Snakes Have Packed Their Own Antivenom for 50 Million Years
Snakes carry a built-in defense against their own bite. How they end up poisoning themselves in the first place is still anyone's guess.
Halloween Week
Zombie Star Lurks at the Center of a Supernova
What strings the wreckage of a medieval star blast into evenly spaced beads? Each leading explanation hits a snag.
Two Piles of Blacksmithing Waste Complicated the Lost Colony Mystery
The colonists told everyone where they were going, then vanished. The argument over whether they got there turns on a pile of iron waste.
Connecticut Hanged a Woman for Witchcraft 45 Years Before Salem. The Accusation Against Her Is Lost.
History kept the epidemic, a dying girl's talk of Satan and a daughter accused decades later. It lost the one thing that explained the gallows.
Bats Likely Took Their First Flight in Europe
Three continents had a claim on the first bat. A mountain of genomes and fossils points somewhere else, and roughly half of every bat family's past is still missing.
Black Hole Wears a Star as a Disguise
Webb keeps finding little red dots in the young universe, and nobody agrees on what they are. One of them gave up its power source.
A Woman in Ashes and Soot Stopped a Boston Sermon in 1677. The Court Called Her a Devil.
She warned Boston that a plague was coming. The magistrates whipped her through the streets. Then the smallpox arrived.
Vampire Hunters Arranged a Farmer's Skeleton in a Skull and Crossbones. DNA Restored His Name.
A 19th-century New England vampire ritual left one grave sealed for two centuries, until genetics finally identified who it belonged to.
A Dying Man's Brain Waves Were Recorded. They Looked Like Memory.
The EEG kept recording after his heart stopped. What it caught has no settled explanation, and researchers spent years looking for a second case to compare it to.
Zombies of the Sea: This Creature's Severed Body Parts Live On
Severed. Alone. Still running an immune system three years later. Still very much alive.
Gloucester's 1817 Sea Serpent Came With Sworn Depositions
Witnesses swore under oath to what they saw in the harbor. Then a small snake turned up in a nearby field, and the naturalists made a bold leap.
A Bottle of Six Pins Buried to Fight Witches
Someone on the Delaware River in the 1740s believed a witch was behind their suffering. The remedy came with a return address.
The Blockage in Her Gut Had Legs. Fourteen of Them.
An 82-year-old's intestinal blockage was hiding a passenger. It was alive, and it wanted out.
4,400 Brains That Forgot to Rot
Water should have finished them off. Instead, shipwrecks and flooded caves are where ancient brains turn up intact.
Newport's Ghost Ship Came Home in 1750. Its Crew Never Did.
Sails set, colors flying, not a soul aboard. Newport spent the next century retelling the story of the Sea Bird, and every telling got stranger.
Something Kept Showing Up Over a Rhode Island Uranium Plant in 1973
Silent lights over a uranium plant, a car that faltered beneath one and a radar plane moments behind. Rhode Island, spring 1973. Nobody explained any of it.