10.
The Tree of Life A pair of notebooks belonging to the famous
naturalist Charles Darwin were recently handed over to Cambridge University.
They vanished mysteriously 2 decades ago.
The reason they’re so valuable is that inside one of the notebooks is the famous sketch
Darwin made depicting the Tree of Life.
It was his tree, or at least his vision of the tree, which revolutionized the human understanding
of the evolution of life on this planet.
Where did the notebooks go?
That's a question nobody has an answer to.
But how they recovered them is quite strange..
According to what the university said, the manuscripts were left outside the librarian’s
office on March 9, 2022.
The spot was not covered by security cameras.
They were stashed in a pink gift bag and there was a small note inside wishing the university
librarian a Happy Easter.
They originally went missing in 2001 after they were taken out of the archives to be
photographed.
But they never made it back into the archives.
And after a bit of searching, it became clear they had been stolen.
These books are so important that local police in England teamed up with Interpol and conducted
an international manhunt for them.
And even with the books discovered once again, the police are still trying to hunt down whoever
took them, and whoever left them so nonchalantly as an Easter present.
What do you think happened to the manuscripts the last 20 years?
Let me know in the comments below!
9.
Mons Olympus In October of 2020, the red planet Mars made
its closest approach to planet Earth in 15 years.
This happens when Earth is at its furthest point away from the sun and Mars is at its
closest point to the sun.
The planets were, at this time, only about 34.6 million miles (55.6 million km) from
each other.
You could see Mars plainly in the sky as a burning red dot.
You could also see its surface with a standard telescope, no need for super advanced equipment!
Maybe you even saw this for yourself in 2020?
Let me know in the comments!
Looking through the telescope, you would have been able to see Mons Olympus on Mars, the
tallest volcano ever discovered in our solar system.
It's difficult to see the actual mountain of the volcano.
But with a telescope, when Mars is so close, you can see the white clouds of carbon dioxide
smoldering around its caldera.
Unfortunately, 2020 has come and gone and you won’t get another chance to see this
incredible mountain of smoke and fire for another 13 years in 2035.
So mark your calendar!
As for when Mons Olympus was first discovered, it's actually a pretty cool story.
In 1971, NASA’s Mariner 9 spacecraft went to orbit Mars.
But they were having difficulty taking photographs because the entire planet was absorbed in
a global dust storm.
As the scientists waited for the dust to calm down, the first thing they saw was a mountain
poking out above the clouds.
They would later identify this mountain as the biggest volcano ever found!
It's twice as tall as Mount Everest and has the surface area roughly of the state of Arizona.
8.
Mummified in Oakland In late March of 2022, construction workers
in Oakland discovered a mummified body inside the Henry J Kaiser Convention Center.
What was a mummy doing in the walls of this historic California building?
So far, authorities haven’t been able to figure out who this person was or how they
ended up trapped inside the walls.
The discovery was made during renovations of the building, which is more than 100 years
old and located right in the center of downtown Oakland.
The mummified individual appears to be a man, and based on his state of decay, he's been
in the walls for about five years.
That's behind drywall, between two concrete pillars, and at the very top of the auditorium
in a small cavity.
Authorities don't believe this was the result of a homicide.
Lt. Frederick Shavies said there was no trauma, no indication of foul play, no marks to suggest
his limbs had been tied, and no signs at all of any harm.
Still, nobody can figure out how he got boarded up inside the actual skeleton of the building.
The best theory the police have now is that he had accidentally gotten himself stuck in
the extremely small nook between the pillars and behind the drywall, then suffocated to
death and was never found.
7.
The Biggest Comet Ever Not long ago, astronomers discovered one of
the biggest comets ever.
And found out that it's heading straight towards us!
The comet is, if not the biggest, then probably the second biggest ever identified.
It’s a huge rock 4 billion years old hurtling towards our planet at 22,000 mph(35,405 kph)!
But don't be too scared, it won’t actually hit us.
It should miss Earth by 1 billion miles(1.6 billion km), making its closest approach in
the year 2031.
Assuming there’s no cosmic wind that blows it 1 billion miles(1.6 billion km) in our
direction, we should escape impact.
The icy space rock is over 80 miles(129 km) across and about 100,000 times bigger than
a normal comet.
It's so big that scientists initially mistook it for a dwarf planet.
It wasn't until the comet got a bit closer that they saw its glowing tail, a clear indication
that it's an icy rock and not a tiny planet.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists tried to learn more about its icy heart.
They looked for the bright spot of light corresponding to the nucleus of the comet, then used a computer
model to wipe the rest away.
It's now the single largest nucleus ever detected by astronomers, and it’s also incredibly
dark.
One of the members of the study, planetary science professor David Jewitt, said the heart
of the comet is blacker than coal.
6.
Camel Carvings Something rather unusual was discovered in
the desert of Saudi Arabia.
A group of very old and almost invisible camel sculptures were found carved into rock faces
in the middle of nowhere.
A new investigation shows the camels are the oldest large-scale animal reliefs anywhere
on the planet.
They were originally discovered in 2018 but were made between 7000 and 8000 years ago.
We know very little about the sculptures at this point.
They are so old and so worn that they don’t look much like camels anymore.
The general shape of them is still there, but most of the sculptures have been heavily
eroded.
That’s the kind of thing that will happen after thousands of years exposed to wind and
rain and sun.
Researchers also don't know who made these carvings.
They look quite similar to the reliefs at the ancient city of Petra in Jordan, but are
much older.
They are older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids of Giza, and predate the domestication
of camels in the Middle Eastern regions.
The giant sculptures, which are basically like Mount Rushmore except camels, were carved
into the rock even before any economic developments had been made in the region.
Right now, it's a huge mystery.
Nothing like them was made afterwards by later cultures.
They are shockingly advanced for being so ancient, and would have required scaffolding
to be made.
Plus, there’s no trace of any ancient settlement near where the builders may have lived.
Who carved out these giant camels when civilization was just beginning?
And why?
5.
Cold Neptune Scientists have made a pretty interesting
discovery involving Neptune.
Astronomers studying the atmosphere of the planet found that its global temperature has
been steadily dropping for the past 17 years.
At the same time, its pole has been getting considerably warmer.
Now, we obviously don't have a meteorological station on Neptune.
But we can see how hot it is by using thermal images.
The team of scientists took these images between 2003 and 2020.
During that time, global temperature dropped about 46 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's a pretty monumental drop, and would be enough to ravage all life on Earth.
But what’s really unexpected is that according to Michael Roman, an astronomer from the University
of Leicester, they had originally thought temperatures would get warmer, not colder!
That's because for the past 17 years, summer has been in full swing on Neptune’s southern
hemisphere.
Exposed to the sun, the planet should be getting warmer.
Each year on Neptune is 165 years on Earth.
The ice planet is 2.78 million miles(4.4 million km) from the sun.
It takes 40 years for a season to go by, with summer starting in 2005 and ending in 2045.
The average temperature on Neptune is -364 degrees Fahrenheit.
But in the last couple years, in what is almost the middle of summer, the temperature increased
from -186 degrees to -166 degrees.
And nobody has any idea why!
4.
The Human Hobbit A human hobbit ancestor of modern humans,
may very well be hiding out in the jungles of Indonesia, according to a new and controversial
claim.
The hobbit is actually called Homo floresiensis, and it lived from between 700,000 and 60,000
years ago on the island of Flores.
This ancient human cousin stood 3’ 6”(1 m) tall, it had a very small brain, huge feet
just like hobbits from the Shire, and nobody really knows where it came from.
It evolved isolated from everyone else then went extinct without a trace.
It’s one of the biggest mysteries in ancient human development.
These days, Gregory Forth, a retired anthropologist from the University of Alberta in Canada,
claims these hobbit-like creatures are still living on Flores today.
He recently told Live Science that because we don't know exactly when the species went
extinct, and because Flores is a big and mysterious place, some of them could very well still
be alive.
Other scientists have called the claim dramatic nonsense.
And so far no tiny ancient humans have been found.
But Mr. Forth believes they could be soon.
3.
Plutonian Ice Volcanoes Pluto is covered in amazing ice volcanoes
unlike anything else we have in our solar system.
Unlike Mons Olympus on Mars, the volcanoes of Pluto spew out ice instead of lava.
Scientists call them cryovolcanoes.
And in 2015 when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the planet, they focused on Wright
Mons and Piccard Mons, two of the biggest ice volcanoes in the galaxy.
Piccard Mons is the bigger of the two, standing 4.3 miles(6.9 km) high and 140 miles(225 km)
wide.
One of the lead researchers, Kelsi Singer, says there's nothing else in the solar system
that has similar features to these gigantic cryovolcanoes.
All across the icy terrain around the volcanoes, researchers discovered giant lumps of solid
ice formed from eruptions.
But the texture of these eruptions is different from other cryovolcanoes on moons like Europa
or Titan.
There's something about Pluto’s thin atmosphere, its ridiculously cold temperatures, and it's
very low gravity that makes it different.
These combinations allow for a fluid, much like liquid water, to be sucked out of ice
volcanoes.
When it hits the air, the liquid boils and freezes at the exact same time.
This creates a hot explosion of semi-liquid ice completely unique to Pluto.
And as of right now, scientists are pretty shocked.
2.
An Alien Megastructure NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has the primary
job of finding planets that orbit different stars.
But why are we searching for exoplanets anyway?
Finding planets in other solar systems helps us understand our own world.
And what we’ve discovered so far is that our solar system is incredibly unique.
The KeplerTelescope is able to detect all kinds of other things as well.
The telescope can find solar flares, star spots, and even artificial structures orbiting
stars.
By artificial structures, I mean anything from an alien satellite to an alien megastructure.
If it was built by a sophisticated civilization and put into space, Kepler will likely be
able to find it.
The way Kepler identifies these exo-planets is by measuring the dimming of starlight.
It can sense where the light dims, which tells it there’s a planet there.
Then after a bit of investigation, Kepler can create a light curve by tracking the planet
to get a good idea of its size and shape.
99% of these exoplanets are circular just like all the planets in the Milky Way.
Kepler discovered something very unique among the stars in the direction of the constellation
Cygnus.
They were looking at a star when the light dimmed by 15% from a passing object.
Then, there was a sudden burst of light dimming where it went down 22%.
Scientists say whatever the object was that passed in front of the star must have been
enormous!
And there were a lot of them!
It doesn't seem to be a disk of dust.
There are no infrared signals.
Right now, it looks like Kepler accidentally stumbled upon some kind of alien megastructure,
something like an artificial planet stuck in the orbit of a star over 1.5 times the
size of the sun.
Of course, we have no idea what it is yet!
1.
Life-Sized Doll Back on planet Earth, something strange was
discovered out in the woods of Georgia.
And trust me when I say strange is the only word to describe it.
Georgia police rushed out into the deep forest south of Atlanta following the report of a
deceased female.
This was in February of 2022, with the caller saying they had discovered the dead woman
face down on a hiking trail.
The cops showed up, but didn’t find a body.
The person wasn't a person at all, but a life-sized female doll that had been dumped in the bush!
The Jones County Sheriff's Office shared their story on Facebook, along with pictures of
the plastic victim, who for some even weirder reason they decided to name Selena.
As silly as it may seem, it’s understandable that the hiker thought he had come across
a dead person.
The doll was wearing real clothes, and it had been dumped in a bunch of bushes and covered
in mud.
She didn't immediately look plastic, and it’s not like the hiker reached out to check.
The doll was even wearing a pair of white socks!
Super creepy and bizarre.
If you had the opportunity, would you take a trip to space?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching.
Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already and I'll see you again
soon for another awesome video on all the best discoveries in the universe! :)