Ultraviolet Habitable Zone to Pentagon Probes Could Aliens Be Investigating Us?

The most powerful space explosion ever seen keeps baffling astronomers--A gamma ray burst observed in 2022 was brighter than any explosion ever spotted before, and follow-up observations are threatening to break our understanding of how these blasts work, reports Leah Crane for New Scientist.

What’s it like to approach the edge of the Universe?--With a finite 13.8 billion years having passed since the Big Bang, there's an edge to what we can see: the cosmic horizon. What's it like? explores Big Think. "If we were to approach this limit, what would we see, and how would the Universe appear different from how we perceive it today? It's a fascinating scientific exercise."

Why space scientists need science fiction--Carl Sagan's novel Contact, in which Ellie Arroway searches for alien intelligence, has been an inspiration and a guide, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein for New Scientist.

Can a Machine Know That We Know What It Knows?--Some researchers claim that chatbots have developed theory of mind. But is that just our own theory of mind gone wild? asks New York Times Science.

JWST has spotted the earliest black hole ever seen in the universe--The discovery of a black hole that formed just 570 million years after the big bang could help us understand the evolution of these cosmic behemoths, reports Alex Wilkins for New Scientist.

Mysterious Microbes in Earth's Crust Might Help With the Climate Crisis, reports Scientific American. 

Time Crystals Made of Light Could Soon Escape the Lab--A new, more robust approach to creating these bizarre constructs brings them one step closer to practical applications, reports Karmela Padavic-Callaghan for Scientific American.

The Ultraviolet Habitable Zone Of Exoplanets, reports Astrobiology.com. "According to experimental studies, the building blocks of life are most likely produced photochemically in presence of a minimum ultraviolet (UV) flux. On the other hand, high UV flux can be life-threatening, leading to atmospheric erosion and damaging biomolecules essential to life."

“The smallest and largest organisms significantly outweigh all other organisms,” said Dr. Eden Tekwa, lead author of “The size of life,” and now a research associate with McGill University’s department of biology. “This seems like a new and emerging pattern that needs to be explained, and we don’t have theories for how to explain it right now. Current theories predict that biomass would be spread evenly across all body sizes.”

Rebuilding The Habitable Zone From The Bottom Up With Computational Zones, reports Keith Cowing for Astrobiology. "Computation, if treated as a set of physical processes that act on information represented by states of matter, encompasses biological systems, digital systems, and other constructs, and may be a fundamental measure of living systems."

Could aliens be investigating us? It's more likely than you think--Aliens may be sending us very small "dandelion seed" probes to gather information, reports The Jerusalem Post. "Pentagon officials wrote in a document released earlier this month that it is entirely possible that aliens are visiting our solar system and releasing tiny probes to perform small-scale reconnaissance missions like the ones the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conducts on other planets."

UFOs: Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding, says Avi Loeb for The Hill. 

The Big Bang says nothing about the creation of the cosmos--Cosmic origins remain a mystery, reports Big Think. "We are often told that the Big Bang is a theory of cosmic creation.  But in reality, cosmology says nothing about how the cosmos came to be."