Near-death experiences (NDEs) might be more common than most would think, according to a new study by the International Association for Near-Death Studies. 

The study reveals that 23 percent of American adults report having had a near-death experience, after which they returned to normal human existence. The study also reveals that 35 percent of the individuals queried about such experiences who have not had an NDE themselves said they know someone who has. 

“In an NDE, usually during a close brush with death, a person has a vivid, emotionally intense experience of lucidly perceiving the material world from a position outside the physical body and/or perceiving and interacting with beings and environments not of the material world,” said Janet Riley, executive director of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, in an email to The Debrief. “Afterward, experiencers are usually profoundly changed.”

The survey, conducted in March 2026 by Centiment and involving 2,100 Americans, looked more deeply at the effects of these experiences. Among those who reported having an NDE, 51 percent said the experience gave them a deeper meaning and appreciation for life, while 37.6 percent said they felt more connected to a “spiritual realm.”

Overall, thirty-one percent said the experience changed their life priorities; 30 percent said they were less afraid of death than before; 30 percent reported greater empathy for others; and 26 percent said they had become more generous and socially minded.

Among respondents who knew a friend or family member who had experienced an NDE, 44 percent said they became more curious about the afterlife, while 40 percent reported a stronger belief in life after death.

“This remarkable data tells us three important things: NDEs may be more common than we realized; people who have NDEs or hear about them are positively impacted, and the majority of Americans believe evidence exists to support the phenomena,” Riley said in a statement. “The survey also makes clear the importance of normalizing conversations about life, death, and what comes after. Those who have had NDEs or who research them may be some of the best teachers.”

What about those who have never had an NDE?

Additionally, the survey revealed that 27.3 percent of participants who had never experienced an NDE themselves found the evidence significant enough to change their minds, while 31.3 percent said it at least provided reliable evidence for some type of phenomenon.

The smallest category of responding participants, at 15 percent, said there was limited evidence, while 24 percent said there was insufficient evidence.

Nearly four out of five respondents (79.8 percent) said there is either some value (36.7 percent) or major value (41.1 percent) in studying near-death experiences.

A Paradigm Shift? 

Culturally, perceptions about NDEs and related subjects may be changing, and mainstream attitudes may be evolving. Even in the world of pop culture, celebrity gossip columnist Perez Hilton (Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr.), known for his often controversial commentary, has spoken publicly about a near-death experience after taking flu medication without food, which led to a stomach ulcer, perforation, and severe sepsis. He ultimately spent 21 days in the hospital.

After the experience, Hilton said he was appalled by his “selfish behavior” and offered apologies, explaining that after finding God, he came to regret the fact that, as he put it, “I didn’t care who I hurt.”

The International Association for Near-Death Studies survey also asked participants whether death frightened them. Twenty-five percent said the idea of dying scared them “a little,” while 14.8 percent said it scared them “a great deal.” However, 31 percent said they felt confident that they would be in a better place after death, while only 6.2 percent worried they would be in a worse place. Another 25 percent said they had “made peace with death.”

“We were founded as a research organization, and no survey like this had occurred recently,” Riley explained. “Given the strong interest in near-death experiences, we thought a survey would be timely.”

“We also felt that communicating the results could help normalize conversations about the phenomenon, which some people are reluctant to share because they fear not being taken seriously,” Riley added.

With this high level of confidence in life after death, such beliefs may continue to spread further into the mainstream, influencing everyday life and shaping how people view themselves and the world around them.

“We also know from NDE research that those who have had the experiences feel a deep connection to others, feel more loving and spiritual, and often feel more altruistic and generous,” Riley says. “We believe connection, love, altruism, and generosity have the potential to make the world a better place.”

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) have announced the first ultrafast laser delivering 1.05 nanojoules of energy in extremely short pulses as short as 147 femtoseconds integrated onto a photonic chip.

The research team behind the accomplishment said that successfully scaling down ultrafast lasers of this magnitude from large tabletop models to microchip integration could enable extremely advanced sensing technologies, improve medical imaging, and potentially enable next-generation atomic clocks for yet-to-be-developed communication and navigation applications.

Ultrafast Lasers on a Microchip Scale Have Remained an Elusive Photonics ‘Holy Grail’

In a statement announcing the breakthrough, team leader and EPFL Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg explained that ultrafast lasers emit extremely short pulses of light energy lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds, which are quadrillionths of a second. Although the development of this category of lasers has enabled ultraprecise micromachining, atomic clocks, and advanced eye surgery, the team notes that the “bulky” technology has been limited to optical laser tables.

On the other end of the spectrum, engineers have built extremely small photonic chips that channel light in a similar way to how traditional microprocessors channel electricity to perform calculations. Some photonic chip designs are already widely used in the communications industry. However, integrating the ultrafast laser technology at the power levels demonstrated by the research team into a smaller chip has remained particularly elusive.

“For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics,” Professor Kippenberg explained.

“Overlooked, Surprisingly Elegant Technology” Could Enable Futuristic Technologies

To find the nexus between size, speed, and power that could enable a true high-energy, ultrafast laser on a chip, the EPFL team opted to turn away from traditional laser designs and instead took advantage of what they termed a “largely overlooked” design: a Mamyshev oscillator.

Unlike some designs, this oscillator uses a nonlinear waveguide placed between the two optical filters in the laser cavity, each of which allows a different color of the spectrum to pass through. When a strong light pulse travels through the installed waveguide, the beam broadens into a wider range of colors.

The team notes that this effect allows part of the light pulse to pass through both filters and remain in circulation. However, they also note that “weak light” does not broaden enough when impacting the waveguide and is ‘rejected.’

Zheru Qiu, a co-lead author of the paper, said that beyond speed and power, their chip has commercial potential due to its material simplicity.

“This design is especially attractive because it does not require any component that is difficult to make on this erbium-doped silicon nitride chip,” Qiu explained.

Another advantage to the team’s design is its resistance to nonlinear interaction. Put simply, when waveguides squeeze light into tiny spaces, that same light interacts strongly with itself.

The resulting nonlinear interactions can degrade the performance of traditional photonic chip designs. However, Qiu said that a laser with a Mamyshev oscillator is “well suited to the tight confinement of light in photonic chips.”

“Our result shows that it is not only possible, but that it can be achieved with a surprisingly elegant architecture that the integrated-photonics community had overlooked,” Qiu explained of their revolutionary architecture. 

Integrated Chips Could Replace Large, Expensive Laboratory Lasers

When discussing the versatility of their ultrafast laser on a chip, the researchers noted that the prototype’s 42-cm-long laser cavity can be folded down to a size smaller than a matchhead. For comparison, they noted that 42 centimeters is “far smaller than optical fiber-based lasers.”

For potential commercial applications, the team said their chips can be manufactured “at-scale,” with an excess of 1,000 individual laser cavities per chip. Although currently in the demonstration phase, the team suggested that a fully realized commercial-grade ultrafast laser-on-a-chip could provide engineers with a critical microengineering tool they have lacked.

“With kilowatt-level peak powers, the chip can drive demanding applications that have long depended on large, expensive laboratory lasers,” says Qiu.

The researchers suggested their chip could impact several technologies, such as advanced sensing and medical imaging, and potentially pave the way for futuristic technologies based on ultraprecise atomic clocks.

The study “High-pulse-energy integrated mode-locked laser using a Mamyshev oscillator” was published in Nature.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

Newly released NASA satellite images reveal the extent of recent wildfire damage on Santa Rosa Island in vivid detail, showcasing the impact of the largest Channel Islands fire on record.

The images, obtained with NASA satellite observation platforms that include the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) and the Fire Event Explorer, reveal fire damage to nearly half of the island’s southeastern side.

The fire was initially spotted on May 15, 2026, and containment efforts began as the blaze spread across the island over the following days.

Now, the new NASA imagery is revealing the extent of the damage caused by the historic fire, which officials say came close to endangering one of our nation’s rarest species.

18,000 Acres Scorched on Santa Rosa Island

Current damage estimates indicate that close to one-third of the island was impacted, constituting more than 18,300 acres on the island, which is part of California’s Channel Islands National Park.

Comparisons with past NASA imagery of Santa Rosa Island, made possible with Landsat satellite images, reveal a sharp contrast between once verdant regions of the island, which are now scorched by fire, shown in reddish brown in the more recent images (see below).

Fortunately, Channel Islands National Park officials reported that the fire had been 97 percent contained by May 26, after burning its way through chaparral and grassland covering large portions of the island.

Endangering One of America’s Rarest Species

The Channel Islands serve as a unique and extremely diverse habitat for a range of species of both plants and animals. Among the species threatened during the recent fires were Torrey pines (Pinus torreyana), recognized as our nation’s rarest pine tree, which only grows on Santa Rosa Island and in a preserve in urban San Diego.

Fortunately, most of the island’s Torrey pine forest remains intact, although some damage was reportedly discernible in surveys by firefighters on the island and in drone imagery of the scorched areas.

According to island officials, the fire appears to have burned its way inland at lower intensity, making its way through pine areas that burned ground-dwelling vegetation while leaving the overlying canopy largely unaffected.

Damage from the Largest Channel Island Fire

Park officials say that some smaller areas of forest did sustain significant damage, as conditions in those pockets allowed a greater burn intensity.

Closer to the fire’s northern boundary, Santa Rosa’s cloud forests—the wooded areas comprised mostly of oak and pine growth surrounded by chaparral, whose name is derived from the island fog that sustains them—were successfully preserved by firefighting crews who worked ahead of the fire to cool areas where combustible vegetation grows.

Based on recent local reports, the fire that consumed large portions of Santa Rosa Island’s vegetation is the largest known to have impacted any of the Channel Islands. Fortunately, many of the island’s indigenous trees and other vegetation are resilient enough to withstand fire, since they do not rely on it as part of their growth cycles like many mainland plant species.

Additional information about the fires can be found here, and more imagery of the recent damage has been made available at NASA’s Earth Observatory page.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

An international team of astronomers has uncovered what they are calling the clearest evidence yet for dying white dwarf stars as the origin of a class of mysterious cosmic signals called long-period radio transients.

The research, led by University of Sydney PhD student Kovi Rose, potentially offers researchers a ‘Rosetta Stone’ capable of deciphering and categorizing other such signals.

“For the first time, we have pinpointed the origin of these signals, confirming the source to be a ‘cataclysmic variable’, or an accreting white dwarf star,” Rose explained in an email to The Debrief.

The team behind the discovery, including the astronomers at CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, said that identifying the origin of these transient cosmic signals that come from a few remote regions of the Milky Way galaxy could also offer researchers a “natural laboratory” to study the extreme physics that occur in such environments.

Mysterious Cosmic Signals “Have Puzzled Astronomers for Years”

According to the same email, long-period radio transients were initially thought to be slow-spinning neutron stars, known as pulsars, emitting periodic energy bursts. However, the team notes that mathematical models suggest that slow-rotating neutron stars cannot generate enough energy to produce the mysterious cosmic signals.

“Long-period radio transients have puzzled astronomers for years,” Mr. Rose explained. “We’ve only found about a dozen, and their origins have been unclear.”

Hoping to solve the mystery, the University of Sydney-led team aimed their instruments at a region of space and discovered a small, dense star called a white dwarf. However, unlike our solitary Sun, this white dwarf is part of a binary star system, named ASKAP J1745−5051, with a much larger but less dense red dwarf as its companion.

After several scans with ASKAP, the team discovered that the smaller white dwarf, about the size of Earth but with a mass closer to the Sun’s, was shedding or accreting material onto the larger but less dense red dwarf star. As the material heats up, it releases X-rays.

The team also detected periodic bursts of radio signals from the binary system. Although these regular emissions are tied to the system’s orbital motion, the researchers found that the bursts of X-rays and radio signals didn’t peak at the same time. According to Mr. Rose, this lack of synchronicity “tells us they’re being produced in different regions of the system.”

Analysis Reveals Long-Period Radio Transient Match

A closer analysis suggested that, due to the proximity of the two stars, which orbit each other in just one hour, their interacting magnetic fields were producing regular radio-wave bursts, which the team clocked at 1.4-hour intervals.

Professor Murphy, Head of School at the University of Sydney School of Physics and Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), said that similar objects have previously been linked to binary star systems, “but this is the first one where we can clearly see both stars and the accretion process in action.”

When the team compared the emissions from the binary system with those of previously detected long-period radio transients, the data were a clear match. According to Rose, this comparison proved definitively that this elusive category of mysterious cosmic signals “comes from a white dwarf actively pulling material from a companion star.”

Natural Laboratories for Exploring Extreme Plasma Physics

Although the team’s findings do not rule out other causes of these mysterious cosmic signals, they said their discovery “strengthens an alternative explanation” that at least some are caused by binary star systems involving white dwarfs.

“The system is also only the second known long-period radio transient to emit regular X-rays – and the first where the cause of the regularity has been confirmed,” they explained.

When discussing the potential impact of their findings on future research, the team noted that ASKAP J1745-5051 could provide astronomers “a reference point” for understanding other long-period radio transients that have remained uncharacterized.

Mr. Rose said that the system could help researchers determine whether other long-period transients are more like pulsars or like white dwarf systems, “acting like a stellar Rosetta stone,” referencing the famous stone tablet that helped modern researchers decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. He also noted that the system offers researchers a unique opportunity to study extreme plasma physics and magnetic-field interactions “under conditions that cannot be replicated on Earth.”

“These systems are natural laboratories,” Mr Rose said. “They allow us to test our understanding of how matter behaves in strong magnetic fields and under intense gravitational forces.”

In the future, the University of Sydney-led team said they are planning future observations of the system with a combination of optical, radio, and X-ray telescopes “to better understand how these emissions are generated” and to determine whether similar mechanisms found in this system can explain the full population of long-period radio transients spotted to date.

“Each new discovery is helping us piece together the bigger picture,” Mr Rose explained. “We’re only just beginning to understand this new class of cosmic events.”

The findings are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

 Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

For thousands of years, human population growth occurred so slowly that there wasn’t even a noticeable curvature in the graph of humanity’s civilization. Villages became towns. A harvest fed another generation. Empires grew and collapsed while the total number of people on Earth crept upward by degrees.

This has changed dramatically with the onset of the modern age, as industry, medicine, energy production, agriculture, and technology drove our population curve into one of the most spectacular population explosions in human history. This growth, however, has also defied mathematical explanations, challenging some of the best models used to explain life on our planet.

Now, a new mathematical model suggests that hidden within that rise is a deeper pattern, one that may also point to how quickly things could change if humanity abruptly runs into the planet’s limits.

A Worst-Case ‘Crisis’ Scenario

Published in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, the study was authored by University of Milan physicist Dr. Alessio Zaccone and the late Dr. Kostya Trachenko of Queen Mary University of London. Their work used more commonly used mathematical methods to describe disordered materials, where scientists study how complex systems evolve, relax, and respond over time.

By applying this new model to our population growth, Dr. Zaccone and Dr. Trachenko have discovered that their simple equation appears to embrace a wide range of growth regimes observed over the last 12,000 years, from long periods of relative stability to rapid acceleration of our growth after the onset of the industrial age.

They also demonstrated just how rapidly our growth curve could shift if we lost the underlying assumptions for rapid human growth.

In a deliberately conservative worst-case scenario in which carrying-capacity constraints became abruptly active today, the researchers found that the global population could be cut in half as early as 2064.

Instead of trying to predict the future by looking at factors such as migration, fertility rates, technological development, economic changes, climate policy, and others, Dr. Zaccone and Dr. Trachenko sought to address a simpler, much more profound issue. Namely, can a general nonlinear model be used to describe the population growth curve in the history of humanity?

The answer is yes, though with important caveats.

“We show that a simple nonlinear differential equation (originally studied in the physics of disordered systems) mathematically describes key regimes of global population growth over the past 12000 years,” researchers write. “The proposed framework provides a compact analytical setting to explore future scenarios, including a deliberately conservative, worst-case illustration in which the global population could halve as early as 2064 if carrying-capacity constraints became abruptly active today.”

Why Population Models Are Hard to Build

Historically, modeling of population growth has been a controversial issue. As far back as 1798, English cleric Thomas Malthus proposed a simple exponential growth curve. According to his framework, the growth rate is determined by the difference between birth and death rates. If birth exceeds deaths, the population grows exponentially. If the opposite happens, it declines.

The problem with that approach is that the population of any species, including humans, doesn’t grow indefinitely. The carrying capacity, i.e., how many individuals of the species can be sustained, is limited.

It was Dr. Pierre François Verhulst who, in the 19th century, added this factor to our population growth models. He showed that population growth occurs, though it is progressively slowed by resource limitations and eventually comes to a stop.

Later, in 1960, Dr. Heinz von Foerster and colleagues famously proposed a hyperbolic model suggesting that human population growth was accelerating toward a mathematical “doomsday” singularity in 2026.

Obviously, Dr. von Foerster’s prediction did not come to fruition. However, his model raised a further crucial issue in population dynamics—namely, that any mathematical population framework can be fitted to describe certain historical events. The problem is that when applied to a much wider timeframe, they can completely break down.

According to Dr. Zaccone and Dr. Trachenko, the problem isn’t that those models were useless per se. On the contrary, most of them are very useful and supply valuable information about various aspects of population dynamics. However, none of them can be universally used, as they are typically local estimates valid for a specific timeframe.

A Single Mathematical Model To Capture It All

In their new study, Dr. Zaccone and Dr. Trachenko developed a nonlinear differential “rate-feedback” equation. In essence, it implies that the population growth rate depends on the population size, and a single parameter K determines whether the dependence is positive or negative.

If K = 0, the model yields a simple exponential growth curve. For negative values of K, the behavior approaches logistic dynamics, with population growth being increasingly slowed by resource restrictions. If K is positive, the model shows a rapidly accelerating growth curve.

Importantly, according to researchers, the classic models aren’t equivalent to theirs. Rather, these behaviors appear as local approximations within the proposed framework. It means the researchers do not claim to have developed a magical equation that will solve all problems. Instead, what they propose is a mathematical tool to bring a few key models under a single umbrella.

“Different growth regimes since the early Neolithic until the present can be interpreted within a single nonlinear rate-feedback equation in appropriate limits,” researchers write. “These include the well-known Malthus (exponential) and Verhulst (logistic) growth laws, as well as von Foerster-type hyperbolic growth as a controlled low-order truncation.”

Humanity’s Population Growth Regimes Keep Changing

Based on empirical estimates of the global population over the last 12,000 years, researchers discovered that our species has experienced multiple regimes throughout its history. While some of these periods were defined by relative population stability, others featured exponential growth, and others featured compression or stretching of the growth curve.

While there were shorter periods of population decline, for instance, during the Black Death in Europe, researchers focused on broader trends in population growth. These regimes, they say, were clearly distinct from each other.

The era of early agricultural societies was relatively stable. Later periods featured increasing acceleration in our population growth. Since the 1970s, the authors argue, our population dynamics can be best approximated by a stretched exponential regime, suggesting that population growth has slowed significantly compared to earlier stages.

Within this mathematical model, the current stretched-exponential regime implies K < 0. In other words, humanity’s growth doesn’t approach a critical threshold, and the possibility of catastrophic runaway growth can be ruled out.

When the mathematical Model Runs Into Earth’s Limits

Researchers suggest that if there were a serious shock to our planet, such as a global war, rapid climate change, or a massive pandemic, we could potentially see a collapse of our growth regime due to a drastic reduction in the exploitation efficiency of available resources.

To illustrate this, researchers introduced an additional term in their equation. Specifically, they accounted for the carrying capacity of our planet. Using an extremely conservative estimate of the carrying capacity of 2 billion individuals, they found that under these assumptions, our population would halve by 2064.

However, it’s important to note that this estimate is highly speculative. It cannot be viewed as an exact prediction of our future for several reasons. First, researchers explicitly state that their model is purely illustrative and not intended for prediction.

Secondly, the choice of a carrying capacity of 2 billion is highly debatable. The carrying capacity of Earth itself, rather than per person, depends on many parameters and is not a constant. Technological progress, energy efficiency, agricultural productivity, climatic stability, and international cooperation determine, to a great extent, how many people our planet can sustain at any given time.

Still, the study’s warning is clear. Mathematical population trends can look stable until the assumptions behind them suddenly change. A world that continues along its current stretched-exponential trajectory may avoid doomsday-style runaway growth. But a world that abruptly runs into hard limits could experience a very different future.

The Real Warning Is in the Curve, Not the Date

The researchers acknowledge that the model’s empirical fits vary in strength. The 1970–2023 regime shows a stronger fit than the earlier compressed-exponential periods analyzed in the study, as indicated by the goodness-of-fit metrics reported for each historical window.

However, the significance of their analysis lies not in the exact numbers but in what they imply. According to researchers, their results show that human population growth is not governed by a single law throughout its entire history.

Ultimately, the model’s value may lie less in its specific dates than in its wider message. Human population growth is not governed by a single permanent law. It is formed by feedback, constraints, and changing historical conditions.

The future, in this mathematical model, depends not only on how many people exist, but also on whether the systems supporting them continue to function efficiently enough to avoid sudden encounters with carrying-capacity limits.

“While the current global population growth trend corresponds to 𝐾 < 0 and does not lead to a doomsday criticality, reverting to an effectively 𝐾 > 0 regime would reintroduce a finite-time divergence in the uncontrolled dynamics,” researchers conclude. “In a separate conservative scenario where carrying-capacity constraints become abruptly active, [it] predicts a rapid population decline.”

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

The question of whether artificial intelligence can be conscious has moved well beyond science fiction. It now sits at the center of scientific debate and is increasingly shaping discussions about a range of contentious issues, from AI ethics to animal welfare, fetal development, and laboratory-grown brain tissue.

However, according to a new analysis published in Neuron, the science used to answer that question may not actually be measuring what researchers think it is. A research team led by Hakwan Lau at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, with collaborators from the Université de Montréal and New York University, argues that many common experimental methods in consciousness research do not separate subjective experience from general information processing.

In the paper, The Ethical Impasse of Current Consciousness Science, the researchers argue that current scientific tools may not be capable of reliably detecting consciousness.

The Measurement Problem

Consciousness research relies heavily on methods such as visual masking, binocular rivalry, and the detection of perceptual limits. These methods usually compare brain responses when a person is aware of something versus when they are not. The idea is that the difference between these two cases shows whether conscious experience is present or not.

Lau and his team challenge this assumption. When experiments make a stimulus invisible, they often reduce both conscious awareness and the brain’s ability to process information about that stimulus. This means that what appears to be a marker of consciousness in the brain may actually reflect general cognitive activity.

“Many current theories of consciousness appear to be supported by a range of experimental findings,” Lau said. “But those findings may actually reflect general information processing rather than consciousness itself — so it remains difficult to conclude that these theories truly explain consciousness.”

A Historical Warning

The authors compare the current situation to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when strong claims about consciousness led to a crisis in psychology. The resulting backlash led to the rise of behaviorism, which focused only on observable behavior and halted consciousness research for many years.

Researchers caution that a similar situation could occur again. As AI systems become more advanced and public interest in machine consciousness increases, scientists are under pressure to provide answers. If researchers make strong claims about consciousness in AI, organoids, or fetuses that lack robust methods to support them, scientific credibility could be undermined.

Better Science Required

The authors suggest a different approach. Conditions like blindsight, in which people with brain damage can respond to stimuli they do not report seeing, offer a more controlled way to study consciousness. Another example is hemispatial neglect, where patients fail to notice one side of their visual field while still having basic perception. For researchers, these conditions provide a rare opportunity to separate awareness from information processing and investigate each process on its own.

These conditions show that subjective experience and information processing are distinct from one another. The team says that building experiments around this difference is needed to make reliable scientific claims about consciousness.

The implications of this study extend far beyond the academic world. Deciding whether non-human entities are conscious has direct legal and ethical concerns. The researchers say that the science behind these decisions must meet high standards.

“Questions about consciousness increasingly carry ethical and societal implications,” Lau said. “If scientific claims about consciousness are going to influence discussions about animal welfare, AI ethics, or bioethics, then the scientific foundations supporting those claims must be especially rigorous.”

The researchers conclude that the most urgent challenge is not deciding whether AI, animals, or organoids are conscious, but developing better tools to identify consciousness if it emerges.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

A massive discovery in northeastern Romania has revealed links to a curious ancient culture from ancient Eastern Europe’s Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods.

Archaeologists say the very large prehistoric structure is associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, a group recognized as one of the earliest European cultures to construct large dwelling spaces and settlements.

Estimated to be close to 6,000 years old and covering an area of approximately 350 square meters, the discovery of the ancient “mega-structure,” reported in the journal Plos One, occurred at Romania’s Stăuceni-Holm site.

A Mysterious Neolithic Culture

Thousands of years ago, during Europe’s Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture was among the first to build large settlements, the remains of which have been found in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, and other parts of Eastern Europe.

Many of the settlements associated with this ancient culture date to as recently as 3500 BCE, although some are thousands of years older. However, crucial context for the lifestyles of those who inhabited these ancient communities is often lacking, as past excavations have revealed little in the way of any graves associated with rulers or other individuals who might have had power or influence in society.

Additionally, most dwellings in even the largest communities associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillia were relatively small, leaving few signs of how their local law and government were organized.

Discovery at Stăuceni-Holm

During fieldwork between 2023 and 2024 at the Stăuceni-Holm site, Romanian and German researchers conducted work over consecutive excavation seasons following initial surveys of the area, which uncovered the existence of massive structures buried beneath the settlement site.

In particular, the team noticed a very large feature located near a foundation ditch that surrounded the archaeological site, as well as areas where the presence of a thick floor of clay was evident. Significantly, unlike most of the small dwellings associated with Cucuteni-Trypillia sites, there was little sign that this structure had been used for daily activities like cooking.

One likely interpretation for the unusual site had been that it was some kind of communal structure, which might have been used for community engagements or other group activities.

Cucuteni-Trypillia Megastructures

Another clue involves the fact that at other Cucuteni-Trypillia settlement sites in Eastern Europe, the remains of similar megastructures, which were seemingly designed as large public buildings, have been found. However, few of these discoveries have undergone significant excavation in the past.

As the research team notes in their study, “at the actual state of the research, it seems unrealistic to consider the function of the building as a storage building or a communal place for consumption of food.”

“Also, there are no clear indications for cult purposes,” the researchers note. However, it is possible that the site could represent something as simple as a house that was built in proportion to the size of a larger family who may have used it, if not “a communal building for decision making or a meeting place for special high-ranking inhabitants reflecting a change towards a more hierarchized organization of the community.”

Lingering Questions About an Ancient Neolithic Marvel

Whatever the case, it seems obvious that these very large structures had some kind of community purpose, which may have been an outgrowth of steadily growing populations at the time. Given their frequent appearances at Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements, it is also obvious that such constructions were important to this culture, whatever their exact purpose had been.

With the discoveries at Stăuceni-Holm, archaeologists have a unique opportunity to add to the existing knowledge about these massive features and new interpretations about their possible uses.

The study, “The mega-structure at Stăuceni-‘Holm’, Botoşani county, Romania and the debate about the governing of Cucuteni-Trypillia-settlements,” appeared in the journal Plos One.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

This week in stories we’re covering from The Debrief, a new twist on gravity measurement, hidden in a mysterious envelope, may point to a subtle flaw in our understanding of the universe. Elsewhere, researchers are breaking the tiny bounds of Quantum mechanics by creating a massive Schrödinger cat particle under ultracold conditions. And finally, NASA officials just confirmed a rare event captured in satellite images that caused loud booms heard throughout New England.

Meanwhile, here’s a look at other stories we’re covering right now in our reporting at The Debrief: 

• Scientists Just Revealed Something Massive Has Been Hiding Beneath This New York Cemetery for More Than a Century
  Cornell University researchers have confirmed a massive, century-old underground discovery hidden below a New York cemetery.
• Exoplanet Magnetism Revealed in New Study Researchers Call a “Key Step” in Decoding the Survival of Planets
  The best evidence for exoplanet magnetic fields ever discovered has emerged from new research that measures wind speeds on ultra-hot Jupiters.
• “Explore a Scene from Any Vantage Point You Want”: 3D Volumetric Video Breakthrough Means Streaming in 3D May Soon Be a Reality
  A 3D volumetric video breakthrough, overcoming previous technological limitations, could finally enable true 3D streaming on everyday devices.
• “How in the World Can These Things Happen?”: After a Series of ‘Mystery’ Quakes Shook Utah, Scientists Finally Think They Know Why
  Nearly five decades after the first in a series of mystery quakes rocked the Utah-Wyoming region, scientists think they’ve figured it out.
• Astronomers Discover New Way to Weigh Planets Hidden Inside Dusty Disks
  Newborn planets’ dusty rings hold the secret to uncovering their mass, say researchers who have now characterized these once-obscured celestial objects.
• A Single Jawbone From Egypt Is Changing How Scientists Think About Ape Origins
  For much of the past century, fossils from East Africa have shaped our understanding of ape evolution. Now, a jawbone found in the Egyptian desert adds a new dimension to that story.
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• Einstein-Rosen Bridges May Not Be Wormholes After All, Physicists Reveal
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• Newly Discovered “Witch Croc” Reveals Dinosaur-Like Evolution in the Triassic
  A newly described fossil from Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, belongs to the crocodile family tree, but unlike most crocodile-line archosaurs, it walked on two legs, had small arms, and a toothless beak.
• Something Revealed Itself by Bending the Light of a Distant Star in 2019—Now Astronomers Are Racing to Find Out What It Was
  For just an hour in late 2019, a cosmic mystery revealed itself to astronomers in an unprecedented way: by bending the light of a star.
• “The Sun May be Entering a Different Mode of Behavior”: Scientists Say Something is Happening Beneath the Solar Surface
  The Sun is experiencing long-term changes, producing a major squeeze in the four most recent solar activity cycles.
• Asteroid Impact Craters May Have Helped Create Early Habitats for Oxygen-Producing Life
  Scientists studying an ancient asteroid crater on the Korean Peninsula have uncovered rock formations that may offer clues to the rise of atmospheric oxygen on Earth.
• Scientists Locked ‘Virtual’ Astronauts in a Moon Base with Equipment Failures, Moonquakes and Extreme Radiation. Here’s What Happened.
  Scientists locked virtual astronauts in a simulated Lunar Base with system failures and natural disasters and watched how they’d respond.

When a Cornell University scientist made an unusual discovery in 2022, she didn’t realize it would reveal one of the largest and oldest of its kind ever documented.

That’s because when entymologist Rachel Fordyce was passing through East Lawn Cemetery while walking to work at the university, and noticed an abundance of bees in the spring air, she couldn’t have guessed that one of the largest networks of these ground-nesting bees ever seen had been hiding quietly beneath her feet, undetected for more than a century.

Fordyce collected a few of the pollinating insects in a jar and brought them back to the university’s entomology lab, where they were soon identified as specimens of Andrena regularis, better known as the “regular mining bee.” As their name entails, these little stinging insects make their homes below ground.

Now, based on Fordyce’s unique discovery, she and her colleagues have learned that one of the oldest and most extensive colonies of these ground-nesting bees ever seen has been thriving for decades under the cemetery. Based on current estimates, there may be more than 5 million of the bees present at the location, which spans around an acre and a half.

By comparison, an aggregation of bees this large exceeds the entire human population of Manhattan Island by more than three times.

A Massive Discovery

Steve Hoge, the lead author of a recent study detailing the discovery, said what Fordyce found is undeniably one of the largest bee networks known to science.

“I’m sure there are other large bee aggregations that exist around the world that we just haven’t identified,” Hoge said, “but in terms of what is in the literature, this is one of the largest.”

That isn’t to say that there hadn’t been knowledge of this species in the area already. Based on historical information the researchers uncovered, evidence of the presence of regular mining bees in East Lawn Cemetery had been documented at least as early as the beginning of the 1900s.

Although we normally associate cemeteries with death, they can actually serve as important life support systems by providing habitats for several species.

Older cemeteries—especially those in large cities—can also provide a potentially crucial refuge for not just insects, but also plants, birds, and even mammals. Among the reasons for this are that the land apportioned for cemeteries sees little disturbance over time, and in the case of insects like bees, it is free of the kinds of pesticides that can endanger them.

New Clues to the Mysteries of Bees

Although bees and other ground-dwelling insects are ubiquitous, Hoge was surprised to find how little information was available in the literature about A. regularis.

Based on one of the most detailed scientific references he found, which dates to the late 1970s, females of the species are largely credited with burrowing their nests, where eggs are deposited in chambers alongside pollen and nectar.

Their appearance in large numbers in the spring, as Fordyce noticed in 2022, is partly because the species overwinters as adults, which Hoge says “is relatively rare” for pollinators.

Another key factor regarding East Lawn Cemetery’s massive population is its proximity to Cornell Orchards, which is located less than half a mile away.

The study was carried out using small mesh emergence traps, which researchers can use to funnel insects into glass containers as they leave their underground nests. From late March until mid-May 2023, ten of these traps were used throughout the cemetery to collect more than 3,200 insects. Other species the research team captured along with A. regularis were beetles and varieties of flies, although they say bees “dominated” the samples they obtained.

The total estimated bee population the team calculated indicated an average of 5.5 million bees, although as many as 8 million of the pollinators could be hidden below the cemetery.

Citizen Scientists Becoming Involved

Other aspects of the bees’ lives, which include differences in the emergence patterns between males and females, and the phenomenon known as brood parasitism, where nomad bees (Nomada imbricata) occasionally enter the nests of A. regularis colonies and lay their own eggs inside their brood cells. Upon hatching, these larval interlopers kill the host larvae and plunder the pollen and nectar stores within the mining bee nests.

As a means of locating and protecting these beneficial pollinators and their aggregations, the research team has now appealed to citizen scientists for help with locating and reporting similar nesting sites.

“These populations are huge, and they need protection,” says Bryan Danforth, professor of entomology in Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

“If we don’t preserve nest sites, and someone paves over them, we could lose in an instant 5.5 million bees that are important pollinators,” Danforth says.

Danforth and the team’s recent study, “Emergence dynamics and host-parasite associations in a large aggregation of Andrena regularis (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Andrenidae),” appeared in the journal Apidologie.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

Residents of New England were startled over the weekend as a loud quaking boom shook the northeast, while many observers spotted a bright fireball streaking through the skies over the U.S. and Canada.

Now, NASA has confirmed that the energy released as a meteor exploded in the northeastern skies on May 30, 2026, was roughly equivalent to 230 tons of TNT. The resulting blast was also so bright that it registered in satellite imagery normally used to detect powerful lightning bolts.

Shortly after the incident, NASA took to social media, reporting that the GOES-19 satellite had detected a bright fireball at 2:06 p.m. EDT that coincided with reports of loud booms.

“The meteor appears to have fragmented at an altitude of 40 miles over northeast MA and southeast NH,” the NASA statement read, adding that at the time, the energy released as the object tore apart while streaking through the atmosphere was approximately the “equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT, which accounts for the loud noise.”

In the video above, provided by NOAA, imagery from the GOES East (GOES-19) satellite revealed the meteor, which the satellite’s sensors registered as a lightning bolt. The meteor appears approximately one second into the looped imagery above, seen as a bluish-white flash to the right of the center of the frame.

In a subsequent update issued on Monday, NASA officials have now revealed new details about the incident, confirming the object’s size, mass, and the approximate speed as it passed above the Earth.

“The meteor was about 5 feet (1.6 meters) in diameter with a mass of 5.6 metric tons and entered Earth’s atmosphere at roughly 42,000 mph,” NASA officials wrote in Monday’s statement. “The meteor traveled through the atmosphere from northwest to southeast for 26 miles before breaking up at an altitude of 31 miles and producing a meteorite fall into Cape Cod Bay.”

The NASA update also slightly downgraded the power of the blast that the exploding object produced.

“Based on the latest data, the energy released at breakup is estimated to be equivalent to about 230 tons of TNT,” NASA’s statement on Monday noted.

Fortunately, there were no injuries or damage to property or infrastructure resulting from the May 30 incident. However, some area residents who were present at the time of the explosion reported feeling buildings shaking on Saturday afternoon.

In a statement provided by the agency from its NASA Space Alerts account on X, which periodically issues notifications on “cosmic activity in near-Earth space including solar events, asteroids, comets, and meteors,” the agency noted that objects like the one observed over the northeast, while capable of producing loud noise, are generally not viewed as being potentially dangerous.

“NASA’s planetary defense network watches the skies for objects of all sizes – and specifically is tasked with finding objects 140 meters and larger which can cause widespread damage,” the notification read.

“Meteoroids, like this one over New England, are much much smaller,” the statement added, calling them “almost impossible to track in space” and adding that “they do not survive passage through our atmosphere intact and do not pose a hazard.”

Fortunately, larger and potentially more dangerous space objects aren’t as “impossible” for NASA to track. Presently, the American space agency and its international partners are tracking more than 40,000 larger near-Earth objects (NEOs) and are frequently discovering new ones as part of their broader planetary defense objectives.

The explosion heard over the northeast on Saturday marked only the latest in a series of similar incidents that have occurred in the early part of 2026.

On March 21, a meteor crashed through the roof of a Texas home, causing minor damage, although no injuries were reported. Also in March, a meteor that exploded above Ohio on Saint Patrick’s Day similarly alarmed residents, one of whom described the sound to The Debrief as having resembled “a nuclear explosion” due to its volume and duration.

NASA provides additional information about meteor reentries and their effects at its Fireballs FAQ page, which can be found here.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

The best evidence for exoplanet magnetic fields ever discovered has emerged from new European research, which measured wind speeds on seven ultra-hot Jupiters using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) and the Gemini North telescope.

In a recent paper published in Nature Astronomy, the team suggests that magnetic fields are most likely driving the winds, enabling the first measurements of exoplanet magnetism.

Ultra-hot Jupiters are a class of exoplanets similar in size and composition to Jupiter in our solar system, yet orbiting much closer to their host stars, resulting in surface temperatures above 2000°K.

“This breakthrough opens a completely new window on exoplanet research,” said lead author Julia Seidel, an astronomer at the Laboratoire Lagrange, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, France.

“It’s the first time we can compare the magnetic environments of other worlds,” Seidel added, calling it “a key step toward ultimately understanding which planets can stay alive, keep their water, and perhaps even, one day, host life as we know it.”

Exoplanet Magnetic Fields

On Earth, magnetism is one of the primary influences on our atmosphere and is essential to maintaining habitability. Other planets in our solar system, like Jupiter and Saturn, have strong magnetic fields, while Mars has only small, weak pockets of magnetism rather than a powerful global field.

“Radio astronomy has been trying to find the direct signals of exoplanet magnetic fields for the past 15 years, but due to technical and geometrical limitations, they have not yet been successful,” Seidel told The Debrief, noting past works by Phillip Zarka and collaborators, who she said have “led a gargantuan effort in that direction.”

“But thus far, the tentative claims could not be confirmed,” Seidel added.

“In our work, we use an indirect method, via the wind speed measurement, to infer the characteristics of the magnetic field,” Seidel continued. “So it’s not a direct method, so not as robust, but it’s the first clear indication that planets outside of the solar system have a magnetic field at all!”

Strange Exoplanet Winds

Like some of science’s most spectacular advancements, the team set out looking for something else entirely: exoplanet wind speeds. The exoplanets observed in the team’s work are all tidally locked, meaning that one side always faces toward their star, while the other faces away.

Each ultra-hot Jupiter that the team observed orbits on a different side, yet all have tremendous dayside temperatures and frigid nightsides.

Exoplanets with such extreme temperature differences between hemispheres generate weather patterns that differ greatly from those seen on Earth. When air pockets with very different temperatures meet, they produce winds. These radical differences between the two sides produce a range of wind speeds from 7200 to 25000 kilometers per hour, compared to the relatively slow 1500 kilometers per hour of our local Jupiter.

“In the beginning, we set out to check if the atmospheric winds behaved the same way for all hot planets,” Seidel said.

A strange pattern emerged from the data, as the team identified that the hottest parts of the planet had slower winds, defying expectations.

“This is totally counterintuitive because, all things being equal, hot planets have more energy to accelerate the winds! Something must happen that slows down the wind speeds for hotter objects,” said co-author Vivien Parmentier, a professor at the Laboratoire Lagrange.

A Magnetic Explanation

To explain these anomalies, the researchers proposed that powerful global magnetic fields were serving as a brake on the charged particles that make up the winds. They were able to extrapolate each exoplanet’s magnetic field strength from the wind speed data.

Results of the work indicate these magnetic fields are relatively close to what has been found in our solar system, roughly half the strength of Jupiter’s and four times that of Saturn. An unusual added effect of these magnetic fields is that they likely produce much more dramatic auroras than those seen on Earth, moving the gases that produce such vivid lights.

“I like to imagine that some of these worlds have a sky filled not only with stars, but with vast curtains of colourful light dancing across a planet that’s half in perpetual day and half in endless night,” explained co-author Bibiana Prinoth, a former PhD student at Lund University, Sweden, now an astronomer at ESO in Garching, Germany.

The team has already identified the direction of their follow-up research.

“The next step is clear: Until what planetary temperature do magnetic fields dominate how atmospheres flow and at which temperature do these winds behave more similar than in the solar system?,” Seidel said.

“For that, we are planning an observational survey to look at less hot planets and see when the trend depending on the ionisation of the atmosphere (and therefore the magnetic field) breaks.”

The paper, “Magnetic Field Strengths of Hot Giant Exoplanets Consistent with Solar System Values,” appeared in Nature Astronomy on June 2, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

Brown University researchers have revealed a new video processing method called PackUV, which they are describing as a “key step” towards realistic, storable, 3D volumetric video that can be viewed from all angles and is compatible with the video codecs that currently power most video on the internet, making it streamable.

The team behind the new volumetric video processing approach said their technique could enable practical 3D video streaming on everyday devices like smartphones, computers, and smart TVs without requiring new display technologies, ushering in a new era of realistic 3D video entertainment.

3D Volumetric Video Offers Unprecedented Versatility and Challenges

According to Brown computer science graduate student and study leader Aashish Rai, volumetric video involves capturing actions with multiple synchronized cameras encircling the target scene. After the scene is recorded, specialized algorithms rebuild the location in three dimensions. Notably, the newly constructed volumetric video can be viewed from any perspective within the recording space.

“With volumetric video, you can basically explore a scene from any vantage point you want,” Rai explained, adding that capturing three dimensions plus a time dimension actually makes the resulting recording “a 4D video.”

Capturing video in this manner allows directors to show scenes from perspectives unattainable by conventional filming techniques. In theory, such a video could be combined with a user interface that lets viewers navigate through a scene, including options such as viewing a sports play from on the field or a concert from the stage.

Still, the Brown researchers note, several challenges have kept volumetric 3D video from wider adoption. This includes compressing the video enough to make streaming 3D volumetric content viable with current internet infrastructure and protocols.

“Volumetric video is incredibly hard to store and stream,” Rai explained, adding that a 30-minute clip “can balloon to terabytes of data, and the formats it comes in are completely alien to the infrastructure the internet already runs on — your computer, your streaming service, your video codec.”

Rendering 3D Video Onto a 2D ‘Surface’ Creates Internet-Capable Files

To overcome the obstacles preventing the wider adoption of the technology, the Brown team started with the 3D scene rendering method currently in use, called 3D Gaussian Splatting. According to the team’s statement, this approach renders 3D images using “fuzzy blobs that encode the color, opacity, and shape of points in space,” called Gaussians.

In the new approach, the team found a way of mapping a 3D scene and its millions of Gaussians into a more manageable 2D image. According to Rai, the approach is similar to how a mapmaker projects a 3D globe onto a flat, 2D surface, resulting in “a structured, multi-scale image” that encodes all the information contained in the original dynamic 3D scene.

Next, the team’s process involves stacking the 3D-encoded images together. The result is a video with a much more manageable file size than traditional 3D volumetric videos, which the team notes “is compatible with stalwart video codecs that run Netflix, YouTube and most of the rest of the internet.”

“We basically convert this entire 4D scene into a normal video that you can stream over the internet and share with friends,” Rai explained.

Renders Scenes Up to 30 Minutes Without Breaking Down

In addition to overcoming file-size and streaming limitations that have plagued current 3D volumetric video strategies, the Brown team said their work addresses the tendency of current methods to “break down” over time, thereby limiting the length of potential videos.

The primary challenge is tracking objects when they go out of camera view, such as a ball temporarily “disappearing” behind a competitor. The team said the existing technology also has trouble handling “novel movement,” such as a person entering a room midway through another sequence of events.

According to Rai, their approach solves this limitation by splitting a longer video file “into small chunks.” Once separated, their system checks the start of each video segment to determine whether something has entered or left the scene. Once PackUV makes that determination, Rai said it instructs the software to “model accordingly.”

“By restarting the tracking process more frequently, the new technique is better able to reacquire objects that have been temporarily blocked and deal appropriately with new movements,” the research team explained, adding that their approach can seamlessly render complex 3D volumetric video scenes up to 30 minutes in length without failure, “far longer than other Gaussian Splatting approaches.”

3D Volumetric Video Could Impact Entertainment, Manufacturing, and “Other Areas”

To validate their approach, the Brown team put together what they described as potentially “the largest dataset of multi-view video ever assembled” and made it publicly available to other researchers. This includes video of all kinds of activities, including cooking, woodworking, and various sports.

Critically, the assembled dataset was all captured with arrays of 50 to 90 synchronized cameras. Rai’s team said these included actions captured in laboratory settings, specially equipped with cameras, as well as mobile camera arrays capturing action “in the real world.”

Although this work is just a first step toward streamable, 3D volumetric video at the viewer’s fingertips, Rai said that their work helps advance a technology with a wealth of potential future applications, in which building a ‘digital twin’ of the real world is critical to seamless streaming.

“There are real-world applications in entertainment and sports, for example, but also other use cases — manufacturing and other areas — where you need to create digital twins of the real world,” Sridhar said. “Fundamentally, that’s what this work is about.”

Rai will present the work, PackUV: Packed Gaussian UV Maps for 4D Volumetric Video, at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

47 years after the first of a series of mystery quakes shook Utah area residents, scientists have determined that these Earth-shaking events originate deep in the mantle rather than in the crust, where typical earthquakes originate.

Although the research team behind the published study outlining their mystery quake origin theory suggests a potential cause of these continental mantle earthquakes (CMEs), they said that there remain inherent challenges in studying these transient events, which occur in isolation without foreshocks or aftershocks, helping explain the decades-long mystery surrounding them.

“It’s sort of a mystery in terms of fundamental physics,” said the study’s leader, geology professor Keith Koper, “How in the world can these things happen?”

How a 1979 Mystery Quake Shook up Science for Decades

According to a statement announcing the new mystery quake findings, the enigma began on February 24th, 1979, when the University of Utah’s seismographic instruments detected an earthquake beneath the town of Randolph, near the Montana-Wyoming border. Although the relatively sophisticated instruments indicated it was a respectable 3.8 on the Richter scale, there was a surprising lack of public reports of shaking and rumbling that typically accompany such events.

When the young researcher decided to try to pinpoint the origin of the mystery quake that appeared suddenly without a foreshock, civilian reports, or a local fault line, his calculations didn’t make sense. According to Zandt, his data revealed that the mystery quake had originated 90 kilometers (about 56 miles) beneath the surface.

Because earthquakes originating below the so-called ‘Moho’ (Mohorovičić) region separating the Earth’s upper crust and lower mantle were considered impossible, the researcher was initially perplexed at the stubbornly consistent data. Still, he noted, the depth would help explain why people hadn’t felt the event, despite its relatively robust energy signature.

After some further analysis, Zandt, who has enjoyed a long career on the University of Arizona’s geology faculty since the initial mystery quakes investigation that he performed as a postdoctoral candidate and came out of retirement to co-author this new study, said the results “convinced me of the reality of the deep depth.” However, he added, “It was hard to convince others of the highly anomalous mantle earthquake occurring in a region where none should exist.”

 New Analysis Finds Eight Additional CME’s and a Possible Cause

After submitting an abstract about the mystery quake for the journal Earthquake Notes, the young researcher’s findings of a mantle-originating event remained largely unnoticed. Then, in 2025, a new generation of university geologists took a fresh look at the data. According to the team’s published study, this included reexamining the waveform data from the original mystery quake and from eight other events that had occurred since then in the same general region.

After a thorough analysis and some input from Zandt, Professor Koper’s team confirmed that all nine events originated below the crust, resulting in the creation of the new CME category. Before the team published their findings, another CME was detected on September 10^th, 2025. Measured at a magnitude of 4.1, the event originated approximately 68 kilometers beneath the surface, or over 20 km below the Moho line.

According to Koper, the ‘archetypical continental mantle event’ was an example of an earthquake “nucleating in very unusual conditions.”

“The high temperature, the high pressure, and almost all the material at that depth is going to flow,” the professor explained, adding that the stretched deep Earth material is more like “taffy on long time scales, millions of years.”

“Nevertheless, you can still see it in rocks that have made their way back up to the surface; you can see how they were stretched,” he added.

‘Little Icebergs’ of Earth’s Lithosphere Direct the Mantle’s Flow, Like a Ship’s Rudder

Although the University of Utah team is confident in their identification of a new type of earthquake that originates beneath the crust in the mantle, they note that the newly identified CME’s still present a few mysteries. For example, the nine events characterized in their study occurred without any foreshocks or aftershocks. Koper said that another point that makes the study’s findings “a big deal” is that researchers have no idea how big a CME can be.

“With crustal earthquakes, we can measure what we think their maximum size is going to be,” the professor explained. “We measure the faults that we can map out near the surface. We can measure the length of a fault segment, and that clues us into how big it can be, which helps us estimate seismic hazard.”

More research will be needed to further understand the mystery quakes that randomly shake the relatively isolated region, but the study authors said they already have a working theory to explain these little-understood, transient events.

Resting within the Earth’s mantle are ancient blocks of the planet’s lithosphere, structures that the team compared to icebergs. According to the team’s theory, the area where the quakes are occurring has a geological composition and history that make it susceptible to the events leading up to a CME.

“On the scale of millions of years, the mantle is hitting the craton and then flowing around it,” Koper explained. “It’s that interaction where that mantle flow is being diverted around this hard cratonic root that’s causing the increased strain rate, the increased deformation, and it’s also creating extra stresses.”

“We think it’s that interaction between the keel of the iceberg and the medium around it that’s leading to these earthquakes,” the professor added.

The study “The 10 September 2025  4.1 Earthquake in Northeastern Utah, United States: An Archetypal Continental Mantle Event” was published in The Seismic Record.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

The dusty rings of newborn planets may hold the key to uncovering their mass, according to a team of researchers from the University of Warwick, MIT, and McMaster University, who are finally characterizing these previously obscured celestial objects.

In a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, the team reveals their novel method for extrapolating a newborn planet’s mass from measurements of the dusty rings surrounding its host star, which prevent direct observation of the planet.

These rings, known as protoplanetary disks, serve as breeding grounds for worlds, with their material eventually coalescing from dust into entire planets.

Observing Protoplanetary Disks

Advancements in observational technologies, such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, have allowed astronomers to take a closer look at protoplanetary disks, the rings of dust and gas that make up a host star’s planet-forming region. In those more detailed observations, astronomers have identified that these large disks are comprised of distinct ring structures.

Researchers have suspected that these separate rings reveal something about the newborn planets already orbiting within the protoplanetary disk, yet have been unable to devise a method to interpret what they are seeing.

“These bright rings are not just beautiful structures – they are essentially planetary fingerprints,” said lead author Amena Faruqi, PhD student, Astronomy and Astrophysics Group, University of Warwick. “We’ve long understood that the rings could be created from concentrated dust that piles up just beyond the orbit of young, embedded planets, but we’ve been so far unable to link features of these rings to planet masses.”

“By reading ‘between the rings,’ we have now found a way to reconstruct the masses of the planets that create the rings, even when those planets are too faint or too embedded to observe directly,” Faruqi added.

Modeling Newborn Planets

The international team developed intricate computer simulations to model how varying planetary masses would influence the shape of dust rings within the protoplanetary disk. Analysis of the model revealed three essential clues in the rings for characterizing the planet that shaped it: the width, the amount of dust, and the brightest point. 

In particular, the brightest point in the ring held special significance, directly related to the planet’s mass and unaffected by external factors such as dust grain size or observational wavelength. According to the team, with just this one factor, researchers can identify the mass of a newborn planet obscured by a dusty disk, even without knowledge of the disk’s specific conditions.

As a control, the team looked to one of the only systems whose planets have been directly imaged within their disk, PDS 70. Using their new technique based on the brightest point of five disks, the researchers arrived at a mass figure extremely close to those achieved in other mass estimates.

“One of the strengths of this work is that it doesn’t stay in the realm of theory—we’ve been able to take these simulation results and apply them directly to real observed systems,” said co-author Dr. Jessica Speedie, 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Using the PDS 70 system as an observational laboratory in particular enabled a real verification of the approach, giving us confidence that these methods are genuinely ready to be applied widely as soon as possible.”

What Hides in Protoplanetary Disks

The team says their research lays the groundwork for identifying planets within disks in the future, either confirming suspected ones or revealing entirely new surprises, potentially even offering new insights into how our own Solar System formed.

“Another striking result of the simulations is that, in typical discs, more massive forming planets can trap as much as 20 times the mass of Earth of dust within these rings,” said senior co-author Professor Emeritus Ralph Pudritz, Department of Physics and Astronomy, McMaster University. “This confirms ALMA observations – but raises the question of why new planets have not been detected in the trapped dust and pebbles of the ring.”

Since these rings contain sufficient dust to initiate planet formation, the absence of any such formation within them will be an important focus of observations and astronomical theories moving forward.

“This work gives observers a new practical toolkit for connecting what we see in dust rings directly to the masses of the planets creating them,” concluded senior co-author Dr. Farzana Meru, Reader, Department of Physics, University of Warwick. “What excites me most is the timing. With ALMA delivering increasingly detailed disk images, and future facilities on the horizon, there has never been a better moment to develop these methods.”

The paper, “Reading between the Rings: Observed Dust Ring Properties as Probes of Planet Masses,” appeared in The Astrophysical Journal on May 28, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

For much of the past century, fossils from East Africa have shaped our understanding of ape evolution. Now, a jawbone found in the Egyptian desert adds a new dimension to that story.

A team from Mansoura University and the University of Southern California has described a new species, Masripithecus moghraensis, in a study that appeared in the journal Science. The fossil of a lower jaw found at the Wadi Moghra site in northern Egypt, the researchers say, is the first clear evidence of an ape fossil in North Africa. Dating to 17 to 18 million years ago, it predates the known dispersal of early apes into Europe and Asia by at least a million years. This may indicate that early ape evolution extended further north than previously thought.

“We spent five years searching for this kind of fossil because, when we look closely at the early ape family tree, it becomes clear that something is missing — and North Africa holds that missing piece,” said Hesham Sallam, paleontologist at Mansoura University and senior author of the study.

A Jaw That Changes the Map

The fossil is of a lower jaw with several distinctive features. Masripithecus had large canine and premolar teeth, as well as molars with rounded, textured surfaces and a robust jaw. No other ape from the same time period shows this combination of features. According to the researchers, these traits indicate a flexible diet based mainly on fruit, with some harder foods like nuts and seeds. This adaptability would have been important in northern Africa, with increasing seasonal variation in the climate.

Masripithecus stands out among East African apes of similar age by its anatomy. Its place in the ape family tree is even more significant. By combining fossil features and geological data with DNA from living apes, the team found that Masripithecus appears closer to the lineage that eventually gave rise to modern apes than any previously known Early Miocene species.

“It is well known that the fossil record of hominoids in Africa is geographically very biased,” said David Alba, a paleontologist at the University of Barcelona, in an interview with National Geographic. “It is also known that they were present in Saudi Arabia sometime later, so finding them in northern Africa by this time is important, but not totally unexpected.”

A Corridor Between Worlds

This discovery is important for both geography and anatomy. During the Early Miocene, the African and Arabian plates were moving closer to Asia. At times, lower sea levels reduced marine barriers and opened a corridor through northern Africa and the Middle East. The team’s analysis supports the idea that this region played an important role in the early evolution of living apes. This shifts the focus of ape evolution. East Africa, once seen as the main center of ape origins, may have been more of a peripheral branch.

Erik Seiffert, co-author and paleontologist at the University of Southern California, said the discovery changed his own thinking. “For my entire career, I considered it probable that the common ancestor of all living apes lived in or around East Africa. But this new discovery, and our new and novel analyses of hominoid phylogeny and biogeography, now strongly challenge that idea.”

The genus name Masripithecus combines the Arabic word Masr (for Egypt) with the Greek píthēkos, meaning ‘ape’. The species name is a reference to Wadi Moghra, where the remains were found. The researchers expect that more fossils will be found as fieldwork continues in the region. For now, this discovery shows that important parts of evolutionary history may still be hidden in areas yet to be fully explored.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

Breaking the tiny bounds of quantum mechanics, researchers at the Southern University of Science and Technology and the Quantum Science Center of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area have created a massive Schrödinger cat particle under ultracold conditions, reaching nearly absolute zero.

In quantum mechanics, particles can exist in a superposition of uncertainty, only existing in a certain position once they are measured, most famously illustrated by Schrödinger’s cat, an example in which the condition of a cat inside a box cannot be known until opening it.

Now, in a recent paper published in Nature Physics, the team revealed how they developed a seven-atom cluster that, when passing through a barrier higher than its own kinetic energy, entered a superposition state on a new scale.

Quantum Superposition

When an object enters a quantum superposition, it theoretically occupies multiple points of space at once, with its precise location unsure until measurement occurs. Typically, this is relegated to extremely tiny sub-atomic systems. Yet in their new research, the Hong Kong and Chinese team produced quantum tunneling in a larger system, which could be a major boon to the development of quantum sensors at a larger scale.

In addition to spatial quantum superposition, the team identified quantum tunneling as the other core concept in their recent work. A particle’s ability to quantum tunnel, which references its ability to cross a solid or energy barrier that would typically be impenetrable based on classical physics, declines with mass.

The researchers wondered whether there was a way around this, allowing macroscopic objects to undergo quantum tunneling. Typically, quantum tunneling occurs at the subatomic scale, perhaps a single atom at most, yet the team sought to move several atoms joined together through a quantum tunnel in their new work. 

Quantum Activity at Large Scale

For their large-scale quantum tunneler, the team built a mass system on an optical lattice by cooling the atoms to near absolute zero and trapping them with laser beams. Many quantum technologies, such as quantum computers, require extremely low temperatures, as cooling atoms to this degree enhances their quantum properties.

While the added mass complicates quantum tunneling due to inefficiency, creating a superposition in such a relatively large object could have fascinating repercussions for fundamental physics, especially in the poorly understood relationship of quantum mechanics and gravity.

The key to the team’s success was using a relatively weak bond between atoms rather than the tighter bonds typically used, allowing them to exploit the object to achieve a tunneling strength closer to that of a single atom.

With this new method, the team has developed a highly scalable process that is theoretically capable of achieving the same results with about 100 atoms. Further work to confirm their results could lead to the generation and detection of even larger spatial quantum superpositions.

Future Applications

The work may enable future researchers to investigate quantum effects at even larger scales and facilitate the development of quantum sensors and measurement devices. Additionally, atomic interferometry, which measures motion, gravity, time, and more based on the atom’s wave-like behaviors, could benefit from the technique by pushing it past the normal quantum limit.

This could be especially useful in investigating the weak relationship between gravity and mass, which is hard to detect at very small scales.

In the near future, the researchers have identified specific elements of their work that they will continue to pursue. Their success with the experiment also enabled the team to observe peculiar quantum phenomena, such as long-lived, strongly interacting states and many-body interactions, which they hope to investigate further.

Moving forward, they also aim to push beyond the current theoretical limit of 100 atoms in their work to several hundred atoms.

The paper, “Scalable Generation of Massive Schrödinger Cat States Via Quantum Tunnelling,” appeared in Nature Physics on May 11, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

Mosquitoes may have surprisingly overcome one of humanity’s best defenses against them, coming to associate the smell of DEET with a nearby meal, an international team of researchers says.

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the researchers identified that repeated exposure reduced DEET’s repellent effect on mosquitoes. However, their findings don’t end there; the team also discovered that under certain conditions, DEET may actually begin to attract mosquitoes rather than repel them, offering a strange glimpse into nature’s adaptive qualities.

DEET and Mosquitoes

DEET, the common name for diethyltoluamide, is a clear or slightly yellow liquid used to ward off insects, such as ticks, fleas, and mosquitoes. It has been used by the US military since 1949 and by civilians since 1957.

Claudio Lazzari of France’s University of Tours and Clément Vinauger of Virginia Tech led the international study, rooted in Ivan Pavlov’s famous 1890 study of conditioning, in which he noted that any indication that a dog was about to be fed, such as the ringing of a bell, would cause it to salivate, even without the sight of food. 

Yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) were the subjects of the team’s research. This particular species is known to infect millions of humans with deadly diseases such as dengue fever, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya every year. 

Feeding Them Blood

Since the insects feed on blood, the team first tested their attraction by placing a bag of warm blood on the other side of a fabric mesh restraining the mosquitoes, to observe how much effort the creatures would expend attempting to stab through to the meal. They found that insects were extremely enthusiastic, yet backed off when the smell of DEET was introduced.

They next devised an experiment to see if that could produce Pavlovian conditioning in the mosquitoes, getting them to associate the smell of DEET with feeding time. In a remarkably short time, the researchers observed a positive result. They began the experiment with 30-second feeding periods, during which the last 10 seconds introduced DEET. After a mere four repetitions of this tactic, the team found that 60% of the mosquitoes attempted to feed solely in response to the smell of DEET. 

Lending further confirmation to the finding, the team offered one of their colleagues, Ayelén Nally, from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, a free meal to the insects. One of Nally’s hands was sprayed with DEET, while the other was clean. Surprisingly, the mosquitoes showed a strong preference for the DEET-covered hand over the clean one, once they had been conditioned to associate the scent with food.

DEET Remains Useful

The team repeated the process, next training the mosquitoes to associate DEET with receiving a sugary treat, producing the same effect. The team says their findings indicate that, in the right scenario, DEET may shift from a repellent to an attractant for pests. 

“If a mosquito bites someone who applied DEET to their skin several hours earlier and the concentration of the repellent is too low to repel the mosquito,” Lazzari said, “but still strong enough for the insect to smell it, the mosquito may be more likely to bite people who smell of DEET.”

The researchers say that their work is only the beginning of efforts to better understand how insect repellents work, demonstrating that learned behavior may play a role. Despite their findings, they note that DEET generally works and saves lives by reducing insect-borne illnesses.

“If someone applies DEET and the concentration fades over time, but a mosquito still manages to feed, the insect may begin associating that smell with a reward,” Vinauger concluded. “That’s a possibility we should take seriously when we think about how repellents are used in the real world.”

The paper, “Associative Learning Switches DEET Valence from Aversive to Appetitive in Aedes Aegypti,” appeared in The Journal of Experimental Biology on May 28, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

The concept of the Einstein-Rosen bridge is often understood as a cosmic shortcut, akin to a tunnel that links distant points in spacetime.

While that image makes for compelling science fiction, a new study shows that it does not match the actual physics behind this concept. Recent research suggests that the original bridge theory was not a wormhole but a mathematical feature of how time is structured. This new realization could help solve a persistent problem in physics.

The study, led by Professor Enrique Gaztañaga from the University of Portsmouth, along with K. Sravan Kumar and João Marto, was published in Classical and Quantum Gravity. The researchers suggest that the bridge functions as a mathematical link between two directions of time, one going forward and the other going backward.

Einstein and Rosen’s Original Concept

Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen never directly proposed a shortcut through space in their original 1935 theory. Instead, they were studying how quantum fields behave under conditions of extreme gravity. To keep their equations consistent, they described a link between two copies of spacetime that are mirror images of each other.

The interpretation of a wormhole came much later. The bridge in the original concept collapses too quickly for anything to travel through it, making it unusable as a passage. Despite this, the idea of a literal tunnel still became popular.

Gaztañaga and his team reexamined the original idea. They do not view the bridge as a path through space, but as a mechanism of how quantum mechanics works in curved spacetime. Their findings suggest that to fully describe what happens near black holes, we need to consider both directions of time, not just the forward-moving one that we experience.

Solving the Information Paradox

This discovery is significant for one of physics’ biggest puzzles, known as the black hole information paradox. In 1974, Stephen Hawking demonstrated that black holes slowly radiate heat and can eventually evaporate, apparently destroying all information about the matter that fell into them. This directly goes against the belief in quantum mechanics that information cannot be destroyed.

The researchers say the paradox arises only when we think of black holes in terms of a single direction of time. When we include both directions in the quantum picture, information persists at the event horizon rather than disappearing. It continues evolving in the time-reversed component of the quantum state. We cannot see this from our perspective, but the information is still there.

Before the Big Bang

The implications for this extend beyond black holes. If time has two mirrored directions at the quantum level, the Big Bang might not be the absolute beginning. It could instead represent a quantum change from a shrinking universe to a growing one, each with its own direction of time. In this case, our universe could be inside a black hole that formed in an even larger cosmos.

The researchers point to a possible clue from observations. The cosmic microwave background displays a persistent imbalance that standard models struggle to explain. Models with mirrored quantum components fit the observational data better, but the researchers are careful to note that they still do not confirm the theory.

Gaztañaga’s team does not intend for the study to replace Einstein’s theory of relativity or standard quantum mechanics. They instead propose that both ideas gain strength when we take the full, time-balanced structure of quantum mechanics seriously. What the Einstein-Rosen bridge may really describe is not a shortcut between galaxies but a window into the hidden structure of time itself.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

A twist on gravity measurement, hidden in a mysterious envelope, may point to a subtle flaw in our understanding of the universe, raising new questions about its underlying forces.

That envelope held the key to an experiment led by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) physicist Stephan Schlamminger, which attempted to confirm a measurement of the universal gravitational constant made by a French team in 2007.

Working based on the previous team’s processes, Schlamminger made an important discovery that deepens our understanding of the fundamental force of gravity, as revealed in a recent paper published in Metrologia.

The Universal Gravitational Constant

Of the four forces that govern the universe, gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force, gravity has remained the most elusive to clearly understand. The problem is that it is incredibly weak compared to the other three, making precise measurements difficult. 

An easy example of this disparity is that even a small magnet, small enough to fit in the hand, can overcome the gravitational pull of the entire mass of the Earth, despite the extreme disparity in size. Despite its weakness, gravity is the force that binds our universe together, forming galaxies and holding moons in their orbits around planets, and those planets in orbit around their host stars.

A challenge scientists have pursued for over two centuries is measuring the universal gravitational constant, also known as big G, the fundamental strength of gravity throughout the universe. Schlamminger dedicated a decade to his pursuit of the universal gravity constant problem. 

Gravity in the Lab

While we can obviously notice the effect of gravity at the scale of our planet’s effect on our bodies, when considering objects small enough to be manipulated and measured inside a laboratory, the strength of gravity is so faint as to be almost imperceptible. 

Scientists have devised various methods using extremely precise equipment to measure the universal gravitational constant, but their results have failed to align. The most intriguing part is that the differences extend beyond the expected room for error in the precision instruments employed, suggesting that physicists’ basic understanding of gravity may be in error.

To investigate these errors, Schlamminger spent a decade leading an effort to recreate a 2007 experiment conducted by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in France. If Schlamminger could confirm that finding, it would suggest that physicists may finally have a handle on gravity; otherwise, it could indicate some serious fundamental issue in their understanding.

Ensuring Objectivity

The primary concern for Schlamminger was maintaining the work’s integrity, even in the face of any subconscious bias he may hold. To do so, he had a colleague subtract a number from the data and record it in an envelope to be opened later. Only at the end of the project, with all of the work completed, would the figures be adjusted by the mystery number, ensuring that the data would not be forced to fit the previous outcome.

In 2022, Schlamminger came very close to opening the envelope before suddenly identifying one factor that had gone unaccounted for in his experiment, and adding another two years to the work. Finally, in 2024, he spent the envelope and was pleasantly surprised to see a large negative number, something in the ballpark of what would put his work in agreement with the 2007 findings after the adjustments were made.

However, after the adjustments were made, the mystery number was slightly too large, resulting in a 0.0235% difference from the French measurement.

“At face value, we learned that the new measurement at NIST and the previous measurement at BIPM do not agree with each other,” Schlamminger told The Debrief. “That gives us some idea on the reproducibility of the experiment(s). Since this was the very first time that a big G experiment was repeated, that is significant and new information.”

Continuing to Explore Gravity

“While at NIST, we found a brand-new effect that was never described in the literature before. It is a spurious torque that is mediated by a tiny temperature gradient and the residual gas in the vacuum chamber. It is unclear how much that effect may have biased the BIPM result, because we know little about the temperature gradients in that lab or their vacuum pressure,” Schlaminger continued. “Based on some estimates that I made, it seems unlikely that it accounts for the complete difference. But this effect is definitely something that was not accounted for in their uncertainty budget.”

In conversation with The Debrief, Schlamminger noted the bittersweet nature of repeating an existing experiment and ruminated on how he would advise the next generation to pursue the problem. While pointing out that repeating an experiment can be a learning experience, it remains beholden to ideas that may be outdated. 

He specifically called attention to the cumbersome coordinate measurement machine used in the work, saying that a pendulum design created by University of Washington researchers in the early 2000s would have been much more practical. His primary advice to future scientists is to scour the literature for anything that may be useful, but also to think outside the box to push the envelope even further. 

“Lincoln famously said: Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe,” Schlaminger concludes. “So analogous: Give me six years to measure G, and I will spend the first four thinking about the best way.”

The paper, “Redetermination of the Gravitational Constant with the BIPM Torsion Balance at NIST,” appeared in Metrologia on April 16, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

A newly described fossil from Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, belongs to the crocodile family tree, but unlike most crocodile-line archosaurs, it walked on two legs, had small arms, and a toothless beak. 

Researchers from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and collaborating institutions described the species Labrujasuchus expectatus in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. This animal belongs to Shuvosauridae, a rare group of ancient crocodile relatives that independently evolved body structures similar to those of bipedal, ostrich-like dinosaurs.

Those dinosaurs evolved much later within a separate lineage. Only a small number of shuvosaur species have been identified to date.

The Triassic Era

The Triassic period, which took place about 252 to 201 million years ago, was a time of accelerated evolutionary change. Many major animal lineages began to vary during this period, leading to a range of unusual forms. Along with shuvosaurs, this period saw the rise of lagerpetids, bipedal relatives of dinosaurs whose lineage eventually gave rise to pterosaurs, and Drepanosaurus, a tree-dwelling reptile with a sloth-like claw and a tail that could grasp surroundings. Labrujasuchus lived among this diverse group of animals.

“We see a lot of the successful strategies for modern animals and non-avian dinosaurs first arise in the Triassic, and shuvosaurs are a great example of that convergent evolution,” said Dr. Alan Turner, lead author on the paper. “Bipedalism is certainly a unique path for crocodile relatives to take, but it’s a path well-trod by dinosaurs and later birds. It obviously worked for these animals.”

The Expected Discovery

The name Labrujasuchus expectatus reflects both the location and the circumstances of its discovery. The genus name comes from ‘Ranchos de los Brujos,’ the old Spanish name for Ghost Ranch, combined with the Greek word suchus for ‘crocodile.’ The species name expectatus is Latin for ‘expected,’ referring to the expectation that this specimen would be found in this area.

Previous discoveries at Ghost Ranch included similar species from both earlier and later Triassic periods. The presence of an evolutionary link between them was expected, and L. expectatus helps fill a gap in the fossil record.

“Finding one shuvosaur from earlier in the Triassic and one from later meant that we paleontologists knew there were probably more from in-between waiting to be discovered and described,” said Dr. Nate Smith, Gretchen Augustyn Director and Curator of the NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute. “We wanted to highlight how the fossil record works.”

Smith also explained the “haunted” history behind the site’s name. Local legend holds that ranchers called the land ‘Ranch of the Witches’ to discourage visitors and protect the cattle operations of the Archuleta brothers. The researchers chose to honor this aspect of regional history with the name they chose.

20 Years at Ghost Ranch

This discovery marks a milestone for the ongoing excavation project at Ghost Ranch, which enters its twentieth year this summer. The site, known internationally through Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of its red and ochre badlands, contains four active quarries and has produced some of the most well-preserved Triassic fossils. In 1947, paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert documented more than a thousand well-preserved skeletons of a small Triassic dinosaur known as Coelophysis at this location.

The excavation at Hayden Quarry, where L. expectatus was found, is part of this ongoing project. Each summer, teams of paleontologists and volunteers excavate the site, and each season brings new discoveries, sometimes confirming what researchers already anticipated. The researchers note that long gaps in the species fossil record indicate much of the group’s evolutionary history is still unknown. More “Witch Crocs” may still be out there.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.