Ginger cat riddle has been solved đ The Weird Science Drop #27
Aliens using AI to hide from us, coffee-infused concrete, ancient frozen viruses wake up, plus - whoah, dude! - the mother of all waves spotted in the Pacific.
âChibai!* Welcome to another slice of the odd from the wacky world of science. This weekâs TWSD looks at the more out-there theories surrounding an interstellar comet currently winging its way through our solar system - is it a probe reporting back to aliens ready to invade? - as well as why you should always keep one eye on the sky if youâre in the Australian Outback. If you think your commute is bad, spare a thought for those stuck at the Wuzhuang Toll Station - some amazing images from the worldâs biggest traffic jam. As always, if you like what you see, please share/subscribe!
Daniel
* Hello in Mizo, a language spoken in north east India
Weird Science News
đ The reason why all ginger cats are male might have finally been found. This is actually an old wivesâ tale, as about 80% are boys, but itâs true to say that among all mammals, only in domestic cats do we see such orange colouring so tightly bound to sex.
Chris Kaelin, a geneticist at Stanford Medicine, has been investigating why this is and has come up with an answer: itâs due to a unique genetic quirk not seen elsewhere.
The gene that makes a catâs fur orange is located on the X chromosome, which is one of the two chromosomes that determine sex (XY for males, XX for females). Since males only have one X, they just need to inherit that single âorangeâ gene from their mother to be fully orange.
Females have two X chromosomes. To be completely orange, they must inherit the ginger gene from both parents, which is much rarer. If a female gets a mix, her body randomly switches one of them off in different cells, resulting in the patchy tortoiseshell pattern we all know and love.
The specific gene involved isnât normally related to coat colour in any other animals, but has been mutated in cats centuries ago. Read more on ZME Science
đ Satellites monitoring our oceans have detected the mother of all waves in the Pacific. The huge swell generated in a wild storm back in 2024 has been confirmed to have been over 115ft high - the biggest weâve ever seen. Rad!
The European Space Agency has published the data observed from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite during Storm Eddie, showing that waves recorded from December 21 last year were the largest ever detected from space. Stoked!
These findings indicate that even when a big storm hits in the middle of the ocean, the resultant swell can travel large distances and wreak havoc on coastlines far away. Yew!
On the plus side, surfers competing in Hawaii the day after reaped the benefits, riding some huge waves. On the 22nd, the same swell made its way to California, where Santa Cruzâs Alo Slebir rode what many believed to be the biggest wave ever surfed at Mavericks. The official measurement came in at 76ft - just 10ft shy of the official world record held by Sebastian Steudtner in 2020 at NazarĂ©, Portugal. Gnarly! đ€Read more on Surfer.com
đœ âWhere are all the aliens?â is one of the biggest head-scratchers out there. They should be everywhere, zipping around the stars above our heads, easy for us to detect. But so far, we havenât spotted any - thereâs not one scrap of evidence for little green men.
There are a lot of possible answers to this, ranging from weâre really on our own to the Earth being kept in a cosmic zoo. The latest idea is, of course, based on AI.
This idea comes from a new paper that re-examines the possible challenges of searching for ET put forward by the late, great Carl Sagan back in the 70s. One of them was what he called the âcommunication horizonâ - that alien tech becomes too sophisticated for us to detect.
Plugging in the development of AI overlords ruling the galaxy, this jump to technology so beyond our comprehension that weâd have no clue what weâre looking at could be much more common than we first thought. Read more on Science Alert
đ Australia has just been reminded that what goes up must come down. A mysterious smouldering chunk of space junk was found by miners in the middle of the Outback - and we now think we know where it came from.
Puzzled police attended the site and took notes, but they were quick to admit this was a little outside their remit. The Australian Space Agency is now investigating who was responsible, but from the pictures released by the cops, a suspicious finger is already being pointed at China.
It looks like a steaming slab of carbon fibre, probably from a rocket. Space analyst Marco Langbroek thinks heâs pinned it down to a section of the upper stage of a Chinese Smart Dragon 3, which fell back to Earth over the weekend.
This type of falling debris normally falls in the ocean, not on land. According to international law, the country that launched the space object is responsible for damage caused when it comes crashing down.
No one has been confirmed to have died from falling space stuff (yet!), although there have been injuries and property damage. One man in Kazakhstan did perish in 2017 after debris from a rocket launch ignited a fire that engulfed him during a cleanup operation. Read more on Space.com
đ§ Scientists have pinpointed brain cells linked to depression for the first time. Two key brain cell types have shown genetic disruptions in depression, offering hope for more effective, targeted cures.
Researchers found that certain neurons behave differently in depressed individuals, altering brain systems tied to emotion and stress.
The study provides new clues to creating treatments and to understanding depression, a condition that affects more than 264 million people around the world. Researcher Dr Gustavo Turecki said:
âThis research reinforces what neuroscience has been telling us for years. Depression isnât just emotional, it reflects real, measurable changes in the brain.â
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Interstellar visitor still attracting crazy theories that itâs an alien probe
Crazy theories that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is not an icy space rock but some sort of alien craft have been spreading like wildfire on the internet ever since it was first spotted in July.
The comet, which could be some 14 billion years old, is currently racing past the Sun before it goes on its merry way out of our solar system after taking in the delights of Jupiter next March.
There are two camps - one that thinks itâs a frozen chunk of ice (which it is) and another claiming itâs an alien space probe investigating our galactic neighbourhood (which it isnât).
This is the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected, following Ê»Oumuamua and Borisov, both of which also generated some crazy ideas from, in some cases, people who, by the letters after their name, youâd have thought to have known better.
Having said all that, there is a little wrinkle that might have to be explained. A few radio astronomers have reported faint signals in frequencies overlapping the objectâs trajectory. At first glance, these cosmic echoes mimic encoded communication, suggesting the object is both detecting and responding to external stimuli, potentially even our radar pings.
Itâs absolutely a natural phenomenon, but for now, we canât ignore it. This is just one of a few so-called anomalies that conspiracy theorists point to, includingâŠ
The objectâs path is aligned to the plane in which the planets orbit the Sun, and can be traced back to a direction that coincides with the mysterious and âWow! Signalâ detected in 1977
The comet will make close passes of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter, all while hiding away from the Earth
Itâs all very tenuous, but at the very least 3I/ATLAS will teach us something about what other, much older solar systems are made of. Or itâs radioing back our position to the Klingons. Your choice.
Gribblys inside melting ice could accelerate global warming - and release more of their friends
Researchers have been busy thawing out ancient microbes that have been suspended in the Arctic permafrost to see what happens. And itâs bad news, Iâm afraid.
The little creatures the scientists have been studying have been frozen for 40,000 years. It turns out that if you heat them up, they awaken and start going about their business - mainly pumping out CO2, a greenhouse gas.
So we could get stuck in a worrying runaway cycle as the globe gets warmer, more microbes are released from their hibernation, which in turn pumps out more CO2, making things hotter and so waking more of their friends, and so on.
Permafrost - a mix of soil, rocks and ice - in the northern regions holds about twice as much carbon as Earthâs atmosphere, so large-scale releases could be very bad news for climate change.
Scientists think that in the future, microbes dormant since the last ice age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) may only need a few months to reactivate.
And it gets even worse. Another big fear is that the permafrost also contains prehistoric viruses and other pathogens modern animals - including us - could be helpless to fight off.
So itâs really, really important we keep these hibernating time-bombs in their slumber, otherwise we might go the full Mad Max - or even worse.
Photos of the Week
These amazing images show a huge traffic jam on Chinaâs largest toll road as millions of travellers returned home after the national holidays. Aerial footage shows thousands of cars lined up at the 36-lane Wuzhuang Toll Station in Chuzhou, in the eastern Anhui province, as the National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holiday drew to a close. The sheer logistics needed to deal with this amount of traffic blow my mind!
Infographic magic
Winter is coming. And so are higher energy bills. Perhaps itâs time to consider moving to Egypt?
Cool Quote
âTorture the data, and it will confess to anything.â
Ronald Coase
Weird Science Factoid
Three-quarters of our diet comes from just 12 plant and five animal species. Hence the need for culinary imagination!
Fries on the Side (aka the best of the rest)
â Weâve come up with a new use for old coffee grounds - by stirring them into concrete to make the building material stronger. Itâs an ingenious solution to the problem that the planet dumps about 10 billion kilograms of coffee waste in landfills every year
đ Scientists may have come across a simple way to reverse ageing eyes and give us back the 20/20 vision we enjoyed as youths, instead of having to use a magnifying glass to read a washing machine manual like I had to do the other day. A team from UC Irvine managed to improve the peepers of mice by giving them specific fatty acids
đŁ Fossil footprints have shown two species of human ancestors living side-by-side for the first time. The prints found beside a Kenyan lake date back some 1.52 million years and reveal different species of hominins were hanging out in the area at the same time
â„ Artificial-intelligence tech giant OpenAI has announced plans to introduce âeroticaâ material to its ChatGPT chatbot later this year. Despite getting a barracking from anti-porn groups, CEO Sam Altman insisted âwe are not the elected moral police of the worldâ
đ„ A top secret military firm came clean to sparking New Jersey drone hysteria left America losing its mind. But an unnamed private contractor admitted at a military conference âit was usâ
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About TWSD
Science is weird, and hereâs the proof. The Weird Science Drop goes where other, more-sensible newsletters fear to tread. Every week, we grab our trusty white lab coat, bunch of bubbling test tubes and world-ending robot prototype to go in search of the overlooked, under-the-radar and, above all else, most madcap science news, views and research.
About me
Daniel Smith is an ancient experienced journalist who has worked for a host of news publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. A long, long time ago, he fancied himself as an astrophysicist but instead turned out to be the worst scientist since the man who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider, inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world by pressing the big red button but is safely behind a desk writing this newsletter, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... The Weird Science Drop.
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