Martian Creepy Crawlers The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter has spotted "spiders" on the Red Planet's southern polar region. But they're not the arachnids we fear or adore back on Earth — they're the result of a complex geological process that causes carbon dioxide to sublimate, digging up darker material from below the surface during the planet's spring. And they're a whole lot larger than the spiders you're used to, measuring up to 3,300 feet across. Carbon dioxide forms tall geysers, scattering Martian soil in "spider-shaped" patterns — a fascinating phenomenon resulting in so ..read more

Streaming Stars New footage from NASA shows an eruption from our Sun breaking the tail off of a comet whizzing by, IFLScience reports, making for a dramatic display of the Sun's power. The agency's STEREO A spacecraft captured the sequence of events in early April, when the Sun spewed a coronal mass ejection — an explosion of plasma from the Sun's corona — just as the comet 12P/Pons–Brooks flew into the path of this massive wave of solar energy. As the wave hit, the tail of the comet broke off momentarily and grew back quickly, IFLScience reports, while continuing on its long journey. Astrono ..read more

Scientists have found that our perception of time slows down noticeably when exercising, a fascinating finding that suggests we enter a perceived state of slow motion during physical exertion. "I have long been interested in how people perceive the passing of time and whether this is impacted by particular events," Canterbury Christ Church University psychology professor Andrew Mark Edwards, author of a new study published in the journal Brain and Behavior, told PsyPost. "In the case of exercise, time seems to drag in certain circumstances and yet at others moves very fast." "I was intrigued ..read more

Bye Bye Baby Over the course of less than two weeks, three of Tesla's top executives have resigned — and one announced his exit during an earnings call. As insiders who spoke to Fortune magazine confirm, Tesla vice president of investor relations, Martin Viecha, announced that he was leaving the company at the end of this week's quarterly earnings call, which came after mass layoffs, a dip in sales, and the recall of the Cybertruck. In a post on X-formerly-Twitter — which, of course, the company's CEO Elon Musk also owns — Viecha said that he is "retiring from the world of investor relations ..read more

Falling Behind Meta's Twitter killer Threads has now had more daily active users in the US than Elon Musk's X-formerly-Twitter since at least December, according to estimates by data intelligence platform Apptopia. "Threads DAUs in the US passed X in December 2023 and it has not looked back," Apptopia's VP of research Thomas Grant told Business Insider. In Apple's App Store, Threads is the third most downloaded free app at the time of writing, while Musk's X — formerly Twitter, if you've been living under a rock — ranks 41st. The news highlights X's struggles to attract new users in ligh ..read more

As shares of former president Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) , CEO Devin Nunes is accusing Wall Street of unfairly betting against the troubled Truth Social parent company. As CNBC reports, Nunes claimed the company's stock was the target of "unlawful manipulation" in a letter to a House Republican committee. Given the company's astronomically overvalued shares — a gentle reminder that Truth Social made a pitiful $4.1 million in all of 2023, despite being valued at several billion dollars — as well as the sheer chaos going on behind the scenes, Nunes' accusations are hard to get be ..read more

Dolphin Murder Trigger warning for any animal lovers: federal officials are investigating how a bottlenose dolphin ended up dead and riddled with bullets on a beach in Louisiana, CBS reports, and now investigators are offering a $20,000 bounty for any tips that may lead to the perpetrator. A beachgoer happened upon the corpse of the juvenile dolphin in March at West Mae’s Beach in Cameron Parish, according to a statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Law Enforcement. An autopsy later revealed that the dolphin had suffered bullets to its heart ..read more

Claim Old Story As NPR reports, Naples, Florida resident Alejandro Otero's life has been turned upside down after a two-pound battery pallet from the ISS plummeted through the roof of his house. Now he's tussling with NASA over who should be held responsible for the damage. In March, Otero noted in a since-deleted post on X-formerly-Twitter that the cylindrical hunk of metal "tore through the roof" and rocketed through two floors of his house while he was out of town, leaving his 19-year-old son to handle the situation all on his own. "When he called me to give me the news," Otero told N ..read more

Dust Till Dawn Yesterday, residents in Athens, Greece were greeted with a surreal sight: the city's blue skies and famous landmarks like the Acropolis were bathed in an ominous glow of red, yellow and orange, The Guardian reports — all due to an epic dust storm from the Sahara Desert. Strong winds blew fine sand from the arid region to the Mediterranean area and choked up not just the skies over Athens but also other areas in Greece, according to the newspaper, prompting local officials to call this episode one of the worst dust storms since 2018. Dramatic scenes played out that were more remi ..read more

The diabetes drug Ozempic, its sister shot Wegovy, and their cousins Zepbound and Mounjaro [excellent phrasing imo] have all gained immense hype for being potent weight loss drugs — but interest is growing in their side effects as well. Case in point, in a new survey from the investment firm Morgan Stanley, which was shared with CNBC and Quartz, respondents on those drugs — collectively known as glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonists — also reported lower rates of smoking and alcohol consumption, suggesting that these drugs' craving control mechanisms extend beyond food. Of the 300 peo ..read more