What is the largest animal discovered most recently?

 Imagine you're aboard the Navy ship AFB-14 , sailing off the coast of Kaneohe, Hawaii. The date is November 15, 1976. The anchors are about to be pulled aboard when you see something caught in the middle of the bright orange, parachute-like device.

It's a shark, and a pretty big one at that.

Meet the greatmouth shark ( Megachasma pelagios ). These fish can grow very large—though not as impressively large as, say, a whale shark or a basking shark.

Greatmouths can reach nearly 20 feet (about 6 meters) in length.

It's impressive that these alien-looking sharks have managed to remain hidden for so long. Most of the enormous deep-sea creatures such as sperm whales, oarfish, giant and colossal squid, etc., have long been known to scientists, albeit not very well. Carcasses have washed ashore, specimens have been caught in nets, and, in the case of the sperm whale, we've hunted them for thousands of years.

It's not even that largemouths are super-smart and sneaky. They're relatively slow swimmers, even in deeper waters, and mostly just drift through the water column, sifting plankton from the sea into their cavernous jaws. Their bodies are flaccid and fragile, so much so that sperm whales bounce them around, at least in one case. Sperm whales are a bit of a jerk. You'd expect such a weak swimmer to be washed ashore all the time, but no. As of 2018, fewer than 99 largemouths have been recorded, most of which are carcasses that washed ashore or got caught in nets.

Largemouths have been mistaken for small whales on numerous occasions. Given the vastness of their habitat, one has to wonder if they were perhaps the basis behind the legend of the Ningen . The Ningen is a popular cryptid as old as the internet, described as a pale, humanoid creature that is absolutely enormous.

Hmmm...

Ningen or not, largemouths are very, very large and, relatively speaking, only recently discovered.

What's the scariest thing archaeologists have ever discovered?

 When archaeologists opened the tomb of Liu He, the Haihun ruler of the Han Dynasty, they discovered a trove of money. This included 5,330,000 ancient copper coins, weighing approximately 10 tons, and 358 gold cakes.

A distant relative of the royal family, Liu He was emperor of the Han Dynasty for 27 days.

However, he couldn't do the job. He loved music and chess, but didn't really know how to be an emperor.

Unsurprisingly, he was quickly overthrown, and moved south with his treasures.

He died in his 30s from eating too much cantaloupe.

What is a possible explanation for Punctum, the newly discovered space object?

 

Punctum might be a brand new mysterious astronomical object that has never been observed before

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We discovered it with the ALMA radiotelescope, which was observing the active galactic nucleus of the nearby galaxy NGC 4945, 11 million light-years away, shown above. This enigmatic pointy source of millimeter-range highly polarized electromagnetic radiation was discovered by accident because it showed in the field of view.

We don’t know what it is, but it must be very small to emit radiation that is polarized, which is usually produced by objects with a very strong magnetic field, like magnetars. Except that this one emits radiation four to five orders of magnitude more powerfully than any known magnetar (10,000 to 100,000 times) and even 10 to 100 times stronger than supernovas.

It’s not a transient source of radiation like these powerful explosions because it has been continuously observed since 2023. Furthermore, it’s not visible in visible light or other ranges of electromagnetic radiation.

We can only guess what it is. Maybe it’s a very powerful magnetar that is located in an unusual environment that made it so powerful. This signal cannot come from a remnant of a supernova because they are too large to emit such a powerful polarized radiation.

Perhaps if we find more of these mysterious Punctums elsewhere, we might finally figure out what it is.