Welcome, dear readers, to your weekly weird science roundup — that glorious Friday tradition where we remind ourselves that the universe is significantly stranger than anyone had the decency to warn us about. This week’s dispatches from the frontier of human knowledge involve fossilised Martian life, water that apparently can’t decide what it is, and a species of ancient human relative that appears to have been entirely composed of women. Buckle up.
Weird Science Roundup: Mars Might Have Had Tiny Tenants
Let’s start with the big one. NASA’s Perseverance rover has been trundling around Jezero Crater on Mars with the dedication of a retired man combing a beach with a metal detector, and this week it struck gold. Scientists have confirmed the highest concentration of organic molecules ever found on the Red Planet, lurking in ancient mudstones that were once the floor of a deep Martian lake.
These aren’t just any old carbon-based molecules, mind you. Scientists believe they may be the fossilised remnants of actual microorganisms. Actual. Microorganisms. On Mars. This is rather significant news, and yet somehow it arrived sandwiched between a story about a man who taught his parrot to order pizza and a regional debate about roundabouts. We are a species of baffling priorities.
Furthermore, this follows last year’s discovery of rock patterns resembling those left by microbes on Earth. Consequently, the evidence is building into what scientists are diplomatically calling “a strong suggestion” and what the rest of us are calling “blimey, there were aliens.”
Meanwhile, the James Webb Telescope Is Being an Absolute Show-Off
Not content with merely revolutionising our understanding of the cosmos on a fortnightly basis, the James Webb Space Telescope has been busy capturing the formation of a brand new star 1,280 light-years away in the constellation Orion, and watching early galaxies burn bright and die young like some sort of cosmic cautionary tale. The Euclid space telescope, meanwhile, produced the most detailed photograph of the Milky Way ever taken, which is lovely, though one does wonder what the Milky Way thinks about having its picture taken without permission.
The early galaxy findings are particularly sobering. These galaxies, it turns out, lived fast and died young — a possible preview of our own galaxy’s eventual fate. However, experts assure us this won’t happen for billions of years, so you may as well finish your tea.
Homo Naledi: Still Deeply, Magnificently Confusing
Then there is Homo naledi, the small-brained, cave-dwelling human relative discovered in South Africa in 2013, who has made something of a career out of embarrassing professional archaeologists. First, scientists found evidence it may have used fire. Then, that it may have buried its dead — behaviours previously thought exclusive to much larger-brained hominins. This week, genetic analysis of nearly two dozen skeletons revealed that every single one of them is female.
Every. Single. One.
“The bottom line is this is a weird result from an already weird hominin,” said Dr Elizabeth Sawchuk of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, which is — and we say this with enormous respect — one of the most refreshingly honest things a scientist has ever said publicly. Nobody knows why they’re all female. Nobody knows if the males existed elsewhere, or if H. naledi had some sort of arrangement the rest of us simply aren’t evolved enough to comprehend.
And Finally: Water Is Having an Identity Crisis
Rounding off the week, new research suggests that water — plain, boring, utterly unremarkable water — may actually switch between two distinct chemical structures depending on temperature and pressure. This would explain several of water’s already bizarre properties: why ice floats, why its viscosity drops under pressure, why it resists temperature changes better than comparable liquids. Water is already one of science’s great weirdos, and it turns out it may be even weirder than we thought.
In summary, this week’s weird science roundup confirms what this writer has long suspected: the universe is not just stranger than we suppose, it is stranger than we are currently equipped to suppose, and it is absolutely delighted about that fact. Mars had microbes, galaxies die young, our ancient cousin was apparently running an all-female cave commune, and water has been quietly having an existential crisis since the dawn of time. Honestly, same.
Read the original story at LiveScience – Weird News.
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