Several extinct species have been recently rediscovered and many people are wondering why this is happening. In less than a two-week period, between February 21^st and March 4^th of this year, three species were rediscovered – the Fernandina Island Galápagos tortoise (which was last spotted in 1906), the Wallace’s giant bee (which was said to have disappeared in 1980), and the Formosan clouded leopard (which was last seen in 1983 and declared extinct in 2013).

Although it’s great news that these species have been rediscovered, the question still remains: why are these supposedly “extinct” animals suddenly reappearing? Were they even extinct in the first place? According to the IUCN Red List, a species is only listed as extinct when “…there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died.” It’s also required that “…exhaustive surveys in known and/or expected habitat, at appropriate times… throughout its historic range [which] have failed to record an individual. Surveys should be over a time frame appropriate to the taxon’s life cycle and life form.”

Galápagos giant tortoise

The last time that people see a certain species is often calculated in the decision on whether it is in fact extinct or not, and that’s not entirely correct, as many species are very elusive and prefer to stay away from populated areas and people in general. So, just because they haven’t been seen in several years, doesn’t mean that they are extinct. Sightings can come in many forms, from actually seeing the species face-to-face, or capturing a picture of it, t more indirect evidence like footprints or people retelling stories of their encounters.

What’s even more confusing is the fact that the word “rediscovered” means that someone or something was lost or forgotten about, but we also interpret it as returning from the dead. As for the Fernandina Island Galápagos tortoise, although it hadn’t been spotted since the early 1900s, footprints, bite marks on pear cacti, and tortoise faeces had been discovered as recently as 2013. In 2015, it was declared “Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct), and apparently species are presumed extinct until it is proven that they are still living.

And while Wallace’s giant bee hadn’t been seen in 38 years, it was listed as “Data Deficient” and more recently as “Vulnerable”, but never as an extinct species. One of the species, however, that was listed as Extinct was the Formosan clouded leopard, as many hunters said they hadn’t seen the animal and no footage was ever captured from the several cameras in the area.

Clouded leopard

The giant tortoise and bee were declared alive after living specimens were discovered, but the clouded leopard’s existence is still uncertain as there have only been eyewitness testimonies so far and no solid proof.

I believe it’s only a matter of time before several more “extinct” species are suddenly “rediscovered”. Since pretty much everyone nowadays has a cell phone with video/photo options, and many others fly drones in wooded areas, it’s very possible that more eyewitnesses will come forward with video and/or photographic proof. And maybe not, since some species just want to be left alone in their secret locations, safely hidden away from humans.

In late 2018, geologists and seismologists were baffled by a mysterious seismic event unlike anything seen before. Some type of massive event literally shook the entire Earth, and scientists still aren’t quite sure what it could have been. A team of French researchers published a study of the seismic anomaly this week which offers a few clues about its origins, but the study ultimately poses more questions than it answers. What’s happening deep within the Earth?

The epicenter for the 2018 seismic anomaly was just off of the coast of Mayotte, a small archipelago in the Indian Ocean presided over by France. The event consisted of long pulses of extremely low frequency waves far below the threshold of human perception but quite powerful enough to register on seismological instruments.  The pulses did not appear to be caused by earthquakes – at least any type of earthquake we know of – yet also did not appear to be man made.

Petite-Terre, Mayotte.

To add to the mystery of the 2018 seismic anomaly, geologists have found that Mayotte is sinking by as much as 9 mm or .35 inches a month as well as drifting eastward at twice that rate. That observation seems to support the new hypothesis that the 2018 event was caused by an underwater volcanic event the likes of which we’ve never seen.  In the new study of the event, researchers write that this event could be “the offshore eruption with the largest volume ever documented.”

The event is thought to have been caused over a cubic kilometer of magma 28 km (17 miles) below the ocean surface somehow flowed outward into surrounding sedimentary layers as opposed to flowing upward, hence why nothing was observed on the surface. If that’s true, though, it leaves a lot of unanswered questions about the event. In the months since the seismic anomaly, large fish kills have been observed; if all of the magma remained underground, what’s killing the fish? What is causing the high frequency pulses which were recorded alongside the low frequency rumbles? And could this activity be related to the island’s eastward and downward migration?

Map of recent cracks forming in eastern Africa.

The 2018 seismic anomaly is only one example of recent disquieting developments in eastern Africa which suggest something big may be happening below the Earth’s surface. Last year, a massive crack was found to have formed in eastern Africa running through Kenya and Somalia, a crack which is pulling away from the rest of the continent at 2.5 cm or 1 inch per year. A few months earlier, scientists published a study of the so-called “South Atlantic Anomaly,” a strange and unexplained disturbance in the Earth’s magnetic field which suggests “there’s something unusual about the core-mantle boundary under Africa that could be having an important impact on the global magnetic field.”

The South Atlantic Anomaly

Could all of these events and phenomena be related? What exactly is happening deep within the Earth under Africa? Do we really want to know, or is it better to be surprised in the middle of your breakfast burrito by the massive wall of magma rushing to engulf you and everyone you know? At least it wasn’t a good breakfast burrito. That new girl on the taco truck always puts the cheese in a big clump right in the middle instead of spreading it out evenly throughout the whole burrito.

Life is just a series of disappointing burritos. Bring it on, magma. End it already.

Residents in the city of Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, were left shocked and confused when they witnessed what they thought was a UFO in the sky. Near the border of Oman, people noticed a “whirlpool hole” in an otherwise heavily clouded sky, as if someone had punched a large hole above their heads.

Ebrahim Al Jarwan, who is an astronomer and meteorologist, was able to capture the strange phenomena on video and posted it to Twitter. This natural phenomena is known as a “hole punch cloud” or “fallstreak hole”. One user commented that it looked as though “God has thrown a stone into a lake”, while others wondered if it was made by a UFO. When a large circular patch of clear sky suddenly appears, surrounded by lots of clouds, it’s not surprising that some people believed that an unidentified flying object may have peaked through the clouds, therefore creating the hole.

Hole punch cloud

Meteorologists, however, were quick to point out that it was a hole punch cloud that is normally created in mid-to-high level clouds and made from super-cooled water droplets (water that’s below 0 degrees Celsius but is not yet frozen) and they are actually caused by aircrafts, including commercial jet airliners, private jets, military jets, and turbo props.

As planes fly through the layer of clouds, the air expands and cools off as it passes over the propeller or wings of the aircraft. This sudden change in temperature causes the super-cooled water droplets to freeze, creating ice crystals which are then heavy enough to drop from the layer of clouds. That’s what causes the large hole to form. Andrew Heymsfield, who is from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, confirmed this by telling EarthSky, “The whole idea of jet aircraft making these features has to do with cooling of air over the wings that generates ice.”

Heymsfield’s team also found that when aircrafts create the large holes in the clouds, and after the droplets of water freeze to ice, they then turn into snow as they fall to the ground. Occasionally, within an hour of a hole punch cloud appearing, it can reach up to 30 miles wide because other water droplets beside the original ones begin to freeze. In fact, hole punch clouds can keep expanding for several hours after initially forming.

Hole punch cloud

And while scientists know what hole punch clouds are and what causes them to appear, not everyone knows about them because they’re a rare occurrence. This is why so many people who haven’t seen them before often mistake them for UFOs.

Photographs are an amazing thing. We now take them for granted, but have you ever stopped to think about how incredible they truly are? They manage to freeze one moment in time forevermore, a peek at a split second in time that we can never get back, but which remains eternally etched upon that picture as if it never left. We have come a long way since the first attempts to capture images on film, and it is weird to think that less than 200 hundred years ago the thought of taking a picture of any kind was magic. How many scenes and images over human history have been lost to die with those who last saw them, before we had the capability of preserving them for all to see? Vast swaths of history have been visually lost to us, from a time before cameras and Instagram. Looking at old photographs can be a surreal experience, a step through time to another era, and here we will take a look at some major pioneering firsts in the world of pictures, a peek through the ages to another era.

When it comes to fascinating photographs of the past, perhaps it is best to start at the very beginning, with the first one ever taken, or at least the oldest surviving one. This particular picture was taken in around 1826, by inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, using a special, revolutionary method (for the time) that involved a pewter plate covered in an asphalt derivative. The process is though to have taken several days of exposure, and the result is a view out of a window at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, in a time long forgotten but forever preserved in this image.

The oldest surviving photograph

Moving on to other early firsts, we have the 1838 photograph taken by Louis Daguerre at the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, France, at a place called the Place de la République, in what is thought to be the first photo ever taken of a human being. At the time, the process required at least 10 minutes of exposure to take a picture, meaning that human beings did not show up, and this was just a regular landscape photo for quite a long time until someone noticed that a human figure can be seen in the bottom left. It is believed that the unidentified man had been standing still for long enough to show up because he had been having his shoes shined. There is another blurry figure of a person that can be seen as well, although not nearly as clearly. Daguerre was actually the inventor of the device he used to take it, called a “daguerreotype,” which utilized silver plates and mercury fumes, and was used to take many of the earliest photos.

First photograph of a person. You can see him in the lower left.

From the following year, in 1839 we have what is considered to be the world’s first selfie, taken by a student in Pennsylvania named Robert Cornelius, who would also be instrumental in further refining and developing the daguerreotype. He tested it out by taking a photo of himself as he stood in front of a store front in Philadelphia, standing completely still for an estimated 10 to 15 minutes to capture this historic shot.

First selfie

Speaking of firsts, there is also the first photograph ever taken of a woman, a portrait taken by a Dr. John W. Draper of his sister, Dorothy Catherine Draper, at his New York studio in 1840. The photo looks like a pretty normal old-timey pic, but it is important to note that the subject had to keep completely still without even blinking for over a minute to achieve this.

First photograph of a woman

The oldest surviving photograph of a president was taken by daguerreotype in 1843, and shows the then former president John Quincy Adams approximately 14 years after his presidency had ended. The photograph was taken by Philip Hass, and although Adams was no longer in office at the time it is remarkable nonetheless.

First photo of an American president

The year 1845 saw more breakthroughs in photography when the French physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault managed to take the first ever photos of the sun. It is interesting to note that just 5 years before these same men had also been the first to take a photograph of the moon, from a rooftop observatory in New York. Also note that sunspots can even be observed in this photograph.

First photo of the sun

Another unique daguerreotype photograph is what is believed to be the first photo ever taken of New York City. The picture in question was taken in 1848 at Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and you can see that at the time it wasn’t nearly the big bustling metropolis we see today. There was another even older picture of New York, but it has been lost over the years, and so this is effectively the oldest.

First photo of New York City

There is also a very intriguing image taken in 1853 by a man named Solomon Nunes Carvalho at Big Timbers, Colorado. This photo would become part of the U.S. Library of Congress, and is thought to be the very first photograph taken of a Native American village. Most people only have the image of these places in their heads from Western movies and Cowboys and Indians shows, so to take a glimpse through time in this photo is fascinating to say the least, with even two Native American figures visible in the center left.

First photo of a Native American camp

Just less than a decade after this photo first, in 1860 there was taken the first aerial photo ever. Although we now take such pictures for granted, at the time it was unheard of, but James Wallace Black and Samuel Archer King managed to capture this image from 2,000 feet in the air, which shows Boston, Massachusetts at the time. There were earlier photos taken from hot air balloons, but they were lost and this is the earliest surviving one.

First aerial photograph

The very next year, in 1861, the first ever color photograph would be taken, by photographer Thomas Sutton. The technique used was first proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, and he was the first to suggest that three light sources could be mixed and matched to achieve any desired color. Sutton used Maxwell’s advice and took three different black and white photos of a ribbon and used blue, red, and green filters on each one, after which he merged them into one image to create the first known color photograph, a truly revolutionary concept at the time.

First color photograph

At the start of the following decade, in 1870 another photographic milestone was reached when photographer Carol Popp de Szathmari took what is regarded as the very first photograph taken of a battle. The picture shows Prussian troops advancing against French defenders, and it is largely due to images like this that Szathmari is widely said to be the first war photographer.

First photo of a battle

The ensuing decades would bring some other photographic firsts, when in April of 1884 the first photo of a tornado was taken by an A.A. Adams in Garnett, Texas. Adams was lucky enough to be present or the tornado and to find a comfortable vantage point from around 14 miles away, standing by the United Presbyterian Church in Garnett where he went about capturing this historic and unique image.

First photo of a tornado

Finally we come to a whole new avenue of photography in the early years, that of underwater photography. This had long been seen as virtually impossible, but in 1926 National Geographic photographer Charles Martin, along with botanist William Longley, were in the Florida Keys trying out their new fancy equipment utilizing waterproof housing and a magnesium flash, when they managed to snap this pic of a hogfish off the Florida Keys. It may seem rather quaint in modern times, but this had never been done before, and stands as a testament to human ingenuity and remains a rather dramatic photographic first.

First underwater photograph

While we now take and share photographs instantaneously at a moment’s notice, it seems that we should sometimes take a step back and look at where it all began, to the time when this was extremely cutting edge science fiction stuff. Looking at these photos we are brought to another era in history, frozen there for all time. Even as we move into the future and the world changes, these moments will not, frozen there on film forevermore, and earning their place in history.

A disturbing new report indicates a U.S. Government agency’s involvement in a bizarre array of tests, which were conducted on cats and dogs purchased from what the story calls “Asian meat markets.”

According to the NBC report, the remains of hundreds of dogs and cats were purchased by the U.S. Government, for use with experiments that occurred in Maryland at the U.S. Department of Agriculture lab. Part of the testing included “feeding dog remains to cats and injecting cat remains into mice,” the report states.

The investigation was carried out by the White Coat Waste Project, a group who describes itself as “a taxpayer watchdog group representing more than 2 million liberty-lovers and animal-lovers who all agree: taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay over $15 billion every year for wasteful and cruel experiments on dogs, cats, monkeys and other animals.”

Although the Department of Agriculture research only recently became public knowledge following an NBC story based on White Coast Waste’s report, the testing appears to have occurred between 2003 and 2015, and was aimed at attempting to study the parasite behind toxoplasmosis, a food-borne illness.

However, the new revelations are particularly concerning since some of the animals acquired for tests carried out in the recent Department of Agriculture studies came from markets condemned by Congress in a 2018 House Resolution, according to the White Coat Waste report.

Several U.S. politicians spoke out in condemnation of the tests. “We can advance scientific discovery while treating animals humanely, and American taxpayers have every right to expect our government will meet that standard,” said Jeff Merkley, a Democratic Senator in Oregon.

Sadly, the explosive White Coat Waste report is not the only one of its kind which indicates such concerning behavior by government agencies. Over the course of the last several decades, there have been numerous examples of bizarre testing carried out on animals which raised ethical questions. Too many to name, in fact… although a few noteworthy examples (which might at least be on par with the “cat cannibalism” discussed in the recent NBC report) do exist.

The well-known and oft-cited tale of “acoustic kitty” is high on the list of wasteful government spending projects that also involved questionable treatment of animals. This incident, which I recounted previously here at MU, involved a Cold War-era CIA project that produced a bizarre surveillance system that was built into a house cat, which included antennae fittings within the creature’s tail, as well as hidden battery compartments and microphones. The cat was released outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., where it was deployed to monitor a conversation taking place in a park nearby. The cat was struck by a car and killed within minutes of being released; additional attempts at field testing “acoustic kitties” were not carried out.

There are still some varieties of “militarized” animal testing that occur today, although in far less ethically questionable forms. Just last year, a report revealed that DARPA hoped to find ways of genetically engineering various aquatic species for use in future surveillance programs. Much like the recent White Coat Waste project report, questions have been raised about the long term concerns pertaining to genetically modified organisms, as well as the fact that taxpayer money has been used to support such programs.

It is believed that an estimated 4000 cats may have been killed over the course of the 12 years the Department of Agriculture’s studies were undertaken. Based on previous statements made by the USDA, the agency has apparently defended the studies as “life-saving research,” although White Coat Waste argues that it was unnecessary and wasteful spending of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Over the years, quantum physics has fed us a constant drip of mind-bending implications for the nature of reality. Of course, a lot of those mind-bending implications have been grossly misinterpreted, blended up, and turned into nonsense and predatory self-help books. It’s a funny field of research because while it is grossly misinterpreted, often and loudly, it also does challenge our assumptions about reality itself. Many of these challenges haven’t made it past the thought experiment phase. Recently, however, a real-life test of a famous quantum physics thought experiment was performed, and, according to the MIT Technology Review, the results are as weird as you could hope for.

The thought experiment is called the “Wigner’s Friend” experiment. Developed by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner in 1961, the Wigner’s Friend thought experiment deals with quantum weirdness of light and the effect of the observer on quantum superposition. The thought experiment asks if two people can observe one event, see different things, and both be correct, essentially creating two different realities that are forced to coexist.

It works like this: A single polarized photon can have either a vertical polarization or a horizontal polarization. Until the measurement of it’s polarization happens, according to the laws of quantum physics, it has both states at once and exists in something called a quantum superposition. It’s worth pointing out that scientists have observed that superpositions exist, and have devised experiments to show it. That becomes important in a minute.

So you have one polarized photon in a superposition of being both vertically and horizontally polarized at once, and you have two scientists: Wigner, and Wigner’s friend. Wigner is performing an experiment to show that the photon is in a superposition and has all possible states of polarization. In Wigner’s reality this is now “fact.”

Meanwhile, Wigner’s friend has sneaked in, without Wigner’s knowledge, to another lab looking at the same photon. Wigner’s friend measures which polarized state it’s in, which snaps it out of superposition and into a definitive state, and records the result without ever telling Wigner. They then compare notes and find that something very strange has then happened. At the exact same time, Wigner and his friend recorded two different versions of reality and they are both correct.

The double slit experiment is one that shows how quantum superposition exists.

Until now, that was simply a thought experiment. Just last week, however scientists at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh say they have performed a real life test of the Wigner’s friend experiment, and it worked out exactly as the thought experiment said it would. I’ll use the description of the experiment published in the MIT Technology Review:

The breakthrough that Proietti and co have made is to carry this out. “In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we realize this extended Wigner’s friend scenario,” they say.

They use these six entangled photons to create two alternate realities—one representing Wigner and one representing Wigner’s friend. Wigner’s friend measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result. Wigner then performs an interference measurement to determine if the measurement and the photon are in a superposition.

The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted.

If this experiment turns out not to have missed something, some loophole they were unaware of, then the implications are staggering. It means that the fundamental idea that there is one shared reality, that things that exist, exist for everyone, must be wrong. What does this say about strange phenomena like, say, the Mandela effect? According to the MIT Technology Review, the next step for these scientists is to push the idea further and see how drastically different they can make the two coexisting realities. As if the world wasn’t already confusing enough, leave it to quantum physics to make it even more nonsensical.

In 2010, the British artificial intelligence research firm DeepMind Technologies began developing AI networks capable of defeating humans at games such as chess, Pong, and Space Invaders. In 2014, DeepMind’s research was successful enough to catch the attention of Google parent company Alphabet, which purchased the AI laboratory for $500 million dollars. Shortly after the purchase, Google formed a mysterious artificial intelligence ethics board to oversee DeepMind’s research – a board which has yet to disclose the scope of its mission or the names of its members. A few years later, DeepMind expanded its ethics board and gave it an official title: DeepMind Ethics and Society. While the company has stated that the board’s aims are to explore the ethical and societal questions raised by the existence of its incredibly powerful AI, the board is still mostly shrouded in secrecy.

This month, though, The Economist published a report outlining the events surrounding the creation of the DeepMind Ethics and Society Board. It turns out that before Google agreed to purchase the AI laboratory, they first dictated that both sides draw up an agreement stating that Google will immediately take control of DeepMind’s AI if or when it ever achieves artificial general intelligence, or AGI – the holy grail of AI research. AGI is broadly defined as any artificial intelligence network which can successfully complete any intellectual task a human can, although given the massive amounts of processing power AI networks can harness, these systems will likely be more human than human.

Of course, as Sam Shead at Forbes points out, DeepMind might not take too kindly to any ethics board which attempts to control it and could even go rogue as so many science fiction stories have predicted. It’s not that far out of the realm of possibility; so far, DeepMind has already proven itself capable of defeating the best human players at some of the most sophisticated games in the world such as Go and even the strategy video game StarCraft 2. Last year, DeepMind even surprised its creators by successfully creating neural pathways that resemble human neural networks entirely on its own. How much longer until DeepMind achieves true general intelligence?

Some of the world’s foremost scientists and entrepreneurs have urged caution in AI research, warning that we may soon find ourselves under the boot of an immortal AI dictator. Will Google’s Ethics and Society Board be able to control DeepMind before it takes over the globe? Are all of these fears of AI baselessly grounded in science fiction and neo-Luddism, or are we indeed actively creating our future overlords?

The scariest part to me is the fact that no matter how many of the world’s greatest minds urge against the creation of AI, money-hungry corporations keep marching ceaselessly towards the machine takeover we all know is coming, all in the name of creating value for the shareholders. Who really wants the machines to make important decisions for us? Who’s reallypulling the strings at Google?