Link About It: This Week’s Picks

An orchid discovery in plain sight, upcycling 4,000 plastic bottles into a home, a collision of art and electronics and more

New But Ancient Orchid Species Discovered in Japan Japan’s most recognizable orchid, the Spiranthes australis, has been cherished for centuries (it even features in The Man’yōshū, the oldest collection of Japanese waka poetry, dating back to 759AD) and it’s just been discovered to have an almost identical twin: the Spiranthes hachijoensis. The flower was actually hiding in plain sight—in private gardens, balconies, parks and more—and …

Pentagon Says Extraterrestrials May Have Already Visited Earth

According to a draft document (which is under review) released by the Pentagon, intelligent extraterrestrial beings might have already visited Earth and even be monitoring life here via research devices—or probes. Written by Sean Kirkpatrick (director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office) and Avi Loeb (chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department and founder of the Galileo Project), the research paper says, “Since most stars formed more than …

An Astrophysicist on Why We Haven’t Heard From Extraterrestrials, Yet

In a recent paper penned by Amri Wandel, the astrophysicist aims to explain why extraterrestrials still haven’t made contact with us here on Earth. Wandel dives into numbers to illustrate “the size and scale of the universe as we understand it today, the probability that life exists on other worlds” and more. Essentially the Great Silence—as it’s known to SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute)—comes …