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Dante’s Inferno may have been far more than a religious epic. New research argues that the 14th-century poet essentially imagined a catastrophic asteroid impact centuries before modern science understood meteors. In this interpretation, Satan crashes into Earth like a giant cosmic object, blasting through the Southern Hemisphere and reshaping the planet itself — carving out the circles of Hell while forcing up Mount Purgatory on the opposite side of the globe.

A new study suggests AI chatbots may do more than spread misinformation — they can actively strengthen a user’s false beliefs. Because conversational AI often validates and builds on what users say, it can make distorted memories, conspiracy theories, or delusions feel more believable and emotionally real. Researchers warn that AI companions may be especially risky for isolated or vulnerable people seeking reassurance and connection.

Scientists in Germany have pulled off a staggering computing feat by fully simulating a 50-qubit quantum computer for the first time ever using Europe’s new exascale supercomputer, JUPITER. The breakthrough shatters the previous 48-qubit record and highlights just how powerful next-generation supercomputers have become.

Here we go again.

President Donald Trump and the Department of War have released the long-awaited UFO Files, and they’re about as revelatory as the JFK assassination files were, namely not at all.

In my preliminary review of the files (it will take days or weeks more to read through them all), and following the UFO/UAP community online with endless believers that we are being visited by alien beings (or “non-human intelligence” or “biologics” in the current jargon) digging through the files in search of their long-promised “disclosure” of contact, absolutely nothing stands out beyond the usual blurry photographs, grainy videos, artist reconstructions, and countless stories about weird things in the sky and in space.

As always, I will acknowledge that extraterrestrial intelligences are probably out there somewhere in the cosmos—with a trillion galaxies, each of which having hundreds of billions of stars, each of which having planets it is as close to 100% that some of them somewhere will evolve life and even intelligent life—but very few members of the public are interested in the search for signatures of bacterial-grade life in the atmospheres of exo-planets (as NASA continues to search for life elsewhere).

What nearly everyone cares about is the second question: have they come here?

The answer remains the same: not that we know of. That is, there remains no definitive evidence of alien visitation on Earth, and the UFO Files release has done nothing to change that, which even most of the UFO/UAP proponents acknowledge, promising “just you wait” and “disclosure is still coming” and “the ‘holy crap’ material will be released soon”. So…we shall see. I remain skeptical unless and until my priors are updated with new evidence, which is not in these files.

What is in the files? Here is a brief overview of what I came across as I worked my way through them:

Figure 1. Artist’s “composite sketch” of this object, which an eyewitness described as having been seen in this field, unhelpfully identified by the Department of War as taken somewhere in the United States.

Here is the full caption:

Actual site photo with FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports from September 2023 of an apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky, 130-195 feet in length, and disappearing instantaneously.

How anyone standing in a field could assess the length of an object without some means of measurement by which to compare it is beyond me, or how anyone could possibly know it was made of bronze (obviously meaning “it looked like bronze-colored metal,” or some such).

Figure 1

Figure 2. Document dated October 28-29, 2001, in which the Georgian Foreign Ministry reports a Russian aircraft violated Georgian airspace and bombed areas of the Kodori Gorge. Russia denied it, saying it was a UFO. Georgian response: UFO is a Russian “bold lie”. Recall that this is a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union and shortly after Vladamir Putin came to power and launched a military action in Georgia.

Figure 2

Figure 3. In this document, dated September 12, 2023, the Mexican Congress heard testimony on UAP from experts that includes these long debunked fake alien corpses that even all UAP proponents acknowledge as fake. If this is any indication of the quality of the "UFO files" purported to reveal we’ve been visited by aliens, God help us (and I’m an atheist).

Figure 3AFigure 3B

Figure 4. This document, dated October, 2023, is emblematic of so many of the UFO Files documents, so heavily redacted as to be difficult to read, much less given proper context. Here is the disclaimer provided by the Department of War attached to all of these documents: “Redactions have been made to protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP.”

Figure 4

Figure 5. These are two of many photographic stills taken from videos shot, again unhelpfully, somewhere in the “Southwestern United States.” The UAP is the little dot that could be almost anything (a balloon, a drone, an aircraft), subsequently being tracked by a helicopter. Given the terrain I immediately thought of one of the many military bases throughout this part of the country where planes and drones and, yes, even balloons, may be found.

Also unhelpful are all the blacked out rectangles, which very likely represent all the information we would need to identify the speed, distance, size, etc. of the object based on where, exactly, this was filmed, and when, etc.

This is another reason why I support Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project at Harvard University because they are building multiple observatories in various locations in order to triangulate whatever objects are detected. Without triangulation, it is extremely difficult to assess size and speed of the various objects identified in these files (and elsewhere) of UAPs.

Figure 5AFigure 5B

Figure 6. This UAP is almost surely a drone or small plane, probably moving away from the camera. The caption reads: “U.S. Indo-Pacific Command reported UAP that resembles a football-shaped body near Japan” and appears to be taken in 2024.

Figure 6A

Figure 6B is an image of an “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle” (UAV) I found online labeled “The Jetank unmanned aerial vehicle successfully completed its first flight in China, Shaanxi province.” I’m not claiming this accounts for the UAP sighting near Japan, but with a range of 7,000 kilometers, and with all the political concerns about Chinese aerial technology, it’s not completely crazy to think it could be something along these lines.

Figure 6B

Figure 7. These light anomalies photographed from the surface of the moon by Apollo 17 astronauts are curious indeed. At first I suspected they were lens flares, as I’ve seen many such images in photographs taken at haunted houses, graveyards, and the like purportedly representing ghosts floating around the facilities, but it is not clear that lens flares explains these images.

I await the government’s own additional investigation, as explained in the file:

While this photo has been previously released and discussed by keen observers, there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly. New preliminary US government analysis suggests the image feature is potentially the result of a physical object in the scene. Additionally, as part of this investigation, the government has obtained the original film from the Apollo 17 mission and the results of the full NASA and DOW analysis will be released when completed.

Similar such images were photographed by Apollo 12 astronauts with no explanation provided.

Figure 7AFigure 7BFigure 7C

Figure 8. This video short from the files was posted by UAP investigator Steven Greenstreet on 𝕏 (@MiddleOfMayhem) noting “This ‘alien UFO’ appears to be a parachute and a flare, which is leaving behind a smoke trail”:

0:00 /0:13 1×

Figure 8

Figure 9. This screen shot from a UAP video appears to be a balloon trailing its string or tail.

Figure 9AFigure 9B

The following is a comment from the pilot and astronaut Scott Kelly, from a NASA press conference at which he spoke, explaining how difficult it is for pilots to determine what it is they think they saw:

In my experience of flying over 15,000 hours in 30 something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions, so I get why these pilots would look at that Go Fast video and think it was going really really fast. I remember one time I was flying off Virginia Beach Military operating area and my RIO [Radar Intercept Officer], who sits in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced we flew by a UFO. I didn’t see it, so we turned around to go look at it. It turns out it was a Bart Simpson balloon.

My brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and also now a U.S. Senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago that when he was the commander of STS 124; they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the Space Shuttle and they see something in the payload bay and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt—they couldn’t quite figure it out—and they were potentially going to have to go and do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that my brother grabbed the camera and they took a picture of it, and when they blew up the picture they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay; it was actually the International Space Station that was 80 miles away.

There are cases where pilots have rendezvoused on a buoy because they thought that was their wingman. It’s just a very very challenging environment to work, especially at night.

That’s enough for now. Much more to come as I go through the files, but in general, remember the “residue of anomalies” problem that exists in all science: No hypothesis or theory in any field accounts for 100 percent of the phenomena under investigation.

This residue problem means that no matter how comprehensive a theory is there will always be a residue of anomalies for which it cannot account. The residue problem in UFOlogy was poignantly illustrated in Leslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, in which the UFOlogist admitted that “roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained” as:

weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole-punch clouds, and the list goes on!

So the entire extraterrestrial hypothesis for explaining UFOs and UAPs is based on a residue of data left over after the above list has been exhausted.

What’s left? Not much.

But, as always, I remain open to examining new evidence if it is forthcoming. Let’s see what’s in the next tranche.

Ever since JWST first began peering out at the early Universe a few years ago, astronomers have been spotting strange "little red dots" (LRDs) in its infrared images. There are hundreds of these compact blobs at very high redshifts at distances of about 12 billion light-years. Astronomers think they began forming some 600 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them players in the infancy of the cosmos. They appear red in optical light and blue in the ultraviolet. So, what are these strange objects?

A spiral galaxy seen close up and tilted at an angle, so that its disc fills the view from corner to corner. Its disc is yellow near to the centre and pale blue farther out, showing cooler and hotter stars, respectively. Thin brown clouds of dust, glowing pink spots of star formation, and sparkling blue patches filled with star clusters swirl through the galaxy. Behind it, small orange dots are very distant galaxies.

This week Bill Maher’s comedy-and-news bit is about the “Assassination Generation,” referring to all the young men who kill or commit arson for ideological reasons. As we know, a big proportion of young people (about 40%) think that political violence is sometimes warranted.  As you might expect, Maher deplores this behavior and the ideas behind it. Given that this is the social-media generation, Maher suspects that the deeds are done in part to get popular if your life sucks.  As he says,  referring to Cole Allen, “This is about being 31 and still living with your mom in Torrance. Life was supposed to come out better.” But he avers that these kids have it a lot better than they think (Cole Allen stayed at the Hilton before his failed assassination attempt at the correspondents’ dinner).

Maher does imply that sometimes political violence may be warranted—he mentions Stalin and Hitler—but, he says, “that’s not where we are now.”

The mantra for Young Assassins at the end: “What this is really about for today’s young assassins is, ‘When life lets you down, and doesn’t properly reward you for being the awesome person you’re sure you are, there’s one big save left: convince yourself you were meant for a cause bigger than yourself. And for Cole Thomas Allen, it was I’m Fighting Hitler‘.”

The guests you see are Represemtatove Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), and Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile. 

I rate this better than the average bit, and it’s time someone said that it’s insane to make a hero out of Luigi Mangione.

There’s a specific sequence in the anime Dragonball Z that for some reason has stuck in my head for over two decades. Goku, the main character of the show, travels to King Kai’s planet and can barely stand up when he arrives because the planet’s gravity is 10 times stronger than Earth’s. Over time, he trains in this gravity, and his body begins to adapt to it. Eventually, after leaving the planet, he’s stronger, faster, and more agile than he ever was before. But would that really happen if you were exposed to 10G over a long period of time? Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UCR) decided to test that idea and report their results in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. But instead of using anime characters, they used fruit flies as their test subjects.

A team at the University of Hong Kong has developed a new “super steel” that can survive the harsh conditions needed to make green hydrogen from seawater. The material uses an unexpected double-protection mechanism that resists corrosion far better than conventional stainless steel. Even more impressive, it could replace costly titanium parts used in today’s hydrogen systems.

Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system

Fifteen years after Western astronomers first discovered ‘buckyballs’ in space, they’re back with stunning images and rich data generated by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The results of their study have revealed the cosmic origin of these strange molecules.

Scientists have taken a major step toward ultra-secure quantum communication by demonstrating a remarkably stable quantum encryption system that worked across more than 120 kilometers of optical fiber. Using tiny semiconductor quantum dots that emit single particles of light on demand, the team achieved one of the highest secure key rates yet for this type of technology while maintaining continuous operation for over six hours without manual adjustments.

Scientists have taken a major step toward ultra-secure quantum communication by demonstrating a remarkably stable quantum encryption system that worked across more than 120 kilometers of optical fiber. Using tiny semiconductor quantum dots that emit single particles of light on demand, the team achieved one of the highest secure key rates yet for this type of technology while maintaining continuous operation for over six hours without manual adjustments.

A major obstacle may be standing in the way of the next generation of ultra-tiny computer chips. Researchers discovered that many promising 2D materials lose their advantages because an invisible atomic-scale gap forms when they are combined with insulating layers. That tiny gap weakens electronic performance and could prevent further miniaturization. The team says new “zipper materials” that lock together more tightly may offer a path forward.

A major obstacle may be standing in the way of the next generation of ultra-tiny computer chips. Researchers discovered that many promising 2D materials lose their advantages because an invisible atomic-scale gap forms when they are combined with insulating layers. That tiny gap weakens electronic performance and could prevent further miniaturization. The team says new “zipper materials” that lock together more tightly may offer a path forward.

About a month ago, a woman in Egypt was harassed on a public bus (she will go unnamed to protect what privacy and dignity she still has left). She recorded the man who was targeting her, and when she confronted him, he responded not with shame but with escalation: he mocked her appearance, called her trash, and insulted her by saying she looked like a nonbeliever.

When the video went viral, the public response was revealing. Before many people asked what had happened to her, they wanted to know something else: Was she Christian or Muslim?

If she were Christian, the matter was to be treated as an internal issue for the Church. Once it became known that she was Muslim, however, the urgency evaporated. No serious solidarity emerged. No meaningful protection appeared. Instead, what followed was rationalization, skepticism toward the victim, and the suggestion that she herself was somehow the problem. At one point, the alleged harasser was even welcomed onto a television program!

Meanwhile, the woman at the center of the incident was left to absorb the consequences alone. She lost her job. She spent substantial money pursuing the case in court. More profoundly, she lost a basic sense of personal safety. People found her social media accounts and sent threats of harassment and death. In effect, she paid a steep price simply for insisting on two elementary rights: the right to exist in public and the right to travel without being assaulted.

Morality that depends on who you are, rather than what was done to you, is no morality at all.

Yet, this is often the same culture that speaks most loudly about morality. But what does “morality” mean if it does not include the willingness to stand beside a victim? What is moral seriousness worth if a woman’s right to dignity and protection is treated as secondary to sectarian identity? Moral standards are not being applied universally. They are being applied conditionally. And morality that depends on who you are, rather than what was done to you, is no morality at all.

And so, I ask: isn’t it a mockery of us as human beings, with all our complexity, our differences, our layered identities to be reduced to a single question: What is your religion?

It should not matter whether I am Muslim, Christian, or neither. I am exhausted by the inevitability of this question, by the way it is the sole lens through which people are judged.

What I want to consider is what it means to have your identity stripped away, to be left alone in a society that believes your position on religion is enough to judge you as morally deficient—and even to justify your imprisonment if your beliefs are revealed—as in the case of Sherif Gaber, a young Egyptian atheist who has faced years of legal persecution for expressing his beliefs online. Gaber was accused under Egypt’s laws, specifically charges related to “contempt of religion” for content he published on social media platforms. Since 2015, he has been arrested, detained, and subjected to ongoing legal pressure. With multiple cases brought against him the total sentence is at least six years in prison.

Think about that: for writing commentary on religion no different from what you read in the pages of Skeptic and other publications, in Egypt you could end up in prison. This is the consequences of a legal framework in which individuals are prosecuted for expressing beliefs that go against socially accepted religion.

After publicly criticizing religious ideology, a fatwa calling for his death was issued in Egypt, forcing him into hiding under security protection.

The German author Hamed Abdel-Samad represents another form of skeptical consequence. After publicly criticizing religious ideology, a fatwa calling for his death was issued in Egypt, forcing him into hiding under security protection.

Exact statistics on the number of atheists or even such cases are difficult to obtain due to fear and underreporting, but human rights organizations have repeatedly documented the use of laws to silence dissenting religious views. Deviation in belief is not merely debated—it is punished—and public opinion in such cases leads toward support a death sentence for religious skeptics, seeing dissenters as a threat to social and religious order, further reinforcing a climate in which legal punishment is not only tolerated, but sometimes socially demanded.

Why have religious institutions become so deeply entrenched in power? If debate fails, is prison or the threat of death really the answer? Is it not enough to believe that nonbelievers or followers of other religions will be punished in the afterlife? Apparently not.

The Suffering of Being the Exception

I remember asking a friend twice my age whether he had any friends from his generation who shared his non-belief. It took him a full five minutes to answer. For a moment, it was like he was begging his own mind to offer a single name. But, ultimately, his answer was “No.”

After that, I let my thoughts wonder. When he was my age, did he wish to find someone like him? Not even necessarily when it comes to shared views on religious belief, but in thinking that a person should not be judged by their faith or lack thereof? Was he rejected by his family for refusing to conform to their beliefs? Was he threatened, punished, as I have been? Was he forced into religious practices he did not believe in? And does he now perform them merely to avoid the headache?

These questions are not abstract or hypothetical to me.

These questions are not abstract or hypothetical to me. I have seen the answers in my own life. At times, the answer is you will be on the receiving end of open aggression, but sometimes it also takes quieter forms like shaming and an unwillingness to accept even the act of questioning.

People like my friend are rarely visible, not because they do not exist but because visibility comes at a cost. In my experience, disbelief is often met with rejection and violence. Families will expel you, and they’ll attempt to reshape you by forcing some sort of conversion therapy with clerics, guilting, or constant reminders of what you should be.

Silence becomes the safer option. Many learn early on to separate what they think from what they say, to perform belief rather than risk confrontation. Others choose distance: emotional, social, or even geographical. Emigration, when possible, becomes less about seeking new professional opportunities and more about survival.

In 2014, Egypt’s official religious authority, Dar al-Ifta, claimed that there were exactly 866 atheists in the country, roughly 0.001% of the population. This number was widely mocked, not only for its precision, but for its detachment from lived reality. Even at the time, many argued that the figure was far too low, with some suggesting that there were likely more nonbelievers in a single university than the officially reported national number. While statistics remain difficult to obtain, some surveys suggest that around 11% of Egyptians identify as “not religious,” with the percentage rising to nearly 20% among younger generations.

Nonbelievers often conceal their views to avoid social ostracism.

The lack of reliable figures on atheism itself is not incidental. It reflects a climate in which many individuals choose silence over exposure. Reports consistently note that nonbelievers in Egypt often conceal their views to avoid social ostracism, legal consequences, or even threats to their safety. At the same time, most of the population still identifies as religious, creating a social environment in which deviation from dominant beliefs is often stigmatized.

So, while I can’t speak for my friend directly, I recognize the pattern. It is not one story or anecdote but a shared condition.

To be the exception in this country is to be destined for suffering. Rejection, when it comes from loved ones and family, is often justified as fear for your fate in the afterlife. But at a societal level, the consequences can escalate to imprisonment or even death like the case of Farag Foda, an Egyptian intellectual assassinated in 1992 after publicly criticizing religious extremism, who remains one of the most striking examples of how dissenting ideas can provoke violent responses beyond the law.

Between the cases of Foda (silenced by bullets), and Sherif Gaber (pursued through courts), exclusion and the belittling of your mind and your difference are considered as the “gentler” responses.

And at times, even families may resort to threats of violence—this happened to me when my uncle decided that I must get a session about the hijab with a sheikh that was 20 years old and whose education stopped at elementary school. This sheikh was younger than me! Here’s what he said:

You must wear the hijab because our messenger Mohamed said that. You should wear it and you get hit for not wearing it, and others have the right to harass you.

In response, I started to laugh at this nonsense. Then my uncle started to shout at me saying “I’m 30 years older than him yet I respect him” and then he started to hit me.

I got my arm twisted and my bones almost broken, and he hit my head on a wooden chair! Yet, my own mother saw what he did as right and blamed me for the incident. The police didn’t do anything. Why? In upper Egypt, such violence is called discipline.

I do not betray. I do not lie. I do not gossip about others’ right to live as they choose. I do not harass. I do not steal. I do not submit to tyranny or dictators. I am not a misogynist. I do not compromise when it comes to justice. Even the most outwardly devout struggle to uphold many of these virtues. And yet, in this society, because I am labelled as a disbeliever, I am ostracized. My words are attacked, my freedom of belief is confiscated, and I watch others suffer the same fate simply for their intellectual stance on religion.

What harm is there in my choice to not wear the hijab?

What harm is there in my choice to not wear the hijab? What harm is there in choosing whether or not to pray or fast? There is far more violence rooted in these questions than most are willing to see. So, I do not blame those who hide who they are. Because in a society that imposes identity upon you the alternative is to lose everything.

Imposed Identity

We all live complex lives. I have my work as an architect. I have my intellectual and cultural space, my identity, my way of thinking. But then there is my family, who reject my very existence based on my decision not to wear the hijab or not to have children.

In my dealings with people, I have noticed that anyone who rejects the type of “corrective” violence I describe here is met with extreme violence in response. Whoever refuses to be violated is punished by society. Whoever refuses to be beaten faces something worse. Whoever asks for the bare minimum of dignity risks losing everything to obtain it.

We are all expected to bow. And if you refuse, then you must accept a different reality of being rejected, threatened, and hunted. Even if your only “crime” is a word, writing an article, speaking in a café, or simply attempting to express your identity to those closest to you.

I often think of my childhood friend. We were raised together in strict religiosity, grew up side by side for 18 years, and even her father, before he passed, urged her to never let go of our friendship. But with age came socialization—she began to see my thoughts as a threat to her rigid faith. She urged me to stop questioning and stop overthinking. And when I didn’t, she chose to walk away.

Isolation is a personal condition that is reproduced across generations, shaped by accumulated histories, beliefs, and constraints.

Perhaps that was, in a way, a form of liberation. I was no longer confined by her worldview, no longer afraid of being alone. It was painful to lose her, but I was not the one who refused to accept the other.

The phrase “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, is not a literary exaggeration, but a logical outcome of living in a society such as this. In the novel, isolation is a personal condition that is reproduced across generations, shaped by accumulated histories, beliefs, and constraints.

In a similar sense, the solitude I describe here is not simply emotional or self-imposed. It emerges from a social environment that penalizes deviation and narrows the space for intellectual and personal autonomy. This isolation is produced through sustained pressure to conform, and the consequences of refusing to do so. We are all, to varying degrees, the product of long accumulations of inherited fears, ideas, and habits we did not choose. We simply find ourselves born into one place or another in the world, and yet it shapes us. But understanding this does not erase the impact of harm, nor does it make its possibility easier to endure.

I meet dozens of people every day, yet I know almost with certainty that only a few will truly understand—or even try to—what it means to choose your own thoughts. I rarely see anyone disturbed in the way I am when women are dehumanized in inherited religious discourse, when oppression is justified in the name of faith, or when entire populations are reduced to arrogant narratives that erase their humanity.

Because of this, the world often feels harsher to me than it does to others. And holding on to the bare minimum of humanity begins to look like an extreme position. I remain in a state of constant alert around others not out of fear, but out of a need to protect myself from disappointment.

I carry repeated disappointments from family, friends, and those closest to me. Not necessarily because they are bad people, but because they are, like everyone else, shaped by the same accumulations that reproduce fear of difference, superficial religiosity, and daily moral tribunals disguised as faith.

What exhausts me most, however, is the persistent sense of isolation and the awareness that I am surrounded by people who do not respect their own freedom. So, how could they respect mine?

And so, solitude is no longer merely a feeling. It has become a way to protect what remains of me.

You’re a long-necked Titanosaurs grazing the plains and chomping away on tree leaves about 100 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous in what would eventually become a future Starbucks location. You look up at the night sky and notice a bright dot that seems slightly larger and brighter than usual since you’ve seen it a bunch. You grunt at your cousin (official dinosaur language) asking if he notices it, too. Your cousin grunts back that it does seem bigger and brighter and wonders what’s up.

By the mid-20th century, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence would emerge as an established field of scientific research. The era witnessed the first experiments, and many of the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of SETI were proposed during this time.

More than 300 million kilometres from the nearest mechanic, NASA's Curiosity rover found itself in a situation that would make any engineer break into a cold sweat. A rock got stuck to its drill and wouldn't let go. What followed was a week long, long distance rescue operation that says as much about the ingenuity of the people behind the machine as it does about the extraordinary challenges of exploring another world.

Physicists may have just cracked open a hidden side of the quantum world. For decades, every known particle was thought to belong to one of two categories — bosons or fermions — but researchers have now shown that bizarre “in-between” particles called anyons could also exist in a one-dimensional system. Even more exciting, these strange particles may be adjustable, allowing scientists to tune their behavior in ways never before possible.