In twelfth-century Suffolk, two children with green skin appeared speaking an unknown language and claiming to come from a land without sunlight. What lies behind the strange story of the Green Children of Woolpit?

Have you ever had insomnia?  Sure, most people have at some point in their lives.  It’s one of those things that gets generalised and used to mean “I didn’t sleep so well last night.”  And while th…

The SR-71 Blackbird spy plane could be considered the crown jewel of Lockheed’s legendary ‘Skunk Works’ department, at the height of the Cold War. Built almost entirely out of titanium, it was a flying platform so revolutionary for its time that it could simply fly higher and faster than anything the Soviets could throw at it—if they could even detect it at all, given its reduced radar cross-section. The SR-71 was so elusive that to this day the CIA still […]

For centuries, Japan’s Heikegani crabs have seemed to bear the angry faces of fallen samurai on their shells. Carl Sagan helped popularize an evolutionary explanation for their strange appearance—but the real answer may lie not in the crabs, but in us.

In 1974, humanity sent a message toward the stars. But transmitting a signal is the easy part. How do you communicate with another intelligence when you may share no language, culture, senses, or even way of understanding the world?

Get your priorities right, read the Tuesday Grail news briefs as soon as possible! Quote of the Day We live to improve, or we live in vain. Thomas Paine

For nearly two thousand years, the carbonized scrolls of Herculaneum have remained tantalizingly unreadable. Now, X-rays, virtual unwrapping, and machine learning are beginning to reveal what lies inside—offering us a rare opportunity to recover knowledge thought lost to antiquity.

This crazy, strange, chaotic world of ours has no shortage of oddities to grab our attention.  One needn’t look very far to find something weird enough to elicit a head-shaking sigh, or even a prof…

In the autumn of 1944, residents of a small Illinois city reported a mysterious prowler creeping through the night and pumping a strange gas into their homes. Victims described sickly sweet odours, nausea, coughing, and even temporary paralysis. The culprit became known as the Mad Gasser of Mattoon—but was there ever a gasser at all?

If every part of something is replaced, is it still the same thing? The Ship of Theseus has puzzled philosophers for centuries, but the question becomes considerably stranger when we stop talking about ships and start talking about ourselves. What, exactly, makes you you?

Is Utsuna-bune a tale of alien encounters and advanced technology?  Is it a description of a real event, an event that carries with it the intrigue and mystery of foreign lands and strange cultures…

The ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti is one of the most iconic figures of history: Not just due to her significance as the wife of the heretical Pharaoh Akhenaten – in a reign in which they instituted...

G'day all! Going into last week, I'm sure we were all a bit of sick of the whole topic of AI...and then some 'whistle-blower' from Anthropic

Lots of positive feedback about RPJ’s interview with Meredith Spearman – be sure to go check it out if you haven’t already! Quote of the Day Gretchen: You’re weird.Donnie: Sorry.Gretchen: No, that was...

In 1873, a shoemaker named James Worson supposedly vanished into thin air before three witnesses. The story has been repeated as fact for more than a century—but following its history leads not to Victorian police records or newspaper reports, but to a single man: Ambrose Bierce. What happens when repetition begins to look like corroboration?

What if wanting doesn’t require a mind? A bacterium cannot think about survival, yet its behaviour is organized around staying alive. If that’s enough to call it a kind of wanting, then…

Along England’s Somerset coast lies a strange landscape of fractured limestone—and an old legend about the dragon said to have made it. Known as Blue Ben, the creature belongs firmly to folklore, b…

One summer night in 1955, a Kentucky family found themselves besieged by strange, glowing-eyed creatures that seemed impervious to gunfire. They fled to the police for help—but when they returned home, the creatures came back.

What if wanting doesn't require a mind? A bacterium cannot think about survival, yet its behaviour is organized around staying alive. If that is enough to call it a kind of wanting, then where do we draw the line between wanting, sentience, and consciousness? And what happens when we build machines that begin to behave the same way?

Fuel’s too expensive to go anywhere these days, so get comfortable at home and enjoy the Tuesday Grail news briefs instead! Thanks to @sharonahill.bsky.social. Quote of the Day To live in hearts we le...

Research shows there could be benefits to sensing those we’ve lost.

Two billion years ago, nature built a working nuclear reactor. Even more remarkable is how a tiny discrepancy in uranium discovered in 1972 allowed scientists to reconstruct what happened—and even …

One of our top stories for this week, came from a statement made by the US Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, who during his keynote address at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference, claimed the Uni...

Before we can fully understand the process of sitting in a chair, we should consider a few things that might have a potentially devastating effect on the outcome.

Microwave sickness, skin-writing, the nocebo effect, and our enduring suspicion of invisible radiation. What happens when the symptoms are real, but the cause may not be what we think it is?

Can the human soul be weighed? For more than a century, experiments have claimed to measure what leaves us at the moment of death. But follow the evidence far enough, and the story becomes stranger than the question itself.

For years, a photograph supposedly showing the human soul leaving the body has circulated online. Attributed to Russian scientist Konstantin Korotkov, the image has been linked to Kirlian photograp…

For decades, Clapham Wood in West Sussex, England, has been associated with strange lights, disappearing animals, unexplained deaths, UFO sightings, and rumours of occult activity. But how much of …

While we are not able to predict the form of life outside of our small solar system, we can predict certain qualities of such form, though still with a margin of error which leaves much to the imag…

The Younger Dryas Impact Theory is perhaps one of the most controversial theories currently being debated in the fields of archaeology and space science. Proponents – including alternative history aut...

There once was a man named David, he loved his family so.  They lived on a farm in Tennessee, in eighteen hundred eighty.  One day while his daughters played nearby and his wife watched from her swing...

The human body is a pretty fragile thing, when you think about it.  Maybe not as fragile as movie makers try to make it seem, but still far less durable than a lot of other life forms on this plane…

If there is a quintessential European nation, country or group of people who personify the rest of the world’s idea of what it means to be European, Romania might be pretty close.  Its storied hist…