Apparently, this year, two anonymous federal agents briefly observed a mysterious matte black triangular object flying through the air. Another colleague had informed them of its presence. They were based in a redacted location in the western United States, dubbed a “national security site.” The dark triangle of their focus ascended, hovered, then sped away into a canyon.

The unsettling, smooth craft resembled a delta-wing drone and boasted a wingspan of between nine and 15 ft. It made no noise and left no trail behind it, but it showed up on an infrared monocular. The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office recorded the occurrence in a memo and a signed statement the experienced military observers gave to the FBI.

Everything We Know About the Mysterious Black Triangle UFO in the Pentagon’s Latest Files

The Pentagon made this sighting public in a recent release containing 28 PDFs. This amounted to the seventh release of its kind under an executive order mandating the disclosure of UAP, or “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” files. There has been no shortage of alleged UAP, or UFO, spottings lately. A pressing question, of course, remains whether some of these objects are the product of a hostile nation’s intelligence.

Extraterrestrials have quite clearly been a trending topic. Steven Spielberg’s recent June unveiling of the alien-themed Disclosure Day sparked controversy, with some claiming that it might have been “cursed.” The theory that UFOs are “Devil[s] in Disguise,” attempting to deceive us, has been gaining traction. Even Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke has expressed the belief that these manifestations are actually of demonic origin.

In any case, while further investigation of supposed UFO appearances is indeed necessary, we must not let the hype distract us from other matters that also require more exploration. Since the government has just demonstrated what seems to be admirable transparency, we might now continue to politely request the release of files on other matters…

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BBC's Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots. Previous incarnations of the nature series were defined by their gorgeous, crystal-clear footage that seemed almost too good to be real. But one dead giveaway of AI is when things look too polished and seamless. To counter that, Blue Planet III goes warts and all.

Executive Producer Elizabeth White told The Guardian in the past, "the amount of plankton and things" floating in the water would have caused them to cut a shot. Or "we might have framed out a boat or a buoy or gone: 'Oh, actually … the water conditions are not really good enough …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Every time I leave the nail salon with a fresh manicure, I definitely feel a little boost in my self-esteem. You just hold up your hands and admire how cute they look all day.

Other people are checking out your nails, too. In a study, researchers Sara DeMichele and T. Joel Wade of Bucknell University showed 342 adults illustrations of hands that looked identical except for the nails. Participants rated each one on a scale of 0 to 7 for attractiveness, along with how desirable they thought the person would be as a romantic partner.

Medium-length nails were the clear favorite, scoring 5.1 for attractiveness compared with 3.2 for short nails and 2.5 for long ones. Researchers think medium nails suggest someone takes care of themselves without making everyday tasks unnecessarily difficult. Like struggling to open a can of soda with long acrylic nails. 

Scientists Just Found the Most Attractive Nail Length and Color

White nails came out on top in the color department, earning a 4.6 attractiveness rating, with red following at 3.8. Blue and black didn’t do so well, scoring 2.5 and 2.3. The researchers suspect white polish gives people the impression that someone takes care of their appearance. But among non-heterosexual participants, black was actually the favorite.

The fact that red didn’t score higher caught researchers off guard. “One finding that surprised our team was the relatively lower attractiveness ratings associated with red nails,” DeMichele told PsyPost. After all, red has a long history of being considered sexy, and a 2008 study even found that men rated women as more attractive when red was involved. Other researchers have since had trouble replicating those results, so the whole red-attraction theory is still up for debate.

Of course, we can only conclude so much from pictures of illustrated hands. The participants were mostly White Western adults, and the researchers didn’t examine different nail shapes or elaborate designs. So if you’re devoted to your long stiletto nails or black manicures, there’s no scientific reason to abandon them.

DeMichele has also been looking into how getting your nails done affects your own confidence. Her early research suggests that certain nail lengths and colors might give people a little self-esteem boost, although those findings haven’t been published yet.

As for me, I’m going to keep getting my nails done because I like them. If someone else thinks they’re attractive, that’s a nice bonus.

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When you hug, hold, squeeze, and pet your cat, you’re probably vaguely aware, maybe just in the back of your mind, that you’re actively trying to improve your quality of life by engaging in a pleasant activity. But something might be happening on a deeper, hormonal level that boosts not only your mood but your cat’s, too.

According to research published in iScience by a Kyoto University team, previous studies on whether cats actually make our lives better have been a bit of a mixed bag. There’s enough science to strongly suggest that dogs offer health benefits that stick around for quite a while. But research on cats’ health benefits, like the animals themselves, is complicated and inconsistent.

To figure out why cat ownership’s perks are harder to pin down, the researchers tracked 19 human and cat pairs for a month using Bluetooth tracking beacons and urine samples to check in on any biological effects.

Your Cat’s Brain Chemistry Could Be Affecting Your Mood, New Research Suggests

They found that simply owning a cat doesn’t magically turn your brain into a blissful utopia. But something fascinating is happening, and you need to be in close physical proximity to your cat to reap the benefits.

The study found a direct hormonal link between humans and cats: higher oxytocin in cats correlated with lower cortisol and fewer negative vibes in humans. Oxytocin is the hormone associated with bonding, and cortisol is the hormone that triggers stress.

In other words, the more your cat feels your bond, the less stress you’ll feel in turn. The researchers found such a close connection between the two that a cat’s oxytocin levels tracked an owner’s bad mood more closely than the owner’s own biochemistry did.

This is, of course, a good example of small-sample-size theater, and it all amounts to correlation rather than causation, but excuse me for snuggling your kitty just a little bit more tightly tonight.

The post Why Spending Time With Your Cat Feels So Good, According to Science appeared first on VICE.

The vaccine is personalized to a patient’s tumor, and results from the Phase 3 trial are yet another example of the promise of mRNA vaccines in treating cancer.

The Webb telescope sees tiny red dots everywhere. Astronomers can’t agree on what they are, but some believe they may be enormous stars with black holes inside.

Paleontology has been on a real Neanderthal tear lately, with all sorts of discoveries about how our ancient ancestors lived. Today, we learned a new factoid from a preprint study on ResearchSquare, published by researchers and found by IFLScience: Neanderthals loved eating beaver.

Okay, cool it, you pervs. I mean literal beaver, and marmots, too.

We’ve long known our extinct cousins were capable hunters. They could bring down towering woolly mammoths and small little rabbits. But new evidence suggests one of their favorite snacks was medium-sized rodents.

Neanderthals Apparently Loved Eating Beaver, According to New Research

At the Valdegoba Cave in northern Spain, researchers uncovered hundreds of 130,000-year-old Eurasian beaver and alpine marmot bones, along with stone tools and Neanderthal fossils. A lot of the bones had tooth marks likely made by opportunistic scavenger animals like foxes and wolves.

Some distinctly Neanderthal marks are mixed in as well, like cut marks on some bones that strongly suggest the work of a skilled butcher, or, to use the study’s more precise, fascinating word choice, “defleshing” and “disarticulation.” Never have I come across a more sociopathic word choice than “defleshing.”

The Neanderthals were munching on beaver, but it wasn’t a usual staple of their diet. Given how many of the bones they found showed signs of human processing, beaver meat was more of a quick fix, a snack they could go to in a pinch, when more substantial meals weren’t available. Beavers and marmots were to Neanderthals as the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is to modern humans.

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Last week, Starshield - the version of SpaceX's Starlink used by the Ukrainian military - was throttled to block terminals traveling above certain speeds from accessing the service. The Ukrainian army's interceptors, which counter Russian drones carrying bombs, suddenly stopped working at high speeds, making it easier for Russia to attack the country's energy infrastructure and leading to a reported two deaths and at least 17 injuries.

The Ukrainian military reported receiving no advance warning about the Starshield speed restriction. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it was a direct message from the US amid rising tensions b …

Read the full story at The Verge.

SpaceX plans to access at least 80,000 cell sites as part of efforts to compete directly with Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources tell the publication that SpaceX is in talks with Crown Castle Inc., one of the nation's largest cell tower owners.

The move would give SpaceX access to half of the 158,500 cell towers currently operational in the US, according to Reuters. When asked about a potential partnership with SpaceX, Amazon, or other satellite services during an earnings call on Wednesday, Crown Castle CEO Chris Hillabrant said, "I don't think I want to get into customer-specific detail, but you can …

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A new Texas-based defense startup has a plan to improve military and police dogs in the US: it's going to genetically modify them and equip them with Anduril's military technology. Warhound is the brainchild of Anduril's Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal Biosciences (the company that says it's trying to resurrect extinct animals), and it's already secured $200 million in funding from investors.

Warhound plans to use Colossal's work in genetics, cloning, and animal biology to "produce healthier dogs with characteristics suited to demanding missions," with Anduril then equipping them with its "advanced cybernetic Augments." T …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The cloud has baffled astronomers since its discovery in 2018. Now, a new study offers a possible cause for its appearance.

Although the case is considered exceptional, investigators are working to determine how the infection occurred and whether the pathogen played a role in the patient’s death.

Monkeys, they’re just like us! Yes, we share a ton of genes, but socially, researchers recently found monkeys from groups that lived through a deadly outbreak became much more wary of tainted food afterward. Now you’re starting to see why Taco Bell is still trying to recover from that tainted lettuce scare.

As The New York Times described them, they’re basically “germaphobe monkeys,” an apt nickname for the Japanese macaques observed in a study published in Royal Society Open Science.

When a virus tore through a South Texas macaque sanctuary, three out of four monkey groups watched their neighbors suffer and die from a disease spread through bites and scratches. Once the epidemic faded, cognitive scientists from the University of California, San Diego set up an experiment, the results of which they detailed in a press release.

Offered they macaques two food choices, food on a clean surface versus food on a board covered in feces.

Scientists Discovered That Monkeys Become Germaphobes After Surviving a Deadly Outbreak

That’s an easy choice for you, but for the macaques, a little s—t on their food isn’t usually a deal breaker. Monkeys that hadn’t been exposed to the virus happily eat the poop-covered food 79 percent of the time. But macaques from groups that survived the outbreak and witnessed its horrors only ate the poop-covered food 47 percent of the time.

Sure, if you knew someone who ate poop-covered food 47 percent of the time, you would think they were deranged. But again, these are monkeys, and 47 percent is crazy low.

What’s so fascinating here, and what’s so weirdly human about this phenomenon, is that the initial virus that wiped out so many of the monkeys wasn’t transmitted through food at all, and yet, like so many of us in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic who were furiously scrubbing down groceries in hopes of eliminating all traces of what would ultimately turn out to be an airborne virus, the monkeys that survived the outbreak turned into hypochondriac neat freaks, and justifiably so. They had undergone a severe trauma, and they were mitigating potential vectors of infection.

The researchers say that the psychological defense mechanism stems from something called the “behavioral immune system,” which triggers disgust in the brain to ward off perceived threats. When we went through a global pandemic that shut down the world, we went apes—t with the hand sanitizer. After the macaques went through their own tiny version of a pandemic, their sense of security was on high alert based on past trauma.

Strongly suggesting that avoidance of potentially disease-ridden stuff is a learned social behavior, potentially handed down from mother to baby, the researchers found that former pets and lab-reared monkeys were more willing to eat the dirty food. Poor things. They never had a mama to teach them not to eat food covered in poop.

The post These Monkeys Survived a Deadly Outbreak, Then Started Acting a Lot Like Humans appeared first on VICE.

Oh sure, SpaceX's credit risk is pretty high because it's about to borrow another $40 billion to spend on Nvidia chips, but who cares about that? SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss a merger!

The degree to which you find this merger compelling likely has to do with the degree to which you believe Elon Musk about wanting to go to Mars, or "spread the light of consciousness," as he put it in this week's SpaceX earnings call (and earlier S-1). Now, a reasonably informed person knows that we don't have the technology - or, frankly, even the raw information to build the technology - in order to support human life in space. …

Read the full story at The Verge.

For years, AI leaders have touted healthcare as one of the clearest examples of where their technology will improve lives. Now "it is finally here," Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge. The company claims to have developed an AI-powered tool it says can diagnose conditions up to four times more accurately than human doctors.

The findings, published Thursday in one of the world's most prestigious journals, Science, are based on tests pitting Microsoft's AI system against human physicians on a series of scenarios drawn from medical case reports and emergency department data. Microsoft compiled the cases into its own benchmark, S …

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Ancient plants reveal that the vestiges of the North American ice sheet started expanding a few thousand years ago, but that climate change caused it to reverse course.

Reincarnation doesn’t seem like it’s a supernatural phenomenon that’s going to be definitively proven anytime soon with scientific research or study of any kind. But the descriptions in people’s reports of memories of past lives can be studied, and recently were. A study published in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice that peered into 1,600 stories of reincarnation found a weird recurring pattern in the tales.

Researchers at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies went through an extensive archive of over 1,600 cases where kids allegedly recalled the life of a specific, identifiable dead person.

First, let’s define a term: Intermission Time, which is the kind of temporal waiting period between a person dying and getting recycled back into a newborn baby. That time, according to the pattern uncovered by the researchers, is roughly 16 months among the cases that actually had a timetable attached to them.

People Who Died Suddenly or Violently Were Reportedly Reincarnated Faster, Study Finds

There were some exceptions that also yielded some fascinating patterns. Whenever a person died a sudden, unexpected death, or if it was violent, their soul was apparently moved further up the respawn queue, taking only 12 months to reincarnate, a 40 percent reduction compared to people who had died slowly from natural causes.

Lead author Saeedeh Sadeghi and her team tested for every logical explanation imaginable, trying to find some connective thread that can explain why so many of these very specific timelines are cropping up.

Things like parental involvement or religious beliefs or maybe some lightly shared cultural folklore might help explain… Some aspect of this. It didn’t. Researchers admit they don’t really know how to explain any of this. They admit that the accelerated rebirth pattern among people who died unexpectedly was even stronger in families whose religions didn’t believe in reincarnation.

None of this is definitive proof of an afterlife or of reincarnation. It’s more likely that all of this could be chalked up to coincidence, a statistical quirk. But it is a weird correlation that’s difficult to explain, and may never have a neat and tidy explanation. But, hey, feel free to use this as the basis of your next horror novel. It seems ripe for spooky supernatural narratives.

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The new open-source model speaks the language of DNA and can help researchers understand the effects of any changes on gene activity and health.

A rush of new data centers could bring air pollution roaring back to levels not seen since the 2000s in Texas, which has become ground zero for the physical infrastructure behind generative AI.

New and proposed data centers are demanding a tremendous amount of electricity. How developers and utilities meet that demand - with gas turbines or renewable energy - will determine just how dirty things will get. So far, though, things are looking grim.

Tech companies and data center developers are devising new ways to get enough electricity, including building out their own power sources. But if all planned data center projects were to plug into …

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The company plans to offer testosterone replacement therapy, marking its first foray into prescribing controlled substances.