๐ The Curiosity Files #16
Curiously exploring the mysteries of our past, present, and future
โCuriosity is its own reason. Arenโt you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure behind reality?โ Albert Einstein
Welcome to The Curiosity Files!
Twice a week, Iโll journey through the most fascinating discoveries across ancient history, human origins, space, consciousness, cutting-edge science and the unexplained.
๐ฟ Ancient Mysteries, Archaeology & Lost Civilizations
Earthquake reveals Myanmarโs hidden monuments.
Tremors from the quake caused subsidence cracks and deep fissures across the region, revealing buried monuments and forgotten ancient ruins.
Tiny cut marks on animal bone fossils reveal that human ancestors were in Romania 1.95 million years ago.
At least 20 cut-marked bones verified both by qualitative and quantitative methods โ provides very reliable evidence that hominins were indeed in Eurasia by at least 1.95 million years ago, even though there are no hominin fossils from Grฤunceanu.
Has The Mysterious Lost Capital Of The Ancient Kingdom Of Lyncestis Been Unearthed In Northern Macedonia?
Archaeologists may have uncovered the lost capital of the ancient Kingdom of Lyncestis, potentially the birthplace of Queen Eurydice I, Alexander the Great's grandmother. This enigmatic site has long intrigued researchers.
Archaeologists hike up a cliff and find 20,000-year-old stone tools.
The blades recovered from the cave were made between 24,000 and 12,000 years ago. At this time, Earth was nearing the end of the last major ice age.
Revisiting Human Evolution: Insights from an Expanded Framework of Evolutionary Processes.
A new theory of human evolution challenges the old "Out of Africa" model, suggesting we split from apes much earlier than thought and may have originated in East Asiaโreshaping our understanding of where we come from and why it matters.
Hunter-gatherer sea voyages extended to remotest Mediterranean islands.
New evidence shows that hunter-gatherers reached the remote Maltese islands over 8,000 years agoโmaking some of the longest sea crossings in Mediterranean prehistory and challenging assumptions about their seafaring skills.
Finally! Noahโs Ark Site to Be Excavated.
After years of tantalizing speculation, researchers are finally preparing to excavate the Durupinar Formationโa 160-meter, boat-shaped structure in eastern Turkey believed by many to hold remnants of Noahโs Ark.
Ancient jawbone found on seafloor belongs to mysterious group of human ancestors.
Denisovans, who co-existed with Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, remain a poorly understood group. To date, confirmed Denisovan fossils are limited to fragmented remains, including jawbones, teeth, and a finger bone, primarily found in Siberian and Tibetan caves.
๐Book
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
Without warning, giant silver ships from deep space appear in the skies above every major city on Earth. Manned by the Overlords, in fifty years, they eliminate ignorance, disease, and poverty. Then this golden age ends--and then the age of Mankind begins....
๐ Cosmic & Space Mysteries
The Physics of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.
A bold theory suggests our universe is just one in an endless cycle, where each universe hands off to the next through a kind of cosmic rebootโleaving behind faint hot spots in the cosmic microwave background that may be the dying echoes of black holes from a previous universe.
No Big Bang? Groundbreaking New Theory Could Upend the Standard Model of Cosmology.
The universeโs expansion may be driven by โtransient temporal singularitiesโโrapid, invisible bursts of energyโrather than dark matter or dark energy, according to new research that challenges the widely accepted standard model of cosmology.
Scientists spotted evidence of an unseen universeโeven though that should be impossible.
The James Webb Space Telescopeโs JADES survey recently observed a galaxy that shouldnโt be visible, because it existed only 300 million years after the Big Bang. At that point in cosmic history, the universe was shrouded by neutral hydrogen, and most objects and phenomena would not be visible until nearly a billion years later. For now, researchers think the light might be coming from the first stars to exist, or outflows from a supermassive black hole at the galactic core. But the source remains unknown.
For the first time, astronomers watch a black hole โwake upโ in real-time.
โEach of these eruptions is releasing a hundred times more energy than we have seen elsewhere.โ
๐ง The Mind, Consciousness & the Origins of Life
Consciousness is fundamental - What physics shows us about consciousness.
For decades, our best intuitions have told us that consciousness is a product of complex brain processes, creating the taste of coffee or the smell of a rose. However, Annaka Harris argues this view has been shattered by modern neuroscience and explains why consciousness is the most fundamental thing in the universe. It may, in fact, be impossible to talk about any aspect of the universe objectively, because the universe is ultimately defined by different perspectives on itself.
Exploring ultraweak photon emissions as optical markers of brain activity.
Scientists have discovered that the brain gives off tiny flashes of light that may reflect its activity and healthโhinting at a possible new way to "read" the brain using light instead of electricity.
A mouse watching The Matrix changed what we know about our brains.
Scientists have constructed the most extensive functional brain map to date, charting the connections of 84,000 neurons as they transmit signals, thanks to a mouse that was shown clips from "The Matrix".
By the light of brahman.
Ideas from classical Indian philosophy help illuminate the enigmas of selfhood, consciousness and the nature of reality.
Brainpower boosted by tapping out a specific rhythm, study finds.
French scientists have uncovered an odd superpower triggered by tapping your finger to a rhythm โ it can help you hear and understand someone talking to you in a noisy environment, such as a party or a busy cafe. While it may sound a little woo-woo, there is a reason for it.
๐ฆ Evolutionary Oddities & Life on Earth
The largest flood in Earthโs history burst through Gibraltar and Sicily and refilled the entire Mediterranean in just a few years.
A little over 5 million years ago, water from the Atlantic Ocean found a way through the present-day Strait of Gibraltar. According to this theory, oceanic water rushed faster than a speeding car down a kilometre-high slope towards the empty Mediterranean Sea, excavating a skyscraper-deep trough on its way. The Med was, at the time, a largely dry and salty basin, but so much water poured in that it filled up in just a couple of years โ maybe even just a few months.
A recent study finds ants best humans at tests of collective intelligence.
Wilkes Land crater: The giant hole in East Antarctica's gravitational field likely caused by a meteorite
The crater was first detected as a huge dent in Earth's gravitational field. Initial ground-based seismic and gravity surveys already indicated that the crater was huge โ around 150 miles (240 km) across โ but newer techniques reveal that it is likely more than double this size.
Ancient rocks tie Roman Empireโs collapse to a mini ice age.
The fall of the empire almost certainly occurred through a complex interplay of socio-political factorsโbut recent research suggests a brief climate crisis may have contributed more than we thought.
๐ Cutting-Edge Science & Technology
Musician Who Died in 2021 Resurrected as Clump of Brain Matter, Now Composing New Music.
"Could there be a filament of memory that persists through this biological transformation?"
How AI is interacting with our creative human processes.
Humans are not going to stop using technology to help us create anytime soon. But when we turn the tools themselves into artists and storytellers, brains and bodies, magicians and ghosts, we bypass truth for wish fulfillment. Maybe whatโs worse, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to contribute our own voices to the lively and loud chorus of human experience. And we keep others from the human pleasure of hearing them too.
$44M detector sitting above the LHC may catch the universeโs most elusive particles.
The worldโs largest particle collider is getting a religious makeoverโbut not the kind involving holy water or divine intervention. Named after Methuselah, the biblical figure said to have lived nearly a thousand years, MATHUSLA is a towering detector that aims to spot long-lived particles that that slip past existing detectors, potentially unlocking physics beyond the known universe.
Fruit flies can be made to act like miniature robots.
Light and smells can turn flies into remote-controlled near-automatons.
๐ธ The Unexplained & the Unusual
Navy crew reports dramatic encounter eerily similar to iconic โTic Tacโ incident.
The sailors were able to record video of two of the โTic Tacsโ as they appeared on a thermal sensor in the shipโs command center.
๐ Beyond the Known
Researchers discover a new type of quantum entanglement.
Researchers discovered that it is possible to entangle photons in nanoscale systems that are a thousandth the size of a hair, but the entanglement is not carried out by the conventional properties of the photon, such as spin or trajectory, but only by the total angular momentum.
Space could emerge from time.
An investigation of the changing behaviour of a single quantum bit through time has uncovered a tantalising similarity to the geometry of three-dimensional space.
Black Holes May Be โSupermazesโ of Many-Dimensional Strings.
Physicists think the insides of black holes may be complex mazes of tangled strings in higher dimensions.
Which story intrigued you the most? Let me know in the comments below and provide links to any curiosities you have found!
Until next time, stay curious!
All of the aboveโฆ your stacks always makes me feel in awe of how little we actually know and yet how much a few pretend that we do know if that makes sense.