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.   

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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?

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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.

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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.

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The idea that external forces are causing internal anxiety that manifests physically in your body isn’t exactly new. But a new study published in PNAS found that stress from the pandemic rapidly aged people at an epigenetic level, meaning they aged more quickly at a genetic level.

But it really affected only one group: young people, particularly teenagers.

Teens, with their still-forming brains, had such a hard time processing the traumas of not being able to go anywhere to protect the health and safety of themselves and those closest to them that the biological timers deep down in their DNA sped up.

Lead author Alicia Schowe and researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry analyzed saliva samples from over 1,000 German participants using four different epigenetic clocks. They tracked DNA methylation, the chemical tags along your genetic strands that regulate gene activity.

Pre- and post-lockdown data revealed that while physical health hits like weight gain and smoking bumped up aging metrics across the board, adolescents were the sole group whose subjective mental anguish directly turbocharged their biological clocks.

The Pandemic Did Some Real Damage to Teenagers

Puberty is already a dramatic mess of hormonal angst, but stripping away real-world social interaction made it all the worse on a biological level, leaving measurable genetic scars.

The broader Takeaway is one we knew before the pandemic, met face-to-face during it, and one many people refuse to acknowledge post-pandemic: large-scale societal crises hit vulnerable populations hardest. People already struggling in the lower socioeconomic strata or people with poor health suffered the worst epigenetic hits.

Scientists don’t yet know if this accelerated cellular aging leads to an earlier onset of age-related illnesses like cancer or diabetes. For now, keep an eye on your teenager and ask yourself: Are they acting like a divorced 45-year-old accountant more than usual? Because that might be the rapid biological aging at work.  

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1998 KY26 is an object in space, and it’s a very, very fast one. For some mysterious reason that no one can figure out yet, it’s getting faster. This happens with asteroids sometimes, but this one’s different. There might be some kind of propulsion source that’s moving this thing along.

In a study published in the journal Icarus, as reported by ScienceAlert, astronomers can’t make heads or tails of this weird, 36-foot-wide weirdo of a space rock, which spins on its axis every 5 ½ minutes and is currently about 186 million miles from Earth.

Cue the chorus of far-out theories, like from everyone’s favorite conspiratorial Harvard astronomer, Avi Loeb, who you might remember as the guy who believed Comet 3I/ATLAS could have been an ancient alien artifact. This time, Loeb isn’t reaching super deep into alien theories, as he suggests 1998 KY26 may be a dead Soviet spacecraft.

Loeb’s theories are always a bit fanciful. Best to stick with the prevailing scientific hypothesis that KY 26 is a “dark comet,” meaning it’s a sneaky comet with no tail that accelerates by outgassing water vapor into space, using its own melting as propulsion.  

Good theory, right? Makes a lot of sense. There’s a ton of logic to it. Case closed.

Well, that theory just got blown up.

This Asteroid Is Speeding Up for Reasons Scientists Still Can’t Fully Explain

Georgia Tech aerospace engineers Korbin Hansen and Masatoshi Hirabayashi ran thermal 3D models on the comet to see if hidden ice could actually survive inside it. They found that KY26 is way too warm. For buried ice to hang around over long cosmic timescales, temperatures need to stay below a frosty -198°F.

Even the coldest spots on KY26 average around -53°F to -61°F. At those temperatures, any internal water reserve would have completely evaporated within 2,000 years. If that ice were powering its weird acceleration, the whole stash would burn up in 62 years.

So what’s actually pushing this asteroid off of its orbital path? It’s hard to say, but without going to sci-fi extremes, researchers suspect it could be good old-fashioned solar radiation pressure and thermal emission forces moving what is “likely a dehydrated asteroid” that has no water and hasn’t had any in a long time.

Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is currently en route to catch up with the rogue rock, with a rendezvous scheduled for July 2031.

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Southern Thailand once hosted a gigantic rodent. A 66-pound rodent once roamed Thailand about 33 to 35 million years ago, and we know this thanks to a gigantic tooth found in a coal mine back in 2004.

As detailed in Scientific Reports, a team of international researchers finally identified the species using two fossilized teeth dug up in Krabi province: a dark molar and a two-inch, cream-colored incisor that geologist Pannipa Tian originally thought was just a regular old bone. Instead, it belonged to Yakamys sirindhornae, a newly discovered member of the extinct Ischyromyidae family that breaks previous records for Paleogene-era rodents because of its chunkiness.

At 66 pounds, it was roughly the size of a modern beaver, making it about half as massive as today’s capybara. South America gets all the attention when it comes to the very specific claim of having mega-rodents; this discovery proves that giant rodents were already stomping around Asia millions of years before their South American cousins diversified.

Scientists Just Discovered a New Species of Giant Rodent, and It Was an Absolute Unit

You can infer a lot about a creature from its teeth alone, but we still don’t fully know what Yakamys sirindhornae looked like or what it ate. The teeth were found in ancient lake sediment, which researchers speculate means it might’ve lived a relatively chill, semi-aquatic lakeside life.

On the other hand, it could also have been a gigantic jittery squirrel, for all we know.

We won’t find out more until paleontologists dig up some more of its remains and get a better look at this big, chunky beast of a rat-like creature that probably wouldn’t sneak away with a fallen New York City sidewalk pizza slice as much as it would just walk up to you and take it off your plate, daring you to do something about it.

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Cats like to play it coy. They want your attention, but act like they don’t. They’re shy unless they’re in the mood to be the center of your world. A team of researchers in Japan got curious about this weird vacillation between shyness and extroversion. They found that cats are basically human babies. Here’s what that means.

According to a study published in PLOS One, scientists at Kyoto University surveyed 300  cat owners using questionnaires originally designed to track infant temperament. We normally consider cats aloof sociopaths who occasionally like to cuddle, but the researchers found that they had a much more flourishing life than we outwardly projected.

The data was able to be broken down into four distinct Personality types: highly sociable, sociable, fearful, and shy.

Scientists Discovered That Cats Have Something Surprising in Common With Human Babies

The shy group was especially interesting, as they showed fearfulness but also an uncontrollable urge to investigate. That one exhibited classic human infant-like shyness. It’s the cat equivalent of a baby staring at you, then shying away when you move near.  Male cats and former strays were especially represented in this category.

Lead author Madoka Hattori—who, speaking with Gizmodo, says she started her scientific career at age six by testing if her pet cat was left-pawed—notes that understanding these personalities can help owners and shelters stop treating hiding cats as just “timid.”

Maybe don’t force them to interact; instead, give them the time and space they need to feel comfortable in a social situation. Kind of like us.

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On December 21, 1978, two Safe Air pilots reported seeing UFOs in the skies near the Kaikōura mountain ranges in New Zealand. According to a newspaper article from the time, multiple objects were sighted over a four-hour period and tracked by Wellington Airport’s air traffic control radar. One of the pilots was quoted as saying that he’d spotted something coming toward them “at tremendous speed.” The next evening, several people in the area claimed to have seen similar objects.

A producer for Channel 0 in Melbourne, Australia heard of the sightings and sent a TV crew to investigate by plane. Sometime after midnight on December 31, while flying between Wellington and Christchurch, they captured footage of a rapidly moving white light that appeared to be following them. On the return flight two hours later, they encountered other brightly illuminated objects, including one that resembled a flying saucer. You can check out the recordings for yourself below.

The Strange Story of the 1978 UFO Encounter That Was Actually Caught on Camera

“Just being on the cramped, noisy flight deck of the Argosy barrelling down the coast in the dead of the night was exciting,” recalled reporter Quentin Fogarty. “Factor in a row of pulsating, hypnotic lights hovering outside the window, and it goes to another level,” he continued. The footage was featured on the prime-time news and quickly spread around the world—it even got covered by CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite. 

However, skeptics immediately dismissed the story, attributing the phenomena to everything from lights reflecting off of squid boats to an unusual view of Venus. The TV crew were also accused of perpetrating a hoax, but they always maintained that whatever they saw above Kaikōura was real. “We had film, our own eyewitness accounts and confirmation from the flight crew and air traffic controllers that we had stumbled into something astonishing,” Fogarty told The New Zealand Herald in 2018. “My grandkids love to hear the story of my brush with UFOs. I just wish I could provide an ending,” added journalist Dennis Grant.

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In a Siberian Bronze Age burial complex meant for elites, the earliest physical evidence of the use of cannabis for its psychoactive qualities was discovered. About 1,400 cannabis seeds miraculously remained preserved within the tomb. The seeds date back roughly 2,800 years. The structure belonged to the multi-talented badasses known as Scythians — tattooed nomads, equestrians, warriors, skilled metallurgists, and more.

While evidence of cannabis cultivation in East Asia tracing back 6,000 years had previously been found, until the materials from the Siberian site in question had been analyzed, scientists had only confirmed proof of its use as a drug going as far back as 2,500 years in China.

Research team leader Gino Caspari, from the Institute of Archaeological Sciences of
University of Bern, explained to CNN, “There is a lot of speculation about prehistoric use of plant-based drugs, but through this find we are actually able to show that there is a basis to it.”

The Drug Test Results Didn’t let the community Off the Hook…

Drug tests done on plaited hair supported the theory of cannabis use, though the questions of how much cannabis entered the body and how it was consumed remain open. While the exact meaning that the mind-altering substance held for the ancient Scythians is somewhat uncertain, it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that it played a role in spiritual ceremonies around funerals. Caspari speculates that it also could have provided a means of sedating victims, as the burial site is home to horse sacrifices and what might be human sacrifices as well.

In The Histories Book 4, penned around 440 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded the Scythians’ use of cannabis for purification and burial rituals. The Thracians upheld similar practices.

Caspari and his associates have been working at the Uyuk Valley tomb since 2017, and their efforts remain ongoing. Thus, more interesting facts may still come to light.

Of course, the discovery will be used by extollers of the merits of cannabis to try to sway public opinion and perhaps continue to affect legal change. Whether or not cannabis is more harmful than helpful clearly remains a hot topic. However, the risks associated with the beloved mind-bender are certainly important to consider. Psychiatry Online quoted one former user, “It’s the most deceptive drug I have ever taken.”

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The Inca sacrificed children to their deities to maintain harmony within the world and prevent natural disasters. According to new research published in the journal Antiquity, those kids were probably not having a great time, as they were drugged with psychedelic substances, either to alleviate some of their existential dread knowing they were about to die, or out of the belief that the mind-expanding drugs would help them communicate with the gods.

It was a massive honor for the child’s family, but it seemed like the kid really got the short end of the stick — going on a likely awful psychedelic trip, getting killed, and then spending your afterlife having to negotiate the fine details of droughts and famines with celestial beings.  

A New Study Reveals What Inca Children Were Given Before Being Sacrificed to the Gods

Lead researcher Dagmara Socha and her team at the University of Warsaw analyzed the hair and fingernails of eight frozen mummies, mostly young girls aged 6 to 14. Every single child tested positive for cocaine from chewing sacred coca leaves, which suppressed hunger, fought off extreme altitude sickness, and kept energy up during grueling climbs. Half of them were spiked with chicha, a fermented corn beer used to dull their panic as the fatal blow or live burial drew near.

The researchers even found harmine, an antidepressant alkaloid pulled straight from Amazonian ayahuasca vines, in the nails of a girl known as the “Lady of Ampato.” The Inca hauled Amazonian vines hundreds of miles through ancient trade networks just to keep their young sacrificial messengers of the gods from having a meltdown as they trekked up the mountain.

We may never know exactly how the children reacted to this supposed honor, but given that their systems were loaded with a drug cocktail that would be suspicious to see in a person’s body today, we can probably assume that at least some of those kids were not having a great time.

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It’s hard to say what feels worse: having a kidney stone the size of a grape, or the embarrassment of archaeologists finding that kidney stone among your remains 5,300 years after you died. At least you’re dead, right?

According to research published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, a Bronze Age man buried in a monumental kurgan tomb in southwestern Russia lived a tough, likely miserable life on the steppe, all the while dealing with what was probably an incredible amount of urological pain.

Archaeologists May Have Found a 5,300-Year-Old Kidney Stone the Size of a Grape

Lead author Natalia Berezina and her team from Lomonosov Moscow State University analyzed the man’s 5,000-year-old skeleton, and based on his body alone, they deduced he lived a rough life. Heavy labor. Suffered from gout. Had multiple healed bone fractures, likely from dealing with cattle or heavy wagons. And then there was the most painful discovery, the find that will cause us to wins over 5000 years later: a jagged, brown, 0.8 inch mineral mass about the size of a grape found among some hand bones.

X-ray diffraction revealed the specimen contained whitlockite, a calcium salt that acts as a telltale sign for bacterial activity. Without the wonders of modern medicine, this guy spent his final years riding horses and hauling freight across the harsh landscape while dealing with a kidney stone that probably made every waking moment sheer misery.

If the stone eventually blocked his ureter, it likely triggered sepsis, ending a life that must have been miserable.  

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The internet loves a weird animal friendship. A bird and monkey hugging, or a tiger cuddling a pig while resisting the urge to eat it. These relationships are often hallmarked by their G-rated quality, like cartoon animal friends who only get up to mischievous hijinks. We don’t often imagine the pair having sex, but that’s exactly what’s happening between a bull and a male donkey in Ethiopia.

According to a study published in Current Biology by University of Pisa researchers, ethologist Elisabetta Palagi and her team stumbled upon a whirlwind romance between a bull and a donkey, while studying monkeys in the Ethiopian highlands. The bull, named Achille, was seen repeatedly mounting a male donkey named Patroclo.

Scientists Observed a Bull and Male Donkey Having Sex 51 Times in Just Two Weeks

Achille and Patroclo belong to different owners, live on separate farms, and only meet up as they’re released for grazing. Both eligible bachelors have plenty of cows and female donkeys to choose from, yet they repeatedly choose each other.

Over the two weeks the researchers observed them, they logged 51 mountings, with 34 resulting in full penetration, often accompanied by affectionate licking, mutual grooming, and nuzzling. Sounds like human postcoital cuddling.

Whenever Achille tried to flirt with other donkeys, Patroclo would literally step in to cockblock the bull, while other male donkeys made it clear that Achille’s advances were entirely unwelcome. Patroclo willingly offered up his hindquarters and nipped at the bull in encouragement.

While there is a distinctly human urge to project romanticism onto some farm animals, it’s undeniable that the two share a deep social bond that transcends gender, sexual norms, and even species.

The star-crossed animal Farm lovers have since been moved to different pastures since the researchers observed their behavior.  

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If you’ve spent most of your life irrationally afraid of bugs crawling into your ears while you sleep, never fear, because according to recent research, bugs so dislike earwax that the gunky stuff that clogs up your ears acts as a kind of natural insect repellent.

According to a study published in Soft Matter and detailed in The Conversation by researchers from Georgia Tech and the University of Wollongong, that gross, waxy substance officially known as cerumen is designed to clean, protect, and lubricate your ears also provides an all-natural bio-defense system that insects hate.  

Your Earwax Could Inspire the Next Generation of Bug Repellents. Seriously.

To test how bugs handle your ear canal’s gunk, the team gathered earwax from humans, sheep, pigs, and rabbits, then smeared it all over the inside of a large beaker. Then they brought in some fire ants to see what they thought of it all.

Ants usually have no problem scaling glass because they can deploy wet suction pads on their feet that keep them suspended. Smooth earwax is packed with microscopic, bottle-shaped pores made of dead skin cells and lipids that instantly suck the moisture right off the ants’ feet. The ants instantly lose all traction and slide off like a cartoon character on a banana peel.

If an ant tries to plow through a wax-coated tunnel anyway, the material’s “shear-thinning” properties kick in. The earwax clings to the insect’s body, forcing the bug to stop and groom itself furiously for minutes on end, but we forget it that it’s initial mission was to power through the earwax.

The researchers admit that harvesting earwax to potentially bottle as a commercial bug spray is totally out of the question, but the underlying principles at play could one day lead to an earwax-inspired version of pest control.

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Oh, what a dream it would be to use my genitals as a weapon to fend off predators.

If only I were as lucky as moths, who, according to research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, have different species of hawkmoths repeatedly evolving to weaponize anti-bat genitalia.

While all I currently have to fend off predators are my lethal fists, male hawkmoths have spent 30 million years rubbing specialized scales on their junk against their abdomens to blast ultrasonic noise directly into the faces of hungry bats.

Noisy genitals. What an innovation.

These Moths Can Blast Ultrasonic Sounds From Their Genitals to Fight Off Predators

Lead author Paul Masonick and his team at the Florida Museum of Natural History examined over 120 species and found that nature didn’t invent this crotch-based sonic-blast jamming once. Hawkmoths have independently evolved genital sonar-scramblers as many as seven separate times through convergent evolution.

They use three entirely different anatomical mechanics and their deployment of their genital defense system

1. Scale-on-scale: Rubbing specialized crotch scales against abdominal scales for short bursts.

2. Scale-on-spine: Dragging genital scales across tiny spikes for longer emissions.

3. Scale-on-nodule: Scraping scales over bumpy nodules for a varied array of obnoxious sounds.

Moths equipped with ears hear a bat’s echolocation coming and fire off sustained bursts designed to scramble the bat’s sonar. Deaf moths, who literally cannot see the bat coming, belt out shorter, touch-activated crotch bursts only after a predator grabs them.

Think about all this from the bat’s perspective. You swoop in to grab a meal and then suddenly your prey’s genitals start screaming at you. Do you often eat food whose genitals are screaming at you? I’m going to guess that you don’t, and you wouldn’t, not even if it were really yummy.

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If you love the mysteries of space, this story is for you.

In a study published last month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers at the University of Arizona made a major discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope. They caught a visible-light glimpse of a gargantuan, 93-billion-mile-long cosmic dust feature dubbed the “Cat’s Tail,” sitting just 63 light-years away in the Beta Pictoris system.

If you’re trying to wrap your brain around that scale, this thing is roughly 1,000 astronomical units long, long enough to wrap between the Earth and the Sun about 500 times. If I put it in the only measurable terms Americans are familiar with, it would be about 1.3 billion American football fields, endzones included.

Hubble Just Revealed a Massive Structure in Space That Scientists Can’t Fully Explain

Up until now, this space anomaly was only visible to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in infrared. Lead researcher Arin Avsar explained that the tail managed to duck visible-light detection for so long because it’s composed almost entirely of heavily carbon-based organic refractory material, meaning it’s made of long chains of black carbon atoms that swallow visible light whole.

You’re probably wondering how a 93-billion-mile trail of pitch-black, porous soot even gets created in the first place. Researchers studying it don’t have a concrete answer, but think it might have something to do with two Pluto -sized planetoids slamming into each other at preposterous speeds, creating an incomprehensible degree of heat that vaporizes carbon into gas, which eventually cooled down into these fluffy porous patches of cosmic dust wafting through its solar system.

Using 14 years of Hubble data alongside JWST’s infrared scans, the team mapped the tail in 3D and found it actually stretches sideways in space rather than trailing behind the star. They also spotted a weird gravitational warp in the dust halo caused by Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant ten times the size of Jupiter that has an intense gravitational pull. Think of it like that old middle school science class trick of using static electricity to curve water as it pours from a faucet.

All this sounds extraordinary, but it provides a glimpse into how our own celestial neighborhood likely formed several billion years ago.

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Companies like Colossal Biosciences have been flirting with the idea of bringing back extinct animals for years. But now that a team of researchers says they’ve found traces of dinosaur red blood cells that somehow survived 115 million years, we might finally see whether researchers can show a level of restraint that Jurassic Park’s John Hammond clearly didn’t have. Though, we probably won’t have to worry about that kind of problem for a while.

According to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paleontologists led by Kliti Grice at Curtin University analyzed a 10-foot, 75-pound juvenile Aratasaurus museunacionali dug up in Brazil. Inside the leg bone’s vascular canals, they found oval structures packed with heme, the iron-filled chemical ring in hemoglobin that moves oxygen around the body.

It’s the first time anyone has identified heme within the structures in a dinosaur fossil.

Researchers Discovered a Surprising Clue About Dinosaur Biology Inside a 115-Million-Year-Old Fossil

Those squishy bits survived for hundreds of millions of years without rotting thanks to the low-oxygen mud that seems to have overtaken the creature soon after its death, quickly halting the decay process. Then, a manganese oxide mineral called hausmannite moved in, acting like all-natural bubblewrap that kept the cellular framework and collagen amino acids in place.

While the imagination immediately turns to Jurassic Park and whether anyone with the power to bring dinosaurs back to life actually paid attention to the moral lessons of the multibillion-dollar film franchise, finding heme isn’t the same as finding intact DNA.

Grice insists they aren’t trying to cook up a live dinosaur; instead, they’ll use this discovery to study the creature’s metabolism, how it transported oxygen throughout its body, and its activity levels. And then there’s the much more interesting question posed by this discovery: the chances might be slight, but if there is one set of dinosaur bones out there with some little specks of blood still kicking around, there might be others just like it sitting in museum collections around the world or in the next batch of bone researchers dig up.

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Just as the wrinkles on your face denote age, your testicles also have their own way of showing their age, and it has nothing to do with their wrinkliness.

As testicles age, DNA incurs damage and sperm loses some of its function; we know that much, but why it happens is less understood. Researchers in China may have found a molecule that speeds up testicular aging.

According to a study published in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Naval Medical University analyzed over 10,000 cell nuclei from young and old donors. Unlike ovaries, which run on a strict, finite egg timer, testicles operate a self-renewing stem cell bank that keeps the factory running well into a guy’s senior years.

But around age 45, while still functional, the machinery starts to show its age.

Scientists Found a Surprising Connection Between Aging Testicles and a Little-Known Protein

Researchers say testicular aging comes down to a communication breakdown between two vital parts of the process: Leydig cells, which pump out testosterone, and Sertoli cells, which support developing sperm. In young testicles, these two are in constant communication. In older testicles, the pair have developed the kind of communication issues that usually lead to couples therapy.

Sertoli cells start cranking out massive amounts of a protein called WLS, the villain of the story, which plays a big role in pathways run by a transporter called Wnt, essentially the master switchboard regulating cell survival, renewal, and metabolism.

When researchers artificially cranked up WLS levels in lab-cultured cells, those cells rapidly aged, proving WLS is actively aging testicles.

One major caveat is that the team examined only four human donors, since high-quality tissue samples are hard to come by. They’re going to need a lot more samples to confirm their findings, but the team has already made big strides just in identifying WLS as the source of testicle aging, which is knowledge that may one day help an entirely different team of researchers develop a fertility treatment for aging men.

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