Been getting a lot of asks about “NASA finding a parallel universe” or whatever and let me break it down.

It’s 90% sensationalism. ANITA, a detector in Antarctica has recently picked up some strange signals. The signals indicate that a very high energy particle (the neutrino) had passed through the earth without interacting with anything, something unexpected of a high energy particle.

So, here come the weird ideas. Scientists try to come up with ways of modifying our understanding of physics to make these detections more plausible. SOME of these require bizarre beyond the standard model ideas, like the one in the news. However there are much more likely answers, such as a common function of how physics normally works (won’t go into details here, but here’s a paper on it https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.01737) or simply a systematic explanation, like the signals bouncing off weird features in the ice and distorting the signal. Here’s another article: https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.091102

Conclusion? The news relies on article clicks and outrageous claims get those clicks.

The victims of the 1986 Challenger Shuttle explosion likely did not die on initial failure of the rocket, but instead were probably alive and conscious until their fuselage crashed into the ocean some time later. Six astronauts and one civilian schoolteacher died.

The failure was due to malfunctioning O-Rings, a known problem to both NASA and the contractor hired to build the shuttle. Several NASA engineers warned against the launch and were concerned about the integrity of said O-Rings. Several chief engineers, most notably Roger Boisjoly, pleaded for the launch to be rescheduled, but was ignored by the administration.