A Dead Drop

Spoiler alert to all the kids out there: Santa Claus isn’t real, which is a shame because unlike most imaginary beings, this one gives you presents once a year. He was, however, based on Saint Nicholas, a man that lived during the fourth century who did indeed have a habit of handing out gifts to people in secret.

Now, as reported by The Telegraph, an intrepid team of archaeologists has claimed to have found the tomb of the saint himself. It’s located beneath a church in Demre, in southern Turkey – and if you needed any more confirmation that he’s not living it up in Lapland with elves and flying reindeer, this is it. Sorry, younglings.

The church, in Antalya province, was surveyed recently using things like ground-penetrating radar, and the team noticed a small, human-sized gap beneath the surface, among other things.

All the evidence points towards there being a tomb there, and apparently, it’s a good bet that Saint Nicholas’ remains will be found there. Getting to them will be tricky. The floor of the ancient church is covered in mosaics, which will have to be removed extremely carefully.

A fresco on the walls of the ancient church. Anton_Ivanov/Shutterstock

Saint Nicholas died back in the year 343, but for centuries was interred at the church until disappearing in the 11th century. There’s a chance that Italian smugglers could have thieved his bones, but according to Turkish archaeologists, they may have stolen the wrong ones. The tomb that was suspected of belonging to the gift-giver is probably that of another, unknown priest, and it is likely that the long-dead philanthropist is still resting in peace underneath Demre.

Interestingly, Saint Nicholas is thought to have been born in the same city. Unlike the Santa Claus of legend, he doesn’t seem to have gotten around that much.

The inside of Saint Nicholas’ Church, where the eponymous man is thought to still be buried. Bahadir Yeniceri/Shutterstock

Either way, it’s definitely this religious figure that the modern stories of Father Christmas originate from. Apart from being something of a Christian Jedi – his ability to resurrect people that were literally butchered, for example, gained him the moniker of “Nikolas the Wonderworker” – he sounded like a fairly lovely human, helping out those in need.

One story has him anonymously throwing purses of money into the window of a house in which three destitute girls doomed to become prostitutes lived. Whether or not tales like this were true proved irrelevant to the Dutch, who translated his name into “Sinterklaas” – which, you guessed it, is where we get the name Santa Claus from.

Every 3 seconds, someone in the world develops dementia, most commonly in the form of Alzheimer’s disease. With an ever-aging world population, that figure is only going to become higher over the coming decades. That’s why scientists at the University of Birmingham, UK, have been working hard to find ways to diagnose and predict this progressive condition.

They discovered that struggling to read simple words could be an early sign that a person is at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Although it’s early days for the research, they believe the study could be used to develop a low-cost and non-invasive method to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease as early as possible.

“A prominent feature of Alzheimer’s is a progressive decline in language, however, the ability to process language in the period between the appearance of initial symptoms of Alzheimer’s to its full development has scarcely previously been investigated,” Dr Ali Mazaheri, of the University of Birmingham, said in a statement.

“We wanted to investigate if there were anomalies in brain activity during language processing in MCI patients which could provide insight into their likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s. We focused on language functioning, since it is a crucial aspect of cognition and particularly impacted during the progressive stages of Alzheimer’s.”

As explained in a new study published in Neuroimage Clinical, the researchers gathered 25 relatively healthy seniors with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a condition found in 20 percent of people over 65, which often develops into Alzheimer’s. The experiment involved them completing a language comprehension task while hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG), a method that measures and records the electrical activity of your brain. Using their findings, they were able to predict which patients would go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease within the next three years.

“Crucially, what we found in our study is that this brain response is aberrant in individuals who will go on in the future to develop Alzheimer’s disease, but intact in patients who remained stable,” added co-author Dr Katrien Segaert.

“Our findings were unexpected as language is usually affected by Alzheimer’s disease in much later stages of the onset of the disease.”

Now the authors hope their work will lead to further study in this particular area.

“It is possible that this breakdown of the brain network associated with language comprehension in MCI patients could be a crucial biomarker used to identify patients likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. We hope to now test the validity of this biomarker in large population of patients in the UK to see if it’s a specific predictor of Alzheimer’s disease, or a general marker for dementia involving the temporal lobe,” Segaert said.

Researchers claim they have uncovered evidence of ancient hominin-like creatures comparable to Australopithecus. Even more intriguingly, they were discovered not in East Africa as would be expected, but in Germany instead. The two teeth discovered date to 9.7 million years ago – which, if proved correct, would rewrite our origins, although there are some serious doubts that need to be cleared first.

If these fossils are proven to be that of animals similar to the famous bipedal Australopithecus from East Africa – and that is a big if – then it could have some seriously profound implications for the story of human evolution.

“I don’t want to over-dramatize it, but I would hypothesize that we shall have to start rewriting the history of mankind after today,” Herbert Lutz, director of the Natural History Museum in Mainz, told local media this week as he revealed the discovery. The paper is currently in pre-print. “This is a tremendous stroke of luck, but also a great mystery.”

This would be an astonishing find not only because there have never been any comparable early hominins like this found in Europe before, but also because if the dating is correct, then the species was knocking around some 6 million years before the famous Lucy was laid to rest in Ethiopia. The current estimate for the last common ancestor between chimps and humans ranges from around 10 million to 7 million years ago, although one recent study suggests that it might have been as long at 13 million years ago.

The researchers have found two teeth to date. Lutz et al. 2017

If this older figure is correct, then the dating of these hominin-like teeth would fit in with that. Yet there are other factors to take into consideration. Only earlier this year, researchers announced they had discovered what they believed to be fossil evidence of the last common ancestor between chimps and humans, which put the divergence at around 7.2 million years ago.

What is more interesting in this scenario, however, is that these fossils were discovered in Eastern Europe. This lines up nicely with the recent findings from Germany date-wise, but only if they are not hominin in origin. It is not unusual to find evidence of primates across Europe, and the author’s even note in their paper that while the size and dimensions of the newly discovered teeth are within those known for various Australopithecus species, they also fall within the range for female chimps, too.

If this is the case, then the 9.7-million-year-old teeth could simply be an as-yet unknown species of ape that was once living in the forests of ancient Germany. Of course, it could also turn out that the researchers are indeed correct with their initial understandings and this discovery instead completely rewrites what we thought we knew about human evolution. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Researchers have observed rings of comets in three different star systems and they think they are likely going to merge into single planets at some point in the future. The research is being presented at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences meeting.

Astronomers have observed well-defined rings in Fomalhaut, HD 32297, and HR 4796A. The first two have rings rich in ice while the latter is more ice-depleted and carbon-rich. In all three cases, the traditional view that early star systems are messy and chaotic is challenged.

These rings are well defined and structured, suggesting that multiple sizable objects are keeping them in check. The same phenomenon is observed in Saturn’s rings. So instead of having a single proto-planet slowly gaining mass, the researchers think that a swarm of minor objects are the best candidates to explain the observations.

“Comets crashing down onto these growing planet surfaces would kick up huge clouds of fast-moving, ejected ‘construction dust,’ which would spread over the system in huge clouds,” research leader Carey Lisse, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement. “The only apparent solution to these issues is that multiple mini-planets are coalescing in these rings, and these small bodies, with low kick-up velocities, are shepherding the rings into narrow structures – much in the same way many of the narrow rings of Saturn are focused and sharpened.”

These rings are located between 11 and 30 billion kilometers (7 and 19 billion miles) from their parent star, which is between two and seven times the distance that Pluto is from the Sun. Each ring has enough material to make a few Earths and what they might be forming could be something akin to (the yet-to-be-found) Planet Nine.

“These systems appear to be building planets we don’t see in our solar system – large multi-Earth mass ones with variable amounts of ice, rock, and refractory organics,” Lisse added. “This is very much like the predicted recipe for the super-Earths seen in abundance in the Kepler planet survey.”

Millions of comets might inhabit these rings. In all three systems, the stars have pushed the gasses away so the planets that are forming won’t look like Uranus and Neptune. And what might form in the carbon-rich system HR 4796A could be different still. The lack of ice suggests that only rocky fragments are left over in this disk.

Planetary formation remains mysterious and it could be that planets form in many different ways.

Gemini Planet Imager observations of the HR 4796A disk. Marshall Perrin / Space Telescope Science Institute, Gaspard Duchene / UC Berkeley, Max Millar-Blanchaer / University of Toronto, and the GPI Team

Around 400 mysterious clustered stone structures have been found, via satellite imagery, in an inhospitable region of west-central Saudi Arabia. At present, it’s not clear what they were for, but they’ve been nicknamed “gates” based on their appearance.

Their age is unknown, as are their architects’ identities. Either way, according to the University of Western Australia’s ancient history professor David Kennedy, they’re the “oldest man-made structures in the area.”

They’ve been built roughly, and seem to be fairly low. Some are relatively small, extending only around 13 meters (43 feet) across. Others are far larger, with the longest being 518 meters (1,699 feet) from end to end.

Those odd elongate features are the mysterious “gates.” Google Earth via LiveScience

The international team behind the research, due to publish its analysis in the journal Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy next month, has spotted some remarkable details that hint at the purpose and construction timeline of the “gates”

For one thing, the entire area – named Harrat Khaybar – is a volcanic field covered in extremely old lava flows. A few of the gates have even been constructed on top of some of the more prominent, now-extinct lava domes.

The last known eruption dates back to the year 650, and some of the frozen remnants have been placed atop these “gates,” implying that they’re at least 1,370 years old. The year 650 eruption at the otherworldly site coincides with the very early spread of Islam around the region. Were the walls built around this time?

Some are as large as American football fields. Google Earth via LiveScience

Plenty of lava flows predate this, however, so the walls could be much older. It all depends on what the geochronological dating of the lava flows, and maybe even the “gates” themselves, reveals.

For one thing, the researchers explain that other types of stone structures called “kites” – once used to hunt animals – hint that the landscape pre-eruption peak may have been far more habitable to human existence. Tuff cones, volcanic edifices that tend to form near water, also suggest that the area was wetter in the past.

The fact that kites were found on top of these “gates” implies that the mysterious stone walls predate this period of time, which also means they are older than plenty of these lava flows.

Some were constructed on the side of extinct lava domes. Google Earth via LiveScience

Right now, it’s anyone’s guess – and a proper recon of the area, on foot, is needed.

Using satellite imagery to look for hidden geological or archaeological structures that can’t be seen from the ground tends to produce mixed results. Sure, sometimes an ancient, supermassive fire pit that predates Stonehenge, or a volcano-mimicking temple in Peru can be identified – but sometimes, that long-lost Mayan temple turns out to be illegal marijuana fields instead.

Fortunately, this time around, it seems that “space archaeology” has once again hit the jackpot.

[H/T: LiveScience]

One day, you might look back at the moment when AlphaGo trounced the world’s best Go player and feel an acute sense of guilt. Guilt that you failed to see the warnings signs and stop the robot uprising that’s soon to come.

Now, a new AI by Google’s DeepMind research group has taught itself, using only the basic rules of the game, to beat AlphaGo at its own game. While we wouldn’t go as far as calling this a “god-like” AI, we would say that it’s a seriously impressive, and perhaps daunting, milestone.

AlphaGo learned how to play the 3,000-year-old board game by analyzing matches played between humans in the past. The latest incarnation is essentially self-taught, and no human data or input was necessary after its initial construction. That’s why it’s been dubbed “AlphaGo Zero” – it uses no human knowledge at all.

Yes, AlphaGo was impressive. AlphaGo Zero, however, spent just three days training itself to become a world-beater; it then pitted itself against its predecessor and won 100 games to nil. In just 40 days, AlphaGo Zero surpasses all other versions of the AI, and arguably becomes the best Go player in history. It took this AI just 72 hours to transcend three millennia of human knowledge in this respect.

This may now make it sound like humans are obsolete in this regard, but in a blog post, and in an accompanying Nature article, the designers explain why this was never just about playing an ancient game.

This technique, of teaching itself how to handle a new situation, is for some purposes better than anything any of the previous incarnations managed, because “it is no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge.”

“If similar techniques can be applied to other structured problems, such as protein folding, reducing energy consumption or searching for revolutionary new materials, the resulting breakthroughs have the potential to positively impact society,” they add.

This shines a light on what most are considering to be the near-future fate of AI; programs that augment and amplify human roles, rather than replace them, for the most part. From helping to confirm diagnoses of diseases to corroborating or disagreeing with the latest climate model, this type of pattern-recognition AI is going to be the next big thing.

If you’re a pessimist, you’ll see this latest development as another step towards our machine overlords. If you’re an optimist, this marks an exhilarating leap forward for humankind.

Back in 1859, a powerful storm on the Sun launched colossal solar flares towards Earth, and the subsequent electrical surge triggered the shutdown of telegraph systems all over the planet.

According to a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal, there’s a solid chance that another such storm could impact Earth within 100 years – and this time around, the consequences would be far greater. Not only would it annihilate electrical circuits in a world covered in them, but it would also endanger $10 trillion worth of damage.

Avi Loeb and Manasvi Lingham, two renowned astrophysicists at Harvard University, have been concerned with the prospect of a so-called “superflare” for some time now. Unlike most, they’re far more worried about superflares than asteroid impacts or volcanic supereruptions.

They point out in their new study that, in the worst case scenarios, “the most powerful superflares can serve as plausible drivers of extinction events,” and that “the risk posed by superflares has not been sufficiently appreciated.”

Using the geological record, along with data from other Sun-like stars, the pair worked out the frequency of various types of superflare impacting Earth. They found that extreme, atmosphere-eroding, extinction-level superflares occur on the Sun once every 20 million years. Additionally, they found that the chances of one able to cause major ecological and technological damage occurring within the next century is around one-in-1,000. A weaker one that just causes damage to electrical systems is even more likely, perhaps one-in-eight.

Just as a point of comparison, the chance of you witnessing a supervolcanic blast in your lifetime – something covered far more by the media – is around 90,000 times less likely compared to experiencing a type of superflare.

Just recently, these two researchers penned a study detailing how an Earth-sized magnetic shield could be used to defend ourselves from such an event. Although prohibitively expensive, perhaps it’s something that humanity should consider if the chances of a superflare event are so disturbingly high.

So what exactly is a superflare, compared to a regular solar flare? The difference, as you’d image, is in terms of its inherent energy.

Solar flares, accompanied by a flash of visible light, unleash about 100 quintillion joules of energy, along with plenty of electromagnetic radiation. These can occur every few days to a few times each day.

Superflares are far stronger stellar explosions, the type that releases up to 10,000 times more energy than regular flares. Just one involves at least enough energy to satiate the electricity demands of the entire planet for 14,700 years.

In either case, if pointing in the right direction, these flares take a few days to reach Earth, whereupon they impact the planet’s magnetic field and generate some spectacular aurorae.

If these flares are extremely energetic, however, the planet’s magnetic field experiences a huge increase in its electric current. This can trigger a geomagnetic storm, which if powerful enough has the potential to knock out satellites and electrical grids, and even partly strip away the ozone layer.

There was actually a near-miss in 2012. An explosion on the Sun produced not only plenty of flare-based electromagnetic radiation but a coronal mass ejection (CME) – a fountain of highly-magnetized solar plasma particles.

If these smashed into Earth’s magnetic field, they would certainly have generated a geomagnetic storm comparable to the 1859 event. Fortunately, the planet missed this CME by just nine days. If we had caught it, it would have caused widespread technological and economic damage.

Although several movies feature superflares boiling away the planet’s atmosphere, it’s generally thought that our Sun is nowhere near unstable or energetic enough to generate such Earth-destroying beasts.

Pictured here is a coronal mass ejection (CME), following on from a solar flare on the surface of the Sun, back in August 2012. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

From René Descartes to the Wachowskis (directors of the Matrix trilogy, amongst others) to Elon Musk, many have envisioned that our existence is just part of the scheme of a superior intelligence and our lives are merely part of a simulated reality. There’s obviously no evidence for it and there are actually many arguments against it, and now researchers think they have found a physical property that occurs in metals that cannot be simulated, telling us once and for all that our lives, good or bad, are actually real.

Researchers Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhin, both from Oxford University, studied the computational methods to describe complex quantum systems. The study, published in Science Advances, did not set out to prove that reality is not a simulation. But it found that there are some quantum mechanics problems that cannot be simulated, as far as we know.

It all depends on how the problem can be worked out by computers. If the problem is linear, the computational resources need to scale up as the number of particles in the system increase. This can be very difficult but the bigger the computer, the more complex the system it can deal with. But problems can exist where the scale between particles and processors increases exponentially and soon it becomes impossible to simulate.

The research proves that a quantum mechanics phenomenon is definitely in the latter category. The gravitational anomaly known as the thermal Hall conductance happens when systems are exposed to incredibly high magnetic fields or extremely low temperatures. Its effects appear as electric currents related to the temperature gradient of the system or as a twist in the geometry of space-time.

The researchers tried to simulate this effect but found that the system became far more complex and that the simulation was ultimately impossible due to a matter of principle. Just to store the information of a few hundred electrons one might need more atoms than exist in the visible universe.

“Our work provides an intriguing link between two seemingly unrelated topics: gravitational anomalies and computational complexity. It also shows that the thermal Hall conductance is a genuine quantum effect: one for which no local classical analogue exists,” said co-author Professor Zohar Ringel, from Hebrew University, in a statement.

So to simulate these quantum effects, we’d need a computing method like we’ve never seen before. And by extension, the complexity of a system to simulate our entire reality is far beyond the realm of possibilities.

Blunt force injuries on human remains recently discovered in Peru provide the earliest evidence for ritualistic violence in the Americas to date, reports The Asahi Shimbun. The fact that the trauma was low level and showed signs of healing leads scholars to believe that the injuries weren’t designed to kill.  Their findings were published earlier this month in the journal PLOS One.

The discovery was made by a Peruvian-Japanese excavation team, who weredigging in Pacopampa in the northern highlands of Peru. Thousands of years ago, the site was home to an ancient Andean civilization built on ritualistic practice and socioeconomic inequality.

The archeologists unearthed a total of 104 bodies from the 13th to 6th centuries BCE. Of these, seven displayed traces of low-level trauma, such as fractures to the skull, facial features, and limbs. One skeleton, belonging to a 35- to 54-year-old woman, also showed signs of a dislocated elbow joint.

Nagaoka T, Uzawa K, Seki Y, Morales Chocano D (2017)/PLOS ONE

The individuals would have been attacked repeatedly with blunt tools and fists, the researchers say, as part of a ritualistic practice.

“Given the archaeological context (the remains were recovered from sites of ceremonial practices), as well as the equal distribution of trauma among both sexes and a lack of defensive architecture [in Pacopampa], it is plausible that rituals, rather than organized warfare or raids, caused most of the exhibited trauma,” the researchers explained.

Interestingly, all the injuries show signs of healing, which suggests that the violence wasn’t intended to be lethal and the victims did not die as a result. Instead, it was only meant to harm the individual. This is unusual because we expect ritualistic sacrifice to end in death – as was certainly the case in later eras.

“The elites’ role may not yet have been established in the nascent hierarchical society at Pacopampa and that violence in a ritual context may therefore not necessarily have produced the same results,” said the researchers.

The paper also refers to the civilization’s “affinity with the cult of predatory animals”. During this period, predators – and big cats, in particular – were a key religious icon, and anthropomorphized images were incorporated into pottery and sculptures.

“[W]e can suspect that these figures may have exercised fierce forces on victims in ritual practices,” the researchers explained. “If we apply this explanation, we see that violence in a ritual context may have contributed to the dominance over the people by an elite class. Violence may have become an element of ritual activity and the basis for social development, particularly where it was incorporated into rituals by taking on a new meaning of sacredness in ritual places.”

An asteroid flew past Earth the other day, and there is a small but not insignificant chance it will hit us when it returns in 2079.

Called 2012 TC4, the asteroid flew about 42,000 kilometers (26,000 miles) above Antarctica early Thursday, October 12, about a tenth the distance between Earth and the Moon.

Studies during this flyby should nail down the size of this asteroid a bit more. We know it’s about 15 to 30 meters (45 to 100 feet) across, roughly the size of a house. That’s about the same size as the asteroid that exploded above Chelyabinsk in Russia in February 2013.

It takes 609 days for 2012 TC4 to orbit the Sun, but owing to the particulars of its and our orbit we will not see it again until 2050, and then 2079. The risk of an impact this time around was essentially nothing, but in 2079 it is one in 750 – or 0.13 percent.

“We know today that it will also not hit the Earth in the year 2050, but the close flyby in 2050 might deflect the asteroid such that it could hit the Earth in the year 2079,” Rüdiger Jehn of the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object program told AFP.

That probability is still very small. Even if it did hit Earth, the effects would be minuscule. Paul Chodas from NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies told Space.com it “would be simply a flash through the atmosphere and a breakup – a very bright fireball, basically.”

So, thankfully, there’s probably not too much to worry about. But this asteroid is interesting because scientists have been using it as a trial run to prepare for a future cataclysmic asteroid impact, which could end life on Earth.

“This campaign is a team effort that involves more than a dozen observatories, universities, and labs around the globe so we can collectively learn the strengths and limitations of our near-Earth object observation capabilities,” Vishnu Reddy from the University of Arizona, who led the project to study the asteroid, said in a statement.

Currently, there is no risk of a devastating impact. Perhaps the biggest threat is 2009 FD, an asteroid 160 meters (535 feet) across that has a one in 630 chance of hitting Earth between 2185 and 2198.

On NASA’s list of potential impacts, 2012 TC4 ranks only 13th. And its small size is such that we really wouldn’t have much to worry about.

But an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, and the chances are we might one day be faced with a similar threat. Making sure we can track asteroids, and even prepare what we would do if one was heading our way, is hugely important.

If you look at television shows featuring a genius you very quickly see a pattern emerge. Hugh Laurie’s TV-doctor, House, is a medical genius but struggles with severe depression as well as a messiah complex. Sherlock Holmes can solve any case, but has many addictions and may just be a sociopath. Countless TV shows, films, and books all peddle the idea that highly intelligent people are prone to mental illness.

However, the stereotype of tortured genius may now have gained some more scientific backing to it, after a new study has found that people with high IQs are more at risk of developing mental illness than the rest of the population.

The study, published in Science Direct, looked at Mensa members with an IQ of over 130 and found that “those with high intelligence are at significantly greater risk for the examined psychological disorders and physiological diseases.”

The study found that anxiety disorders were particularly prevalent amongst the 3,715 members of American Mensa they surveyed. Of these members, 20 percent had a diagnosed anxiety disorder, much higher than in the general population, where just over 10 percent are diagnosed with anxiety disorders.

The researchers used a model that suggests intelligent people with “hyper brains” react more to environmental stimulus, and “that may predispose them to certain psychological disorders as well as physiological conditions involving elevated sensory and altered immune and inflammatory responses”. Science Direct.

The study suggested that due to increased levels of awareness experienced by people with higher IQs, they react more to stimulus from the environment, creating a hyper brain/hyper body scenario, where they display a hyperactive central nervous system.

Tiny stimuli, such as a clothing tag brushing against you or a strange sound can even “trigger a low level, chronic stress response which then activates a hyper body response,” Dr. Nicole Tetreault, co-author of the study, told Thriveworks, which could explain why people with high IQs are more likely to suffer a heightened state of anxiety.

“Unique intensities and over-excitabilities [..] can be at once both remarkable and disabling on many levels,” the authors wrote in the study. “A significant portion of these individuals are suffering on a daily basis as a result of their unique emotional and physical over-excitabilities.”

The authors stressed that their study showed correlation and not causation, and called for further investigation into this at-risk sector of the population, and more focus on the mental health of people with high levels of intelligence.

“Intelligence research most often focuses on the flashes of lightning seen in this rare population, however in order to serve this group of individuals fully we must not neglect to acknowledge the rumbles of thunder that follow in the wake of their brilliance,” they conclude.

Hey, remember that huge telescope in China, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST)? Well, it was switched on in September 2016, and now some discoveries have been revealed – pulsars!

According to China Daily, the telescope has spotted dozens of pulsar candidates, several of which have since been confirmed by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.

Pulsars are neutron stars that spin incredibly rapidly, completing a rotation in a second or less, and that give off notable flashes of radiation.

“It is truly encouraging to have achieved such results within just one year,” Peng Bo, deputy director of FAST, told China Daily.

Of the pulsars discovered, one called J1859-01 is 16,000 light-years away and rotates once every 1.83 seconds. Another, J1931-01, is 4,100 light-years away and rotates once every 0.59 seconds.

FAST is the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, spanning 500 meters (1,640 feet) and eclipsing the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico. It is positioned in a vast karst depression in southwest China’s Guizhou Province.

The telescope is being used to study the origin and evolution of the universe, and it has already found some intriguing signals. Now it is the first Chinese radio telescope to detect pulsars, and it could become the first telescope ever to find a pulsar outside our galaxy as early as next year, which would be a huge finding.

A pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star. NASA

We know of about 2,700 pulsars inside our Milky Way so far, with the first discovered back in 1967. FAST is expected to double that number, and may also aid in the study of gravitational waves.

FAST has not been without controversy, though. When it was constructed, it was reported that thousands of people had to be re-located to make way for it. In August this year, meanwhile, various reports said they were struggling to find experts to run the facility.

These pulsar discoveries should hopefully get us back on track with actual science, though. The telescope is also being used to hunt for signals from extraterrestrials, but as you might imagine that’s pretty unlikely. Still, signals from distant rapidly spinning stars is just as cool, right?

Next up for the telescope, researchers hope to begin hunting for interstellar molecules and perform a large-scale survey of the neutral hydrogen in the universe.

I know, I promised we would never talk about The Dress again. I’m sorry. I lied. Because there’s a new optical illusion in town, and this time it’s a shoe.

Yes, The Shoe has been making the rounds on the internet, ever since someone called Nicole Coulthard published it on a Facebook group called Girlsmouth this week.

She said she saw the shoe as pale pink and white, but her friend said it was pale blue and grey. And thus, here we are.

“Ok girls so my friend has just sent me this asking what colour the shoe is, I would say pale pink and white, but she insists its pale blue and grey,” Coulthard posted on Facebook. “What do you girls see? Please tell me pink and white!”

In the IFLScience office, the majority of us see the shoe as pale blue and grey, but plenty of people online have been reporting both colors. And several pointed out that it was likely actually pink and white, as Vans – who made the shoe – didn’t have a grey and blue version.

 Follow

heidi @lovingmaynards

pink n white

 Follow

Tom Giles 

@TomGilesNBCS

Ok. The shoe was most definitely grey/teal… and then I stared at it for a minute trying to convince myself otherwise… now its pink/white

 Follow

Jono Pech @ #PAXAus 

@JonoHimself

It’s the same shoe. I was sure it was blue and grey but after colour balancing it, I’m blown away.

 Follow

Chelsea Traynor @ChelTraynor

SCOOP: the shoe is a pink and white Vans Old Skool. They don’t make a grey and teal version. You’re welcome.#pinkandwhiteshoes

  Speaking to the Metro, Coulthard said her friend had bought the shoes a few weeks ago and sent a picture to her mom, who said the blue color suited her.

“She texted back saying they are pink mum, but when she looked at the pic she saw blue too,” she said. “She sent it to me and I was convinced they are pink, we had a big argument as she said I only said pink because I knew she had bought pink shoes so that’s why I decided to put it up on Girlsmouth.”

Do we know what’s going on here? Well, sort of. You might remember last time we covered The Dress, a researcher called Pascal Wallisch from New York University said the time you woke up – and hence the amount of light you’d been exposed to – affected whether you saw the dress as black and blue or white and gold.

In his study, Wallisch showed that early risers were more likely to see white and gold, while people who stayed up late were more likely to see black and blue. Although not true for everyone, he said there was a pretty decent correlation.

“The same thing seems to be going on as with the dress,” he told IFLScience. “However, one key difference seems to be that people are much more easily able to toggle the percepts here.”

Sure, it’s a bit silly, but it’s a cool effect that is actually quite tough to explain. I’d like to say this is the end, but there will inevitably be more illusions inspired by The Dress. I can only apologize.

A pregnant woman narrowly avoided death last week after her unborn child “kicked” through her uterine wall. Fortunately, the mother and newborn baby both survived this exceptional mishap.

The woman, known under the pseudonym Zhang, was in her 35th week of pregnancy. She was sent to Peking University Shenzhen Hospital in China on the morning of October 2 after suffering from severe stomach pain, the hospital reported in a statement on its official Weixin social media page. Along with her intensifying abdominal pain, Zhang’s doctors also noted problems with her blood pressure, pulse, and breathing.

Zhang had undergone a surgery in 2016, just a few months before becoming pregnant, to remove fibroids from her uterus. These are non-cancerous growths that can grow along the wall of the uterus. After finding this in her medical history, the doctors promptly carried out an ultrasound scan where they diagnosed a “high degree of suspected scar rupture of the uterus”.

The mother and child were at a huge risk of infection. Thankfully, doctors managed to save them.  Peking University Shenzhen Hospital/Weixin

After making this diagnosis, it took doctors just 5 minutes to rush Zhang into the operating theatre. On operating, they found the fetus’ legs poking into her abdominal cavity through a 7-centimeter (2.7-inch) tear in her uterus.

The doctors said the woman’s previous surgery left scar tissue in her womb, leaving the uterus wall more at risk of breaking. This is known as a rupture pregnancy. These are thought to affect less than 5 in 1,000pregnant women who have previously had a Caesarean section, with that risk being notably lower for first-time pregnancies and for women who haven’t previously had a Caesarean section. It’s even rare to experience this after having surgery for uterine fibroids.

In this case, both mother and child were at a huge risk of infection. Thankfully, doctors managed to deliver the baby with complete success. Zhang and her baby are now said to be happy and recovering well.

Online dating (and dating apps in particular) gets its fair share of bad press, whether it’s for causing a “dating apocalypse” or concerns over users’ privacy. But new research suggests that it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, sites like Match.com and apps like Tinder could be contributing to a stronger, more diverse society.

In the olden days, people relied on (offline) social networks consisting of strong and loose connections to meet prospective partners. Loose ties are acquaintances or friends of friends, and it’s these connections sociologists say play an important role in meeting dating partners. After all, people are less likely to form a romantic relationship with a close friend and more likely to date a person connected to their friendship group, or someone they met at a bar, at work, or college.

There’s been a huge shift in dating culture in the last two decades. Today online dating is the second most common way for a heterosexual couple to meet and the most common for homosexual couples. So Josue Ortega, from the University of Essex, UK, and Philipp Hergovich, from the University of Vienna, Austria, decided it was time to explore how it affects society. To do this, they built a virtual network of men and women from different races. For simplicity, each “agent” was looking to marry a member of the opposite sex.

First, they programmed the model to show what would happen if those agents could only marry those they had a mutual connection with, say a friend of a friend. This produced low levels of interracial marriages.

Next, they reprogrammed the system to include additional links (representing online dating matches) so that two agents, previously unconnected, had the chance to meet and marry. Levels of interracial pairings dramatically increased.

So, does it reflect what’s happening in the real world? Afterall, the simplicity of the model doesn’t account for agents’ preferences or real-life obstacles.

It turns out, rates of interracial marriages remain low in the US (6.3 percent) and UK (9 percent), but these numbers have risen significantly since the advent of online dating. In the noughts, numbers of interracial couples increased by 50 percent. More recently, apps like Tinder are accelerating the trend.

“It is intriguing that shortly after the introduction of the first dating websites in 1995, like Match.com, the percentage of new marriages created by interracial couples increased rapidly,” the authors explained in a preprint of their study available to view on arXiv.

The researchers acknowledge that at the results show a correlation, not a cause and effect, between online dating and interracial marriages. There are also other factors to consider, such as changing demographics and social attitudes. Still, it makes an interesting argument, especially now that one-third of newlyweds meet online.

Last month, French scientists released a widely-celebrated study showing they had partially restored consciousness in a man who had spent half of his life in a vegetative state. While the rest of the world assumed he was alive, it’s now been revealed that the man actually died months before their report was published.

The study, published last month in the journal Current Biology, involved vagal nerve stimulation to induce signs of consciousness in a 35-year-old man who had been in a vegetative state for 15 years after a car accident. Following this treatment, he was able to smile, move his eyes, turn his head, and respond to basic commands.

However, the study did not mention that the man had died in June 2017. His death was only publically admitted last week during an interview in the French newspaper Le Parisien, where researcher Professor Marc Guenot claimed his death was not connected to the treatment.

“Unfortunately, this man died this year, a pulmonary complication,” Professor Guenot told Le Parisien last week. “This has strictly no connection with electrical stimulation.”

When asked if he was concerned with fostering false hope for families in this situation, Professor Guenot responded: “There is no question of that. And the family of this 35-year-old man was warned… The brain injuries of these patients are irreversible.”

The researchers also gave statements to the press which suggested the man was still alive. Lead researcher Angela Sirigu told The Guardian in September: “He is still paralyzed, he cannot talk, but he can respond. Now he is more aware.” Although, since most of the scientists on the project are French, it’s entirely possible their statements were lost in translation.

Nevertheless, their failure to disclose the information has aroused questions about transparency and ethics in science. The researchers claim they made the decision to not reveal the death out of respect to the man’s family, as well as concerns that people might have wrongly blamed the therapy for his death.

Professor Jacques Luauté of the University of Lyon, another researcher from the study, told Le Monde: “We had discussed it with the family. Together, we wrongly thought that this would lead to people making a link between the stimulation and the death. We concluded that the death – unrelated to experimentation – was a private family event.”

“This was a mistake because it was obvious that we’d been asked what had become of the patient.”

When you think about race, you probably think about skin color. Although the shade of your skin might seem to be the most variable trait in regards to race, we know surprisingly little about it. That’s especially true when it comes to Africa and the wide variety of skin tones found there.

Now, a landmark new study has seen scientists investigate the genetics of skin color among people in Africa. Their study, published in the journal Science, gathered genetic information from over 1,500 people and data on skin color from over 2,000 people from some of the most diverse regions of the African continent, making it the largest study of its kind to date.

According to the researchers, their findings challenge the idea of a biological concept of race.

“When people think of skin color in Africa most would think of darker skin, but we show that within Africa there is a huge amount of variation, ranging from skin as light as some Asians to the darkest skin on a global level and everything in between,” said Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, in a statement.

Their analysis found eight genetic variants within the human genome that are associated with skin pigmentation. They discovered that most variants associated with light skin (now most common in Europeans) and dark skin appear to have both originated in Africa. Furthermore, the oldest version of these variants in most cases was associated with lighter skin, suggesting that moderately pigmented skin evolved before darkly pigmented skin.

Most of these genetic variants associated with light and dark pigmentation appear to have emerged more than 300,000 years ago – a time before the origin of modern humans. Some variants even emerged up to 1 million years ago.

“If you were to shave a chimp, it has light pigmentation,” Tishkoff added, “so it makes sense that skin color in the ancestors of modern humans could have been relatively light. It is likely that when we lost the hair covering our bodies and moved from forests to the open savannah, we needed darker skin. Mutations influencing both light and dark skin have continued to evolve in humans, even within the past few thousand years.”

The region with the strongest ties to skin color was the area around the SLC24A5 gene, which arose more than 30,000 years ago. A variant of this is believed to play a role in lighter skin colors found in European and south Asian populations. It turns out that it’s also common in some populations in Ethiopia and Tanzania. Similar variants around MFSD12, OCA2, and HERC2 were shown to lighten the skin of the African San hunter-gatherer population as well as in Europeans.