All photos are credited to NASA.

Many will feature little-known animals that inhabit our planet today, with the occasional extinct or prehistoric species thrown in for good measure. It's a good way to not only share the wonder of our planet's beautiy, but also a reminder that we're not the only ones who exist on it.

NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists have captured images of the sun’s surface in the finest detail yet, revealing a strange and dynamic facade.

It’s dangerous to look directly at the sun without proper eye protection. But researchers were able to peek at its scorching surface with the help of the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

Scientists originally took the images for a different reason: to fine-tune and test the limits of the telescope. But when they looked at the results, they realized they’d photographed the sun’s bright outer shell at higher resolution than ever before.

What’s more, they saw strange feathery patterns rippling across the surface.

Read more here.

LONDON (AP) — A massive ancient oak tree linked to the legend of Robin Hood may have been loved to death.

The 1,200-year-old Major Oak in Sherwood Forest is believed to have died after it didn’t sprout leaves this spring, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said Thursday.

Visitors over the past two centuries who viewed the tree’s gnarled limbs and sprawling canopy in Nottingham compressed the soil, making it difficult for rain to reach its roots, the conservation group said.

The forest has been under threat for years and the tree had been rumored to have died in the past — only to have the group confirm it was still alive.

That is no longer the case.

“The tree’s failure to produce leaves this year is heartbreaking for everyone,” Hollie Drake of the RSPB said in a statement announcing the death.

Source

Would you consider living in a place like this?

If you were in charge of design, what would you do in our own Arnot Mall?

Cornell professor of entomology, Bryan Danforth, and his research assistant, Henry Steig, are walking slowly through Webster Union Cemetery, eyes to the ground, when Danforth sees it.

A cloud of dozens of bees, swirling and darting close to the earth.

"Whoa, look at this! We did not waste our time," Danforth told Steig, who is an undergraduate at Cornell studying entomology.

They were in Rochester last week to put a theory to the test. Their question: Are graveyards natural gathering places for ground-nesting bees?

What brought them here was a remarkable discovery at East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca in 2022: an aggregation of bees thought to be among the largest in the world.

"In a one-and-a-half-acre area of that cemetery, there were 5.5 million bees coming out of the ground," Danforth said.

Cemeteries are ideal nesting sites because of their well-drained, sandy soil, low foot traffic, low pesticide use, and abundance of wildflowers and trees, according to the researchers. And these species are hard-working pollinators drawn to wildflowers, crops, and fruit trees.

Read the rest here.

Let's have another ongoing thread, this time the focus being interesting trivia and tid bits of info.

First up, have you ever wondered the origin of the term, "spick and span"?

Reportedly, it comes from an old Norse word for nail which is "spik," referring to shiny, bright new nails on a ship. The word "span" is said to be derived from the Old Norse spánn (meaning chip or shaving of wood), which gave rise to the Middle English term "span-new" (meaning fresh from the carpenter's knife).

Sometime around the 1300's the term "span-new" began to be used, meaning something is brand new.

By the mid-16th century, the phrase was expanded to "spick-and-span-new". Sailors and shipwrights used it to describe a newly built ship where every single nail (spick) and woodchip (span) was brand new.

The phrase gradually shortened to "spick and span". By the mid-1800s, the meaning shifted from being "brand new" to the modern definition of being extremely neat, tidy, and spotless. Which is how we use the term today.

NEW YORK (AP) — A biotech company that aims to resurrect lost creatures said Tuesday it has hatched live chicks in an artificial environment — a development that was met with mixed reviews from scientists and critics of its de-extinction mission.

Twenty-six baby chickens — ranging from a few days to several months old — were born from a 3D printed lattice structure that mimics an eggshell, according to Colossal Biosciences.

Colossal previously announced it had genetically engineered living animals to resemble extinct species, including mice with long hair like the woolly mammoth and wolf pups that take after dire wolves.

Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm said the artificial egg technology could one day be scaled up to genetically tweak living birds to resemble New Zealand’s extinct South Island giant moa, whose eggs are 80 times the size of a chicken’s and would be difficult for any modern bird to lay.

Read more here.

What do you think? Is it a good idea to bring back extinct species?

Conversely, what extinct species would you like to see brought back, if such a thing were possible?

An asteroid roughly the size of one to two school buses will fly by Earth Monday, coming as close as 91,593 kilometers (56,913 miles), according to the European Space Agency — equivalent to about one quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon.

Astronomers at the Mount Lemmon Survey in Tucson, Arizona, discovered the asteroid on May 10 and named it 2026JH2. The object belongs to a class of asteroids called Apollo, which orbit the sun on trajectories that intersect with Earth’s own orbit around the sun.

At its closest pass, 2026JH2 will be about 24% of the average distance between Earth and the moon, and about two and a half times the distance at which hundreds of geosynchronous satellites orbit, providing services such as telecommunications and weather forecasts. The close pass is expected to occur on Monday just before 6 p.m. ET, according to NASA’s JPL Small-Body Database.

Read more here.

You can read a little more about this here.

by Karen Stollznow

You’ve probably seen it on social media before: a paragraph of scrambled text that looks like nonsense at first glance, yet somehow you can read it with surprising ease.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

This effect, often playfully referred to as typoglycemia, is frequently shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work.

But this viral claim is only part of the story. To understand why it works, we need to look at how the brain actually processes written language.

There is no magical ‘rule’

The claim that usually accompanies this snippet is that as long as the first and last letters of a word are in the right place, the order of the middle letters doesn’t matter.

At first glance, the claim seems plausible.

But while there is a kernel of truth here, the explanation is misleading.

Reading scrambled words has much less to do with a magical “rule” about first and last letters, and much more to do with how our brains use context, pattern recognition and prediction.

We don’t read letter by letter

When we read, we typically don’t painstakingly process each letter in sequence. Instead, skilled readers recognise words rapidly by drawing on multiple cues at once. Psycholinguistic research shows that we process words as patterns rather than as sequences of individual sounds.

These include familiar letter patterns, the overall shape of the word and, crucially, the context of the sentence. Our brains are constantly predicting what is likely to come next, then checking those predictions against the visual input.

This is why we often miss typos in our own writing. We don’t see what’s actually on the page, we see what we expect to be there.

The same principle helps us make sense of jumbled words. Even when letters are out of order, enough of the structure remains for the brain to make an educated guess.

Word shape and structure matter

The viral meme suggests that only the first and last letters matter.

But this oversimplifies what’s really going on. We are sensitive to how letters relate to each other within a word. Common spelling patterns and familiar combinations make words easier to recognise, even when slightly distorted.

This is also why certain visual disruptions make reading harder. Text in alternating caps, such as “AlTeRnAtInG CaPs”, is difficult to process because it disrupts the usual visual contour of words. The same goes for “ransom note” lettering made from mismatched fonts, which interferes with pattern recognition.

In other words, readability depends on preserving enough of a word’s internal structure, not just its outer letters.

Not all scrambled text is readable

If the meme were true, any sentence with intact first and last letters should be easy to read. But that’s not what we find.

Take this example:

Slhal I cmorape tehe to a srmmeus day

It follows the supposed “rules”, yet it is much harder to decipher. In fact, this is the opening of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

So why is the viral paragraph so much easier to read? Because it has been carefully (if unconsciously) engineered to be readable.

The hidden tricks behind the meme

Several factors make the famous example easier to process than it appears.

First, many of the words are short, which limits how many possible combinations the letters could form. Words like “you” and “can” are often left unchanged.

Second, function words such as “the”, “and” and “is” are usually intact. These small, common words provide the grammatical scaffolding of the sentence, making it easier to predict what comes next.

Third, when longer words are scrambled, the changes are often minimal. Adjacent letters are swapped (“wrod” for “word”), which is much easier to process than more extreme rearrangements.

Finally, the passage itself is highly predictable. Once you recognise the topic and rhythm, your brain fills in the gaps automatically, much as it does when listening to speech in a noisy environment.

The key to understanding this phenomenon is context. Words are not processed in isolation. Each word is interpreted in relation to the others around it, and within a broader framework of meaning.

This allows us to compensate for missing or distorted information.

But there are limits. As scrambling becomes more extreme, or as words become less predictable, comprehension quickly breaks down. Reading speed also slows noticeably, even when we can still make sense of the text.

Humans and machines

Interestingly, computers can now unscramble jumbled words with remarkable accuracy. By analysing probabilities and patterns across large datasets, algorithms can determine the most likely original form of a word or sentence.

In this sense, machines and humans rely on similar principles. Not rigid rules about letter position, but flexible systems that weigh patterns and probabilities. This highlights why the “typoglycemia” claim is an oversimplification, rather than a scientific rule.

The idea persists because it captures a genuine insight in a catchy way. It reveals that reading is not a simple, letter-by-letter process, but a dynamic interaction between perception and expectation.

At the same time, it’s a reminder of how easily scientific ideas can be distorted as they spread online.

So yes, we can often read scrambled words. But not because the order of letters doesn’t matter. It’s because our brains are remarkably good at making sense of imperfect information. So good, in fact, that they can turn a mess into meaning.

Karen Stollznow is a Research Fellow of Linguistics, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University and University of Colorado Boulder.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation and is shared through a Creative Commons License.

Check out out!

Reed, who studies the speech variations of the Appalachian region, uses the concept "rootedness." It's the local attachment people place onto pronunciations and certain words, he said.

"[With] a pronunciation like 'warsh,' it's always the stories about someone's aunt or their grandfather or their grandmother, their mama or their papa," Reed said.

"These pronunciations and these words stick around because they are meaningful," he continued. They're indicative of home.

In a park in southeast Baltimore, near where filmmaker John Waters shot his 1980s classic Hairspray, which features the classic Baltimore accent, locals and transplants alike offered their perspectives on the accent.

Cary Griffin, 70, lives in Washington, D.C., but visits her 8-month-old grandson in Baltimore. She remembers her grandmother, from Richmond, Va., going to do the "warsh."

Adam Cook, 29, is originally from California and moved to Baltimore four years ago. He immediately noticed the receptionist's strong accent at his dentist's office. Ed Morman, 79, who has lived in Baltimore for 39 years, said he actually heard the accent more when he lived in Philadelphia and Seattle. He does not say "warsh" because of his own New York accent, he said.

Others felt strongly about the matter: "I do say warsh!" said Lisa Molina, a 53-year-old Baltimore native, sitting on her stoop on a sunny day. Her mother says it — so naturally, that's how Molina says it.

Richard Spindler, 54, who lives in the same building as Molina, agreed that's the only right way to say wash.

Read the entire article here.

Do you know someone who says "warsh"? Can you think of any other unusual pronunciations you've heard from someone?

https://science.nasa.gov/specials/your-name-in-landsat/?fbclid=IwY2xjawReosFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR4aF9luj_hgkkffMDsBU-YTpIW-7z3ATlTkUkwaMPBiTJTewgS9zod_OVeDTA_aem_380DrPfiPRiNXq2wzQvP0Q

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/faberge-winter-egg-russian-royalty-auction/

by Carl Lipo

Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is often portrayed in popular culture as an enigma. The rationale is clear: The tiny, remote island in the Pacific features nearly 1,000 enormous statues – the moai. The magnitude and number of these monuments defy easy explanation.

Since European ships first encountered these stone giants in the 18th century, outsiders have branded the island as fundamentally mysterious, possibly beyond archaeologists’ ability to explain. This characteristic is part of what makes the island famous. Tour operators market the inexplicable. Documentaries promise unsolved puzzles. Popular books ask how “primitive people” could possibly move 70-ton megaliths.

Archaeological researchers have put forward various explanations for the statues, which were made between 1200 and 1700, but there remains no consensus. For decades, experts offered plausible scenarios: powerful chiefs commanding workers, elite-controlled statue quarries, wooden sleds drawn by hundreds of islanders, roller systems, wooden rails and ceremonial pathway markers. Based on authoritative assertions and compelling narratives, these accounts are rarely connected to archaeological evidence.

I’m an archaeologist who has been studying Rapa Nui for more than two decades. In newly published research, my colleagues and I believe we’ve solved the mystery in three essential ways.

First, using 11,686 photographs taken by drone, we created a comprehensive, three-dimensional model of Rano Raraku, the volcanic crater where 95% of Rapa Nui’s moai were carved. It was a systematic documentation – every slope, every carved surface, every production feature captured at a resolution down to the centimeter. The model generated predictions that we and other researchers could test: If production had been centralized, workshops would have been clustered; if they’d been hierarchical, we’d find differences in resources used at each level; if it had been dictated by elites, techniques would be standardized.

Our data revealed the opposite: Drone imagery shows 30 independent workshops working simultaneously. Instead of top-down organization, small, clan-level groups seem to have used innovative human engineering.

A close-up of a 3D model of the volcanic crater where nearly all of Rapa Nui’s giant statues were carved, with unfinished carvings outlined. Lipo et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC BY

Previous attempts to understand Rano Raraku failed not because the quarry held impenetrable secrets but due to the lack of published documentation and the limitations of traditional mapping methods. Two-dimensional maps couldn’t capture three-dimensional relationships. Statues emerge from cliff faces at various angles. Production areas overlap vertically. Carving sequences intersect across time. Traditional archaeological methods provided impressions but missed details and couldn’t capture the system as a whole.

Our 3D model changes that. We identified 426 moai in various stages of production, 341 extraction trenches, 133 voids where completed statues were removed, and previously unmapped quarrying areas on the exterior slopes. Each workshop was self-contained, demonstrating decentralization. Three distinct carving techniques emerge, showing that different groups employed different approaches while producing standardized forms.

Unfinished moai remain partially carved in a volcanic crater. Lipo et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC BY

The walking moai

Second, we generated data to resolve the age-old question about moai transport: How did Rapanui people move these megalithic giants? Despite many decades of attempts, previous transport theories all shared a fatal flaw: They made no predictions that were testable, meaning that scientists could prove or disprove.

Our walking hypothesis – based on oral traditions, ideas by our colleague Sergio Rapu Haoa and tested by Czech engineer Pavel Pavel – made specific, testable predictions. We found that “road moai,” those statues that were abandoned along constructed roads used for transport, differ morphologically from those that reached their final destinations, large platforms called ahu.

We measured 62 moai abandoned along ancient roads. The road moai proved distinct, characterized by wider bases, D-shaped cross sections and a forward lean of 5-15 degrees. These features wouldn’t be necessary if the moai were transported in a horizontal position. They make vertical transport – “walking” the statues – possible.

In 2013, we built a 4.35-ton concrete replica scaled from road moai. It wasn’t an artistic interpretation but a precise reproduction of measurable features from a statue found along the road and abandoned during transport. With 18 people and three ropes, the statue walked 100 meters in 40 minutes.

In previous work, the author and colleagues built a replica moai to demonstrate the walking transport.

In recently published work, we documented that physics confirmed what walking the replica demonstrated about the road moai shape. The forward lean creates an inverted pendulum that converts lateral oscillation into forward progress.

Those moai that reached ahu must have been altered in order for them to stand upright stably, while those along the roads would retain the features that enabled them to be “walked.”

The distribution data for moai across the landscape provided another test: The locations of road moai leading from the quarry follow an exponential decay curve, meaning that probability of a moai falling in transport is highest near the quarry and decreases with distance since those that fall over never get any farther. Fracture patterns on those road moai with breaks align with vertical impact stresses, meaning the broken moai were damaged by falling from a standing position.

Our testable predictions held.

Deforestation without collapse

The third “mystery” is how an advanced society could destroy its own environment. The island was deforested by the end of the 17th century. This mystery also yielded to systematic analysis. We analyzed data from previous archaeological excavations. Rather than finding increased rat consumption by people, indicating dietary stress from a lack of other food sources, remains of rats eaten by people decreased over time while seafood dominated throughout.

Ecological modeling revealed what we think really happened. Polynesian rats, introduced with the arrival of the first Polynesian colonists around 1200, could grow into a population of millions within just a few years. By eating 95% of the island’s tree seeds, rats prevented forest regeneration. Humans cleared land for cultivation, but rats made the recovery of the palm forests impossible. The synergistic interaction seems to have accelerated deforestation within five centuries.

This wasn’t “ecocide” – intentional self-destruction – but rather unintended ecological transformation caused by an introduced species. Our research also demonstrated that the Rapanui adapted through the use of rock mulch agriculture, which improved soil productivity. They continued to eat seafood and produce monuments for 500 years after deforestation began.

To tackle Rapa Nui’s mysteries, we used systematic documentation. We specified testable predictions, gathered data that could prove us wrong and accepted what the evidence showed. Rapa Nui shows that even entrenched mysteries yield to methodical investigation.

Carl Lipo is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean for Research, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons License.

The Last Penny Minted in the US