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Why did the world's most powerful empire almost never use archers in battle? The Romans had access to bows. They trained archers. Yet they refused to make them central to their military strategy -- even as enemies surrounded them with arrows. It wasn't ignorance or cowardice. It was a deliberate choice rooted in Roman military philosophy, engineering, and culture. The Romans built their empire on heavy infantry, disciplined formations, and controlled violence. Archers -- with their unpredictability, distance, and dependence on open terrain -- threatened everything Rome's military system was designed to achieve. In this video, we uncover why the...

Fauci was kind enough (and stupid enough) to write his most intimate thoughts and feelings in a diary. He wrote this on a government-owned computer, making Fauci's inner musings the public's business. And the release of those more than 1,100 pages of his spectacularly narcissistic, self-congratulatory braggadocio will almost certainly have future historians asking one simple question: Why wasn't this guy in jail? It's been less than two months since that diary was made public, and researchers are still pulling astonishing nuggets of damning information out of it. Reason.com's Zach Weissmueller has taken a very deep dive into the diary's...

For years, we've been asking whether artificial intelligence can write like us, draw like us, code like us, or eventually replace us. Anthropic just gave us a more interesting question: Can AI notice something in nature that human scientists have been staring past?On Wednesday, Anthropic announced that its Claude AI had identified what researchers believe is previously unrecognized biological system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. The system contains a reverse transcriptase, a nearby partner gene, and a long array of repeating DNA sequences. Anthropic calls it ART, short for array-associated reverse transcriptases.From Anthropic:Today, we’re sharing...

Kent Weeks explores the tomb of Ramses the greats 100 children in the valley of the kings. Ancient Egypts Largest Tomb: KV5 (DOCUMENTARY) | 48:59 History Documentary Archives | 2.78K subscribers | 2,087 views | February 29, 2024

WASHINGTON – For most of Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on protecting women's sports, not a single Democratic senator was in attendance. The only two Democrats to show up at all were ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. Both of them left within the first hour of the hearing and Klobuchar never spoke. The Democrats also did not host a single witness for the hearing. Durbin's devoted much of his opening testimony to dismissing the issue of trans athletes in women's sports, bringing up issues like affordability, getting cell phones out of the hands of...

Researchers have begun drilling into a mysterious, boat-shaped formation in the mountains of eastern Turkey, hoping an underground robot will unearth the answer to one of biblical history’s biggest mysteries. Members of the Noah’s Ark Scans expedition believe the Durupinar formation, located in eastern Turkey near Mount Ararat, could mark the final resting place of the vessel described in Genesis. “Good morning from the outer rims of Noah’s ark,” the project’s marketing and fundraising director, divisive Christian activist Lauren Witzke, wrote in a Tuesday update. “Core drilling has begun and the big bang evolutionists are already in damage control mode,”...

It was a rather dreary October afternoon in 2011 when I turned to my computer to watch a rough cut of Jefferson’s Secret Bible, a documentary for the Smithsonian cable television channel. I was the Under Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and the film was about the conservation of a precious artifact, a book known as the “Jefferson Bible” that would soon go on display at the National Museum of American History. After his retirement to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson had carefully cut out selected passages from Greek, Latin, French and English versions of the Bible, then pasted them in four...

Explanation: A once-in-a-lifetime crater has appeared on the Moon! A comet or asteroid roughly the size of a humpback whale (approximately 10-20 meters, 30-60 feet) crashed into the Moon sometime between April and May of 2024. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), with its monthly monitoring of the Moon, captured today’s images of the lunar surface before and after the event. The resulting crater, named after Apollo-era lunar scientist McGetchin, is two soccer fields across. Craters of this size are only expected once every 132 years! Follow up thermal imaging revealed a large cold spot that surrounds the warm crater. Surface...

Science is proving Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists wrongDawkins’ rejection of religion is waning while scientific discoveries are prompting fresh arguments for belief in GodTwenty years ago, Richard Dawkins published his international best-seller The God Delusion, thus establishing “New Atheism” as a major cultural force. Over the ensuing decade, other authors — such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss and Daniel Dennett — seized the popular imagination with their respective arguments about why belief in the divine is untenable.The physicists among them argued that the universe could be explained “from nothing”. The biologists argued that Darwinian explanations of...

BioRxiv The Preprint Server for Biology The DNA Legacy of Thomas Jefferson Posted September 21, 2026 Richard E. Green, Samuel H. Vohr, Joshua D Kapp, Jane E. Ailes, Samuel Sacco, Remy Nguyen, James Cahill, Peter D. Heintzman, Joanne Flores, Logan Kistler, Courtney A. Hofman, Robert C. Fleischer, Beth Shapiro, Richard Kurin doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.09.18.752809 This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. Abstract Allegations that Thomas Jefferson fathered the children of the enslaved Sally Hemings emerged in the context of U.S. presidential politics in the late 1700s and early 1800s and entailed...

Dementia research has reached a profound turning point. Alzheimer's disease was once considered 'untreatable', but that is not the universal rule any longer, according to this year's World Alzheimer Report. In the past five years alone, novel drugs have been shown to modestly slow decline in early Alzheimer's, while growing evidence suggests some dementia cases could potentially be delayed or prevented through risk reduction. Today, hundreds of clinical trials worldwide are now investigating possible medicines, new diagnostic options, and lifestyle interventions to identify, treat, or delay cognitive decline. The possibility of a cure is still far away, but it "feels...

A rare form of sudden and potentially permanent vision loss is becoming the latest safety question surrounding blockbuster GLP-1 drugs, with patients filing lawsuits in the U.S. even as regulators overseas have already added warnings. The condition is called nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION. It occurs when blood flow to the optic nerve is reduced, potentially causing abrupt vision loss that can be permanent.The complication appears to be extremely rare. The bigger issue is that researchers still disagree over whether drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy actually cause it.That uncertainty is now moving from medical journals into courtrooms...

This El Niño will have an epic tantrum. While still months away from reaching its peak, the super El Niño is already shattering temperature records. Data show that the sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific has reached 3.07°C (around 5.5 F) — tying the record set by the 2015–16 El Niño — with scientists expecting it to get a lot hotter. “This month (September) is very likely to have the highest monthly anomalies on record,” Zeke Hausfather, co-author of comprehensive climate change reports for the United Nations, told Phys.org in an email. Based on an analysis of 14 different...

Explanation: This shot captured an unexpected silhouette. Which is it? It isn't the sunspots, the small dark regions caused by concentrated magnetic fields visible around the Sun's bright disk. Sunspots typically last for weeks and were expected, since these spots were seen previously. It isn’t the International Space Station (ISS), the small dark structure on the middle left. This is because the featured picture was planned with sub-second timing to record the iconic structure passing before the Sun. It is the airplane. Just as this exposure was taking place in June, from Prasek in the Czech Republic, an airplane began...

The Romans may have loved their pets just as much as we do, yet with no internet on which to upload photos of their furry companions, the ancients had to make do with mosaic portraits of their beloved animals laid into their villa floors. An extraordinary example of one such pet-themed artwork has recently been discovered in what was an affluent household in Adramytteion, located beneath the modern settlement of Ören in Türkiye. Dated to the late second or early third century CE, the Roman-era residence consists of three mosaic-paved halls set around a central atrium. Within the north hall...

Energy groups are pushing Gov. Kathy Hochul to restart Indian Point’s dormant nuclear reactors as part of a new ad blitz for “Climate Week.” The Democratic governor’s face will appear on a billboard on a truck alongside the message “open up Indian Point, or the heat goes out and the light goes out.” Westchester County’s Indian Point was closed in 2021 under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo after years of pressure from anti-nuke activists and politicians who worried that its location just 40 miles out of Midtown would mean disaster in the case of a meltdown. But Hochul is leading an...

The tomb in which Tutankhamun's mummy was discovered in 1922 may originally have been built for a different ruler, before being adapted to house the remains of the Boy King following his untimely death... in 2015 British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves proposed that she may be lurking in a concealed room beyond the walls of Tut's tomb... Previously, a number of experts -- including Howard Carter, who first uncovered KV 62 -- had noted that it seems rather small for a royal burial chamber. Reeves then pointed out that the structure is a "left-turning monument", and therefore conforms to the architectural...

A new study has proposed the existence of a hidden solar system planet candidate that is smaller and closer to Earth than the infamous, hypothetical Planet X. This new world, dubbed "Planet Y," could be around the same size as Earth and may exist alongside another popular Planet Nine candidate; potentially bringing our solar system's planetary tally to 10, if both can be confirmed. Did the Sun Pull a Rogue Planet into the Solar System? | 10:19 Territory | 123K subscribers | 146,224 views | September 21, 2026 Narrated by Mathew McQuinn

Explanation: When does a nebula look like a comet? In this crowded starfield covering over two degrees within the high-flying constellation of the Swan (Cygnus), the eye is drawn to the Cocoon Nebula. A compact star forming region, the cosmic Cocoon punctuates a nebula bright in emission and reflection on the lower right, with a long trail of interstellar dust clouds to the left, making the entire complex appear a bit like a comet. Cataloged as IC 5146, the central bright head of the nebula spans about 10 light years, while the dark dusty tail spans nearly 100 light years....

For decades, many scientists have confidently dismissed the vast majority of the human DNA as useless evolutionary garbage. Yet a recently published scientific paper in Cell, one of the world’s most prestigious biology journals, declares a “paradigm shift” against the idea that huge portions of the human genome are merely “junk DNA.”After the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, a startling discovery was made. Only about 2 percent of the entire human genome codes for proteins. Scientists naturally asked, what is the other 98 percent doing?Evolutionary biology was ready with an answer. For decades, they had claimed that the...