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And here we are, 50 years on, with nothing much changed. Instead of Cheviot sheep, the glens filled with expensive Airbnbs; instead of stags, land and houses which locals can’t afford to buy or rent; and the black, black oil still there, with the private oil and gas giants making record profits”

—Angus Peter Campbell, writing earlier this year in the P&J

In the Cornish moorlands of southwest England lies a mysterious mound of stone and turf. Now covered with grass, the site was previously thought to be a medieval livestock pen built around 1000 C.E. Now, researchers have concluded the construction is actually 4,000 years older—dating to at least 3000 B.C.E., during the Neolithic period.

Known as King Arthur’s Hall, the unique site is located in Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. It’s about 160 feet long and 70 feet wide, and its walls are made of 56 earth-covered stones, which once stood upright. Now, they are all leaning, lying flat or buried.

“There isn’t another one of these anywhere,”

A compound found in a parasitic fungus that commonly paralyzes and kills caterpillars has been shown to block pathways critical for the growth of some cancers.

The researchers found cordycepin triphosphate blocks two separate signaling pathways often hijacked by cancer cells to assist their spread throughout the human body. Although it's not clear yet which molecules cordycepin triphosphate is targeting the team did find that the chemical appeared to be working quickly.

Source:

Cordycepin generally inhibits growth factor signal transduction in a systems pharmacology study

https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1873-3468.15046

Rutgers Health research has uncovered why a relatively new antibiotic for tuberculosis (TB) works against multidrug-resistant strains, potentially inspiring improved treatments and drug development strategies.

The study by scientists at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and other institutions found that deficiencies in a critical enzyme make tuberculosis bacteria that resist old antibiotics more vulnerable to the new antibiotic bedaquiline.

Study Paper:

Catalase activity deficiency sensitizes multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis to the ATP synthase inhibitor bedaquiline

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53933-8

In early October, The Swan auction house in Tetsworth, Oxfordshire, listed several lots of human remains for sale, including skulls from west Africa and shrunken heads from South America.

They were withdrawn within a couple of days after objections were raised by representatives of the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford and indigenous activists.

The remains included examples from the Naga people of India, the Ekoi people of present-day Nigeria and Cameroon, and other groups in the Solomon Islands, Benin, Congo, Nigeria, Amazonia and Papua New Guinea.

While the UK’s museums and education institutions increasingly have professional guidelines about the respectful treatment of human remains, those in private collections do not have any protection. Although it is difficult to legislate how people care for private collections, this case raises the question of whether human remains should still be allowed to be bought and sold at all.

With cities in India and Pakistan ranking among the world's most polluted, new technologies must be adopted to tackle dangerous levels of winter smog, environmentalists urge.

According to the Swiss IQ Air index, Lahore in Pakistan and Delhi in India have the highest levels of fine particulate matter in the air, known as PM2.5, of any city—the only two to be rated as "hazardous."

Lahore, the provincial capital of Punjab, tops the index, with pollution reaching levels ten times higher than those in Shanghai early this week. The pollution is so bad that the huge gray clouds blanketing the region can be seen from space as satellite imagery from NASA Worldview shows.

"Excessive secrecy has led to grave misdeeds against loyal civil servants, military personnel and the public — all to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos."

Like previous congressional UFO hearings, today's event featured testimony from current U.S. military personnel who claim the American government has for decades hidden evidence of advanced technologies and otherworldly visitors from the public. A multitude of anecdotes were presented about flying orbs coming out of the ocean, disc-shaped objects, and craft "exhibiting flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal." While such claims are nothing new, what is noteworthy about today's hearing are the pedigrees of some of the whistleblowers who testified, including a former U.S. counterintelligence officer, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral and a former NASA associate administrator. All of them stressed the need for more government transparency, less stigma about the UFO topic and new policies to bring UAP data out of the "black" classified world and into the public domain.

There was a very X-Files vibe to a congressional hearing into unidentified anomalous phenomena on Nov. 13. Witness testimony included eyebrow-raising claims about the existence of UAPs and alien technology on Earth. The hearing was focused on testimony with little substantive evidence behind some of the more extraordinary claims.

What this all means for UFO fans

The hearing didn’t deliver any knockout new information No one was beamed into space and no UFOs or alien technologies appeared. The main takeaway was a broad call for the government to be more transparent in sharing UAP data and to protect people who may come forward with UAP-related experiences.

There has been no compelling evidence to prove UFOs or UAPs are extraterrestrial in nature, but the phenomena continue to fascinate the public. UFO sightings still pour in, though many have mundane explanations related to birds, balloons and drones. UAPs are very real in the sense there are some as-yet-unexplained phenomena. Is it aliens? The proof hasn’t appeared. As Gold concluded, "As the saying goes, the truth is out there, we just need to be bold enough and brave enough to face it."

The Pentagon’s UFO office has received more than 700 reports, a newly declassified assessment reveals.

It’s a dramatic increase in witness sightings and accounts that adds to a growing list and comes as former Defense Department officials claim the U.S. has technology far beyond human capabilities.

Recently there have been sightings near sensitive U.S. military sites, including dozens of UAP in December 2023 at Langley Air Force Base. The Pentagon later said those UAP were unidentified drones.

In the Thursday report, AARO identified 18 reports of UAP sightings near U.S. nuclear weapons sites, with 10 of those involving flights of five minutes over the sensitive area. Two of the sightings involved flights of near an hour and near two hours. All the sightings involved just one or two UAP.

AARO said that so far it is not aware of “advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough aerospace technologies.”

Every time generative artificial intelligence drafts an e-mail or conjures up an image, the planet pays for it. Making two images can consume as much energy as charging a smartphone; a single exchange with ChatGPT can heat up a server so much that it requires a bottle’s worth of water to cool. At scale, these costs soar. By 2027, the global AI sector could annually consume as much electricity as the Netherlands

What Schett had in mind for his patient: chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy. The treatment involves isolating a patient’s T cells—the sentries of the immune system that strike invaders—and engineering them in a lab to destroy blood cells called B cells that have become cancerous. B cells also help power many autoimmune diseases, and Schett had seen a 2019 study describing mice with lupus restored to good health after CAR-T treatment. He wondered whether the treatment could rescue someone like Thu-Thao.

To build their robot, the team started with stick insect designs. They then modified them in ways that mimicked the dung beetle. Then, instead of using machine learning to teach the robot what to do, as is done with many other modern robots, the researchers used a modular, neural-based, loco-manipulation control approach based on just two behaviors—pitch and roll for the upper two pairs of legs and simple biomechanics for the lower pair. The result was a robot they call ALPHA.