These 8 mind-bending moments in science made us question reality in 2023

You know that part in war movies where a grenade explodes near a soldier — and suddenly the movie’s sound director mutes everything except for a faint concussive ringing, while the whole battlefield scene becomes five seconds of fuzzy chaos? 

 

Yeah. That’s what it felt like covering science this year when a Pentagon whistleblower testified before Congress that the US military was not only in possession of unidentified aerial phenomena evidence — but that it has a UFO crash-retrieval program which caused a former Defense Department inspector general to ring the alarm, and that it has collected biological evidence of non-human intelligence. 

 

"We are not talking about prosaic origins or identities," whistleblower David Grusch told the Debrief in its eye-bulging summer report. "The material includes intact and partially intact vehicles." 

 

Even though NASA and other agencies had already ramped up documentation efforts on flying anomalies with an eye toward international politics and domestic airspace safety, 2023 truly became the year of alien-chasing when military members with seemingly sterling credentials stepped forward to talk about their encounters with tech that no one can so far explain — and a punitive culture of coverup they say kept them silent until now. 

 

We're often told that, by all accounts, the universe has been in a state of constant expansion since the Big Bang. Astronomers and cosmologists argue that we're also headed for a Big Crunch, or major contraction. But some scientists outside of the mainstream think the universe has actually been oscillating since the Big Bang — expanding and contracting repeatedly. 

 

"Not unlike the 1993 romantic comedy 'Groundhog Day,' starring Bill Murray as a weatherman stuck in a time loop, reliving the same day over and over, our universe could be repeatedly cycling through different iterations. Crunch, bang, crunch, bang," writes Salon science and health editor Troy Farah.

 

Farah explores one cyclical theory about the universe that's been given a new life by a handful of astronomers as research into the possibility of dark matter challenges traditional models of our known reality. 

 

What if I told you that your entire concept of observable reality is actually hinged on the massive sea of space-time ripples, emanating from a bunch of black holes that smashed into each other hundreds of millions of years ago? And what if I told you that this year, for the first time ever, scientists got to probe the nature of these black holes and offer the world proof that these ripples — gravitational waves — not only exist all around us, but can even be heard with the human ear? 

 

"Basically, these waves could be the sounds of the universe forever growing and reproducing. According to the cosmic inflation theory, the universe is eternal, leading to the speculative theory of pocket universes, which would mean that the universe is forever growing and reproducing. Our universe is just one pocket in this," Salon's Nicole Karlis wrote. 

 

Karlis' work on the gravitational beat led her to track down the story of this massive hum of energy, pervading the universe and puzzling scientists. In this brain-melter of an article, Karlis transforms phrases like "primordial quantum spacetime fluctuations" from science-fiction jabber into plain-spoken explanations that make us question everything we thought we knew about the origin of all matter. 

 

You’d be forgiven for thinking their name sounds like a psychedelic metal album, but the cosmological truth behind so-called “dark stars” is way more brain-warping than anything the Ozzman ever pumped through an amp. In fact, the James Webb Space Telescope should be crowned the new Prince of Darkness this year after scientists used its incredibly fine-tuned instruments to fetch potentially groundbreaking evidence of three dark stars. 

 

Scientists have been theorizing about dark stars since 2007, explains Salon's Matthew Rozsa, but this year’s research “is some of the strongest evidence for dark stars to date.”

 

Rozsa sifts through decades of theory with the research authors and physics professors who have been grappling for proof of the unseen universe since dark stars were first proposed, and delivers a series of “whoa” moments in this down-to-earth explainer. 

 

It’s easy to get lost in the muddied waters of pseudoscience when we start talking about a person’s “energy field” — and pop-culture science figures have spent a good deal of airtime these past few decades, debunking wishy-washy New Age claims about vibes and the power of positive thinking. That’s why it was an absolute slap in the cerebellum to find out that those who are simply vibing were right all along. 

 

"This is not metaphysical," neuropsychologist Dr. Julia DiGangi told Salon. "This is not metaphorical. It's actual neural chemical energy."

 

The mind is the lens through which we perceive all reality and if there's a real impact on that perception based on quantifiable emotional energy then — oof — color us shook. Indeed, there is a science to the evolution of emotions, as Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams explains in this fascinating conversation with DiGangi — and understanding that science can actually help relieve emotional dysfunction. 

 

Awash in the still-unclear science of popular antidepressant medication — and confronting recent evidence that the link between serotonin and depression may be completely misunderstood — a growing number of researchers are examining what could be a new tool in mental health treatment. Neuroscientists continue to shake up the field when they found that psychedelics could help alleviate depression in some tests and even promote faster regrowth of neuronal connections in the prefrontal cortex. 

 

Salon's Troy Farah stakes out new ground in this emergent pharma-science and talks to researchers who are unraveling our brains’ mysterious natural talent for creating psychedelic compounds, including the psychedelics DMT and bufotenine, as well as mebufotenin (5-MeO-DMT), a powerful psychedelic also found in toad venom.

 

Come for an unflinching challenge to the assumptions of modern depression treatment. Stay for the perfect synopsis of psychedelics’ synaptic benefits — along with a spate of bangers like “our brains are essentially fat, watery bags of neurons that are tangled together like a dense thicket of thorny weeds.”

 

Is it poetry, or is it a breathtaking research paper that forces us to see the inherent connectedness of all matter and thoughtforms? This year, researchers took a second look at Darwinian selection and proposed a bold new idea about how *gestures around* all this evolves, calling it the “law of increasing functional information.” In short, a complex and evolving system — whether that’s a flock of gold finches or a nebula or the English language — will produce ever more diverse and intricately detailed states and configurations of itself, with the aim of passing on information about itself (not just genes). 

 

“It really represents a connection between science and the philosophy of science that perhaps offers a new lens into why we see everything that we see in the universe,” lead scientist Michael Wong said at the time.  

 

The most mind-blowing aspect of the scientific proposal is how closely it hews to a great body of literature and poetry through history. It’s almost as if the humanities were onto something all along.

When fluid physicists study wave patterns in turbulent flows, it can help them create more efficient piping systems. When neuroscientists copy those methods, they discover a massive trove of spiraling brain waves — called “spindles” — emerging as signals from billions of microscopic neurons and coordinating the flow of activity between different parts of your brain. 

 

“In our research we observed that these interacting brain spirals allow for flexible reconfiguration of brain activity during various tasks involving natural language processing and working memory, which they achieve by changing their rotational directions," researchers said. 

 

By scanning the brains of 100 young adults and contributing to the massive, open-science Human Connectome Project, the scientists were able to open new fronts in neuroplasticity research — while pushing the needle on large-scale neuroscientific approaches.