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.” 

Our analysis, based on a thorough survey, ground-level recording, and a digital photogrammetric 3D model, shows that the construction of both the wall and the camps around Masada took about two weeks. This supports Roth's argument for a four-to-nine-week siege.

The circumvallation was also built as a means of psychological warfare against the besieged. In fact, the sections above the south and west cliffs were built only to lower the defenders’ morale and to function as a symbol of Roman might.

The audience for the psychological warfare may also have been the Roman soldiers themselves – Levithan showed that the Roman legions besieging Jerusalem only a few years prior were not an unstoppable war-machine; in fact, their commanders did not have full control over them, as soldiers avoided dangerous circumstances and officers had to persuade them to volunteer for more dangerous missions.

The impressive circumvallation around Masada probably helped the Roman army's morale by boosting soldier confidence – an important factor in ancient warfare.

Mars was once a very wet planet as is evident in its surface geological features. Scientists know that over the last 3 billion years, at least some water went deep underground, but what happened to the rest? Now, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) missions are helping unlock that mystery.

"There are only two places water can go. It can freeze into the ground, or the water molecule can break into atoms, and the atoms can escape from the top of the atmosphere into space."

The whole atmosphere is very turbulent, heating up and cooling down on short timescales, even down to hours. The atmosphere expands and contracts as the brightness of the Sun at Mars varies by 40 percent over the course of a Martian year.

The team discovered that the escape rates of hydrogen and deuterium change rapidly when Mars is close to the Sun. In the classical picture that scientists previously had, these atoms were thought to slowly diffuse upward through the atmosphere to a height where they could escape.

But that picture no longer accurately reflects the whole story, because now scientists know that atmospheric conditions change very quickly. When Mars is close to the Sun, the water molecules, which are the source of the hydrogen and deuterium, rise through the atmosphere very rapidly releasing atoms at high altitudes.

The second finding is that the changes in hydrogen and deuterium are so rapid that the atomic escape needs added energy to explain them. At the temperature of the upper atmosphere only a small fraction of the atoms have enough speed to escape the gravity of Mars. Faster (super-thermal) atoms are produced when something gives the atom a kick of extra energy. These events include collisions from solar wind protons entering the atmosphere or sunlight that drives chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere.

Planets

The solar system has eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. There are five officially recognized dwarf planets in our solar system: Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.

Inner Planets

The first four planets from the Sun are Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. These inner planets also are known as terrestrial planets because they have solid surfaces.

Outer Planets

The giant planets in our outer solar system don't have hard surfaces and instead have swirling gases above a core. Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants. Uranus and Neptune are ice giants.

Dwarf Planets

Beyond Neptune, a newer class of smaller worlds called dwarf planets reign, including longtime favorite Pluto. The other dwarf planets are Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris. Ceres is the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system. It's located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

A spacecraft carrying European and Japanese probes passed closer to Mercury than originally planned overnight after thruster problems delayed the mission to study the little-known, sun-scorched planet.

The new path meant the spacecraft needed to fly 35 kilometers (22 miles) closer to the planet than initially planned—passing just 165 kilometers above the surface—during its latest flyby.

The European Space Agency's operations team confirmed that "all went well" with the flyby overnight. It also posted a new image taken by the probe of the planet, whose pockmarked surface resembles the moon.

Mercury is by far the least studied of the four rocky, innermost planets in our solar system, which also include Venus, Earth and Mars.

Traditional Views on Habitability: The Goldilocks Zone

Traditionally, the search for habitable environments beyond Earth has centered around the concept of the “Goldilocks Zone” or the “Habitable Zone.” This is the region around a star where conditions are just right—neither too hot nor too cold—for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface. The presence of liquid water has been considered a critical factor for life as we know it, mainly due to its role as a universal solvent in biochemical processes. This notion has shaped many astronomical surveys and planetary missions, focusing on planets that reside within this special zone around their host stars.

Expanding the Parameters: Extremophiles and Alternative Solvents

Recent discoveries in the field of astrobiology have begun to challenge and expand our understanding of habitability. Organisms known as “extremophiles” have been found in extreme conditions on Earth, such as in acidic lakes, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and even in the radiation-rich environments of nuclear reactors. These findings suggest that life can exist in a wider range of conditions than previously thought, leading scientists to consider other factors beyond the presence of liquid water.

Additionally, there is growing interest in the potential for life to exist in environments with solvents other than water. For example, the methane lakes on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, present an interesting case for astrobiologists. While methane is not as versatile a solvent as water, it could theoretically support some forms of life, broadening the scope of what scientists consider “habitable.”

Survey observations using the Subaru Telescope's ultra-widefield prime focus camera have revealed that there may be a population of small bodies further out in the Kuiper Belt waiting to be discovered.

There have been five spacecraft that have flown to the outer solar system (including New Horizons), but New Horizons is the only spacecraft that has flown through the Kuiper Belt while observing Kuiper Belt objects.

Researchers often define collapse as a social simplification in which hierarchies are flattened or governance systems break up. But with this definition it’s not clear what is inherently “bad” about collapse. After all, the disintegration of colonial empires in the mid-20th century was a collapse by this definition — and a development which most would celebrate.

We argue that the demise of a social hierarchy need not entail societal collapse, what matters is how events impact human welfare. Therefore, it is necessary to pin down what exactly is harmful about collapse before trying to generalize from past examples. After all, the purpose of learning from history should be to prevent wrongs, not protect contemporary inequalities.

In new research published in Biology Letters, we studied how light pollution affects the development of Australian garden orb weaving spiders. We discovered it makes their brains smaller, particularly in the regions devoted to vision – with unknown effects on their behaviour.

What light pollution means for animals

Artificial light is one of the fastest-growing ways humans are polluting the world, and it has a huge range of effects on animals, plants and ecosystems. Recent evidence suggests the stress of living with light pollution may impair the growth and development of the brain in some birds and mammals.

This may be catastrophic. To survive in novel environments where light pollution is most common, such as cities, animals may actually need larger and more complex brains.

But what about insects and spiders and other, smaller creatures that inhabit the night? Could light pollution similarly affect the growth and development of their brains?

Our study on the nocturnal Australian garden orb weaving spider suggests it does.

These names of stars that have either been approved by the International Astronomical Union or which have been in somewhat recent use. IAU approval comes mostly from its Working Group on Star Names, which has been publishing a "List of IAU-approved Star Names" since 2016.

As of April 2022, the list included a total of 451 proper names of starsc

Of the roughly 10,000 stars visible to the naked eye, only a few hundred have been given proper names in the history of astronomy. Traditional astronomy tends to group stars into constellations or asterisms and give proper names to those, not to individual stars.

Birds are known to have evolved from the reptilian dinosaurs and feathers are highly modified dinosaur scales. The origin of mammalian hair in deep time is less clear because hard scales, bones and feathers preserve better than other types of tissue.

Fossil imprints of hair are found in Middle Jurassic species, such as the beaver-like Castorocauda, about 220 million years ago. And a mammalian ancestor with fossilised fur, the rat-like Spinolestes, which had a mohawk of bristles, is known from the Cretaceous period, 125 million years ago.

Such fossils are rare.

But scientists have found food residues that contain hair-like structures inside fossilised faeces from the Permian period, around 260 million years ago.

We can take a look, however, into mammal ancestor evolution to get a better understanding of fur and hair evolution.

We know the mammalian and the reptilian lineages separated from each other more than 300 million years ago. The first mammalian ancestors still looked very much like reptiles.

But they had a different diet. They hunted on large prey with their fangs, whereas reptiles originally fed on small spiders, millipedes or insects.

Constant temperature is an essential for stamina, in mammals, which you need for hunting. This can be accomplished, among other things, by developing fur.

Do aliens sleep? You may take sleep for granted, but research suggests many planets that could evolve life don’t have a day and night cycle. It’s hard to imagine, but there are organisms living in Earth’s lightless habitats, deep underground or at the bottom of the sea, that give us an idea what alien life without a circadian rhythm may be like.

There are billions of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy. How do we arrive at this number? The Milky Way has between 100 billion and 400 billion stars.

Seventy percent of these are tiny, cool red dwarfs, also known as M-dwarfs. A detailed exoplanet survey published in 2013 estimated that 41% of M-dwarf stars have a planet orbiting in their “Goldilocks” zone, the distance at which the planet has the right temperature to support liquid water.

Perhaps life on M-Earths would evolve biorhythms synchronised to these cycles. If a circadian clock organises internal biochemical oscillations, it may have to.

Or perhaps evolution would find a weirder solution. We could imagine species that live on the planet’s dayside and migrate to the nightside to rest and regenerate. A circadian clock in space instead of in time.

This thought should remind us that, if life exists out there, it will upend assumptions we didn’t know we had. The only certainty is that it will surprise us.

Fetching appears to be largely spontaneous in the domestic cat. Forman et al. found that only around 6% of cats who fetch were trained to do so. The extent to which dogs are trained to fetch is also unknown but is likely much higher. This study did not distinguish trained from spontaneous fetchers in either species. Future studies could explore the effects of human training on fetching behavior.

Conclusions

Fetching is observed in both cats and dogs, and at higher rates in cats than previously reported (40.9%). Some fetching was observed in most breeds of cats and dogs, although some breeds were more likely to fetch than others. Fetching was more prominent in cat breeds originating in the Far East and in dog breeds from the Retriever, UK Rural, Poodle, Pointer and Spaniel clades. We have proposed multiple hypotheses and open questions for future research as to why fetching behavior may be observed in both companion species, despite their different domestication histories.