This could be why we still haven’t found alien life

 

Image courtesy of NASA

 Joel Kontinen

Where is alien life? We have found hundreds planets but alien life is still missing. What is the reason for  this? It could be that alien life never existed or are there other valid reasons?

The search for extraterrestrial life has been a topic of fascination and speculation for centuries. The universe has not yet yielded conclusive evidence of alien life. This phenomenon, known as the Fermi Paradox, poses the question: given the high probability of habitable planets, why have we not detected signs of extraterrestrial civilizations? 

Scientists aren’t finding alien life because they are likely searching for the wrong signals or looking in the wrong places, a new study warns.

Astronomers are mainly focused on avoiding “false positive” cases of instruments being fooled by the biology-mimicking chemistry of non-living things on other planets. However, , the study says that they should consider false negatives as well. A false negative is when life is present on an alien world but it remains invisible to us because we aren’t looking for the right signals.

“We should be aware of these false-negative results,” Inge Loes ten Kate, an astrobiologist from the University of Amsterdam, said. “These shortcomings are not yet high on the research agenda.”

False negatives may yield from factors like poor preservation of biological traces, weak signals from planets or limits of existing instruments.

Some theories try to explain this:

The Rare Earth Hypothesis: Suggests that the conditions necessary for complex life are extraordinarily uncommon across the universe. 

Life Is Common, Intelligence Is Rare: Many scientists believe that while simple life forms may be abundant, the emergence of intelligence is a rare leap. 

The Great Filter: A theory that posits a barrier preventing most life from reaching our level of development, such as the leap from single-celled organisms to complex life. 

But what if there is no alien life?

 Source:

Vishwam Sankaran 2026 This could be why we still haven’t found alien life 28 May

The most detailed survey of the universe ever conducted starts now

 

Image Courtesy Of Nsf–Doe Vera C. Rubin Observatory/Noirlab/Slac​/Aura

Joel Kontinen

What do we know of the universe?  Not much, but the most detailed survey of the universe starts now.  Over 11 000 new asteroids discovered and ”they are expected to result in the most complete inventory of solar system objects ever created.”

“The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is finally beginning its mammoth survey of the universe. After a year of testing and calibration,it is starting the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which is poised to become the most detailed record of the universe ever captured.

For the next decade, Rubin will collect about 10 terabytes of data every night in the form of hundreds of high-resolution images of the southern sky. Each image will cover an area about 40 times the size of the full moon, and the completed survey will include nearly the entirety of the sky that is visible from the southern hemisphere.

This treasure trove of data will serve several purposes. The first, which has already begun, is to alert researchers to anything changing in the night sky, such as the appearance of supernovae or the motion of asteroids and comets. they are expected to result in the most complete inventory of solar system objects ever created,”

Source:

 Leah Crane 2026 The most detailed survey of the universe ever conducted starts now | New Scientist 30 June 

Early Homo sapiens may have lived in rainforests, new clues suggest — and it could overturn our understanding of human evolution

 

Image courtesy of Phil P Harris, CC BY-SA 2.5

Joel Kontinen

Did early humans live in the rainforests ages ago? This is what new study suggests.  

Nearly 70,000 years ago, modern humans created stunning rock art in an unexpected place: the tropical Indonesian island of Sulawe. The finding, announced in January, made headlines for being the oldest known rock art in the world.

But the discovery's location also highlighted another surprising finding: that members of our species, Homo sapiens, were thriving in the tropics tens of thousands of years ago.

But that perspective has been changing over the past few decades. Sulawesi's ancient rock art is one of several clues that modern humans may have lived in tropical rainforests for hundreds of thousands of years. That would mean modern humans could have been living in these hot, wet regions since soon after the emergence of our species in Africa around 300,000 years ago.

Understanding how, when and where modern humans inhabited rainforests — and how that shaped our evolution — "may give us an insight into something about what it means to be uniquely human," Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and author of the book "Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped World History" (Penguin, 2022), said, .

But the evolution thing is not true.

Conventional wisdom held that modern humans emerged from one parent population in an East African savanna and did not encounter rainforests until around 12,000 years ago, after agriculture emerged to support survival in these climes. The lack of H. sapiens fossils from Africa's tropics appeared to support this view.

Then, in 2017, scientists identified the oldest modern-human fossils — except they weren't in East Africa, but rather in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. The following year, Eleanor Scerri, an archaeological scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, and her colleagues reviewed archaeological evidence, including the Jebel Irhoud fossils, and integrated it with genetic data from present-day populations. The evidence pointed toward H. sapiens originating from many subdivided populations across Africa.

Source:

Sophie Berdugo 2026 Early Homo sapiens may have lived in rainforests, new clues suggest — and it could overturn our understanding of human evolution | Live Science 26 June

 

 

 

 

 

Hidden black hole could explain mystery at the heart of our galaxy

 

Image courtesy of Spark802, CC BY-SA 4.0

Joel Kontinen

The centre of our galaxy is a strange and chaotic place, but we may finally have an explanation for  three populations of stars, all strikingly different from one another but with similar ages, and researchers have come up the with a relatively simple model that can explain all of them at once.

This is a Darwinian explanation of the origin of  a  galaxy and black holes and stars.  The history of the Sagittarius A objects  is based on fables and not  objective science.

The closest objects to Sagittarius A* are called S-stars: a spherical swarm of stars, many of which are on elongated orbits that take them dangerously close to the black hole. Their distribution also has a strange, unexplained gap called a zone of avoidance. The next layer contains clockwise disc stars, which are massive stars that sit in a relatively orderly disc outside the orbits of the S-stars. Finally, there are the off-disc stars, which are on more scattered orbits, including some that appear to circle in the opposite direction from the rest.

Source:  

 Leah Crane 2026 Hidden black hole could explain mystery at the heart of our galaxy | New Scientist 24 June

Walking shark found in Papua New Guinea is new to science

 

Image courtesy of MV Erdmann.

Joel Kontinen

Sharks are living fossils that defy the cause of evolution. Walking sharks are not new in evolution, but this one is new to science. 

“Sharks in the genus Hemiscyllium, commonly known as walking sharks or epaulette sharks, use their pectoral fins like legs to move around and are only known to be in Australia and New Guinea.”

Walking sharks does not mean that they have discovered a breaks  that makes Darwin’s theory that says walking fishes do away  with fishes with legs cannot form.

“The new species the Darwinian has been named Hemiscyllium after Christine Dudgeon at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, who was part of the team that formally identified it.

She first encountered the shark after midnight one day in March 2025, swimming in just a metre of water covering a meadow of seagrass in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.”

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Never-before-seen shark that 'walks' on land discovered off Papua New Guinea | Live Science 16 June 

Elusive dwarf fox, feared extinct, photographed for the first time on island of Yucatán

 

Image courtesy of (Rathe fael Chacón.

Joel Kontinen

The Lazarus effect  is evident in tiny foxes in the Yucatan.

The tiny animal was part of the mysterious Cozumel fox population, a potentially undescribed species that had not been officially sighted in more than 20 years.

Park and museum officials spotted and captured the fox in 2023 and, after a health assessment, released it back into the wild. Researchers have now shared the photographs and documented the encounter in a new study published May 4 in the journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation.

Although the rediscovery confirms that Cozumel foxes are still alive, they are likely on the brink of extinction, the study authors noted

.Cozumel foxes are an example of insular dwarfism, an evolutionary process in which larger animals, including fox-sized mammals, evolve to be smaller after colonizing islands, where there are limited resources and less space than on the mainland. The foxes aren't the only mammals that have shrunk on Cozumel over time; other examples include the island's.critically endangered pygmy raccoons (Procyon pygmaeus) and dwarf coatis.

The Darwinist tend to picture this an evolutionary process, but it is not.  

Source:

Patrick Pester 2026 Elusive dwarf fox, feared extinct, photographed for the first time on island off Yucatán | Live Science 21 June

 

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Walking shark found in Papua New Guinea is new to science

 

Image courtesy of MV Erdmann

Joel Kontinen

Sharks are living fossils that defy the cause of evolution. Walking sharks are not new in evolution, but this one is new to science.  

Sharks in the genus Hemiscyllium, commonly known as walking sharks or epaulette sharks, use their pectoral fins like legs to move around and are only known to be in Australia and New Guinea.

The new species has been named Hemiscyllium dudgeonae after Christine Dudgeon at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, who was part of the team that formally identified it.

She first encountered the shark after midnight one day in March 2025, swimming in just a metre of water covering a meadow of seagrass in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.

Dudgeon was looking for a different species, Hemiscyllium michaeli, known to inhabit nearby waters. “Because it was so late and I had been in the water for a while, I was a bit over it,” she says. “Then I just saw one swimming along the bottom.”

She shone her torch in front of the shark, which was nearly three-quarters of a metre long, making it freeze as a defensive response. Then she grabbed it and gently employed a jiujitsu-like move that researchers call the “flip and tuck”. “You sort of just flip them over and tuck the tail under your armpit and it stops them from wriggling away,” she says.

Once the shark was secure, she handed it over to her colleague, Jess Blakeway, who was in a boat drifting nearby.

The species that the team had been expecting to find has a more leopard-like pattern. “This new one has got lots of spots and dashes that reminded me of braille or morse code,” says Blakeway.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Walking shark found in Papua New Guinea is new to science | New Scientist 16 June