Inverse - 🛸 UFO committee members wanted

Monday

August 22 2022

Look to the skies — UAPs are all the rage again. But you probably knew them as UFOs before their rebrand. The new acronym, short for unidentified aerial phenomena, came from the Pentagon. A 2017 New York Times feature revealed a unit inside the Department of Defense to investigate anomalous sightings by military pilots. Nobody's saying they're aliens ... and a lot of people are thinking they're drones ... but that hasn't stopped a public onslaught demanding the truth, or something like it.

That's trickled down to risk-averse NASA. The agency announced earlier this year that it, too, would investigate UAPs. But there, too, it's not exactly a UFO hunt. Agency officials have stated again and again that they're hoping to find undocumented scientific and atmospheric occurrences. There's no shortage of those. Ball lightning used to be relegated to the same books as UFOs, ghosts, and bigfoot before it was discovered to be real. So maybe NASA won't find aliens like X-Files fans want, but it could find unknown forces of nature at work, so that's still pretty cool.

Or, you know, it COULD find aliens. Maybe. Hard maybe.

What's New

Deadly impact

Science

More than one asteroid could have killed the dinosaurs

Geoscientist Uisdean Nicholson and his colleagues weren’t looking for evidence of an ancient disaster when they found Nadir Crater. They were interested in a much older, much slower event: the gradual breakup of a supercontinent starting around 140 million years ago.

But seismic data from the submerged continental shelf, off the coast of modern Guinea and Guinea-Bissau in western Africa, threw the researchers a meteor-sized curveball. And as they dug into the research more, they realized the discovery could rewrite what we know about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Learn more

PEARLY WHITES

Mind and Body

This toothpaste breakthrough could be the future of dental care

No one wants cavities. There’s the searing pain of a toothache, the inability to eat your favorite foods, and, worst of all, the unavoidable trip to the dentist. Imagine if there was a way to nix cavity-forming bacteria in the bud while whitening your less than ivory ivories? That, dear reader, may soon be the future of dentistry.

A group of Chinese researchers has developed a two-in-one hydrogel product that both kills bacteria and whitens your teeth, according to a recent study published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. When applied to teeth and blasted with some green light, the novel hydrogel killed nearly 94 percent of oral bacteria used in the experiment while also freshening up stained teeth.

The hydrogen gel is still a work in progress, but it may one day replace your Crest Whitening Strips’ coveted place in your medicine cabinet.

Feature

Entertainment

She-Hulk director Kat Coiro has been smashing rules since the beginning

Kat Coiro’s origin story, like so many in the Marvel universe, takes place in New York City.

Wandering into what she describes as a “little bookstore slash comic book store,” an adolescent Coiro first saw She-Hulk as an impressive, imposing female figure taking up as much space as she could away from other buff and tough men.

“I remember seeing She-Hulk, standing in her super suit like this,” Coiro tells Inverse over Zoom, posing with her arms flexed. “I saw it amidst all these other covers and I said, ‘I need to have this.’”

Flipping through its pages, the future director of movies and TV (who grew up without a TV) would have her mind further blown by a superhero who refused to stay drawn within the lines. “I remember seeing her walk across the advertisements, yelling at the writers, and breaking all the rules,” she says. “It felt fresh and new. As a little girl, I thought, ‘I want to grow up to be like that.’”

A film and TV director with a body of work made up of micro-budget dramedies and sitcoms, Kat Coiro has indeed grown up to be sensational like She-Hulk, now in her own Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law directed and produced by Coiro.

Review

Gaming

Saints Row brings the series back to basics, with mixed results

For every adrenaline-pumping moment in Saints Row, another brings your fun to a screeching halt.

There’s no better example of this than when I stole a helicopter, wingsuited out to land on a car and escape the police, only to realize my character had become irreparably stuck to the top of the car. The only solution was to reload.

It’s been nine years since Saints Row 4, and this new entry feels like a back-to-basics reboot. But technical issues, bugs, and many more little frustrations conspire to make this a middling experience at launch. It’s unfortunate because when Saints Row fires on all cylinders, it’s an absolute blast with some truly lofty high points.

Learn more

Meanwhile...

'House of the Dragon' Episode 1's ending explained

'House of the Dragon' already broke 'Game of Thrones' canon in one weird way

Everything we know about the 'Game of Thrones' Jon Snow sequel series

New image shows an elusive black hole behavior for the first time

Today in history: On August 22, 2004, The Scream (1893), a famous painting by Edvard Munch, was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway.

Song of the day: "Winterfell Snowfall at Dusk"

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Inverse - 🛸 UFO committee members wanted

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🍿 Reviewing 'House of the Dragon'

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🍿 Reviewing 'She-Hulk'

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