First conducted in 2014, the recurring questionnaire tracks yearly anxiety trends that often range from everyday concerns to existential terrors. This year, 61.1 percent of over 1,200 respondents once again cited “corrupt government officials” as their biggest fear—the same subject was last year’s number one entrant as well as its 11th year on the list. After that, it’s the fear of another world war (51.9 percent). However, “AI harming the political process” wasn’t too far behind for third place at 51.9 percent. The technocentric worry is now essentially tied with the fear of loved ones becoming gravely ill (51.8 percent).
Government corruption is once again at the top of the list. Credit: Chapman University
That said, the survey’s own plus or minus 3.79 percentage point margin of error complicates the results a bit. Taking the margin of error into consideration, it’s a tossup when trying to definitively rank the list’s third through tenth fears. Regardless, about 49.7 percent survey takers are also anxious about AI negatively impacting the economy—a double dose of AI-centric woes for the first time in the survey’s history. It’s also the first year researchers at Chapman University in California included questions about AI, but they made it clear it likely won’t be the last.
“As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into everyday life, understanding these fears will be increasingly important,” said Chapman University sociologist and survey creator Christopher Bader. “We expect concerns about AI to remain a significant part of the national conversation in the years ahead.”
It’s understandable why AI currently vexes so many people. The blanket term now encompasses everything from photorealistic fake images, to dubious search engine chatbots, to nebulous doomsday warnings. Despite these worries, the AI industry’s biggest threats arguably remain the rampant spread of misinformation, coupled with a lack of meaningful regulations or oversight.
But no matter your top technological fear, survey organizers still believe the annual report highlights a very relatable human emotion.
“What I’m seeing more and more over time is that our fear about our loved ones is going to always be there, no matter what’s going on in the world,” said sociologist Ashley Kranjac, director of Chapman University’s Earl Babbie Research Center.
Launched in 2023, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope observes some of the most distant regions of the visible universe for signs of dark matter and dark energy. But even while focused on the “big picture,” Euclid’s onboard equipment is surprising astronomers by capturing tiny photobombers like errant comets.
Its recent portraits of one specific dusty space rock are especially impressive, however. Euclid spotted a never-before-seen comet sailing through space more than 807.7 million miles from Earth. The telescope isn’t designed to automatically flag an image interloper. Instead, the bright blemish seen in multiple images was spotted by a moving object detection program designed by Mikko Pöntinen, an astronomer at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
“I was excited to see my software flag a ‘streak’ smeared across several images—the result of a fast-moving object,” said Pöntinen. “Further inspection revealed that it had a fuzzy cloud around it, indicative of an active object like a comet that is shedding dust and gas.”
Pöntinen quickly relayed his findings to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (MPC), which then passed the news along to researchers around the world. On October 8, the MPC confirmed the newly discovered comet, which is now classified C/2026 S1 (Euclid).
C/2026 S1 was seen from five different fields of view over multiple days in the Euclid Deep Field North region of the telescope’s scans. Astronomers now know the comet’s trajectory isn’t located on the same horizontal plane as the planets. Instead, its path is technically taking it over the solar system along a multi-thousand-year orbit.
Euclid’s discovery is particularly striking because the telescope’s six-year mission is specifically mapped to avoid areas of the sky that are laden with comets and asteroids.
“Very few comets are expected to be discovered by Euclid, so it was a happy coincidence,” added Euclid archive scientist Bruno Altieri.
With Alaska’s fat bears done packing on their winter weight and spooky season in full swing, it’s time to turn our collective animal-loving attention to a smaller mammal—bats. The Bureau of Land Management’s (BOEM) annual Bat Beauty Contest returns on October 24 and promises “plenty of batty puns.”
Beginning Saturday, October 24, BOEM will post photos of the competitors to their Facebook and Instagram accounts and ask you to vote for the best-looking one. All of the competing bats are part of wild populations that live on land managed by the public agency and are photographed by wildlife technicians. The winner will be announced (appropriately) on Saturday, October 31.
The bats in this competition are known for their squishy faces and clever names. In 2024, a hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus) from Oregon named Hoary Potter took the crown. Other contestants included a long-eared myotis (Myotis evotis) named Honey Bunches of MyOtis, a myotis bat (Myotis myotis) named Robert Battinson, and western small-footed bats (Myotis ciliolabrum) named Batt Damon and Batlor Swift. The contest was not held in 2025 due to the 43-day-long federal government shutdown.
A hoary bat at Isle Royale National Park in Michigan. Image: NPS Photo/Bat Conservation International.
The contest is not all bat puns and a way to keep the spirit of Fat Bear Week alive. It falls during Bat Week (October 24-31). Bat Week raises awareness about the Earth’s only flying mammal. More than just a Halloween symbol, bats play a critical ecological role as plant pollinators and through eating insects that can threaten crops and forests around the world. According to Bat Week, one bat can eat up to its body weight in insects every night. Only three species of bats eat animal blood, with two specializing in bird blood. Female lesser long-nosed bats even make tequila possible. Every spring, they migrate from south-central Mexico up to the southwestern United States, following “nectar corridors” of columnar cacti and agave plants. They pollinate agave plants, which are then used to make tequila and mezcal. When they feed on cactus fruits and nectar, they may also help disperse cacti seeds. Other bats eat pollen, nectar, or fruit.
Bats are increasingly threatened due to habitat loss, light pollution, and diseases like white-nose syndrome. This fungal disease infects the skin of the muzzle, ears, and wings of hibernating bats. In about 20 years, it has killed millions of bats across North America and affects about half of the species on the continent. Bats also are often misunderstood as carriers of diseases such as rabies.
The planet is home to over 1,400 species of bats, and they make up almost 20 percent of all mammal species. Bats also can be found almost everywhere on Earth, even in desert and polar regions. To look up which bat species live near you, you can use Bat Week’s state bat database.
In the summer of 1518, people in Strasbourg couldn’t seem to stop dancing—some even danced themselves to death.
It all started with one woman, who stepped into the street and began moving uncontrollably. Soon, dozens of other residents followed suit, overcome with the inexplicable urge to hop, jerk, and sway. Within weeks, the outbreak had spread throughout the city, leaving officials, physicians, and religious leaders scrambling to figure out what was happening—and, more importantly, how to make it stop.
Five centuries later, the dancing plague of 1518 remains one of history’s strangest medical mysteries. Historical records confirm that a bizarre episode turned a medieval city into a very unwilling dance floor that summer, but exactly why it happened remains a matter of debate.
A bizarre outbreak takes hold
The dancing plague began on July 14, 1518, when a woman named Frau Troffea started dancing in Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire and now a city in northeastern France. Though her husband begged her to stop, Troffea kept moving as day faded to night, while a crowd of onlookers gathered around to watch. Eventually, she collapsed and fell asleep, but when she awoke the next morning, she resumed her solitary jig.
Troffea’s uncontrollable dancing, known as choreomania, seemed to be contagious. Dozens of other people were soon gyrating in the streets of Strasbourg and, by late August, as many as 400 individuals had succumbed.
At the time, the leading theory was that St. Vitus, a fourth-century Sicilian martyr believed to punish sinners by making them dance, had cursed the afflicted. Then, once St. Vitus decided his victims had suffered enough, he would relieve them of the curse.
St. Vitus was martyred in 303 during the persecution of Christians by the co-Emperors Diocletian and Maximian. Image: Contributor / Getty Images / Print Collector
City leaders determined that the best course of action was to keep the dancers dancing, so they cleared the outdoor grain market, built a stage, and hired musicians. They didn’t explain their rationale in any known, surviving documents, so historians don’t know exactly why they did this. But John Waller, associate professor of the history of medicine at Michigan State University and the author of The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness, suspects they had two reasons: They believed dancing could help people purge physical impurities from their bodies, and they viewed it as a form of penance.
“If people were believed to have been cursed by God or a saint for some kind of immorality, well, dancing was associated with hedonism and that was fundamentally immoral,” he tells Popular Science. “A way of basically punishing oneself would be to dance to the point of exhaustion and pain and potentially even death. It would make sense with that potential framework.” In other words, from the leaders’ perspective, if dancing was their punishment, let them be punished.
Dancing themselves to death
Regardless of their motives, the authorities’ decision had “very, very clear consequences,” he says. It was a hot summer, and the dancers were likely under the full glare of the sun. They weren’t eating or drinking much, and they weren’t resting.
“This is certainly going to be extremely dangerous for a large number of people, particularly anybody with any kind of susceptibility to heart attack or stroke,” says Waller.
The historical records are murky on exactly how many people died—one writer claimed as many as 15 per day, at least for a time—but it was enough to make city leaders completely change course.
“They essentially banned dancing, except for some people in the privacy of their own homes, and then instituted a program of penance and prayer,” says Waller. “They clearly realized that what they’d been doing before was causing harm and I suspect they got the impression that it was making things worse.”
Eventually, the authorities transported the remaining dancers to a shrine dedicated to St. Vitus about 30 miles away, where religious leaders went to work praying and leaving offerings. As days and weeks passed, the dancers overcame their choreomania and returned to their normal lives—traumatized and tired, but otherwise fine.
Strasbourg’s dancing plague in 1518 wasn’t the only such incident of its kind. Image: Getty Images / Contributor / Bettmann
The dancing plague of 1518 wasn’t the only such incident of its kind. Numerous other outbreaks of uncontrollable dancing occurred in western Europe between the late 1300s and mid-1500s—and Waller thinks it’s no coincidence that many were clustered along the Rhine River and its tributaries.
“Rivers are very good for, obviously, transporting trade goods, but they’re also very good for spreading ideas,” he says. “From the headwaters in Switzerland all the way down to where the Rhine flows into the North Sea, you’ve got this belief in a saint who curses with a dance.”
Theories behind the dancing
Now that we have the benefit of hindsight, what might explain the dancing plague of 1518 and others like it? One theory is that the dancers were sickened by ergot, a fungus that can contaminate grain. Another holds venomous spiders bit the afflicted. Demonic possession, epilepsy, typhus, and encephalitis—brain inflammation caused by an infection or autoimmune response—have also been put forward as possible explanations.
But after considering all the evidence, Waller thinks there’s only one plausible theory that truly makes sense. He suspects the dancers of Strasbourg were all victims of mass hysteria, also known as mass psychogenic illness, brought on by intense psychological distress.
The years leading up to 1518 were rough, particularly for the lower classes, with failed crops, bad weather, economic issues, social unrest, religious tensions, and illnesses like smallpox, leprosy, and syphilis taking a toll on peoples’ psyches. They were hungry, anxious, sad, scared, and worried that God had abandoned them.
Waller suspects the people living in Strasbourg simply reached their breaking point, then entered into a trance-like state that rendered them largely insensitive to their extreme fatigue and sore feet. They danced, Waller argues, rather than weeping, fighting, praying, or engaging in some other behavior because of their belief in St. Vitus and his dancing curse.
Given the period-specific cultural and religious underpinnings, could something like the dancing plague of 1518 happen today?
Waller shares several modern examples of mass psychogenic illness that, although they don’t involve dancing, he finds to be similar in nature. More than 300 students in Blackburn, England, suffered from a mysterious fainting fit in 1956, for example, and hundreds of people succumbed to alternating fits of laughing and sobbing in East Africa in 1962. In 2007, students at a Catholic boarding school near Mexico City came down with a mysterious sickness that made walking difficult. A year later, 20 female students in Tanzania suffered a mass fainting episode during their final-year national examinations.
And although the dancing plague of 1518 took place more than 500 years ago, Waller says we can still learn plenty from it. For him, the most important takeaway is “the way in which our expression of severe distress can be culturally conditioned and channeled.”
When Waller initially started researching the dancing plague of 1518, it was such a “wild phenomenon” that his inclination was to think “as strange as the past can be, this was simply too strange to have actually happened,” he says. But as he dug deeper—and, more importantly, began to understand the context within which it arose—it started to make more and more sense.
In other words, he says, it reminds us that psychological distress is not expressed in a vacuum. The culture, beliefs, and circumstances around us can shape how our inner turmoil manifests—and, in some cases, how it spreads from one person to another.
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, most surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
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