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Explanation: What spooky planet is this? Planet Earth on a dark and stormy night, of course. The ghostly scene was photographed at Hverir, a geothermally active area found along northeastern Iceland's volcanic landscape. Triggered by solar activity, geomagnetic storms have unleashed energetic particles trapped in Earth's magnetic field. Penetrating the planet's upper atmosphere at high latitudes, the particles create auroral displays in the starry night sky. Ghostly towers of steam and gas are venting from local fumaroles to dance against the eerie, greenish northern lights. For now, auroral activity on planet Earth remains in a high state as the Sun...

The system that has driven life-altering discoveries and helped make the United States a superpower is now under intense strain.The warning, buried in an obscure government report this summer, was unflinching.The Defense Department’s vaunted network of research laboratories — whose scientists helped develop satellite communication, radar technology, and even the computer mouse — was in trouble.The labs lost a significant share of their staff last year, largely in response to the Trump administration’s efforts to thin the federal work force, the report found. Refilling critical positions was proving difficult due in part to President Trump’s demand that new hires be...

According to a Türkiye Today report, green malachite and copper has been uncovered in a 9,000-year-old workshop in a Neolithic settlement in southeastern Turkey. Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said that the pieces of raw and worked malachite, copper beads, and other copper objects were found in the workshop, which has a stone-paved work area. Six postholes were found around the edges of the area, suggesting that it may have been covered by a canopy. "The discovery shows that the mining tradition here continued for about 2,000 years and that specialized production activities took place in specific work...

Analysis of deep grooves in the bedrock on the islands of the Maltese archipelago suggests that they are ruts made by the wheels of carts over thousands of years, Gizmodo reports. It had been suggested that the tracks dated to between 5200 and 750 B.C. and were related to quarrying activity. Joel Grima of the University of Malta said that similar cart ruts can be found in urban areas of Europe, Asia, and North America. In Malta, more than 2,600 tracks totaling more than 30 miles have been recorded. Most of the tracks are in clusters, and some of them...

Explanation: Spooky shapes seem to haunt this dusty expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood, they lurk above the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. Over 2 light-years across and brighter than most of the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula. It lies at lower right in the starry field of view. Inside the Ghost Nebula are reddish...

Explanation: That's no moon. But you could be forgiven for thinking it was a crescent Moon in the sky. It is a lesser known fact that Venus also has phases. (What about other planets?) The featured image shows Venus seen almost directly between the Sun and the Earth. This happens once every year and a half, and it is like the alignment that happens every month during a new Moon. But the new Moon is dark, while Venus' backlit atmosphere refracts and scatters the sunlight, creating a glowing crescent arc that extends beyond 180 degrees: the tips of this arc...

On El Hierro Island in Spain, they set out to build an electricity system powered only by wind, with backup from a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant. The relevant statistics for El Hierro are: average electricity demand: 5 MW; nameplate capacity of the wind turbines: 11.5 MW (i.e., 2.3x “overbuild” compared to average usage); storage capacity of the pumped storage system: 70 MWh (i.e., 14 hours of average usage). The operator of the facility has provided eight years of operating data for the system. I reported on the results in my last post on October 23. In summary, the wind/storage system provided...

Unexpectedly, a kind of protein that is usually linked with diseases in the brain may play a vital role in semen, helping shepherd genetic material into sperm cells, scientists at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute report today in the research journal Molecular Cell. Dr. Fitzpatrick, an expert on amyloids in brain research, wondered if those fibrils could also help materials naturally in the body enter sperm: specifically, the genetic molecule RNA, which helps turn instructions encoded in DNA into protein molecules. Scientists knew that seminal fluid contains lots of small RNAs, thought to play a major role in what genes are active...

Soldiers in Uganda caught an alleged serial killer cannibal who is accused of killing and eating 38 people over his savage 15-year spree, authorities said. Mujurizi Moses is the “worst serial killer and cannibal in Uganda’s history” who devoured body parts of dozens of victims victims between 2010 and 2025, the country’s defense chief General Muhoozi Kainerugaba alleged on Monday. The machete-wielding maniac is accused of slaughtering a pastor and his family, a witchdoctor, eight of his own relatives, and an elderly woman hacked to death in front of her two grandchildren, according to the Daily Monitor, a Ugandan outlet....

Have we been wrong about the location -- and the nature -- of Odysseus' homeland for 2,000 years? | 13:50 Honor Cargill-Martin | 11.1K subscribers | 6,968 views | October 28, 2026 Alas, no YT transcript available.

Explanation: Jupiter is one of the least lonely planets in the Solar System, at least when it comes to natural satellites. 115 moons have been discovered orbiting Jupiter so far! (Saturn has the most with 293, but who’s counting.) Ganymede and Io, two of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, met in the sky on October 20th, 2026. Today’s video captures the meeting, with Ganymede briefly blocking Io from view. This event, when an astronomical object passes in front of another and either completely or partially blocks it, is called a mutual occultation. The mutual occultations of Galilean moons are rare to witness...

Explanation: Sometimes it's night on the ground but day in the air. As the Earth rotates to eclipse the Sun, sunset rises up from the ground. Therefore, at sunset on the ground, sunlight still shines on clouds above. Under usual circumstances, a pretty sunset might be visible, but unusual noctilucent clouds float so high up they can be seen well after dark. Normally too dim to be seen, they may become visible just after sunset during the summer when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon. Noctilucent clouds are the highest clouds and are known more technically as polar mesospheric...

A brief tour of Troy, one of the most famous - and confusing - archaeological sites in Turkey. The Ruins of Troy | 7:27 Scenic Routes to the Past | 62.7K subscribers | 30,203 views | October 23, 2026

The remote ruins of Oenoanda, home of the famous Epicurean inscription of Diogenes. Scenic Routes to the Past explores the remote Hellenistic ruins of Oenoanda in northern Lycia. The site features an impressive Roman aqueduct, extensive defensive walls, and the remnants of an agora once home to one of the ancient world's longest philosophical inscriptions, which remains a focus of ongoing archaeological study. The Ruins of Oenoanda | 7:58 Scenic Routes to the Past | 61.7K subscribers | 25,713 views | August 7, 2026

Over 50 years after helping excavate the remarkable Anglo-Saxon site, archaeologist Dr Phil Harding returns to help celebrate and dedicate the reconstruction. Phil Harding Opens Saxon Hall 50 Years After Helping Excavate it | Archaeology Brought to Life | 9:54 Butser Ancient Farm | 10.1K subscribers | 30,788 views | October 22, 2026

Explanation: The Great Nebula in Orion, an immense, nearby starbirth region, is one of the most famous of all astronomical nebulas. Here, glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. In the featured deep image in assigned colors highlighted by emission in hydrogen, wisps and sheets of dust and gas are particularly evident. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye near the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. In addition to housing a bright open cluster of stars known...

Watch this full podcast episode where Anthony Delany and Maddy Pelling talk with Irving Finkel about the first ghost, going all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest evidence of human belief in ghosts comes from 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Who were these first ghosts? What was the underworld they lived in like? What do these most ancient ghosts tell us about today? Maddy and Anthony's guest today, Irving Finkel, Assistant Keeper [ASSISTANT?] of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum and author of 'The First Ghosts: Most...

In my post several days ago on October 18, I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food. Do you want to double grain production? Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage! The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world. Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history. Tens of millions died horrible deaths of...

Science Norway reports that a stone with a groove running all the way around it was discovered near an islet off the coast of western Norway that is the site of Hespriniholmen, a greenstone quarry estimated to be between 5,000 and 9,000 years old. Greenstone was used to make axes that have been unearthed in western and eastern Norway. Arild Skjæveland Vivås of the Stavanger Maritime Museum said that the team of researchers found the stone, which weighs more than 60 pounds, on an underwater pile of quarry waste. They fastened a rope around the groove and pulled it up...

Additional ring ditches have been discovered at the Hunn burial ground in eastern Norway with ground-penetrating radar, according to a Science Norway report. Standing stone circles are known to have stood in the South Field some 2,000 years ago. The newly uncovered circles were found in the West Field, where traces of large burial mounds remain. "They may have made the circle first in order to plan the construction of the burial monument, or it may have formed because people walked in a circle around it," said Anne Lene Melheim of Norway's Museum of Cultural History. Several possible graves have...