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They’re getting a helping hand. The Russian Orthodox Church sent fragments of a medieval prince’s hand to soldiers in the frontlines as a means to raise morale and provide “spiritual strength” to end the war. The church, which backs Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, said it dispatched a fragment of Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy’s sword hand to soldiers in the occupied region of Donetsk. The Moscow ⁠Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church said sending the prince’s remains served as a symbol to allow the so-called “holy commander” to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Moscow’s invading army. “A fragment of the...

A group of Cuban doctors claim they were effectively sold into slavery by their country’s regime and are asking for $129 million in damages in a lawsuit. The legal filing says 3,500 doctors were sent to Brazil between 2013 and 2018 and claims the Cuban regime earned more than $2.3 billion for their services but paid them “a small fraction” — less than 10 percent — of their earnings. The doctors, now living in the US, claim that when dispatched abroad they were never informed 90 percent of their wages would go to the Cuban government. They also say that...

Explanation: What does this image look like to you? Many see a giraffe facing right, with neck stretched high and long legs mid-stride (but some may see a squirrel instead). The featured image shows LDN 1295, also called the Giraffe Nebula, in the constellation of the mythical queen of Aethiopia (Cassiopeia). It is an object in the Lynds Catalogue of Dark Nebulas, compiled in 1962 by American astronomer Beverly Lynds, a pioneer for women in astronomy and astrophysics. Dark nebulas are interstellar clouds of dust and gas that block the visible light of the stars behind them. These nebulas are...

AI isn’t a mind — it’s a tool. What most people call “AI” today is actually a Large Language Model (LLM). It isn’t sentient, conscious, or capable of wanting anything. An LLM is a program trained on enormous amounts of text so it can predict what words should come next in a sentence. That’s why it can answer questions in a way that sounds human — it’s imitating patterns in language, not thinking or understanding. The amount of human knowledge stored in text, audio, video, databases, and other formats is massive and growing rapidly. If some of that data is...

Most Christians believe the universe is billions of years old. Some treat the six days of creation as a metaphor. Others latch onto explanations such as Gap Theory or Day-Age Theory to reconcile. But there is one theory that I’ve found after years of on-and-off research that has legs. In fact, it has fewer scientific and mathematical holes than the Big Bang Theory itself. The distant starlight argument is the favorite club skeptics swing at Genesis. Light from a galaxy ten billion light-years away cannot reach Earth in six thousand years if light crawls at 186,000 miles per second. Therefore,...

Trajan's Baths in Oppian Hill will host a new museum where visitors to Rome can admire the Great Mosaic and the Painted City, two massive ancient artworks buried near the Colosseum that are estimated to date from the 1st century... The "Painted City" fresco and "Great Mosaic" were discovered in an underground gallery during excavations in the 1990s of the Baths of Trajan on the Oppian Hill near the Colosseum. After being hidden underground for centuries, its blues and terracotta colors are still clear but faded... The Painted City is a ten-square-metre fresco belonging to a building that predates Trajan's...

Explanation: Is this star winking at us? The central object in today’s animation is not one but two stars. XZ Andromedae, indicated by the bold lines, is an Algol-type eclipsing binary with a nearly edge-on orbit from Earth’s perspective. The bottom light curve shows the amount of light from the system dim and brighten as the cooler star eclipses its hotter, brighter companion. Analysis of several XZ Andromedae light curves indicates there may be two other stars orbiting the system. This particular light curve was created with Citizen Astronomy, an open-source software for differential photometry. The software takes the difference...

Let’s start with the obvious: “Basket of deplorables” is a weird turn of phrase. There are baskets and there are deplorable people, but pairing the two is the oddest of linguistic odd couples. Hillary Clinton said those three words in the final months of her 2016 presidential campaign, making rhetorical and political history. There were two kinds of Donald Trump supporters, she explained: Voters who feel abandoned and desperate, who she placed in one metaphorical basket, and those she called “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic” — her “basket of deplorables.” Trump — the same man who announced his candidacy...

For six centuries, the body of Alexander the great lay in a monumental tomb in at heart of Alexandria. After a series of disasters, the tomb vanished. The conqueror's body, however, may have survived... Following the death of the conqueror in Babylon, their body began a long journey involving squabbling generals, a golden coffin in Alexandria, and various imperial visitors. tol-in-stone examines the tumultuous history of this lost mausoleum, exploring theories ranging from catastrophic destruction to a potential relocation to Venice. Where is the Body of Alexander the Great? | 8:35 toldinstone | 648K subscribers | 298,441 views | July...

A new study, "Range and diet diversity in the Pleistocene American 'cheetah,' Miracinonyx trumani," was published in the scientific journal Current Biology on Friday. Using the tiniest of bones, including some found in Wyoming's Natural Trap Cave, the diet and DNA of the American cheetah-like cat have been revealed in astonishing detail... "It's actually most closely related to the living mountain lion, and those are both sister species most closely related to the jaguarundi," she said. "The three of them together are distantly related to modern cheetah."... Some of the best Late Pleistocene specimens [various species] ever found have come...

Explanation: Why are Saturn’s poles geometric? Saturn’s North Pole has been known to be surrounded by a hexagonal (6 sides) cloud since discovery in 1987 in data taken by NASA’s Voyager spacecrafts, which quickly flew past the ringed world in the early 1980s. Now, recent observations of Saturn by the Hubble Space Telescope reveal a slightly different geometric cloud pattern around the South Pole: a decagon (10 sides). The geometric boundaries are possibly caused by waves when the fast-moving gas away from the poles interacts with slower-moving gas closer to the poles. In the featured image composite by the Hubble...

Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and co-chief executive of techbio company Insilico, is among the scientists who have devoted countless hours to studying aging. He has a reality-check for anyone who thinks that artificial intelligence means that the ability to double lifespans is tantalizingly close. “Absolute nonsense,” said Zhavoronkov, whose company uses AI to discover and develop drugs.In 150 years of discovery, no drug has been clinically proven to extend life, he said in an interview. “Regardless of how rich you are…you cannot buy one year of life with a drug.” What could be within reach in the next decade or so—in...

The auto industry has a new solution to Americans’ fear that electric vehicles will run out of juice: a gasoline engine.

Spanish researchers achieve complete tumor regression in animal models, opening new possibilities for one of medicine's deadliest cancersIn a promising development for pancreatic cancer treatment, scientists at Spain's National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) have successfully eliminated pancreatic tumors in mice using a triple-combination therapy. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on January 25, 2026. This represents a significant advance in tackling pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), one of the deadliest cancers. PDAC has one of the lowest survival rates, with over 10,300 new patients diagnosed annually in Spain alone, and a devastating five-year...

In mid-July, the FDA approved Leqembi, a series of injections that specifically target the plaques that build up in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. Those plaques are what cause the memory loss, behavioral changes, and terminal decline.That medication was given to Gail Youngsdale. Three years ago, Gail's Alzheimer's disease was progressing. At the time, Leqembi was a trial drug. Doctors gave her injections to target the nine spots of plaque in her brain.Now? They're gone and Gail has gotten married and gotten most of her memory back.We're out here reversing Alzheimer's y'all. pic.twitter.com/OuNJCax9Hq— L (@SomeBitchIIKnow) September 3, 2026Every single spot...

The newly identified atmospheric wave appears to be strengthening, giving scientists a rare chance to watch an unusual feature develop on Saturn. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a giant 10-sided pattern encircling Saturn's south pole, giving scientists a rare opportunity to watch an unusual feature develop on another planet. The unusual pattern is actually a huge atmospheric wave embedded in one of Saturn's powerful jet streams. It extends through multiple layers of the atmosphere, showing that it is more than a cloud-level feature. The discovery marks the first time that a large pattern with regular sides has been observed...

Explanation: The Pelican Nebula is slowly being transformed. IC 5070 (an official designation) is divided from the larger North America Nebula by a molecular cloud filled with dark dust. The deep featured picture from Utah, USA incorporates 25 hours of exposure and brings out great details of this filamentary dust. The Pelican Nebula receives much study because it is a particularly active mix of star formation and evolving gas clouds. The light from young energetic stars is slowly transforming the cold gas to hot gas, with the advancing boundary between the two, known as an ionization front, visible in bright...

My goodness, my Guinness! A massive haul of 70,000 pints of Guinness was stolen in the dead of night — sending British police on a desperate hunt for the missing stout. The two trailer loads of beer, valued at $155,000, were snatched last Monday from an industrial park in Runcorn, near Liverpool, according to the Cheshire Constabulary. The Guinness, destined for pubs, was brazenly taken by two drivers who pulled up to the depot and hauled away the trailers carrying 800 barrels of the dark, creamy Irish beer. “It is famously said that ‘Guinness is good for you,’ but that...

When we return to work after the Labor Day weekend, the hope is that America will start paying attention to the stark choice offered at the midterm elections in November. There are just two months left until voters decide whether the Trump administration can continue the free enterprise agenda that is sparking an economic boom and keep reversing the woke cultural insanity that ruined so many lives — or whether the big-government socialists who call themselves Democrats will cripple all that progress and mire the country in another round of debilitating impeachment politics. While historical precedent and the pundit class...

Explanation: Pluto is more colorful than we can see. Color data and high-resolution images of our Solar System's most famous dwarf planet, taken by the robotic New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby in 2015 July, have been digitally combined to give an enhanced-color view of this ancient world sporting an unexpectedly young surface. The featured enhanced color image is not only esthetically pretty but scientifically useful, making surface regions of differing chemical composition visually distinct. For example, the light-colored heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio on the lower right is clearly shown here to be divisible into two regions that are geologically different,...