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On the morning of July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Lae, New Guinea, aboard a silver Lockheed Electra. Their destination was Howland Island, a narrow strip of coral in the central Pacific.
They had already travelled some 22,000 miles. Most of their journey around the world was behind them. Ahead lay roughly 2,500 miles of open ocean, ending at an island barely two miles long.
They never arrived.
Eighty-nine years later, a new expedition has reached another remote Pacific island to investigate a mysterious shape beneath the water.
By 1937, Amelia Earhart was one of America’s most famous aviators. Five years earlier, she had become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, surviving mechanical problems and dangerous weather before landing in a field in Northern Ireland.
Her next ambition was to circumnavigate the globe, following a route close to the equator. Her first attempt ended when her aircraft was damaged during takeoff in Hawaii. She tried again in June 1937, this time flying eastward.
With Noonan handling navigation, the pair crossed the Americas, the Atlantic, Africa, India and Southeast Asia. By the time they reached New Guinea, only the Pacific remained.
Waiting near Howland Island was the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca. Its crew was supposed to help Earhart locate the tiny island using radio communication, a critical task when even a small navigational error could leave an aircraft searching empty ocean.
But something was going wrong.
The Itasca could hear Earhart’s transmissions, yet she appeared unable to hear their replies. As the aircraft approached Howland, communication became increasingly desperate.
At 7:42 a.m., Earhart transmitted:
“We must be on you, but we cannot see you. Fuel is running low.”
Somewhere beneath them was an island they couldn’t find. Their fuel was running low, and the ship trying to guide them could hear their calls but couldn’t reach them.
At 8:43 a.m., her final confirmed transmission came through:
“We are on the line 157 337.”
She was describing a navigational line running northwest to southeast, along which the aircraft was apparently searching for Howland.
Then silence.
Neither Earhart nor Noonan was ever seen again.
A massive rescue operation followed, but after more than two weeks, the search was abandoned. The prevailing explanation was that the aircraft had run out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. Yet another possibility remained: what if they had reached land?
Some 350 nautical miles southeast of Howland lies Nikumaroro, an isolated coral atoll in what is now Kiribati.
Researchers have long wondered whether Earhart and Noonan continued southeast along their navigational line and reached the island. Its broad reef might have provided somewhere to land, although surviving there would have been difficult.
Over the decades, investigators have examined reports of human remains, fragments of equipment and pieces of metal discovered on Nikumaroro. None has conclusively connected the island to Earhart’s aircraft.
But recently, attention shifted from the island itself to something beneath its lagoon.
The mystery centres on an underwater feature nicknamed the Taraia Object.
Researchers noticed its unusual outline in satellite imagery from 2020. They later examined historical aerial photographs and identified what they believe could be the same feature in images dating to 1938, just one year after Earhart disappeared.
Could her Lockheed Electra have been lying there all this time?
The possibility prompted a new expedition organised through Purdue University, where Earhart had worked before her final flight.
In October 2026, 17 researchers travelled to Nikumaroro, equipped with sonar and instruments capable of detecting metal beneath shallow water and sediment.
Their mission is to examine the object directly and determine whether it could be aircraft wreckage.
Survey work began on October 14, although rough weather interrupted operations the following day.
Not everyone is convinced.
Ric Gillespie, who has investigated the Nikumaroro theory for decades, has suggested that the mysterious shape could simply be a fallen tree.
From above, an indistinct object beneath shallow water can resemble something extraordinary. Until researchers examine it, nobody knows what it is.
And even finding an aircraft would raise new questions. How did it reach the lagoon? Did Earhart and Noonan survive the landing? What happened afterward?
Amelia Earhart was just 39 when she disappeared, almost at the end of the most ambitious flight of her career. Her disappearance made her a legend, but the final radio messages remind us of the real pilot behind the mystery, searching desperately for an island she could not see.
In 1662, someone on the island of Mauritius reportedly saw a dodo alive for the last time.
The large, flightless bird had evolved without natural land predators. But after humans arrived, hunting, habitat destruction and introduced animals pushed it toward extinction.
For more than 350 years, the dodo has represented something irreversible: a species lost forever.
Now scientists are attempting to change that.
On October 14, American biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences announced a significant advance in its effort to resurrect the bird.
The company's scientists have reconstructed much of the dodo's genetic information. But ancient DNA is fragmented, and understanding which genes made the dodo unique is enormously difficult.
Their solution is an artificial intelligence system called GenoMorph.
By studying skull development and genetic information from more than 70 living bird species, the system has identified approximately 2,300 potential genetic targets associated with the dodo's distinctive beak and facial structure.
Scientists can now begin testing which changes actually matter.
But there's a complication. You cannot simply clone a dodo. There are no living dodo cells to clone.
Instead, Colossal plans to genetically modify reproductive cells from the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo's closest living relative. The company has expanded its breeding colony to 36 pigeons and developed techniques for working with cells that eventually produce eggs and sperm.
The hope is that carefully selected genetic changes could eventually produce a bird resembling its extinct ancestor.
Imagine scientists successfully create a flightless bird with a large hooked beak, the right body proportions and many of the dodo's original characteristics.
Would that animal actually be a dodo? Or would it be a genetically engineered pigeon that happens to look like one?
A species is more than its appearance. Its behaviour, development and relationship with its environment also matter.
And Mauritius has changed dramatically since the 17th century. Even if scientists recreate a convincing dodo, they would still need to ensure it could survive in the wild.
Colossal says it is working with Mauritian researchers and conservation groups to explore habitat restoration and the removal of invasive predators. No release site has been selected, and there is no announced date for hatching the first bird.
The technology could have applications far beyond extinct animals. Techniques developed for manipulating bird reproductive cells and understanding genetic traits might eventually help protect living species threatened with extinction.
But the bigger question remains. For centuries, extinction has meant the end of the story.
We may be approaching an age when scientists can write another chapter. Whether it's the same story is something we haven't figured out yet.
In June 2023, the destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka Dam unleashed catastrophic flooding, destroying homes and forcing thousands of people to flee.
But upstream, the opposite happened. As the reservoir emptied, a vast landscape that had been underwater since the 1950s began to reappear.
This was Velykyi Luh, the Great Meadow, a region once central to the lives of Ukraine’s Zaporizhian Cossacks. And beneath decades of accumulated sediment lay something extraordinary: traces of civilisations stretching back thousands of years.
As the water receded, people began discovering ancient pottery, Greek amphorae, weapons and objects from the Byzantine period.
Among the finds were an 18th-century Cossack burial cross and stone cannonballs associated with a historic Cossack stronghold. Archaeologists also identified opportunities to investigate ancient settlements and burial grounds previously inaccessible beneath the reservoir.
The region’s archaeological history stretches from prehistoric communities and Bronze Age settlements to Scythian fortifications and medieval towns associated with the Golden Horde.
One particularly intriguing site is Mamai-Sarai, a 14th-century Golden Horde settlement whose partially submerged remains could reveal new details about life along the Dnipro River.
But uncovering this history is only the beginning.
Much of the territory remains dangerous because of the war. Archaeological sites face shelling, erosion and illegal treasure hunting. Meanwhile, nature is rapidly reclaiming the exposed land, with young forests spreading across the former reservoir bed.
One Ukrainian archaeologist estimates that properly studying the region could require a century of research.
And there is another question: should Ukraine eventually rebuild the dam?
More than 100 Ukrainian organisations and experts are urging UNESCO to help protect the Great Meadow rather than allow it to disappear underwater again. Others point to the reservoir’s former importance for water supplies and agriculture.
A wartime catastrophe has unexpectedly reopened a chapter of human history that was sealed beneath water for seven decades.
The question now is how much of that history can be recovered before it disappears again.
A conversation ends. The customer hangs up. But somewhere inside the company's software, the conversation is only beginning.
Every word can be analysed. Every pause examined. The employee's performance becomes a collection of scores, ready for a manager to review.
And the person on the other end of the telephone may never know.
At Co-op Legal Services in Britain, employees providing legal assistance have raised concerns about AI software used to assess their telephone conversations.
The system evaluates more than 50 aspects of customer calls, turning conversations into performance data.
Workers have criticised the monitoring and the pressure they say it creates. Co-op disputes their characterisation, saying the technology supports coaching and customer service, with human managers retaining responsibility for decisions.
To an employer, this means better training and more consistent service.
To an employee, it can feel like an invisible examiner listening to every interaction.
A distressed caller may need patience rather than efficiency. An angry customer might require a different approach from someone asking a simple question.
AI can identify patterns in language and conversation structure. But whether those measurements capture the quality of an interaction is another matter.
A score can appear objective simply because a computer produced it.
Yet someone still decides what to measure, what to reward and what counts as success.
The risk is that employees begin adjusting their conversations to satisfy the software rather than the person they're speaking to.
The customer becomes the audience. The algorithm becomes the judge.
The concerns are serious enough that California recently passed restrictions on certain AI workplace surveillance practices, including systems that infer employees' emotional states.
There are legitimate reasons to monitor customer service, particularly when legal advice is involved.
But what happens when an employee disagrees with an automated assessment? Can they challenge it? Do they even know how their score was calculated?
And how much should a manager trust a machine's interpretation of a conversation they never heard?
For now, the controversy at Co-op Legal Services concerns how monitoring technology is used and how employees experience it.
The sharks are protected. The fishermen are restricted. The conservation rules are in place.
In Delaware Bay, on America's east coast, sand tiger sharks gather in waters that have become an important refuge for the species. Their jagged teeth and intimidating appearance make them popular aquarium attractions.
But scientists have uncovered an uncomfortable contradiction: the same sharks protected by American conservation efforts are being legally captured for commercial aquarium displays.
Between 2018 and 2024, 80 sand tiger sharks were removed from Delaware Bay for aquarium exhibitions.
Most were shipped overseas, including to China, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea and Thailand.
One company, Florida-based Dynasty Marine, collected 71 sharks between 2022 and 2024, according to records examined by The Guardian.
The trade operates through special permits that allow protected animals to be captured for public display.
So this isn't necessarily illegal trafficking. That's precisely what makes the story unusual.
The system designed to protect these animals also contains a route for selling them.
Sand tiger sharks are classified as critically endangered globally. Their northwestern Atlantic population is thought to be in better condition than populations elsewhere, partly thanks to American fishing protections.
But there's a problem.
Scientists have never completed a formal population assessment for this group. Nobody can confidently say how many sharks remain or whether removing them is sustainable.
And these animals reproduce slowly, making population recovery difficult.
Researchers from the University of Delaware warn that collecting sharks from a relatively healthy population to supply aquariums elsewhere could undermine the conservation success that made those sharks available in the first place.
Aquariums argue that displaying marine animals can educate visitors and encourage conservation.
But the researchers question whether taking threatened animals from the wild is justified when the consequences for their populations remain unknown.
There's another troubling gap: scientists cannot reliably track what happens to every shark after export, including whether it survives transport and captivity.
For a species already struggling worldwide, that's a significant unknown.
The researchers are calling for better population assessments, greater transparency and stronger coordination between conservation authorities and the aquarium industry.
America spent decades protecting these sharks from being caught. Now some of them are being caught because they're valuable enough to display.
Walk into a traditional arcade and something unusual happens.
Nobody asks you to create an account. There are no season passes, daily rewards or complicated progression systems.
You choose a machine, press start and play.
Friends gather around, someone challenges your high score, and suddenly a simple game becomes a shared experience.
It's remarkably straightforward. And perhaps that's exactly what makes it appealing again.
On October 14, The Guardian reported on a small but growing movement of independent arcades. Among the examples are NQ Japan, a new venue preparing to open in London's Soho with Japanese arcade cabinets, and Pixel Bunker in Milton Keynes.
It's not a worldwide arcade boom, but there are signs that enthusiasts are rediscovering physical gaming spaces and shorter, more focused experiences.
And the movement has deeper roots.
In 2004, Barcade opened in Brooklyn, combining classic arcade machines with a social atmosphere. Similar venues spread during the following decades, attracting both nostalgic adults and younger visitors who never experienced the original arcade era.
The appeal goes beyond old technology.
Unlike online multiplayer, arcades bring people into the same physical space. Playing, watching, competing and laughing become part of the experience.
But there's another possible explanation for their continued appeal.
Our relationship with entertainment has changed dramatically.
Social media delivers stories in seconds. Videos become shorter. Streaming services provide almost anything instantly. We're increasingly accustomed to entertainment that rewards us without making us wait.
Yet modern games often demand the opposite.
Lengthy introductions, complicated mechanics, enormous maps and endless progression systems can turn what should be relaxation into another commitment.
A game offering 100 hours of content once sounded like incredible value. Today, for someone juggling work, family and other interests, it might sound exhausting.
Perhaps our tolerance for friction, delayed rewards and unnecessary demands on our time is changing.
Of course, arcade games weren't designed purely for our enjoyment. Many were brutally difficult because every lost life encouraged players to insert another coin.
But an arcade game offers something increasingly valuable: immediate satisfaction without a long-term commitment.
There's no enormous storyline to remember, no weekly challenges to complete and no pressure to return tomorrow.
You can play for five minutes, have a fantastic time and walk away.
Perhaps that's part of why these old machines continue to attract new generations.
Games designed 40 years ago may be better suited to some of our modern entertainment habits than games designed today.
On March 4, 2024, a network of radio telescopes in South Africa detected an unusual flash from deep space.
It lasted only a few milliseconds, yet it had travelled for more than 10 billion years before reaching Earth.
To put that into perspective, our Sun is approximately 4.6 billion years old. The radio waves had already been travelling through the universe for billions of years before our solar system even formed.
Scientists call such events fast radio bursts. Nobody knows exactly what produces them, although one possibility involves the remains of exploded stars.
In October 2026, astronomers announced that they had traced this particular burst to a surprisingly small galaxy, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. It became the most distant radio burst ever linked to its home galaxy.
But the distance record wasn't the most interesting part.
We tend to imagine the enormous distances between galaxies as completely empty space.
They aren't.
Scientists know that vast quantities of ordinary matter exist as extremely thin gas spread throughout the universe. Much of it is so diffuse that conventional telescopes struggle to detect it.
And this is where the ancient radio burst becomes useful.
As radio waves travel through that gas, their different frequencies are delayed by slightly different amounts. By measuring those tiny differences in arrival time, astronomers can estimate how much material the radio waves passed through.
The signal isn't just evidence of an event that happened 10 billion years ago. It also carries information about the space between that event and Earth.
One of astronomy's longstanding challenges is accounting for all the ordinary matter that scientists believe the universe contains.
Fast radio bursts offer a way to investigate where some of that material is hiding. This particular burst allowed researchers to study matter along a route stretching across much of the universe's history.
On the night of October 3, a gang broke into a storage facility belonging to Marchesi Antinori, one of Italy's oldest and most prestigious winemakers.
Their target, an extraordinary amount of wine.
The thieves arrived at the facility near Cortona, Tuscany, disabled the security systems and began loading two large trucks.
They didn't even bring their own equipment. According to the winery, the gang used Antinori's forklifts to move the valuable cargo.
By the time they disappeared into the night, approximately 30,000 bottles were gone.
Estimated value: €5 million.
Among the stolen wines were Solaia, Tignanello and Guado al Tasso, prestigious labels from the 2023 vintage. Around 10,000 bottles were Solaia alone, with individual bottles typically selling for hundreds of euros.
The timing was particularly convenient for the thieves. Much of the wine had already been packaged for shipment to international distributors. In other words, somebody had done most of the packing for them.
When employees returned on Monday morning, they discovered the enormous theft. The company waited until Friday, October 9, to announce it publicly while investigators examined the evidence.
Marchesi Antinori has been producing wine since 1385.
That's 26 generations of the same family, surviving wars, revolutions, economic crises and more than six centuries of Italian history. Then, one Saturday night, seven men arrived with two trucks. The robbery is believed to be the largest wine theft ever recorded in Italy by value.
And it may not be an isolated case. Another famous Tuscan producer, Banfi, suffered a major theft in July, although investigators have not established whether the incidents are connected.
Stealing 30,000 bottles of luxury wine is an impressive logistical achievement. Selling them might be considerably harder.
Unlike stolen cash, expensive wine comes with recognisable labels, vintages and commercial distribution networks.
You've successfully stolen €5 million worth of some of Italy's finest wine. You've escaped with two truckloads of merchandise. Now you need to find someone willing to buy it.
Preferably without asking where you got 30,000 bottles of Solaia.
Apartment buildings have plenty of roof space, but sharing solar electricity between individually metered homes is tricky. Australian company Allume Energy built SolShare to distribute power from one rooftop installation among multiple apartments. On October 9, it won Australia's 2026 Good Design Award of the Year. One roof, several electricity bills, and a smarter way to connect them.
Archaeologists in Chodlik, eastern Poland, found a roughly 4.5-metre-long, boat-shaped grave containing cremated remains, silver ornaments and animal fragments. Such burials, more familiar from Scandinavia and the Baltic, bring Vikings to mind. That resemblance doesn't establish who was buried here. The wood hasn't survived, so researchers can't yet tell whether it held a real boat or merely resembled one. Either way, it's a curious sign of how far burial customs could travel.
Most of us see a leak and call a plumber. Yuko Mohri turns it into an instrument. Inspired by improvised repairs in Tokyo’s subway, the Japanese artist builds systems from buckets, tubes, everyday objects and musical instruments. Dripping water triggers chain reactions: objects move, shake and make sounds. At London’s Barbican arts centre, this watery orchestra never plays quite the same way twice.
A study of 67 Japanese learners of English found that people better at hearing subtle differences in sound also tended to learn unfamiliar English pronunciation more successfully. Researchers at University College London and Tohoku University also observed differences in speech processing during brain scans. It doesn't mean listening replaces grammar, but it suggests language lessons might work better if they trained our ears as carefully as our vocabulary.
We photograph our cars, motorcycles and household appliances. We keep receipts, record maintenance dates and occasionally remember where we put the instruction manual. But there's one thing we almost never preserve: the sound of a machine when everything is working properly.
And that's rather strange, considering how often an unfamiliar rattle, squeak or hum is the first thing that makes us suspect something is wrong.
Here's the idea: create a personal sound history for the machines you own.
Start with a motorcycle. Warm up the engine, place your phone somewhere safe, and record fifteen seconds of it idling. Save the recording with the date, mileage and a few notes. Repeat the process every few months, ideally under similar conditions.
Now you have something useful: a reference.
If the engine begins making an unfamiliar noise, you can listen to the old and new recordings side by side. You might notice a change you hadn't previously recognized, or share both recordings with a mechanic.
The same principle could work for a washing machine, refrigerator, electric fan or almost anything mechanical.
Absolutely. A simple browser app could record audio, store it with a photograph and a few notes, and let you compare two recordings. Add a visual frequency display and you have an interesting weekend project.
You wouldn't need artificial intelligence, special microphones or an elaborate diagnostic system.
Of course, there's an important limitation. Different recording positions, background noises and operating conditions can make perfectly healthy machines sound different. And serious mechanical problems don't always announce themselves audibly.
This wouldn't be a machine doctor. It would be a memory.
The experiment: Pick one machine you use regularly. Record it today, save the conditions and repeat the recording in a month. See whether having a reference actually helps you notice changes.
Record 15 seconds of a machine running normally, label the conditions, then repeat in a month and compare. A weekend web prototype could store clips and display their frequency patterns.
In August 2025, a wildfire swept across Holyrood Park in Edinburgh, Scotland. When the flames died down, park rangers discovered something unusual on Crow Hill, near the famous Arthur's Seat.
A pile of animal bones. More than 800 fragments, weighing approximately 13 kilograms. Not buried. Just lying on the hillside, previously concealed by vegetation.
Naturally, archaeologists wanted answers.
The bones came from an extraordinary assortment of animals: horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, rabbits, deer, birds, weasels and even cats.
Some had been cut with what appeared to be electric saws. Others had holes drilled through them.
One small bone was carefully painted with black and white stripes. Another carried red pigment resembling a fingerprint.
And then things got even stranger.
Two bones had limpet shells attached, suggesting they had spent considerable time submerged in seawater. Someone, it seemed, had been collecting bones from very different places.
But why carry them all the way up a Scottish hillside?
Radiocarbon dating provided another surprise.
One horse bone dated to approximately 1811, while a cat bone dated to after 1950. Yet some of the bones had been cut using modern power tools, while others had holes drilled through them.
Someone had been modifying bones belonging to animals that died decades, perhaps even centuries, apart. Was somebody collecting them over many years? Did they come from old animal burial sites, perhaps even pet cemeteries? Or did someone simply gather discarded bones from different places?
And why would they eventually end up together on a Scottish hillside?
The different degrees of weathering suggest the bones may not all have arrived at the same time.
We know some of the bones are old. We know some were deliberately altered. But we don't know who brought them together, or whether their different ages mean anything at all.
Was it an artist collecting unusual materials? Someone practising an obscure craft? A private ritual? Or simply a very eccentric hobby?
Archaeologists have suggested possibilities but found no evidence establishing who assembled the collection or why.
The location makes the mystery particularly interesting. Crow Hill isn't somewhere you'd casually carry 13 kilograms of unwanted bones. If disposal were the only purpose, there were considerably easier options.
And Edinburgh has encountered something like this before.
In 1836, seventeen tiny wooden coffins containing miniature figures were discovered on Arthur's Seat. Nearly two centuries later, their purpose remains disputed.
Now another unexplained collection has appeared on the same volcanic hillside.
Somewhere, 1.5 billion light-years away, the cosmos appears to have signed its own sheet music.
Astronomers have discovered something rather wonderful: an enormous formation in space shaped remarkably like a treble clef.
The structure stretches across part of a galaxy cluster some 1.55 billion light-years from Earth. In new observations released by NASA on October 14, the familiar musical symbol appears in glowing pink, surrounded by clouds of blue and violet.
Scientists think the shape was created in two stages. First, a supermassive black hole sent a huge cloud of electrically charged material into space. Much later, two enormous groups of galaxies collided. The force of that collision stirred up the old cloud, making it visible again in radio waves.
The image combines observations from several telescopes, including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
There’s something delightful about the idea that two colliding galaxy clusters and a supermassive black hole could accidentally produce something resembling a symbol from a piano lesson.