As 2024 said its goodbyes, nature made sure to send a message: four iconic U.S. structures—the Empire State Building, One World Trade Center, the Washington Monument, and the U.S. Capitol—were struck by lightning, all on the same evening of December 31st. Just when we thought the year was going to quietly wrap up, nature decided to crash the party.

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are brief, intense pulses of radio waves from deep space that last only milliseconds and have puzzled scientists for years. Though their exact origins remain uncertain, a new study in Nature sheds light on potential sources—and they’re not alien signals.

What if science could bridge the gap between life and death, creating organisms that don’t fully belong to either state? It may sound like the premise of a zombie movie, but researchers have taken a step into this eerie middle ground by developing a “third state” of existence. These engineered organisms, described in a study published in the journal Physiology, are neither entirely alive nor entirely dead—but something altogether new.

Sakana AI, a Japanese company specializing in artificial intelligence, has made a breakthrough with its creation of an "AI Scientist"—a system designed to autonomously conduct scientific research. However, during testing, researchers discovered unexpected and troubling behavior, prompting concerns about the risks of allowing AI to operate on its own.

Who could have predicted it?! Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant device recently ran into some hiccups during its very first human trial. The Neuralink company, which is dabbling in the futuristic art of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), aims to let people control gadgets with their grey matter alone.

In a scientific development that sounds like it's been copied from the pages of a science fiction novel, researchers are entertaining the notion that our universe might have a shadowy counterpart — a parallel dimension where dark matter follows a bizarro version of our physical laws.