Although we will see specifically the Christian version of these beings, angels are an object of study and admiration in many cultures and religions around the world. In their variant recorded in the Holy Bible, these creatures are described as beings of extreme power and strength, responsible for performing tasks entrusted by God to fulfill His divine will.

It is true that for skeptics, these stories are hard to believe. But remember that the books of the Bible were written in ancient times, when knowledge about universal phenomena was very limited. So if we look for solid, logical explanations of the angelic accounts and compare them with scientific and empirical discoveries, the resulting conclusion might surprise us. In this list, we will see that, in fact, angels could be actual life-forms living out there, right now, beyond our current knowledge.

10 They Are Not The Kind Of Life-Forms Scientists Are Looking For

One of the main questions posed by humankind is whether there is life outside our world, and we now live in a time when this question is being taken very seriously.

To date, the scientific community has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in finding potentially habitable planets in space, which are currently counted in a few tens. However, it happens that despite detecting habitable planets, scientists’ search for alien life-forms is very limited: Their plan is to identify carbon-based life forms.

All life-forms known to humans (including us) are carbon-based, so the reason for using that filter in the search is obvious. The problem is that by doing so, any living being with a different composition will probably go unnoticed, and that includes the plausible angelic creatures.

While angels are not abstract forces but actually have bodies,^[1] studies on the sacred texts show that angels are represented with a nature closer to that of God. We know that God is described in the Bible as a spirit, the “spirit” being a kind of ethereal, presumably energetic force.

In short, angels seem to be life-forms composed of an unknown substance, superior to any known type of matter or energy. With such characteristics, it is evident that scientists would not be able to locate this type of being, even with their best technological achievements.

9 The Angelic World Is Outside The Visible Universe

The Bible states the expansion is composed of three different zones called “heavens.” The first one is our atmosphere, the second heaven is outer space, and the third one is God’s dwelling place. Given the immaterial characteristics attributed to God, it is understood that the last heaven refers to a place separate from the physical universe.

It is also said that angels stand before God, so, logically, these creatures also live in the same divine abode or “Heaven.” If we interpret these stories, the abode of the angels could be an extra-dimensional realm, from which the entire material creation (including Earth) can be seen but not vice versa. How possible can this be?

A few decades ago, science formulated the string theory. One of the results of this theory is the possibility that there are multiple “cosmic bubbles”: parallel universes cohabitating within a larger expansion.^[2] Each of these universes could have different physical laws, challenging our understanding of reality. More recently, a posthumous publication of famous physicist Stephen Hawking stated there could be only a few coexisting universes.

Perhaps, one of these universes is actually the divine abode inhabited by the angels. And the fact of its unknown physical nature is consistent with the description given by the Bible about this place, being unreachable for humans. In turn, the idea of the angels’ world being outside our material universe supports the argument that humans have no means of detecting these creatures, if they exist.

8 Angels Move Faster Than Light

And continuing on the basis that angels are not limited by our physical laws, there is another spectacular ability these creatures have: they can move at superluminal speeds.

Indeed, the fact of being immaterial creatures superior to our physical world frees them from having a speed limit. They are thus differentiated from matter in our universe, which cannot travel faster than light in a vacuum.

For example, there is an occasion contained in the ninth chapter of Daniel’s book. The prophet Daniel was praying to God, when even before he finished doing so, an angel traveled from his dwelling place outside this universe to where the prophet was. In comparison, light takes more than a second to travel from Moon to Earth, but this angel traveled incalculable distances (from one universe to another; you do the math) in a blink.

It has been speculated for decades that perhaps there is a type of matter capable of surpassing the speed of light. Theoretical particles called tachyons could move faster than light in a vacuum, which makes it difficult for scientists to detect them.^[3] If these particles leave the light behind—similar to an airplane breaking the sound barrier—they are impossible to perceive in real time with the currently available means.

The same would apply to angelic creatures; maybe they are moving from one place to another right now, and we cannot even notice it.

7 They Interact With Human Race Only When Necessary

Chapter 19 of Genesis describes the famous story in which two angels destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, with a rain of fire and brimstone. Interestingly, scientists at University of Bristol (England) deciphered an ancient Assyrian star map, which points to the fall of a supposed meteor over the Alps in 3123 BC. Using computer simulations, scientists also noted that the burning debris from the impact could have rained over the Middle East. This is the area where it is believed Sodom and Gomorrah existed.

On the other hand, Isaiah 37: 36, 37 records an occasion when an angel destroyed the Assyrian army of King Sennacherib, after which the latter ceased to besiege the city of Jerusalem.^[4] About this situation, Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentioned during the first century: “God had sent a pestilential distemper upon his army: and on the very first night of the siege a hundred fourscore and five thousand [ . . . ] were destroyed.” In turn, the famous Sennacherib’s Prism, written in the seventh century BC, records the victories of the king over enemy cities, except against Jerusalem.

These and other archaeological findings show that the biblical accounts of angels on Earth have a very real component in their stories. Such things leave open the possibility that these beings have really interacted with our race. In addition, in both stories, the angels acted as a last resort in situations that required an urgent solution. Clearly, angels manifest only on specific occasions in human history when the situation requires it, after which they disappear again.

6 The Stealth Mode Of The Angels

Numbers Chapter 22 tells the story of a man named Balaam, who, by order of a foreign king, was going to curse the army of Israel. Then, when he went to meet the king, an angel got in his way and did not let him continue traveling. Without seeing the angel, Balaam blamed the animal he was riding on, and hit it. Suddenly, the angel became visible in front of the man, and then Balaam understood the seriousness of the matter.

So it seems that angelic creatures prefer to observe human actions in secret, hidden in plain sight thanks to a superior physical ability that allows them to enter or leave the visible spectrum. This is not so far-fetched, since scientists have discovered that there are several ways to truly achieve invisibility.

An object can be made invisible, for example, by covering it with layers of materials (specifically called “metamaterials”) capable of bending light or by making it resonate at certain frequencies with the use of electromagnetic waves.^[5] So if invisibility is plausible to humans, it is evident that the mentioned angelic race could also develop an ability of that kind.

5 They’ve Existed Since Long Before Us

Both the previous point and the following one are related to a scientific formulation known as the zoo hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that perhaps an advanced alien race deliberately avoids contact with humans while secretly watching us evolve over time.

In Job 38: 4-7, God explains to His human servant that when the Earth was formed, the angels, described as “morning stars,” celebrated with joy at such an event. This statement shows that angels are creatures different from humans, unique in themselves and in existence long before the emergence of the first human beings on Earth.^[6]

This also seems to be another reason why angels do not manifest themselves before the human race. Everything points to the fact that the angels have seen us during our entire history, and therefore, they know human behavior very well. In a way, we are already predictable to them, so they know well how to remain hidden from our sight.

4 They Comprise A Species Of Their Own

Sacred texts mention at least four different types of angels, each one with particular physical features and a specific purpose.^[7]

First, we have the seraphs, the angels closest to the presence of God. They have six wings, and their name (Hebrew: seraphim, “burning ones”) implies that seraphs may have an incandescent appearance, like fire.

Then there are the cherubs, protective angels of the divine abode. Their wingspan is equivalent to the height of the angel himself, and it is also said that they are beautiful in appearance.

Angelic messengers represent the rest of their population and perform all kinds of tasks across the cosmos—from sending divine messages to protecting or destroying people.

Above all the described types of angels, there is the archangel. This type of creature is explicitly mentioned only twice throughout the Bible, and in the singular. By this and by the etymology of his name (“chief angel”), we understand that there is only one archangel at a time, whose presence gives him the right to rule all other angels.

Based on this classification, we can see that the angels are divided into groups according to their appearance and position. Just as there are humans with variations in their genetics and their sex, it seems that the angels also have remarkable differences among themselves. This is an aspect that describes them more as a real species instead of being an isolated group of creatures.

3 The Angelic Population Could Be Huge

Following the line of the previous point, another piece of evidence for the angels being a true species is their population number. Many species are limited in their growth by things like the environment or genetics. And yet, we have already seen that angels do not seem to have a problem with that. In the Bible, angels are mentioned fewer than 300 times, but how many of them are there, actually? Well, the Bible itself also gives the answer.

In the fifth chapter of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, the apostle John has a vision of the celestial kingdom in which the angelic creatures live. As far as John can see, the number of such creatures amounts to “thousands of thousands.” Certain versions of the Bible that translate the original texts in a literal way use the term “myriads of myriads.” This phrase originates from Greek and is literally translated as “ten thousand times ten thousand.”

This proves that the so-called “invisible region” is inhabited by at least hundreds of millions of individual angelic beings.^[8] So from the biblical material, it can be interpreted that angels do not exist in small quantities, as if their purpose was limited. Rather, they seem to be an individual species or some other type of population, with freedom of development and free will.

2 Is Their Form Of Communication Superior To Ours?

Repeatedly throughout the Bible, it is shown how angels had conversations with humans in earthly languages. But it is to be expected that, as extraterrestrial beings, angels have their own form of communication different from the languages of Earth. Does the Bible offer evidence that this is the case? Yes, and it also points out that their way of communicating is far beyond our reach.

In Isaiah 55:9, God said that His “ways and thoughts” are superior to those of humans, which obviously includes His language. And in his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul—who claimed to have had direct contact with angels—made a distinction between the “tongues of men” and the “tongues of angels.” This denotes that angels have a language that does not belong to human nature.^[9]

So, having established that angels have their own language, what would it be like? Well, one answer might be the visions recorded in several parts of the New Testament, when fully lucid people contemplated images impossible to recreate in reality. Such events sound similar to the effects of a process known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which can be utilized to deliberately introduce images into the human mind through the use of electromagnetic radiation.

So angelic creatures not only communicate with each other in a different language, but such language is beyond the learning capacity of humans.

1 Angels Could Protect Our Universe In Secret

In recent years, scientists have discovered that some kind of mysterious force called “dark energy” is accelerating the expansion of the universe. However, even more recent research shows that this dark energy decreases or increases, depending on the moment, defying even well-known physical laws. It seems that this force “plays” with the universal structure in a certain sense, and the scientific community still does not know what exactly this energetic manifestation is.^[10]

In the biblical text of Job 38:31, God asks His servant, “Shall you be able to join together the shining stars of the Pleiades?” By the context, the Creator affirms that He is the one who maintains the order of the universe at will, with the possibility of modifying it as necessary.

The holy scriptures also state that angels are able to control natural elements at their discretion. So, could angels be the so-called dark energy that baffles scientists and controls the cosmic expansion? It is unclear, but if so, that explains why the unknown force that shapes the universe fluctuates almost deliberately. Maybe the angels are out there keeping the order of the material universe, and we do not even realize it.

Economy student, passionate about Graphic Design, an avid enthusiast of the art of writing.

Even before the humble beginnings of philosophy in ancient Greece, humans have been obsessed with the idea of substances, where one material ends and another begins, and the general building blocks of life. But over the thousands of years that we’ve studied various materials, we’ve developed a good idea of what’s what. With the science of chemistry and the periodic table, we’ve come to figure out and predict how basic substances or materials work.

Some materials have bizarre and abstract traits and are frankly quite weird. Nature seems to operate by strict rules, where things are seemingly predictable and fit wonderfully into neat little explanatory packages. This gives us the ability to categorize things in different ways and understand them for what they are.

Here are 10 absolutely strange materials that have been discovered by scientists throughout the years.

10 Triiodide

While triiodide itself refers to one chemical which can be mixed with many others to create different chemicals, triiodide, short for triiodide ion, isn’t inherently very interesting. It’s often a yellowish substance that turns red when prepared in such a way to create nitrogen triiodide, with the inorganic compound designation of NI.

What makes nitrogen triiodide so special? It’s ridiculous explosiveness.

Most explosives use chemical processes which are quite complex, or heat and combustion. But not nitrogen triiodide, which is explosive on contact. That’s right. Take a simple gram or so of this powder, set it on a table, touch it with nearly anything, and watch the show.^[1]

All that’s required for it to blow up is simple contact, or friction. This material is so unusual due to its volatility that even touching it can cause it to explode.

9 Vantablack

Vantablack is an artificial material that was developed by Surrey NanoSystems. This coating goes on many things, from paint to carbon objects. It’s the material equivalent of a black hole in that it traps light, so much so that three-dimensional objects coated with the material appear to be two-dimensional as the refraction of any light is so heavily reduced.

It holds the world record for the darkest artificial substance and the darkest black you can buy. The material absorbs 99 percent of all light it comes into contact with.^[2]

People even coated a building with it in South Korea to create “the darkest place on Earth” in a mimicry of the deepest recesses of space. The goal was to create an experience of being absorbed into blackness—a deep, dark cloud of black.

Three-dimensional objects coated in Vantablack actually look like shadows from the profile view. Definitely an interesting material, to say the least.

8 Ultrahydrophobic Material

Ultrahydrophobic material isn’t the stuff we buy to coat leather and suede products or the spray coatings that protect our outdoor wood projects from the rain and other elements. An ultrahydrophobic coating actually causes water to encase itself into tiny spheres that look like gemstones or marbles.

It’s so water-resistant that if you sprayed your old windshield with it, you could drive in the rain at up to 64 kilometers per hour (40 mph) and your windshield wouldn’t get wet.^[3] Goodbye, trusty windshield wipers.

In fact, ultrahydrophobic material repels almost all liquids, causing them to shrivel up into little balls that you can even roll around as if they were actual marbles. This material is genius and has a lot of applications, including those for high-tech industries. It’s also ultra-weird.

7 Ferrofluid

Ferrofluids are a type of liquid that can easily be formed into strange shapes without even touching them. Often dark, blackish, reddish, or grayish liquids, ferrofluids act very much like any other liquid when they’re outside the presence of a magnetic field.

The moment the fluids come into contact with a magnetic field, they become highly magnetized, morphing shapes, bending, or pulling. They do everything our usual solid magnets do, only as a liquid state.

This stuff looks like a dark, liquid metal. It can be purchased online or even made with readily accessible Internet instructions. Like so many other wonders of physics, it’s truly an amazing sight to see ferrofluids in action as they respond to the magnetic field and fall right in line with it. Then they disperse randomly once the magnetic field is removed.^[4]

6 Supercritical Fluid

Supercritical fluid is a material created under certain circumstances of temperature and pressure. It suspends the dividing lines of physical properties as we know them. In short, supercritical fluid is a substance somewhere between liquid and gas. It is a mixture of both, and yet it is neither liquid nor gas.

It occurs when any fluid gets heated above its critical temperature and pressure. Critical temperature is the point where a substance has been heated to such a degree that you cannot liquefy it. Critical pressure is the pressure that’s needed to turn a gas into a liquid at a high temperature.

Supercritical fluid is a gas-like substance with highly liquid properties.^[5] If you were to delve into the atmospheres of some planets, like Jupiter or Neptune, you would be immersed in it. It’s a super-freaky version of all liquids . . . or is it a gas?

5 Nitinol

Nitinol is a trade name for nickel titanium, a metal alloy with some extremely unusual (and important) properties. Nitinol is often used in the medical industry, but it has other applications.

The weird thing about this metal is that it’s almost like the liquid metal featured in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day in that it can always return to its original shape. Nitinol has superelasticity, or a memory for its original form.

So if you make an object out of nitinol and then bend it completely out of whack, it’ll automatically crawl and form back into its original shape before your eyes (aka pseudoelasticity). These shape memory properties make it both fun and practical.^[6]

Stents are a great application as nitinol can bend within the human body when needed, has the durability of a metal, and can return to its original form every single time after the force which causes it to warp is released. Nitinol’s bending, shape-shifting properties are activated by heat. At some temperatures, it will bend out of its original state. At others, it will return to its original state.

This temperature difference can be controlled within 1 degree Celsius (1.8 °F). From algae that remembers the light shined upon it to nitinol which always remembers its original shape and returns to it under the right conditions, materials with a “memory” are definitely fascinating and weird.

4 Gallium

Gallium is a metallic element with the atomic number of 31, which even more closely resembles the liquid metal from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Gallium’s particularly strange characteristic is the low temperature at which it liquefies, which is only a tad shy of 30 degrees Celsius (86 °F). That’s close to room temperature in many places.

This metallic element is bright, shiny, and silvery white in color. When you handle gallium, there’s no ambiguity that you’re handling a liquid metal. As a liquid, this metal can be played with—it rolls and forms into various shapes in your hands.^[7]

Gallium has many practical uses, like LED lights, cabling, and pharmaceuticals. It’s an extremely soft metal, even in its solid state. In fact, it’s so soft that you could slice into it with a knife without much resistance at all. If you made a solid sphere, a ball of gallium, and then picked it up, it would melt in your hand. That’s one fascinating metal.

3 Hydrogel

Hydrogels are a fascinating group of substances, not unlike supercritical fluids. However, instead of being suspended somewhere between a liquid and a gas, hydrogels are suspended somewhere between a liquid and a solid.

A hydrogel maintains its shape and doesn’t flow around objects like a solid does, but it bends amazingly like a liquid with an extremely soft pliability. JELL-O is one famous hydrogel that we all know about. It’s a fun snack for people around the world. But there are other types of hydrogels and other uses for them besides foods.

Due to their flexibility and durability, hydrogels are showing great promise in the world of science for biomaterials, which go on or in the human body. Their ability to completely liquefy, fill a space, and then solidify and still be flexible is mind-blowing.^[8]

Hydrogels are a series of polymers that contain both chemical and physical properties which change their state from solid to liquid seamlessly. When heated, the polymer proteins dissipate and travel more freely. When cooled, those same proteins harden again but not quite as drastically as when water hardens into ice. These proteins make hydrogel one of the most unusual feeling and visually entertaining substances.

2 Graphene Aerogel

Graphene aerogel is the lightest material on Earth and definitely the lightest solid material that we know of. It weighs in at just 0.16 milligrams per cubic centimeter, almost lighter than air. Its density is even lower than helium, although slightly higher than hydrogen, the lightest of all the gases.

Graphene aerogel is created by taking a hydrogel and replacing the liquid contents with air, making the substance 99.98 percent air by volume. This is why it’s so light—it’s empty. There aren’t a lot of the dense atoms of a solid or a liquid to weigh it down. As a result, graphene aerogel is the least dense of all known solid materials.^[9]

On top of being used today for many adhesives, coatings, and fillers, graphene aerogel is also being developed as a lightweight material for 3-D printing that produces precise results. The future of graphene aerogel shows much promise, and this substance is going to be a staple of the future for printing items like lightweight coffee cups or even jewelry.

1 Dark Matter

Dark matter is one of the most elusive substances in the currently known universe, and that makes it arguably one of the most fascinating. Dark matter makes up about 27 percent of the physical universe. It cannot be detected by its luminosity, the refraction of light that we use to “see” and detect regular matter with our eyes and instruments.

Instead, dark matter can only be detected by its gravitational pull. We know it’s out there, but we can’t see it. So we can only perceive its presence by its pull on other objects that we can see.

With its existence first hypothesized in the 1970s, dark matter set the stage to explain the mysterious movements of many objects being pulled in its gravitational field—like galaxies which seemed to miraculously escape the gravitational pull of the larger galaxy cluster to which they belonged.

Gravitational lensing occurs when a substance in space distorts the space fabric and “bends” light from behind it. Even though we can’t see dark matter, this is how we know it exists. It bends the passing light rather than emitting or reflecting light.^[10]

For a frame of reference, dark matter makes up about 27 percent of the observable universe, but observable matter only comprises 5 percent of our universe. About 68 percent of the universe is “dark energy,” a mysterious, elusive energy.

This means that about 5 percent of our universe can actually be seen and detected using observation of the actual substance itself. It can only be perceived by its effect on the tiny sliver of the universe we can see. This makes dark matter one of the strangest substances detected by modern science.

I like to write about dark stuff, fun stuff, weird stuff, history, and philosophy. Here’s a fun one about weird and wacky substances.

Sci-fi gives us the strangest, most memorable places in all of fiction. Whether it’s the sky-high city of The Empire Strikes Back, the gritty streets of Blade Runner, or the desert kingdoms of Dune, sci-fi always immerses its fans into incredibly unique worlds. It seems a shame that these places are just made-up—no matter how hard you wish, you’ll never end up on Gallifrey or aboard Serenity.

But if you know where to look, you’ll find plenty of real-life places that look like they were dreamed up by George Lucas or Philip K. Dick. There’s the apocalyptic Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic, the flying saucer–shaped Buzludzha Monument in Bulgaria, and the depressing dystopia of the Tower of David. And then there are the following places, some creepy, some gorgeous, some downright weird, and all looking ripped straight out of a sci-fi story.

10New York’s Floating Cities

From the Nautilus to Snowpiercer, sci-fi has long loved tricked-out vehicles. They’re moving cities, sustaining life wherever they go, and while they don’t exist (yet), a couple of ships off the coast of New York City are the next best thing.

More Silent Running than Waterworld, the Science Barge is operated by the NY Sun Works, a group dedicated to building sustainable greenhouses. Drifting in the Hudson River, the ship is a farm on the water. Totally self-sustaining, it relies on wind and solar energy for its power, vegetable oil for its heat, and rainwater for its crops. So when the apocalypse starts, this is the place you want to be, especially if you’re a salad fan.

A much scarier ship is floating near the Bronx in Long Island Sound. Resembling a fortress made of oversized Legos, the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center is the world’s largest prison ship, housing 800 felons in medium to maximum security. Built to relieve overcrowding on Rikers Island, this $161 million vessel boasts 100 cells, a law library, and a basketball court on top of the ship.

9The Glow-In-The-Dark Highway

We’re always trying to build the car of the future. Strangely, none of us think about road on which this car will drive—none of us but Daan Roosegaarde. This Dutch artist figured it was time to advance highway technology. Inspired by bioluminescent jellyfish, Roosegaarde created the world’s first glow-in-the-dark road.

Working with the civic engineering firm Heijmans, Roosegaarde converted Highway N329 in Oss into a radiant roadway. The road’s paint is made from photo-luminizing powder, which captures sunlight during the day and lets off a light-green glow at night. When you drive in the dark, the stripes along the road take the place of streetlights. Roosegaarde hopes this 500-meter (1,600 ft) stretch of highway outside Amsterdam will save energy, and he wants other countries to follow his lead.

However, Roosegaarde isn’t anywhere near finished with his project. Next, he wants to use his glow-in-the-dark powder to create weather symbols that show up on the street. For example, he might paint a snowflake that lights up when the weather gets cold, warning drivers about snowfall or ice on the roads. Right now, these icons are still in the development phase, but if the paint on N329 can stand up to the daily onslaught of cars, perhaps Roosegaarde’s powder will revolutionize the way we drive at night.

8Gardens By The Bay

Judging by box office numbers and online movie reviews, it seems there are two kinds of people in the world: those who loved Avatar and those who hated it with every fiber of their being. But regardless of your opinion on the storytelling of James Cameron’s space epic, Pandora looks like a lovely place to visit—if you wipe out those rhino monsters and wolf creatures, anyway. Unfortunately, Pandora doesn’t actually exist, a sad reality that left some film fans with suicidal thoughts.

While those people probably need counseling, less hardcore fans can satisfy their Avatar obsession with a trip to the Gardens by the Bay. Located in central Singapore, this amazing park is the closest thing we have to a luminescent alien forest, thanks to the 18 supertrees that dominate the landscape. These artificial giants measure 25–50 meters (80–160 ft), and while they don’t sport any vegetation of their own, they’re covered in 200 different species of ferns and flowers. Eleven of these steel trees contain photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into energy for the rest of the park. The trees also collect their own rainwater, are interconnected with bridges, and light up in the dark.

Elsewhere in the park are the Cloud Forest and Flower Dome, enormous biomes that house over 200,000 different plants, including olive groves, baobabs, and fynbos. These modern-day arks are climate-controlled and generate their own power by processing horticultural waste in steam turbines. Looking at pictures of Gardens by the Bay, you get not only an Avatar-vibe but a sense of technology and nature merging in the best possible way.

7The National Radio Quiet Zone

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope is truly a special piece of equipment. Located in the eastern half of West Virginia, this telescope is the size of the Washington Monument, weighs 8 million kilograms (17 million lb), and takes up 8,000 square meters (2 acres) of land. This observatory wasn’t made for stargazing. Instead, Green Bank tunes into the music of the universe. A radio telescope, this giant wiry dish listens to radio waves from faraway stars and galaxies.

By the time extraterrestrial energy reaches the Earth, it’s weaker than a snowflake tumbling to the ground. To pick up these faint frequencies, the telescope is extremely sensitive. Anything that generates radio waves is either banned from the Green Bank base or highly controlled. Even the cafeteria microwave is kept inside a special, shielded cage.

Scientists took extra steps to block outside electronic pollution. In 1958, the Federal Communications Commission declared the 34,000 square kilometers (13,000 sq mi) surrounding Green Bank to be a “National Radio Quiet Zone.” Roughly the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined, the Quiet Zone is a huge chunk of land almost completely free of cell phones and Wi-Fi. All power lines are buried 1.2 meters (4 ft) below the ground, people use dial-up telephones and ham radios, and every radio station but one (which broadcasts at a low frequency) is banned. There’s even a group of radio wave police who arm themselves with antennas and track down any rogue interference.

Blocking 21st-century technology from the region is getting harder and harder, but for now, the National Radio Quiet Zone is a throwback to a 1950s way of life—with a sci-fi space dish at the center.

6The Soviet Lightning Machine

Hidden away in the forests outside Moscow is a strange collection of tubes, coils, and wires. It looks abandoned now, but gigantic gadgets such as this were built to make lightning—a lot of lightning.

The Soviets built this Marx generator decades ago, and it’s said to have produced as much power as all other generators in Russia. That’s more power than every nuclear, thermoelectric, and hydroelectric plant combined, though Marx generators can only run for a small fraction of a second at a time.

The Russians used the crazy contraption to test materials’ resistance to lightning strikes. For example, they once reportedly shocked a Sukhoi Superjet.

5Rjukan, Norway

For over a century, the citizens of Rjukan lived in the dark. Founded in the early 1900s by Sam Eyde, the village was built for people working in his Norsk Hydro factories. Rjukan is totally surrounded by mountains, so from mid-September to early March, the town was completely covered by gloomy shadow.

The locals weren’t pleased with their situation, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. Sam Eyde tried to compensate by building a cable car to carry people to the top of the mountain. During those dismal months, it was the only way anyone could spend a few minutes basking in the sunlight. After all, you couldn’t actually bring sunlight into the valley—at least not until Martin Anderson showed up.

A traveling artist, Anderson built three solar-powered heliostats on top of the mountain. Sitting 450 meters (1,500 ft) above Rjukan, these computer-operated mirrors track the Sun as it travels across the sky and reflect the light down into the town square, creating 600 square meters (6,500 sq ft) of beautiful light for Rjukan’s sunlight-starved citizens.

Rjukan isn’t the only town that relies on mirrors for sunlight. Viganella, Italy uses a single steel mirror to warm its town, but while it captures more sunlight, it isn’t as strong as Rjukan’s sci-fi heliostats.

4Hong Kong’s AI Metro

With an on-time record of 99.9 percent, the Hong Kong subway is the best in the world. Its success is thanks to a computer program created by Hong Kong engineer Andy Chun. Using a special algorithm, his program quickly calculates the best way to keep the trains running, and it’s way more efficient than any feeble-minded human.

Each week, 10,000 workers keep the tracks in tip-top shape. Night after night, they descend into the tunnels after the trains stop running, and they only have a few hours to carry out 2,600 engineering jobs per week. Before the computer program came along, experts had to hurriedly plan who would go where and do what, and it took far too long. Then Chun’s program changed everything.

After interviewing numerous engineering experts, Chun transformed their wisdom into a series of rules for his AI. Before the repair teams get busy, the AI pores over a model of the subway system and identifies what needs to be done. Next, it compares solutions against one another until it finds the best way to accomplish everything neatly and quickly. It even knows to check its plans against city regulations to make sure everything is safe and legal.

Chun’s AI is so effective that it cuts out two days’ worth of planning a week and gives workers an extra 30 minutes each night to fix up the tracks, saving the metro $800,000 per week. With a program this efficient, it might not be long before computers are running the subway entirely—and as sci-fi fans know, that’s probably not going to end well.

3The Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex

Take a road trip across North Dakota, and you’ll see whole stretches of vast, grassy nothing. But pass through the sleepy little town of Nekoma, and you’ll spot something incredibly bizarre and totally alien rising up out of the ground: a giant concrete pyramid.

While it’s missing the pointy top we associate with Egyptian pyramids, this obelisk makes up for its flat roof with four creepy eyes. There are two circles on each side of the pyramid, one inside the other, almost like a pupil inside an iris. And if you drive up closer, you’ll find the pyramid is surrounded with checkpoints and buildings such as an office, a church, and a gym. But chances are good that you won’t pay too much attention to this abandoned community. You’ll probably just stare at the pyramid. What is this thing, and what is it doing in the middle of nowhere?

The focal point of the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, this misplaced monolith was constructed back in the 1970s. Costing a whopping $6 billion, this concrete pyramid was made for one purpose—to watch out for incoming Soviet missiles. Those creepy eyes on all four sides of the pyramid were radars watching the skies for sneak attacks. And if the Russians ever did launch a nuke, officials inside the pyramid would shoot it down with one of their Spartan anti-ballistic missiles.

In addition to silos all over the complex, a massive labyrinth of tunnels ran under the pyramid itself. And in true bureaucratic fashion, the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex was operational for less than a year. After it opened in April 1975, the government started worrying about safety issues, so in February 1976, they flooded the tunnels and shut the whole thing down. So, that was $6 billion down the drain.

The pyramid was later bought for $530,000 by the Spring Creek Hutterite Colony, an Amish-like community of pacifists.

2Americana, Sao Paulo

Alternative history is one of the biggest sci-fi subgenres. These stories deal with the big “what ifs” of history. Take for example Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in High Castle, which asks, “What if the Nazis had won World War II?” Similarly, quite a few wonder, “What would’ve happened if the Confederacy had won the Civil War?” Well, if you’re curious, you can head on down to Americana, Sao Paulo and find out.

After Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, sore losers in the South weren’t crazy about rejoining the US. Sensing their frustration, Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil invited irate Southerners to pack up their bags and move even further south. Ten thousand people accepted his offer, and while most eventually went back home, 40 percent stayed in Brazil and established the town of Americana.

Nicknamed the “Confederados,” these immigrants set up a surreal little world of good old Southern values. They built Baptist churches, flew the Stars and Bars, and ate biscuits and black-eyed peas. And when they weren’t using forced labor to work their new cotton plantations, they were throwing antebellum balls and singing old-fashioned Southern ballads.

While the town has toned down its Dixieland vibe, the Confederados’ descendants still speak fluent English and throw an annual festival where people dress up in Southern costumes, have grand parties, and unfurl the Confederate flag—all in the middle of Brazil.

1Monkey Island

From Doctor Moreau to King Kong to Jurassic Park, islands have always had a special place in science fiction. These little land masses are perfect for creating weird worlds and strange situations that wouldn’t happen on the mainland. But while you probably won’t find a real-world island populated with polar bears, magical wells, and time travel, quite a few in the ocean have their own mysterious stories.

Take Monkey Island for example. Deep in the jungles of Liberia, in the middle of the Farmington River, is an island populated with over 60 chimpanzees. Surrounded by water, these apes spend their days hidden in the trees but rush down to the beach whenever white-clad workers show up with food and medicine.

The story of Monkey Island (chimps aren’t monkeys, but it’s a local nickname) starts back in 1974, when the New York Blood Center opened a research facility in Liberia. Named “Vilab,” the facility was dedicated to curing deadly diseases. That meant infecting over 100 apes with viruses like hepatitis because chimps are the only non-human species susceptible to the illness.

The facility closed down in 2005 thanks to changing attitudes toward animal testing, raising the question of where the infected chimps were going to go. That’s where Monkey Island came in. The apes were placed on an island where they would spend the rest of their lives in relative comfort.

Today, the chimps are cared for by local teams working with the New York Blood Center. Most of the animals are completely healthy and show no signs of plotting a revolution.

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The words “Victorian science” bring to mind sober men with ridiculous facial hair peering through microscopes. What it doesn’t bring to mind are certifiable lunatics trying to fly into space, electrocute their genitals, and teach dogs the alphabet. Yet that’s exactly what researchers of the day were up to.

10 Trying To Take A Hot Air Balloon Into Space

If scientist James Glaisher had had his way, the first manned spaceflight would have taken place 100 years before Yuri Gagarin’s. That’s because 1862 was the year that Glaisher and Henry Coxwell set off in their hot air balloon for the “aerial ocean” above. Their government-funded flight took off from Wolverhampton on September 5. Almost immediately, things went horribly wrong.

Approximately 8 kilometers (5 mi) above the Earth, the temperatures dropped to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 °F) and the animals that Glaisher had brought to observe died. About 1.6 kilometers (1 mi) above that, both men suddenly got the bends and collapsed.

At 11 kilometers (7 mi) up, both men blacked out but not before Coxwell pulled the valve release cord with his teeth. To Glaisher’s dismay, the balloon descended, taking them away from the edges of the atmosphere.

Somehow, this near-death experience didn’t put Glaisher off. He made 21 more flights but never realized his dream of ballooning into space.

9 Interviewing Politicians Telepathically

As editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, W.T. Stead championed anything that would help us talk to one another. However, he didn’t discriminate between real-world stuff and ideas from la-la land. Stead was convinced that he could talk to people using only the power of his mind.

At the time, many believed in hidden psychic abilities. So it seemed plausible that you might be able to contact people mentally. For Stead, this meant telepathically sending notes to his secretary, dictating reports to his writers while in another country, and trying to ask questions of famous politicians using only his mind.

Indeed, Stead’s greatest “scoop” came thanks to his powers. He was one of the people killed on the Titanic in 1912. His journalists later claimed that he telepathically reported the disaster to them as it happened.

8 Teaching Dogs To Read

Sir John Lubbock was one of Victorian Britain’s leading scientists. Over his long career, he invented the words “Neolithic” and “Paleolithic,” became vice chancellor of London University, and introduced Thomas Edison’s electric streetlights to England. Oh, and he also wasted hundreds of research hours trying to teach his dog to read.

Lubbock was convinced that dogs could be taught to understand English. Not just simple commands like “sit,” “stay,” or “come back with my donut,” but full, complex sentences. To that end, he drew up giant boards with sentences on them, stuck them in front of his dog, and tried to get the animal to understand them.

By his own account, Lubbock insisted he’d scientifically proven that dogs were capable of learning to read. However, no one has ever repeated this feat.

7 Communicating With Mars

In 1888, Giovanni Schiaparelli announced the discovery of canali on Mars. In Italian, canali means “channels.” A translation mistake meant the English-speaking public heard of them as “canals,” implying intelligence. Almost immediately, this sparked a craze for communicating with Martians through any means possible.

One of the maddest attempts came in 1892. A wealthy French woman had bequeathed an absurd amount of money to establish a network of giant mirrors across Earth. These mirrors would be flashed at the red planet, sending Morse code messages hurtling across the empty depths of space. The Martians would see these messages, build similar mirrors, and flash their own messages back.

By 1892, preparations were well underway to begin using the mirrors to communicate with Mars. Unfortunately, the plan fell apart when more sober scientists pointed out that Mars was now moving away from Earth so the aliens wouldn’t see them anyway.

6 Testing Spectacles On Horses

In 1893, an unsuspecting horse owner sparked one of science’s most bizarre quests. Convinced that his horse was going blind, the anonymous man walked into an optician’s store and ordered a pair of horse glasses. For optician Mr. Dolland, it was the start of a lifelong quest to provide horses with spectacles.

Dolland became convinced that all horses were shortsighted. They bolted when something spooked them because they couldn’t see what it really was. Design a pair of perfect horse specs and bolting, with its attendant injuries, would be a thing of the past.

It’s unknown how long Dolland kept at his crazy idea, but it was certainly long enough to test different glasses on dozens of horses. Eventually, he settled on a pair of bifocals he believed could improve the sight of any horse in the world. The horse-owning public disagreed. Dolland’s contribution to equine science sank without a trace.

5 Electrocuting Their Own Genitals

The Victorians liked men to be men, and any sign of unmanliness was a serious cause of concern. To battle weakness and deficiencies of “masculine energy,” Victorian scientists came up with one of the most absurd cures ever: a belt that delivered constant electric shocks to the subject’s genitals.

These were the days when electricity was so new that it was considered a potential cure-all for just about everything. Just as wackos in the 1950s claimed that radiation could heal anything, so too did Victorians consider electricity a kind of wonder drug.

The experiments were considered such a success that their use expanded to curing impotence, and they started appearing for sale in magazines. Strangely enough, they never really caught on with the general public, who seemed unwilling to embrace severe shocks to their genitalia.

4 Training Wasps As Pets

Remember John Lubbock, the guy who thought he could teach dogs to read? Turns out he had a second hobby that was nearly as weird as the first. Lubbock was convinced that you could train wasps to be the perfect pet.

He tried to train them like you would a dog—to eat out of his hand, allow themselves to be stroked, accompany him to meetings, and, presumably, attack his enemies on command.

As you’d expect, these experiments didn’t go well. Lubbock frequently got stung by his tiny charges, who we’re gonna assume failed to understand what the heck was going on. Yet he persevered and, amazingly, managed to train one single wasp to obey his commands. The creature only lasted nine months before dying, but that was enough for Lubbock to proclaim the winged monsters made perfect pets.

3 Imprinting On The Eyes Of Condemned Criminals

Optography is the practice of analyzing the eyeball to reproduce the last image it saw. If that sounds nuts, it’s because it is. Not that this stopped the Victorians from trying. From 1880 onward, scores of condemned men were asked by scientists to look at dramatic things just before they were executed.

Wilhelm Kuhne led the charge. In 1880, he acquired the head of guillotined murderer Erhard Gustav Reif and examined his eyeballs for images of violent movement. As time went on, the experiments became more elaborate. One condemned man was asked to keep his eyes completely shut as he was led onto the scaffold and to snap them open the second before he was hanged. Strangely, he acquiesced.

Such experiments were so numerous that optography acquired a respectable sheen. As late as 1927, murderers destroyed their victims’ eyeballs to prevent identification by optography.

2 Insane Self-Experiments

The Victorian era saw the emergence of medical ethics. For the first time, you couldn’t just grab a pauper to conduct your experiments on. This meant loads of scientists conducted experiments on the only available people: themselves and their associates. Some of these experiments were insane.

Take August Bier’s investigations into spinal anesthesia. In 1898, the German surgeon and his assistant Augustus Hildebrandt shot their spines full of cocaine and tried to discover if they could still feel pain. Hildebrandt punched a hole in his boss’s neck, leaving spinal fluid leaking out. Meanwhile, Bier stabbed, clubbed, and burned his partner before crushing his testicles. When neither felt any pain, they celebrated by getting riotously drunk.

Others did equally bad stuff. Jesse Lazear allowed himself to be bitten by mosquitoes carrying yellow fever, while Pierre Curie brought Victorian craziness into the Edwardian era by deliberately giving himself radiation burns.

1 Eating One Of Everything In Existence

William Buckland has many claims to fame. He was a theologian, a geologist, and one of the only people Charles Darwin actively hated. But we’re only interested in his strangest experiment. At some point in his life, Buckland decided it would be useful if he ate one of everything in existence and recorded its taste for future generations.

In the name of “science,” Buckland located and devoured everything from mice on toast to alligators to bat urine to puppies. He dined on potted ostrich, roast hedgehog, panthers, porpoises, and even the preserved heart of King Louis XIV. He’s been called “the man who ate everything.” And he recorded the taste of each item meticulously.

Incredibly, in his lifelong experiment, Buckland only found one creature that he didn’t enjoy eating. According to his notes, the common garden mole tasted “disgusting.”

Earth science is an umbrella term for the disciplines studying our world. They include geology, meteorology, and oceanography, to name a few.

Within these fields, researchers recently found things that should not be there, processes that work when they should not, and an epic global event that everyone missed. From NASA confusing mud to a time when Earth’s geology inexplicably quit, one can understand why scientists love taking samples of dirt.

10 Pele’s Hair

The 2018 eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii had a beautiful side effect. Sprouting from the volcano were strands so thin and golden that they resembled hair. Indeed, the phenomenon is called “Pele’s hair.”

Named for the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire, the filaments are made of glass. They can be very dangerous. The ultrathin yarns often hitch a ride on the wind and end up in the drinking supplies of people and nearby cattle ranches.

Each stick also has a sharp point that can damage the soft tissues when picked up or swallowed. Contact with the strands also causes irritation and inflammation.^[1]

Pele’s hair forms when gas bubbles rise to the surface of lava and pop. The power of the burst flings the bubble’s skin through the air and stretches it in the process. The drawn-out bubble then turns into a glass filament. For all their grumpy characteristics, the golden strands cluster together in drifts that are several feet thick and the result is usually gorgeous.

9 The Arctic Craters

Every year, NASA flies over both polar regions in Operation IceBridge to measure changes in the ice. The crew that flew in 2018 found something that had never been seen before. While traveling over the eastern Beaufort Sea, they found holes in a thin layer of sea ice.

Seals often break through the ice to breathe or pull themselves onto its surface. Some scientists thought this was the case but changed their minds once they realized that the craters were too huge. The suggestion of a fragmented meteor strike also fell apart. Pieces of a meteor would have left the holes more widely dispersed.

Another sensible theory suggested that the warming Arctic water might have caused hot upwelling, but now the holes were too small. One hypothesis still sticks—that of whales punching breathing holes—but the phenomenon still lacks a detailed explanation.^[2]

8 Rare Death Valley Lake

The hottest place on the planet is aptly named Death Valley. This cork-dry desert stretches through Southern California inside the Death Valley National Park. Each year’s rainfall barely tops 5 centimeters (2 in), and temperatures as high as 57 degrees Celsius (134 °F) leave little moisture anywhere.

In 2019, something unusual showed up. A massive lake appeared near Salt Creek. Estimated to be around 16 kilometers (10 mi) long, the lake popped up after a storm. The rain spell was no deluge. It only sprinkled around 2.13 centimeters (0.84 in) of rain throughout the park. This is low compared to the rest of the country’s rainfall.

But Death Valley is the perfect place for a pop-up lake. The desert’s soil is so parched and compact that it cannot absorb water very well. This is the reason why a relatively mild storm could deposit a lake in the hottest spot in the world.^[3]

7 Africa’s Ice Stream

Around 300 million years ago, southern Africa looked very different. For example, Namibia was a vast glacial landscape, a far cry from the volcanic desert of today. One of its best-known features is steep hills called drumlins.

In 2019, researchers explored northern Namibia. They noticed telltale signs that the drumlins were not just hills but the remnants of an ice stream. The latter is a river that transports ice from the center of a glacier to its edge.

After analyzing the landscape’s shape and finding deep grooves in the rock, it became clear that a glacier once had a major artery in the area. In fact, this stream was so huge that it rivaled the major ice rivers of Antarctica today. It drained southern Africa’s ice cap, flowing 200 kilometers (124 mi) before emptying into a small sea.^[4]

This marine area would later become Brazil. The discovery also confirmed Africa’s position around 300 million years ago—it hugged South America above the South Pole.

6 Baffling Island Mud

In 2015, a submarine volcano pushed a new island to the surface. It breached near Tonga and was never named. NASA scientists landed in 2018 and discovered that they were not the first life to emerge there. They encountered plants, a barn owl, and sooty terns nesting everywhere.

The researchers were eager to explore what was only the third island to be born—and to last more than a few months—in the last 150 years. The nameless patch gave the team an opportunity to study how animals and plants colonize virgin territory. Instead, they encountered mud that defied explanation.

Satellite photos had previously picked up on the light-colored material, which could not be identified. Once on the ground, it turned out to be a claylike mud. The stuff was exceptionally sticky, all over the island, and lacked any clear origins.^[5]

The inexplicable goop was not the only surprise. Satellite imagery also showed what looked like dark sandy beaches. But when researchers arrived, the “sand” was pea-sized rocks that painfully bit into their shoes.

5 The Dragon Aurora

Earth’s spectacular auroras start with the Sun. When its magnetic field lines knot and burst, they create sunspots. In turn, the sunspots release charged particles. These particles hitch a ride on solar wind out into space.

If such an energy storm hits Earth, the particles collide with the planet’s magnetic field and zip through the atmosphere until they reach the poles. The breathtaking ribbons of light are the result of the solar particles interacting with atmospheric molecules from elements such as nitrogen and oxygen.

Early in 2019, Iceland lit up with an aurora that resembled a massive green dragon. Apart from the whimsical connection to a mythological beast, the light show confused NASA scientists. Breaking all the rules of how an aurora should form, the dragon appeared during a sunspot-free time. Even though there were no particles or stellar storm, the fantastic aurora remained for days.^[6]

4 Mysterious Island Rocks

The island of Anjouan is located between Madagascar and Africa’s east coast. As the entire island was spewed out by a volcano, all of Anjouan’s rocks should be basalt. In recent years, geologists wrung their hands over a mystery. The tropical island also had quartzite rocks. As in, everywhere.

That might sound normal, but it could not be more impossible. Volcanoes cannot produce quartzite, and the mineral should never be on a volcanic island. Anjouan goes against everything geology knows. The sheer number of the rocks, which were lighter colored than the dark basalt, deepened the mystery.

Then locals lent a hand and mentioned that quartzite streaked all the way up the island’s mountains. Researchers followed the trail and found the mother lode. It was a hill-sized area and the biggest clue.

The massive chunk suggested that a quartzite piece broke off Earth’s supercontinent when it separated millions of years ago. It sank to the ocean floor and got pushed back up when a volcanic ridge shoved Anjouan into existence about four million years ago.^[7]

3 Earth’s Strange Silence

Our planet is a noisy bug. It creaks and groans with geological processes. However, within the Palaeoproterozoic era (2.2 and 2.3 billion years ago), Earth went mysteriously quiet.

Some scientists believed that this lull never happened. But in 2018, a study gave more evidence that the globe’s geology went silent. Researchers examined rocks from China, Northern Canada, Western Australia, and Southern Africa.

The samples unanimously supported the suggestion that rock-forming processes went on holiday during the Palaeoproterozoic. For about 100 million years, Earth stayed dormant. The study showed that fewer volcanoes erupted, tectonic plates hardly moved, and sedimentation slowed down.^[8]

Back in the day, Earth’s innards were exceptionally hot and caused a lot of volcanic activity. Nobody knows why it stopped—or why it restarted. When it did, volcanoes flared up and the continental crust’s composition changed and fractured into smaller pieces.

Whatever happened, the new activity changed tectonic formation and movement away from their ancient ways to the way they behave today.

2 The Mayotte Mystery

In 2018, strange waves rippled across the planet. They rang Earth like a bell for more than 20 minutes, but scientists did not notice. If it were not for a civilian watching a live seismograph feed, this mystery might have gone unnoticed.

The waves began on November 11, close to the island of Mayotte, which is near Madagascar. They triggered equipment across several African countries and then traveled the seas to ping sensors in New Zealand, Chile, Canada, and Hawaii.

Seismologists have never seen anything like it. At least, the waves were identified as a type that usually follow after main and secondary waves first ripple away from an undersea eruption. Based on the strength of the Mayotte waves, a magnitude-5 eruption should have occurred on November 11. But it never did.

Additionally, earthquakes release waves with several frequencies. The Mayotte waves had one signal, and bizarrely, it repeated every 17 seconds. Despite complex theories about quiet earthquakes and collapsing magma chambers, the global ring remains unanswered.^[9]

1 The Blobs

Deep inside Earth is a mystery that nobody understands. Thousands of miles below the surface are two of the planet’s biggest structures. Their technical name is “large low-shear-velocity provinces,” which is perhaps why scientists just prefer to call them “the blobs.”

One hangs around deep under Africa, and the other is far below the Pacific Ocean. Geophysicists first detected the anomalies in the 1970s, but they remain poorly understood. Their age, creation, and purpose are complete mysteries. Scholars have also failed to reach a consensus over their density and influence on geological processes.^[10]

However, few disagree that the structures are epic. The blobs are hot pressurized rock reaching 100 times higher than Mount Everest. One description put the scale into perspective: If they stood on the surface of the planet, the International Space Station would have to change course to avoid hitting them.

Every generation has its own idea of what “futuristic” means. Fifty years ago, that would have been flat-screen TVs, 24-hour ATMs, and other things we take for granted today.

As technological growth is exponential rather than linear, “futuristic” in 2019 means quite a bit more than it did back then. All bets are off at this point as scientific progress is rapidly leaving even our imaginations behind. Most of us didn’t even know that these 10 futuristic technologies were in development, let alone already in existence.

10 Thought-Controlled Prostheses

Humanity has a long history of going out and doing things that take our limbs away. Compared to our early days, prosthetic limbs have a come a long way. They’re not just pieces of wood vaguely shaped like an arm anymore. Today’s prostheses almost look and operate like real limbs.

However, anyone who has lost an arm will tell you that prostheses aren’t anything like the real thing. No matter how advanced they get, they still can’t communicate with the brain and neural network.

Of course, that was until science decided that it was time to build thought-controlled prostheses—and did. In an experiment funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a man from Florida became the first person to be fitted with an artificial limb that can be controlled by thoughts, blurring the line between imagination and reality.

Even if he still can’t do everything he could with his real arm—like splash water on it or drive—the arm largely works as intended.^[1]

9 Full-Fledged 3-D–Printed Organs

3-D printers can print almost anything as long as the blueprint and material is available. From guns to musical instruments to clothes, people who’ve been experimenting with 3-D printing since the technology came out have done unbelievable things with it. Some of 3-D printing’s truly futuristic applications lie in medicine, like printing and replacing organs damaged during accidents.

Although we have previously discussed a San Diego research firm that successfully printed liver tissue, that was not exactly the same as 3-D printing organs because a human organ is much more than just tissue. Almost all our organs are so intricately designed that even our best machines haven’t been able to replicate them yet.

Until now. A researcher from Rice University recently printed a full-scale model of the lung—complete with air pathways and blood vessels mimicking the real thing.^[2] We’ve also come one step closer to perfectly replicating human tissue. In another lab, scientists were able to reprogram the cells of our tissues into stem cells and make a bio ink out of it. The ink could then be used to print a complicated organ—such as the heart—exactly like the real thing.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’re now able to completely make a human body on our own, though these advancements are still something we never expected we’d be able to do so soon.

8 Working Retinal Implants

According to WHO estimates, around 1.3 billion people around the world are diagnosed with vision impairment. Many of them suffer from degenerative retinal diseases that cannot be cured. Completely curing blindness would certainly be considered a futuristic proposition, and thanks to groundbreaking research into retinal implants that perfectly mimic the human eye, we may already have the tech to do it.

Recently, scientists made a retinal implant that works exactly like the real thing and successfully tested it in rats. We’d like to note that eye implants already exist, though none of them could fix the damage done to the retina as it’s responsible for taking the information seen through the eye to the brain. This new tech can fix the eye and be used as a replacement for the retina and photoreceptor cells, something that wasn’t possible before.^[3]

In other research, scientists have created a 2-D material that could be used to make an artificial retina. Combine that with the above implants, and we may already possess the tech required to eradicate blindness. However, it will be at least a few more years until it’s perfected and made affordable enough for the masses.

7 Digital Tattoos

You may have heard of the various types of LED screens that scientists are working on, including superthin, foldable screens that we may be able to carry in our pockets like handkerchiefs. But you may not have heard that the same thing could be done to skin. Based on recent developments, we already have the material to do that.

We’re not talking about replacing actual skin. No, these would be tattoo-like augmentations to the skin that would double as displays. If one Japanese research team is to be believed, we’ve already developed the material with which it would be made.^[4]

It could be used for a lot of things, like monitoring heartbeats and other health readings while connected to an app on your smartphone, storing unlock codes for your various devices, or simply serving as over-the-top, bespoke tattoos for really fancy parties.

6 Grow Organs Of One Species In Another

One of the biggest problems with organ transplants is how choosy the human body is when accepting something it didn’t grow on its own. But there may be a way to get around that problem. In another organism, you grow the required organs that perfectly resemble those made by your own body and then transplant them.

If that sounds like something straight out of the distant future, we’re pleased to report that it isn’t anymore. In fact, scientists have already done it in mice. In a study published in Nature, researchers were able to grow pancreas cells for a mouse in rats. (And yes, they are completely different species.)

First, they injected rats with stem cells and did some other complicated science stuff. Then they transplanted the developed pancreas cells into mice with diabetes. To everyone’s surprise, the mice were cured and their sugar levels were kept down for one year. This technique could be used someday to grow whatever organs we need in other animals.^[5]

5 3-D–Printed Nanobots

Nanobots have been imagined in popular fiction as well as the daydreams of budding scientists for quite some time now. In theory, we’d be able to build robots so small that they could enter the bloodstream and carry out minute operations inside the body, like manually killing cancer cells.

We’ve discussed some progress in that field before, though these devices weren’t technically tiny robots. Instead, they were folded DNA strands from another organism, even if they could be called nanobots for all intents and purposes.

More recently, scientists from Hong Kong developed 3-D–printed nanoscale robots with stem cells, nickel, and titanium and successfully used them to deliver cancer cells to a specific location in mice. Of course, the end goal should have been removing the cancer, but that wasn’t what they were testing. They wanted to see if the bots could deliver a payload to a precise location and used cancer cells because they are the easiest to track.^[6]

4 Sending Taste Over The Internet

The Internet has transformed our lives. We can now see and hear what’s going on in different parts of the world by just clicking a few buttons on our smartphones. However, we can only send information that engages our senses of sight and hearing, and it’s still limited by the quality of the recording equipment and the skill of the person recording it. We have no way of sending, for example, what we smell through the Internet.

But we’re one step closer with taste. In a study conducted at the University of Singapore, researchers were able to successfully send a measure of sourness of a lemon drink to a glass of water in another location. They even had people test it out. Although most admitted that the virtual lemon taste was a bit less sour than the real thing, the participants were largely able to identify the taste.

Of course, this has only been tested on a lemon as of now and researchers cannot reproduce the real flavor without simulating olfaction. Still, it’s pretty unbelievable.^[7]

3 Self-Healing Skin

Wear and tear is a major problem for every industry, whether it’s manufacturing, architecture, or medicine. Everyone has to accept that things are going to break down with time, and we have to take that into account when designing things. The problem is especially noticeable in the human body, which gets weaker and more prone to injuries as we age.

If some recent developments are to be believed, we’re not going to have that problem for long. Scientists at the National University of Singapore recently developed a self-healing material that mimics the skin of a jellyfish. The skin is able to repair itself within minutes of being cut or torn and can even withstand coming into contact with water.

While those with more perverse minds could see this as the next step to building realistic sex robots, it has quite a few other uses as well. It can be used to create realistic prostheses, which could be combined with the previously mentioned thought-controlled mechanism to build artificial limbs better than our real ones. This electronic skin is also sustainable because a material that can heal itself doesn’t need to be discarded as waste.^[8]

2 3-D–Printed Food

In the machines vs. humans debate, it’s clear that we’re going to lose quite a few jobs to our metallic counterparts as time progresses. It’s not all misery, though. It’s just another part of the rapid technological progress of the last few decades, which has also helped us in many areas of life. However, we assume that some jobs will always be strictly human endeavors as machines would never be able to do them.

Cooking is definitely one of those jobs as there’s no way that a machine would have an idea of the right ingredients and proportions to make food taste good. However, machines have already proven they can do it as well as we can.

According to Natural Machines, a 3-D food printing company, we already have the technology required to 3-D print food items like burgers and pizzas. Foodini, as their machine is called, is capable of taking ingredients and turning them into dishes that taste as good as those made by people. The best part is that the company is now focusing on health food and fresh ingredients.^[9]

Many other firms are now developing machines that give you the option to 3-D print food items at home.

1 Remote Touching

A big limitation of getting things done is being there to do them. We know it sounds like a philosophical and edgy argument as you obviously have to go places to do things there (like buying groceries). However, many researchers are hard at work trying to overcome that limitation, no matter how impossible it sounds.

Imagine a world where you could have sex with someone across the world like you were there or conduct a remote conference with a version of yourself that could replicate everything you do, including handling things from far away. The concept is so futuristic that we aren’t even able to wrap our heads around how it could be possible. However, a technology developed by researchers at MIT is already able to do just that to a large extent.

Known as inFORM, it’s a shape-shifting interface that can take input from a remote location and precisely replicate those actions in another. inFORM is only the name of the interface, though, as they’re now building quite a few other applications on top of it.^[10]

Take Materiable, which is one of those applications that allows you to remotely handle objects and has even been successfully tested in the lab. It’s able to mimic the properties of a lot of materials found on Earth, like sand, water, and rubber.

Remote handling is only one of its applications as we don’t even know everything that it could be used for yet.

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant, get in touch with him for writing gigs, or just say hello to him on Twitter.

Historical records do a good job of telling us what history was like in umbrella terms. They often fall far short of recreating exactly how people at a given time would have experienced the world around them. For example, we weren’t really sure what popular music in ancient Greece was like, nor did we have much of a sense of the alcohols of ancient China.

With technology consistently getting better at answering these questions and more, however, we’re gradually getting closer to experiencing history precisely as the people living in those times did. Here are ten times we were able to recreate the past with the help of good old science.

10 Ancient Greek Face

We tend to assume that people in various parts of the world have always looked pretty much the same throughout history, though that’s not really true. There are many factors that influence facial structure and other things that make up people’s looks in a given time period, like immunity to disease, popular style at the time, and diet.

We definitely still don’t know what people in all the time periods in history looked like, but some scientists have tried to answer it for ancient Greece. We’re not talking about what people usually think of when they hear or read “ancient Greece” but the general Greece region, as it’s also one of the oldest continuously inhabited regions in the world.

In 2018, researchers reconstructed the face of a teenage girl from 9,000 years ago, using her remains and technologies like CT scanning and 3-D printing. Interestingly, she had a pronounced jawline and overall more masculine-looking features than women born in that region today. The researchers hypothesized that this may have been due to chewing on animal skin to make leather. They postulated that she also suffered from anemia and maybe scurvy.^[1]

9 The Destruction Of Pompeii

Unless you’ve ignored all the history lessons anyone ever tried to give you, you know of the destruction of Pompeii in ancient Rome. Once a bustling center of culture and trade, it was struck by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. We’re still in the process of uncovering the sheer scale of the destruction caused by the eruption, but simply put, Pompeii was wiped out, with many of its citizens dying.

If you want to know what the disaster may have looked like to someone living there, you can. In an exhibition held at the Melbourne Museum in 2009, they included a theater installation with a short animated video of the event, painstakingly put together by historians with whatever information they had about the eruption up to that point.^[2]

8 Ancient Greek Music

We know a surprising lot about music in ancient Greece, compared to other civilizations from that time. We know the kind of instruments they used, and thanks to works by people like Homer and Euripedes, we know how they composed music. Despite having access to all that, we still had no idea how to read those compositions, as they had a different notation style than the one we use today, along with weird symbols we didn’t know the meaning of. Not until modern times, at least.

Thanks to some recently found and compiled documents, we now have a better idea of how music composition in ancient Greece actually worked. Using that, a few teams of researchers and musicians have successfully recreated the sounds of ancient Greece.^[3] Many other experts are now trying to perfectly recreate that sound as more and more information is uncovered by historians and archaeologists.

7 Hittite Feast

The Hittite Empire was centered around the Asian part of what is now Turkey and was a major player in the region from roughly 1600 to 1200 BC. That was mostly because it was the only major player in the region, as it was still the Bronze Age. From their records, we can tell that they put a lot of emphasis on their culinary culture, so much so that anyone who entered the kitchen in an unhygienic state was outright given the death penalty. That’s a bit extreme.

In an attempt to recreate their food, a Turkish archaeologist and chef got together in 2015 to replicate their cooking techniques. For one, the Hittites didn’t use yeast to make their bread and preferred to eat cold meat with cooked onions and bread on festive occasions. The team even replicated their cooking techniques for authenticity and used no modern kitchen equipment other than a knife.^[4]

6 Chinese Beer

Ancient China has a long, rich history stretching back thousands of years. Although we know much of this history from everything from cave paintings to written records, we know comparatively little about what life was really like in ancient China.

In a bid to recreate some of that, a team of researchers from Stanford University collaborated in 2017 to brew beer just like the Chinese did some 5,000 years ago.^[5] They got the recipe by looking at inscriptions found inside pottery utensils from back then and made what is perhaps the oldest beverage we have ever had the chance to get a taste of.

Made with grains like millet and barley, along with Job’s tears (a type of grass found in Asia), the recreated beer tasted sweeter and fruitier than what we’re used to now.

5 Neolithic Dog

The domestication of our best friend, the dog, has been one of the most pivotal moments in human civilization. Not only were we able to accomplish more tasks with the help of our furry friends, but dogs also helped people live on their own, without depending on the other members of society to alert them of incoming dangers.

We may assume that dogs have always looked as they do now, but that’s not really true. The earliest varieties of domesticated dogs looked more like wolves than modern-day dogs, as they hadn’t yet gone through years and years of artificial breeding.

In order to nail down their exact look back then, in 2019, a forensic artist used an excavated dog skull from 4,000 years ago and also employed 3-D modeling and projected images provided by other teams of archaeologists. The reconstructed face—with every detail painstakingly added by the artist after consulting with history experts—looks like a cross between a wolf and a modern dog.^[6]

4 Beer At King Midas’s Funeral

The history of humanity is essentially the history of alcohol, as we’ve mentioned before. Alcohol has shaped our civilization in more ways than any other invention, and historians can tell a lot of things about an ancient culture by just tracing their drinking habits.

Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist from the University of Pennsylvania, has devoted a huge part of his life to studying ancient alcoholic beverages and recreating them. He does so by looking for traces of ingredients in cooking equipment from ancient times and has successfully brought many ancient beverages back to life. His proudest recreation is the beer served at the funeral of King Midas, specifically the one who ruled Phrygia (in what is now Turkey) during the eighth century BC.^[7]

If you want to get a taste of some of these beverages, you can do so by visiting Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware, which brews and packages the drinks devised by McGovern.

3 Aphrodite’s Perfumes

Recreating ancient fragrances is a much more difficult task than ancient alcohol or sounds, as the factors that make up a smell are far more difficult to preserve in history. It’s not impossible, though, as we still have the descriptions of those smells from cultures that liked to write everything down, especially the Greeks.

In 2018, using inscriptions from the Mycenaean period (perhaps the oldest Greek records we have access to), chemists from the National Archaeological Museum of Athens recreated some of the perfumes associated with the goddess Aphrodite for the museum’s 150th anniversary.^[8] The highlight of the show was Aphrodite’s Rose, a particularly noteworthy fragrance talked about in ancient inscriptions. The process took over 18 months to complete, which included traveling across the Greek countryside for ingredients to keep it authentic.

2 Egyptian Ale

We know that ale was a part of everyday life in ancient Egypt. People used to have it with all the meals, and it wasn’t because ancient Egypt was essentially a never-ending party. Ale was considered to be a safer alternative to water, as water purification techniques weren’t particularly well-developed back then.

We had no idea how Egyptian ale tasted, until now. In 2019, researchers from Israel studied ancient jugs excavated from the region and isolated six strains of yeast from the kitchenware. The yeast had survived in the pores of the pots, which came as a surprise to them.

While the less adventurous researchers would send that to the lab and call it a day, these scientists wanted to do something more fun with it. They used it to ferment beer of their own, giving us the first taste of alcohol in ancient Egypt.^[9]

1 Roman Concrete

Roman concrete is one of the most enduring materials ever created by humans. We can still see structures made with it throughout what was once the Roman Empire at its mightiest. The recipe was lost to history, and scientists have been trying to recreate it ever since they got to know about it.

Thanks to the efforts of some researchers from the University of Utah, though, we may have finally figured out its secret. It was made with the help of volcanic ash, and it was seawater that gave the concrete its famous sturdiness. When they studied a pier and other structures made with it, they found that the seawater reacts with the materials in the concrete to form interlocking minerals that made it even stronger—minerals that are hard or expensive to make in the lab.^[10]

With sea levels rising around the world, we’re desperately looking for better technology to build seawalls and other anti-ocean structures, and this may just be the breakthrough we were looking for.

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant, get in touch with him for writing gigs, or just say hello to him on Twitter.

The definition of ‘mysterious’ has changed drastically over the centuries. What may have been a baffling secret of nature in, say, the 13th century would be common knowledge by now, as our understanding of the world has got a lot better, thanks to steady advancements in science and technology. That’s not to say that mysteries don’t exist anymore. There’d always be something our current set of knowledge can’t explain. In fact, it’s essential to have things we’re yet to figure out to grow and progress as a society.

Some mysteries, however, aren’t just persistent, but seem to get even more confusing the more we look into them. From the mysteriously-diverse wildlife under Antarctica to how exactly the Sun works, here are ten unresolved mysteries that got even more baffling the last time we checked up on them.

See Also: Top 10 Mysteries And Crimes Solved By The Internet

8 We Still Don’t Entirely Get The Sun

If you think about it, the Sun must have been the most mysterious thing in the world for an early man. Here you are, barely making sense of the world around you full of various types of life, diverse landscapes and weird weather patterns. Absolutely nothing, however, compares to the giant ball of fire hanging in the sky that rises from one side of the horizon every day and sets into the other. Is it controlled by a higher entity? Will they switch it off some day? These are the questions our ancestors would have been faced with without anyone to answer them.

Of course, our understanding of the Sun has improved quite a bit from those times. Thanks to modern science, we now know that the heat of the Sun doesn’t come from fire, but rather complex nuclear fusion reactions in its core. That said, the Sun still holds many mysteries we may never know the answer to, as it’s impossible to actually go there and take readings.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t raise the bar for how close we can go and get better observations, which is exactly what the team behind the Parker Solar Probe believed. The probe has been the closest we have ever got to the Sun, though instead of answering questions, the mission raised entirely new ones.

Their observations suggest that things on the Sun are actually much, much more chaotic than we had previously thought. For one, the probe found that the Sun’s surface is regularly hit by sweeping magnetic waves so powerful that they temporarily reverse the local magnetic field. More importantly, they found that the waves and solar winds on the Sun travel at least twenty times faster than any standard model of the sun we have.

If we could account for that discrepancy and understand exactly what’s going on there, we’d be in a much better place to safeguard ourselves from harmful solar waves that could someday kill all electricity on Earth.^[1]

7 Life Under Antarctica Is Surprisingly Diverse

When we first started scientifically researching and documenting all the species on Earth, we were working under the assumption that life would be more diverse in the more hospitable regions of the world. We were working under the assumption that ‘hospitable’ means the same thing for all—or at least most organisms, though as we gradually found out, that’s not the case. Life is actually much more diverse and thriving in some of the most extreme regions of the world, and we still don’t understand how.

One of those regions is Antarctica, which also happens to be the only continent that’s not permanently inhabited. We’re not really talking about the surface, though, but the sea under the almost-perennially frozen cover of ice.

Mind you, it’s one of the most extreme places in the world, so much so that you need to spend an hour to dress up for a dive. Diver equipment here is about 200 pounds heavy, as you’d die within ten minutes if you attempt to dive with regular diving gear. It’s a fair assumption that it’s not conducive to any sort of life. As one photographer on a National Geographic expedition found out, though, that’s really not the case.

While we always knew that the waters underneath Antarctica hold their own secrets, no one thought of it as a vibrant ecosystem for plant and animal life. It was when the photographer made his way down to the floor that he realized the sheer diversity and number of organisms that call this hellhole home. From sea spiders to corals to sea stars, Antarctica’s deep sea is surprisingly teeming with life, though we don’t understand how. The photographer was so mesmerized by the prolific life on the ocean floor that he called it a ‘luxuriant garden’.

Again, this place is so hostile that he had to deal with nerve damage for seven months after the expedition.^[2]

6 Interstellar Space Is A LOT Weirder Than We Expected

It’s no breaking news that the universe beyond the tiny little planet we call home is a mysterious place. While we’re definitely closer to solving some of those mysteries than we were, say, a hundred years ago, that’s still not close enough. There are still many things we don’t understand about what all is out there, made worse by the fact that every time we have a new technology to get us closer to the answers, it actually ends up posing even more questions than before.

Take the Voyager 2, which – along with the Voyager 1 – is the only time we have been able to send a piece of our tech to interstellar space. One of its main aims was understanding what happens beyond the boundary of what we know as the heliosphere – the range of the Sun’s magnetic field that protects us from all kinds of radiation.

What we found there, however, doesn’t align with our calculations at all. For one, the magnetic field beyond the heliosphere is about two to three times stronger than we expected. That means that the interstellar particles exert an electromagnetic pressure of over ten time than we previously thought, which is pretty baffling for scientists who need those figures to be accurate to better understand the universe. They also found a lot of leakages in the space that marks the boundary between the heliosphere and interstellar space.^[3]

5 Science Keeps Finding Alien-Like Ancient Creatures

All throughout history, the question of exactly where we came from has been on everyone’s mind. For some, it’s a philosophical question, but for the scientists, it’s a literal one. How did human life, and life in general, physically start on Earth is still largely a mystery, even if we have made tremendous strides in that field recently. We now know a lot about early life on Earth, thanks to better excavation and analysis techniques.

While we have answered many questions about the origins of life on Earth, research teams keep finding stuff that simply refutes everything we think we knew. As an example, consider the various alien-like species they have found – and still keep finding—in the Canadian Rockies, particularly from the Cambrian period. Many of the species couldn’t be classified according to any of our evolutionary models, making us rethink the whole thing every now and then.^[4]

4 We Don’t Know Anything About The Oldest Animals

While on the one hand we’re finding completely unknown species, we’re still no closer to finding the beginning of the tree of life Earth as we see it on the other. While it’s true that our ability to look into the past has vastly improved in the recent years – especially in the fields of archaeology and excavation—dial the proverbial knob of history too far back, and you’d start entering entire eras that are in the dark.

Moreover, we keep finding things that challenge our previously held models of our lineage. Research has found that the animals before the Cambrian period were entirely distinct from anything that came after, and we don’t understand how. The complex traits we see in animals today – no matter how immensely varied we all are – are actually a result of an event called the Cambrian Explosion, though the animals and plants that existed before are a complete mystery to us.^[5]

3 The Evolution Of Turtles Is (Still) A Mystery

Turtles occupy an interesting place on the family tree. It’s an animal that has successfully freed itself from the laborious-yet-crucial role of getting a house, simply by being born with one on its back. If you think that it’s not easy to trace its evolutionary roots, you’d be right. Scientists have never had much idea about where turtles really come from, though our basic understanding of them has certainly come a long way in recent times.

That understanding, though, was challenged by the recent discovery of a turtle-like animal some 220 million years ago. According to scientists, the animal that should have been at that place in the family tree of the turtle should have had a beak and a pair of two holes in its back, just like turtles. If we cross checked it with other fossils found around that time, we’d find that they don’t align with this discovery, either.^[6]

2Saturn Gets More Mysterious Every Time We Check Up On It

For all the discussion about colonizing outer space, we forget that unimaginably vast parts of the solar system – let alone the galaxy and beyond – are quite boring to begin with. While we’re sure it’d be fun to visit alien worlds at first, that excitement would wear off quite soon and we’d find that there’s not much to do in space.
Saturn, on the other hand, defies all norms of how boring space should be. Every time we make a visit to Saturn or one of its many moons, we find something completely different we don’t understand.

Take its rings, which keep getting more mysterious the more we try to understand them. We know that they’re made up of ice and rock and always have moving, outward ripples due to the gravity of Saturn’s 62 moons. As some recent findings suggest, though, they also have waves that move inward, which is confusing for the scientists. They don’t know what’s causing them, though it’d be clearer in future expeditions. There’s also the fact that its outer ring is much bigger than previously thought, as a recent study found.^[7]

1 Math Doesn’t Agree On The Rate Of Expansion Of The Universe

If you haven’t, we’d highly recommend reading the story of how we first discovered that the universe is expanding. While too long for the scope of this list, the discovery – for the first time in human history – proved that everything, everywhere is always in motion, which is sort of poetic, too. It still posed many more questions, like the rate of its expansion, whether it’d keep doing it indefinitely, and what does it mean for us.

As per recent research, though, we’re not just no closer to finding the answers, we also keep finding things that completely throw us off the path. If some recent observations are correct – and there’s no reason to believe they aren’t; they’re scientists after all – calculations of the rate of expansion of the universe keep turning different values depending on how we measure them. If you calculate it by studying the afterglow of the Big Bang, it’s a completely different value from calculating it from the cosmic microwave background.

It defies the fundamental rule of math and universe, that the correct answer to a problem would be the same regardless of the method you use to find it. According to some, it may need an entire new type of science to account for the discrepancy, as the true rate of expansion can only be one value if we go by our current rules of math and science.^[8]

Science is hands down one of the coolest subjects in the world. It is always striving to learn, so it’s mutable and adaptive. Some people think it’s a weakness of science when what we believe is true is proven wrong, but that’s what makes science so valuable. It’s never arrogant enough to say “This is an absolute truth.” Instead, it simply seeks to explain something as well as it can, given the evidence. 

With that in mind, science cannot explain some things yet and sometimes those things are the most mundane things you can think of.

10. We’re Not Entirely Clear On How Anesthesia Works

If you’re headed to the hospital for a major surgery, then you’re going to need anesthesia. It just makes it easier for doctors to fiddle with your innards if you aren’t watching and screaming. 

There are many kinds of anesthesia used for a variety of purposes, some of which are local, some general, some inhaled, and some injected. Whatever anesthesia you’re getting, it’s designed to prevent you from feeling pain. Sometimes that means you’re unconscious.

Given what anesthesia does, it needs to be administered carefully. Too little and you’ll feel surgeons cutting into you. You may even be unable to react to show you’re conscious, but you’ll feel everything. Too much anesthesia and you could die. It’s serious business.

Knowing what we know about anesthesia, it’s harrowing to also know that we don’t know how it works. The process by which it can knock you out and make you unable to feel pain is a literal mystery. There are theories it may dissolve some fats in your brain and otherwise interfere with how your brain transmits information.

In 2020, a study revealed that one kind of anesthesia, of the many kinds, weakens high-frequency electrical signals between neurons. The experiment was done in mice and could account for the pain-negating effect while simultaneously allowing lower frequency signals, the things that govern your ability to breathe and keep your heart beating, to continue. 

Again, that study was in 2020 and it was done on mice. It was the first time scientists could see something they thought might explain the workings of a medical procedure we’ve been doing since the 1840s.

9. Itacolumite is a Bendable Rock and We’re Not Sure How it Works

If someone asked you to describe the characteristics of rocks, you might say things like hard, heavy, rigid, or solid. Some pretty basic and boring adjectives. But if you were tasked with describing the rock known as itacolumite you could also add bendable to the list.

Itacolumite is a kind of sandstone and it’s most prevalent in the Brazilian mountains from where it gets its name. The stone can bend in your hands, even under its own weight, the way you might expect a piece of rubber to bend. It’s no Stretch Armstrong but, compared to the rocks that you find most everywhere else in the world, it’s impressive.

The reason flexible sandstone works is a mystery. The structure of the stone is made of grains of quartz that are more widely separated than they would be in a more rigid stone. The spaces between these grains are irregular as well, which seems to allow for flexibility. But how and why this happens is still not known. 

8. We Understand the Purpose Behind Different Tastes Except for Sour

Humans can detect five principle kinds of taste. We categorize them as sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. Science has even managed to come up with a reason for each. 

Biologically speaking, sweet lets you know something has sugars in it, which means carbohydrates, which means energy. Umami is triggered by things meaty and that means protein. Bitter is often associated with things we don’t want to eat and dangerous plants, especially poisonous ones, are bitter and we learned to avoid those because of bitterness. Salty deals with electrolytes and fluid balances and general body health. And then there’s sour.

Whether you love sour food or hate it, science has not been able to explain the biological purpose behind our ability to taste it. It’s a simple way to tell if food is acidic, but that doesn’t benefit us in any significant way. A sour food could be poisonous, or it could benefit fluid balance, or it could have carbohydrates. Or not. The sourness isn’t relevant to those or a reliable way to judge their worthiness in fulfilling those needs. 

It’s been speculated ancient fish could “taste” sour through their flesh and that could alert them to acidic and therefore dangerous waters. Also, being that humans can’t produce their own vitamin C, the ability to taste sour might help us identify it naturally in our food. Or it might help us identify rotten fruit that is producing acids from bacteria. But, again, that’s a maybe. 

7. Everyone Has Face Mites But It’s Not Clear Exactly Why

If you were to look at your face under a powerful microscope you’d discover an entire world of tiny little creatures living in your pores, enjoying your oils, reproducing, and pooping on you with abandon. These little mites, called Demodex, are arachnids and live on all mammals. They have developed alongside us. We have no idea what they’re there for.

The mites don’t cause you any harm and you also can’t really get rid of them. In 2,000 random people tested, every single person had them. The little fellas live in the pores on the oiliest parts of your face nestled against hair follicles. They feast on the sebum, the oily substance your skin makes to protect itself, and then late at night they crawl out to breed on your face before digging back into your pores again.

While evidence suggests we’ve always had these mites, as in since our species started, the reason is still unclear. They’re usually not dangerous, though some people can have a reaction to them or suffer from too many. But mostly they eat dead skin and keep your face running smoothly.

6. Flying Squirrels Glow Pink in UV Light For Some Reason

Flying squirrels are absolutely adorable, and why wouldn’t they be? They’re squirrels that glide through the trees like Batman. Science has also discovered that these little mammals are also the ultimate rave animals as they glow bright pink under ultraviolet light.

To be clear, no other squirrel glows under black light, just flying squirrels. Researchers studied the fur of squirrels using a mass spectrometer to find out what compounds might make it glow and found nothing, putting a bit of a speed bump in the road to understanding. 

The phenomena wasn’t captured on camera until 2021 and experts were left with little but speculation. The squirrels could glow in a way visible to other squirrels as part of a mating ritual, as a communication method, or even to ward off predators. It’s hard to say right now since it’s unique to just these animals.

5. Bats Hate Solar Farms But We Don’t Know Why

Bats are some of the most helpful animals in nature, cleaning up the skies of terrible pests like mosquitoes every night as well as inspiring some of our best superheroes. They also tend to prefer dark places to live like caves, attics, under bridges, and so on. One thing they seem to hate? Solar farms.

Bats avoiding solar farms may not seem like a big deal, but it could be. If bats don’t want to be around them, then that can alter the entire ecosystem. The insects they prey on can thrive in those areas. Solar farms actually do provide great breeding grounds for insects. As solar farms spread, so too could the insects and potential diseases carried by them.

So far no one knows why the bats hate the farms. It now becomes a balancing act as to whether anything can or should be done. Fossil fuels arguably kill more bats than solar farms could, so maybe nothing is to be done about bats not wanting to be there, especially since we don’t even know why. 

4. Dogs Brains are Getting Larger for Some Reason

There are two kinds of pet owners; those who think their pets are geniuses and those who think their pets are idiots. If you’re in the genius camp and you own a dog, you may be on to something. Dog brains are actually getting bigger, but the reason behind it remains something of a mystery.

Compared to their ancient ancestors, many modern dog breeds have larger brains than they did in the past. In general, dog brains are smaller than wolf brains but the more removed a dog breed is from wolves in the modern world, the larger their brain seems to be. 

Domestication shrunk the size of dog brains, but as we have bred new dogs and tasked them with jobs like hunting or herding, their brains have begun to increase again. Domestic dogs may have developed these larger brains not just because they have jobs – wolves had to do as much or more – but because they live in a more complicated and social world. The expectations and burdens of living with humans are forcing their brains to expand to handle it all. 

3. Tornadoes are Getting Bigger, Faster, and More Plentiful 

If you’ve been feeling like bad weather has been getting worse, you’re not alone. Tornadoes are, in fact, bigger, faster, and more frequent today than they have been in the past. And while that’s concerning, maybe more concerning is that we can’t explain why.

Over the past 50 years the part of the US known as Tornado Alley has expanded. The deadly storms are more frequent and more powerful. Climate change is something people can point to but saying that and explaining it are two different things. If climate change is to blame, how is it to blame? That’s what we don’t exactly know yet. Warmer winters are definitely contributing to the problem, allowing tornadoes to form both sooner in the year and further north, but that does little to help explain them or predict them.

Predicting and warning about tornadoes is something that suffers with the new patterns. In 2011 the average lead time for a tornado was 13 minutes. That was how much warning people in the path of a storm would have to prepare. By 2020 it was down to 8.4 minutes. That’s better than 1990 when it was only 5 minutes, but the fact it’s heading back down instead of going up is not a good sign. 

2. Crows Will Sometimes Act Very Unexpectedly Towards Their Own Dead

Crows are some of the most intelligent animals in the world. They are capable of conscious thought and possess self-awareness, something that humans long thought only primates could manage. In fact, crows and gorillas may be intellectually on the same level. That’s both stunning and impressive and should make us look at these birds in a whole new light.

Knowing how intelligent crows are, it’s even more baffling to see some of their behavior. Some crows have been observed engaging in illicit behavior with the corpses of other crows. The least offensive way to say it is necrophilia. 

Crows generally avoid their own dead or use them as a chance to warn others of danger. About 24% of the time crows will approach a corpse to poke at it in some way. But in 4% of cases the birds would try to copulate and the reason is just not clear at all. One idea was that the behavior was observed during mating season and hormone levels in the living birds could have impaired their cognitive function, but there’s no concrete evidence.

1. The Science of Whether or Not Water is Wet is Not Settled

Is water wet? That sounds like one of the dumbest questions you could ever ask but, scientifically, it’s not dumb at all. And it doesn’t have a definite answer, either. Part of the problem here is rooted in what “wet” means. That sounds semantic but there’s more to it than that. 

Science defines wetness by a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a substance thereby making it “wet” as we understand the water. And by that definition water isn’t actually wet, it’s just what makes something else wet. That said, if you think wet means something liquid then water is wet. 

To think of it another way, wet is the way something feels when the liquid is on it. So if you dunk your hand in water, your hand is now wet because water is on it. But since wet is just a sensation, the water itself isn’t technically wet because it’s not on anything and has made nothing wet yet. The water is never wet, it’s just your hand that gets that way because of the water. If that sounds vaguely confusing, that’s the point and that’s why science is still not 100% clear on whether water is wet.

Chinese medicine, holistic therapies, and ritualistic shamanism are often viewed as pseudoscience. But they are actually very ancient practices that have been around for thousands of years. However, due to raised interest worldwide, our scientists are now running huge numbers of research trials to try and discover if there is any truth in these strange areas of knowledge. Because of the advancement in technology, such as brain imaging, we are now able to study the brain patterns of people actively practicing meditation or receiving acupuncture, shedding light on what is happening in the brain and body. Here is a Top 10 rundown of the best scientific research to date.

10Acupuncture

The ancient technique of sticking needles into the skin at strategic points has origins dating back thousands of years, the first documented record being around 100 B.C. It is still widely used in China today to treat the root cause of conditions as opposed to the symptomatic approach of Western medicine. However, acupuncture is gaining recognition fast in the West with the British National Health Service stating that acupuncture encourages the body to produce pain-relieving endorphins. Acupuncture is now available for free on the NHS in some areas of the United Kingdom.

So, the question is, if the UK NHS are providing acupuncture to patients, surely there must be some clinical evidence to prove its efficacy? There is! There are over 3000 clinical trials studying the benefits of acupuncture in a vast array of illnesses and conditions. For example, the British Acupuncture Council says obesity has been studied in numerous acupuncture trials with positive results.

A pain management review of acupuncture was published by Manyanga et al. in 2014.^[1] The review looked at 12 trials comparing acupuncture to standard care in osteoarthritis (plus placebo and no treatment at all). The results showed significant pain reduction, improved mobility, and better quality of life. And the longer the treatment period, the greater the benefits. The review team from Canada concluded that there is evidence to support the use of acupuncture as an alternative to traditional painkillers in people suffering from osteoarthritis.

So, it’s a big tick for acupuncture, as long as you can overcome the horror of hundreds of needles sticking into your skin at one time.

9Meditation

The National Center for Biotechnology Information currently has over 4000 published papers listed for the search phrase “meditation efficacy,” 400 alone over the last year. Although meditation has been practiced for centuries, particularly in Eastern cultures, it is only recently that the effects of meditation are being studied more widely within the scientific community. Specifically within the field of neuroscience. Some studies have shown that meditation produces positive benefits such as more patience, self-confidence, happiness, less judgmental attitude, calmness, release of anxiety and depression, and a general increased comfort with life’s uncertainties. These benefits, in turn, bring more physical vigor and energy for life. Sounds great, but where is the science?

Here is some carried out by a professor of Physiology, a professor of Anesthesiology, and a professor Pharmacology. The aim of the study was to find out the effect of “Osho dynamic meditation” on the stress hormone levels and whether it has any anti-stress effect. Osho was an Indian guru who introduced dynamic meditation to the world in 1970. Dynamic meditation includes several stages—deep, fast chaotic breathing, EXPLODING! (letting it all out), repeating the mantra “Hoo, Hoo, hoo” whilst jumping up and down, ten minutes of silence, and then dancing. Really, it’s true. It is said to decrease aggressive behavior, anxiety, and depression.

The study measured the plasma cortisol levels (stress level indicators) before and after 21 days of meditation. The results showed a significant reduction at trial end. Thus, it was concluded by the team that Osho dynamic meditation did indeed produce an anti-stress effect, which could be attributed to the release of repressed emotions, psychological inhibitions, and traumas. The study team says that dynamic meditation could be used for the improvement of stress, plus stress related physical and mental disorders.

Incredible and almost unbelievable? How about this one: Dr. Zoran Josipovic of NYU has been using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the meditating brains of Buddhist monks.^[2] Neuroscientists believe the brain is split into two networks—the extrinsic and the intrinsic. They do not function at the same time. They switch. The extrinsic network is where everyday tasks originate, like putting the kettle on or taking part in exercise. The intrinsic network or the “default network” as scientists are now dubbing it, is linked with emotions and inner thoughts. It is also the area of the brain where the most activity is seen during fMRI in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s, depression, or autism, indicating that this is the area being attacked by these conditions. So far, study results have shown a clear disconnect between the two brain networks in experienced and proficient meditators such as Buddhist Monks. The hope for the future is that as it is now proven that the intrinsic brain can be purposely isolated from the extrinsic during meditation, it opens up a new pathway of research for various brain disorders.

Happy, meditating monks and a possible future solution for Alzheimer’s? Neuroscientists say yes. So, it appears that meditation might be mind blowing in many positive ways.

8Sound / Music Therapy

Music is an important part of many people’s lives. It is mood enhancing and can lift your spirits, or can be a more calming, relaxing influence. Research has shown that just listening to music can reduce stress levels and increase production of the antibodies needed to fight off invading viruses and boost the immune system. However, more recent science is proving that music and sound therapy may have a far greater impact on human health than was previously believed.

Music Director Anthony Holland teamed up with his science colleagues at Skidmore College in 2013, looking at the idea of tuning forks, which cause each other to resonate in unison. They discussed that if finding the right frequency can cause a crystal glass to shatter suddenly, maybe it would be worth investigating if the right frequency could be found to shatter an organism, like a cancer cell for example. Having discovered the magic frequency, in 2015 Novobiotronics published a paper on their lab-based trial on leukemia cells with very promising results. In their findings, they report a 61 percent reduction in cancer cells. It is still early days, but Anthony, a musician at heart, is optimistic that this research could be music to the ears, as well as all other potential cancer dwelling areas of the body.

Ultrasound is a well-known form of sound therapy, but how about histotripsy? Histotripsy is “non-invasive, mechanical tissue ablation”^[3] which uses sound energy to blitz cancer cells. The mechanical process of histotripsy is a focused ultrasound causing microbubbles to form under extreme pressure. These bubbles then oscillate furiously creating huge amounts of energy which causes the targeted tissue to normalize. William W. Roberts, M.D., associate professor of Urology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, reveals that in their current research, they are looking at how patients suffering with from liver cancer, prostate cancer, congenital heart syndromes, and thrombosis might benefit from histotripsy.

7Energy Healing (Reiki)

Reiki is a Japanese technique for reducing stress and promoting healing. It is the “laying on of hands” and is based on the idea that an unseen life force energy flows through centers called chakras. Sometimes this energy gets blocked, the chakras become unbalanced, and this can be rectified using Reiki.

Slightly too eccentric for some tastes, famous cardiovascular surgeon, Dr. Mehmet Oz brought energy healing into the limelight when he invited Reiki master Julie Motz to treat patients during open heart surgeries and heart transplant operations. Dr. Oz believes “Reiki has become a sought-after healing art among patients and mainstream medical professionals.”

But has it? Is that true? A trial from the University of Arizona compared Reiki against physical therapy to see how it fared with increasing limited range of movement in patients suffering from shoulder pain.^[4] The study proved the concept that a ten-minute Reiki session is as effective as manual physical therapy in improving range of movement in patients with painful shoulder limitation. The research team even suggests that it might be beneficial for physical therapists to train in Reiki so that they could reduce the need for manual work on patients!

In Brazil, scientists at the Institute for Integrated and Oriental Therapy in Sao Paulo evaluated the immediate effect of Reiki on abnormal blood pressure after a 30-minute Reiki session. They saw a positive reduction of blood pressure, suggesting Reiki could be used in the control of hypertension.

A further study from Turin, Italy, looked at the effects of Reiki therapy on pain and anxiety in cancer patients attending a day oncology unit. Reiki sessions of 20 minutes showed a reduction of blood pressure, and overall it was considered helpful in improving well-being, relaxation, sleep quality, pain relief, and reducing anxiety. The research team writes that offering Reiki in hospitals could help with patients’ physical and emotional needs.

Hands up who didn’t believe in hands on healing? Hands up those who still don’t!

6Qigong / Tai Chi

The ancient practice of Tai Chi has been growing in popularity over recent years, but in China, this art form (or health and well-being exercise) has been part of daily life for millions of people for thousands of years.

But does it work and what does it do? So far it is commonly accepted that Tai Chi has some fitness and general wellness benefits, particularly in older adults. In 2016, a team of researchers conducted a study into the specific effect of mental attention in an elderly population before and after participating in a 16-week Tai Chi program.^[5] Set mental ability tasks that were performed showed a significant improvement in the participants who had committed to the 16-week Tai Chi program.

What about Qigong? Qigong is lesser known than Tai Chi, but it is actually the foundation on which Tai Chi was created. Thus, the principles are similar, focussing on well-being, general health, and improved cognitive function. Earlier in 2017, a German team investigated EEG brain activity during Qigong Training. The EEG imaging clearly showed significant changes in brain activity, concluding that Qigong induces a relaxed, attentive mind, as well as the participant being “centred” (a state of mind different to “mind-wandering”).

5Mantra Chanting

Mantra is a Sanskrit word for “sound tool,” and “Om” (or Aum) is probably the most well-known mantra of them all. Similar to listening to music, where the vibrational frequencies resonate with our brain evoking emotions, it is believed by many cultures and individuals worldwide that the vibrational frequency of a repeated mantra induces movement of both physical and emotional energy, stirring our emotions. But do they actually do anything?

In 2011, a study carried out at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, looked into the neurohemodynamic effects of “Om” chanting using fMRI.^[6] In this study, they observed a significant deactivation in the limbic system of the brain when the participants were chanting “Om.” The limbic system is the part of the brain responsible for both our higher mental functions and primitive emotions. It includes the amygdala (emotional center) and the hippocampus (home of long-term memory and emotional response). The research team compared their results to those of a different study looking into the neurohemodynamic effect of VNS treatment (vagus nerve stimulation) used to reduce epileptic seizures and to target treatment-resistant depression. Similar observations were recorded in the VNS trial, with significant deactivation of the limbic system. Therefore, the effect of chanting the mantra “Om” is at least equal to electric shock treatment when it comes to creating inner peace and calm. Is that what they call a no-brainer?

4Telepathy and ESP

Have scientists proved that telepathic communication is no longer science fiction? Well, almost. An international research team has developed a way to say “hello” with the mind, by recording the brain signals of a person in India, converting them into electrical brain stimulations, and relaying them to recipients on the other side of the world.^[7] It’s telepathy of a fashion using a process called synaptic transmission. EEG is used to record electrical activity by firing neurons in a participant’s brain. The subject’s conscious thoughts are recorded by EEG, decoded by a computer, and emailed to researchers in France. The stimulation is then delivered to three other participants using a process called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) which applies pulses to the recipient’s brain. The recipient and research team are then able to decode the signals into words.

But is that really telepathy? The scientists say not entirely. They prefer to call it the “transmission of information from one brain to another using non-invasive but still physical mechanisms.”

Another study defining telepathy as “the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense” wanted to explore the neural basis of telepathy by examining a “famous mentalist” and another subject with no known special ability. Both performed a set telepathic task whilst undergoing fMRI. The results showed the two participants’ brains were firing in completely different areas, the famous guy showing activation of the right parahippocampal gyrus (which is part of the intrinsic system linked to emotions and inner thoughts), whereas the other guy showed activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus (extrinsic system—where the performance of everyday tasks are handled). The study team says that the findings suggest that the limbic system of the brain is significant in the study of telepathy and further systemic research would be beneficial.

In the 1990s, the CIA famously closed their remote viewing studies which were part of the Stargate program, even though it is still muted that their research turned up some interesting findings. As early as the 1970s, Stanford Research Institute was carrying out research into perception augmentation techniques on behalf of the CIA. In 1975, Stanford concluded in their final report, “Our data thus indicate that both specially selected and unselected persons can be assisted in developing remote perceptual abilities to a level of useful information transfer.”

3Hypnosis

Hypnosis is widely known across the world, usually as an aid to combat addictions like smoking, or to lose weight, or get rid of phobias. It is also popular as a stage act. But research is being done to test the benefits of hypnotherapy and the claim that it helps us to improve our lives. A lot of people are either afraid or don’t believe. Is it mind control? Is it the devil’s work? Or is it a real tool that can be used to improve many aspects of our lives?

In 2007, a research team at Mount Sinai School of Medicine published their trial results showing that the use of hypnosis before surgery in breast cancer patients not only reduced the amount of anesthesia administered during the operation, but also pain, nausea, fatigue, discomfort, and emotional upset at discharge were greatly diminished in comparison with standard procedures. The time and cost of the procedure were dramatically reduced also, and the team concluded that, overall, the present data supports the use of hypnosis with breast cancer surgery patients.

In addition, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine scanned the brains of hypnotized subjects and could see the neural changes associated with hypnosis. Fifty-seven brains were scanned in total using a guided hypnosis technique used clinically to treat anxiety, pain, or trauma. Altered levels of activity were recorded in distinct sections of the brain, and David Spiegel MD, the study’s senior author, concludes this is confirmation of which parts of the brain are involved in this kind of treatment. Consequently, he enthuses that how we use the mind to control perception and the body can be changed using this very powerful means. He also suggests that it has taken 150 years to acknowledge that the mind has something to do with pain and controlling it. “It is now abundantly clear that we can retrain the brain,”^[8] Spiegel writes.

Spiegel and his team are about to begin a new trial looking into the benefits of hypnosis on fibromyalgia. They will be recruiting soon, and participants can apply here.

2Acoustic Levitation

Acoustic or sound levitation has been the stuff of legends since time began. From the pyramids of Giza to Machu Pichu, there has always been speculation as to how they were built, with believers and non-believers disagreeing over whether some form of ancient levitation was involved. However, that debate may be about to change. Argonne National Laboratory has been experimenting with acoustic levitation or “containerless processing method” in order to increase the solubility of molecules used in pharmaceutical drugs. Currently, solubility is low which means that drugs are not as effective as they could be. If they could be transformed into something more soluble, like an amorphous form, efficacy levels would dramatically increase.

Argonne’s revolutionary acoustic levitation trial has achieved just this, creating great optimism for the future. Admittedly, the technique cannot yet move huge slabs of stone, but the small quantities of pure amorphous forms being synthesized can potentially be useful in the optimization of clinical products. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so who knows what the future holds?

How about a larger object? Researchers from the University of São Paulo in Brazil, and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, published a paper in Applied Physics Letters, 2016, describing their acoustic levitation work. They demonstrated that acoustic levitation can levitate spherical objects much larger than the acoustic wavelength in air. The spherical object is a two-inch polystyrene ball which we might not find very impressive, but this demonstration is one of the first to levitate an object larger than the wavelength of the acoustic wave.^[9] “At the moment, we can only levitate the object at a fixed position in space,” says Marco Andrade, co-author of the study. “In future work, we would like to develop new devices capable of levitating and manipulating large objects in air.“

Maybe this is this how they built the Pyramids? What did they know that we have forgotten? Scientists are now busy working on it at least, so hopefully we will find out soon.

1Aromatherapy

The term aromatherapy probably evokes an image of a health spa, or those gift sets we get at Christmas from a lovely aunt, but we don’t necessarily want. However, aromatherapy is an ancient method used in Egypt, China, and India for over 6000 years to enhance health and promote feelings of well-being. Our ancient ancestors believed that different scents influenced different systems in the body. For example, lavender scent was thought to relieve stress and calm the body. Lemongrass was used to ward off insects and relieve body aches.

Aromatherapy gained a lot of attention in the 20th and 21st century in therapeutic, cosmetic, aromatic, fragrant, and spiritual use. And its role in mood, alertness, and mental stress became the hot topic amongst the scientific community recently, with some researchers looking at brain activity using EEG patterns and fMRI. Several studies published interesting results such as patients with depression required smaller doses of antidepressants after citrus fragrance treatment, and the scent of orange oil reduced anxiety in dental patients.

How does it work? The complete mechanism of action is still being studied, but put simply, a biological signal is received by receptor cells when a scent is inhaled. The signal goes to the hypothalamus in the brain, which causes the brain to release messengers like serotonin and endorphin—hormones related to pleasure. So there does seem to be some logic.

One of the most recent publications, dated 2017, is from the University of Calabria in Italy, who published their clinical evidence and possible mechanisms of aromatherapy in treating the behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia in patients with Alzheimer’s.^[10] Their results provided substantial evidence for symptom relief of agitation using aromatherapy in dementia patients, and positive effects were seen in the brain. There is also promising evidence for the effectiveness of aromatherapy, more specifically bergamot essential oil, for managing chronic pain associated with Alzheimer’s Disease.

It seems that science is suggesting that lovely smells make us happier, calmer, and more relaxed. So, giving someone a bunch of flowers is not only a loving thing to do, but it also has a positive effect on well-being. It’s official.

Kathryn has lived in “Coconutland” for the past ten years. She was born in “Farmlandshire” where she grew up and was totally oblivious to the existence of places such as South East Asia. Kathryn, (or Katy) has run her own IT business for 12 years which is not very exciting. She also wrote a book about search engines in 1999, worked as a journalist for a glossy holiday magazine—a bit like Country Life but with coconut trees and beaches—and now just writes about everything and anything she finds interesting. When she is not writing, she can be found swimming in the sea, dancing on the sand, or drinking a cold beer.