swiss Alps published the first-ever website at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
From his NeXT computer, Tim Berners-Lee published, appropriately enough, a primer on the web, explaining the concept of hypertext and describing how to set up a server.
But Berners-Lee didn’t share the site with the public until a year later, when he told his friends in the alt.hypertext newsgroup about his creation. It would take another couple of years and the arrival of the first “killer app”—the browser Mosaic—for the web to catch on.
In 2013, to mark the 20th anniversary of making the web available to anyone, CERN recreated the original website in all of its black, white, and blue glory.
Uber’s design, which it unveiled at the Forbes 30 under 30 Summit today, is made to carry up to one meal for two people. Featuring rotating wings with six rotors, the vehicle can vertically take-off and land, and travel a maximum of eight minutes, including loading and unloading. The total flight range is 18 miles, with a round trip delivery range of 12 miles.
As Uber stated previously, their plan is not to use the drones for full delivery. Rather, they plan to use the drones for partial delivery.
Once a customer orders food, the restaurant will prepare the meal and then load it onto a drone. That drone will then take off, fly and land at a pre-determined drop-off location.
An Uber Eats delivery driver will then complete the last mile to deliver the food to the customer.
The Mars 2020 rover of NASA has shed its skin and was given a new arm. The rover now can also stand on its own, which makes everything better.
Having gone through a few major updates this October, and having been relocated from the Spacecraft Assembly Facility to the Simulator Building at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to undergo testing, the first, inner layer of protective, anti-static foil of the rover has been removed by scientists.
… you can see a team of engineers in bunny suits (a nickname for their clean room coveralls) "unwrapping" the rover.
After removing the first layer of anti-static foil, the team of engineers wiped down the last layer of foil with 70% isopropyl alcohol. The protective foil and alcohol wipe-down are meant to prevent Earth material from hitching a ride on the rover to Mars and contaminating the surface of the planet.
[...]
A few days later at JPL, on Oct. 8, the Mars 2020 rover carried its full weight on its six legs and wheels for the first time ever.
Add a little mystery and enchantment to your Fall and Winter wardrobe with the Hedwig Wing Harry Potter Lightweight Scarf from the NeatoShop. This spellbinding accessory features a luminous snowy owl with a Hogwarts letter in his beak. Winterwear has never been so bewitching.
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Being overweight or obese is indubitably associated with having tooth wear, scientists from King’s College found out.
Significantly, they also found that the increased consumption of sugary soft drinks may be a leading cause of the erosion of tooth enamel and dentine in obese patients.
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"It is the acidic nature of some drinks such as carbonated drinks and acidic fruit juices that leads to tooth wear," said lead author Dr Saoirse O'Toole from King's College London.
Tooth wear is ranked as the third most important dental condition, after cavities and gum disease and the consumption of acidic food and drink is a leading cause of this. Obese patients also have other risk factors such as increased likelihood of gastric reflux disease (heartburn) which was controlled for in this study.
"This is an important message for obese patients who are consuming calories through acidic sugar sweetened drinks. These drinks may be doing damage to their body and their teeth. There is also an important message for dentists. We should be asking our patients who are obese and have tooth wear what calories they are drinking as this may be having an effect on their full bodies - not just their teeth," Dr O'Toole added.
Scientific research might tell us there's nothing to worry about, but sometimes even the best news can lead our imaginations to terrifying places. Oh, Egyptian mummies were buried in tombs meant to stay sealed for eternity? Nuclear fallout can cause DNA mutations? What could possibly go wrong? It's a small leap from science to horror stories. Almost all our classic movie monsters sprang from real, if misunderstood, science.
Whether these classic monsters sprung from a swamp, Egyptian sarcophagus or, like Frankenstein, a bag of body parts cobbled together for an experiment gone awry, they were all rooted in the public’s fascination with (and sometimes fear of) science. Though the monsters’ look was the creative handiwork of Universal’s team of costume designers, makeup artists and set designers, the public’s scientific understanding (however limited it may have been) of amphibians, mummies, and anatomy fed into the horror.
“Without real science, these monsters would not have been as terrifying as they were,” says Beth Werling, collections manager, history, for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where a new exhibition “Natural History of Horror” explores the scientific inspiration behind cinema’s most popular movie monsters. “To one degree or another, all of these monsters had scientific origins.” While Werling cautions that it’s unlikely Universal undertook a concerted effort to bring actual science into the movies, “it is clear that they were certainly looking at images of King Tut's tomb for copying props and set design as well as some real scientific instruments for Frankenstein's lab.”
Cancer cells are very elusive cells. As they hide among billions of blood cells, they become incredibly difficult to find. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. But what if we try to remove the haystack first? This is the new approach by 3-D-printed cell traps; they remove the “hay” to expose the cancer cells.
Trapping the white blood cells—which are about the size of cancer cells—and filtering out smaller red blood cells leaves behind the tumor cells, which could then be used to diagnose the disease, potentially provide early warning of recurrence and enable research into the cancer metastasis process. The work, led by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, could advance the goal of personalized cancer treatment by allowing rapid and low-cost separation of tumor cells circulating in the bloodstream.
More details about this approach over at PHYS.org.
They look and sound like venomous vipers. But don’t be fooled, because they’re not. They’re just your Congolese giant toads, which look like vipers when they display their backside, and sound like vipers when they hiss.
These toads (Sclerophyrs channingi) may be using mimicry to avoid becoming other animals’ lunch, researchers report October 20 in the Journal of Natural History.
If this is true, then this would be the first known case of a toad trying to mimic a poisonous snake.
The Chinese god of wealth Caishen, or "Cai Shing Ia", as Thais call him, must have been trending not just here on Earth, but also on the heavens, as this deity took over Thailand’s social media feed and mobile screens on Thursday. Some people have changed their profile pictures into Caishen believe that by doing so they will become prosperous. Others do the same thing, but they do it for the lolz.
“I don’t believe in this. You need to work to get money,” says the first comment. The second says, “People these days are so superstitious, what a shame. I feel sorry for our country.” Both have Caishen profile pics.
