It’s a nightmare; the only difference is you’re actually asleep during a nightmare. Sleep starts, or hypnic jerks, those abrupt, full-body jolts that fire off just as you finally drift off, ruin nights’ sleep before they even begin. According to a new study published in PLOS Mental Health by researchers at the University of Salzburg, these nighttime spasms are not only responsible for you kicking your partner, but research says that they are also taking a major psychological toll on you.

What sounds like a random, innocuous muscle twitch is actually a full-body jerk, often accompanied by the feeling of an electric shock or a blinding flash that lights up the inside of a sufferer’s head. Some even experience the terrifying sensation of suddenly plummeting into a bottomless void.

Their heart starts racing, and they go into a full-blown panic as they are suddenly jolted awake.

Why Your Body Suddenly Jerks Awake Just as You’re Falling Asleep, According to Science

For some, it’s a weekly or even daily occurrence, and you can imagine that it can drive them absolutely nuts. According to the research, frequent sufferers report heavily degraded sleep quality paired with spiked levels of depression and daytime anxiety.

The jolts create a climate of fear, where going to sleep becomes stressful as the sufferer worries about falling asleep, keeping their nervous system on high alert. That hyperarousal makes their brains misfire, causing their bodies to convulse in acute terror. Now they’re too panicked to rest, so they don’t get adequate sleep, which rolls over into more stress tomorrow.

Researchers note that emotional strain triggers episodes more directly than basic sleep deprivation. Doctors used to write off hypnic jerks as a harmless quirk of the body, but new data shows that they deserve to be taken a lot more seriously as a manifestation of severe cognitive hyperarousal, where the brain is basically so overwhelmed by the pressure to fall asleep, to even just relax, that it starts slamming a panic button.

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If you’ve had an out-of-body experience, new research suggests you may have experienced a weird state between sleep and waking, where the dreamy unreality of unconsciousness spills into consciousness.

As detailed by ScienceAlert, a study published in Consciousness and Cognition by Radboud University neuroscientist Teresa Campillo-Ferrer and her team hooked 35 participants up to EEG caps to figure out why our brains occasionally glitch out so hard that we think our consciousness has left our bodies to go on metaphysical adventures.

They found that those bizarre “unusual bodily experiences,” or UBEs, as they call them, ranging from feeling like you’re hovering above your own bed to dealing with the classic sleep paralysis demon staring at you from the doorway, happen when your brain refuses to choose between being asleep and being awake.

Scientists Found a Surprising Explanation for Out-of-Body Experiences

They found that during this hazy half-state, your temporal regions are still active. Slow sleep-cycle waves mix with fast waking beta and gamma waves. Your internal wiring gets caught between two states, allowing subconscious dream logic to leak straight into your waking reality while you are conscious enough to freak out about it.

Further research will need to look into how, exactly, the brain can produce sensations that feel convincingly real. So the next time you find yourself floating several feet above your bed with your physical body still in it, don’t panic. Go on whatever wild metaphysical adventure you want; just know it probably isn’t a spiritual experience as much as it’s your brain refusing to pick a lane.   

The post Scientists Watched People Have Out-of-Body Experiences. Here’s What They Saw. appeared first on VICE.

After aborting a planned catch of Starship Flight 15's booster, SpaceX successfully captured Starship with its "Mechazilla" launch and catch tower for the first time. The company has performed 'chopstick' catches of its boosters before, but this is the first time the maneuver has successfully been executed on the Starship vehicle itself.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said during the company's third-quarter earnings call that "success is not guaranteed on these first flights, but I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight." While not a complete success, in that the company was unable to recover the entire launch vehicle, it sti …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you live with a cat, you’ve likely spent years trying to keep a nagging thought at bay: this thing is probably just using you as some kind of big, dim-witted, easily manipulated servant. You’d probably try telling yourself that was the case, that it really does love you, but now, a study published in the journal Animal Behaviour comes along to confirm your darkest suspicions.

Researchers from the University of São Paulo think that cats have weaponized their meows, turning the sound into a means of bullying us into solving all of their problems.

The researchers gave 38 food-motivated cats a treat locked inside a clear plastic box with holes. The cats could smell the prize, but couldn’t breach the container with their paws. The team then observed how the animals reacted while completely alone vs. in the presence of a human.

Your Cat Might Be Manipulating You With Its Meows, According to a New Study

It was a blowout. A complete no contest. Cats were 16 times more likely to start screaming when a person was in the room, dropping a matinee 86 frantic meows at humans compared to a paltry 20 when left alone.

When they were alone, they didn’t waste breath yelling at no one. They just stared at the door, waiting for the human to walk back in. Even more telling is that while they were vocalizing at humans, the cats aggressively flashed their eyes back and forth between the box and the person, the internationally known cartoony representation of saying “Hey, open it for me, you idiot.”  

Cats evolved a high-pitched, infant-like shriek over thousands of years specifically to torment us into doing things for them. The next time your cat meows at you, know it’s giving you a direct command to do something for it, and when you do, you are likely just making it feel like it owns you instead of the other way around.

What a life, am I right?

The post The Real Reason Your Cat Meows So Much, According to Science appeared first on VICE.

As Israeli restrictions limit repairs in Gaza, fuel is being diverted from wells to drainage pumps.

The galaxies’ dark matter was ejected during a collision, but ironically, its absence is some of the best evidence of the elusive substance yet.

Under cofounder Jensen Huang, Nvidia has become the engine for the AI boom - and one of the tech industry's biggest environmental liabilities. Its sought-after chips have triggered a new wave of water- and chemical-intensive factories, drained power grids from inside massive data centers, and set the stage for a looming e-waste problem.

Under Huang's leadership, Nvidia clashed with environmental groups seeking to hold the company accountable for its so-called "hidden" emissions. Huang has talked up the idea of using AI to fight climate change while his company's supply chain emissions ballooned. Nvidia's investments, meanwhile, have support …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Coral reefs are dying from rising ocean temperatures. They lose their color and die. A serendipitous event in a Stanford lab may have given scientists a way to save them.

In a tank at the Hopkins Marine Station, a healthy coral fell onto a bleached one. — Read the rest

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The ancient Maya loved using a bright red paint to decorate all sorts of things, from temple walls to pottery. Thousands of years after their civilization collapsed, we’re finding that their favorite shade of red contained mercury that poisoned their water and food supply.

According to a recent study published in Science Advances by Auburn University paleolimnologist Matthew Waters, it’s an environmental catastrophe of their own making. The Maya loved the color red. It held several sacred meanings, from representing blood to the Sun, among others.

To get that vibrant hue, they relied heavily on cinnabar, a bright red mineral that is highly toxic because it contains mercury sulfide. The funny thing is, Cinnabar does not naturally occur in the Yucatán Peninsula, where the Maya resided. They used a complex trade network to import the stuff that was poisoning them.

The Ancient Maya May Have Been Poisoning Themselves With Something They Considered Sacred

Over the centuries, rain washed paint runoff directly into water sources essential to the community, like Lago Coba and Cenote Xcach. When the mercury hit the lake bottom, bacteria transformed the runoff into lethal methylmercury.

When modern researchers pulled sediment cores from those lakes, they found mercury levels up to six times higher than today’s highest safety thresholds. All that mercury nuked the local aquatic ecosystem, killing the algae and freshwater shellfish the Maya relied on for protein.

Historians have debated for years whether climate change or war caused the Maya collapse during the Classic Period. Seems like we could also add in the casual drinking of toxic heavy metals.

The post The Ancient Maya Loved This Color So Much They Accidentally Poisoned Themselves With It, Scientists Say appeared first on VICE.

With Hubble expected to reenter the atmosphere by 2034 and several malfunctions on board, NASA is asking commercial space companies for proposals on how to extend the telescope’s lifespan.

Between 2016 and 2018, a team of researchers at a dig site near Cambridge, England, found a mildly disturbing but archaeologically fascinating ditch filled with 8,000 ancient frog bones. Was it some ancient pagan ritual? Perhaps the bodies of some failed arcane experiment? The researchers were baffled and spent the past decade or so trying to figure out what 8,000 frog bones in a ditch in England could mean.

Now, scientists at Bournemouth University and the Museum of London Archaeology think they’ve figured out who put them there. To their surprise, it’s an animal that says hoo.

As reported by the BBC and detailed in the journal Environmental Archaeology, scientists say the bones are the remains of a frog buffet dined upon by short-eared owls and hen harriers who eat like kings during the Roman period.

Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of 8,000 Ancient Frog Bones Found in a Ditch

By analyzing how the bones were broken and measuring the tiny upper-arm humerus bones, the researchers realized that hungry predatory birds devoured thousands of young frogs over a single winter.

The researchers say much of this was indirectly fueled by human activity. Local settlers had cleared much of the dense forest to graze their livestock, inadvertently stripping away the natural tree cover that protected local frog populations.

The defendant wetlands were retreating at the time, which was perfect for frog breeding, and even more perfect for hungry birds looking to snack on breeding frogs. The frogs were defenseless as they sat out in the open grassland. The birds gorged themselves on frogs, leaving thousands and thousands of their bones behind.

By the time they were done, the leg left behind a 46-foot ditch stuffed with 8,000 bones as evidence of their incredible feast. A meal so epic it baffled scientists nearly 2,000 years later.

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There’s something behind Neptune. It’s a big object, and it seems to be orbiting the Sun in the opposite direction from everything else. Researchers have no idea what it is or where it came from, but one thing is certain: it’s weird.

According to data from EarthSky and the Rubin Observatory, this celestial weirdo goes by the temporary name R631. While Earth and everything else in the solar system orbit the Sun in a roughly flat pancake shape, this 62-mile-wide… Thing is cutting through the solar system at an extremely steep 142-degree angle, and all against the natural flow of the cosmos.

Scientists Just Discovered Something Very Strange Lurking Beyond Neptune

It makes no sense, especially given how our solar system formed billions of years ago. A massive cloud of dust flattened out and started spinning like a record. Everything born from that record started spinning in the same direction, and it’s been that way ever since. R631 just up and decided to spin the other way, actively ignoring the fundamental physics that everything else in our celestial neighborhood abides by.

This anomaly is currently sitting about 3 billion miles away and takes almost 548 years to make one full trip around our Sun. Since this rebel plays by its own rules, astronomers suspect it could be a massive comet, possibly from outside our solar system, that will start spewing gas when it makes its closest pass to the Sun in 2047.

Of course, the idea that it is from outside of our solar system is just one theory — that maybe it got kicked out of some neighboring star system and got sucked into our Sun’s gravity. The other option is that it was born and bred right here in our solar system but got flung into a reverse orbit after getting caught in a gravitational game of pinball with Neptune or Jupiter.

Researchers will keep a close eye on it for now, though we probably won’t learn much more about it for some time.

The post Something Strange and Massive Is Lurking Beyond Neptune, and Scientists Don’t Know What It Is appeared first on VICE.

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. We'll be taking a break next week and will be back on November 25th. Opt in for Optimizer here.

The SS Jeremiah O'Brien is a World War II Liberty ship. The hulking vessel was built in 56 days. It made 11 trips to Normandy, France, to supply the Allied powers in the fight against German U-boats. Last week, it was the site of a black-tie peptide party thrown by a trio of Gen Z venture capitalists.

Roughly 150 people attended the event, where four types of …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Armed with a team of AI agents, Google researcher Pietro Miotti claimed earlier this week to have discovered a potentially unmapped Maya site in Mexico. There was just one problem: The site had already been discovered and was published in an academic journal last year. The incident, which sparked criticism among archeologists online, underscores a growing tension in science as amateurs wielding increasingly powerful AI tools parachute into specialist fields, often without the expertise needed to understand what they are looking at.

Local communities are often already well aware of sites in their area.

Miotti said the idea to use AI to sea …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Humanity has thrived thanks to a stable cryosphere, but burning fossil fuels has increased the risk of “accelerating and partly irreversible” harm to the planet’s cold places.

Creatine is everywhere right now. But are the claims around this classic supplement actually based in real science? Or are they just more marketing hype?

For decades, creatine has been sold to fitness buffs, as a way to build more muscle, faster. Now it’s being pitched to almost everyone, with influencers, podcasters, and celebrity doctors claiming it can sharpen your mind, lift your mood, offset sleep deprivation, and even reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. And these wellness claims are driving a real surge in profit — US sales topped half a billion dollars in 2025. 

So what is creatine actually doing in your body? Will it really help you build muscle, or are those dramatic before-and-after photos telling a different story? And when it comes to your brain, is there real evidence behind the claims about memory, mood, and Alzheimer’s, or is the hype getting ahead of the science?

We dug into the research on creatine, from the muscles to the mind, and spoke with exercise scientist Nick Tiller and associate professor Matthew Taylor, whose team at the University of Kansas studied creatine’s effects on people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Read more about the real science behind creatine:

• Nutrition report: Influence of age, sex and exercise type on creatine and lean body mass
• National Library of Medicine report: The effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive performance
• Nature report: Single dose creatine improves cognitive performance and induces changes in cerebral high energy phosphates during sleep deprivation
• Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition report: The birth of modern sports nutrition: tracing the path from muscle biopsies to creatine supplementation
• Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition report: Effects of creatine supplementation with and without exercise and diet intervention on body composition, cognitive function, and markers of health in middle-aged and older adults
• Alzheimer’s & Dementia report: Creatine monohydrate pilot in Alzheimer’s: Feasibility, brain creatine, and cognition
• The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry report: The Effect of Creatine Monohydrate on Mental Disorders: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials
• Montreal Gazette article: The Right Chemistry: Creatine, a supplement with a rare commodity: Evidence

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After its latest device struggled to perform, brain-computer interface startup Synchon halted clinical trials. The company says it will upgrade the implant’s hardware and is at work on a new device.

These Arctic currents have never broken down so early in the season. Combined with an unprecedented El Niño, the outcomes aren’t easy to predict.

Researchers at Google DeepMind have unveiled a new AI model designed to unravel how changes in our DNA affect different cells, giving scientists a more detailed view of a notoriously difficult problem that could hold important clues to the causes of disease - and point the way to new treatments.

AlphaGenome 2 is the successor to DeepMind's genome-predicting AI model AlphaGenome, which was released last year. While nearly every cell in the human body carries the same DNA, different types of cells - from heart muscle cells and skin cells to immune cells fighting an infection - switch different genes on and off, and those patterns can change d …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Radical Numerics has developed a model that it says can identify natural and AI-engineered pathogens without an internet connection.