2026-04-11 21:00:06
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were ritually sacrificed, kicked out of the galaxy, taxonomically revised, and wore many hats.
First, scientists shed light on human sacrifice and cousin sex using ancient DNA from the bones of people who lived in fifth-century Korea. Then: the yeeting of a star, an octopus imposter, and the indignities of a bare head.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Ready or not, it’s time to visit an ancient burial ground packed with the bones of sacrificed families. Welcome to the Imdang-Joyeong site in Korea, which contains a cluster of 1,500-year-old tombs from the tumultuous Three Kingdoms period.
As the name suggests, this era was dominated by a trio of warring dynastic factions called the Goguryeo, Baekjae, and Silla. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that the Silla kingdom followed unique customs, including the practice of “Sunjang,” a coburial of sacrificed people with an elite grave owner, as well as consanguineous marriages—marriages between close blood relatives.
Now, researchers have now sequenced ancient DNA from 78 deceased individuals to corroborate the findings with confirmed lineages. The results revealed that consanguineous marriages were indeed common, and that adult women were often buried together with their own kin, which is a rarity in ancient graveyards around the world.
“Silla is thought to have practiced different marital customs from that of its neighbors, such as Goguryeo,” said researchers co-led by Hyoungmin Moon of Seoul National University and Daewook Kim of Yeungnam University. “Most notably, Silla royal elites are documented to have practiced consanguineous marriage, which is rarely observed in Goguryeo and Baekjae records. Historical accounts of consanguineous marriage are thought to be related to the consolidation of the rank and social status within Silla royals and local elites.”
“However, because of limited ancient genome studies in Korea, no corroborating genomic evidence so far has been reported regarding the marriage customs of the Three-Kingdoms period Koreans,” the team added. “Our research is the first to analyze the genome-wide composition of closely related individuals from an ancient Three-Kingdoms period of Korea.”
Many tombs at this site include separate chambers for elite grave owners, and for sacrificed people, which often included entire families that may have been ritually sacrificed and buried alongside their masters. Both elites and sacrificed individuals were often born from unions between first or second cousins, suggesting that consanguineous marriages were common across class lines.
“We found decisive evidence of three cases of families in which parents and their offspring were sacrificed together in the same grave,” the team said. “Our genetic findings are the first to confirm the acts of Sunjang of an entire household and suggest that these practices might be common for sacrificial burials of the Three-Kingdoms period.”
In addition, some adult women were buried alongside their parents and grandparents, a pattern that is rare in most other ancient burial grounds in which women tend to be buried alongside their husbands and in-laws. The study offers a rare glimpse of a society with idiosyncratic customs that is ready-made to be the setting of a new HBO prestige series.
In other news…
Some space explosions go so hard that they can kick a star right out of a galaxy. Scientists report the serendipitous discovery of one of these so-called “runaway stars” that was likely ejected from the galaxy approximately 2.8 million years ago “with an ejection velocity exceeding 600 kilometers per second”—or about 1.3 million miles per hour—according to a new study.
This cosmic sprinter is a white dwarf, the collapsed remains of a star, that was accelerated to ludicrous speed by a “Type Iax” supernovae, a type of stellar kablooey that occurs in some binary star systems.
This runaway star “is notably hotter than previously studied members of this class,” said researchers led by Aakash Bhat of the University of Potsdam. “Kinematic analysis indicates that the star has a high probability of being unbound from the Galaxy.”
So long, runaway star, and safe travels through intergalactic space.
Prepare to be ink-pilled, because it turns out that the oldest known octopus fossil ever found—a 300-million-year old species called Pohlsepia mazonensis—is not an octopus at all. It is a member of the nautilus family that just ended up looking sort of like an octopus in part because its shell fell off during the decomposition process.
“We present the first comprehensive reassessment of this enigmatic fossil, alongside multiple new specimens, using a suite of advanced analytical techniques,” said researchers led by Thomas Clements of the University of Reading. During this process, the team discovered a special “radula”—a feeding organ lined with rows of teeth—that matched the nautilus family.
As a result, P. mazonensis “represents the oldest known fossil soft tissue nautiloid (albeit without its shell),” the team concluded. The finding is a boon to octopus scientists (a.k.a. Doc Ocks) who have been perplexed for years by this specimen, given that the fossil record otherwise suggests that octopuses emerged much later in time, during the age of dinosaurs.
It just proves the old adage: Don’t believe everything you hear about the evolutionary origins of octopuses.
We’ll cap off with a hat tip to a study that chronicles hat etiquette across early modern England, roughly spanning the 1400s to 1700s.
Authored by the aptly-named Bernard Capp of the University of Warwick, the work is packed with madcap anecdotes about hats as signifiers of identity, instruments of shame, tools for salutations, and even makeshift toilets in the most ribald tales.
“The ‘Pleasant History’ of Hodge tells of a simpleton humiliated by a maidservant who claps on his head the hat in which she had just defecated,” Capp noted in the study. “Such behaviour, moreover, was not confined to fiction; in 1747 a Wiltshire man admitted snatching a rival’s hat, pissing in it, and clapping it back on the victim’s head.”
Other highlights include the Cap Act of 1571, which allowed offenders “to be prosecuted for wearing hats to church;” jokes about fine ladies wearing towering ribboned hats that spooked local livestock; and a man named Thomas Ellwood who was rendered unable to leave his house for months in 1659 because his father confiscated all his hats, because who would dare, in his words, to “run about the Country bare-headed, like a Mad-Man”?
Hats off to this heady historical work, and beware the bareheaded Mad-Men.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
2026-04-11 00:07:51
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss gun violence and chatbots and acceptance of depravity.
EMANUEL: It takes a lot for a post to shock me these days, especially if it’s from a known shitposter like the president of the United States, but I’ll confess that I was shocked by Trump posting a video of a woman getting beaten to death with a hammer last night.
I’m not a big believer in the “Trump is doing X because he doesn’t want you to think about Y” theory, but it’s hard not to read as at least an intuitive desire to change the subject away from the conclusion (?) to his disastrous adventure in Iran. It’s not going to work either way, and that’s not going to be the legacy of his posting style either. What’s sticking with me at the moment is not the graphic nature of the post itself or the attempt to demonize certain minorities—unfortunately none of that is surprising at this point—but that I don’t know if it’s possible to roll back this level of acceptance of even embrace of depravity in our culture.
2026-04-10 02:00:46
Scientists have observed an extremely rare chimpanzee “civil war,” a conflict that has killed at least seven adults and 17 infants, and which sheds new light on the nature of warfare in humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.
Male chimpanzees are often aggressive to outsiders, but it is unusual for chimps to kill former members of their own social groups. Though Jane Goodall and her colleagues observed one famous example—the Gombe Chimpanzee War of the 1970s, which resulted in seven adult deaths—it’s estimated that these violent episodes occur only once every 500 years, based on genetic analyses of chimpanzee lineages.
Now, a team led by Aaron Sandel, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, has reported a far more deadly “group fissure” among the Ngogo chimpanzees of Uganda. This population exceeded 200 individuals at one point, making it the largest group of chimpanzees ever observed in the wild. But over the past decade, the chimps have fractured into two factions, one of which has staged multiple lethal raids on the other.
“Certainly, these are not strangers,” said Sandel in a call with 404 Media. “These are chimps that once knew each other, and we know that for certain.”
The Ngogo group has been studied since the 1970s by primatologists like Thomas Struhsaker, and have been intensively observed since 1995 as part of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project set up by David Watts and John Mitani. For more than three decades, researchers from around the world have convened to watch the group during summer field expeditions, while Ugandan research assistants have maintained a continuous presence at the site.
Because of this longstanding observation, Sandel said, researchers were able to be on the ground “witnessing every moment” as the deadly chimp war unfolded.
Chimpanzees from different clusters socialized together before the group fissure in 2015. Image: Aaron Sandel
This group has always had distinct subpopulations that spent more time together, including the Western and Central clusters. Even so, before the fissure, the clusters regularly overlapped for shared activities like grooming, patrolling, and interbreeding.
Sandel vividly remembers the exact day that this dynamic had noticeably shifted: June 24, 2015. He was following the Western cluster, which was at the center of its “neighborhood” territory, he said.
Video credit: Aaron Sandel
“They hear chimps from the Central neighborhood nearby, and they go quiet,” he recalled. “They seem nervous. They're touching each other with this reassurance that they typically do when they hear the outsider chimps, but I was just alone with them. I remember, just in that moment, being really puzzled and focused, like ‘what’s going on?’”
“They could have reunited and done what's typical—screaming and charging around, maybe some slapping, and then come together, sit together, groom, maybe go their separate ways after, because they'd already started to be a bit more disconnected,” Sandel continued. “But instead of reuniting in typical chimpanzee fusion fashion, the Western chimpanzees ran and the Central chimps chased them.”
Video credit: Aaron Sandel
What started as a weird vibe transformed into a weeks-long chill between the groups, followed by a temporary thaw. Ultimately, the tension spiraled into bloody conflicts.
“You act like a stranger, you become a stranger,” Sandel said. “It seemed like that planted the seed of polarization.”
Over the course of the next few years, the males in each cluster began to treat each other like outsiders. The last offspring that had parents from different clusters was conceived in March 2015. The Western and Central chimps were fully separated by 2018.
The Western chimps, despite being smaller in number, have since amped up hostilities by staging 24 violent attacks against their former kin, killing at least seven mature males and 17 infants from the Central cluster. The death toll may well be higher, but some deaths and disappearances cannot be conclusively attributed to the conflict.
Sandel and his colleagues proposed a few possible causes of this “civil war,” a term that specifically refers to human conflicts, but that may have parallels in other species. First, the unusually large size of the group may have amplified feeding competition among individuals, even in their lush forest habitat. Social networks within the group may have also been disrupted by a wave of six deaths in 2014—five adult males and one adult female—some of whom likely died from disease.
The beginning of the fissure also coincides with the rise of a new alpha male, Jackson, who replaced the previous alpha, Miles. Sandel recalled Miles grunting in submission to Jackson on the same day that the Western cluster ran away from the Central cluster. Such transitions between alphas can introduce social instabilities as the dominance hierarchy is upended, a process that can take several months.
Indeed, Miles reacted violently toward other members of the group in the wake of his displacement. Jackson, who led the Central cluster, ended up as one the casualties of the conflict; he died from injuries inflicted by the Western cluster in 2022.
Whatever the cause of the rupture, this group of former kin have now become hostile enemies. It’s always dicey to draw broad comparisons between the behavior of humans and other animals, but the team speculates in the study that one possible takeaway is that "it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.”
“If we study chimpanzees in detail and start to understand the mechanisms driving their cooperation, their conflict, and something as complex as one group becoming polarized, splitting, and engaging in ongoing lethal conflict, then we might gain insights into similar dynamics that are happening in humans,” Sandel said.
“If chimps are able to do this complex process in the absence of ethnicity, language, and religion—the things we often attribute to human warfare—chimps don't have those narratives and those excuses,” he concluded. “They're stripped away of those cultural dimensions. It must be their interpersonal social bonds and daily conflicts, reconciliations, and avoidances—all those dynamics. If that's the case with chimps, to what extent is it the case in humans? It’s a hypothesis to be tested.”
2026-04-09 23:21:05
In February, Oklahoma native Darren Blanchard attended a city council meeting in Claremore with the plan to speak out against a proposed datacenter in the community. When he went a few seconds over his allotted 3 minute time limit, the city ordered Blanchard arrested and transported to the county jail. The city charged Blanchard with trespassing, according to police records 404 Media has obtained about the incident. Blanchard has vowed to fight the charges.
The arrest occurred on February 17 during a Claremore City Council meeting where city officials were set to hear from the public about Project Mustang, a proposed data center. City residents are concerned about the datacenters' use of water, what might happen to their electricity bills, and how noisy the building will be. Answers aren’t forthcoming and Beale Infrastructure, the company behind the datacenter, won’t talk to local media and has gotten city officials to sign non-disclosure agreements.
2026-04-09 21:27:50
The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony in a recent trial told 404 Media. The case involved a group of people setting off fireworks and vandalizing property at the ICE Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas in July, and one shooting a police officer in the neck.
The news shows how forensic extraction—when someone has physical access to a device and is able to run specialized software on it—can yield sensitive data derived from secure messaging apps in unexpected places. Signal already has a setting that blocks message content from displaying in push notifications; the case highlights why such a feature might be important for some users to turn on.
2026-04-08 22:31:59
This week we start with Jason’s story about how wildlife cops are doing Flock lookups for ICE. It shows that ICE is gaining access to this sort of information through pretty unexpected ways. After the break, Emanuel tells us all about the AI ban at Wikipedia. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph breaks down a set of vulnerabilities in the ‘secure’ chat app TeleGuard.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
0:00 - Intro
1:03 - Wildlife Conservation Police Are Searching Thousands of Flock Cameras for ICE
27:55 - Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content
34:33 - An AI Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned
Subscriber's Story - A Secure Chat App’s Encryption Is So Bad It Is ‘Meaningless’