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.