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An unfortunate fox that lodged its head in a sink drain has been successfully rescued in the UK. South Essex Wildlife Hospital in the southeast of England responded to a call last week regarding a curious cub that had become stuck in an unusual place.Tom Linsel, a Slovakia-born veterinarian who works at the South Essex Wildlife Hospital, arrived on the scene and found the poor fox had been trapped there for several hours. It had also cut its paws while struggling to free itself. With “a little wiggling and patience,” the rescue centre wrote on Facebook, the fox was set free. The animal was rushed back to the hospital where its paw was treated before receiving a course of medication to help ease the swelling. “The cub is fine and has since been released back to its den in the garden it was found," a spokesperson for the South Essex Wildlife Hospital told IFLScience. Working hard to free the young fox.Image courtesy of South Essex Wildlife HospitalIf you wish to help support the work of South Essex Wildlife Hospital, consider giving them a donation at https://southessexwildlife.org/donate.Red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) are common in the UK, as well as large swathes of the Northern Hemisphere including North America, Asia, and Europe, as well as parts of North Africa. They have also been introduced to Australia, where they are considered a major damaging invasive species.Intelligent and adaptable, the species are happy to live in an array of habitats, from rural countryside to bustling cities. Urban living has it advantages, like plenty of food to scavenge and lots of places to shelter, although it does come with challenges – such as getting heads stuck in drains. Interestingly, foxes that live in urban environments have adapted to become more similar to pet dogs as they adapt to the pressures of city life. Compared to country bumpkins, urban foxes have significantly longer, thinner snouts and smaller craniums. Scientists think this might be a sign of "domestication syndrome," a collection of traits that arise during domestication, including smaller brains, coat color changes, reductions in tooth size, and changes in craniofacial shape. In short, urban foxes are becoming more domesticated just like a pet dog.

In 2018, the world got very excited about an unusual star. KIC 8462852, better known as Boyajian's star or just the "alien megastructure" star, it was found to be dimming in an unusual way. As a planet orbits a star, it blocks out a certain amount of light and causes it to dim from our perspective on Earth. When we looked at Boyajian's star, however, we found that it was dipping by variable amounts. This led to wild speculation that we could have found a "Dyson sphere" – a theoretical megastructure built by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization around a star to harness its energy. Of course, the explanation turned out to be dust. But that hasn't stopped the search for supposed advanced alien civilizations (Type II on the Kardashev scale) that may wish to construct such megastructures. Two teams have recently come out with papers on their searches for potential Dyson Spheres, finding potential candidates worthy of closer inspection.                Looking at the light emitted from stars, we can tell all sorts about their composition, age, and type. When looking for Dyson Spheres, astronomers are looking for two things; variable luminosity as the structure passes in front of the star from our perspective, and an excess of infrared light caused by heat waste that could be emitted by a megastructure.The problem, as noted by both studies, is that excess infrared can be a sign of circumstellar dust, protoplanetary disks, or debris disks. In short, you would expect excess infrared from younger stars, but this diminishes as the star ages and the matter coalesces into planets and asteroid belts. Excess infrared radiation has been detected in older stars, aged between 10 and 200 million years – 16 to be precise – while one case has been found in a star over 1 billion years old. These are thought to be cases of Extreme Debris Disks (EDD), potentially caused by collisions between rocky planets. However, there are still unanswered questions about how this could happen."The stellar ages of these candidates are in tension with the current models of rocky planet formation which predict that most collision events (leading to such disks) should occur within the first 100 Myr," one team writes in a not-yet peer-reviewed paper posted to pre-print server arXiv. "Therefore, these objects might indicate that these processes last longer than thought or that other processes lead to such disks."The good news is that searching for extreme excesses of infrared light can help us to learn more about these unusual and rare systems and potentially locate candidates for Dyson Spheres at the same time, making it a double win.Using machine learning to search through data on nearly 4.9 million stars and identify cases where infrared emissions are much higher than expected, the first team found 53 potential candidates. These include stars thought to be younger, but also more mature stars, making them better candidates for potential alien megastructures. Precise aging and further observation of these stars is necessary to draw more conclusions, and of course, the explanation is likely to be down to non-alien explanations. A second paper accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society focused on searching for partial Dyson Spheres – megastructures that do not entirely surround the star – and looked at a catalog of around 320,000 stars and identified "seven sources displaying mid-infrared flux excess of uncertain origin". Interestingly, these candidates appear to be M-dwarf stars in their main sequence, or stars smaller in mass than our Sun which are in the main stable period of their lifespan. This is surprising."M-dwarf debris disks are very rare objects, and up to date, only a reduced number has been confirmed," the team explains, adding that proposed explanations for this lack of debris discs include detection and age biases, or different processes taking place around these smaller stars."However, the temperature and the fractional infrared luminosity [...] of our candidates are different from those of typical debris disks, which tend to be cold (10 - 100 K) and to have low fractional luminosities [...] These high fractional luminosities [...] is a feature more compatible with young disks compared to those of ordinary debris disks [...], but the lack of variability seems to be inconsistent with the young-star scenario," the team writes, adding that there are several natural explanations for excess infrared, though none of them clearly explain what is going on with these candidates, given that they are M-dwarfs."Are our candidates’ strange young stars whose flux does not vary with time? Are these stars M-dwarf debris disks with an extreme fractional luminosity? Or something completely different?"It is worth noting that these stars have been speculated to be both good and bad candidates for hosting life. Many rocky planets have been found around them, but the light hitting them is longer in wavelength, potentially making them poor candidates for photosynthetic life.This team stresses that though these candidates appear to be consistent with partial Dyson Spheres, it is extremely premature to assume that this is the cause, and further observations are needed. We have found plenty of weird objects that defy our expectations, and precisely zero aliens. Expect this pattern to continue, until hopefully, one day, it doesn't.The first study is posted to pre-print server arXiv, while the second is accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

According to a significant new report, NASA remains unable to fully explain the mysterious sightings observed in the sky. A panel convened by the space agency to investigate Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) emphasized the necessity for additional and enhanced data to comprehend these occurrences. Recent accounts from various sources, notably military pilots, have detailed sightings of unidentifiable objects across the United States. While certain sightings have been attributed to known natural or human-made causes, others persist in confounding explanation. Bill Nelson, NASA’s chief administrator, acknowledged the challenge posed by the lack of comprehensive information, making it exceedingly arduous to elucidate these remaining anomalies. “There is a global fascination with UAPs,” Mr Nelson said during a panel discussion following the publication of the report. “Much of that fascination is due to the unknown nature of it. “Think about it: most UAP sightings result in very limited data. That makes it even more difficult to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of UAP.” To better understand where those still mysterious phenomena are coming from, the space agency’s panel urged it to come up with “a rigorous, evidence-based, data-driven scientific framework” to better examine and understand them. Some of that can be done by Nasa, it said, and the space agency should play a “prominent role”. But the research must be done across the US government. Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate, says begins the report by saying that UAPs are “one of our planet’s greatest mysteries”. “Observations of objects in our skies that cannot be identified as balloons, aircraft, or natural known phenomena have been spotted worldwide, yet there are limited high-quality observations,” she writes. “The nature of science is to explore the unknown, and data is the language scientists use to discover our universe’s secrets. “Despite numerous accounts and visuals, the absence of consistent, detailed, and curated observations means we do not presently have the body of data needed to make definitive, scientific conclusions about UAP.” The post NASA says mysterious UAP sightings cannot yet be fully explained appeared first on Anomalien.com.