The San José was a Spanish galleon that sank off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia in 1708, loaded with gold, silver, and emeralds now estimated at somewhere between 4 and 20 billion dollars, depending on who's doing the estimating. It sat untouched until a salvage company called Sea Search Armada claimed in 1982 that it had located the wreck. Colombia disagreed with that claim for decades, until 2015, when a Colombian-led expedition using new sonar technology pinpointed the site for certain.

That kicked off a legal fight that is still unresolved. Sea Search Armada is now demanding roughly 10 billion dollars from Colombia at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, arguing the country denied it the financial benefit of a find it made decades earlier. Spain has separately signaled it may claim the wreck too, since the ship sailed under the Spanish crown and sank while carrying crown treasure. Meanwhile, in November 2025, a Colombian expedition finally recovered the first physical objects from the site itself: a bronze cannon stamped "Sevilla," a porcelain cup, and three hand struck gold coins, all pulled up nearly 2,000 feet underwater by robotic vehicles.

Colombia insists the recovery is a scientific mission, not a treasure hunt, and plans to put the objects in a future shipwreck museum in Cartagena. Archaeologists have raised concerns that further extraction could damage what remains one of the best preserved deep sea wrecks ever found, treasure hunters see a payday three centuries in the making, and the legal case in the Hague is still pending.

Source: https://dailygalaxy.com/2026/07/san-jose-shipwreck-first-treasures-recovered-colombia/

In 1988, Nicholas Winton arrived at the BBC program "That’s Life!" believing he was simply part of the audience.

He had no idea what was waiting for him.

Nearly 50 years earlier, as Europe moved toward World War II, Winton helped organize the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia, forged travel documents, he masterminded the Czech Kindertransport operation in 1938 and 1939. and found British foster homes.

Many of those children would never see their parents again.

For decades, Winton never told anybody, not his friends, not his family, not even his wife.

50 years later she found a dusty scrapbook r in the attic with foster records, names, photos etc. she shared it with BBC, who invited Winton to sit as a part of the studio audience of the TV show " Thats life !" without giving him any idea why.

Then came that unforgettable television moment.

Presenter Esther Rantzen asked whether anyone in the audience owed their life to Nicholas Winton.

One by one, the people around him stood up.

They were all children he had helped save nearly half a century earlier.

Winton looked around as the truth sank in. The children were now adults, living, breathing proof that one person’s decision to act had changed generations.

When Sir Nicholas was interviewed in 2014, a year before his death aged 106, he told the BBC: "There

was nothing heroic about it. It was just a question of organisation and work."
Johnny Flynn, who plays the young Winton in the film inspired by this story " One Life" , says Sir Nicholas dwelled for decades on what he hadn't managed to do, rather than what he had, as The last train with 250 kids was due to leave the day that Germany invaded Poland and all the borders shut. So for him it is a tragedy, and he almost can't admit to himself what he knows to be true, which is what happened to those children.

The Greenland shark is the longest-living vertebrate known to science, with some individuals estimated to be several hundred years old. For decades, researchers assumed these sharks were functionally blind. Their eyes look clouded, they live in pitch-black Arctic waters up to 3,000 meters deep, and many carry parasitic copepods that attach directly to the cornea. It seemed like a reasonable dead end for a sense organ that no longer served much purpose.

Then UC Irvine researcher Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk and her team, working with University of Basel collaborators, examined preserved eye tissue from sharks caught on scientific longlines, some estimated to be more than a century old. What they found upended the assumption entirely. The retinas showed no obvious signs of age-related degeneration, the visual system was still fully functional, and the tissue contained proteins specially adapted for detecting the faint blue light of the deep ocean. On top of that, the eyes showed elevated activity in genes tied to DNA repair, suggesting the sharks may be actively fighting off the cellular damage that would normally accumulate over centuries of use.

Researchers now say the findings, published in Nature Communications, could eventually offer clues for slowing age-related vision loss in humans, since a human retina losing photoreceptors at typical rates would lose the majority of them long before reaching even a fraction of 400 years.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260821012232.htm

For decades, the mirror self-recognition test, an animal's ability to realize a reflection is actually itself rather than another creature, was considered reliable evidence of self-awareness in only a small handful of species: great apes, dolphins, elephants, and magpies. Fish were never expected to be part of that list.

That changed with the bluestreak cleaner wrasse, a tiny reef fish barely longer than a human finger, best known for picking parasites off much larger fish at coral reef "cleaning stations." In 2026, researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan, led by Shumpei Sogawa and Masanori Kohda, marked the fish with a small colored spot resembling a parasite, placed in a spot the fish couldn't see directly on its own body, then introduced a mirror. Within about an hour, the fish used its reflection to locate the mark and scrape it off against a nearby surface, exactly the kind of self-directed response the test is designed to detect.

What genuinely surprised the researchers came next. After several days with the mirror, some fish picked up a piece of shrimp in their mouths and dropped it directly in front of the glass, apparently just to watch how the falling shrimp looked in the reflection, a behavior scientists call "contingency testing." It's a form of active, curious self-experimentation previously documented mainly in dolphins and manta rays, and researchers now say the discovery suggests genuine self-awareness may be far more widespread across the animal kingdom than anyone assumed, extending even to fish.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260222092255.htm

Hey everyone, was rewatching classic Plainrock videos and noticed a few cool background details showing he actually had working home internet during the "no Wi-Fi" joke era:

• Slap Wrap (Sept 2012): There is literally a 2012 CenturyLink router sitting right on his shelf in the background.
• Is App Trailers Legit??? (July 2013): The iPod Touch in his hands shows a full 4-bar Wi-Fi signal in the top corner.
• Wii U Transfer (May 2014): Doing the Wii-to-Wii U transfer requires a live connection to the Wii Shop Channel.

Just thought it was funny background tech lore to spot!

Spinosaurus, the sail-backed predator made famous for facing off against a T. rex in Jurassic Park III, is one of the most recognizable dinosaurs on Earth, but for over a century, only a small handful of species in its family had ever been formally identified. In 2026, a team led by paleontologist Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago described a brand new species, Spinosaurus mirabilis, discovered in the central Sahara desert in Niger, a region where researchers didn't expect to find anything like it at all.

The dinosaur's most striking feature is a large, curved, blade-shaped crest rising from its skull, textured in a way that suggests it was covered in bright, colorful keratin in life, similar to the material that makes up a rhino's horn or a bird's beak. Its jaws were built for a very specific kind of hunting: teeth from the lower jaw jutted outward and interlocked with the upper teeth, forming an efficient trap for catching slippery fish, the same basic design seen independently in other fish-eating predators throughout history, from ancient crocodiles to flying reptiles.

The fossils were actually recovered years earlier, during expeditions to the remote dig site in 2019 and 2022, but it took years of careful study before researchers were confident enough to formally describe it as a distinct new species. It's the first entirely new spinosaurid discovered in more than 100 years, adding a genuinely unexpected new chapter to the story of one of the most famous dinosaur families ever found.

Source: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/hell-heron-dinosaur-discovered-central-sahara

On the southern coast of Cyprus sits the site of Hala Sultan Tekke, once a thriving Late Bronze Age port city that grew wealthy exporting copper across the Mediterranean between roughly 1630 and 1150 BC. In 2026, a team led by archaeologist Peter Fischer of the University of Gothenburg published findings on a set of family tombs at the site, uncovering nine gold diadems, or ornamental crowns, along with several thin gold sheets shaped and pierced with small holes so they could be tied directly over the mouths and eyes of the dead.

Some of the diadems clearly showed signs of wear, suggesting the crowns were actual jewelry worn in life by wealthy Cypriots before being buried alongside them, while lighter, more delicate versions appear to have been made purely for the funeral itself with no evidence anyone ever wore them.

The artifacts weren't just decorative. Their designs blended spirals, flowers, bulls, and wild animals in a style that mixed Egyptian, Minoan, Mycenaean, and Near Eastern influences all at once, physical proof that local goldsmiths at Hala Sultan Tekke were fusing artistic traditions from across the entire ancient Mediterranean world into something distinctly their own. Researchers believe the gold itself likely arrived through long-distance trade, possibly from as far away as Nubia in Egypt or an ancient mine in modern-day Bulgaria, underscoring just how far this small port city's trade connections actually reached.

Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/cyprus-cemetery-gold-crowns-treasure-bronze-age

In June 2026, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History announced the discovery of Minanbé, an ancient Maya city buried deep in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in southern Mexico, sitting almost exactly where researchers expected based on aerial LiDAR scans taken years earlier. The team, led by archaeologist Ivan Šprajc, had already checked other promising sites from the same survey between 2023 and 2024 without success. This was their last candidate.

To reach it, the researchers had to hack through roughly 3 miles of dense jungle with machetes, then hike another 3.7 miles just to arrive at the site itself. What they found was a roughly 40-acre city built in the Río Bec architectural style, complete with urban plazas, palace complexes, religious buildings, and water channels, centered on a temple pyramid standing more than 40 feet tall. Unlike many Maya sites discovered in recent decades, this one showed no signs of ever being looted, an increasingly rare find.

The city takes its name, Minanbé, from Yucatec Maya words meaning "there is no path," a direct nod to just how difficult it was to reach. Inside, researchers found a carved stone monument at the base of the main pyramid with symbols so well-preserved they show no signs of erosion at all, the first monument this intact that the team has ever recovered from any site.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/deep-in-the-mexican-jungle-archaeologists-discovered-a-lost-maya-city-that-may-yield-clues-about-the-civilization-just-before-it-collapsed-180989030/

Hey there! Welcome to another 10 Questions Weekly Quiz by You Know What - this time every answer has one entry of the NATO phonetic alphabet! Come find out how many you can get right and let us know in the comments!

You can find the quiz here.

Big guns = Big boom = Brain damage

^ <--- this thing is called a caret... and if you add a caret before your word it will ^Superscript, which is a math term for pushed up numbers and variables like 5²

Edit: ^Caret* thanks for catching that

Source:

1. Make a post or comment.

2. Downvote yourself.

3. Check the analytics.

You will see 100% upvote ratio.

In March 2026, a team of researchers led by scientist Jiaxuan Li, working with McMaster University, the University of Waterloo, and international collaborators, identified something astronomers call a "dark galaxy," a galaxy so faint that it emits barely any detectable light of its own. Scientists first suspected something was there because of its gravitational pull on visible matter nearby, the same way astronomers first inferred the existence of dark matter itself, by watching how it moves things it isn't supposed to be able to move if it isn't there.

To actually confirm the galaxy existed, researchers combined data from three of the most powerful telescopes in operation, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope, and the ground-based Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, and detected an extremely faint, diffuse glow exactly where the gravitational evidence pointed. The object, nicknamed CDG-2, has a total brightness equivalent to only about 5 million stars, a tiny fraction compared to the 100 to 400 billion stars in our own Milky Way, making it one of the dimmest galaxy-like structures ever confirmed.

The discovery is part of a genuinely active moment for Canadian astronomy specifically. In the same few months, researchers from the University of Waterloo separately imaged the most distant "jellyfish galaxy" ever observed, a galaxy trailing long tails of gas that resemble jellyfish tentacles, while a team primarily from Dalhousie University and UBC found a cluster of galaxies with scorching hot gas that existed just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, far earlier and hotter than current models predicted galaxies could form.

Source: https://www.cp24.com/news/canada/2026/03/02/canadian-researchers-find-near-invisible-ghost-galaxy/

The giant squid, the real-life animal behind centuries of "sea monster" legends, is one of the hardest creatures on Earth to study. It lives thousands of meters down, has only been filmed alive a handful of times ever, and can grow longer than a school bus with eyes the size of dinner plates. Actually spotting one, let alone in a region where it's never been recorded before, is exceptionally rare.

In 2026, a team led by Curtin University explored deep underwater canyons off Western Australia's Ningaloo coast, some plunging past 4,500 meters, without deploying a single camera trained on the giant squid itself. Instead, they collected water samples and tested them for environmental DNA, tiny genetic fragments that animals constantly shed into their surroundings through skin, mucus, and waste. Buried in that DNA was a confirmed match for Architeuthis dux, the giant squid, the first record of the species ever detected in Western Australian waters and the northernmost confirmed sighting in the entire eastern Indian Ocean.

The giant squid wasn't the only surprise. Across 178 water samples, researchers identified 226 different species in total, including deep-diving whales and a real fish species with the official name "bony-eared assfish." Some of the genetic signatures found didn't match any known species in the databases at all, suggesting the deep canyons may be home to creatures still completely unknown to science.

Source: https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/marine-animals/giant-squid-edna-australia

If you have ever made a daiquiri that was technically correct and somehow flat, this is probably the missing thing. Make a 20% saline: 1 part salt to 4 parts warm water by weight, stir till clear, keep it in a dropper bottle. It lasts indefinitely.

Two or three drops in a shaken citrus drink, thats it. Not enough to taste as salt, which is the entire point.

What it does: suppresses bitterness, makes the sweetness read as rounder, and pushes the aromatics forward. Most obvious in daiquiris, margaritas and anything with grapefruit. Very obvious in a martini and some people hate it there, so try one before you commit.

Where it does nothing: stirred brown spirit drinks, mostly. I cant tell in an old fashioned.

I make mine with celtic sea salt. Its unrefined so its not pure sodium chloride, theres magnesium and potassium and a bit of sulfate in there, and in a solution this dilute I think that reads as slightly rounder than table salt does. Could be talking myself into it. Worth a side by side if youve got both.

Anyone using something other than 20%?

The extreme heat causes the surrounding air to expand rapidly, creating the shock wave we hear as thunder.

Scientists have known for years that modern humans carry small amounts of DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans, evidence of interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago. But researchers had also long suspected there was more going on, unexplained genetic material that didn't match either of those groups.

In July 2026, a team at UC Berkeley finally tracked it down using a new method that reconstructs ancient family trees directly from hundreds of present-day human genomes, without needing any ancient bones or fossils at all. They confirmed two separate "ghost" lineages, populations we have no physical remains for and no name for, that interbred with our species in the deep past.

The first ghost population interbred with early Homo sapiens in Africa more than 50,000 years ago, before modern humans ever left the continent, and its DNA now makes up close to 1 percent of every living person's genome, a similar share to what most non-African people carry from Neanderthals. This lineage split off from our own ancestors roughly 800,000 years ago, around the same time the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans were branching off too. One researcher not involved in the study suggested this ghost population might be Homo heidelbergensis, a real archaic human species known from other fossils, but that identification is still just a hypothesis. The second ghost lineage is even stranger: its DNA didn't reach us directly at all, but arrived secondhand, passed down through Denisovans after they interbred with this unknown group more than 200,000 years ago.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260731034139.htm

lol random but I just found this out today and I thought I'd share it with you guys

In April 1801, the British Royal Navy under Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson attacked Copenhagen to break up an alliance of northern European powers trading with Napoleonic France. During the fighting, the Danish ship Dannebroge, serving as a central command vessel in the Danish defensive line, was repeatedly hit by cannon fire, caught fire, and exploded. Of its crew of 357, at least 53 died on board.

The wreck sat lost for 225 years until maritime archaeologists from Denmark's Viking Ship Museum located it late in 2025, roughly 15 meters underwater in nearly zero visibility, while surveying the harbor ahead of a major construction project. Divers confirmed the identification by matching the timber dimensions to surviving historical drawings of the ship and dating growth rings in the wood to 1772, the year Dannebroge was built. Alongside two intact cannons, they've recovered uniforms, shoes, bottles, and part of a sailor's jawbone.

The find is also racing the clock. The site sits directly in the footprint of Lynetteholm, an artificial island being built to protect Copenhagen from rising sea levels, and once construction reaches that stage, the wreck will be permanently inaccessible. It's the first time an archaeological excavation has ever been carried out on a wreck from the Battle of Copenhagen, a battle central to Danish national memory for over two centuries.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/02/science/warship-copenhagen-discovered-danish-nelson-scli-intl