It’s often said that to know your enemy, you must become your enemy – and when that enemy happens to be fake news, a new study of a game where players become “fake newsmongers” suggests it really does help.The game in question is Bad News, developed by Dutch media platform DROG and scientists from the University of Cambridge as a way to “vaccinate” the public against disinformation. In pretending to be creators of fake news – the aim is to gain as many followers and as much ill-placed credibility as possible – players are exposed to real-life fake news strategies, such as political polarization, spreading conspiracy theories, and impersonating others.Back in 2019, a study of 15,000 participants indicated that the game was successful at improving people’s ability to spot and resist disinformation, but the team was keen to see if the same results could be achieved in a more traditional educational setting: a secondary school classroom.Coming from four different Swedish schools, 516 upper-secondary students aged 16 to 19 were first asked to complete a questionnaire that measured their ability to spot both manipulative and credible content, rating Twitter-like posts for how reliable they believed the post to be and providing a justification for it.Then, the students were tasked with playing Bad News, either individually, in pairs, or as a whole class group. After playing, they filled out a post-test questionnaire that again measured their disinformation-spotting skills, as well as what they thought about the game.Regardless of whether or not the student played the game by themselves, the study revealed that playing had a positive impact.“The students improved their ability to identify manipulative techniques in social media posts and to distinguish between reliable and misleading news,” explained study author Thomas Nygren in a statement, though students who already held positive attitudes towards credible news sources were the best at doing so.Many students were also better able to explain how they could spot the disinformation presented.But before people start demanding the game be immediately added to curriculums everywhere, the authors do note some limitations: the study was conducted on students from just one country and only tested their ability to spot disinformation in a social media post. Future studies, they suggest, should investigate the impact of the game elsewhere and on assessing the credibility of an entire news article.“This is an important step towards equipping young people with the tools they need to navigate in a world full of disinformation,” said Nygren. “We all need to become better at identifying manipulative strategies – prebunking, as it is known – since it is virtually impossible to discern deep fakes, for example, and other AI-generated disinformation with the naked eye.”The study is published in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education.

Astronomers using JWST report that a hellish super-Earth called 55 Cancri e might have a thick atmosphere made up of either of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide. If confirmed, it would be the first known rocky planet beyond the Solar System to have a dense atmosphere.  Earth is a rocky planet and its atmosphere is vital in allowing life to flourish, protecting it from the Sun's radiation and the harshness of space. Mars is also a rocky planet, however, its very thin atmosphere, just 1 percent of Earth's, may be part of the reason there is (as far as we know) no life on the Red Planet. An atmosphere isn't necessarily an indicator of a potentially habitable planet but it's a good place to start and though it's unlikely life exists on 55 Cancri e since its surface is a molten ocean of magma, the fact JWST can and has detected hints of a possible atmosphere there is a very promising sign in our ability to hunt for Earth-Like planets. 55 Cancri e has almost twice the radius of our own world and a mass 8.8 times Earth's own. It orbits a star smaller than our Sun but so closely that it goes around it in less than 18 hours, meaning the star-facing side has temperatures high enough to melt iron and the world is expected to be marked by volcanos and a magma ocean. It is that geological activity that might sustain the atmosphere that a team of astronomers believe they have observed.“The planet is so hot that some of the molten rock should evaporate,” lead author Renyu Hu from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement seen by IFLScience.55 Cancri e is tidally locked so its night side is in constant darkness and its day side constantly facing the scorching star. If the planet was without an atmosphere, the day side would be very hot and the night side very cool, but this is not what JWST found. The day side is cooler than expected and while lava flow to the night side can explain some of it, an atmosphere can better explain the cooling observed.“This is a very strong indication that energy is being distributed from the dayside to the nightside, most likely by a volatile-rich atmosphere,” Hu explained.However, more observations are needed to truly characterize what is going on around 55 Cancri e; the evidence is compelling but to solve such a conundrum as this planet, astronomers need more information. “55 Cancri e is one of the most enigmatic exoplanets. Despite enormous amounts of observing time obtained with a dozen of ground and space facilities in the past decade, its very nature has remained elusive, until today, when parts of the puzzle could finally be put together thanks to the JWST,” explained co-author Professor Brice-Olivier Demory from the University of Bern.JWST's ability to pick up this potential atmosphere bodes well for its ability to detect cooler, more likely candidates for potentially habitable planets. It should also lead to a better understanding of planets as a whole. “JWST is really pushing the frontiers of exoplanet characterization to rocky exoplanets,” Hu said. “It is truly enabling a new type of science,” said Hu.The study is published in the journal Nature.

In a world first, scientists have repurposed an existing drug and shown it could help fix faulty proteins thought to be involved in long COVID. The drug, naltrexone, is typically used to treat substance use disorders, but the team believe their research shows its potential to help millions of people living with long COVID and ME/CFS.As science has learned more about long COVID, many have drawn parallels between it and the chronic condition ME/CFS, which stands for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Sometimes referred to simply as chronic fatigue syndrome, this often misunderstood condition is associated with a catalog of symptoms beyond debilitating fatigue, with at least a quarter of patients becoming bed- or housebound for long periods of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.When people in recovery from COVID-19 began to report a similar constellation of symptoms, including exhaustion, brain fog, heart palpitations, and gastrointestinal issues, ME/CFS patients, clinicians, and researchers spotted the similarities between the two syndromes.A team at Griffith University’s National Center for Neuroimmunology and Emerging Diseases (NCNED) have now built on some of their previous findings in ME/CFS to show that an existing drug could have potential benefits for patients with long COVID too.The study centers on a type of protein called an ion channel. “Ion channels are integral membrane proteins that facilitate the passage of ions (charged particles) across the cell membrane,” explained first author Etianne Sasso, a PhD candidate at Griffith University, in a statement.Effectively, these are gateways by which ions that are essential for many bodily processes can enter and exit cells. The team had previously shown that in both ME/CFS and long COVID, some of the ion channels on immune cells don’t function effectively.The team discovered that naltrexone – a drug that was first approved in the US in 1984 as a treatment for substance use disorders involving alcohol and opioids – can restore the function of these ion channels in cells from ME/CFS patients. Now, they’ve repeated that finding in long COVID, using a technique called electrophysiology.“We found that by restoring the function of these ion channels, important ions such as calcium were again able to move in and out of immune cells, controlling many of the body’s biological processes,” Sasso explained.Effective treatment strategies are lacking for both long COVID and ME/CFS, so these results could be great news for a large, but underserved patient community.Following their discovery, the researchers are now planning two clinical trials to see how real patients respond to the drug.“We will be undertaking two clinical trials testing the efficacy of low dose naltrexone where the first will be in long COVID patients while the second trial will, for the first time, be in ME/CFS patients,” said Professor Sonya Marshall-Gradisnik, the senior author and director of NCNED.“Should these trials prove successful, it could mean a vastly improved quality of life for countless individuals struggling with long COVID and ME/CFS.”The study is published in Frontiers in Immunology. 

Black holes are strange objects which (though we have learned plenty about them) confound our understanding of physics. In an attempt to reconcile some of the paradoxes discovered when studying them, physicists have proposed stranger hypotheses still, with one suggesting that they imply we live in a holographic universe, where all of what we see and perceive is in fact encoded at our universe's boundary, a 3D (plus time) representation of a two-dimensional (plus time) universe. Further than that, some have suggested that it could imply that our universe is within a black hole of a larger universe.Black holes, formed when massive stars collapse, are areas of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. Their existence posed a problem when studying them in terms of thermodynamics. The final state of a black hole, when it reaches equilibrium, is dependent only on three parameters: its mass, angular momentum, and electric charge."In classical general relativity, a black hole prevents any particle or form of radiation from escaping from its cosmic prison," French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet explains in a 2016 review. "For an external observer, when a material body crosses an event horizon all knowledge of its material properties is lost. Only the new values of M [mass], J [angular momentum], and Q [electric charge] remain. As a result, a black hole swallows an enormous amount of information." Sounds simple doesn't it, or at least as simple as physics can get? But if a black hole has mass (and they have a lot of it) then they should have a temperature according to the first law of thermodynamics, and in line with the second law of thermodynamics, they should radiate heat. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes should emit radiation – now termed Hawking radiation – formed at a black hole's boundary."Hawking then pointed to a paradox. If a black hole can evaporate, a portion of the information it contains is lost forever," Luminet continued. "The information contained in thermal radiation emitted by a black hole is degraded; it does not recapitulate information about matter previously swallowed by the black hole. The irretrievable loss of information conflicts with one of the basic postulates of quantum mechanics. According to the Schrödinger equation, physical systems that change over time cannot create or destroy information, a property known as unitarity."This is known as the black hole information paradox, and – given how it appears to violate our current understanding of the universe – it has been the subject of a lot of study and debate. One proposed solution, of sorts, was found by looking at the thermodynamics of black holes in the context of string theory. Gerard ’t Hooft showed that the total degrees of freedom contained inside a black hole is defined in proportion to the surface area of its horizon, rather than its volume. This allows for looking at the entropy of a black hole."From the point of view of information, each bit in the form of a 0 or a 1 corresponds to four Planck areas, which allows one to find the Bekenstein–Hawking formula for entropy," Luminet continues. "For an external observer, information about the entropy of the black hole, once borne by the three-dimensional structure of the objects that have crossed the event horizon, seems lost. But on this view, the information is encoded on the two-dimensional surface of a black hole, like a hologram. Therefore, ’t Hooft concluded, the information swallowed by a black hole could be completely restored during the process of quantum evaporation."While this is reassuring in one way (black holes do not violate the second law of thermodynamics, yay) it lead to a pretty out there idea that the physics of a three-dimensional volume can be described at its two-dimensional boundary. While this is not true of space outside of a black hole, there are proposals that the universe itself could be a black hole, where all processes take place at the boundary and what we observe emerges from these interactions. It's a wild idea, with even wilder tag-ons. For instance, it has been suggested that gravity could arise as an emergent force from entanglement entropy at the boundary. The theory is not the most compelling idea out there to explain our universe, with standard physics still describing best the universe that we see. But there are reasons why people take it seriously. For one thing, for the model to work, the universe's Hubble Radius – the radius of our observable universe – must be the same as its Schwarzschild radius, or the size of the black hole that would be created if all the matter within it was condensed to a single point. These two figures are, in fact, surprisingly close, though this can also be put down to a cosmic coincidence. There are other reasons, such as this chart of everything, which suggests that we could be living within a black hole of a larger universe. But until such a theory comes up with compelling evidence and predictions beyond our current understanding of physics, we'd suggest not to plunge into an existential crisis just yet, whether you are a 3D object in conventional space-time or a holographic projection from a 2D boundary inside a larger universe.

CURIOUS Live is back for its first event of 2024. We'll be putting intriguing questions to the experts on some curious topics during IFLScience’s second-ever virtual event, delving into nuclear war, the connection between mental and physical health, insect detectives, and the search for life elsewhere in the universe. We’re speaking to experts in each of these fields to find out what science, history, technology, curious case studies, and experiments have taught us about everything from the devastation of atomic bombs to the ongoing search for extraterrestrials.What to expect at CURIOUS Live 2024Atomic BombsFirst up, IFLScience writer and producer Rachael Funnell sits down with Annie Jacobsen, reporter and Pulitzer-shortlisted author of Nuclear War: A Scenario. Jacobsen obtained exclusive interviews with military experts to ascertain just what happens minute-by-minute, second-by-second, following a hypothetical nuclear blast on Washington, and we wanted to know what such a scenario might look like, as well as what it would mean for the planet. ImmunopsychiatryNext, IFLScience content creator Eleanor Higgs teams up with Dr Monty Lyman, medical doctor and author of The Immune Mind, to unravel the emerging field of immunopsychiatry. Ever wondered why you get sick when you’re stressed? Or why being ill can make you feel depressed? It turns out the divide between our mental and physical health has been historically overstated. In fact, there are mechanisms that connect the two, and things like our gut microbiomes may even explain why some people get more of a buzz from exercise than others.Insect DetectivesReturning for our third talk, Rachael takes us into the world of forensic entomology alongside Dr Erica McAlister and Adrian Washbourne, authors of Metamorphosis: How Insects Are Changing Our World. Explore how insect detectives play a crucial role in forensic science, from estimating time of death to uncovering hidden clues.Alien LifeLastly, IFLScience’s space correspondent Dr Alfredo Carpineti leads an exploration of humans’ search for alien life in our final talk with astronomer Professor Lisa Kaltenegger, who recently penned Alien Earths. From labs filled with thousands of different worlds in miniature to questioning what really defines “life”, the search is a complex one. Some have even suggested that rather than finding “little green men”, we’d more likely stumble across some purple ones…Sign up to watch and you’ll receive a CURIOUS Live booklet ahead of the event with more background information on these curious topics, experienced experts, and even a quiz you can try out for yourself, test on your class, or take for a whirl in a pub quiz. So, join us on May 31, and you just might learn something you’ll never forget.

A grim milestone in the struggle against climate change has now been reached, as the disappearance of Venezuela’s final glacier means the country has won the race to be the first to see all of its ice bodies melt. As recently as 1910, the South American nation boasted six glaciers spanning a total area of 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), yet these have been reduced to mere smatterings of ice that no longer meet the requirements to be classed as glaciers.Five of the country’s glaciers had already gone by 2011, with just the Humboldt glacier – also known as La Corona – clinging on in the Sierra Nevada National Park. However, the frozen landmark has now shrunk so much that it has been reclassified as an ice field."In Venezuela there are no more glaciers," Professor Julio Cesar Centeno from the University of the Andes (ULA) told AFP in March. "What we have is a piece of ice that is 0.4 percent of its original size."In its heyday, La Corona covered 4.5 square kilometers (1.7 square miles), yet it now stretches for less than 0.02 square kilometers (2 hectares). Generally, a piece of ice must extend for at least 0.1 square kilometers (10 hectares) to be considered a glacier.Research conducted over the past half-decade has indicated that glacial coverage in Venezuela declined by 98 percent between 1953 and 2019. The rate of ice loss accelerated rapidly after 1998, reaching a peak of around 17 percent per year from 2016 onwards. La Corona itself covered some 0.6 square kilometers (0.2 square miles) in 1998, but had shrunk down to such an extent that it was already on the verge of losing its glacier status in 2015. Commenting on the glacier’s demise, ULA researcher Luis Daniel Llambi told the Guardian that “our last expedition to the area was in December 2023 and we did observe that the glacier had lost some two hectares from the previous visit in 2019, [down from four hectares] to less than two hectares now.”Also in December, the Venezuelan government arranged for the Humboldt glacier to be covered with a geotextile blanket in the hope of insulating and protecting it. Not only did the plan fail, but it has also drawn the ire of conservationists who say the ill-advised strategy could lead to ecosystem contamination as the fabric breaks down into microplastics over time."These microplastics are practically invisible, they end up in the soil and from there they go to crops, lagoons, into the air, so people will end up eating and breathing that," says Centeno.All in all, it’s a pretty tragic demise for a country that hosted cross-country skiing events as recently as the 1950s.

Behold the Colorado River toad. Also known as the Sonoran Desert toad, these bulbous fellas pack a psychedelic punch just below the surface. Their venom, which they can secrete through glands on their skin, contains a hallucinogenic compound, which the scientists behind a new study say could be a potent antidepressant.Psychedelics have received a lot of attention in recent years for their potential in treating severe depression. Psilocybin – of magic mushrooms fame – is a big hitter in this arena, with a growing body of research leading scientists to conclude it could be a game changer for some of the hardest-to-treat cases. Now, there’s a new psychedelic in town, and it comes all wrapped up in a nice amphibious package. A new study has investigated a modified form of the compound 5-MeO-DMT – a relative of DMT that's extracted from the venom of the Colorado River toad (Incilius alvarius) – and concluded it could be an effective treatment option for depression and anxiety. It’s long been understood that this toad’s venom can cause intense hallucinations and trippy experiences – that’s why authorities are constantly telling us to stop licking them. But how the toads produce their psychoactive slime remains a bit of a mystery, and there are also questions to be answered about how the compounds act on the human brain.  Structural pharmacologist Daniel Wacker from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, along with colleagues, set out to investigate how 5-MeO-DMT interacts with a type of serotonin receptor called the 5-HT1A receptor. Most research on psychedelics up to now has focused on a similar but different receptor, 5-HT2A, because it’s key to their ability to produce hallucinations. Previous research had shown that 5-HT1A was worth a closer look when it comes to developing new and improved antidepressants, but not much was known about how psychedelics interact with the receptor. To find out more, Wacker and the team modified the structure of the psychedelic compound at different sites, creating variants that could be tested for their potential efficacy.As well as examining the variants in vitro, they tested one in a mouse model of depression. They compared it to LSD as well as existing drugs that target 5-HT1A, and found that the toad venom compound had a similar antidepressant and anti-anxiety effect – without getting the mice high.“We show that a 5-HT1A-selective 5-MeO-DMT analogue is devoid of hallucinogenic-like effects while retaining anxiolytic-like and antidepressant-like activity in socially defeated animals,” they write in their paper.  The 5-MeO-DMT compound was massively more selective towards the 5-HT1A receptor compared to 5-HT2A – 800-fold, in fact – demonstrating once again that this under-researched receptor deserves a closer look. Of course, it’s not yet clear whether this compound that works so well in mice could have similar positive results in humans. However, this is not the first time that Colorado River toad venom has been suggested to have antidepressant properties.“Our studies uncover molecular aspects of 5-HT1A-targeted psychedelics and therapeutics,” the authors write, “which may facilitate the future development of new medications for neuropsychiatric disorders.”But we’re afraid you’re going to have to wait for more research. This is not – repeat, not – an invitation to pop down to the southern US or Mexico and start milking toads. No matter how invitingly mystical they look.The study is published in Nature. 

A "mysterious lump” of purple material was recently discovered while digging at a Roman site in the UK. It turned out that the curiously colored substance was an extremely rare chunk of Tyrian purple, a dye that was once worth more than its weight in gold.The discovery was made in 2023 on the grounds of Carlisle Cricket Club in the north of England while archeologists were excavating a monumental building with a bathhouse built in the third century CE under the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus. In the drains of the ancient structure, the researchers unearthed an unusually soft chunk of material with a distinctive purple hue. They sent the object to scientists at Newcastle University who concluded that the organic pigment contained Bromine and beeswax – a sure sign it was Tyrian purple.Today, dyes are cheap and easy to make in a lab. In antiquity, however, they required a huge amount of effort and expertise to make. Purple – a relatively rare color in nature – was made into a dye by crushing thousands of sea snails caught in the Mediterranean Sea.To make enough Tyrian purple to dye a garment or stain a decorative item would require tens of thousands of snails and a significant amount of elbow grease. As such, it was extremely pricey and became widely associated with royalty, riches, and Roman emperors. While many relics of Tyrian purple have been found around the Mediterranean, it’s incredibly rare to find the material in the UK in what was the northernmost stretch of the Roman Empire. “It’s the only example we know of in Northern Europe – possibly the only example of a solid sample of the pigment in the form of unused paint pigment anywhere in the Roman Empire. Examples have been found of it in wall paintings (like in Pompeii) and some high-status painted coffins from the Roman province of Egypt,” Frank Giecco, Technical Director at Wardell Armstrong, said in a statement.Septimius Severus – a Roman politician who served as emperor from 193 to 211 CE – was born in present-day Libya and is known to have traveled to the Roman province of Britannia in 208 CE with the aim of strengthening Hadrian's Wall, the 117-kilometer (73-mile) long fortification that marked the north-west frontier of the Roman Empire.It is strongly suspected that this lump of Tyrian purple found in Carlisle, a short journey from Hadrian's Wall, had something to do with this historic visit. “For millennia, Tyrian Purple was the world’s most expensive and sought-after color. Its presence in Carlisle combined with other evidence from the excavation all strengthens the hypothesis that the building was in some way associated with the Imperial Court of the Emperor Septimius Severus which was located in York and possibly relates to an Imperial visit to Carlisle,” explained Giecco.

New archaeological evidence shines a light on the story of the now-famous settlers of the Roanoke colony. The new discoveries relate to a local Indigenous community that had ties to the settlers.The supposed mysteryThe story of the “lost colony” of Roanoke is well known today, but it is steeped in supposed mystery and speculation. In 1587, English colonizers led by explorer John White landed on Roanoke Island, which is located in what is Dare County, North Carolina, today.This was not the first group to land on the island. An earlier attempt at forming a settlement had already failed two years previously. Still, this second attempt had learned from past mistakes and was, therefore, better provisioned and had more people ready to colonize the “new world”. However, even from their first days, the settler community had a rocky relationship with some of the Indigenous tribes that lived in the area.Eventually, White returned to England to request more help for his burgeoning community, which meant he left behind his family – his wife, daughter, and granddaughter (called Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America).White had not intended to be gone for too long, but his return journey to Roanoke was delayed by the Spanish Armada attacking England. He eventually made it back to the island three years later, only to find the settlement was completely empty. There were no bodies at the site, no graves to suggest people had been killed. The only evidence they found was the words “CROATOAN” and “CRO” carved into a tree at the colony’s border, which likely referred to Croatoan Island, which was about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south.White and his crew were soon forced to abandon the island due to storms, and so the missing settlers were supposedly lost to history.Today, the “lost” Roanoke colony has become something of a cultural force in itself. There are various explanations as to what happened to the settlers, some of which have become a source of white nationalist pride. Some believe the colonists attempted to return to England on smaller ships, some argue that the Spanish attacked them, while others contend that the local Indigenous communities killed them all.However, the most likely answer is the only one that actually takes notice of the evidence at the site. It is likely the colonists simply joined the local Indigenous communities and eventually integrated with them.But while this is the most likely answer, there are still some controversies concerning which tribe or tribes may have received the wandering settlers. There are also questions as to where exactly the settlers lived while on the island itself.Newly discovered villageIn recent years, archaeologists who have investigated the colony have turned their attention to the Elizabethan Gardens in Manteo, which was once the site of the “Algonquian village of Roanoke”, an Indigenous community that had connections to the settlers.The village was first identified in 2023 when shards of Algonquian pottery that dated to the 1500s were discovered, along with a ring of copper wire. This latter artifact, so archaeologists with the First Colony Foundation believe, may have been worn as an earring by an Indigenous tribe member.  “The copper ring”, Dr Eric Klingelhofer, the First Colony Foundation’s Vice President of Research explained in a statement, may "indicate contact with the English.”Klingelhofer and his colleagues believe the ring was made in England and may have been used in trade. This is because, they argue, the Indigenous peoples at the time lacked the technology to produce the ring’s rounded strands. Of course, the English were not the only ones who could have made the artifact, but there is currently no evidence that the French or the Spanish had explored that far north at the time.Additional evidence from the last few digs has added weight to the idea that the village was likely palisaded (encircled by high walls) and may have contained around nine houses. These, the archaeologists believe, may have belonged to the elite warriors as the working-class families would have lived outside the fortification where they raised crops.“The objects we found are important, but it’s their relationship to different soils which are evidence of links to the past, and together that’s what tells the story,” Klingelhofer added. “And we’re beginning to see that this site was more of a capital with a tribal seat where a ruler or chief lived, and it would be palisaded to keep him safe.”This chief would have presided over a territory that stretched from present-day Dare County, Roanoke Island, and parts of the mainland at the time when the English arrived.“The new findings confirm a theory that matches what we know of the village,” added Klingelhofer. “It was described as a palisaded village because the explorers came here and recorded it. And these findings add to our story.”The First Colony Foundation has scheduled further excavations for later this year.

The more we learn about the world and the cosmos, the more we have had to let go of ideas of our own importance. We discovered that the world is not the center of the universe around which all objects rotate. Then we found that the Earth rotated around the Sun, and believed that that was the center of the universe instead.Now we know that is not the case either. Abandoning ideas of our own importance, we now use the Copernican principle and its updated astronomical twin, the cosmological principle; that we on Earth are not at the center of the universe, nor occupy a privileged region within it. Though regions of space may differ – for instance, the Great Nothing – viewed at a large enough scale, the universe is isotropic and homogenous, or the same wherever you are within it.A violation of this principle would be huge. Not as big as if the laws of thermodynamics were broken, but still a big deal.“The Copernican principle is a cornerstone of most of astronomy, it is assumed without question, and plays an important role in many statistical tests for the viability of cosmological models,” Albert Stebbins of Fermilab explained to Phys.org. “It is also a necessary consequence of the stronger assumption of the Cosmological Principle: namely, that not only do we not live in a special part of the universe, but there are no special parts of the universe – everything is the same everywhere (up to statistical variation)."“It is a very handy principle, since it implies that here and now is the same as there and now, and here and then is the same as there and then. We do not have to look back in time at our current location to see how the universe was in our past – we can just look very far away, and given the large light travel time, we are looking at a distant part of the universe in the distant past. Given the Cosmological Principle, their past is the same as our past.”But when studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) –  the leftover radiation from around 400,000 years after the universe began, that is faintly detectable and permeates all of the known universe – several teams have found apparent violations of this principle. If the principle (and our current understanding of physics) hold, the first light that began its journey as the hot early universe cooled should be roughly the same temperature, bar for minor fluctuations in temperature."[NASA's COBE and WMAP missions] measured the temperature of the CMB to be 2.726 Kelvin (approximately -270 degrees Celsius) almost everywhere on the sky," the European Space Agency explains. "The ‘almost’ is the most important factor here, because tiny fluctuations in the temperature, by just a fraction of a degree, represent differences in densities of structure, on both small and large scales, that were present right after the Universe formed. They can be imagined as seeds for where galaxies would eventually grow."Dividing up the CMB into segments allows you to analyze the distributions of temperatures. When you divide up the CMB into smaller segments (dipole being two hemispheres, quadrupole being divided into fourths, etc) and compare them, the temperature distribution in these regions should appear completely random. Hot and cold regions in the quadrupole should not correspond to hot and cold regions in the octupole. But in this case, they do.         The universe being what it is, we have been sent a few curveballs from its first light. Adding to the infamous cold spot, physicists found a trail of anomalous hot and cold spots stretching out along an axis, dubbed the "Axis of Evil" in a 2005 paper. Even more annoyingly, this axis aligns with our solar plane (the plane on which the planets of the Solar System orbit the Sun), with temperatures "above" the Solar System being slightly cooler than the temperatures from "below".That's a pretty unusual result, and has sent some looking for another possible "preferred axis" in cosmology, speculating that the universe is not homogenous after all. One 2016 paper points to spiral galaxies, which appear to be more inclined to be "left-handed" than right-handed, among other discoveries."Several directional anomalies have been reported in various observations: the polarization distribution of the quasars, the velocity flow, the handedness of the spiral galaxies, the anisotropy of the cosmic acceleration, the anisotropic evolution of fine-structure constant, including anomalies in the CMB low multipoles, such as the CMB parity asymmetry," the paper reads. "Although the confidence level for each individual anomaly is not too high, the directional alignment of all these anomalies is quite significant, which strongly suggests a common origin of these anomalies."But as strange as the results are, they have not been replicated by all who have tried. Some have put the unusual results down to statistical errors, while others have suggested that the fact it appears to line up with the solar plane could be because the microwave radiation is dominated by the local foreground. If statistical errors, data collection errors, and other local causes are eliminated and the problem remains, we could need new physics. Errors and particularly unusual results do happen sometimes in science, and are corrected by further study. Faster-than-light neutrinos turned out to be a faulty cable, and puzzling radio bursts have turned out to be from microwave ovens, so let's not get too excited just yet.