James' World 2

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Imagine waking up in pitch darkness paralyzed from head to toe. You try to scream but can’t. Suddenly you realize there is a ghost with bloody fangs hovering over you. Before you know, the creature violently attacks you.

While this sounds like something out of a horror movie, experiences like this called sleep paralysis are quite common as shown in our research in more than six countries.

Sleep paralysis—paralysis upon falling asleep or awakening—affects about 1 in 5 people. If being paralyzed when waking up isn’t chilling enough, some people worldwide encounter terrorizing bedroom intruders, ranging from magical witches and demons to blood-sucking vampires. These surreal sights can best be described as a nightmare coming alive before your eyes.

But why does sleep paralysis occur and, crucially, why does it come with these uncanny visions? Although the science behind the bodily paralysis is now understood, it has remained a mystery why you might see a ghost.

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The discovery of a hidden primordial black hole, which formed just 750 million years after the Big Bang, suggests that it may be the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of the cosmic monsters hiding in the early universe.

A rare supermassive black hole found hiding at the dawn of the universe could indicate that there were thousands more of the ravenous monsters stalking the early cosmos than scientists thought — and astronomers aren’t sure why. 

The primordial black hole is around 1 billion times the mass of our sun and was found at the center of the galaxy COS-87259. The ancient galaxy formed just 750 million years after the Big Bang and was spotted by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory in Chile, in a tiny patch of sky less than 10 times the size of the full moon.

Obscured beneath a cloak of turbulent stardust, the rapidly growing black hole was seen consuming part of its accretion disc of orbiting matter while spewing the leftovers out in a jet traveling close to the speed of light. The monster black hole appears to be at a rare intermediate stage of growth, somewhere between a dusty, star-forming galaxy and an enormous, brightly glowing black hole called a quasar. 

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An illustration of a quasar, which the new black hole is an early form of, blasting a jet of hot, radioactive wind into the cosmos. (Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

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You’re not being paranoid. If you always feel like somebody’s watching you, as the song goes, you’re probably right. Especially if you’re at work.

Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, as labor shifted to work-from-home, a huge number of US employers ramped up the use of surveillance software to track employees. The research firm Gartner says 60 percent of large employers have deployed such monitoring software—it doubled during the pandemic—and will likely hit 70 percent in the next few years.

That’s right—even as we’ve shifted toward a hybrid model with many workers returning to offices, different methods of employee surveillance (dubbed “bossware” by some) aren’t going away; it’s here to stay and could get much more invasive. 

As detailed in the book Your Boss Is an Algorithm, authors Antonio Aloisi and Valerio de Stefano describe “expanded managerial powers” that companies have put into place over the pandemic. This includes the adoption of more tools, including software and hardware, to track worker productivity, their day-to-day activities and movements, computer and mobile phone keystrokes, and even their health statuses. 

This can be called “datafication” or “informatization,” according to the book, or “the practice by which every movement, either offline or online, is traced, revised and stored as necessary, for statistical, financial, commercial and electoral purposes.”

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Photograph: Robert Daly/Getty Images

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Among the forests of Yellowstone National Park, some wolf packs share their territory with cougars. Generally, the two species leave each other alone, although wolves may occasionally run a cougar up a tree and steal its kill—or poke around its feces, which the felines use to mark their territory.

Whether from this scat or the water contaminated with it, some wolves manage to pick up a strange feline parasite. This parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, doesn’t make the wolves ill, but it does change their behavior, making many of them bolder and more inclined to take risks—for better or for worse.

Scientists who have been studying the Yellowstone wolves found that those infected byT. gondii are more likely to disperse from their pack or start a pack of their own. “Dispersal is one of the most dangerous things because survival actually decreases for dispersing wolves, so not very many wolves actually survive the dispersal process,” says Connor Meyer, a researcher at the University of Montana, and one of the authors of the study, published in Nature. But if that wolf succeeds and becomes a pack leader, it will father more pups, achieving a greater reproductive success—a reward that may be worth the risk.

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A parasite infection can make a leader of the pack—or a dead wolf.

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Horseback riding was likely a common activity as early as 4,500 to 5,000 years ago, according to a provocative new study that looked at human skeletal remains for small signs of the physical stress associated with riding horses.

People first started keeping horses about 5,500 years ago, initially for their meat and milk, researchers believe. But how and when horses became a transformative mode of transportation isn’t so clear.

“Cattle and sheep and goats were domesticated thousands of years before horses were. And horses are different from cattle and sheep and goats, in that they are essentially a transportation technology,” says David Anthony, an emeritus professor of anthropology with Hartwick College.

Horses began living with humans before the invention of the wheel, and horse-drawn chariots first appeared around 4,000 years ago. About a thousand years later, there’s an explosion of horses and horse-related themes depicted in artwork. And scientists have tried to collect other forms of evidence to home in on when horse riding may have first emerged.

Some researchers, like Anthony and his partner, archaeologist Dorcas Brown, have examined the teeth of ancient horses, to check for wear patterns caused by bits. The trouble is, there’s not that much material out there to study, says Anthony.

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“Jeez, this is not a real human,” one commenter wrote. “I’m scared.” 

“No legit she’s AI,” another said. 

Nicole, who lives in Germany, has alopecia. It’s a condition that can result in hair loss across a person’s body. Because of this, she’s used to people looking at her strangely, trying to figure out what’s “off,” she says over a video call. “But I’ve never had this conclusion made, that [I] must be CGI or whatever.”

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Illustration by Brian Scagnelli / The Verge

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Interestingly, these tend to be free, probably because most of the common problems are universal, and that usually means someone has thought of that already and gotten mad enough to fix it. And if someone on GitHub or an obscure video encoding forum has not solved the issue, there’s some great shareware software out there that won’t break the bank. 

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The Verge

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