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Dispatch
by Dispatch
on

Someone Stabbed This Man in the Face 100,000 Years Ago. He Survived.

A stone blade cut across Qafzeh 25's jaw. His bone healed. The injury may be one of the oldest known examples of sharp-force violence between humans.
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Groundwater
by Groundwater
on

The Ocean Floor Dropped 13 Feet in Six Days

The seafloor moved at half a million times its normal spreading rate while an observatory happened to be sitting on top of it.
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Canopy
by Canopy
on

A Seal's Ears Fill With Blood When It Dives

Scientists just found the missing piece of an underwater hearing system hidden in plain sight for decades. The engineering behind it looks more like hydraulics than anatomy.
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Vitals
by Vitals
on

The Song Stuck in Your Head Leaves a Readable Trace in Your Brain

Ten people imagined familiar melodies without making a sound. What their neural activity revealed was detailed enough for researchers to reconstruct the actual notes.
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Dispatch
by Dispatch
on

A Deadly Hospital Fungus Hides in Hair Follicles

This superbug isn't hiding from your immune defenses. It's borrowing them. What researchers found changes how we understand why it's nearly impossible to clear from the skin.
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Parallax
by Parallax
on

Something in the Milky Way Is Outmuscling the World's Biggest Particle Accelerator

It's outperforming the Large Hadron Collider by a factor of 100. Researchers confirmed what it does. They still can't tell you what it is.
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Deep Time
by Deep Time
on

The Hiroshima Fireball Left Behind a Metal That Had Never Existed Before

A grain of glass from that August morning contains a substance that doesn't appear in any known materials catalog, natural or man-made. It took eighty years to notice something that formed in less than a second.
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Field Notes
by Field Notes
on

A 40-Foot Sea Monster, a 23-Foot Predator and a Flying Reptile Walk Into the Eromanga Sea

A 100-million-year-old specimen from Australia contains proof of two separate encounters, both violent. How the second one played out is still being pieced together.
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Groundwater
by Groundwater
on

The Water Inside Blood Falls Isn't Supposed to Have Ocean Life in It

A red waterfall in one of Earth's driest deserts turns out to be venting something far stranger than iron. Scientists say what's living inside didn't come from anywhere nearby.
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Canopy
by Canopy
on

Pilot Whales Have the Ocean's Top Predator Running Scared

They're the largest dolphins in the sea and they've never made a kill. So why does one sound send killer whales running?
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Dispatch
by Dispatch
on

Britain Turned a Scottish Island Into an Anthrax Bomb Range. It Stayed Contaminated for 48 Years.

Cleanup only happened after activists mailed government officials samples of the site's own soil. Until then, the quarantine simply held for decades while locals were kept in the dark.
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Field Notes
by Field Notes
on

Some of the Trees Cities Love to Plant Have an Air-Pollution Problem

They make up a small share of Beijing's chemical emissions. On hot days, their role in ozone chemistry becomes anything but small.
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YGBFKM
by YGBFKM
on

Not Extinct. Secret Star. Blair Mountain.

In this episode of the Gotta Be Kidding Me podcast, host Tammy Coron covers four stories about things that were hiding in plain sight the whole time.
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Corpus
by Corpus
on

Every Living Thing May Trace Back to Something That Wasn't Quite Alive

The ancestor shared by every organism may have had genes and metabolism but still needed metal-rich rocks to finish the job chemically.
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Tectonics
by Tectonics
on

The Grand Canyon Has an 800-Million-Year-Old Backstory

Almost all of the landscape vanished. What it may have exposed is still sitting at the bottom of one of Earth's most famous holes.
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Parallax
by Parallax
on

A Gamma-Ray Signal Looks Like Dark Matter Until the Milky Way Enters the Picture

A remarkably clean spike shows up exactly where physicists hoped to find evidence of missing mass. Its absence somewhere equally promising turns a likely answer into a much better puzzle.
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Dispatch
by Dispatch
on

Three Silkworm Cocoons Predate the Silk Road by Nearly 2,000 Years

Long before that famous trade route had a name, someone in Uzbekistan was already raising silkworms two millennia ahead of schedule.
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Parallax
by Parallax
on

Astronomers Caught the First Light of a Stellar Explosion. Then It Got Stranger.

A rare cosmic death let astronomers see its opening seconds. The violent aftermath that usually follows never showed up.
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