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Archaeologists are peeling back the myth of the Roman Legionary, using incredible new discoveries from Britain's Vindolanda and Gaul's Lugdunum. By excavating 2,000-year-old barracks, sewers, and mass graves, they uncover perfectly preserved artifacts, from intimate letters and children's shoes to macabre human remains. This documentary reveals a vibrant, human side to the Roman soldier while exposing the brutal reality and fratricidal violence of life on the empire's frontier and in its great cities. Recovering Lost Artifacts From An Ancient Roman Mass Grave | 52:13 Unearthed History - Archaeology Documentaries | 242K subscribers | 19,297 views | November 30, 2025

Explanation: Blasting outward from variable star KX Andromedae, these stunning bipolar jets are 19 light-years long. Recently discovered, they are revealed in unprecedented detail in this deep telescopic image centered on KX And and composed from over 692 hours of combined image data. In fact, KX And is spectroscopically found to be an interacting binary star system consisting of a bright, hot B-type star with a swollen cool giant star as its co-orbiting, close companion. The stellar material from the cool giant star is likely being transferred to the hot B-type star through an accretion disk, with spectacular symmetric jets...

Explanation: Tonight, if you can see the stars of the Big Dipper, then you can find comet Lemmon in your evening sky. After sunset, look for the faint but extended comet above your northwestern horizon -- but below the handle of the famous celestial kitchen utensil of the north. It might be easier to see this visitor to the inner Solar System through your camera phone, which is better at picking up faint objects. Either way, look for a fuzzy green 'star' with a tail, though probably not so long a tail as in this impressive snapshot taken over Seč...

At an off-the-record meeting held on November 21, 1962 with NASA Administrator James Webb, NASA Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans, and Special Assistant to the President Jerome Wiesner, President Kennedy states clearly that his administration's priority is for the United States to land on the Moon before the Soviet Union. Listening In: JFK on Getting to the Moon (November 21, 1962) | 4:04 John F. Kennedy Library Foundation | 136K subscribers | 931,620 views | October 11, 2012

Around 8,000 years ago, a vast stretch of land connected Britain to mainland Europe. This lost world, known as Doggerland, was a thriving Mesolithic landscape teeming with mammoth, deer, and human communities. But everything changed with a catastrophic event that submerged this Stone Age Eden beneath the rising waters of the North Sea. In 1931, fishermen accidentally pulled prehistoric bones and tools from the seafloor, marking the first modern discovery of Doggerland. Since then, especially from the 1990s through 2019, archaeologists and scientists have used sonar scans, seabed sampling, and digital reconstructions to piece together what life was like in...

Explanation: An example of violence on a cosmic scale, enormous elliptical galaxy NGC 1316 lies about 75 million light-years away toward Fornax, the southern constellation of the Furnace. Investigating the startling sight, astronomers suspect the giant galaxy of colliding with smaller neighbor NGC 1317 seen just right of the large galaxy's center, producing far flung star streams in loops and shells. Light from their close encounter would have reached Earth some 100 million years ago. In the sharp telescopic image, the central regions of NGC 1316 and NGC 1317 appear separated by over 100,000 light-years. Complex dust lanes visible within...

Explanation: Where do comet tails come from? There are usually no obvious places on the nuclei of comets from which the jets that create comet tails emanate. One of the best images of emerging jets is shown in the featured picture, taken in 2015 by ESA's robotic Rosetta spacecraft that orbited Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Comet CG) from 2014 to 2016. The picture shows plumes of gas and dust escaping numerous places from Comet CG's nucleus as it neared the Sun and heated up. The comet has two prominent lobes, the larger one spanning about 4 kilometers, and a smaller 2.5-kilometer lobe...

Today I spent the day with my excellent collaborator Richard Ellenbogen cross-examining witnesses at the New York Public Service Commission’s hearing on whether the pending rate increase request of our utility Con Edison should be approved. We had a lot of fun. Although the hearing was theoretically open to the public, they had no live video feed, and you had to register in advance to attend in person. It looked like everybody there was an interested party. At the close of the hearing, we were invited (along with everybody else) to file a post-hearing brief by next Friday, December 12....

Hoo boy. Sometimes, you might do something so embarrassing, so humiliating, that you want to hide in the closet. The prestigious science journal Nature may be thinking about doing that right about now, because on Wednesday, they officially retracted an influential 2024 climate report that predicted gloom and doom, death and misery, and impending economic catastrophe. As is the case with so much of the leftist climate narrative, their wild claims were quite simply unproven:In April 2024, the prestigious journal Nature released a study finding that climate change would cause far more economic damage by the end of the century...

This video features an extremely rare decadrachm of Alexander the Great - a coin that the conqueror himself might have presented to one of his officers. Alexander the Great held this coin (maybe) | 4:14 Toldinstone Footnotes | 44.2K subscribers | 3,217 views | December 2, 2025 Coins [Toldinstone Footnotes search]

Texas researchers have now definitively dated a distinctive rock art tradition, a profound discovery shared across multiple ancient Mesoamerican cultures.For thousands of years, ancient forager societies across southwest Texas and northern Mexico painted these stunning murals, known as the "Pecos River Style," inside remote limestone rock shelters.These colossal murals stretch up to 100 feet long and soar 20 feet tall...Though the desert climate perfectly preserved these significant American works, researchers only recently attempted to date the tradition...To pinpoint the art's origin, researchers employed 57 radiocarbon dating analyses across 12 sites, utilizing plasma oxidation and accelerator mass spectrometry, which firmly placed...

Explanation: What would it look like to plunge into a monster black hole? This image from a supercomputer visualization shows the entire sky as seen from a simulated camera plunging toward a 4-million-solar-mass black hole, similar to the one at the center of our galaxy. The camera lies about 16 million kilometers from the black hole’s event horizon and is moving inward at 62% the speed of light. Thanks to gravity’s funhouse effects, the starry band of the Milky Way appears both as a compact loop at the top of this view and as a secondary image stretching across the...

Explanation: Put on your red/blue glasses and float next to asteroid 101955 Bennu. Shaped like a spinning toy top with boulders littering its rough surface, the tiny Solar System world is about one Empire State Building (less than 500 meters) across. Frames used to construct this 3D anaglyph were taken by PolyCam on the OSIRIS_REx spacecraft on December 3, 2018 from a distance of about 80 kilometers. With a sample from the asteroid's rocky surface on board, OSIRIS_REx departed Bennu's vicinity in May of 2021. The robotic spacecraft successfully returned the sample to its home world in September of 2023.

In my last post I linked to, and quoted portions of, the objection submitted by myself and two colleagues to the pending settlement of the rate increase request of our local utility, Con Edison. The gist of our objection is that the ratepayers should not be forced to pay to build infrastructure for delivery of “renewable” electricity that does not exist. Our objection was filed on the day before Thanksgiving, November 26. That day had been set as the due date for all statements either in support or opposed to the pending settlement, which is referred to as the Joint...

Explanation: What's happening in the center of nearby spiral galaxy M77? The face-on galaxy lies a mere 47 million light-years away toward the constellation of the Sea Monster (Cetus). At that estimated distance, this gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across. Also known as NGC 1068, its compact and very bright core is well studied by astronomers exploring the mysteries of supermassive black holes in active Seyfert galaxies. M77's active core glows bright at x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and radio wavelengths. The featured sharp image of M77 was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The image shows details...

Explanation: This asteroid has a moon. The robot spacecraft Galileo enroute to explore the Jovian system in 1993, encountered and photographed two asteroids during its long interplanetary voyage. The second minor planet it photographed, 243 Ida, was discovered to have a moon. The tiny moon, named Dactyl, is only about 1.6 kilometers across and seen as a small dot to the right in the image. In contrast, Ida is much larger, measuring about 60 kilometers long and 25 km wide. In fact, Dactyl is the first moon of an asteroid ever discovered. But now many asteroids are known to have...

A Danish sperm bank has introduced a minimum IQ requirement of 85 for potential donors. This new rule has sparked debate about genetics, ethics, and parental expectations in assisted reproduction. Setting a Minimum Intelligence Standard The Danish sperm bank Donor Network now screens donors by intelligence, becoming the first in the world to require a minimum IQ of 85. It also bars anyone with a criminal record. So far, the company has turned away about 18 percent of applicants who failed to meet the IQ standard. The average IQ is about 100, and researchers estimate that intelligence is 50–80 percent...

The Ivan Sanderson Papers hold an amazing array of archival material, covering topics from natural history to radio and television programming to cryptozoology. Sanderson was a prominent zoologist in the mid 20th century who turned his attention to less mainstream scientific fields like ufology and cryptozoology. Ivan Sanderson, born in Scotland in 1911, was educated in zoology and botany at Cambridge. After working in counter-espionage for the British Naval Intelligence during World War II, he began to focus on his academic pursuits. Sanderson used the media to bring information about the natural sciences to a wider audience. In the...

IntroductionThe Old Copper Complex, also known as the Old Copper Culture, refers to the items made by early inhabitants of the Great Lakes region during a period that spans several thousand years and covers several thousand square miles. The most conclusive evidence suggests that native copper was utilized to produce a wide variety of tools beginning in the Middle Archaic period circa 4,000 BC. The vast majority of this evidence comes from dense concentrations of Old Copper finds in eastern Wisconsin. These copper tools cover a broad range of artifact types: axes, adzes, various forms of projectile points, knives, perforators,...

Explanation: How typical is our Solar System? Studying 3I/ATLAS, a comet just passing through, is providing clues. Confirmed previous interstellar visitors include an asteroid, a comet, a meteor, and a gas wind dominated by hydrogen and helium. Comet 3I/ATLAS appears relatively normal when compared to Solar System comets, therefore providing more evidence that our Solar System is a somewhat typical star system. For example, Comet 3I/ATLAS has a broadly similar chemical composition and ejected dust. The featured image was captured last week from Texas and shows a green coma, a wandering blue-tinted ion tail likely deflected by our Sun's wind,...