10. A Hole in Antarctica A team of researchers from the University
of Toronto have discovered a massive hole the size of Panama on the surface of Antarctica. The
discovery is quite baffling to specialists, who can't seem to agree on whether the hole
can be blamed on climate change or not. When looking at the satellite images of Antarctica,
it seems as though somebody-or something-blasted a giant pit into the middle of the ice.
But what actually happened is called a polynya, a phenomenon in which a giant pit of open water is
surrounded by sea ice. It usually happens along the coastal regions of Antarctica,
but this one is special because it happened hundreds of miles from the shore. It's deep
in the Antarctic interior and scientists wouldn't even know about it if it weren’t for satellites.
The polynya is about 30,000 square miles (77,700 square km) and scientists can't really say how it
formed. Their best guess is that the temperature of the water in the Southern Ocean is abnormally
high, causing sea ice to melt and forming a massive hole of nothing in an otherwise,
relatively solid ice sheet. What this means for the future and how it will impact us?
No one has any idea yet!! 9. A Mysterious Monument
Archaeologists have discovered a mysterious monument hidden in plain sight in northern
Guatemala. To the naked eye, the monument just looks like a normal hill near the ancient Maya
city state of Tikal. But when researchers really zoomed in on aerial images that they took of the
area, they realized that the hill is actually an artificial structure hidden beneath hundreds of
years of soil and vegetation that have piled up. The building turned out to be a pyramid hiding
in plain sight, part of an ancient neighborhood that archaeologists have never explored before.
On the ground, they would have never known about this mysterious monument because they
would have just walked over it, thinking it was nothing but a boring hill covered in grass.
What's truly interesting about the ancient neighborhood is that it appears to be distinctly
different from all other neighborhoods at Tikal. The buildings are shaped differently
with different architectural features more closely resembling the Aztec capital
of Teotihuacan 800 miles (1,287km) away!! After completing laser scanning using light
detection and ranging technology, the researchers identified the ancient neighborhood as a tiny
replica of one of the squares at Teotihuacan called the Citadel, which happens to include
the very famous pyramid of the feathered serpent. But what is an Aztec neighborhood doing in a Maya
city??? It seems that the people of Teotihuacan had built a little slice of home in the Maya
capital. The two civilizations must have had some kind of relationship prior to 378 AD. That was
when the king of Teotihuacan sent his generals to take over Tikal, which they did successfully. It
looks like they installed their own little piece of home about a century before the invasion, but
scientists and historians are clueless as to why. 8. A Scream of Bees
Scientists were researching honeybees and giant hornets in Vietnam when they
discovered something terrifying! It turns out that bees actually scream in terror!!
The researchers recorded sounds made by honeybees when they’re attacked by hornets
and now we can listen to the terrible scream of bees when they feel their lives are in danger.
I do not think I needed to know this. Bees respond to the threat of hornets by
screeching in utter terror. The sounds are called antipredator pipes, that's actually quite similar
to how other animals cry out or shriek when in distress. For example, animals that live in
groups or flocks often scream when a predator comes too close. And bees do the same thing.
Of course, you can't actually hear the screams with your human ears which is probably for
the best. Scientists only figured out what was happening because they recorded 30,000
communication signals from bees. They found that when the hornets showed up, the communication
between the bees became eight times more intense. The bees created a buzzing noise by vibrating
the muscles in their thorax and by shaking their wings. The vibrations pass through their legs, go
through the hive, and can be sensed by other bees. To humans, it may sound like a gentle buzzing,
but to the bees, they might as well all be screaming bloody murder at the same time!
7. Universe in a Lab A shocking new theory could prove
that our universe was created in a laboratory. Wait, what?! We might be in the matrix after
all! Or we’re somebody’s crazy experiment!! It has to do with quantum gravity technology,
something that scientists say could one day elevate us to a “class A” civilization. A
civilization of this caliber has the technological capabilities to create their own universe!
As you may already know, there are a lot of theories floating around about how our universe
was created, meaning what happened before The Big Bang. One of these possibilities is that
our universe was created by a very advanced civilization in a lab, and scientists are now
saying that this could be possible using quantum tunneling. This is a science that we don't
currently understand, but it has the potential to create a baby universe out of literally nothing.
As of right now, we don't actually understand how quite a few very important pillars of physics
function. The two main pillars that we don't understand are quantum mechanics and quantum
gravity. But it's not out of the question for us to master these features of physics in the future.
As it stands, we are actually a “class D” civilization because we can't even function
as a species to prevent our own people from dying of hunger and because we're destroying our own
world. We need to upgrade quite a bit just to be a class C civilization. But sometime very long ago,
billions of years in the past, a civilization very similar to us may have mastered all the quantum
sciences needed to create a baby universe. That baby universe may have been ours, which expanded
at The Big Bang to ultimately create us. What do you think about this? How do you
think our universe was created?? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
6. Planet 9 Some new information has brought a secret planet
back into the spotlight. Technically, Planet 9 is hypothetical. It's a potential planet hiding
at the farthest reaches of our solar system, with its gravitational pull being responsible
for the peculiar organization of space debris beyond Neptune. For quite some time, researchers
have speculated that there is a huge planet hiding from view, influencing the orbit around the sun of
all the most distant objects in the solar system. The hypothetical planet is estimated to be about
5 or 10 times larger than Earth, and about 800 times as far from the sun as Earth.
In 2021, scientist Michael E. Brown suggested that Planet 9 may have once been closer to the sun,
but was pushed out of its orbit by Jupiter billions of years ago during the formation of the
solar system as we know it today. The issue with the planet is that it's never actually been seen
by any telescope. There are too many things in the way to either confirm or deny its existence.
So far as we know, Planet 9 is the center of its own little cosmic party,
so far away from the sun that it takes 20,000 years to complete a single orbit.
5. The Glow-in-the-Dark Springhare Researchers have accidentally discovered
the first African mammal that literally glows in the dark. It's called a springhare, and it
has fantastic fluorescent abilities that allow it to glow when the lights go out. Fluorescence
in nature typically occurs when an animal absorbs light and then bounces it back out of them again.
It occurs very rarely, in only a handful of mammals across three different continents. One of
these is the platypus, which was only discovered to glow in the dark in 2020! Cool right??
The newest discovery of the glowing springhare was made by researchers at Northland College.
They had actually been visiting the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago to check out the
fluorescent abilities of flying squirrels when they accidentally pointed their flashlight at
a springhare. Surprise – surprise, they were amazed to see that the springhare glowed as well.
The specimen at the museum was collected back in 1905 and has been glowing for over 100 years.
The fluorescence that we're talking about is extremely subtle,
meaning you wouldn't actually see it if you crept up on the animal at night. But scientists,
seeing as they just made this discovery a few weeks ago, are still trying to figure
out what a springhare being fluorescent means and just what other animals might glow in the dark!
Any ideas? Let me know in the comments below! 4. The Mysterious Arthur’s Stone
There is a mysterious stone tomb in western England called Arthur’s Stone. It supposedly has
links to the legendary King Arthur, despite the fact that the stone originated 6000 years before
he may or may not have existed. Recent excavations have shown that the site was first occupied
by a mound of earth, meaning even before it was constructed, a different monument was in the same
place. It’s also not the only mysterious structure from thousands of years ago. There are other old
monuments dotting the landscape here, which Julian Thomas from the University of Manchester says is a
ceremonial landscape similar to Stonehenge. The only difference is that Arthur’s Stone and the
other monuments in the region are significantly older, by thousands of years. But what it implies
is that in this part of the UK, the Neolithic people were very serious about their spirituality.
Arthur's Stone itself is pretty small, consisting only of nine standing stones and
one large capstone. It leads to an underground passage that was once a burial chamber,
although whatever human remains were there have been gone for centuries. The person buried beneath
the stone tomb could have been a great Neolithic warrior, a local king, or even a high priest.
But because this is thousands of years ago we're talking about, historians just don't know the
truth about the mysterious stone tomb. 3. An Interstellar Object
An interstellar object named Oumuamua could be the closest thing to a real UFO that
anyone has ever seen. The object itself was discovered floating through our solar system,
a massive chunk of something 3000 feet (914m) long and possibly about 548 feet (167m) thick.
Scientists couldn't immediately identify it, and so they resorted to educated guessing.
One of those guesses was that the interstellar object was an iceberg of pure nitrogen floating
by our planet, about 85 times the distance of the moon. This would mean it was a chunk that broke
off a frozen planet similar to Pluto and has just been floating through space for millions of years.
Other researchers, including a Harvard astrophysicist, claim that the object was a type
of intergalactic vessel called a lightsail sent from a different civilization. They back up their
reasoning by saying there isn't enough nitrogen in all of the universe to create a frozen iceberg
3000 feet (914m) long and over 500 feet (152m) thick. It's just not scientifically possible.
After debunking this first theory, we can open up the possibility of an actual alien ship.
The mysterious object was moving at speeds of 57,000 mph (91,733 kph). It definitely did not
originate in our solar system. And what makes it so strange is that it did not display the ordinary
behavior of a rock moving through space. It seemed to move on its own trajectory, unaffected by the
pull of the sun or any other large celestial object. It could be that it was a long-distance
vessel powered by light from stars, cruising to… well, nobody knows exactly where it could
be going. Once it left our solar system, we lost track of it and have no idea where it is now.
2. Brain Tapeworm A man was recently hospitalized with a
mysterious illness. He was experiencing seizures, he was disoriented, and he was exhibiting very
strange behavior. After undergoing multiple tests, doctors still had no idea what was wrong with him.
He was a medical anomaly – at least, he was until doctors finally made the terrifying discovery
that he had tapeworms living in his brain! They had been there for a very long time - decades!
This bizarre case was documented in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The man was 38 years old and otherwise in perfect health. But one night, his wife found him on the
floor shaking and yammering gibberish. He was hospitalized, poked and prodded,
and then the doctors found the tapeworms. Twenty years earlier, the man had been living
in a rural part of Guatemala. There, it's actually not that rare to accidentally eat parasites from
pork that wasn’t cooked properly or by eating in an unsanitary restaurant. And doctor’s believe
that is probably what happened. The tiny parasitic eggs spread throughout his body until they
wound up in his brain. They had travelled through his muscles, into his bloodstream,
and up into his brain. He was totally fine for 20 years until the giant tapeworms got too big
and started pressing on parts of his brain that began to change everything!
Thankfully, this was a pretty easy fix. Doctors just treated him with
anti-parasitic and anti-inflammatory drugs and he was released from the hospital within five days.
1. Fossils in the Sky A man discovered fossils at the top of a mountain,
8300 feet (2530m) above sea level. The fossils that he found were embedded inside a giant rock,
and they looked like some kind of prehistoric tentacle monsters! He wasn't an archaeologist or
even a paleontologist. He was just an ordinary guy who uploaded his discovery to TikTok. The
video quickly amassed over 3 million views, and people began to speculate over just how exactly
fossils ended up so high at the top of a mountain. Paleontologists were quick to come forward and
label the fossils as crinoids, a group of sea creatures from millions of years ago related to
starfish and sand dollars. They thrived during the Paleozoic era, between 250 and 500 million
years before today. Tim Ewen, the curator for the Natural History Museum, calls them sea
lilies. He describes these creatures as having a stem anchored to the sea floor, kind of like
a living flower. The rest of their body floats slightly above the anchor, allowing them to feed
on tiny food particles by catching them with their long tentacles. They are fascinating creatures,
with some even still alive today – but again, what are they doing at the top of a mountain?
The reason is actually quite simple. It has nothing to do with a biblical flood like some
people suggest, but rather tectonic plates. These fossils were initially under the sea,
but because of plate tectonics, they’re now at the top of the mountain. It was a process that
took millions of years, with continents literally colliding against each other due to the intense
tectonic forces going on underground, which slowly lifted up the land to create mountains.
What do you think the mysterious Planet 9 looks like, and does it even exist? Let me
know your thoughts in the comments and thanks a lot for watching. Remember to hit the subscribe
button and come back soon for another amazing video! See you next time! Bye! :)