Nullary Sources

GTA 6 Reviews Plague Real-Life Nudist Resort After Fans Draw Comparisons to Leaks

chz — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:01:13 -0700

Grand Theft Auto 6 fans believe its nudist resort was inspired by a real-life location, and its owners are already being bombarded with problematic reviews.

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“For anyone wondering about the suddenly recurring references to ‘Jason Duval,’ 'Lucia,’ binoculars, a pool, firearms, and other suspiciously similar details — those are references to Grand Theft Auto VI,” the site owner said in response to just one of the many reviews that have shown up on the Cypress Cove Nudist Resort Google page recently. “Yes. A video game.”

The owner, which has already taken what action it can against the reviews, said the influx of reviews is a “coordinated series of fabricated posts using GTA VI references.” They then allege that some posts were followed by requests that the rest “pay money to have the reviews changed or removed.”

We gotta put a stop to gamers, man

The planet Mercury is shrinking far faster than we thought

chz — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:01:23 -0700

Mary Randolph for Scientific American:

Everyone gets wrinkles eventually—even planets. On Mercury, these signs of aging look like hills and ridges, called shortening structures, across its surface. As the planet shrinks and contracts over time, more of these ridges rise up. And according to a new analysis, there are far more of them than scientists had realized.

Scientists have long known that Mercury’s interior was shrinking: for the past 4.5 billion years, the planet has contracted as it cooled from its fiery origins. But the new research, published in Geophysical Research Letters on Thursday, shows that it’s actually shrunk a lot more than previously estimated, providing new insight into the planet’s evolution and makeup.

Congrats to Mercury on its weight loss 🎉

New Mexico State Fair ribbon quilt now on display in Smithsonian

chz — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:01:47 -0700

Griffin Rushton for KOB 4 of Albuquerque, New Mexico, back in 2025:

Ribbons are a big deal. Carol Johnson has won hundreds and hundreds of them [from the New Mexico State Fair] over the past 43 years.

“My father was an alcoholic and I heard all the time, ‘Can’t you do anything right? What’s the matter with you? Can’t you do anything right?’, so with the ribbons, I was like, 'Oh, I can do something right.’,” Johnson said.

Johnson stitched 609 of her ribbons together into a quilt. The quilt won her yet another blue ribbon in 2023 – and a spot in the Smithsonian Museum’s Renwick Gallery.

Without question one of the all-time flexes

Astronaut’s Before-and-After Photos Show How Cities Switched From Orange to White Light

chz — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:01:57 -0700

Matt Growcoot for PetaPixel:

Over the past 15 years, cities at night around the world have undergone a transformation: instead of being bathed in warm, orange sodium vapor light, they’re now lit up by brighter, white LED lights.

NASA astronaut and photographer Don Pettit, who has been living on and off at the International Space Station since 2002, has documented this transition and recently shared a series of photos that starkly demonstrate what that change looks like from space.

The source for this and all the photos is just a Twitter thread by Pettit, so you can just view that if you’d like, but I’m linking this repost article in case you don’t want to go to Twitter on account of that website sucking ass

Here’s just some random jazz for you on this Tuesday, “Take Me to the Clouds” by trumpeter Malcolm…

chz — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:00:59 -0700

Here’s just some random jazz for you on this Tuesday, “Take Me to the Clouds” by trumpeter Malcolm Strachan off his 2020 album About Time.

‘Quiet’ pulsar suddenly reveals three glitches in 15 years of observations

chz — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:01:21 -0700

Shreejaya Karantha for Phys.org:

Using more than 15 years of observations from the Parkes radio telescope, astronomers detected three rotational glitches in the pulsar PSR J1637−4642—a young neutron star that had shown no signs of glitches since its discovery. The three glitches included one that changed its rotation rate by nearly 3 parts per million. Their paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 20. It has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Neutron stars that rapidly spin, sending out regular pulses of radio signals, are called pulsars. Some pulsars occasionally experience sudden increases in their rotation rate, known as glitches. Younger pulsars tend to exhibit this complex timing behavior often, which is why they are interesting to study.

While the exact cause of glitches remains unknown, astronomers think a glitch is caused by a sudden transfer of angular momentum from the superfluid inside the star to its solid crust.

Love it when a star glitches out

New heart attack definition promises better care for women

chz — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 12:00:42 -0700

Andrew Gregory for The Guardian:

Doctors have agreed the world’s first universal definition of a heart attack, paving the way for millions of women to finally receive better treatment after decades of being “deprioritised”.

In one of the biggest procedural shake-ups in a generation, the world’s four leading cardiovascular health groups have signed off on new guidance for healthcare professionals when seeing suspected heart attack patients.

Historically, some less common forms of heart attack, which evidence shows typically affect women far more than men, have been coded as less important, with treatment and care often worse as a result.

Until now, experts said, women had been getting less effective treatments, which did not always target the specific cause of their heart attack and could even make them more unwell.

I’ve stopped being surprised by “it turns out some serious health thing presents differently in women and is treated less seriously in those cases” stories at this point

In Chile, injured penguins sport copper vests to help them heal

chz — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:00:53 -0700

Mauricio Cuevas for the AP:

Researchers in Chile have designed an unlikely new garment for injured penguins — snug red vests threaded with copper and zinc that they hope will help the aquatic birds heal faster.

Veterinarians have found success in the past using such suits to treat injured dogs and cats. Now they’re trying out the technology on Humboldt penguins in Chile, home to the largest concentration of the vulnerable species.

Sometimes you just gotta play dress-up with penguins

Ice Island Survives Run-In With Joe Island

chz — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:02:14 -0700

News post from NASA:

Summer is prime iceberg season in Greenland’s glacier-fed fjords, and 2026 was no exception. Especially notable was the berg that broke from the Petermann Glacier along Greenland’s northwest coast in August. Roughly the size of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, it was the largest calving event by any Arctic glacier since 2020.

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Glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College has also been tracking the iceberg, using images from NASA-USGS Landsat satellites, as it drifted down Petermann Fjord toward Nares Strait. In the week since it calved, the berg drifted an average of 3 kilometers per day. It continued toward the fjord’s junction with Nares Strait, where it rammed into a small rocky outcrop known as Joe Island (Joe Ø).

Joe Island

Three Mount Shasta climbers rescued after relying on AI to plan climb

chz — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:01:03 -0700

Adam Robinson for KRCR of Redding, California:

Three novice climbers were rescued from Mount Shasta on Sunday after becoming lost, running low on supplies and spending an unplanned night in Mud Creek Canyon, the U.S. Forest Service - Shasta-Trinity National Forest (USFS) said.

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The USFS said the climbers told them they had used an artificial intelligence platform, YouTube videos and AllTrails to plan the trip. They said they relied on AI to decide what food to bring and how much food and water they would need.

The group said it packed supplies for an eight-hour climb, not its roughly 16-hour ascent. The climbers said AI recommended simple carbohydrates instead of fats because fats “take too long to digest.”

People who think AI works like this just aren’t ever going to go away, despite AI’s constant attempts to kill them

An anomalous return of the Odden ice tongue suggests unusual Arctic conditions

chz — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:01:05 -0700

Krystal Kasal for Phys.org:

Data from many sources, including NASA, have shown a significant decrease in Arctic sea ice since 1979. However, the processes driving the melting and freezing of sea ice are complex, and fluctuations occur throughout the year. Short-term variations in temperature, winds, ocean convection and water salinity within a certain region can also affect how much ice can reform or melt.

A recent study, published in Polar Science, indicates that a region of the Greenland Sea near the West Jan Mayen Ridge has experienced an increase in winter sea ice over the past couple of years, resulting in a recurrence of a feature called the Odden ice tongue. The recurrence suggests a confluence of interesting processes that may lead to a better understanding of short-term variability in sea ice.

Odden Icetongue is without a doubt the name of a character in some fantasy novel

WORLD ORDER has a new song and dance routine! This one’s called “BEAUTIFUL WORLD” and it’s the theme…

chz — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:00:50 -0700

WORLD ORDER has a new song and dance routine! This one’s called “BEAUTIFUL WORLD” and it’s the theme song for the latest stage show by a theater company called Gekidan Science Fiction Megane, which is why they’re performing on a stage here and there a bunch of extras who I presume are from the company

Navajo data sovereignty has its roots in a native seed bank

chz — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:01:51 -0700

Arlyssa D. Becenti for the Arizona Republic:

Tucked inside a small building in the Navajo capital is a seed bank where Diné botanist Jesse Mike and his small team with the Diné Native Plants Program are working to expand the availability of native plant materials across the Navajo Nation.

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But the significance of the Diné Native Plants Program extends beyond strengthening land stewardship and cultural knowledge by collecting, preserving, and cultivating native plant species. Its deeper significance lies in the Navajo Nation’s claim to ownership and protection of the work the program does with Navajo seeds, as established by the Navajo Nation Genetics Research Policy Statement, which was adopted in 2024.

The policy marked the first time the Navajo Nation formally protected its intellectual property and other outcomes from genetic and genomic research involving Navajo “people, plants, animals, ecosystems,” and it also affirmed the Nation’s authority to determine when and how genetic and genomic data are shared, ensuring that sharing benefits the Navajo Nation.

Hell yeah plants

2,600 silver coins found in outskirts of Moscow may have been buried by a medieval plague victim

chz — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:01:51 -0700

Kristina Killgrove for Live Science:

Archaeologists in Russia have unearthed a medieval hoard of 2,600 silver coins, including more than 350 coins of a type never seen before. The hoard may have been buried by a nobleman who later fell victim to a plague.

The coins were found in an elegant ceramic jug, according to an Aug. 26 translated statement from the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The jug was buried in a pit in what is now the historic center of Kolomna, a city about 71 miles (114 kilometers) southeast of the city of Moscow. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Kolomna was the second-most-important city in the region.

Honestly it’s a little nice learning that people used to keep loose change in jars way back when

At least 1-in-4 former NFL players who died between 2016-2021 had CTE, study finds

chz — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:00:43 -0700

News release from Mass General Brigham, a research health network that’s apparently the largest private employer in Massachusetts (thanks Wikipedia):

In a new study from Mass General Brigham, Boston University (BU), and the Concussion & CTE Foundation, researchers found evidence that at least 1 in 4 former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) at the time of their death, a much higher prevalence compared to the general population. Researchers also found that 61.3% of NFL donors with CTE met clinical criteria for dementia, with severe CTE more frequently associated with dementia. Results were published today in The BMJ.

Currently, CTE can only definitively be diagnosed after death through examination of brain tissue. To estimate prevalence, researchers identified all former NFL players from the hard-shell helmet era who died between 2008 and 2021. Between 2016 and 2021, the highest donation period, 878 former NFL players died. Of those players, 235 donated their brains, and 215 (91.4%) of the donated brains were found to have CTE.

These days I have a hard time accepting that football is a thing we should let people play

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Discovers Field of Honeycomb Textures

chz — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:01:49 -0700

News release from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab last month with some photos:

As NASA’s Curiosity rover recently began climbing up a Martian valley nicknamed “Valle Grande,” it sent back images that were a familiar sight to mission scientists: honeycomb-like textures called polygonal fractures, each one about 1.5 to 3 inches (4 to 8 centimeters) across. The mission has spotted small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande.

In a 360-degree panorama that the rover captured on June 19 and 20, the 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days, or sols, of the mission, the polygonal shapes spread in all directions for as far as the rover can see.

Love me some polygons

Why is one corner of China’s internet insisting a golden era never existed?

chz — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:00:41 -0700

Sylvie Zhuang for CNN:

Something weird has been happening on China’s internet. One small and vocal corner has been claiming the country’s most famous historical dynasty never existed.

That’s the Tang, which ruled China from 618 AD to 907 AD, a period that saw huge territorial expansion, booming international trade and the flourishing of a high culture envied far beyond its borders. Every child learns about the Tang at school; historical dramas inspired by its palace intrigues are a staple of state TV.

Claiming that the 300-year dynasty was actually a myth is akin to saying the American Civil War never happened, or telling a Brit that the Magna Carta is a fiction. But in recent months it’s been spreading among China’s very online population, posing a headache for a ruling Communist Party obsessed with controlling how its citizens talk about their 5,000 years of fractious and contested history.

It all appears to have started when a history influencer named Qiao Yu deployed some baffling astrological data in a video in May, to “prove” the Tang had never existed.

It's—"comforting" really isn’t the right word for this because I derive no comfort from it whatsoever, but there’s a feeling kind of like comfort in knowing that people everywhere on the planet are dipshits like this

Archaeologists investigate a feared young woman’s 17th century vampiric grave in Poland

chz — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:00:48 -0700

Sanjukta Mondal for Phys.org:

In 2022, excavations at a cemetery in Pień, Poland, led by researchers from the Institute of Archaeology at Nicolaus Copernicus University, led to a mysterious discovery. In what they call Grave 75, they uncovered the 400-year-old remains of a young adult woman buried in a very unusual and unsettling way. A curved iron sickle was placed directly over her neck, with its blade pointing toward her throat, while a triangular iron padlock was attached to the big toe of her left foot.

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The padlock and sickle in the grave were consistent with anti-demonic rituals, practices meant to shield the living from the dead. In the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, disease, famine and other misfortunes could devastate communities, and the dead became convenient scapegoats for shifting blame.

A padlock on your toe would go super hard as part of a nonsensical JRPG character design

Since a worldwide rerelease of SNES RPG Terranigma just got announced and that’s cool news, here’s…

chz — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:00:40 -0700

Since a worldwide rerelease of SNES RPG Terranigma just got announced and that’s cool news, here’s “One Who Opens the Door,” which has a cool ambient intro before blasting into a direct cover of “Into the Door” from the game halfway through. This was arranged by its original composer Masanori Hikichi for an art exhibition by the game’s character designer Kamui Fujiwara in 2021 (co-composer Miyoko Takaoka also contributed a few arrangements).

Snake undergoes ‘world-first’ human cancer therapy

chz — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:01:14 -0700

Dan Wareing for BBC News:

A snake named after the Hollywood star Jodie Foster has made a full recovery after receiving cancer treatment normally used in humans.

The 4m (15ft) reticulated python, who lives at Chester Zoo, was given electrochemotherapy after a cancerous tumour was discovered in its jawbone.

The reptile is believed to be the first snake in the world to receive this kind of treatment, according to the veterinary team at Chester Zoo.

When I say “fuck a cancer” here that 100% unquestionably also includes snake cancer