A photograph of Mars has become a source of conspiracy theories on the internet. Flavia Correia told her followers of the Olhar Digital club about this story.
A blurred image, a tiny detail in the desolate landscape, and the promise of a revolutionary discovery—this is what fuels one of the most common internet phenomena: turning vague spots and minor details captured in space into supposed evidence of an unexplained flying object (UFO).
The latest case involves a photo taken on August 20, 2023, by the navigation camera (NavCam) of NASA's Curiosity rover in Gale Crater. The recording shows a small dark spot with a silhouette vaguely resembling a jellyfish floating above a rocky ridge.
The image attracted attention again after it was reposted on X by the account @KariSivertzen—an account known in the digital 'scavenger' community that studies raw files from space agencies for anomalies.
The template for viral spread follows a clear formula: a raw recording is reproduced on social media with suggestive angles and moves to YouTube channels, where it receives the wrapper of thorough technical analysis to confirm theories about the presence of UFOs in space.
The Amazon was home to an ancient and complex civilization. They carved huge geometric figures into the ground around the same time that the Greeks were developing geometry in Europe. This culture, known as Aquiry, lived in the southwestern part of the forest between 600 BC and 900 AD. A recent study reveals the true scale of this society, which left behind giant earth-carved signs called geoglyphs.
According to a study published in the journal Nature, the territory inhabited by Aquiry covers about 183 thousand square kilometers and may contain between 24,000 and 30,000 such structures. Scientists believe that at the peak of this civilization, between 100 and 300 AD, the area could accommodate between 1.25 million and 3 million inhabitants. This population density is significantly higher than previously thought possible for a forest in that era.
We spoke with Alceu Ranzi, president of the Amazon Geoglyph Institute and coordinator of the research in Brazil.
When you use a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, you can become a victim of 'algorithmic flattery.' This is the tendency of a chatbot to agree with the user's misconceptions to please them. However, this problem also has a collective scale. A study published in the journal Science Advances showed that when hundreds or thousands of AI agents interact in a network, they begin to follow the majority and independently reach a consensus.
To understand how this phenomenon occurs, researchers created simulated environments with a thousand AI agents trained on models from the Claude (Anthropic), GPT (OpenAI), and Llama (Meta) families.
If a forecast indicates very heavy rain in a certain region, does that also mean a risk of flooding or landslides? The answer is: not necessarily. Between forecasting a meteorological phenomenon and forecasting its possible consequences lies a range of information that needs to be analyzed.
The amount of precipitation is one of the data used in this process, but not the only one. To understand what might cause a certain phenomenon, monitoring bodies must correlate meteorological data with the characteristics of each region and the conditions that may promote or exacerbate its impact.
For those who work at a computer or drive for long periods, sitting for most of the day may seem inevitable. However, prolonged inactivity affects not only energy consumption; it also changes muscle activity, blood circulation in the legs, and how the body handles glucose.
This behavior is called sedentary behavior. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines this term as any waking behavior characterized by an energy expenditure of ≤ 1.5 METs while being seated, semi-reclined, or lying down. Sedentary behavior and physical inactivity are not synonyms: a person can exercise regularly and still spend many hours of the rest of the day sitting.
In Brazil, an analysis of the National Health Survey in 2019 showed that 30.1% of adults reported six or more hours of sedentary behavior per day. This data is based on self-reports and therefore does not correspond to a direct measurement of the time each participant spent sitting.