Blurs

A Learjet 60 crashed in Palm Beach County, Florida, on Sunday 1 November 2026, sadly killing all nine people aboard.  The circumstances are particularly disturbing, as preliminary information suggests the aircraft experienced serious difficulties shortly before plunging almost vertically towards the ground. There is a historical pattern of Learjet aircraft experiencing unexpected loss of control at high altitude, followed by extremely rapid descents. What happened? Date: 1 November 2026. Aircraft: Learjet 60, registration N722BD. Location: Near Cresthaven, Greenacres, Palm Beach County, Florida. People aboard: Nine – all died. Departure: Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Texas. Destination: North Eleuthera Airport, Bahamas. Crash time: Approximately 12:50pm local time. The aircraft crashed close to Military Trail and 10th Avenue North, erupting into a huge fireball. It narrowly missed nearby homes and passing vehicles. The final moments – what went wrong? This is perhaps the...

On the evening of 30 September 2026, Tennessee attempted to carry out the execution of Christa Pike, a woman who had spent more than three decades on death row for a murder committed when she was 18. It did not go according to plan. Pike was administered two doses of pentobarbital, the single drug used under Tennessee's current lethal-injection protocol.  Yet she remained alive. More than an hour into the procedure, witnesses reported that she was still breathing and could be heard snoring. Eventually, the execution was abandoned and Pike was transported by ambulance to an outside medical facility. The extraordinary failure has now triggered an independent review by the state and a halt to Tennessee's remaining scheduled executions for 2026. But the incident is more complicated than the headline “two lethal injections failed” might suggest. The precise reason why the procedure failed is not yet known. Who Is Christa Pike? Christa Gail Pike was born in 1976 and was convicted of ...

On 16 July 2024, a meteor crossed the sky over the northeastern United States. It was not subtle. The daytime fireball was seen across several states.  People reported the shockwave. Radar detected the event. And a doorbell camera captured part of its passage. Then a fragment came down in Hillsborough, New Jersey.  It smashed through the roof of a house. At first, it was an extraordinary piece of luck — a meteorite had effectively delivered itself to a laboratory. But the real surprise came later. Scientists examining the rock discovered something preserved inside it that was potentially far more valuable than the meteorite itself. Evidence that salty liquid water had once circulated through the asteroid from which the rock came. Within that altered material were also amino acids and a surprisingly diverse collection of carbon-bearing organic compounds. The meteorite had apparently spent billions of years carrying around the chemical consequences of an ancient extraterrestrial...

A 66-million-year-old fossilised dropping may contain one of the most remarkable snapshots of the final days of the dinosaurs — including a feather that could help explain why some birds survived the extinction that destroyed almost every other dinosaur lineage. There are fossils that preserve bones, footprints, and occasionally; soft tissue. And then there are fossils that preserve something far stranger: the contents of an animal's last meal. In 2016, palaeontologist David DeMar Jr. was prospecting in Montana's Hell Creek Formation when he picked up a small, reddish-brown fossil roughly half the size of a golf ball. It was a coprolite — fossilised animal dung. But something was sticking out of it. Under a hand lens, DeMar realised he was looking at a tiny feather. What followed has turned an unremarkable-looking piece of fossilised waste into an extraordinary palaeontological record. Researchers have now identified several feathers, bird bones and fish scales preserved inside...