🛸 Aliens, immortality, and zombie JFK...

Thursday

Sept 15 2022

Humans are excellent at many things, and especially holding extreme beliefs that defy hard, seemingly inescapable facts. In fact, it is a distinct quirk of our cognitive powers that enables us not only to defy the truth as it plays out in front of our eyes, but to then use the moment that should make us doubt it all to strengthen our beliefs instead.

After all, if you have spent decades waiting for the moment aliens are supposed to land in your backyard and they don't show up to their appointment, you might be inclined to reschedule the foretold visitation instead of give up on your entire life's belief system.

That's the subject in today's top story. Keep scrolling for more mind-boggling tales and don't stop believing.

What's New

Cult week

Culture

The cults that survive even when the prophecy fails

Aliens, immortality, and zombie JFK... one essential trait explains how extreme beliefs survive and thrive.

In 1959, Charles Paul Brown experienced a “cellular awakening.”

According to Brown, his body glowed, Bible verses flashed before his eyes, and he felt a “piercing through to the core of the cells and atoms of the body,” which, as he put it, awakened his DNA. He was unable to get out of bed for months after the incident. When he recovered, he declared he was immortal.

Brown ultimately gave up on a career as a gospel preacher and instead founded his own religion centered on immortality. In 1982, Brown created The Eternal Flame, a group whose belief system centered around his claims to eternal life. He promised to pass on to his followers his self-proclaimed immunity to death through a process he called “cellular intercourse.”

Over three decades, The Eternal Flame grew to include thousands of people and changed its name and tenets several times. Then in 2014, the erstwhile immortal founder suffered a major catastrophe — Brown died at 79.

With Brown’s immortality definitively disproven, the end should have been nigh for his ideas, too. But a large part of his teachings have lived on.

Cult week

Anniversary

10 years ago, Joaquin Phoenix made the most realistic cult thriller ever

Ignorance is probably the most universal human experience, but how you choose to grapple with that cold awareness is individual.

Some people seek comfort in the ideas and communities borne from love, art, or religion. But at the extreme, a few of us become prey for groups and people who isolate us and take advantage of our despair: Cults. As intoxicating as they are terrifying, cults are a ready fuel for our wildest imaginations. And nowhere is that perhaps more true than in Hollywood.

With roots in film stretching back to Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat in 1934, the cinematic appeal of cults intensified in the 1970s, disturbingly correlating with the real-life Manson murders that unfolded in the same decade. Moviegoers devoured classics like The Devils, The Wicker Man, and Suspiria. But for much of film history, cults were a trope of sensationalist horror films, used to terrorize and titillate audiences with Satanists and witches.

Films that offer deeper, more realistic depictions of cults are a relatively new phenomenon — which is part of what makes watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master such an intensely transformative experience ten years after it first hit the screen.

Study

Science

Signs of life on Mars may be deeper than any current rover can dig

Early this year, NASA announced that its Perseverance rover had found organic molecules on Mars by shining a laser through samples collected in Jezero Crater, adding to the rover Curiosity's finds in 2018. But Curiosity and Perseverance’s discoveries of organic molecules on the Martian surface could just be the tip of the iceberg.

According to a newly published paper in Science Advances, a team working with the European Space Agency’s EXPOSE-R2 system on the International Space Station have found that the technique Perseverance used might have trouble finding many molecules to detect. After exposing the sorts of organic molecules most easily detected by the technique — known as Raman spectroscopy after Indian physicist C.V. Raman, who discovered it nearly a century ago — to a simulated Mars in Earth orbit, only a few traces of life remained at the surface.

But there might be a gold mine for astrobiologists beneath the probes’ wheels — it’s just that rovers haven’t been able to dig deep enough to get at it.

Learn more

Health

Innovation

AI can detect pancreatic cancer better than radiologists

In recent years, AI has infiltrated hospitals: We now have everything from digital nursing assistants to robotic surgeries. For their next feat, computers are taking on cancer detection.

Scientists have developed a new AI system that can spot signs of pancreatic cancer missed by even the best radiologists, according to a new study published in the journal Radiology.

This novel tech, which will likely roll out in Taiwan in the near future, adds to the argument that AI can help improve health care and give doctors and hospital specialists more time with patients.

Woah

Space

The mind-boggling Lobster Nebula shines in new image

The Lobster Nebula shines in a sea of stars, thanks to a commemorative image from a telescope located nowhere near water.

In fact the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) that took the new fabulous view of this object that the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab published on Monday, September 12, is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. It scans the sky atop the arid and mountainous southwestern flank of the Andes Mountains, some 7,200 feet above sea level. (Here’s a Google Map view of the site.)

From this location, DECam has spent the last ten years scanning the sky from the Southern Hemisphere. NOIRLab officials celebrated DECam’s decadal feat with the release of a gorgeous new view of the Lobster Nebula that brims with vibrant colors.

Take a closer look

Review

Movies

With Pearl, A24 perfects its first horror franchise

Horror sequels are nothing out of the ordinary. If a new movie manages to scare up a profit at the box office, you can pretty much assume a sequel is already in the works. Prequels, however, are another story. Even before George Lucas poisoned the well, it was generally agreed that trying to tell a new story set before the original was more trouble than its worth.

So it may come as a surprise that Pearl, the surprise prequel to Ti West’s surprise horror hit X, not only matches but exceeds the original.

Filmed back-to-back with X before that movieearned $14 million on a budget of $1M, Pearl proves that A24’s first horror franchise is Mia Goth, who pulls double duty once again in a movie that manages to out-perform the original in nearly every way.

Read our review

Meanwhile...

Researchers uncover how your brain knows something is food

This new Webb Telescope picture of the beloved Orion Nebula is glorious

'Daredevil: Born Again' won't be the Netflix follow-up fans wanted

Spoilers!

'She-Hulk' Episode 5 finally solves its biggest Marvel mystery

Today in history: Prince Harry of Wales was born in London September 15, 1984.

Song of the day: "Danielle (smile on my face)," Fred again..

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