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Has Nessie made her second appearance of 2025? Onlookers certainly think so after spotting a “dark shape and bubbles” on the surface of Loch Ness.

The latest sighting, which occurred on March 2 but only came to light now, was reported after someone using binoculars spotted what they described as a dark grey shape “lurking beneath the surface water blowing bubbles”.

Something then briefly surfaced above the water before “quickly submerging seconds later”.

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The walker who discovered the carcasses said she was aware of previous sightings

A big cat is feared to be on the loose after two sheep and one lamb were found dead in a field. Stunned walker Alicia White came across the gruesome remains.

The sheep carcasses had been stripped of flesh while the lamb was beheaded. Alicia fears they may have been victims of a giant, feline predator. She said she was aware of previous big cat sightings where she lived.

The 21-year-old farm worker discovered the remains in Carmarthen. "I found them up behind our house,” she told NeedToKnow.

Nepal's Kathmandu has been covered by a toxic haze of dust and smoke for multiple days, with the sun glowing an eerie red through the smog. The Himalayan nation is famous for its mountains, including Mount Everest, but its capital is located in a valley which hasn't seen significant rainfall in six months.

The Nepalese capital is currently ranked as the world's most polluted city in the terms of air quality by the IQ Air, a Swiss-based platform aggregating information on air pollution from various sources including governments, companies, and NGOs.

The science of why you cough, when it’s good for you and when it’s not

The cough reflex can also be triggered by a range of chemicals, like those contained in cigarette or wildfire smoke, as well as toxic gases and the stomach juice that can sometimes backtrack into the respiratory tract during an episode of acid reflux. When you cough, “your airway, because it’s so important to you, is protecting itself against the damage associated with aspiration of oral gastric contents or noxious materials,” says Shiloh.

Receptors on one of several types of neurons that snake through the lining of the respiratory tract trigger the cough reflex. Some neurons detect chemical stimuli and others are mechanosensory, detecting pressure from something like a bit of food, another foreign object or a liquid like Hegland’s coffee.

When activated, the neurons send signals to the base of the brain — the brainstem — to initiate a cough, which briefly rejiggers normal breathing activity into three quick, coordinated phases. First, a sharp inhale. Then, closing of the space between the vocal cords, called the glottis, and contraction of abdominal and ribcage muscles to build pressure in the chest. Finally, opening of the glottis to release a sudden burst of compressed air.

A little over 5 million years ago, water from the Atlantic Ocean found a way through the present-day Strait of Gibraltar. According to this theory, oceanic water rushed faster than a speeding car down a kilometre-high slope towards the empty Mediterranean Sea, excavating a skyscraper-deep trough on its way.

The Med was, at the time, a largely dry and salty basin, but so much water poured in that it filled up in just a couple of years – maybe even just a few months. At its peak, the flood discharged about 1,000 times the water of the modern-day Amazon river.

A supermassive black hole 300 million light-years away has astrophysicists stumped.

It lurks at the center of a galaxy called SDSS1335+0728, and, since 2019, researchers have been watching in real-time as it awoke from a quiescent slumber and started blazing with activity, belching out a series of eruptions of light.

This in itself is consistent with how we know supermassive black holes to behave. But the behavior of this particular black hole – nicknamed Ansky – is so weird and wild that it's challenging to explain.

The popular perception of a black hole is that of a cosmic vacuum cleaner, sitting in space constantly slurping up everything around it. This is only part of the rich and complex existence of the densest known objects in the Universe.

Like anything with mass, their gravitational reach only extends so far; supermassive black holes can go through periods of raging activity, and periods of relative quiet, during which they just sort of sit there not really accreting much material at all. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, for instance, is relatively quiescent.

Summary

In military service members with a history of repetitive blast exposure, higher blast exposure correlated with distinct functional MRI connectivity patterns, changes in cortical volume, and clinical neurobehavioral tests scores; a predictive model indicated possible changes in functional connectivity even in the absence of observable anatomical alterations.

Key Results

■ In this analysis of 212 members of special operations forces, participants with higher blast exposure showed altered functional connectivity (FC) in the superior and inferior lateral occipital cortex (LOC), frontal medial cortex, left superior frontal gyrus, and precuneus compared with the the low-exposure group (P value range, .001–.04) and had higher cortical volume in the LOC compared with healthy controls and the low-exposure group (P value range, .01–.04).

■ Clinical scores from the Neurobehavioral Symptom Inventory and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fifth Edition) were inversely correlated with FC in the LOC, superior parietal lobule, precuneus, and default mode networks (r = −0.163 to −0.384; P value range, <.001 to .04).

■ Predictive functional MRI modeling classified groups into high or low exposure with 88.00% sensitivity (95% CI: 78.00, 98.00), 67% specificity (95% CI: 53.00, 81.00), and 73% accuracy (95% CI: 60.00, 86.00).

Recently researchers documented Amazon River dolphins (Inia geoffrensis) performing a curious behavior: aerial urination. A male turns on its back at the water’s surface and ejects a stream of pee into the air—and almost 70 percent of the time, the team reported in Behavioural Processes, a nearby male “receiver” approaches this spontaneous fountain.

The researchers speculate that male dolphins might use aerial peeing to deliberately communicate their “social position or physical condition.”

Crows Are Surprisingly Good at Geometry

Crows display an impressive aptitude at distinguishing shapes by using geometric irregularities as a cognitive cue. These crows could even discern quite subtle differences. For the experiment, the crows perched in front of a digital screen that, almost like a video game, displayed progressively more complex combinations of shapes.

First, the crows were taught to peck at a certain shape for a reward. Then they were presented with that same shape among five others—for example, one star shape placed among five moon shapes—and were rewarded if they correctly picked the "outlier."

“Initially [the outlier] was very obvious,” Nieder says. But once the crows appeared to have familiarized themselves with how the “game” worked, Nieder and his team introduced more similar quadrilateral shapes to see if the crows would still be able to identify outliers. “And they could tell us, for instance, if they saw a figure that was just not a square, slightly skewed, among all the other squares,” Nieder says. “They really could do this spontaneously [and] discriminate the outlier shapes based on the geometric differences without us needing them to train them additionally.”

Even when the researchers stopped rewarding them with treats, the crows continued to peck the outliers.

On the night of July 29, the 15-meter-high (roughly 50-foot-high) square monument located in the state of Michoacán suddenly slumped under the pressure of incessant rain, its south wall crumbling into a pile of rubble.

The pyramid was once one of the best-preserved monuments of the Michoacán Kingdom civilization. It is located at Ihuatzio, a remarkably preserved archaeological site that contains one other pyramid, a tower or fortress, and some tombs.

Only one of the pyramids at the site was damaged, but personnel from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said that at least six of its 'stepped bodies' are in disrepair, including the outer wall, and the core and retaining wall.

They blamed extreme weather preceding the event.

The spatial structure of optical rotatum follows a logarithmic spiral—a signature that is commonly seen in the pattern formation of seashells and galaxies. Our work expands the previous literature on structured light, offers new modalities for light-matter interaction, communications, and sensing, and hints at analogous effects in condensed matter physics and Bose-Einstein condensates.

The evidence suggests that after sustained population growth into at least the 1330s, approximately 60 per cent of the townspeople died during the Black Death of 1349. However, significant migration by the early 1350s, and again in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, led to periods of population recovery.

One of the most interesting conclusions of this research is that the population of Nottingham appears to have continued to grow beyond the supposed ‘zenith’ of 1300. As with Lynn and Norwich, the population seems to have significantly increased during the early fourteenth century, until at least the 1330s, and that significant migration was a feature of most of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Research of other towns may establish whether such growth was a more common characteristic of English demographic change than has previously been believed.