A Well Preserved Wreck

Few who hear the story of the Endurance could avoid reflecting on the aptness of the ship’s name. A year after setting out on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914, it got stuck in a mass of drifting ice off Antarctica. There it remained for ten months, while leader Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 men waited for a thaw. 

But the Endurance was being slowly crushed, and eventually had to be left to its watery grave. What secures its place in the history books is the sub-expedition made by Shackleton and five others in search of help, which ensured the rescue of every single man who’d been on the ship.

This harrowing journey has, of course, inspired documentaries, including this year’s Endurance from National Geographic, which debuted at the London Film Festival last month and will come available to stream on Disney+ later this fall.

 “The documentary incorporates footage and photos captured during the expedition by Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who [in 1914] brought several cameras along for the journey,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Filmmakers have color-treated Hurley’s black-and-white images and footage for the first time. They also used artificial intelligence to recreate crew members’ voices to ‘read’ their own diary entries.”     READ MORE...

Searching for the Multiverse

What lies beyond the edges of the observable universe? Is it possible that our universe is just one of many in a much larger multiverse?

Movies can’t get enough of exploring these questions. From Oscar winners like Everything Everywhere All at Once to superhero blockbusters like Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, science fiction stories are full of creative interactions between alternate realities. And depending on which cosmologist you ask, the concept of a multiverse is more than pure fantasy or a handy storytelling device.

Humanity’s ideas about alternate realities are ancient and varied—in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe even wrote a prose poem in which he fancied the existence of “a limitless succession of Universes.” But the multiverse concept really took off when modern scientific theories attempting to explain the properties of our universe predicted the existence of other universes where events take place outside our reality.

“Our understanding of reality is not complete, by far,” says Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde. “Reality exists independently of us.”

If they exist, those universes are separated from ours, unreachable and undetectable by any direct measurement (at least so far). And that makes some experts question whether the search for a multiverse can ever be truly scientific.

Will scientists ever know whether our universe is the only one? We break down the different theories about a possible multiverse—including other universes with their own laws of physics—and whether many versions of you could exist out there.

What is a multiverse?
The multiverse is a term that scientists use to describe the idea that beyond the observable universe, other universes may exist as well. Multiverses are predicted by several scientific theories that describe different possible scenarios—from regions of space in different planes than our universe, to separate bubble universes that are constantly springing into existence.  READ MORE...

Pillars of Creation

Photographer Andrew McCarthy recreated NASA’s famous “Pillars of Creation” photograph of the Eagle Nebula using a $500 telescope.

The original iconic image, taken by the Hubble telescope, shows an active star-forming region featuring towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas in the heart of the Eagle Nebula, cataloged as M16.

It was first photographed in 1995 by NASA and has had a huge cultural impact with the image being featured on everything from “t-shirts to coffee mugs,” reports National Geographic.

A $16B Space Telescope vs a $500 backyard telescope
McCarthy spoke to PetaPixel about how he recreated the Pillars of Creation from his backyard in Arizona with a 12-inch Newtonian telescope and a monochrome camera using narrowband filters to create a vibrant color image.

“I shoot the Pillars of Creation a couple times a year. It’s a surprisingly accessible target, near the Sagittarius star cloud in the core of the Milky Way,” explains McCarthy.

“I used special software to remove all the stars in the image, so this unobstructed view really shows off the vast structures of gas and dust within the Eagle Nebula.

“The image was shot over several hours across multiple nights, while my telescope was guided along the stars using a sophisticated tracking mount that compensated for the earth’s rotation.”  READ MORE...

Oldest Tree in the World

GREAT BASIN NATIONAL PARK -  Thousands of feet above the Nevada desert, in a part of Great Basin National Park that tourists rarely see, park ecologist Gretchen Baker neared the top of Mount Washington and raised her binoculars. There just below, sprouting directly from the limestone, grew some of the oldest living things on Earth.

Great Basin bristlecone pines, their dense pale trunks twisted like thick rope by centuries of gusting wind and rain, thrive here in part because so little else does. At altitudes near 11,000 feet along Nevada’s rocky Snake Range there are no grasses, no brush, few pests, no competition. No people to start wildfires. No nearby trees to spread pathogens.

With nothing around to kill them, these ancient beasts are left alone year after year to simply do what they do: store water in needles that can live for decades and pack on the teensiest bit of heft at a time. The wood grows so slowly it gets too dense for beetles or disease to penetrate.  READ MORE...

Microplastics & Human Health

Scientists are certain that humans around the world are ingesting tiny pieces of plastic on a regular basis. Now, they are seeking to understand how the wide distribution of microplastics affects human health and the environment as a whole.

Eating a credit card's worth of plastic — a comparison often used to illustrate estimates that people consume about 5 grams of microplastics a week on average — sounds unhealthy on a very visceral level. Learning that those pieces of plastic could later show up in your lungs is even scarier.

Investigations into microplastics exposure and human health have confirmed that not all plastic ingested by humans comes out the other end; at least in some cases, microplastics can be absorbed into the bloodstream or trapped in the lungs.

But scientists don't yet know how the presence of microplastics in the body affects overall health, especially compared to exposures to other environmental chemicals and contaminants.

You may have heard that plastics never fully decompose. In fact, plastic waste slowly breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, creating microplastics that are so light they can be swept up by the wind.

Microplastics are defined as particles measuring no more than 5 millimeters across, which is about the size of a grain of rice. In the 20-odd years since they were named, scientists have found microplastics in virtually every environment, from ocean floors to mountain peaks, National Geographic reported.  READ MORE...

Hadrian's Wall

Hadrian’s Wall once marked the extent of the Roman empire in Britannia. Now it’s a pitstop on the way to Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, or the country’s largest city, Glasgow. Things have changed over the past two thousand years.

But the 73-mile-long chain of walls, ditches, towers, and forts—which stretches across Great Britain, linking the North Sea and the Irish Sea—continues to fascinate. This year, 1,900 years after construction began, soldiers clad in Roman armor will once again patrol its length and the sounds of ancient instruments will float over its ramparts.


Writer Joe Sills and archaeologist Raven Todd DaSilva traverse a tricky section of the wall, just east of Sewingshields Crags. To the right lies Northumberland National Park—home of England’s cleanest rivers and darkest skies.PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID GUEST


These celebrations make now a great time to visit, and an even better time to hike its length. The wall’s most popular attraction, the sprawling hillside complex of Housesteads Roman Fort, sees some 100,000 visitors per year. But only 7,000 people hike the full length of the wall annually.


The reign of Roman emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117-138) coincided with the pinnacle of Roman power. An expansive emperor—Roman territory reached its widest extent when his reign began—he was known as a builder of monuments, from his opulent villa at Tivoli, near Rome, to the defensive fortifications marking the frontiers of his empire; both are UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Built under Hadrian starting in A.D. 122, the wall stretches through the counties of Northumbria, Cumbria and Tyne, and Wear. For hikers, this landmark near the Scottish border makes the perfect trail for those looking for a straightforward route that barely necessitates a map. Guided by stonework and hedgerows, its path blazes by sidewalks, meadows, woodlands, and crags in a line that has been beaten since ancient times.  READ MORE...

Universe Expanding Faster Than Expected

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy Markarian 1337, which is roughly 120 million light-years away from Earth. In 2006, astronomers saw a certain kind of supernova explode in this galaxy, providing researchers with some of the data nee...IMAGE BY ESA/HUBBLE & NASA, A. RIESS ET AL.

The latest measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope suggest the universe is expanding faster than scientists' models predict—a hint that some unknown ingredient could be at work in the cosmos.

It’s one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy: Based on multiple observations of stars and galaxies, the universe seems to be flying apart faster than our best models of the cosmos predict it should. Evidence of this conundrum has been accumulating for years, causing some researchers to call it a looming crisis in cosmology.

Now a group of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope has compiled a massive new dataset, and they’ve found a-million-to-one odds that the discrepancy is a statistical fluke. In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.

“The universe seems to throw a lot of surprises at us, and that’s a good thing, because it helps us learn,” says Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who led the latest effort to test the anomaly.

The conundrum is known as the Hubble tension, after astronomer Edwin Hubble. In 1929 he observed that the farther a galaxy is from us, the faster it recedes—an observation that helped pave the way toward our current notion of the universe starting with the big bang and expanding ever since.

Researchers have tried to measure the universe’s current rate of expansion in two primary ways: by measuring distances to nearby stars, and by mapping a faint glow dating back to the infant universe. These dual approaches provide a way to test our understanding of the universe across more than 13 billion years of cosmic history. The research has also uncovered some key cosmic ingredients, such as “dark energy,” the mysterious force thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.

But these two methods disagree on the universe’s current expansion rate by about 8 percent. That difference might not sound like much, but if this discrepancy is real, it means the universe is now expanding faster than even dark energy can explain—implying some breakdown in our accounting of the cosmos.  READ MORE...

Halloween Born in "Hell Caves"

The current archaeological site of Rathcroghan displays an artist’s impression of the temple that once stood there. It was the main meeting place of the Connaught kingdom 2,000 years ago.PHOTOGRAPH BY RONAN O'CONNELL

In the middle of a field in a lesser known part of Ireland is a large mound occupied by sheep. These livestock wander freely, chewing the grass beneath their feet. Yet, had they been in that same location 2,000 years ago, these animals probably would have been stiff with terror, held aloft by chanting, costumed pagans while being sacrificed to Celtic demons that inhabited nearby Oweynagat cave.

Considered by the ancient Celts to be a passage between Ireland and its devil-infested “otherworld,” Oweynagat (pronounced “Oen-na-gat” and meaning “cave of the cats”) was the birthplace of the Samhain festival, the ancient roots of Halloween, according to Irish archaeologist Daniel Curley. Far from the child-friendly event it has become, Halloween can trace its origins to a bloody and eerie ritual marked in Rathcroghan, a former Celtic center buried beneath the farmland of Ireland’s County Roscommon.

Curley is an expert on Rathcroghan, which was the hub of the ancient Irish kingdom of Connaught. At the heart of Rathcroghan, on that monumental mound, animals were sacrificed at a mighty pagan temple during Samhain. Now Ireland is pushing for UNESCO World Heritage status for Rathcroghan (“Rath-craw-hin”), a 5,500-year-old mystery slowly being decoded by scientists and historians.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Laergest Comet Ever

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein offers a rare opportunity for a generation of astronomers to study an object from the extreme edges of the solar system.

More than 2.7 billion miles from the sun—29 times farther than Earth treads—a tiny sliver of sunlight reflected off something plummeting toward our home star. Something icy. Something unimaginably old. Something big.

About four hours later, in the predawn hours of October 20, 2014, a telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert turned its gaze toward the heavens and snapped an enormous picture of the southern night sky, capturing hints of this reflected light.

However, it would take nearly seven years for researchers to identify that strange dot of light as a huge primordial comet—possibly the biggest ever studied with modern telescopes. 

Called Bernardinelli-Bernstein, the comet was announced in June, and researchers have now compiled everything they know about it in a discovery paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“My phone didn’t stop ringing—I wasn’t expecting the reception the [scientific] community gave to the discovery,” says Pedro Bernardinelli, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington. 

He co-discovered the comet during the final weeks of his Ph.D. research at the University of Pennsylvania with his then-adviser Gary Bernstein. “Overall, it’s been pretty overwhelming.”  READ MORE...

Ancient Civilizationss

When Pierre-François Bouchard’s men discovered the ancient stone slab that would change the world on July 19, 1799, they weren’t on an archaeological dig; they were doing a last-minute construction job. The French soldiers occupied a run-down fort in Rosetta, Egypt, and had just days to shore up their defenses for a battle with Ottoman Empire troops.

As the men tore down a wall that had been built using the detritus of nearby ancient Egyptian sites, they discovered a large stone fragment covered in three types of writing, including ancient Greek. 

Intrigued, Bouchard wondered if the stone might say the same thing in three different languages. He shared his find with French scholars who had come to plumb Egypt for archaeological treasures.

They got more than they bargained for. The slab was the Rosetta Stone, and the letters and symbols carefully chiseled into its dark face would shed light on the glory of ancient Egyptian civilization. But first, scholars would have to crack its code.  READ MORE

Just Whales

When a killer whale slowly circled back toward wildlife photographer Brian Skerry in the middle of the ocean after discarding the giant sting ray it was devouring, panic is not what came to mind: "Part of my brain is thinking, 'I can't believe what I'm seeing,'" recalled Skerry. "'Don't screw it up.'"

It's a fascinating moment between man and ocean predator revealed in "Secrets of the Whales," a new National Geographic docuseries premiering on Disney+. The incredible four-part series follows various whale species across 24 locations around the globe.

"The latest greatest science is showing that they have cultures, they have traditions," said Skerry, who released a book of the same title earlier this month. "If we can begin to see our planet through the lens of culture with these charismatic ambassadors for the ocean, maybe it's a bit of a game changer—we change our view of how we see our own planet."

Executive produced by Academy Award-winning director James Cameron and narrated by Oscar nominee Sigourney Weaver, the series is split into four episodes focusing individually on orcas (killer whales), humpbacks and belugas, with the final episode featuring both sperm whales and narwhals.

Cameron is no stranger to the world's oceans. In 2012, he dove a deep sea submarine he built nearly 7 miles down to the deepest point of the Mariana Trench. The filmmaker, who's produced various-ocean themed projects, documented the dive in his film "Deepsea Challenge 3D."

"What this series strove to do was to make them a who, not a what," said Cameron from his New Zealand editing studio where he's working on "Avatar 2." "What we learn from what we see, including a lot of things that have never been recorded before, is that they are people. They have family bonds… They have love. They have grief. They're very much like us in many ways."  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

A Native American Society

Shell cups carved with mythical beings. Large effigy pipes. Beaded baskets. These are among the archaeologically significant objects excavated from the Spiro Mounds. Often overlooked, this Native American site in the midwestern U.S. is among the greatest sources of Mississippian Native American artifacts ever discovered.

Located on the Oklahoma and Arkansas border, the Spiro Mounds were part of a city complex populated from 800 to 1450 A.D. At its peak, it supported a population of some 10,000 people. The Mississippian political, trade, and religious confederation incorporated more than 60 different tribes and stretched from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Great Lakes and from the Rockies to the Virginia coast.


The Spiro population, along with other Mississippian groups across eastern North America, was once equal to the Aztecs and Incas, yet despite its size and sophisticated trade society, its legacy is not well understood.

A groundbreaking exhibition aims to change this. Unveiled in February and running through May 9, “Spiro and the Art of the Mississippian World,” at Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western...

The exhibition helps document “the single most powerful group ever to exist” in the U.S., according to Dennis Peterson, executive director of the Spiro Mounds Archeological Center.

“The people who lived [in Spiro] came to control what we call the Mississippian culture. So pretty much all the United States except for the far northeast and the far northwest, Spiro either had trade with, communication with or direct control over for over 350 years with almost no use of violent warfare,” he says.

The Spiro archeological discoveries give important insight into the culture of the ancient Mississippian people.  READ MORE