When former The Simpsons guest star Stephen Hawking passed in March, he left behind a lifetime worth of invaluable contributions to the world of theoretical astrophysics. Aside from his distinguished life’s work, Hawking left behind his last unpublished paper which simplifies the mind-bending concept of the multiverse by reaching the conclusion that there exists a finite number of universes and they all share the same laws of physics. How did Hawking reach this conclusion? For one, he performed decades of careful mathematical calculations, of course. Yet an odd detail from his memorial service set to be held in June could suggest Hawking had help from the future.

When the first details about Hawking’s memorial service were made public, tens of thousands of people from over 50 countries applied for admission. At the service, Hawking’s ashes will be interred between the remains of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. While filling out the ballot for the service, one applicant noticed that the birth date field on the application allows any date can be chosen up to December 31, 2038. Are the service’s organizers expecting visitors from the future?

Wormholes have long been suggested as a possible means of traveling through time.

When asked about the odd date choices, a spokesman for the Stephen Hawking Foundation said they are leaving the possibility of time travelers open just in case:

We cannot exclude the possibility of time travel as it has not been disproven to our satisfaction. All things are possible until proven otherwise. But so far we have had applications from all round the world, and we do mean round – there are no flat-Earthers here.

This isn’t the first time a Hawking-related event invited time travelers from a future time. Hawking hosted a “time traveler party” complete with champagne and hors d’ouvres in 2009, hoping someone from the future might show up. Unfortunately, no one did, causing Hawking to remark that this was evidence time travel was not possible. But why would a true time traveler want to put herself under public scrutiny like that? If they’re here, they’re certainly blending in the best they can. Except Elon Musk – that guy’s way too obvious.

Another staple plot device of science fiction may soon be crossing the line into science. Researchers at UCLA have successfully transferred memory from one creature’s brain to another. Is this the solution to finding out where a criminal hid the money?

This revolutionary discovery appears in the current edition of the journal eNeuro. UCLA neurobiologist David Glanzman did not accept the commonly held belief that memories are stored in brain synapses and decided to look for an alternative memory storage locker. He speculated that one existed in RNA (ribonucleic acid), the messenger service for DNA inside cells. To test this theory, Glanzman used electrical shocks to train Aplysia californica to respond defensively when jolted in a certain area.

Aplysia what? OK, the test subjects in this experiment were California sea hares, the giant foot-long hermaphrodite marine snails found along the US Pacific coast. What do giant snails have to remember besides where they parked their shells? Actually, Aplysia californica are favorite lab subjects of neuroscientists because, while their bodies are slow, their brains are quite fast. And with only about 20,000 neurons in them (humans have 100 billion), sea hare brains are easy to study and map.

Aplysia californica sea hare

After training one set of snails to respond when shocked in their siphon (the water intake tube snails use for locomotion, feeding, respiration, and reproduction) and setting up a control group with their siphons wired but not receiving shocks, Glanzman’s team extracted RNA from their brains and injected them into other snails. When tested, the snails receiving RNA from the trained donors had the same reflexive responses while those getting control group RNA did not.

“If memories were stored at synapses, there is no way our experiment would have worked.”

Snail anatomy

That’s important because synapses are not permanent while some memories are. Or at least they are until a person has Alzheimer’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder or other brain problems. While he doesn’t explain how in the study nor the press release from UCLA, Glanzman believes that this RNA transfer can revive lost memories or those that have been shut down by disease.

Of course, it’s a long way from snails to humans (in most cases) and there are still many neuroscientists who are sticking with the ‘memory resides in synapses’ side. But Glanzman’s research is a start. His next step is to identify which specific types of RNA can be used to perform successful memory transfers.

Until then, remember this – Shocked In The Siphon would be a great name for a band.

UFOs seem to be attracted to volcanoes like flies to potato salad that’s been sitting in the hot sun all afternoon, so it was only a matter of time before one was spotted over Kilauea on Hawaii’s Big Island as it grows and spreads its lava outward. The wait is over as an individual has posted a photo of what he claims is a UFO over the volcano. Is it a spacecraft emerging, a drone observing or a bug bugging out before things get worse?

Pedro Ramirez is a self-described ufologist (per his Facebook page) from Mexico City. He posted his image of the alleged UFO over Kilauea on that page and in a video (of the still photo) on YouTube and it has since been picked up by various news and UFO sites like C. UFO M (Centro Ufologico Mediterraneo). He identifies the location where the photo was taken as the Punalu’u beach Black Sand Beach and the photographer was facing towards Kilauea, which is seen in the background with an “oval UFO” above it. In this case, the “photographer” was not Ramirez but a Google vehicle taking pictures for Google Maps.

Without even looking at the UFO under magnification, that’s where the story begins to fall apart. The Google Maps photo had to have been taken long before Kilauea’s latest eruption last week. This could have been months or even years ago. That means there’s no photographer to question about the date, time, speed, was it witnessed or found later, and other pertinent information. All that can be ascertained from the first glance at the photo is that it doesn’t seem to be a rock expelled from the volcano.

So, what is it? Ramirez says in the video post that the object stays solid under magnification (magnified photos are in the video) so he believes it’s solid. That’s quite a leap. That fact that it appears to be an oval with nothing sticking out of it moves speculation away from a drone or a bird, but doesn’t rule out the infamous speck of dirt on the lens. It’s also unclear from the photo if the UFO was moving or stationary.

Ramirez’s claim of “a wave of reports of unidentified objects have arrived from the Island” may be true, but the Google photo doesn’t appear to be one of them. Unfortunately, other photos or videos haven’t seemed to surface yet so his is getting all of the attention and scrutiny. The theory that UFOs seen at volcanoes are aliens in spacecraft observing, possibly protecting or potentially refueling might apply at Kilauea, but the idea that volcanoes are doorways for ships to enter underground bases may not hold up here since Kilauea is a flattened ‘shield’ volcano and the openings are more like fissures than wide lava mouths.

With just a Google Maps photo to go on, the needle on this one is leaning towards drone, dirt or camera anomaly. Let’s hope this doesn’t make fire goddess Pele angry.

The controversial theory that mysterious and biologically complex octopus is so unique that it had to come from another planet just got a scientific paper backing it.

“Thus the possibility that cryopreserved Squid and/or Octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted as that would be a parsimonious cosmic explanation for the Octopus’ sudden emergence on Earth circa 270 million years ago.”

OK, “should not be discounted” is not exactly a bet-your-life savings-on-it endorsement, but it’s still a big deal. In a paperentitled “Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?” published in the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biologyjournal, 33 scientists researching the cause of the Cambrian Explosion – the mysterious point in Earth’s history when single-cell organisms were suddenly overshadowed by complex animals – linked the panspermia or cosmic cause to the equally mysterious and sudden appearance of octopuses.

“The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus to the common Cuttlefish to Squid to the common are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form – it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant “future” in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large. One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth – most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized Octopus eggs.”

“Cryopreserved and matrix protected” sounds like a Superman origin story with creatures sent by another civilization to populate the galaxy (let’s take a moment to remember Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane to Christopher Reeve’s movie Superman and passed away this week), but the paper leans more towards the idea that Earth received a bombardment of comets and asteroids that could have been carrying organisms that somehow managed to survive the cold, the radiation and the long trip. Only a complex species could devise a way to do this … an advanced species with a really big brain like … an octopus?

Yes, that seems to be the flying octopus in the panspermian ointment of this particular paper. It singles out octopuses as an (or possibly the only) advanced species that sent preserved eggs during the same period that it speculates asteroids and comets were involuntarily bringing other hardy cells and viruses en masse to ignite the Cambrian Explosion some 540 million years ago. “Speculates” because there’s no physical proof yet of the real cause of the Cambrian Explosion – so panspermia, climate change, evolution and others are in play.

If they’re an advanced species, do they know about this?

Octopuses are a special and highly unusual species that can edit their own RNA and slow down their evolution – a process that science can’t explain yet. It’s interesting that many scientists think the idea of intentional panspermia as their origin on Earth “should not be discounted.” Does this mean octopuses are aliens? Only an eight-legged, squishy Jor-El knows for sure.

While the search for extraterrestrial life here in this universe is complicated enough, the problem becomes even murkier when you account for the multiverse theory—our universe might one of many “universes” that make up a collective multiverse. Theoretical physicists have long assumed that the vast majority of parallel universes would be unable to harbor alien life, but that assumption is being challenged.  A research team of scientists from Durham University, Western Sydney University, and the University of Western Australia have now found evidence that upends previously held notions of why the universe formed as it did, and suggests that the conditions to create a habitable universe are much more likely that previously imagined.

Just as Earth is an assumed rarity in our universe—a Goldilocks planet, not too hot, not too cold, and full of liquid water—our universe as a whole was previously considered to be an extreme rarity among potential alternate universes. Why? Dark energy, the strange and baffling invisible force that is driving our universe’s expansion.  Jaime Salcido, postgraduate student at Durham University told Newsweek:

“The multiverse theory suggests that our universe is only one of many, baby universes being born like bubbles in a bigger multiverse, with a wide range of physical laws and fundamental constants. The existence of life seems to depend on a small number of fine-tuned fundamental physical constants, such as the strength of gravity and the amount of dark energy. The formation of stars and galaxies is the result of a tug-of-war between these values: gravity causing matter to clump together, the dark energy causing the universe to fly apart.”

The multiverse theory states that our universe is just one in a perhaps never ending series of other universes.

Scientists thought that if there were any less or any more dark energy in a parallel universe than what we find in our own—dark energy makes up about 70 percent of our observable universe—the alternate universe wouldn’t have the physical laws that allow galaxies, stars, and planets to form in the first place.

To test this, the Australian research team studied computer models of the formation of the universe (because we can do that now…) using EAGLE (Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments), the most advanced computer simulation of how our universe was formed. They found something surprising.

It seems that celestial bodies like stars and galaxies form even when they amount of dark energy is no where near the amount predicted to be necessary. In one case, the researchers added one hundred times the amount of dark energy to the system, and a functioning, potentially habitable universe still formed. Salcido says:

“Our research shows that even if there was much more dark energy, or even very little, in the universe, then it would only have a minimal effect on star and planet formation, raising the prospect that life could exist throughout the multiverse.”

Inter-dimensional aliens are objectively more awesome than regular aliens, so that’s pretty cool.

New research shows that a universe will form galaxies regardless of the amount of dark energy.

The findings do cause a bit of a problem though. The multiverse theory was created as a way to explain the amount of dark matter, and the relationship it has with the fundamental formation of the universe. It doesn’t work anymore. While the researchers say this doesn’t disprove a multiverse, it does mean that our understanding of dark energy was rather flawed:

“It seems that we need a new physical law to understand dark energy. The puzzle remains.”

It wouldn’t be fun if it was easy, right?