Books Adrian Tchaikovsky Reimagining What It Means to be Human: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Ecologist From his brilliant worldbuilding to the ecological perspective that drives his work, Tchaikovsky’s fiction cultivates radical empathy, asking fascinating questions along the way. By Christian Haines | Published on July 22, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Adrian Czajkowski (Tchaikovsky) moves between genres as easily as a spider weaves its web. Hard science fiction (the Children of Time books), space opera (the Final Architecture trilogy), epic fantasy (the Shadows of the Apt series), dystopia (Ogres, Firewalkers), dying earth fiction (Cage of Souls), military sci-fi (Dogs of War)—the list goes on. Tchaikovsky has published more than 30 books in the last 15 years. This year alone sees the publication of three new books: two science fiction novels (Service Model in June, Alien Clay in October) and a novella (Saturation Point in July). The third novel of the Tyrant Philosophers fantasy series, Days of Shattered Faith, comes out early next year. Tchaikovsky attributes his productivity to a regular writing schedule—mornings spent on his computer at local cafés—rather than superhuman imagination or graphomania. Still, amidst this tidal wave of invention, it can be difficult to discern what makes Czajkowski Tchaikovsky—what makes his fiction as distinct as the creepy-crawly creatures of which he’s obviously so fond. It’s the wildly imaginative premises of his work that immediately jump out to the reader: giant spiders turning ant colonies into computers to calculate the movement of the stars; an emaciated priest, the last worshipper of a tiny, invisible god, healing the wounded, only on the condition that they renounce all violence; alien beings the size of moons transforming planets into avant-garde sculptures with no concern for the millions, even billions, of lives lost. But good ideas don’t make writers; they’re the raw material of literature—points of departure, not destinations. What makes Tchaikovsky one of the most interesting writers of speculative fiction today is what he does with those premises, specifically, the way that he builds worlds that exceed the stories they contain; the ecological bent of his fictions, the exuberance not so much of individual organisms but of life’s many-layered relationships; and an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist perspective that elevates the collective good without losing sight of individual freedom. Tchaikovsky is a meticulous builder of worlds. It’s a quality, he’s said in interviews, that he owes to his experience as a GM (game master) running campaigns for tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, he realized that he could be a writer when he discovered the Dragonlance series, novels based on a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that Tchaikovsky’s novels resemble roleplaying games not just in their intricate descriptions of settings but in their insistence on the many, many stories that inhabit a world: there is always another adventure besides the protagonist’s tale, not to mention before and after it. In Spiderlight (2016), Tchaikovsky’s sympathetic parody of Tolkien, the big bad, Darvezian, is not the Dark Lord but the most recent Dark Lord. The novel reads like a work of classical fantasy fiction, something Robert Jordan might have penned, or like an old D&D module, The Keep on the Borderland, for example: a party of adventurers travels from town to town, frequenting seedy inns, fighting Orc-like creatures (the Ghant), in a quest to rid the world of evil. Except Tchaikovsky turns the moral drama of fantasy—the battle between light and dark, heroic humans and dastardly monsters—on its head when the party’s wizard, Penthos, turns a spider into a complicated human character. That the wizard is less Gandalf, more horny pyromaniac, is the reader’s first clue that the world of Spiderlight is trickier than it first appears. Penthos conscripts the spider-turned-human to serve as a guide through the borders of the Dark Lord’s kingdom, but what he gets isn’t a mindless drone but a person struggling to make sense of their new body, negotiating their conflicting loyalties between spider nest and epic quest, wishing they could return to the webbed simplicity of their past. Nth, as this transfigured creature comes to be named, pierces a hole through the simplistic moral order of much fantasy fiction in an implicit argument that worldbuilding doesn’t have to mean multiplying hard-to-pronounce names and inserting a map at the front of the book. It can also mean weaving characters into a broad and knotty tapestry of cultures, histories, social issues, and political factions. Forget the Chose One. Like playing a roleplaying game with friends, characters aren’t destined for victory, they’re trying to survive the monsters, tough choices, and chance happenings that the game master—the author—throws their way. Tchaikovsky’s worlds are too complicated for saviors. Yes, characters occasionally strike heroic poses, like the wizard of Elder Race (2021) who turns out to be a depressed anthropologist from another world. In a nod to Arthur C. Clarke, Elder Nyr’s magic is nothing more than advanced technology. His decision to come down from his mountaintop fortress and help the natives is an effort to alleviate boredom as much as an act of virtue. Meanwhile, Tchaikovsky’s novella Ogres (2022) dissects the value of the hero myth—the belief that one virtuous person might save the world—in the face of an unjust social system. The titular monsters of the title are feudal lords extraordinary in stature, brutal in their management of serfs; the hero, Torquell or “you” (the novella is told in the second-person), is exceptional not only in physical strength but in his willingness to fight the powers that be: “You’re a hero in the making after all. Heroes get to do these things. Otherwise, what would there be to write about when their lives are chronicled?” Sentences like these turn out to be ironic commentary on our tendency to reduce the history of social groups to tales of exceptional individuals. Without giving too much away, Ogres ends with a conceptual reversal—a plot twist, sure, but one that’s less about the events of the story than the perspective on those events—that suggests that heroes embody the traits and the power of communities (and that they’re only worth having around so long as they continue to do so). Tchaikovsky may enjoy undercutting hero myths, but his work is neither cynical, nor grimdark. Joe Abercrombie, he is not. There is hope in his novels, but it’s invested in social connections, in communities rather than individuals. This faith in cooperation—in collective strength or social power—runs like a red thread through all of Tchaikovsky’s fiction. In his earliest published work, the Shadows of the Apt series, it’s obvious from the first novel, in which the character Stenwold rallies a diverse group of characters (Spider-Kinden, Beetle-Kinden, Dragonfly-Kinden, and so on: so many fantasy “races,” each defined by an insect archetype) in an effort to resist the Wasp Empire’s encroachments. The ten-book series chronicles a web of alliances and conflicts as complex as anything in A Song of Ice and Fire, but where Tchaikovsky distinguishes himself is in his worldbuilding, in peeling back the layers of one world to reveal another world not so much underneath but in its interstices, its gaps. The sixth novel in the series, The Sea Watch (2011), tellingly dedicated to the British naturalists Gerald Durrell and David Attenborough, introduces an underwater kingdom and the Sea-Kinden that populate it. Cities constructed from coral are “so alien and beautiful,” with “towers and domes and spires and intricate skeletons of white stone, draped with fronds and frills and gills of waving plantlife, and all illuminated by great bulbous lamps of ghostly greens and bloody reds, brooding purples and violently bright blues.” What’s more, this world within a world is bursting with life, life that transgresses across the usual borders between the living and the inert: The colony was alive, he saw then. It was alive in that sea life swarmed across it. The lights picked out a million sparks of fish in ever-changing constellations, the clinging slick hands of octopuses, high-stepping crabs picking their way sideways up the colony walls, shrimp the size of a man’s arm darting here and there in a flurry of beating legs. The colony was alive beyond all this, though, for its outer walls were built of life: cells and cells of it, each with its rosette of tiny arms. This kind of moment abounds in Tchaikovsky’s fiction; it’s the ecological sublime, an instance in which our concept of life—our assumptions about what makes something living—explodes in the face not of an alien, but of an alien ecosystem. But what exactly is ecology in Tchaikovsky’s fiction? I’ll let one of his characters, Ignaz Trethowan, explain. Trethowan is a rogue scientist in Cage of Souls (2019), a novel about the dregs of civilization on a dying Earth. He offers a textbook definition of ecology as “study[ing] the interrelations between living things and their environments.” Ecology is interdependence; it’s the web of life, the relations not just among species but between species and their habitats. All well and good, but for Trethowan ecology is also an indictment of humankind: Ecology is of no interest to my people, who lock themselves from the world. It is hardly surprising when the world has grown so hostile. The sun is dying slowly, and wreaks havoc on us as we circle round it. Our world is being changed and poisoned and everything that was is passing. My home [the last remaining city, Shadrapar] is the last vestige of a long string of civilisations that have waxed and waned on the Earth. We ran out of resources and space and will. A few tweaks and this could be a description of our own Earth, wracked as it is by climate crisis, plagued by a species enamored of its power over the planet but blind to its limitations. Trethowan goes on to explain that despite the waning of civilization, life persists in strange, non-human forms: Every time I ventured into the jungle there has been a new ecology waiting for me. Evolution works in our jungles almost fast enough to see. As the world becomes unlivable, so life throws up things that can survive in it, faster and faster. One ancient theory was that the planet was aware, a great living world-mind. If so, then that mind has woken up. Life is teeming in the world as never before, changing and changing in the hope of finding a form that can last, and it is not just insensate, animal urges that are being churned up by this flood. There is intelligence out there. We are no longer alone. Trethowan’s reflections on life’s changeability sheds a light on some of the distinctive features of Tchaikovsky’s fiction. His writing eschews the moral clarity of good and evil (the white wizard versus the dark lord, or the violent insects of Starship Trooper versus gun-toting humans) in favor of investigations into otherness, and this otherness is lively: it’s changing and evolving; it’s intelligent, seething with thoughts that escape the grasp of human cognition. We’re not alone. Speculation is not solely the province of the human species. Other thoughts are possible. Without spoiling too much of the book, in Cage of Souls, we find web children (amphibious humanoids that evolved separately from humans), an artificial man (a well-adjusted version of Frankenstein’s creature), a giant spider taking care of an ancient computer (Tchaikovsky can’t seem to get enough of spiders), and a building-sized robotic crab roaming the desert, to mention only a few of Tchaikovsky’s inventions. It’s a cast of creatures that crosses the grotesquery of a medieval bestiary with the systematic examination of life one finds in Darwin. Tchaikovsky’s aliens and monsters don’t so much crawl from the shadows (well, sometimes they do) as evolve, grow, and mutate. They emerge from the same material universe as we humans. What’s so fascinating about Tchaikovsky’s fiction, then, is our intimacy with the alien. There’s a sense that had evolution taken a slightly different course, we might have become them. This kind of evolutionary “what if” is at the heart of a number of Tchaikovsky’s novels. In his multiverse thriller, The Doors of Eden (2020), a series of interludes drawn from a fictional scientific treatise, Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence, chart the different paths evolution has taken on the Earths of other dimensions. These chapters—the most interesting parts of the book, and I mean that as praise—are filled with giant trilobite-like creatures who eventually become a space-faring civilization; a hyper-aggressive scorpion-like species that only barely survives their “Great War to End All Wars”; and a race of “mudskipper-like things” that evolves into “one of the great technical civilizations”: They have no industry you might recognize, and yet the ice caps of the world are their supercomputers, filigreed with metallic and chemical logic gates that they cultivate like gardens, flurrying with electronic thought. Their machines are sliding block puzzles, regulated by melt and flow and freeze. You would never spot their great engines, and yet in a mere millennium they pass from the primitive to a level of engineering sophistication that neither you nor we can imagine. This last species manages to fend off the great Permian extinction event, which figures in every one of these speculative evolutionary timelines, only to fall prey to their own technological hubris: “They do everything they can in a vain quest for equilibrium, but this new fate—which they built themselves—is too much for them to undo. And perhaps there was never a time when they could have escaped. Perhaps they only ever had the choice between two deaths.” Tchaikovsky inherits a certain pessimism from scientists like Darwin: the sense that for all the many shapes it can take, life must always contend with the harsh facts of material existence, not just limited resources, extinction-level catastrophes, and civilizational strife but the fundamental indifference of material existence. The universe wasn’t made for us, wasn’t made for any form of life at all; that life emerges is not fate but happenstance—a cosmological roll of the dice. Children of Time (2015)—winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award and certainly Tchaikovsky’s most popular novel—doesn’t abandon this pessimism, but it softens it, focusing on life’s adaptive and symbiotic qualities. It’s the first book in a series of the same name (which won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023). Each book in the series introduces a nonhuman civilization: spiders, cephalopods, corvids: products of space colonization, genetic engineering, and terraforming projects gone awry. Human civilization on Earth wrecked itself not once but twice. The second iteration of human civilization takes to the stars in the hopes of finding a new home, only to discover that the first iteration accidentally populated planets with “uplifted” species from Earth. There’s no home away from home awaiting humanity, only difficult encounters with alien civilizations. In Children of Time, the Portiid spiders build cities out of webs, construct computers from ant colonies, and struggle over gender inequality (in this spider species, the males are considered inferior and often eaten by the females after copulation). Tchaikovsky alternates perspectives between humans and spiders, giving readers sympathetic protagonists from each species, so that we see civilization not as some one-size-fits-all cultural template but as an adaptive response to natural conditions. Spider civilization and human civilization are very different responses to the same basic needs: food and shelter, of course, but also making sense of the world, finding amusement, and building community. Of course, civilization changes, evolves. The humans on the colony ship divide into factions, debate the literal and figurative course of humanity, war against one another when no compromise is reached. The Portiids engage in their own intraspecies wars, the fight for gender equality eventually winning out because of one crafty male spider, Fabian, who plays rival cities against one another. When the humans and spiders eventually meet, each can only slowly recognize the other’s intelligence, not to mention their social and cultural complexities. Eventually, the two species fight, but the resolution is not the defeat of one side by the other but a union: the spiders and humans come together, forming a new, shared civilization: The two peoples of the green world work together in easy harmony now. There was a generation of wary caution on both sides, but once the nanovirus had taken down those barriers—between species and between individuals—so much potential tragedy was already averted. Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy—the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too—conquers all, in the end. Children of Time is an allegory of cultural recognition, a meditation on living with the differences of other people. It’s pessimistic in assuming that such contact will be difficult, that it will require shaky efforts at translation, rather than intuitive understanding, but it’s optimistic in showing how encounters between civilizations might evolve beyond conflict. Tchaikovsky imagines a third possibility beyond conflict and tolerance: symbiosis—a blending of species, of cultures, the invention of a whole different way of living. It’s an ecological approach to conflict. Tchaikovsky turns our attention to the interconnections that cross the divide between self and other, to the shared project of making and maintaining life in a cold and indifferent universe. Tchaikovsky’s ecological perspective isn’t a neutral way of seeing the world. It goes along with his progressive commitments to equality, cooperation, and living with the Other. His fiction is filled with revolutions, some failures, some (tentative) successes. Oppressed peoples rise up against authoritarian regimes, as in City of Last Chances (2022), a work of urban fantasy that pits a rationalistic empire (think Steven Pinker meets the Spanish Inquisition) against the magical practices and religious beliefs of the city’s longtime dwellers. Students rebel against colonial education policies. Chained-up demons, working in factories, go on strike. Barricades go up, and they fall. Protest is one thing, going up against the system is another. That’s the ecological insight Tchaikovsky brings to politics, that social systems are like ecosystems: their equilibrium can be upset—sometimes need to be—but they’re also resilient, elastic, capable of absorbing change, of exerting pressure, sometimes violently, on the creatures inhabiting them. Worldbuilding as a writer is hard enough, building another world—a new society, a new civilization—is the ultimate challenge in both politics and the imagination. Tchaikovsky joins those speculative writers, like Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and China Miéville, who refuse to take what it means to be human for granted. Revolution is less about taking power than remaking power. It means changing the terms of social existence, reimagining the ecology of everyday life, drafting blueprints for never-before-imagined habitats. Dogs of War (2017) starts out as military science fiction, its “Bioforms”—engineered and technologically-modified animal species: Komodo dragon sharpshooters; heavy artillery grizzly bears—good only for inflicting death and destruction. But the novel pivots, turning into the story of a struggle for social and political recognition: Are the Bioforms persons? If Honey (a Bioform bear) can do research on biotechnology, she’s surely worthy of rights, no? What would it take for Rex—a Bioform dog who transforms from leader of a death squad to leader of a civilian workforce—to become a full-fledged member of society? Or, as Rex voices it, with poignant simplicity: “I was made to be a weapon but I have lived a life. I was born an animal, they made me into a soldier and treated me as a thing. … Servant and slave, leader and follower, I tell myself I have been a Good Dog. Nobody else can decide that for me.” Can we imagine a society that didn’t have a sign on the door, reading: “For Humans Only”? (This question isn’t purely theoretical, by the way, as animal rights activists and lawyers can tell you.) This isn’t Animal Farm. When Tchaikovsky writes about giant spiders, they’re not metaphors—they’re spiders. Bioforms might be persons, but they’re neither human nor dog, bear, or lizard. They’re hybrids that muddle the boundaries between the human and nonhuman. Tchaikovsky’s fiction cultivates radical empathy, not just concern for others but, as he puts it, “the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too.” More than empathy, though, Tchaikovsky writes the alien. He does so even when he isn’t writing about extraterrestrials. The alien is the kind of strangeness that calls into question our conventional understandings of people, the world, and our place in the universe. It reminds us that things aren’t always what they seem, and that even when they are, they can and will (at least, in the evolutionary long run) change. Tchaikovsky’s most recent novel, Alien Clay (2024) brings this point home with a stunning setting: a planet, Kiln, on which there are no individual organisms, only gangly symbiotes, strange combinations of organs and flesh composing funky alien life forms: “Everything on Kiln is part of a network that includes everything else. Even the most hostile interactions, predator and prey, are still working to a pattern of mutual benefit.” Kiln is also the site of a prison colony for dissidents against the Mandate, an authoritarian regime all too enamored with human superiority, unwilling to accept knowledge that doesn’t put humans at the top of the metaphysical ladder. This conflict—human exceptionalism versus alien equality; status quo hierarchy versus the weird tumult of life—doesn’t just drive the narrative, it sums up the ethos of Tchaikovsky’s fiction. It’s the ecological sublime, the alien not as invader but as the thing already inside of us: “The thought of what we might become is irresistible.” I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Alien Clay ends not with human triumph but with mutation—life changing utterly, a new existence is born. I know I’m not the only one to have been submerged in the flood of alien life that is Tchaikovsky’s fiction. What are some of your favorite works by Tchaikovsky? What about favorite characters or favorite ideas? (I didn’t even get a chance to talk about the uncanny intelligence of the corvids in Children of Memory.) Who are some other writers of the ecological sublime—encounters with alien webs of life—that belong in Tchaikovsky’s company? What’s some recent writing (or classics) that’s drawn you in with the attractions of becoming something other than human?[end-mark] The post Reimagining What It Means to be Human: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Ecologist appeared first on Reactor.

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown praised his ex-lover Kamala Harris during conversations with reporters on Sunday, touting her youth and “outstanding” track record as evidence of her capability to serve as president of the United States. Brown, known for his political influence on the California political scene, spoke to reporters outside the historic John’s Grill in San Francisco, where he said that he had learned with the rest of the world about President Joe Biden’s decision to step down as the Democratic nominee and endorse Harris, “35, 40 minutes, maybe an hour ago,” according to the San Francisco Standard. He also pushed the Democrats who had been supporting Biden to support Harris: “I hope all those Democrats who’ve been pushing Biden to quit will now show up and ring doorbells with me.” “In all the jobs she’s had … she’s always been outstanding,” he told the publication. Though Brown was legally married at the time, he and Harris openly had an affair between 1994 and 1995 when she was 29 years old and he was 60 years old, according to Reuters. Brown and his now ex-wife had reportedly been separated for several years, though still legally married, and Harris was an Alameda County assistant district attorney at the time. The affair ended in 1995, but not until after then state House Speaker Brown appointed Harris to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board (a job paying $97,088 a year, according to the Los Angeles Times) and the Medical Assistance Commission (a job paying $72,000 a year, according to the LA Times). “This news [of the breakup] came as a shock to many, including those who found Kamala Harris attractive, intelligent and charming,” the San Francisco Gate reported in 1995. “As a mutual friend once observed, ‘Willie has finally graduated from girls to a woman.’ Also flabbergasted: the brain-trusters who found Kamala the perfect antidote to whatever playboy tendencies still reside in the mayor-elect’s jaunty persona.” Brown would serve as mayor of San Francisco from 1996 to 2004, and Harris would become the district attorney of California in 2003. POLITICO reports that “as mayor of San Francisco in 2003, Brown was supportive of her district attorney campaign although they were no longer dating.” When Harris announced her presidential campaign, Brown wrote an op-ed titled: “Sure I dated Kamala Harris. So what?” Vox wrote of the op-ed at the time: “Interpreted charitably, Brown’s op-ed seems aimed at confronting critiques that Harris could face about their relationship, something she sought to distance herself from when she ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2003. Interpreted more cynically, it comes off as an attempt to give himself some credit for just how successful she’s become.” Brown and the Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal. The post Kamala Harris Ex-Lover Willie Brown, Who Promoted Her Through CA Politics, Praises Her ‘Outstanding’ Track Record appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In the back seat of a Toyota Sienna headed north through the winding roads of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I rapidly bought an internet domain name and a WordPress subscription. I then furiously began constructing a website on my iPhone 12 Mini—a task not for the faint of heart. On this vacation with my family on the North Carolina coast in June 2023, I had the idea to start a publication for young conservatives. I wanted to build a digital platform where my generation could counter the philosophy, theology, and anthropology of the Left. Perhaps publishing articles is not the best way to get clicks and eyeballs in the age of scrolling and tapping, yet I wanted to create an outlet where young conservatives could hone their skills as writers and editors. In starting this project, I wanted to find out if there are other young conservatives who share my vision of cultural renewal and commitment to the written word. I found out that there are. In the 13 months since I cobbled together a website in the backseat of that Toyota minivan, nearly 30 young conservatives from 15 colleges across the nation have turned my idea into reality. New Guard Press, launched last October, now publishes multiple articles a week on cultural and political topics ranging from C.S. Lewis’ fiction to the border crisis to conservative education reforms. Our goal is not to go viral, nor is it to “own the libs.” We don’t want to react to the day-to-day news cycle or simply complain about the latest instance of cultural insanity. Our goal is to offer a positive vision for the future of conservative culture. We strive for patient reflection, thoughtful deliberation, and beautiful writing.  The name New Guard Press stems from the idea that my generation, Gen Z, is the “new guard” of the traditions that gave rise to the American Founding. We are the latest inheritors of the intellectual, religious, and cultural traditions that flow through Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. As inheritors, we must decide what we will do with our inheritance. New Guard Press is a hub for thoughtful young conservatives who cherish those traditions and believe them to be the key to restoring a healthy, flourishing, and well-ordered society. Young conservatives interested in getting involved may visit the New Guard Press website, learn about the submission process, and sign up for our newsletter. I believe that New Guard Press will draw attention as a much-needed voice of calm confidence in the traditions that gave rise to the American experiment. But as we attempt to expand our readership and look toward adding such elements as podcasting and video, our aim is not to anxiously fight tooth and nail for every last click, like, and eyeball. Rather, our goal is to stand confidently on what we have received from our forefathers and use it to articulate a path forward.  The post Why I Started a Digital Platform for Young Conservatives to Take on the Left appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Say ... Where's Joe Biden?

On June 28, 2009, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking sat alone in a college at the University of Cambridge and waited patiently for party guests to arrive. Then he sent out invites.Hawking was doing a (presumably, quite tongue-in-cheek) experiment to see if time travel is possible. The idea was that if he sent the invites out after the event took place, only time travelers would know to arrive. Of course, nobody showed up. You could conclude from that that time travel to the past does not get invented by humans, or that they have a better use for it than partying hard with Stephen Hawking. Maybe there are more interesting times to visit, or paradoxes to be avoided.But there have been other attempts to look for signs of time travelers visiting our timeframe, including one team of physicists who searched the Internet for evidence of knowledge nobody could have had unless they had traveled back in time. Of course, time travelers might want us to know they are here, might want to keep themselves hidden, or not really care either way."Even time travelers who want to advertise their presence may do so ineffectively," the team writes in their paper, "those who want to hide their presence might make a revealing mistake, and those indifferent might or might not leave traceable Internet content."The team focused on searching for time travelers from the future rather than the past, figuring that the technology to create a time machine has not existed in the past, and any knowledge they had would relate to events in our past, making it pretty difficult to distinguish from people who have studied history.The team attempted to find unique events that could not be referenced by anyone without a time machine, but would hopefully be recorded for a significant amount of time into the future. They eventually settled on the discovery of Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) in 2012, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio choosing the name "Pope Francis" upon his selection as the head of the Catholic church. "Histories of bright comets like Comet ISON are generally well kept by societies and journals around the world, indicating that Comet ISON might remain memorable well into the future," the team explained. "Conversely, there is little reason for anyone without prescient information to be referring to something as 'Comet ISON' before 2012 September. Therefore, discussions or even mentions of 'Comet ISON' before 2012 September were searched for as potentially prescient evidence of time travelers from the future."The team searched through Facebook posts, tweets, and Google Trends, which shows when people are searching for particular terms (once a particular threshold has been met). Though disappointing – who wouldn't want to know there are time travelers vacationing in the 21st century? – the team found no evidence of these terms being used on the Internet before the events took place, as detailed in their paper, which has not been peer-reviewed.To widen the net and catch any time travelers who wanted to make themselves known, the team also performed a similar test to Stephen Hawking. They asked time travelers on the Internet to email them, and then later revealed the email address. To get the attention of time travelers, they created a hashtag to make it visible on X (then Twitter).            IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.The team also created a hashtag for time travelers who are worried about changing the past."Alternatively, time travelers who believe that they cannot change the past were requested to tweet '#ICannotChangeThePast2' on or before 2013 August, or include that hashtag at the end of an email sent to "home.nemiroff@yahoo.com" between 2008 November and 2013 August," the team explained. "For this part of the experiment, we were careful NOT to search Twitter or email until after the hashtag was publicly advertised in 2013 September. Therefore, by not pursuing a pre-advertisement search, the past might not have had to be changed in order for this tweet to have been discovered in 2013 September."Unfortunately, no prescient tweets or emails were received from time travelers, sent before knowledge became available to all non-time travelers. While disappointing, and indicating that time travelers are not hanging around in the early days of the Internet, the team suggested a number of other reasons why."First, it may be physically impossible for time travelers to leave any lasting remnants of their stay in the past, including even non-corporeal informational remnants on the Internet," the team explained. "Next, it may be physically impossible for us to find such information as that would violate some yet-unknown law of physics, possibly similar to the Chronology Protection Conjecture. Furthermore, time travelers may not want to be found, and may be good at covering their tracks."The study is posted to preprint server arXiv.

In what sounds more like the beginnings of a low budget creature feature than a real-life event, a team of scientists has discovered traces of cocaine in sharpnose sharks living in the coastal waters of Brazil.While we often think of microplastics and oil when someone mentions water pollution, cocaine has become of growing concern as an environmental contaminant. According to the team behind the discovery, that’s down to a combination of the growing use of cocaine – particularly in Brazil – and inadequate sewage treatment, runoff from cocaine production, and packs of the drug left drifting in the water, leading to it winding up in the ocean, where there’s a worry it’ll affect wildlife.That’s where sharks come in – not only do they play an important role in underwater ecosystems, but they can often be sentinels for environmental pollution, acting as the first warning sign of something being wrong.To determine if cocaine was ending up in sharks, from September 2021 to August 2023, the team analyzed 13 Brazilian sharpnose sharks (Rhizoprionodon lalandii) captured by fishers off the coast of the southeastern state of Rio De Janeiro. This particular species was chosen because they spend their entire lives in coastal habitats and so are likely to have been exposed to pollution coming from humans.Each shark had its weight and length determined, before being dissected and samples of its muscle and liver were taken for testing.The results of those tests revealed that every single sample from the sharks tested positive for cocaine, with 92 percent of muscle samples and 23 percent of liver samples also testing positive for one of the drug’s main metabolites, benzoylecgonine. This marks the first evidence of cocaine being identified in free-ranging sharks.What’s not clear from the study is whether or not cocaine exposure has had any effect on the sharks, although research into its consequences in other fish, such as eels and zebrafish, found differences in important proteins, changes to skin, and disruption of hormone function.To determine the possible effects, the researchers call for more testing. “[W]e recommend the expansion of environmental monitoring studies concerning drugs of abuse on the Brazilian coast, as well as detailed investigation of their effects on environmental health and associated risks,” they write.Cocaine hanging around in a shark’s body may not be great news for humans either.“Although no maximum permissible concentrations for COC or BE have been established in foodstuffs, these findings are indicative of potential human health risks, as sharks are highly consumed in the state of Rio de Janeiro, in fact, throughout the entire Brazilian territory and indeed, worldwide,” the authors state.It’s hoped that further research will provide a greater understanding of the potential impacts of both sharks and humans, although the team concludes that action needs to be taken sooner rather than later:“Ultimately, proactive measures are imperative to mitigate the ecological and public health risks associated with COC contamination in marine environments and ensure the health and balance of coastal ecosystems.”The study is published in Science of the Total Environment.

At a time when our flabbers be gasted daily, it can be hard to keep track of the biggest and breaking stories in the news cycle. One person, however, seems to have been keeping ahead of America’s latest election developments armed with nothing but asparagus.The news that President Joe Biden was taking himself out of the running broke on Sunday, July 21. “I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” he said on X.The announcement sent a shockwave of questions through the Twittersphere (let us know when you have an X alternative to this). What does this mean for the electoral race? Is Kamala Harris the frontrunner to replace him? But one user asked, perhaps, the most pressing of questions…Did the world’s only asparamancer see this all coming? For those of you who have – somehow – never before come across asparamancy, it’s the practice of trying to predict the future using nothing more than a handful of asparagus. Jemima Packington has become famous as the "world’s only asparamancer", and to date has Brexit and the passing of Queen Elizabeth II in her predictions trug.Appearing on BBC Radio Two’s Jeremy Vine show on July 17, Packington tossed her asparagus in response to the question: Biden or Trump in November? The answer: neither of them.“It’s a lady,” she said. “Now I keep on getting this. It’s going to be a lady. The next president of the United States is going to be a woman.”As for whether the asparamancer has struck again, only time will tell, but it adds to a rich history of humans looking to alternative sources for news about the future. I invite you to take a walk through the methods of divination dreamt up in human history, in a list that reads as three parts “haha” to every “eurgh”, checking off such delights as oomancy (reading eggs), tyromancy (fortune telling with cheese), the crawling baby (what it says on the tin), and then *checks notes* rumpology, where one seeks answers in the buttocks.They’re a creative switch up from looking to uncredible sources online, but is it pseudoscience or anti-science, and what’s the difference?

Deep within a cave in southern Italy, a strangely atypical Neanderthal man has been stuck upside down for around 150,000 years. Named Altamura Man, this remarkable skeleton represents one of the most spectacular human fossils ever discovered and could help to clear up some of the mysteries surrounding our evolution as a species – if only we could get the old bloke out.The inverted skull of this peculiar specimen was first spotted poking out of a wall within the Lamalunga karstic system, near Altamura, in 1993. Straight away, researchers were struck by the skeleton’s unusual orientation and gnarly appearance, caused by the accumulation of calcite blobs – otherwise known as "cave popcorn" – upon the surface of the cranium.Unfortunately, however, the bones have completely fused with the surrounding rock, leaving Altamura Man sealed within his natural tomb. Summarizing the ancient hominid’s frustrating predicament, the authors of a new paper explain that the skeleton “still lies deep within a spectacular cave setting, partly embedded within speleothems and extensively covered by coralloid concretions.”“These peculiar location and conditions would entail major difficulties in excavating and preserving ex-situ this skeleton,” they add. Powerless to get their man out of his speleo-prison and into a lab, researchers were unable to study this intriguing individual for several decades, although uranium-thorium dating did reveal that he was between 130,000 and 172,000 years old.By 2015, scientists had finally succeeded in retrieving a few fragments of the skeleton’s shoulder blade for DNA analysis, confirming that Altamura Man was indeed a Neanderthal. To gain more information, the authors of the new study spent the following four years conducting research within the cave itself, using portable X-ray machines, high-resolution endoscopic cameras, and miniature laser scanners that could fit through tiny openings in the rock wall.The combined results of these studies revealed that Altamura Man was a “fully adult Neanderthal who suffered some rather common dental pathologies,” leaving him with several teeth missing. More significantly, however, a digital reconstruction of the skull demonstrated that the skeleton possessed a number of morphological features that had never previously been seen in “classic Neanderthals”.A reconstruction of Altamura Man's face.Image credit: Roberto Montanari/Shutterstock.comFor instance, the skull bore similarities to that of an older hominid that lived in a Spanish cave around 430,000 years ago, and which has been classified as an early type of Neanderthal. In other ways, however, Altamura Man was more akin to other members of his species.Based on this mish-mash of characteristics, researchers believe Altamura Man probably belonged to an isolated population of Italian Neanderthals that evolved separately from those elsewhere in Eurasia, and which preserved some of its more archaic traits for an exceptionally long time.Speaking of exceptionally long times, it’s thought that this particular individual probably died after falling into a sinkhole and getting stuck in a crevice, where he has remained ever since – and is likely to stay forever more.The study is published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

To understand how the brain works scientists have been using two broad categories of experiments: ones that record and ones that manipulate brain activity. Early neuroscience studies used electricity to change the activity of neurons. Then, just two decades ago, scientists developed new technologies that used light. Now, they are using magnets. Does it sound like mind control? Yes, it does. Brain stimulation technologies, magnetogenetics included, have allowed scientists to influence the behavior of animals. But no, you are not at risk of being unwittingly influenced. The technology relies on magnetic nanoparticles in the brain and close-range magnetic fields.How this new technology works is actually really cool. It combines a mechanosensitive protein called Piezo with a magnetic nanoparticle (it’s 200 nanometers in size! That’s 0.0002 millimeters). Piezo (meaning pressure in Greek) is a well-known channel protein that, when mechanically stimulated, can activate a cell. It’s what gives you the sense of light touch. A rotating magnetic field moves the magnetic nanoparticles. This generates torque (rotational force) that can mechanically stimulate the Piezo channels. The nanoparticles only activate the Piezo variant that scientists have delivered to a cell, not native Piezo proteins.Seo-Hyun Choi and colleagues were able to deliver the protein and nanoparticle to specific subgroups of cells in the brains of mice. When the mice were surrounded by a magnetic field, those cells would be activated. Depending on the targeted cells, this could make the mice eat more, or be more attentive parents.How the team's magnetogenetics system works.Image credit: Institute for Basic ScienceIt sounds a bit Frankenstein-y, but this technology will allow scientists to manipulate with high temporal precision the brain activity in animals without the presence of any head-mounted devices. Previous technologies using light or electricity always required a cable or device to be attached to the skull of the animal to deliver the stimulus. With magnetogenetics the animals’ behavior will be completely unimpeded, improving their welfare. This will also facilitate the study of the behavior of multiple animals together in social experiments as they will be freer to interact together. Could this technology be used in humans? Not anytime soon. However, stimulation of brain circuits in humans is already being done. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a powerful therapy for Parkinson’s disease that uses electrical stimulation of dopaminergic neurons. In the future, magnetogenetics could provide an alternative method for targeted stimulation of neurons to alleviate the symptoms of such disorders.As senior author Cheon Jinwoo said in a statement, "We expect it to be widely used in research to understand brain functions, sophisticated artificial neural networks, two-way BCI [brain-computer interface] technologies, and new treatments for neurological disorders."This study is published in Nature Nanotechnology.

An armed intruder forced his way into a Kentucky home after midnight Saturday, police said. But the homeowner was armed, too — and shot the suspect dead, cops added.Kentucky state police told WDKY-TV that troopers received a report about a shooting on Linda Lane in Cadiz, Trigg County. Cadiz is near Kentucky's border with Tennessee, and the city is located about an hour and 20 minutes northwest of Nashville.Trigg County Sheriff Aaron Acree added to WKDZ that no arrests have been made. State police told WDKY that it was an “isolated incident" and there was no danger to the public.A preliminary investigation showed that a male — who reportedly was armed with a weapon — entered the home, state police told the Marshall County Daily, after which the male forced his way into a room.The homeowner soon shot the male, authorities told WDKY, and the alleged intruder was pronounced dead at the scene.Police on Sunday released the identity of the alleged intruder: 25-year-old Austin Gardner, WKDZ-FM reported.Trigg County Sheriff Aaron Acree added to WKDZ that no arrests have been made. State police told WDKY that it was an “isolated incident" and there was no danger to the public.Law enforcement officials completely blocked Linda Lane for several hours as they collected evidence and spoke with witnesses, WKDZ noted. Law enforcement added to WDKY that the investigation was ongoing.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!