A father and son explorer team have successfully reached the most remote place on Earth after embarking on a harrowing journey to Point Nemo, a place where – most of the time – the nearest humans are whizzing overhead on the International Space Station (ISS). That all changed in 2024 when Chris and Mika Brown journeyed to the “Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility”, possibly becoming the first humans to ever pass through the specific coordinates.Chris Brown is a British explorer on a mission to become the first person to visit all the Poles of Inaccessibility. What is one of those? Well, we met with Chris and Mika to find out.“A Pole of Inaccessibility is the point that's furthest from the ocean in any direction, and Point Nemo is the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, which is the point furthest from land in any direction,” said Chris Brown to IFLScience. “Quite specifically, there's three islands; Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, and Maher Island in the Antarctic, and it's 2,688 kilometres [1,670 miles] from each of those islands.”Reaching coordinates so far from land is no mean feat, requiring the right kind of vessel to navigate waves of over 7 meters (23 feet). As Mika Brown told IFLScience, it’s a crash course in establishing your sea legs that involves a lot of nausea and not much of anything else.“All the questions when we were going out there was people asking how do you kind of get on at sea?” he said. “I didn't have an answer for them because we'd never done it. The answer, which we now know, is dreadfully.”They traveled to the Pole of Inaccessibility on the Hanse Explorer, a vessel crewed by an experienced group of sailors, but even they weren’t immune to the effects of such turbulent conditions. Thankfully, it wasn’t in vain and the father-son explorer duo disembarked on Zodiac boats so that they could become the first people to swim at Point Nemo.Without a doubt, it was a kind of attack.Chris Brown, 2024The waters here have a depth of 4 kilometers (2.5 miles), painting a mental image of a dark and ominous expanse of ocean. As it happened, that wasn’t what the Browns found themselves faced with when they arrived.“I was expecting it to be really kind of black,” said Chris, “or a really dark green, having seen the Atlantic Ocean, but it's a fantastic blue. I was amazed, just looking down it's almost an iridescent blue. Amazing, very beautiful.”And they weren’t alone, either.Hard to imagine albatross attack was on the Point Nemo risk assessment.Image courtesy of Chris Brown“There were quite a few albatrosses, and one took a particular interest,” explained Chris. “By particular interest, I mean, really close interest. […] Without a doubt, it was a kind of attack. This thing came within a meter of us and just wasn’t bothered, it was looking very menacing.”Fortunately neither bird nor human came off badly in the fray, and enough time has passed to laugh with good humor about the albatross, as well as all the sea sickness. You can check out the full interview to hear all about it, and it just might inspire you to try a new approach to traveling.

Large congregations of animals can be positive or negative. Large groups of whales seen for the first time may represent an important conservation milestone, while the upcoming cicadapocaplypse might not be everyone's idea of a good time. Underneath the waves off the coast of California, however, a gathering of tuna crabs is causing a stir.Tuna crabs (Pleuroncodes planipes) are not actually crabs but rather a species of squat lobster. These tiny bright red crustaceans typically live in the waters off Baja California in Mexico. They get their name from the fact that they are prey for tuna, though a whole host of other ocean creatures including turtles, sea birds, and rays might fancy them for a small snack. These lobsters live their entire lives in the water column and so are especially vulnerable to changes in currents and tides. They are also not particularly strong swimmers and so get carried with the currents. This is part of the reason why experts think so many of them have appeared near San Diego, and wonder if the effects of El Niño are to blame. "It's not that the crabs are deliberately making their way to us," Dr. Charlotte Seid, manager of the Benthic Invertebrate Collection at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego told NBC San Diego. "They live in those waters and get swept up sort of like birds outside of their migration route, and they find their way to California, even further north than us."Unfortunately, this is not the first time tuna crabs have been relocated by the tide. In 2015, they also appeared near San Diego, where the cooler waters do not spell good news for the crustaceans, with many washing up dead on the shoreline.With a number of these strandings having occurred, one group was inspired to dig into the mechanisms behind them after witnessing one firsthand in 2018. The team found that an atypical current flowing from Baja California to central California was largely responsible.“I think it's really, really important that when we think about climate change, we don't just think about ‘warm temperature equals some response’, and we really try to dig into the mechanisms,” said Michael Jacox, a physical oceanographer with dual affiliation with NOAA and UC Santa Cruz in a statement made at the time.

Looking at the universe, we know that the Earth and the whole solar system are not in a special position. This has been extended too to the existence of alien life – if we are here, we are probably not special, and the universe must be teeming with life. To which, we ought to agree with physicist Enrico Fermi and ask: where is everyone? The Fermi Paradox has been tackled in many different ways, but one solution simply says: wait a minute! Maybe we are special!This is known as the Rare Earth hypothesis, and it originates from a book published in 2000, titled Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe. It was written by two scientists at the University of Washington; Peter Ward, a geologist and paleontologist; and Donald E. Brownlee, an astronomer and astrobiologist.In the tome, the duo argues that the evolution of biological complexity requires so many factors that the odds are against complex life being common. The position in the galaxy needs to be right, the stellar properties need to be right, the position of the planet needs to be right, and maybe you need plate tectonics, a large satellite, and a planet like Jupiter that can save you from comets. The list goes on.           To be fair to the authors, when this was put forward, there were only 11 known exoplanets. Now, there are over 5,600 known exoplanets and thousands more candidate objects. Past estimates suggest that there might be 40 billion Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way. As planet and star combos go, it is not that rare. Not all those planets will be Earth-like, and it is possible that even planets with striking similarities with our own might fail to have the right conditions in the long run.Venus is similar in mass to Earth, and it is believed to have had an ocean. But it is now a hellish place. And yet, scientists have speculated that life might exist in the clouds of Venus. One of the strongest criticisms of the Rare Earth hypothesis is that it fails to imagine life unlike our own. That it is only possible in the slimmest possible conditions on a blue marble.But scientists are investigating so many different worlds, near and far, looking at those conditions and questioning them. So far we have not found life out there – but just because we haven’t doesn’t mean it’s not there.           We will tackle how we are looking for life on alien worlds in our upcoming free Curious LIVE! event on May 31.

Philips has just unveiled the Philips Evnia 49M2C8900L, a new 49-inch, QD-OLED gaming monitor that, along with having key gaming features such as a 144Hz refresh rate, also includes Ambiglow support. This is the company's RGB tech that lets the screen sync up its rear-facing LEDs with what's shown on the screen. We're a big fan of Ambiglow, and the similar technologies found in products such as the Nanoleaf 4D LED strips and Govee AI Sync Box. It adds a big sense of immersion, while also reducing eye strain, in our experience. This immediately gives us hope that this new Philips display will have a chance of earning a spot on our best gaming monitor guide. Continue reading Philips’ new 49-inch OLED gaming monitor just made RGB essential MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best graphics card, Best gaming PC, Best SSD for gaming

Yesterday afternoon, Take-Two Interactive held a new quarterly earnings conference for Q4 2024. There were numerous announcements during the conference, such as Grand Theft Auto 5 surpassing 200 million copies sold, while the franchise as a whole has sold 425 million copies.

Over the last few days, The Telegraph has been running a series of articles about NHS whistleblowers who have had their careers and lives ruined while trying to raise concerns over patient […]

from Great Game India: According to the NTSB investigation, on March 25, the cargo ship Dali was hit with two blackouts during maintenance before ramming into the Baltimore Bridge. A preliminary assessment from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was issued on Tuesday. It states that the shipping vessel that collided with the Francis Scott […]

That long and strange trip may have finally peaked

Watch what Muslim freeloaders do with all the free money given to them, which they complain is “not enough.” Ethan Winstanley