Science News BS Heat Map, July 4, 2026

                         

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Perseverance rover finds even more signs of extinct life on Mars"		A very bad example of false clickbait from the British paper The Register.  The subtitle immediately recants, saying "Scientists remain skeptical." All that was found was some carbon compounds that can be formed through lifeless processes.
"Bacteria Can Learn and Form Memories Without a Brain"		What is going on is here mainly the kind of word trickery that would be going on if you claimed that snow can learn and form memories, on the grounds that snow forms a footprint memory of your feet passing over it.
"Mars Rover Spots Complex Carbon on the Red Planet, Marking Yet Another Detection of a Building Block of Life"		It has always been bunk to suggest that life is built from things so simple they can be called "building blocks." Even the simplest living thing is built from very complex components -- hundreds of types of protein molecules, each requiring a very special arrangement of hundreds of parts. The building components of such building components are amino acids. Neither protein molecules nor amino acids have ever been discovered on Mars. The discovery mentioned involved vaguely described carbon compounds that were not any of the known building components or chemical constituents of life.
"An 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s regained speech and mobility after taking psilocybin."		This is an important case report that may cast doubt on claims that Alzheimer's patients suffer from a loss of physically stored memories, and may bolster a "haze" or "fog" model of dementia in which poor cognitive performance in such people is mainly the result of something rather like a state of drowsiness or stupor that can go away, with restoration of memory performance. Reports of terminal lucidity in those with severe dementia suggest the same thing.
"She Was Half Ape, Half Human—and She May Hold the Secret to What Makes Us Who We Are"		In this Popular Mechanics article, we read of a 4.4 million-year old skeleton called Ardi. No justification is given that this corresponded to any creature that was "half-ape, half-human." Such a phrase might be justified in describing a creature that had an ape as one parent, and a human as another parent; but no such creature has ever existed.  See the appendix for why the alleged "skeleton" is probably no such thing, but instead a set of bones gathered up from a wide area of about 20 square meters, and arranged to look like half a skeleton. The article has a fake large visual, which is not identified as the fake that it is. See the appendix for details. The visual is a work of "vector art" attributed to a Getty Images source of "Alexander Joe." A look at that artist's pages on Getty Images fails to show the image.
"Consciousness: how ‘working memory’ may mysteriously give rise to it"		The article suggests an idea that makes no sense  Working memory is one of the innumerable capabilities of conscious minds, and does nothing to explain consciousness itself.  Similarly, walking is one of the many capabilities of human bodies, but walking does nothing to explain the origin of human bodies.
"Your Brain Doesn’t Just Turn Off When You Die. What Really Happens Defies Our Understanding of Reality."		The headline is false -- your brain does  just turn off when you die, and does so very quickly (although conscious experience often continues in episodes recalled as near-death experiences, contrary to the dogma that minds are produced by brains). Within 10 to 30 seconds after the heart stops, the human brain turns off electrically, resulting in the flatlining state  called asystole, in which brain waves die off to become flat lines.  The Popular Mechanics article discusses a 2023 study simultaneously tracking brain waves and heart activity. Contrary to the very misleading statements that have been made about the patients in that study, statements debunked in my post here,  that study shows brain waves very quickly flatlining in the patients it tracked when they died.
"For The First Time, Scientists Say They've Built a Synthetic Cell From Scratch"		In a ScienceAlert press release, we have a scientist named Kate Adamala making grandiose boasts that are unfounded. There's no published paper backing up her boasts. There's merely an article at her company's site,  and a preprint. Far from being anything that was created chemically "from scratch" (a phrase wrongly used in press accounts of this research), what went on was cannibalization of components from E. coli cells. The article states, "SpudCell currently uses ribosomes from E. coli bacteria." So ribosomes (organelles much more complex than proteins) were stolen from an existing one-celled life form (E. coli), and then put in some sphere-like fatty unit, wrongly called a cell. That so-called cell was not actually capable of sustained natural reproduction, although some artificially-induced "division" is being sold to look like cell reproduction (many a lifeless blob may undergo division).  The ScienceAlert press release says, "According to Science magazine, SpudCell has met some hurdles in publication: apparently one reviewer at Cell, a prestigious science journal, said the project was not real biology."  An article in Science calls this SpudCell object "far from alive," while noting, "Some have also grumbled about Adamala’s efforts to draw attention to the work, which she says was rejected by Cell after one reviewer said SpudCells were not real biology." In another article, a scientist says of this research, "I don’t think it means we’re close to creating a fully synthetic cell.”
"Experts no longer think life began on Earth. Here's what convinced them."		There is no truth in the claim of the article that there has been some change in the opinion of scientists about whether life originated on Earth. No such change has occurred. The "what convinced them" part is nothing that should justify any opinion change -- the mere reported discovery (in miniscule trace amounts such as 1 part in 100 million) of nucleobases on an asteroid. As discussed here, the claimed result is not a reliable one, because the reported amounts were so tiny that the most likely result is that they resulted from earthly contamination. And even if nucleobases had been found on an asteroid, in the reported amounts, that would do nothing to make if more likely that the first life (or any of its components) had first existed in space (as the reported amounts are so small, we would still have Earth as the most likely place for the origination of such things). The BBC Science Focus article erroneously refers to "the discovery of nucleotides on an asteroid." The reported discovery was something much less: mere nucleobases. A nucleobase is a mere fraction of a nucleotide.
"Modern neuroscience is rediscovering an idea Freud had 130 years ago"		This press-release is the clumsiest attempt to sell a groundless theory of neuroscience trying to describe the brain as a "prediction engine." The theory has no warrant in physical realities of the brain. The press release tries an approach of "Freud thought of it first," which is silly, because the once-highly-regarded Freud is now generally regarded as an erring salesman of pseudoscientific nonsense.
"The Circuit that Lets Your Brain Think and See"		No actual explanation is given as to how a brain could think, and neuroscientists lack any credible explanation for human thinking. Appealing to "a circuit" is the laziest last resort when people lack an explanation of how a brain could do something. We have a discussion mainly of not what was observed in the brain, but in the behavior of some computer model. At least we get this neuroscientist confession contradicting a common tall tale of neuroscientists: "Back in 2015, I began working with patients who are missing the hippocampus, the region that lets us form and hold onto memories. If the brain were truly modular, losing that middle piece should leave you unable to do a great many things. But it doesn't. These patients can still do all sorts of tasks."  So why do neuroscientists keep groundlessly claiming that the hippocampus is "the region that lets us form and hold onto memories"?

Appendix:  The original source of the claim about the Ardi skeleton is the edition of Science you can read here. On page 77 we have the images below:

At right is the "skeleton"  corresponding to this so-called skeleton called  Ardi. It is some bones gathered from a rather wide area of maybe 20 square meters. Someone has arranged the bones into something looking like a third of a skeleton. But that could be a misleading act of social construction. We don't know whether there ever existed a single individual having the bones shown in the right part of the visual above. The bones could be fragments from different individuals of different species. So it is very dubious to claim that a skeleton was ever found. 

The Popular Mechanics article mentioned above has a large visual showing a fairly complete skull. The article does not match the so-called skeleton named Ardi, which (as you can see in the top right of the image above) merely has some fragments of a skull. So where does the skull image in the Popular Mechanics article come from? It is apparently just a fake image. A reverse image search shows the image has been used about 30 times since 2014, to adorn various stories about evolution. The use of fake images in articles about human evolution is  an ongoing scandal discussed in my post

"Visual Fakery Is a Pillar of Darwinist Propaganda," which you can read here.  Nowadays online articles about human evolution are massively making use of fake images. 

Nonsense in the Science TV Show "The Hunt for Planet B"

The HBO Max TV show "The Hunt for Planet B" is one that starts out with a scientist spouting bad reasoning right at its beginning. Around the 3:20 mark we see an MIT scientist named Sara Seager  saying this in some congressional hearing:

"Well let me just say that in our own Milky Way galaxy there are a hundred billion stars and we now believe in our universe we have more than a hundred billion galaxies. So if you just do the math, the chance that there's a planet like earth out there with life on it is very high."

This is fallacious reasoning. You do not "do the math" by merely computing the total number of chances for an unlikely event to occur.  That's not "doing the math," but doing only half of the math.  Unless you have also estimated the chance of success on any one trial, you have only done half the math.  

The argument Seager gave is the "many chances equals some successes" argument. When this argument occurs, someone reasons that the chance of at least one success must be high, because there were many chances for success.  The argument is fallacious. If the chance of success on any one trial is sufficiently low, then many chances will probably equal zero successes. For example, if you spend every Sunday afternoon throwing a deck of cards into the air, there will be many chances for the full deck of cards to accidentally form into a triangular house of cards consisting of multiple rows of cards. But you will never, ever see such a house of cards resulting from your tosses. 

In the TV show  Seager follows her junk reasoning with the extremely false claim (at the 4:00 mark) that "scientists never like to speculate." 

At the 11:12 mark in the TV show some scientist says this: "I think people want us to build this telescope because they want to know how we got here."  That's a silly statement to make. Telescopes cannot tell us how mankind got here. 

Around the 14:19 mark Seager escalates her fallacious "many chances equals some successes" reasoning, in a way that makes her sound like a True Believer. She goes from "highly likely" to "certain," saying nothing to justify her claims. She says this, using the phrase "another Earth" to mean another planet with life:

"Another Earth is undoubtedly out there. In our Milky Way galaxy we have hundreds of billions of stars. Our own universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies.  To me personally it is definitely there. "

Here unscientific and unphilosophical. The correct way to reason on this topic is to make a sound estimate of the chance of success on each trial, taking into proper account the very high organization of the simplest living things, and to compare that estimate to the number of trials (the number of planets in the observable universe), rather than to just mindlessly refer to a high number of trials as proof that one of the trials must have succeeded at something vastly improbable, like some person senselessly reasoning that he must have won the Powerball lottery because he bought lots of tickets. 

Around the 16:37 mark  astrochemist Clara Sousa-Silva claims that "some molecules, like phosphine, only life sends out into the atmosphere." At the 16:53 mark she says phosphine is "an unequivocal sign of life." This is not correct. Referring to lifeless planets and a type of star called T-dwarfs, a scientific paper claims that we should expect to find phosphine in the atmospheres of large planets and "hotter objects":

"Disequilibrium abundances of phosphine (PH3) approximately representative of the total atmospheric phosphorus inventory are expected to be mixed upward into the observable atmospheres of giant planets and T dwarfs. In hotter objects, several P-bearing gases (e.g., P2, PH3, PH2, PH, HCP) become increasingly important at high temperatures."

A study in 2025 reported finding phosphine in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf star, which helps show that you do not require life for phosphine to be produced.  Another paper suggests that volcanoes can explain phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.

At the 16:59 mark we get more groundless optimism from Seager, who attempts to justify a dubious belief by using an ad populum argument in which she claims that her opinion is that of "my generation." She says this:

"My generation, we're betting on the fact that nature delivers. That life can originate and evolve anywhere given the chance and we're planning on finding it. There's no question."

There's nothing scientific going on in such silly talk, which has a "True Believer dogmatist" sound to it. All attempts to produce life in experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have been dismal failures. They failed to produce life; they failed to produce any of the main building components of life (functional protein molecules); and they did not even produce any of the building components (amino acids) of the building components of life.  There was a famed experiment that produced some amino acids (the Miller-Urey experiment), but it was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, requiring a special glass gizmo unlike anything that would have existed on the early Earth, and involving a very prolonged high degree of electricity exposure that no place on Earth would have naturally received.  

The fact that Seager says "we're betting...that life can originate and evolve anywhere given the chance" shows what an act of faith is going on here.  Seager here is like some fundamentalist betting that the Rapture will occur in her lifetime.  Various observation developments make Seager's faith in blind chance unreasonable. The first is what we've learned about the complexity and organization in even the simplest living things, that even the simplest one-celled life requires hundreds of types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention involving hundreds of specially arranged amino acid  parts. Faith that chance can produce such results is like believing in the power of accidental ink splashes to produce 100-page technical manuals.  Another is the complete failure to discover radio messages from extraterrestrial civilizations, despite many years of well-funded searches. If "life can originate and evolve anywhere given the chance," we would expect that such searches for extraterrestrial radio signals would have succeeded long ago. 

Around the 26:31 mark SETI astronomer Jill Tarter is asked about the failure of searches for radio signals from extraterrestrials, searches which have now gone on without success for more than 60 years.  She gives an answer that is not candid. A sensible and candid answer would be, "Yes, we have not found anything yet, and this may suggest that extraterrestrial civilizations are much more rare than we had thought."  But Tarter instead gives us a misleading answer, saying, "We just haven't looked far enough." She then gives some analogy trying to persuade us that very little of space has been checked for radio signals from extraterrestrials. Her language is extremely misleading. 

Below are some of the SETI searches that have occurred over the past 65 years (some of the observation time figures are taken from the source here):

• The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."

• The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.

• The SERENDIP II project from 1986 to 1988, involving some 17,000 hours of observations. 

• The All-Sky Search at Ohio State University from 1989 to 1996 (Childers, Dixon and Bolinger), involving 60,000 hours of observations, 

• The Astropulse and Fly's Eye SETI projects surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here. 

• The SETI@Home project, which according to the source here covered 20% of the full celestial sphere, and 67% of the sky area observable from the Arecibo observatory. 

• The Harvard BETA all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years (1995-1999), scanning the whole part of the sky observable from Massachusetts, USA, and doing 35,000 hours of observations. 

• Years of SETI searches using the Allen Telescope Array, involving 12 hours a day of SETI searches, 7 days a week, for years (such as 2007 to 2010), resulting in 95,000 hours of observations (discussed here). 

• An optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching 577 nearby stars that might have habitable planets, looking for laser signals.

• All of the optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence listed on the three pages you can view here, including three searches each involving more than 7000 hours of telescope time, and one search involving 200,000 objects and other searches involving thousands of stars. 

• The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."  

• The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials. 

• A META II SETI project between 1990 and 2010, involving 9000 hours of observations of the southern sky.

• All of the radio telescopes searches listed on the seven pages of search results you can review at the link here, including a Dixon, Ehman and Raub search from 1973 to 1986 involving 100,000 hours of telescope time, 

• A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.

• A SERENDIP III project from 1992 to 1997, involving 40,000 hours of observations, and surveying 30% of the sky. 

• Extensive SETI searches carried out by the 500-meter FAST radio telescope in China. 

• The ASTROPULSE project discussed here, involving 21,000 hours of observations from 2006 to 2010. 

• The SETI-Italia project discussed here, involving 30,000 hours of observation from 2006 to 2010.

• The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding, involving thousands of hours each year of dedicated SETI searching, on two of the world's largest radio telescopes.

• A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the  Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).

At the 27:23 mark we have someone named Matt saying  "Ultimately science is about observation. Because it's only observation which actually gives you the truth." To the contrary, while observation is the most important source of truth, there are other things that can give you the truth, such as mathematics, logic, analysis and deduction.  

At the 30:35 mark we hear some scientist driving a car, praising the James Webb Telescope, while strangely saying, "So you know, I mean I don't know: what else would you want to do with your life?" An answer might be: "Any of a million jobs more useful than astronomy." At around the 32:07 mark, we hear some authority say, "I've learned one does not argue with Nobel Prize winners." It sound like an authority-kneeling sentiment contrary to the true spirit of science, and contrary to the motto of the Royal Society, which translates to English as "Take no man's word for it."

Around the 35:49 mark we hear Sarah Seager boasting "we've made a giant accelerated leap forward in the search for habitable worlds," followed by another scientist making the false claim that the discovery of planets at Trappist-1 "gives us a hint that finding a second Earth is not just a matter of if, but when." No, a second Earth would be a planet containing life, and all attempts to find such a thing have failed. So it very much is a matter of "if" rather than just "when."  

Around the 50:50 mark we have chemist Nick Lane saying this, after referring to hydrothermal vents and the origin of life.  

"There's a particular type of mineral. It's called olivine. You find it as dust throughout interstellar space. This is a really common mineral.  And the thing is it will react with water bubbling hydrogen gas out. And that's basically an environment that's giving rise to life." 

What utter BS, baloney and hogwash that statement is.  Even the simplest living thing is an extremely high level of organization, component interdependence  and information richness; and the origin of such a thing is utterly beyond any explanation of hydrogen bubbling in water. No one has ever observed life or any of the building components of life arising from nonlife because of a mere action of minerals and hydrogen bubbling in water.  We have here more biological origins nonsense from Nick Lane, who has sometimes misspoken on this topic, as I document here and here. 

Around the 54:07 mark we see a scientist named Maggie talking to a retail clerk, and saying that she is working on the search for life in outer space. Asked whether she has found such life  yet,  she gives the misleading answer, "No, but we're getting ever closer." Asked whether she believes that life exists in outer space, she gives some more of the bad "many chances equals some successes" reasoning discussed above. She says, "Surely life arises when the conditions are right." That does not make any sense, given the failure of all experiments realistically simulating the early Earth to produce either life or any of the building components of life (protein molecules). Scientists have never observed life arising from non-life whenever they tried to create ideal sterile conditions for such a thing to happen. 

Around the 1:02:57 mark in the show, we see chemist Nick Lane staring at skulls in a glass museum case. One or more of the skulls are fake. If you pause exactly at the  1:03:12 mark, you can see that the skull closest to Nick is an Australopithecus afarenis "skull" that is labeled as a "skull model," which means a fake. That skull is not an actual skull from an organism that once lived.  

Posing a question presuming Darwinist dogmas, someone asks Lane what he thinks when he contemplates "our cousins and our ancestors?"  At the 1:02:54 mark Lane says, "It's more and more clear that you know, looking at these skulls, that there have been numerous human species and they've all gone extinct apart from us, usually because of us, usually after interbreeding with us." Lane is using the long-running language abuse of Darwinists in which non-human species with shapes rather like human shapes are misleadingly called "human." One of the defining characteristics of humans is their use of symbols. The word "human" should never be used for any species that did not use symbols. The "skull" closest to Lane when he makes this statement is a fake skull of Australopithecus afarenis, which did not use symbols, and is not correctly described as "human." 

The attempt here to promote Darwinist ideas is a bungling one. Instead of having a tale of an ancestry from human ancestors to humanity we have a story of species going extinct because they interbred with us.  At the 1:03:17 mark Lane asks the ludicrous question "Do you feel some guilt when you look into those eye sockets?" (a reference to the extinction of species who died out before recorded history). Lane gives the equally ludicrous answer "I do."

At the 1:04:45 mark a scientist named Matt Mountain gives this vacuous hand-waving explanation, "Physically, evolution made us, biology made us." Not being a theory of organization but a mere theory of the accumulation of random mutations, Darwinist ideas of evolution offer no credible account for the origin of the first human bodies or the first human minds. And if you are talking about "us" in the sense of you and me,  you are not giving any credible explanation of the origin of you and me by referring to evolution (something happening before we existed) or by the hand-waving vagueness of appealing to "biology."  You might have a credible explanation for you and me if you had (1) a credible theory explaining how a speck-sized zygote existing just after impregnation progresses to become the vast organization of a human body; (2) a credible theory of how a human mind can arise from a human body. Scientists utterly luck both of these things. The idea that brains give rise to human minds is not credible, for a host of reasons explained at my site here. 

While giving this hand-waving explanation, Mountain literally waves his hands. 

Around the 1:08:19 mark Seager refers to her search for a second Earth and says, "I have to do something that has some importance as seen by myself because otherwise I have nothing. Does that make sense?" No, it doesn't make sense, because a bit earlier Seager said that she had kids, and a person lucky enough to have children has the most wonderful treasure, the exact opposite of having nothing.  And even a single average person has a body that is the wonderful marvel of organization, and a mind that is the most glorious marvel of cognitive functionality. Such things are the opposite of "nothing." 

 The TV show discussed above ("The Hunt for Planet B") was made in 2021. The James Webb Telescope was launched near the end of 2021. The telescope has run for four full years, and has failed to produce any evidence of a planet with life. Scientist  Nikku Madhusudhan claimed to have found a biosignature on planet K2-18 b, but the claim was unfounded, for reasons discussed here. 

If they made a movie about astronomy failure

Postscript: I noticed today how books in the field of astronomy and astrobiology are engaging in outrageous misrepresentations about the productivity of their authors. I got out from the library several books by scientists (not anyone mentioned above). In the dust jacket of one book by an astronomer, we have the false claim that the person is the "author of eight hundred scientific papers." That is not true, because most of those papers are papers with multiple co-authors, very often more than three. The same type of misrepresentation appeared on the dust jacket of another author in the same field. The person was described as having "written over six hundred peer-reviewed publications." But the person was a mere co-author of most of those publications, which had an average of three or more co-authors. It's not hard to speak truthfully about paper authorship, by using a phrase such as, "He is the author of 100 papers, and the co-author of 212 other papers." 

Wayback Machine Archive Snapshots of This Blog's Content

Should it ever happen years in the future that you attempt to access this blog but find it is not available, you will always be able to read previous snapshots of this blog's contents using the Wayback Machine facility at www.archive.org. 

The way this Wayback Machine works is that you must type the full URL of some site whose content you want to view by examining previous captures of the site.  Follow this procedure to access previous snapshots of this blog's contents:

1. Go to www.archive.org.

2. In the search box at the top, type in the following:

3. You will see an interface allowing you to choose any of various snapshots of this blog's contents taken over the years. Choose the latest one. After doing that, you will be able to navigate this site's pages. 

The only reason I can imagine that someone would do this would be if there were some reason why the regular site (the site you are now at) was not available.  That could conceivably happen if this site were to be hacked by malicious actors, or conceivably it might happen long after my death. 

The Wayback Machine has many snapshots of the previous contents of my three blogs. You can access them by typing these URLs into the search bar of the Wayback Machine, shown above. 

https://orbpro.blogspot.com/

https://headtruth.blogspot.com/

https://futureandcosmos.blogspot.com/ 

When Mysterious Music Is Heard When Someone Dies

Many times someone near death may seem to get a glimpse of light from some mysterious world beyond. Some have claimed to see a glorious vision of a heavenly realm, maybe something like this:

Apparitions of the dead are often reported at a deathbed. A much less common type of report is a report of mysterious music occurring at the time of death. One such report appears on page 221 of Volume II of the classic two-volume Phantasms of the Living. We read this 1885 account by Sarah A. Sewell of events in 1863, near the deathbed of a sick girl Lilly who died on the Tuesday mentioned:

"Our attention was roused by sounds of the music of an Aeolian harp, which proceeded from a corner cupboard in one corner of the room. All was hushed, and I said, 'Lilly, do you hear that pretty music?' and she said, ' No,' at which I was much surprised, for she was a great lover of music. The sounds increased until the room was full of melody, when it gradually and slowly seemed to pass down the stairs and ceased. The servant, who was occupied in the kitchen, two stories below, heard the sounds, and our eldest daughter, who was going into the larder, stopped in the passage to listen and wonder where the music came from, and the servant called to her, ' Do you hear that music?' ...' The next day (Sunday) my old nurse and aunt came up to see how Lilly was, and were, with my husband, all in the room with the child. I had gone down into the kitchen to prepare some little dainty milk-food for her, when the same sounds of Aeolian music were heard by all three in the room, and I heard the same in the kitchen. Monday passed, but we had no repetition. On Tuesday, at the same hour, we [i.e., Mr. and Mrs. Sewell] once more heard the same wailing Aeolian music from the same part of the room ; again it increased in volume, until the room was full of wailing melody ; and again did the sounds appear to pass through the door, down the stairs, and out at the front door. Now, this music was heard three different days, at the same time each day, and not only by those in the room with the child, but by myself, my daughter, and the servant, two flights of stairs below the room the child was in ; and on the second day by my aunt and nurse and the children, who were in the dining-room." 

On the next page Matthew Sewell corroborates the account:

"I heard the sweet music identically with my wife. The music was heard on Saturday, 2nd of May, a little before 4 o'clock in the afternoon, also on the next day at about the same time, and also on the following Tuesday at about the same hour. Those who heard the music were my wife, myself, my wife's aunt, the nurse, our son Richard, aged 7 ; our son Thomas, aged 9 (the last four all dead), our eldest daughter, aged 11, and our servant, who shortly left us and went to Ireland to her husband, who was a soldier, and was soon lost sight of. Our eldest daughter is now in New York, and I have no doubt but that she will remember the circumstance. I am quite satisfied that the music heard was not produced by someone at a distance, for our house was then situated in a long garden, some 50 yards distant from the public road, and the adjoining house to ours was unoccupied at the time. The sound was not a muffled sound at all, but the soft, wild notes of an Aeolian harp, which rose and fell distinctly, and increased gradually, until the room was full of sound, as loud as the full swell of an organ, and it rolled slowly down the stairs, dying softly on the ear in weird cadences. I am certain it was not produced by human fingers."

The reported events occurred in 1863, before there were any machines capable of playing back prerecorded music, and decades before music could be transmitted by radio. The two witnesses were interviewed by one of the authors of Phantasms of the Living. 

On page 223 of the same volume, we read an 1884 account by Mrs. Yates, who states this:

"In 1870 I lost a dearly loved daughter, 21 years old ; she died at noonday, of aneurism. At night, my only other daughter was with me, when all at once we both assumed a listening attitude, and we both heard the sweetest of spiritual music, although it seemed so remote, my ears were hurt listening so intently. Till some hours after, my dear girl and I were afraid to inquire of each other had we heard it, for fear we were deluded, but we found both had been so privileged and blessed."

Giving her address, the daughter (A. Beilby) states the following:

" I can speak with certainty respecting the beautiful music my dear mother and I heard on the 26th November, 1870. I shall never forget it; we were both afraid to speak, it was so exquisite."

Camille Flammarion was the author of the monumental three-volume work Death and Its Mystery, a classic of parapsychology which you can read  here, here and here, as well as the massive tome The Unknown, which you can read here. On this page of The Unknown, we read an account by M. Alphonse Berget, involving a friend of his mother's (Amelie) who had become a nun:

"Amélie had been in religion about three years, when one day my mother went up to the garret to look for something she was anxious to find. All at once she ran back to the salon uttering loud cries, and fell down unconscious. They flew to her help, lifted her up, and she came to herself, crying with sobs :

' Oh, it is horrible ! Amélie is dying — she is dead, for I have just heard her singing as only a person who is dead could sing !'

And another nervous seizure again made her lose her senses.

Half an hour after this, Colonel M. rushed like a madman into my grandfather's house, holding a dispatch in his hand. The dispatch was from the Mother Superior of the convent at Strasbourg, and contained only these words : ' Come. Your granddaughter very ill.' The colonel took the first train, reached the convent, and heard that the Sister had died at three o'clock precisely, the hour of the nervous attack experienced by my mother. This fact has been often told me by my mother, my grandmother, and my father, who were present, as well as my uncle and aunt, all of whom bear testimony that they had witnessed this strange incident."

On page 314 of the May 14, 1921 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here, we read this account by F. H. Rooke:

" Some years ago my sister and I had a joint experience, which has been the greatest comfort to us.  Our mother lay dangerously ill , every nerve racked with rheumatoid arthritis, and both nurse and doctor seemed to think that her sufferings could not last much longer. 

 One night about 1 a.m. my sister was sitting up with the nurse ( I was sleeping on another landing ), when her attention was transfixed by the most beautiful majestic chords, as if every golden note of melody was being played on some heavenly instrument - music far exceeding anything she had ever heard . Turning to the nurse, she said , ' Did you hear that ? '  'I heard nothing,' was the answer. At that moment I entered the room saying 'Where does that beautiful music come from ?' The music had awakened me out of heavy slumber. 

As we spoke the sounds died away, and on looking at the bed, it was evident to me that the sweet spirit of our devoted mother had passed to other realms to these beautiful strains."

On page 92 of the April 24, 1885 edition of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume 3), which you can read here, we have the following account involving mysterious music at the scene of someone's deathbed. It is an account supplied in 1885, of events in 1874. The writer apparently used "Julia X" where he meant to write "Julia Z." 

"Six or seven years passed away, and Mrs. --, who bad been long ill, was dying, in fact she did die the following day. I was sitting at the foot of her bed talking over some business matters that she was anxious to arrange, being perfectly composed and in thorough possession of her senses ; in fact she was right, and my solicitor, who advised that the step she wanted to be taken was not necessary, was wrong. She changed the subject and said: ' Do you hear those voices  singing?' I replied that I did not; and she said: 'I have heard them several times to-day, and I am sure they are the angels welcoming me to Heaven; but,' she added, 'it is strange, there is one voice amongst them I am sure I know, and cannot remember whose voice it is.'  Suddenly she stopped and said, pointing straight over my head, 'Why there she is in the comer of the room; it is Julia X. [Julia Z.]; she is coming on ; she is leaning over you ; she has her hands up ; she is praying; do look ; she is going.'  I turned but could see nothing. Mrs. -- then said, 'She is gone.'  All these things I imagined to be the phantasies of a dying person. Two days afterwards, taking up the Times newspaper, I saw recorded the death of Julia Z., wife of Mr. Z. I was so astounded that in a day or so after the funeral I went up to -- and asked Mr. X. if Mrs. Z., his daughter, was dead. He said, 'Yes, poor thing, she died of puerperal fever. On the day she died she began singing in the morning, and sang and sung until she died.' "

In a 1920 publication here, we read the account below:

"The most famous of all cases of ghostly music, however, is that of Samuel Foote. When staying a night at his father’s house, in Truro, he was awakened by the sweetest music he had ever heard. He got up, roused the household, and they all listened to it, but no one could tell who was responsible for it, or whence it originated. Shortly afterwards, Foote learned that, at the very hour he had listened to the mysterious music, his maternal uncle, Sir John Goodere, had been kidnapped, taken on board the ship of his brother, Captain Goodere, and deliberately strangled."

The eerie 1891 account below (which you can read here) claims that a periodical called the Pittsburgh Dispatch reported "ghostly sounds...the music of a violin" was  long heard after a murder, at a log cabin location.

We may wonder whether anything supernatural was going on, or whether it was just some natural sound that vivid imaginations interpreted as mysterious violin music (maybe a whistling of the wind through woods surrounding a log cabin). Nature can suddenly astound us with sounds that seem like the most wonderful or eerie music. Just yesterday, I heard some songbird outside my window, and its music was so stunning that I thought to myself: this is the Maria Callas of songbirds. The notes were ever-changing and always delightful.  Hearing that bird, I can understand the kind of natural music that inspired  Shelley to write his ode "To a Skylark." 

Thank You, Readers

It finally happened: after 13 years of writing on this site, this blog has  reached a page view count in the millions. I thank my readers for their repeated visits here. 

In the past decade I have not spent a cent to advertise or promote this blog, which I have never spent more than about 20 dollars to promote. And I have never done anything to artificially inflate my page view count. So I presume that some people must be helping me get increased readership, by means of word-of-mouth.  To such people I am particularly grateful. 

I can promise this much to readers who keep visiting this site: you will for sure be able to get my posts at roughly their current publication rate, for almost two more years, at least.  I have hundreds of my not-yet-published posts which I have auto-scheduled for future publication, which will be published on my blog sites even if I meet an untimely demise this year. And all of these posts were manually written by me, without any writing help from any AI tool. So if you want to keep reading up on the "weighty topics" mentioned in this blog's byline, without any ads or AI slop, keep coming here. 

Science News BS Heat Map, June 25, 2026

 

                         

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Did two physicists just upend decades of cosmology research?"		A long-standing dogma of cosmology is a "cosmological principle," the idea that the universe looks the same on a large scale, no matter which direction you look in. But in the article we read, "A new paper published Wednesday in Nature by two physicists calls the cosmological principle into question. They argue that the universe’s structures do look significantly different depending on the direction you look. 'In this survey, we find there are large-scale structures which define special directions,' says Francesco Sylos Labini, a physicist at the Enrico Fermi Research Center in Rome, Italy and one of the study’s authors." The paper's finding will be resisted because it conflicts with a long-held but groundless dogma of cosmology, the idea that there was an instant of "primordial cosmic inflation" during a fraction of the universe's first second. Uncertainty here causes me to give a rating suggesting a result something less than rock-solid.
"Mars life search gets boost as rover test distinguishes mirrored biosignature molecules"		That headline sure sounds like something encouraging came up in the search for life on Mars, does it not? But the article is reporting nothing of the sort. It's just a Mars rover doing some analysis of biologically irrelevant molecules.
"Nasa rover detects potential signatures of ancient microbial life on Mars."		The headline is not justified, because all that is being reported on is the lackluster paper here. That paper does not mention a discovery of any building component of life, and does not mention a detection of amino acids or nucleobases (which have never been found on Mars). All that's going on is that scientists are speculating that what they observed might have been "macromolecular carbon" or MMC. There are 1001 ways to get such carbon without life ever arising. The authors state, "We explored the possibility of instrument background, inorganic Raman peak contributions from minerals and hydration, and terrestrial organic contamination. Ultimately...We conclude that MMC is the most parsimonious explanation for this feature." So it's no actual detection of such "macromolecular carbon," but just a guess about such a thing. Later (in a section very misleadingly entitled "Astrobiologically compelling sample") the authors confess, "The presence of MMC reported in this work cannot be ascribed at this time to any specific formation mechanism; biological, geological, and meteoritic sources of the organics observed are all possible."
"Great apes (including us) have been giggling for 15 million years."		We have the false claim that humans are apes. We also have a repetition of this long-taught falsehood:  "We share 98.9 percent percent of our DNA with many of our primate cousins." The difference between human genomes and that of the animals with the closest similarity (chimpanzees) is actually more like 14% rather than just 1.1%. Of course, we cannot tell whether animals ever laughed millions of years ago.
"It’s very exciting." An astronomer has seen light from just after the birth of the Universe. Now he's sharing it with the world."		Wow, that sure sounds exciting, does it not? But nothing new has occurred. The "light" mentioned is not actually light, but microwave radiation. And it's not from "just after the birth of the universe" but from 380,000 years after the birth of the universe.  This radiation (called the cosmic background radiation) was discovered in the 1960's. So the "new discovery" sound of the title is very misleading.
"A Physicist Made a 'Mini Universe' in The Lab to Check Time Really Exists"		No, the scientist sure as hell did not do any such thing. All he did was concentrate a little matter in a lab. We have not just an article writer falsely mentioning a "mini-universe," but also a physicist groundlessly using that term.
"We've just found the Universe's darkest galaxy – and it could solve one of the last, great mysteries in science."		A claim is made that some galaxy was found with "99.9 percent dark matter." The claim is groundless. Dark matter has never been observed, and all claims about the abundance of this supposedly invisible substance in particular galaxies are very dubious examples of guesswork. The claimed "galaxy" is not even a galaxy, but a mere group of four globular clusters, objects about a thousandth as massive as a galaxy.  The claim of the article that some mystery involving dark matter is one of the "last great mysteries in science" could not be be more false. Almost everywhere nature and reality present the most gigantic mysteries which science has failed to solve. Scientists and science journalists who fail to perceive this are those who have deluded themselves that they understand great mysteries that are a thousand miles over their heads.
"Research Suggests the Older You Get, the More Weed You Should Smoke"		In this article at Futurism.com, we get no research results backing up this claim. We merely hear of a paper that involved only cells, one claiming some benefits to cells, without showing any relation between marijuana use and brain decline. Another paper reviewing 26 studies states, "Although variability in the cannabis products used, outcomes assessed, and study quality limits the conclusions that can be made, modest reductions in cognitive performance were generally detected with higher doses and heavier lifetime use." It's a conclusion the opposite of what is reported in the Futurism article.

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 10)

 Mysterious orbs have been in the news lately. For example, below is a screen shot showing a headline from one major newspaper:

Below are some posts I have published about people reporting they saw mysterious orbs with the naked eye:

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 1 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 2 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 3 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 4 of 4)

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 5)

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 6)

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 7)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 8)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 9)

Let us look at some more cases of this type, which you will never hear about when addressing questions to your latest-and-greatest AI chatbot query tool.  

Below is a newspaper account from 1952, describing a "spooky, glowing ball of light."

You can read the full account using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1952-07-13/ed-1/seq-18/

We have four police witnesses of a spooky orb that moves from a road into the woods, and then changes color from yellow to red before disappearing. 

At the site of the National UFO Reporting Center (https://nuforc.org/) we have a post listing UFO/UAP sightings. They include these:

In February of 2024 someone reported seeing this:

"I observed 1 large pulsating orb red/orange about a mile away to the east. The orb would change colours gradually between more orange than red, then vice versa. I observed this from a vantage point of a canal bridge. The orb was still before slowly getting lower to the ground. I estimate the height in the sky to be about as high a a ten storey tower block as I could use the terrain and surrounding buildings for context. As it was getting lower, it split into 3 orbs, all the same size, and moved lower and south in perfect formation. They then rotated around each other two or three times before flying off at instant high speeds at an angle to the North. About a second later, they were out of sight. It certainly wasn't weather phenomenon. It was deliberately, controlled and clear with a blue sky backdrop making it easy to identify the details."

Another person claims that on September 14, 2023 he had a very detailed encounter with sky orbs, an encounter lasting hours. Below are some excerpts from a much longer account that uses the word "orb" very many times. 

 "All of these orbs would dance around, travel, then eventually disappear. Some would reappear as they had before, do nearly the same dance, travel the same direction, all to disappear again. This went on for hours! There was no rhythm, no order, no definite pattern to their behavior but just random antics, again and again and again....Another curious thing the orb would do is multiply. As you watched it, it would seem to clone itself and birth other orbs the same size and shine as the original. These orbs would trail off and disappear, leaving the main one to dance with its self. A time or two that night, other orbs would show up and the two or three or more would dance back and forth like they were interacting somehow. They would eventually disappear, leaving the original one to itself again."

Another person claims to have seen orbs coming from what looked like a spacecraft:

"Me and my father were driving home after leaving a family members house. We came to a stop sign, I looked up and said 'what in the hell is that!?' At that time my father saw it as well, he had no response. We were froze with awe. It was an egg shaped craft, about the size of bus, maybe bigger. It had a beam of light that came out from no source that I could tell, it simply emitted from the ship. The beam of light scanned the geography, we could see the light moving over the trees in the ground scanning everything. Then that beam of light disappeared, and two orbs came out of The Craft, almost like watching a lava lamp blob separate from another blob it just kind of stretched out from it and formed an orb and then another. One was red one was yellow. The two orbs then began circling the larger craft, they did this for about 1 minute maybe 30 seconds not sure, then they went back into the ship."

At another site we read this account:

"In Rothesay, New Brunswick, in August 2022 around 4 pm, two witnesses observed 8 glowing red orbs, approximately 750-1000 meters away, moving in a sine wave manner. After approximately 30 seconds, the orbs converged and vanished."

On another page of the same site we read this:

"In 1993, a couple in Lake County, Florida, experienced a UAP sighting on their cattle ranch. They were awakened by bright lights from three orbs, approximately 30 meters off the ground. One orb appeared suddenly at their window, causing a buzzing sensation on their bodies. The orbs quickly departed towards a neighboring ranch. Following this event, the couple reported strange experiences and paranormal activities in their lives."

Here is the beginning of a newspaper account from 1897:

We read in the account of a badly wounded prisoner (John Jordan) who is being transported by stage coach. We read this:

"There it was— a ghostly, phosphorescent spheroid of light, waving and swaying behind the horses and moving along the dashboard. At one instant it looked like a reflection and at another it seemed to be a small body emitting the pale light itself. The light shifted to one side and next appeared under the wagon, and as they followed it with their eves it rested over the body of the prostrate John Jordan, who was uneasily slumbering. In a moment the light waved up and down and vanished in the darkness to the rear. Nothing was said to the prisoner about the peculiar experience of the night. Later in the day, however, Jordan revived and began to talk. 

'Say, Sheriff,' he began, 'I've got something to tell you.' 

 'Yes?' 

 'I aint going to last long, Sheriff.' 

'Don't talk like that. You're badly wounded, but you'll pull through as soon as you set medical attention and an easy berth. ' 

' No, I'll not,' Jordan reiterated stubbornly. 'I've called the last turn, I feel it. Last night I saw my sister. My sister's dead you know. She's the only one that ever thought much about me. Maybe I ought to have been a better man. Sheriff, but let that pass. Well, Sis came to me last night. I saw her as plain as I see you now. She was all in white, Sheriff, all in white. She pitied me and pointed to mv eye, where I got them shots in my head.' 

Jordan was wounded in the head and a bullet or shot penetrated the eye. He is no better and is not expected to live."

You can read the full account here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SFC18970612.2.77&srpos=30&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------

 In Episode 8 of Season 16 of the Ancient Aliens TV show, we have an account by astronaut Jerry Linenger, who at the 16:41 mark says that while on a Russian space station Mir he saw a "white globular-looking thing" that looked like a snowball while looking out the window. The object was never identified. 

Below is an excerpt from pages 184 to 185 of The Problems of Psychical Research by Hereward Carrington.

"Dr. Baraduc had prepared a camera beside the bed of his wife, and, at the moment of her death, photographed the body, and shortly after developed the plate. Upon it were found three luminous globes resting a few inches above the body. These gradually condensed and became more brilliant. Streaks of light, like fine threads, were also seen darting hither and thither. A quarter of an hour after the death of his wife, Dr. Baraduc took another photograph. Fluidic cords were seen to have developed, partly encircling these globes of light. At three o’clock in the afternoon, or an hour after her death, another photograph was taken. It will be seen from this photograph that the three globes of light have condensed and coalesced into one, obscuring the head of Madame Baraduc, and developing towards the right. Cords were formed in the shape of a figure eight, closed at the top, and opened at the point nearest the body. Thus, as the globe develops in one direction, the cords seem to become more tense, and pull in the opposite direction. The separation becomes more and more complete, until finally, three and a half hours after death, a well-formed globe rested above the body, apparently held together by the encircling, luminous cords, which seemed also to guide and control it. At this moment, the globe becomes separated from the body, and, guided by the cords, floats into Dr. Baraduc’s bedroom. He speaks to the globe intensely; the globe thereupon approaches him, and he feels an icy cold breeze, which seems to surround and issue from the ball of light. It then floats away and disappears.

Frequently, within the next few days after these experiments, Dr. Baraduc saw similar globes in various parts of the house. By means of automatic writing, obtained through the hand of a non-professional psychic, he succeeded at last in establishing communication with this luminous ball, and was informed that it was the encasement of Madame Baraduc’s soul, which was still active and alive within it!" 

The photos referred to can be seen here.

Baraduc may have been the first person to ever publish a photograph of a mysterious orb.  That photo is discussed in my post here. 

At the website "Stan Gordon's UFO Anomalies Zone," we have a headline of "Three Low Level Glowing Spheres Nearly Strike Car Near Smithfield, Pennsylvania-September 18, 2024."   We read this:

"During more recent years, reports of small, low level, balls of light and sometimes referred to as orbs, have increased and are continuing to be reported from widespread locations. Some of these cases have taken place during daylight, within feet of observers and in good weather conditions. There are other incidents that are more startling such as these “mini-UFOs” appearing inside of homes, and in some cases physiological effects have been reported. Over the years I have received daylight reports of these smaller objects pacing vehicles and even entering the vehicles at times."

We read this account from a witness. 

" She was driving northbound on 119 when suddenly the three objects appeared from the left side of the road and moved across her path of travel at about hood-height.  She said she would have likely hit them had she not slammed on her brakes.  She stated the three balls moved in a straight line with just a few feet between them across the road and into the field below on her right.  Each sphere was white, and about twelve inches in diameter.  "

On page 124 of Volume 10 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1894), which you can  read here, we read this account by a Miss Williams:

(191. 2.) From Miss Williams. 11, Cleveland-terrace, Coatham, Redcar, September 23rd, 1889.

 "I was living at home with my parents at Eston-in-Cleveland. There was a working man called Long living in the village, not far from our house, whose wife was taken ill. Dr. Fulton, who at that time was staying with us, came in one night between 9 and 10 o'clock and said Mrs. Long was dying. After that we sat talking over the fire a good while, and then my sister Isabella and I went off to bed. We slept in a back bedroom, and after we got to this bedroom I said, ' Oh, I've forgotten something in the large bedroom !' To this latter I proceeded by myself, and, as I approached the door, something seemed to say to me, ' You'll see something of Mrs. Long, living or dead ! ' But I thought no more of this, and entered the bedroom, which I had to cross to the opposite end for what I wanted. When I had got the things in my hand, I noticed a lovely light hanging over my head. It was a round light —perfectly round. I had taken no light with me, but went for the things I wanted in the dark. I looked to see if there was any light coming in from the windows, but there was none : in that direction there was total darkness. I grasped one hand with the other and stood looking at the strange light to be sure that I was not deceived and was not imagining it. I walked across the room to the door, and all the way the light was hanging between my head and the ceiling. It was akin to the electric light : something of a cloud, though every part of it was beaming and running over with light. It left me at the bedroom door. On first seeing it a strange impression seized me, and after it left me I was so impressed that I could not speak of it to anyone for a day or two. I wondered at the time whether it had anything to do with Mrs. Long, and on inquiry I found that she died just about the time when I saw the light. If there was any difference, I judged it would be a little before, but there would not be much in it. This would be about 11 p.m , and about four years ago. It left an impression on my mind which I have never forgotten, and never shall forget. Mrs. Long was not ill many days—about two or three ; she died rather suddenly. I was rather interested in her. I did not see her during her illness, but had often seen her and talked to her before.  I was perfectly well at the time. and was in no trouble or anxiety. My age at the time was 23. I have had no experience of the kind before or since. I saw no figure, only a lovely light. Before telling my sister I made her promise she would not ridicule me nor call me superstitious. To the best of my recollection this is a correct statement. "

-- Mary Helena Williams.

"' P.S. —-The light which I saw was a palish blue. It emitted no rays, so that all the rest of the room was in darkness. It was wider in circumference than my head, so that as I walked I could see it above me without raising my head. As I left the room it remained, and when I looked again was gone. It was in a corner, where the darkness of the room was deepest and the least chance of illumination from the windows on the right and left, that I first saw it above my head. I had no fear, but a kind of sacred awe. The light was unlike any other that I ever saw, and I should say brighter than any other, or, at least, purer. Looking at it did not affect the eyes. It was midway between my head and the ceiling."

On the next page Mary's sister corroborates the account. 

A recent news article is entitled "Surprise city earns title of 'new UFO capital' after series of strange floating lights."  Someone named Manoel Orro states this: "One of them was a man from the German embassy, who called me a while later saying that he was a very skeptical, very logical person, who didn’t have the courage to talk about this with anyone in his family, but that a ball of golden light had appeared inside the chalet and he asked me to explain it."