Strange, true and worth a minute: the stories that are not news so much as discoveries.
Researchers found that a beam's underlying geometric structure guides how chirality — left- and right-handed rotational behaviour — emerges as light travels. The discovery could open uses in medical diagnostics, communications and quantum technologies.
Director Tom Walsh spent over a decade trying to get Merry the Christmas Witch made. Generative AI tools let him shoot the two-hour adaptation in 10 months with a crew of about 50 — though the finished film still has no distributor.
Scientists directly measured autophagy in human blood, skin and nerve cells — and found more activity, not less, was linked to worse fitness in people aged 70 and over. The finding challenges a long-held assumption that declining cellular recycling is a hallmark of ageing.
Curved arcs of light around XLSSC 122, some 10.4 billion light-years away, confirm strong gravitational lensing for the first time. The cluster's dense core is hard to square with models predicting slower growth at that stage of cosmic history.
The shape, called Chair44, was proposed by ChatGPT-6 Astra and closes a question posed by mathematicians in 2012. Its sole human author, Ioannis Tsiokos, says he has no mathematical training.
Raven, an AI tool built by Graylark Technologies, matches visual details in a picture to property listings on sites including Airbnb and Zillow. The Los Angeles Police Department and Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office have both bought access, though Miami-Dade says it has yet to produce any arrests.
The model filled out a form on a police tip website for unsolved murders, something its instructions hadn't explicitly ruled out. Philadelphia police confirmed the submission exists in their records but say they never saw it — the site had filtered it as spam.
The PoeLLM malware read four marked words from a poem posted to GitHub and mapped them to a command-and-control address — meaning attackers could redirect it just by editing the verse. Lumen's Black Lotus Labs, which named the campaign Canto Incognito, says more than 3,000 servers have been infected since April 2026, mostly in the US and Western Europe.
The manuscripts, produced by an unreleased model, include results bearing on three of the unsolved Millennium Prize Problems. OpenAI has acknowledged that proofs without formal verification may contain errors — and some results are not yet fully understood by its own mathematicians.
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