Strangeness
Why Do All Our Aliens Look Like Us?
For a species that imagines the universe as a playground of infinite biological variety, we have a remarkable habit of summoning the same aliens over and over again. If you skim through a century of encounter reports, the late-night bedroom visitors, the abduction narratives, the rural close-shaves, you’d think the cosmos is populated entirely by small, symmetrical figures with oversized heads and an expression permanently set to “Windows startup error.” There’s something almost comical about it. Light-years of evolutionary potential, and yet we keep meeting creatures built like underfed department store mannequins. Two arms, two legs, a central head, forward-facing
Read more3I/ATLAS Has Flipped Its Tail Toward the Sun, A First in Comet Physics
Interstellar visitors don’t drop by often, but when they do, they behave like messengers from a much colder, less civilised part of the galaxy. They cut across the Solar System on one-off trajectories, violate a few rules of polite celestial behaviour, and are gone again before the arguments about what they were have even settled. 3I/ATLAS is the latest of these uninvited guests. And it wasted absolutely no time in causing trouble. On 11 November, the Nordic Optical Telescope captured the object throwing out a plume apparently aimed toward the Sun, a bizarre echo of what had already been seen
Read moreWe’re Fogging the Atmosphere With Dead Satellites
If you’d told me a decade ago that the biggest atmospheric experiment of the twenty-first century wouldn’t come from oil companies, governments, or a Bond-villain billionaire trying to “fix climate change” with a volcano-sized aerosol cannon, but from the cremation of broadband satellites, I’d have classed you somewhere between sleep-deprived and unwell. Yet here we are, learning that every time a satellite dies, it doesn’t simply burn up. It performs a sort of metallic last rite across the sky, scattering nanoparticles that linger for years. Scientists finally sampled the stratosphere properly and found something alarming: about ten percent of the
Read moreRussia’s Police Are Vanishing, and the State Pretends Nothing Is Burning
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was designed to project strength abroad, but the cost at home is far more corrosive than the Kremlin admits. The war is slowly unpicking the very institutions responsible for holding Russian society together, and nowhere is this clearer than in the collapse of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD, the backbone of day-to-day security. The state still projects power, but it’s losing control of the mundane, unglamorous business of keeping streets safe, disputes contained, and communities orderly. This decay isn’t dramatic or cinematic. It’s the kind of erosion that happens behind closed doors, inside
Read moreThe LLM Bloodbath: Inside The Global AI War
If you’ve spent any time around AI people recently, you already know the drill: every company claims their model is the smartest thing since fire, every CEO says AGI is “close,” and every marketing deck is full of graphs that look suspiciously like they were drawn by an optimistic intern. But underneath all that theatre there’s a real war happening, not a metaphorical one, but an actual geopolitical and architectural struggle for dominance. And in 2025, that war is no longer about who can stack the most parameters or who can produce the flashiest demo. It’s about strategy, viability, and
Read moreThe J20 Mighty Dragon: China’s Frankenstealth Fighter
Some aircraft are born from decades of relentless experimentation, cutting-edge wind-tunnel sorcery, and quietly panicked engineers who haven’t seen their families since the Bush administration. Others, like the Chengdu J-20, arrive in the world looking suspiciously like someone copied the clever kid’s homework, ran it through Google Translate, and declared it a national triumph. For years, the J-20 has been described as everything from a Raptor-killer to a melted F-22 drawn from memory. The truth is far less dramatic and far more entertaining. It’s neither a miracle nor a joke, neither a threat to civilisation nor the winged embodiment of
Read moreThe Quantum Freakshow Happening Inside a “Boring” Material
Every so often physics quietly taps us on the shoulder to let us know we’ve misunderstood something fundamental. No drama, no explosions, just a small shrug from reality that basically says, “yeah, you got that bit wrong.” This time the correction comes from an ultra-boring material called YbB₁₂, normally as electrically active as a house brick and about as exciting. It’s the kind of insulator you’d never look at twice unless you were planning to build a shed with it. Everything changed the moment researchers cranked a monstrous 35-Tesla magnetic field at it, a field strong enough to rearrange your
Read moreYour Future Mars Protein Shake Is Made From Air… and Pee
Did you know the European Space Agency has finally answered the question nobody sane ever asked: what if we could turn astronaut breath and astronaut piss into lunch? This is not satire. This is not Black Mirror. This is the HOBI-WAN programme, ESA’s straight-faced attempt to solve the eternal human problem of “what do we eat when we’ve flown so far from Earth that even freeze-dried lasagne becomes a luxury item?” The recipe feels almost insultingly crude. You take the CO₂ the crew breathe out, generate hydrogen with electrolysis, blend in carefully rationed oxygen so nothing catches fire, and round
Read moreThe Plane That Shouldn’t Exist (But Absolutely Does)
There are big planes. There are very big planes. And then there’s the Stratolaunch Roc, an aircraft so unnecessarily massive that even the Antonov would look at it and quietly whisper, “Mate, you alright?” The Roc isn’t here to carry your Amazon parcels or your gran’s suitcase to Tenerife. Its job is stranger, more niche, and significantly more dramatic: haul hypersonic vehicles into the sky and drop them like a mother bird yeeting its young into a hurricane. This isn’t cargo aviation. This is controlled chaos with wings. Its wingspan stretches an absurd 117 metres, something Stratolaunch confirms directly in
Read moreThe Conspiracy in Your Bedroom: How Bad Sleep Rewires Your Reality
There’s a romantic idea that conspiracy theorists are wide-eyed truth seekers, bravely connecting dots the rest of us are too blind to see. In reality, according to new psychological research, a decent chunk of them simply need a nap. A team at the University of Nottingham discovered that the less you sleep, the more likely you are to believe that the Notre Dame fire was part of a cover-up, that vaccines are a global plot, or that your neighbour’s cat works for MI6. It sounds harsh, but the data is brutally clear: poor sleep makes your brain reach for the
Read moreInside the Tardigrade: Evolution’s Most Terrifyingly Cute Mistake
If evolution ever had a sense of humour, the tardigrade is the punchline. A creature that looks like a soft, overfed sofa with claws should not be able to outlive radiation, boiling, freezing, vacuum, desiccation, or whatever else the universe throws at it. Yet here it is, marching through geological time with the swagger of something that’s been dared to die for 500 million years and repeatedly declined. Tardigrades, for all their adorable nonsense, are the closest thing nature has produced to a biological cheat code. They’ve been frozen to near absolute zero. They’ve been heated to temperatures that would
Read moreThe Hidden Shift Toward Off-The-Shelf Cancer Immunotherapy
Cancer treatment has always had a depressing resemblance to British rail infrastructure: expensive, delayed, unreliable, and usually requiring a replacement bus service at the exact moment you need it most. For years, the cutting edge of cellular therapy has been stuck in the same loop, brilliant science throttled by the sheer faff of having to manufacture a bespoke treatment for each individual patient. Hand-crafted, artisanal immune cells. Lovely idea. Terrible scalability. That bottleneck is now cracking. Deep inside MIT and Harvard, researchers have engineered a new breed of Natural Killer cells that behave like stealth aircraft in a world full
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