Roger's Rabbit Hole

I go down the rabbit hole so you don't have to. Mysteries, science & tech, minus the nonsense. Bad claims get the knife hand ✌️

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

Welcome to Roger's Rabbit Hole.

Mysteries, science and tech. I go down the rabbit hole - then check what the evidence actually says.

Real or myth? We find out. Bad claims get called out. 👊

Plus the CyberTron build log - my $150 used PC turned local AI (SI) server 😎✌️

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

The full story 👇
https://t.co/rujglYGbbl

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

A 1960 science paper put doomsday on TODAY's date. 🌍💥

Not a TikTok. A real paper in the journal Science, titled "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026."

So what did it actually say? 👇

Three University of Illinois researchers fit a curve to 2,000 years of world population. If growth kept speeding up like that forever, the number of people would hit INFINITY on, you guessed it, Nov. 13, 2026. 📈

Their actual line: "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve. They will be squeezed to death." 😬

The kicker? Nov. 13 was the lead author's birthday. And he used to be a stage magician. 🎩🐇

So why are we still here? Around 1993, real life fell off the curve. By the formula, we'd have been around 200 billion people at the start of this year. Actual count: about 8.3 billion. 🧮

And no, there's no killer solar flare today either. NOAA's forecast shows no solar storms. ☀️

Verdict: BUSTED. Happy Friday the 13th. 🐇🕳️

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

Watch Case File Episode 3 👇
https://t.co/hrDRtPyoLX

The full Rabbit Hole article:
https://t.co/C9GGLiAp6e

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

New Case File is up. 🐇🕳️

For half a century the United States would not say how much it spent on spying. Not even the total. In 1997 a lawsuit by Steven Aftergood forced out one number: $26.6 billion.

Today the intelligence totals are published every year. For fiscal 2026 they came to about $109 billion. What stays secret is nearly everything underneath. The budget is real. The legends are unproven.

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

The full story 👇
https://t.co/g7Bm4oJIiZ

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

From the archive 🐇🕳️⚡

Sailors called it a blessing. Physicists call it a corona discharge. 😏

Picture a ship in a storm, centuries ago. The tip of the mast starts glowing blue, like a ghostly flame that doesn't burn. 👻

They named it St. Elmo's Fire, after St. Erasmus, patron saint of sailors, and a lot of them took it as a sign of protection. 🙏

It's not fire at all. The storm's electric field gets so strong around sharp points (masts, airplane wings, church steeples) that the air itself starts to glow blue or violet. ⚡

Ever seen it? 👇

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

Watch Case File Episode 2 👇
https://t.co/qV602GETEw

The full Rabbit Hole article:
https://t.co/wxcoSXMlug

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

New Case File is up. 🐇🕳️

In 1872 the Mary Celeste was found drifting in the Atlantic with nobody aboard. In the version everybody remembers, the tea is still warm and breakfast is half eaten.

The man who boarded her told a court, under oath, that there was nothing on the table. Captain Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia, and seven crew were gone. The boat was gone too. The file is still unsolved.

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

Watch the first Case File episode 👇
https://t.co/iBWDyB6RzY

The full write-up, with the document trail:
https://t.co/KfYv5qA6Sg

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

New Case File is up. 🐇🕳️

Three lighthouse keepers vanished from the Flannan Isles in December 1900. The untouched meal and the overturned chair come from a poem written twelve years later. The official file tells a colder story.

James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur were gone when the tender Hesperus reached Eilean Mor on December 26. Joseph Moore found the station empty: a tidy kitchen, a lamp ready to light, and two sets of the gear the men wore for the landings gone. No bodies were recovered. The file is still unsolved.

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

The full story from Live Science 👇
https://t.co/TY4IoQFzO5

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

A 1,600-year-old skull with ONE eye socket, right in the middle of the face. 👁️

It was found in a burial jar in Peru's Palpa Valley, Nazca Lines country.

Cyclops? Nope. 🙅

Ancient DNA shows this baby girl had an extra copy of chromosome 13. That's the likely cause of a rare condition called cyclopia, where the front of the brain never splits into left and right halves. It happens in about 1 in 100,000 births. 🧬

An outside expert says that, as far as she knows, it's the first case of cyclopia ever found by archaeologists.

The part that got me: she was buried in the regular cemetery, sharing a jar with another baby, laid to rest like most other infants. Not hidden. Not a monster. Just somebody's little girl. 🫙🐇🕳️

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

The National WWI Museum's write-up on the 11th hour 👇
https://t.co/hAPQsnu7J6

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

Why is Veterans Day on November 11? 🇺🇸

Because of the 11th hour. 🕚

In the early morning of November 11, 1918, in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiegne, France, the Armistice that stopped the fighting of World War I was signed, around 5 a.m. It didn't take effect until 11 a.m. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Those six hours were not quiet. Fighting kept going right up to 11, and men were still dying. Private Henry Gunther of Baltimore is widely cited as the last American killed, about a minute before the clock struck 11. 🕯️

In 1954, Armistice Day was renamed Veterans Day in the United States, a day to honor every American who has served.

To every veteran who served: thank you. 🫡🐇🕳️

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

UCLA's write-up on the planet that pulled a disappearing act 👇
https://t.co/VDzYbhds3J

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

A planet just disappeared. 🪐👀

For seven years, NASA's TESS telescope watched a giant planet 1,000 light-years away cross in front of its star every 8 days or so. Except it kept showing up as much as 6 hours early or late. ⏰

Every pass got shorter. And shallower. Then this year it stopped showing up at all.

So where'd it go? Nowhere. 😏

Astronomers say an unseen neighbor planet on a tilted orbit is making it wobble like a spinning top, and the wobble tipped it right out of our line of sight.

Next scheduled appearance: sometime in the next 30 to 50 years. 📅🐇🕳️

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

The full story 👇
https://t.co/my68FwUYWo

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

From the archive 🐇🕳️🧠

Quick test. Is it the Berenstein Bears or the Berenstain Bears? 🐻
Does the Monopoly Man wear a monocle? 🧐

It's "Berenstain." And no monocle. Ever.

That's the Mandela Effect: tons of people sharing the exact same wrong memory. It's named for folks who "remembered" Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. He walked out in 1990. 😳

The likely culprits:
➡️ Your brain filling gaps with made-up details
➡️ Suggestion slowly rewriting a memory
➡️ The internet reinforcing it when everybody agrees
➡️ Confirmation bias doing the rest

Which one got you? 👇

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

CBC's story on the divers who found her 👇
https://t.co/d8FyIM4QX9

[Roger's Rabbit Hole @RogsRabbitHole]

Nov. 29, 1944, 11 p.m. A German U-boat slips into a bay in Maine and rows two Nazi spies ashore. 🕵️

A local woman and a teenage boy notice two strangers in city clothes, with suitcases and no hats, walking through the snow. 👀

Four days later, that same sub, U-1230, torpedoes the SS Cornwallis off the Maine coast. 43 men die. For 81 years nobody knew exactly where she went down. 🌊

This July, a team of eight divers finally found her, nearly 400 feet down in the Gulf of Maine, after a seven-year search. They're keeping the spot private out of respect: it's a grave. 🕯️

And the spies? Both were caught in New York by the end of December. 🐇🕳️