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Scientists have captured one of the most detailed observations ever of a failed solar eruption, a powerful blast from the Sun that built into what should have been a billion tonne plasma ejection, then stalled and collapsed back to the surface. Using data from five spacecraft simultaneously, the team identified a double magnetic process that strangled the eruption from both above and below.

In August 2025, a NASA spacecraft detected a solar radio burst that refused to stop lasting 19 days, nearly four times longer than any previously recorded. A team of researchers used data from four spacecraft spread across the inner Solar System to track the event and pinpoint its source to a magnetic structure called a helmet streamer, likely supercharged by a series of powerful solar eruptions.

Astronomers have discovered a remarkable triple star system in which two Sun like stars orbit each other every 4.75 days, while a giant star, ten times the size of our Sun circles the pair every 412 days. All three orbit in almost exactly the same plane, and because we view that plane edge on from Earth, the stars eclipse each other in a distinctive pattern that allows all three to be measured simultaneously. The giant is slowly swelling and will eventually overflow its gravitational boundary, triggering a dramatic mass transfer event that could reshape or even destroy the system.

Our Sun is a loner. It lacks a stellar companion hurtling through interstellar space with it. But we’ve known for a long time that’s actually relatively rare - most stars have at least one gravitationally bound partner. Understanding how exactly those stars are related to each other is critical for observational campaigns - especially for those of exoplanets. So a new paper from researchers at the University of Madrid that categorizes almost every star within ten light years into companion categories is a welcome addition to the literature on the subject, and could be used to inform the next round of planet habitable planet hunting satellites.

We’ve been reporting a lot lately on the negative impacts of satellite constellations. And unfortunately it’s time for another article about a paper pointing out the potential hazards of them. This one, by lead author Conner Barker of University College London, focuses on the pollution caused by rocket launches - and admittedly contains some good news, but also a cautionary tale that policy makers should be aware of.

We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun

A Review of This is Not Real Life by Lauren Southern

Before the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook took the extraordinary step of banning a sitting U.S. president, before recommendation engines decided who deserved an audience, before the internet hardened into a set of gated timelines where each tribe watches its own curated reality, there was a brief, chaotic era of online media that felt radically open.

A loose coalition of independent journalists, pundits, comedians, and provocateurs built a parallel public sphere alongside (and often against) the mainstream media. The barrier to entry was low: a camera, an opinion, and the stamina to upload relentlessly. In return came virality, fame, and a kind of influence that traditional institutions did not yet know what to make of—let alone counter. In that ecosystem, “top charts” on platforms like YouTube were closer to what they claimed to be—rankings based largely on raw views rather than finely tuned behavioral targeting that operates today. A creator could rise to popularity because millions of people actively showed interest in their work and clicked, not because an algorithm decided the content fit a retention profile or a desirable political angle.

One of the most visible figures to emerge from that era was Lauren Southern, a young Canadian YouTuber who rose to prominence in her early twenties. In the mid-2010s, Southern often reached audiences in the millions, regularly rivaling and eclipsing the viewership of “legacy” giants like CNN or the Canadian CBC. She did it through a blend of commentary videos, on-the-ground segments, and documentaries—“content” designed to feel more immediate than studio news and more transgressive than polite opinion columns.

An Alt-Press Corps

Lauren Southern’s peers were the era’s rotating entourage of culture-war entrepreneurs and dissidents: some left wing or liberal, like Destiny (Steven Bonnell) and Tim Pool, but most a new-kind of conservative, among them Mike Cernovich, Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio, Tommy Robinson, Paul Joseph Watson, and many others. Collectively, they made the internet feel like a new kind of political machine. They produced street interviews and documentary films, wrote bestselling books (mostly self-published on Amazon), staged public debates, and toured college campuses like a counter-establishment roadshow. They cast themselves as outsiders “speaking truth to power,” and millions of viewers agreed—especially because mainstream institutions kept stepping on the same rake: a mix of selective coverage, performative moralizing, and a growing disconnect from how people experienced the world offline.

This was also the moment when online politics began to feel less like discourse and more like spectacle. The incentives were already there, with outrage and dunking performing better than nuance. But the rules had not fully tightened yet. And in that liminal period—between the old broadcast order and the algorithmic empires of the 2020s—figures like Southern could function as a new mix of celebrity, activist, journalist, personal brand, and political instrument.

Southern’s biggest hits followed a now-familiar template: pick a story the mainstream media either undercovered or framed in a way her audience distrusted, then package it as a mix of first-person journalism and activist theater. In her viral video The Great Replacement (2017), she covered demographic and cultural shifts driven by mass immigration, emphasizing differential birth rates, unsuccessful assimilation, and what she framed as elite ideology and policy choices disconnected from the wishes of the electorate. 

The Internet “freezes” people … locking them into versions of themselves that no longer exist.

In a documentary film Farmlands (2018), which garnered significant attention after then-President Donald Trump posted it on Twitter, Southern traveled through South Africa to build a portrait of a country in crisis. The film threads together interviews with volunteers who document farm-attack crime scenes (“Blood Sisters”), segments with preparedness-minded Afrikaner groups warning of civil conflict, and visits to places like Orania as an example of separatist self-governance, while also touching on post-Apartheid racial land reform and the ANC’s “Kill the Boer” anti-White minority rhetoric.

And in another one of her films, Borderless (2019), Southern moved beyond a single country case study to a route-based travelogue of Europe’s migration system. Filming across multiple locations, she built the story through interviews with migrants (often young men), smugglers, locals, and NGO workers. Throughout, she focused on the widening gap between the notion of “Europe as a promised land” and the brutal reality of camps and informal settlements—alongside recurring allegations about criminality and extremist infiltration among the migrants traveling to Europe from the Middle East and Africa.

Not all of Southern’s breakout content was packaged as “field reporting” or documentary. A substantial share of her reach came from shorter, more playful—and strategically lightweight—culture war videos that borrowed the tone of early YouTube commentary pioneered by atheist YouTubers like The Amazing Atheist and Jaclyn Glenn: jump cuts, jokes, deliberately cheeky provocation, and a posture of “I’m just saying what everyone’s thinking.” Her viral Why I’m Not a Feminist video, for example, worked less as formal argument than as identity signaling and onboarding for her fan base. She framed feminism as humorless, status driven, and hostile to ordinary women; “common sense” gender politics as rebellious; and positioned herself as the fun, sane dissenter against an earnest, scolding establishment.

Those less serious pieces functioned as a sort-of gateway genre. They lowered the stakes, widened the tent, and translated abstract ideological disputes into personality-driven entertainment built on parasocial attachment to a charismatic influencer. In the precensorship internet, this was exactly the kind of content that could travel beyond explicitly political circles, letting her funnel viewers toward more overtly political work.

That mattered because Southern was also selling a new kind of right-wing politics, at a moment when the term “alt-right” was still contested and fluid in online usage. Southern—alongside creators like Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich—often tried to frame it as a countercultural, punk-adjacent style of politics: irreverent, secular, and “common sense,” rather than religiously conservative or explicitly ethnonationalist. That definitional fight didn’t last. The label quickly became associated, in public discourse, with something far more specific—and far more radioactive. And then the environment changed altogether.

The purges and policy shifts arrived in waves, sometimes justified, sometimes sloppy, and often propelled by a genuine fear that the internet had become an ungovernable amplifier for extremism. Social media platforms, under pressure from governments, advertisers, and activist campaigns, began to police content more aggressively and deplatform more readily.

Southern, like many of her peers, disappeared—at least in the way that matters online. That is why her return, through a memoir rather than a rebrand as an influencer, feels unusually revealing. This Is Not Real Life (self-published, 2025) is a firsthand account of the foundations (or early saplings) of this decade’s political psychosis: a period when online identity, partisan performance, and media incentives fused into something that looks, in retrospect, like the dress rehearsal for our current zeitgeist. Southern’s story is not only about her personal arc; it is also about the characters, factions, and forces that shaped that era. The book reads like a guided tour through a lost internet, one that helped build the world of today, even as it vanished from view.

It also offers something rarer than punditry: a case study of what the internet does to the people who rise to popularity within it.

Audience Capture

At its core, This Is Not Real Life is about identity—how it is formed, negotiated, and, in Southern’s case, outsourced. She traces how the persona she crafted online spun out of her control, taking on a life of its own in the minds of her audience. Over time, she describes becoming a “false performative identity”: a self that exists primarily to satisfy external expectations, calibrated to audience appetite and platform incentives. This is also where Southern’s memoir becomes more than gossip or political archaeology and becomes a portrait of how online media influences its influencers.

This is not unique to one creator or one ideological lane, as Southern writes, but more of a structural feature of online fame. Influencers are not simply people with opinions—they are feedback machines. They quickly learn what draws approval and what triggers punishment. They start to anticipate the crowd’s desires before the crowd expresses them. Their content becomes a kind of real-time referendum on their worth.

One of the book’s most interesting threads is Southern’s retrospective account of how the views she helped amplify—many of which she says she no longer holds, including immigration-critical sentiment—often did not originate as reasoned disagreements about policy, nor simply as heroic “speaking truth to power.” In her telling, they crystallized through the following dynamic: a young creator with missionary energy builds a massive audience in near-total isolation, without the editorial friction of peers or institutions; she then learns what “lands” not from a discussion or debate, but from the most fervent slice of her audience—the perpetually online commenters and quote-tweeters. Over time, that feedback selects for certainty and narrows the range of permissible nuance. The content becomes increasingly one-sided not necessarily because the creator set out to radicalize anyone, but because the attention economy (even in its infancy at the time Southern was professionally active) rewards the strongest signal and punishes hesitation.

Southern describes that feedback loop with unusual clarity. Likes, shares, and comments did not merely reward her; they shaped her. The constant attention created an almost irresistible pull toward escalation: more provocative, more polarizing, more engaging. Not necessarily because the creator becomes more knowledgeable or convinced, but because the system teaches the creator what “works.” And once a creator’s livelihood, status, and identity are bound up with that loop, “what works” becomes hard to distinguish from “what is true.” On a personal level, as Southern reflects, if you have been defined through the audience’s mirror long enough, the absence of that mirror can feel like erasure.

This brings to mind René Girard’s mimetic theory, which holds that desires do not arise spontaneously; they are borrowed, copied, and transmitted socially. What Girard described as mimetic contagion—our tendency to want what others want—maps unnervingly well onto online dynamics, where desire is quantified and broadcast. A trending topic is not merely information but a signal about what others crave. The comment section is not merely reaction, it is a template for what one is supposed to feel.

In one of the few interviews promoting her book, Southern said she was familiar with Girard and agreed that his ideas fit her experience. This is quite significant because it reframes the common story of internet radicalization, which is that creators manipulate audiences. The Girardian version is both more nuanced and more plausible: audiences and creators manipulate one another, locked in a mutual imitation of desire until both lose the thread of what they originally cared about. 

If the internet could do this to someone who “understood the game,” what is it doing to the rest of us who live inside the same machinery?

In contemporary terms, this resembles a mix of social proof (the tendency for people to look to others’ behavior to guide their own), intermittent reinforcement (unpredictable rewards create stronger behavioral persistence than consistent rewards), and group polarization (group discussion or interaction shifts opinions toward more extreme versions of the initial shared leanings)—mechanisms that produce escalation even without anyone consciously intending it.

In that light, the escalating cycle of political content begins to look less like a deliberate march toward extremity than like an arms race shaped by attention. Outrage becomes contagious because it is socially rewarded. Certainty spreads because it is easier to rally around. Humiliation becomes entertainment because it cleanly assigns winners and losers. “Truth” becomes whatever keeps the crowd together.

What makes this feel particularly tragic is that we already built systems such as editorial review, fact-checking, proportionality, and the routine exposure to dissenting perspectives, which are meant to interrupt exactly this process. Yet legacy journalism institutions failed twice in that era. First, by leaving obvious, emotionally charged topics undercovered or condescended to, and second, by responding late with a mixture of gatekeeping and moral panic rather than the kind of rigorous, evenhanded reporting that might have met the societal demand.

The book’s reception proves a point.

Both The New York Times and Rolling Stone chose to report only on the book’s most disturbing allegation: that in 2018 Southern was drugged and sexually assaulted by Andrew Tate, years before he became a manosphere celebrity. Whatever one makes of that claim, the way it has dominated coverage is itself revealing.

It illustrates a brutal rule of media, described in detail by Southern in her memoirs: complex stories are often reduced to a single high-gravity event. A memoir about identity, audience capture, self-radicalization, and the psychological costs of online fame becomes “the Tate allegation book” in the public imagination because that is the simplest headline and the most clickable hook. Even when a claim is serious and newsworthy, it can function like a trapdoor: everything else falls through it.

In that sense, the coverage becomes a meta-example of the phenomenon Southern is describing. Nuance is not merely unpopular but inconvenient.

You can’t escape it, so what do you make of it?

Southern’s rise belongs to a particular political and technological moment when social media still felt like a frontier. Creators like Southern and her peers often insisted they were correcting blind spots in mainstream coverage—immigration, crime, cultural conflict, and institutional hypocrisy. Sometimes they were. Sometimes they weren’t. But the more important point is that they convinced huge audiences that they were the only ones willing to say what everyone else was afraid to say. That posture—truth-teller against a corrupt establishment—became the core myth of the era, and it proved potent enough to mobilize electorates and reorder institutions, even if its direct persuasive effects are harder to measure.

In hindsight, it is tempting to treat this as an anomaly. Southern’s memoir suggests something else. That era did not end—it metabolized. Its tactics were absorbed into mainstream politics, marketing, and media. Its techniques—weaponized irony, clip-based outrage, identity branding, and audience capture—are now standard and universally adopted across the board. What changed is not that the internet became less political (quite the contrary) but that it became more managed. The memoir is compelling because it captures what it felt like before that consolidation, when people still believed the internet might replace the old gatekeepers rather than become gatekept itself.

It is thus, in a strange way, an elegy for a vanished internet. Not because that internet was healthier (it often wasn’t) but because it was less automated and therefore more visibly human. You could see the conflicts, the incentives, and the improvisation. With today’s algorithmic feeds, you often cannot even tell why you are seeing what you are seeing. The machinery has become controlled by systems that no one can fully audit or understand. Whatever one thinks of Southern’s politics, there is clear value in a firsthand account of how the early architecture of online influence helped produce the polarization and unreality that now saturate public life.

Southern’s narrative is also, unmistakably, a story about exit—her attempt to escape the chaos of online fame and reclaim a sense of self, grounded in reality and faith. That element will land differently depending on the reader. For some, the turn toward faith will read as an evasion. For others, it will read as the only coherent response to a world that offers only chaos, echoing recent public conversions by figures such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Charles Murray.

But either way, the attempt “to exit” is central to the book’s thesis. Because the internet is not simply a platform; it is a metaphysical environment. Leaving that behind is not like quitting a job. It is more akin to leaving a country.

Southern describes the cost of living as part flesh-and-blood human, part digital persona long enough that the digital persona starts to feel more real than the human. That inversion, where the performed self becomes the “true” self simply because it’s the one everyone recognizes, may be the book’s most distinctive theme. The internet “freezes” people, she argues, locking them into versions of themselves that no longer exist.

For most people, the name “Lauren Southern” denotes one of those frozen identities: a digital fossil that cannot apologize or mature in the ordinary ways humans do. The audience doesn’t want a person. It wants a symbol. And symbols are not allowed to change. So fans still perceive Southern—now a mother in her 30s—as the same person she was way back then.

Most people will never become famous, but millions of people experience a smaller version of the same distortion: curating an online identity, monitoring feedback, adjusting beliefs and aesthetics to match the expectations of peers or employers. In that broader sense, Southern’s story is not only about the politics of the 2010s. It is about what happens when human identity becomes primarily legible through a digital world.

If you come to Southern’s memoir looking for a neat political conversion story—villain to redeemed heroine, or extremist to repentant moderate—you may leave unsatisfied. The book is a portrait of how an era produced certain kinds of people, and how many of those people struggled with what the era demanded, making it much more interesting.

A decade from now, many more public figures will publish memoirs like this—attempts to explain how they became characters in a story the internet wrote for them. Southern’s book arrives early enough to still feel like a dispatch from the source. It captures a digital world that shaped the real world (down to her testimony in the Canadian House of Commons) and then disappeared, leaving behind only artifacts, screenshots, and “frozen identities.”

The book also leaves the reader with an uncomfortable question: if the internet could do this to someone who “understood the game,” what is it doing to the rest of us—those who never chose fame, but live inside the same machinery all the same?

In a stellar flyby, a star approaches our Solar System close enough to create gravitational mayhem. The last one was 70,000 years ago. There are more in the future, and it's possible that they could disrupt comets from the Oort Cloud and send them into the inner Solar System, with the risk of catastrophic impact.

Critical safety equipment in many train systems is vulnerable to disruption by space weather, which could lead to fatal accidents

Critical safety equipment in many train systems is vulnerable to disruption by space weather, which could lead to fatal accidents

News is pretty scant as it’s just the same-old same-old, but I have a few stray wildlife photos to exhibit today. I’m all out of photos excerpt for these, so please send in your good wildlife snaps. In all the photos below, readers’ captions are indented and, as always, you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

First, from Scott Ritchie, his favorite photograph of Australia’s golden-shouldered parrot (Psephotellus chrysopterygius), an endangered species and the world’s only parrot that lives in termite mounds.

Bob Jochums sent two photos of Barred owls (Strix varia) taken outside Atlanta, Georgia.

A family “portrait” (minus Papa) on the “veranda” of the nest box.

An earlier photo of Mama leaving the nest box to get a little time to herself … or to hunt for food or nuzzle with Papa.

From Claudia Baker:

Red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus), picking at the rail fence along the front of my property, in Eastern Ontario,  in July 2023. I have never seen one around here before, so was quite excited to get pictures of it. Can’t tell if it’s male or female, as the sexes are similar. It is the only eastern woodpecker with an entire head that is red. Their range is East of the Rockies from southern Canada to the Gulf states. They apparently will hide foot in crevices of wood and return for it later, so maybe this is what it was doing. In any case, it dug around in this rail fence for awhile, long enough for me to get several pictures.

It will hide insects and seeds in cracks in wood, under bark, in fenceposts, and under roof shingles. Grasshoppers are regularly stored alive, but wedged into crevices so tightly that they cannot escape. It has many nicknames, including half-a-shirt, jellycoat, flag bird and the flying checker-board. I read that the Red-headed woodpecker was the “spark bird” (bird that starts a person’s interest in birds) of legendary ornithologist Alexander Wilson in the 1700s.

I did not know that there are worms in my rail fencing. Or maybe this worm was hidden by this gorgeous bird earlier and it came to claim its lunch.
Red-headed woodpeckers are fierce defenders of their territory. They may remove the eggs of other species from nest and nest boxes, destroy other birds’ nests and even enter duck nest boxes and puncture the duck eggs. (!)  Quite mean for so beautiful a bird!

I have not seen another since this one in 2023. The oldest Red-headed woodpecker on record was banded in 1926 in Michigan and lived to be at least 9 years, 11 months old.

My friend Cate, to her surprise and wonder, found white leucistic squirrels (a genetic variant of the Eastern Gray Squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis) living around her summer house in Michigan. There are several more photos in this thread, including the famous white squirrels of Olney, Illinois. which are albinos.

You won’t believe this even exists but up here in Ludington, Michigan there are at least TWO entirely white squirrels, NOT albinos–I saw two of them, many miles apart, last year. And now there’s one in my yard! 1/8 pic.twitter.com/LHfbFhvAOi

— Roseland, Chicago: 1972 (@RoselandChi1972) May 10, 2026

It seems like the white squirrels might be new around here, because last year the year-round neighbors looked at me strange when I asked about them. This year, there have been other sightings, and one neighbor expressed envy that I got one in my yard. 3/8 pic.twitter.com/JOkUomJr6f

— Roseland, Chicago: 1972 (@RoselandChi1972) May 10, 2026

From Peggy Mason in Canada (see location at bottom):

These harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) were lying around on the rocks of Poise Island in Porpoise Bay in Sechelt, BC, Canada. There were five of them. They ranged from silvery white (the smallest, a baby I think) to black with some white markings.

This is the silvery white baby:

This is the very black one:

Here is the silvery white baby, possibly with its mother. That is what I thought – basically from their proximity and size difference – although I received no confirmatory data one way or the other on this:

Bonus pictures are a beautiful bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), a juvenile judging by its coloring and some pretty pink flowers on Poise Island.:

And Peggy’s location:

Scientists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider may be seeing the strongest hints yet of physics beyond the Standard Model — the decades-old theory that explains the fundamental particles and forces of the universe. By studying incredibly rare particle transformations called “penguin decays,” researchers found behavior that doesn’t fully match theoretical predictions, raising the possibility that unknown particles or forces are influencing the results.

A new AI-powered chip from UC Davis can analyze light and chemicals using a device tiny enough to fit almost anywhere. By combining smart silicon sensors with machine learning, it achieves lab-style spectral analysis without the bulky equipment.

A new AI-powered chip from UC Davis can analyze light and chemicals using a device tiny enough to fit almost anywhere. By combining smart silicon sensors with machine learning, it achieves lab-style spectral analysis without the bulky equipment.

Scientists have created a global “treasure map” for rare earth elements by uncovering where the strange volcanic rocks that contain them are most likely to form. By combining thousands of rock samples with seismic images of Earth’s deep interior, the team discovered that these metal-rich rocks tend to appear along the ancient, thick roots of continents. These unusual rocks, once seen as geological oddities, are now incredibly important because they hold many of the materials used in smartphones, electric vehicles, and wind turbines.

Residues on medical equipment reveal that physicians in China over 600 years ago used aconitine, a highly toxic plant chemical, to alleviate pain during surgical procedures

Men who do not produce sperm can’t be helped by existing fertility treatments, but a start-up is now claiming it can grow their sperm in the lab. Columnist Michael Le Page suspects this technique will have to be combined with gene editing if it is to help many men

Airstrikes on Tehran earlier this year emitted a plume containing almost 30,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide that reached Asian countries

From 17th century France to Nova Scotia and all the way to the bayous of Louisiana, one particular cryptid has had a far longer run than most. The rougarou is said to be the werewolf of the swamps, stepping out of Cajun folklore and into your nightmares. Where can we find the rougarou, and what role will it fill for centuries to come?

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NASA’s Psyche spacecraft just used Mars as a giant gravitational slingshot to continue its journey toward a strange metal rich asteroid. The close flyby boosted the spacecraft’s speed by about 1,000 mph while also producing rare crescent images of Mars glowing through its dusty atmosphere.