Jingszo !

At the eastern end of the Strand, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice, William Gladstone stands atop a plinth. Four times Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister, this eminent, emblematic Victorian is flanked by four female effigies testifying to the virtues of education, inspiration, courage, and brotherhood. Gladstone himself looks stately and solemn, as is fitting, but also mildly outraged, all clenched fists and frowns.

Finding life beyond the Earth would be a major scientific discovery with significant implications for all areas of science and human thought. Yet, only one direct search for extraterrestrial life has ever been conducted.

We highlight taxonomic misidentifications to show that coelacanth specimens from the British Rhaetian have been confused as far back as the late 1800s.

These aren’t your everyday protons and neutrons; they are composite particles that hint at a richer, more intricate spectrum of matter dictated by the fundamental forces that govern reality. The journey into this exotic realm, led by a dedicated team of physicists, promises to revolutionize our perception of how quarks can combine, potentially rewriting chapters in the physics textbooks we’ve relied on for decades.

The first interstellar object to visit the solar system may have been a fragment of an icy exoplanet, research suggests.

Is there a scientific reason why the universe exists? In other words, what is the science of why there is anything at all, instead of only nothing?

This digest covers UFO and UAP-related developments from August 31, 2025 to September 6, 2025, summarizing key reports, sightings, disclosures, investigations, and policy responses from across the globe.

It could be a legendary version of Etemenanki, a Mesopotamian ziggurat built to honor the god Marduk at such a scale that it inspired tall tales, as it were, spread far and wide in the ancient world, such as the rumor that its construction required mobilizing the manpower of all humanity. But it really did exist, as evidenced by its ruins discovered at the site of the ancient city of Babylon — which, in Hebrew, was called Babel.

A universe full of white dwarfs

Here, we present archaeobotanical data for ancient barley grains in association with sickle blades and grinding stones from the cave of Toda in the foothills of southern Uzbekistan.

Astronomers have captured a stunning image of a tail growing on interstellar invader Comet 3I/ATLAS. The image was captured on Aug. 27, 2025, by a team of scientists and students using the Gemini South telescope located on Cerro Pachón in Chile.

People from the past have left behind a treasure trove of clues about their lives — from enormous monuments to fragments of personal items, as well as the bones of the people themselves. But the people who left these clues are often a mystery. Now, thanks to modern scientific techniques and technology, researchers can accurately reconstruct what those people actually looked like, helping to bring long-dead people from history back to life.

Was it aliens, a top-secret government test balloon, or just “hyped up kids” spreading a wild tale of a flying saucer buzzing their playground?

The diverse forms of true or pseudo-time crystallinity will drive the development of materials with fundamentally interesting and technologically useful emergent nonlinear phenomena, like the one described here.

Highlights

New trends in online extremism are currently unsettling the typical classifications used to assess violent threats to democratic societies. While extremism is usually perceived to be a matter of extreme ideologies and methods, social media enables and shapes distinct hybridization processes by which conspiracy beliefs, personal grievances, and various ad hoc convictions are combined with ideology fragments, consequently producing new extremist narratives

New research reveals that carbon made it possible for Earth’s molten core to freeze into a solid heart, stabilizing the magnetic field that protects our planet. Without it, Earth’s deep interior — and life above — might look very different.

The Scale Was Created for a Scientific Broadcast, Not an Academic Journal

A Harvard professor has proposed that a bizarre interstellar object speeding toward Earth might have been dispatched by aliens to evaluate our intelligence. Professor Loeb has been outspoken about his theories – and now proposes we should take action before it enters our solar system.

Research into UFOs, which initially drew puzzled looks and smirks, is now considered an increasingly crucial part of Japan’s defense system and in need of additional support.

Using perceptual data from a prior study and musical features extracted with the MIR Toolbox, we trained LASSO regression models to predict eight emotional characteristics: Valence, Energy Arousal, Tension Arousal, Happiness, Sadness, Tenderness, Anger, and Fear.

The Hayabusa2 space mission recently retrieved 5.4 g of material from asteroid Ryugu, providing the first direct access to pristine material from a carbonaceous asteroid.

Something must have come over me, says Kohei Ohmori, reflecting on the 280 hours or roughly 5 months spent drawing a hyper realistic composition of a metallic bolt and nut using just pencils. The 30-year old artist, who has publicly discussed his struggles with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), has managed to overcome what is often perceived as a weakness and harness his incredibly capability for focus, which recently culminated in a solo exhibition at the Setouchi City Museum of Art.

One of these studies was done with regards to the Himba tribe in Northern Namibia!

A winged lion sculpture that symbolizes the Italian city of Venice was made in China and went on a remarkable journey that possibly involved explorer Marco Polo's father and the court of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, researchers suggested Thursday.

This occupation is characterized by a fireplace associated with a quartz knapping workshop. The quartz workshop consists of a dense concentration of almost 1,200 artifacts. 80% of these artifacts are knapping waste, attesting to the function of this concentration as a knapping workshop. Their presence within the workshop, despite their very small dimensions, confirms what grain size and anthracological analyses have also suggested, i.e., that the site was only slightly impacted by taphonomic phenomena. In a region where stratified sites are rare, the exceptional preservation of this site has provided a unique opportunity for extensive multidisciplinary studies, offering the most detailed possible view of the techno-cultural traditions of its inhabitants and the paleoenvironmental context in which they lived. The presence of the fireplace itself—an extremely rare, if not unique, vestige of this kind for the Paleolithic in West Africa—also attests to the extremely limited impact of post-depositional processes.

Furthermore, focusing observations near exoplanet conjunctions or planet–planet occultations might increase the likelihood of intercepting transmissions from any similarly oriented deep-space network. In the case of Mars, persistent DSN transmissions to Mars lead to over 77% duty cycle within 2′ of Mars, 4 × 105 times the average duty cycle across the celestial sphere.

Without previous knowledge on a topic or fact checking, information and misinformation might be indistinguishable. Several factors have been identified to contribute to belief in misinformation related to the message (and its source) including consistency with already held beliefs (Bryanov & Vziatysheva, 2021). When it comes to why someone might spread misinformation, it can happen unintentionally, someone misunderstanding information or believing the misinformation themselves, but some sources may have ideological motives or financial interests. Claims that honey prevents or cures COVID-19 were made by honey sellers. Although, eating honey might be good for you, and might even have anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and antioxidant properties (Samarghandian et al., 2017), it is unlikely to protect you from contracting COVID-19.

Melinda Messenger has shared images and videos of an eerie UFO encounter. The former glamour model posted a lengthy caption in which she was adamant that the light orbs were not man made or a meteor shower. The images, albeit blurry, show a number of golden-coloured light orbs hovering in the sky before splitting to show more.

The propulsion mechanisms hypothesized for silver sphere UAPs encompass a range of theoretical and speculative technologies, from electromagnetic and quantum field manipulations to spacetime distortions and negative mass theories. Each concept offers explanations for different observed characteristics, such as silent operation, extreme maneuverability, and apparent defiance of inertia.

The Latin motto TRAHOR FATIS (I am drawn by Fate) appears but four times in the Tarot masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, the Sola Busca deck, and yet it hangs unmistakably over the cards’ entire colorful procession of ancient Greek and Roman heroes. Armored in the style of late-fifteenth century northern Italy, they bear bagpipes, shields, lyres, pennants, staffs, and torches, while accompanied by basilisks, crows, falcons, doves, and eagles. Every single card is a miniature drama — the expressions of the highly individualized figures inviting us to speculate, like the Tarot itself, on the past and future of this cryptic world.

In this episode:

uNHIdden is a non-profit foundation, medically led by doctors and clinical psychologists.

A team led by scientists from Peking University has developed a rubber-like material that converts body heat into electricity. This advance could allow the next generation of wearable electronics to generate their own power continuously without the need for bulky batteries or constant recharging.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing for a unique opportunity to study the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas from what could be the best vantage point in the solar system.

Barnard’s Universal Criminal Cipher Code for Telegraphic Communication between Chiefs of Police, Sheriffs, Marshals and other Peace Officers of the United States and Canada (1895) was a book of codes to help disguise internal police telegrams in what amounted to some kind of 19th-century version of the encrypted email. Despite first appearances the “cipher” of the book has some sense of order in its "self-indexing" system, as the Preface explains:

The magnetic fields that formed in the very early stages of the universe may have been billions of times weaker than a small fridge magnet, with strengths comparable to magnetism generated by neurons in the human brain. Yet, despite such weakness, quantifiable traces of their existence still remain in the cosmic web, the visible cosmic structures connected throughout the universe.

Sceletium tortuosum is a little succulent plant that grows in the semi-arid Karoo and Namaqualand regions of South Africa. It has a long history of traditional use among the hunter-gatherers of the region.

So how does one go from needing energy to needing elements? Life gets much of its energy from a physical phenomenon called a “thermodynamic disequilibria” - basically a fancy way of saying that a “system” in nature has some potential energy, whether that’s thermal, mechanical, chemical, or radiative. One of the most common ways for life to take advantage of a disequilibria is through a process called a reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction.

Every good story needs a baddie, like SMERSH or the Mafia: “The story gets bigger and more awesome as time goes on, but we are beginning to understand the whole web of intrigue involved.” In the case of psychic questing the enemy is “a sinister group called the People of Hex”. Unseen but leaving clues, they perform dark rituals at sacred sites all round the country. Debbie had a vision of a druid, which led them to a pond barrow: “This druid was basically saying “Come down ‘ere, summink ‘eavy’s ‘appening.”‘ At the barrow, they found a bone inscribed with strange characters – evidence of the People of Hex. ‘People were pumping up the energies in relation to ancient warriors causing a considerable imbalance of energies.’ The People of Hex perform negative rituals and ‘we had to stop it. It was like unblocking the plughole.”

Scientists have recreated a crucial step that may have set life in motion nearly four billion years ago.

Saturn’s moon Titan may be more alive with possibilities than we thought. New NASA research suggests that in Titan’s freezing methane and ethane lakes, simple molecules could naturally arrange themselves into vesicles—tiny bubble-like structures that mimic the first steps toward life. These compartments, born from splashing droplets and complex chemistry in Titan’s atmosphere, could act like primitive cell walls.

A recently discovered asteroid roughly the size of a commercial jet will pass within 1 lunar distance of Earth on Sept. 3. Here's how you can watch the flyby live online, courtesy of the Virtual Telescope Project.

The body of this hybrid mummy, Fernando, discovered at Nazca in Peru, appears to still contain the organs and presents a dentition in good condition.

This does not imply that the emergence of life was impossible, but it suggests that current knowledge may be lacking. The research highlights that identifying the physical principles behind life’s rise from nonliving matter remains one of the greatest challenges in biological physics.

These analyses revealed that the East Asian specimens of Harbin and Dali show an exceptionally high concordance with the Denisovan profile, surpassing all other examined Middle Pleistocene hominin specimens, including Neanderthals. Specifically, 15 out of 18 of Dali’s features and 16 out of 18 of Harbin’s matched Denisovan predictions. These findings are robust to overall skull size and to correlations between phenotypes. We also found that Kabwe 1 shows a strong affinity to the Denisovan–Neanderthal clade and might be placed near its root. Our results show that gene regulatory phenotyping may assist in classifying poorly understood specimens.

Initially seen as an interesting speck in the program's imagery, CAPERS-LRD-z9 turned out to be part of a new class of galaxies known as "Little Red Dots." Present only in the first 1.5 billion years of the universe, these galaxies are very compact, red, and unexpectedly bright.

Another finding was that the ratio of two types of carbon isotopes, Carbon-12 and Carbon-13, was broadly similar to that found on Earth, suggesting the material was created in an environment with similar carbon species. However, there are a couple of features of 3I/ATLAS’s creation that could have caused the lopsided CO2/H2O ratio.

If the aim is to image a planet with an atmosphere laden with water vapor, then the telescope would need to be optimized to detect light with a wavelength of 10 microns (10 millionths of a meter, equivalent to the thickness of a human hair), which is the infrared wavelength at which water vapor emits.

Observing Earth From Afar: Could Extraterrestrials Be Watching?

The report concludes there is “credible evidence that UAP encounters can cause physical, physiological and psychological harm,” and calls for independent research, clinical training, specialist referral pathways, and far greater transparency between military and civilian health systems.

Researchers always thought a quantum Bayes' rule should exist because quantum states define probabilities. For example, the quantum state of a particle provides the probability of it being found at different locations. The goal is to determine the whole quantum state, but the particle is only found at one location when a measurement is performed. This new information will then update the belief, boosting the probability around that location.

Water-rich sub-Neptunes may offer key clues to where life could exist beyond Earth. For astrobiologists, the hunt for life outside our solar system begins with the same question you would ask in a desert: where is the water? Among the planets discovered so far, a very common type appears to have interiors rich in water. These worlds are known as “sub-Neptunes” because their size and mass fall between Earth and Neptune.

If confirmed, vast cloud could test predictions about the Milky Way’s hidden architecture

When we look at the night sky, it can appear as though our cosmic surroundings are filled with countless stars, planets, and galaxies. However, researchers have long proposed that our local region of the universe may contain far fewer galaxies than expected.

Germany’s ZDF has acquired two titles exploring historic and modern encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena from UK-based distributor Espresso Media International.

The Sun will someday die. This will happen when it runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core and can no longer produce energy through nuclear fusion as it does now. The death of the Sun is often thought of as the end of the solar system. But in reality, it may be the beginning of a new phase of life for all the objects living in the solar system......

Earth is so far the only known planet on which life exists—with liquid water and a stable atmosphere. However, the conditions were not conducive to life when it formed. The gas-dust cloud from which all the planets in the solar system formed was rich in volatile elements essential for life, such as hydrogen, carbon and sulfur.

Scroll and pan around this map to see the latest location and traverse path for the Mars Perseverance rover at Jezero Crater. The goal of the mission is to seek signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and dust) for possible return to Earth.

For the study, the researchers used a series of computer models to simulate the beginning of the universe that challenge the longstanding theory that the universe began with a period of rapid expansion known as “inflation”, with scientists estimating this occurred within the first fraction of a second of the universe’s existence. However, this inflation theory postulates that several variables were all involved in making this theory possible.

A skull that was found embedded in a cave wall in Greece more than 60 years ago may finally have an identification.

Remembering past events in minute detail, revisiting them methodically, and reliving past emotions—this is the peculiarity of people with an exceptional memory of their own lives, known as autobiographical hypermnesia, or hyperthymesia. This fascinating condition remains poorly understood, and each new case contributes to our understanding.

The United States Department of Defense has been baffled as thousands of unidentified spherical objects have been detected hovering in U.S. skies.

The paucity of well-preserved and dated Pleistocene human remains impedes investigation of demographics and interactions in Late Pleistocene populations in Southeast Asia.

Conclusions

Life today depends on proteins, cellular workhorses that do everything from flex muscles to ferry oxygen. And proteins, in turn, depend on RNA, which carries the recipes for making them and also helps with their assembly. In modern cells, large protein-based enzymes help connect RNA snippets to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Then, the RNA- and protein-based cellular machine called the ribosome stitches the amino acids together into a protein chain, reading the correct sequence from a longer strand of messenger RNA. But billions of years ago, before the evolution of the enzymes and the ribosome, how could life’s first proteins have been constructed?

For the entirety of its existence, humanity has been a passenger on Planet Earth, subject to the vast and indifferent mechanics of the solar system. Cosmic events, from the life-giving energy of the sun to the cataclysmic impacts that have punctuated geological history, were forces to be endured, not controlled. That era has quietly come to an end. With the successful execution of NASA's Double Asteroid…

Archaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA, can reveal powerful insights into kinship and the movement of individuals in (pre)history. Here, the authors report on the identification of two individuals with genetic profiles consistent with recent sub-Saharan African ancestry, both of whom were buried in early-medieval cemeteries in southern Britain. Focusing primarily on a sub-adult female from Updown in Kent, the authors explore the societal and cultural contexts in which these individuals lived and died, and the widening geographic links indicated by their presence, pointing back to the Byzantine reconquest of North Africa in AD 533–534.

The pursuit of understanding these phenomena extends beyond national borders, as nations recognize the potential implications for both national security and scientific advancement. Organizations like The Sol Foundation are contributing to the discourse, offering white papers and research initiatives aimed at unraveling the mysteries of UAPs. As humanity grapples with the possibility of extraterrestrial life, these investigations may redefine our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

Treating cardiac arrest during spaceflight is challenging because both the rescuer and the patient are floating due to microgravity. The current NASA emergency protocol for the International Space Station recommends the hand-stand method of CPR, where the rescuer performs a handstand on the patient's chest with their legs pressing on the side of the spaceship to create the pressure needed for chest compressions.

Hydrothermal vents pump out fluids laden with heavy metals and other toxic substances, which organisms like P. hessleri accumulate within their bodies. As Wang and his colleagues report today in PLOS Biology, this deep-sea worm endures dangerous levels of arsenic and sulfide by combining the two chemicals in its cells, fighting poison with poison to create a less hazardous mineral that also gives the animal its distinctive color.

The history of UAP whistleblowing is a story of remarkable evolution, tracing a clear trajectory from the speculative, civilian-led accusations of the mid-20th century to the highly-credentialed, legally-protected insider testimony of the present day. The foundational narratives established by figures like Jesse Marcel and Donald Keyhoe—alleging recovered non-terrestrial technology and a deliberate government “conspiracy of silence”—have been amplified and given new life by modern insiders like Luis Elizondo, Christopher Mellon, and David Grusch. These contemporary figures have leveraged their deep knowledge of the national security state to reframe the issue as a matter of urgent defense and intelligence concern, successfully forcing a reluctant government and a skeptical media to engage with the topic seriously for the first time in decades.

Along with their medicinal uses, mandrakes had magical powers. In the fourth century, Pseudo-Apuleius described how mandrake could remove the effects of demonic possession: “For witlessness, that is devil sickness or demoniacal possession, take from the body of this said wort mandrake by the weight of three pennies, administer to drink in warm water as he may find most convenient - soon he will be healed”. Mandrake amulets or figures, known as puppettes or mammettes, were used from the medieval period to bring good fortune and happiness, even to cure sterility. See for example the mandrake charms in Bernard Picart’s engraving from eighteenth-century France.

Experts disagree on the age of Pumapunku. The site is part of the larger Tiwanaku complex and is believed to date back over 1,500 years to A.D. 500. It has puzzled historians and archaeologists because of its advanced engineering and intricate stonework.

The idea of building settlements on Mars is a popular goal of billionaires, space agencies and interplanetary enthusiasts.

Here, we present archaeobotanical data for ancient barley grains in association with sickle blades and grinding stones from the cave of Toda in the foothills of southern Uzbekistan. This finding helps shed light on one of the greatest mysteries in central Asian archaeology—how did the Kelteminar people live? We complement our data with a suite of radiocarbon dates, a detailed palynological study, an analysis of wood charcoal remains, and a detailed analysis of all aspects of the archaeological remains. These data, collectively, paint the clearest picture thus far of the prehistory of this poorly studied corner of the ancient world.

Work in progress: Our map now shows >98% of sightings reported to Puma Watch. We’re working to improve its coverage of sightings reported in the press and to the authorities. We’ll soon add the ability to filter by details such as date or species and expand its coverage region

Around 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system took shape out of a vast swirl of gas and dust surrounding the Sun. The asteroids that remain today are among the most complete relics from that chaotic era, comparable to scraps and spare parts left behind at a construction site. By analyzing their shapes, surfaces, and chemical makeup, scientists can uncover clues about what conditions were like when the solar system first formed.

Curiosity is continuing its winding path through the mysterious boxwork structures that have been a major focus of the last several months of the mission. After driving away from “Río Frío,” we are now parked on top of a ridge overlooking a topographic depression that we've nicknamed the “Thumb.” The image on this post shows that ridge running along the “thumb’s” edge. Our goal today is to characterize this ridge before we drive down into the Thumb.

The SETI Post-Detection Policy is humanity’s first attempt to prepare for a moment that may never come, but for which we must be ready. It is a product of foresight, a rational effort to impose order on a potentially chaotic event. Its core principles provide a clear and logical path through the initial stages of contact: verify the signal rigorously, notify the world’s scientific and political bodies, share all data openly, and engage in a global consultation before ever sending a message in reply.

The sky is a theatre of immense complexity, and our attempts to interpret it are fraught with challenges. Before we can reach for extraordinary conclusions about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, we must first engage in a rigorous and honest assessment of the ordinary. The proliferation of man-made objects, from commercial drones to classified military aircraft and orbital satellite networks, provides a vast pool of potential misidentifications. The natural world contributes its own share of illusions, with atmospheric optics and celestial bodies often masquerading as intelligently controlled craft.

New NASA research has found that Ceres may have had a lasting source of chemical energy: the right types of molecules needed to fuel some microbial metabolisms. Although there is no evidence that microorganisms ever existed on Ceres, the finding supports theories that this intriguing dwarf planet, which is the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, may have once had conditions suitable to support single-celled lifeforms.

Using scientific instruments in novel ways is a common practice, but still results in significant new discoveries. But sometimes, it doesn’t happen so much as a “that’s funny” moment as an intentional new use of old equipment. A new paper from researchers that Imperial College London (ICL), PhD student Solomon Hirsch and his advisor Mark Sephton, shows how the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometers that have been a mainstay of Martian probes since the Viking era could be used to find extant life there.

On December 16, 2017, The New York Times published a groundbreaking front-page article titled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” This report unveiled the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a previously undisclosed initiative within the U.S. Department of Defense dedicated to investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) .

The idea of seeding the atmosphere with large amounts of chemicals that shouldn’t be there, and that will change global temperatures and weather systems in ways we cannot predict or control, is obviously folly.

The new scientific study, by Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading and other researchers, maps the geographic origins of our primate ancestors and the historical climate at those locations. The results are surprising: rather than evolving in warm tropical environments as scientists previously thought, it seems early primates lived in cold and dry regions.

Life Before the Great Dying

Asteroid Bennu—the target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission, led by the University of Arizona—is a mixture of materials from throughout, and even beyond, our solar system. Over the past few billion years, its unique and varied contents have been transformed by interactions with water and the harsh space environment.

Using single-cell RNA sequencing, Brooks et al. assembled a two-dimensional map of the expression of thousands of genes during neural tube closure in the mouse embryo. Starting with a few well-known genes with localized expression patterns, they were able to predict the expression patterns of 870 genes during the process. This map matched known gene expression with high accuracy and predicted expression patterns for hundreds of previously uncharacterized genes. Moreover, they showed that activating a key developmental pathway, known as Sonic hedgehog signaling, dramatically reshaped gene expression along the width and length of the neural tube.

These findings give astronomers a hint at where and when to look for technosignatures; the periods during which extrasolar planets, or "exoplanets," in other star systems align with their stars are of particular interest.

Exoplanets, with their large volumes and low temperatures, are ideal celestial detectors for probing dark matter (DM) interactions. DM particles can lose energy through scattering with the planetary interior and become gravitationally captured if their interaction with the visible sector is sufficiently strong....

Big cat expert Rick Minter, who hosts a podcast detailing such encounters, is investigating these sightings. He revealed: "A dog walker near Tetbury watched a black panther cornering a fox at dusk. Her three big dogs were on leads but they rumbled the cat, which rushed away and the fox emerged from its trapped situation and left the area keeping close to the walker and her dogs, seemingly wanting their company for safe escort."

While the debris shed from the asteroid amounted to less than 0.5% of its total mass, it was still 30,000 times greater than the mass of the spacecraft. The impact of the debris on Dimorphos’ trajectory was dramatic: shortly after the collision, the DART team determined that the flying rubble gave Dimorphos a shove several times stronger than the hit from the spacecraft itself.

Psychologists have long considered how a tendency towards irrational thinking or particular personality traits might predict peoples’ interest in conspiracies. Yet these individual factors do not explain the group processes through which conspiracy theorists are extending their influence and impact.

Skeletons showing multiple instances of unhealed trauma and isolated skeletal segments of severed left upper limbs have been documented in the Neolithic sites of Achenheim and Bergheim (northeastern France, approximately 4300 to 4150 cal BCE), providing tantalizing evidence of war-related practices of overkill, mutilation, and/or trophy taking. 

Common descent theory plays an influential role in shaping the search for extraterrestrial life by providing insights into evolutionary processes, universal biology, and potential biosignatures. Although it offers valuable guidance for identifying environments and characteristics favorable to life beyond Earth, scientists must remain open to discovering organisms fundamentally different from those known on our planet. Balancing expectations informed by Earth’s biology with the readiness to encounter unprecedented forms of life is essential for advancing the search for extraterrestrial organisms.