All posts tagged: ghostly

That ghostly presence may just be bad plumbing

That ghostly presence may just be bad plumbing

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Every day, you encounter sounds that you can’t technically hear. Some of these are produced at incredibly high pitches, but many others occur as infrasound. This range of ultra-low frequencies below 20 Hertz (Hz) are found everywhere—during thunderstorms, inside factories, and even amid rush hour traffic. But a growing body of evidence suggests that infrasound is regularly detectable in spookier situations. More specifically, the seemingly imperceptible tones may frequently show up in “haunted” hotspots. This isn’t to say that ghosts generate ultra-low rumblings like crocodiles. Instead, researchers writing in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience suggest that infrasound may help explain why some places simply feel more creepy or foreboding than others. “Consider visiting a supposedly haunted building. Your mood shifts, you feel agitated, but you can’t see or hear anything unusual,” Rodney Schmaltz, a psychologist at Canada’s MacEwan University and study co-author, said in a statement. “In an old building, there is a good chance that infrasound is …

Ghostly particles might just break our understanding of the universe

Ghostly particles might just break our understanding of the universe

Published by skeptic

Neutrinos rarely interact with normal matter Shutterstock / betibup33 Notoriously ghostly particles called neutrinos may have revealed a crack in our understanding of all the particles and forces in the universe. The standard model of particle physics, which catalogues all the particles and forces we know to exist, is one of the biggest successes of modern physics, but physicists have also spent decades trying to break it. That is because it has enough flaws – notably, it doesn’t connect gravity to any of the three other fundamental forces – for researchers to suspect that they must formulate another, better model. If the standard model cracks under a stress test, that would point to where we should start building this next model. Francesca Dordei at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Cagliari and her colleagues have now identified one possible crack by studying the enigmatic neutrino. “In all the checks [of the standard model] that we did in the last two decades, every time, stubbornly, they confirmed the standard model, which means that …

A ghostly glow was seen emanating from living things in 2025

A ghostly glow was seen emanating from living things in 2025

Published by skeptic

Living things produce “biophotons” Mike_shots/Shutterstock This year, scientists observed an eerie glow emanating from mice that disappears after death, reminiscent of paranormal ideas of a bodily aura. The discovery led to a flurry of interest in the underlying science of biophotons. Biophotons are ultraweak particles of light that are produced by structures in living cells including mitochondria, which generate energy. Researchers have long sought out these mercurial, faint signals, and the field has often been controversial, in part due to the extreme difficulty of separating out biophotons from other sources of light, like infrared radiation, and proving that they are real. The experimental hurdles have meant that previous biophoton studies tended to focus on smaller, specific body parts. But in May, Daniel Oblak at the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues detected biophotons emanating from the entire body in four hairless mice. After the mice died, these biophotons rapidly faded away. They also detected biophotons being emitted from the leaves of an umbrella tree (Heptapleurum arboricola). This more comprehensive, and careful, study made …