Insane Discoveries

I usually enjoy the website  www.iflscience.com, but this time they've blown it.  On a post labeled Top 10 Insane Unexplained Discoveries, I can find only 3 real mysteries of the 11 things listed.   5 of the others are worth pursuing but are not really mysterious and I don't think anybody deserves to be a considered a crank for the other three, just wasting time on something unlikely to be fruitful.  The video is pointlessly long and conveys its largely incorrect message painfully slowly, exacerbated by especially irritating music.


Here they are:

10: Hastatic Order:  There seems to be a mysterious force that occurs in certain Uranium compounds while cooled to superconductivity.  This is a real mystery, worth pursuing.

9: Variable Constants:  The speed light in a vacuum is a constant.  Under poorly understood circumstances, the speed of light in certain far away galaxies can be observed to be changing.  There are several completely plausible explanations: gravitational lensing, for one.   What's not known is which it is.  Definitely worthy of scientific pursuit.

8: Disappearing Europeans.  They found a substantially colony of dark skinned, blue eyed paleolithic europeans that have died out.  Lots of colonies have died out.  Not really a mystery at all.

7: Tetra Neutrons.  Irreproducible.

6: Ultra energetic cosmic rays.  There are several mechanisms that might cause it.  The leading candidate, a supernova, was incorrect.  But there are others.  Certainly a phenomenon worth pursuing. But it's unlikely to generate a new principle of physics or biology or something.

5:  Placebo Effect:  many people have shown substantial cures when given placebos.  Clearly the mind can make you sick, and clearly it can quit doing it.  No mystery at all.  It's worth study--maybe it can be used in presently unanticipated ways.

4: Kuiper Cliff.  There's a region of the Kuiper belt which has apparently been swept clear of the usual asteroids, etc.  This would take a substantial planet, but no such thing is evident.  This is not a mystery at all.  Something happened to make the planet go away too recently for the asteroids to fill the space, but not recently enough to still be apparent.  It might be another large object bulls-eying the planet such that the fragments spread far (probably from outside the solar system) or more likely, it might have been captured by another planet on the way through.  Maybe it'll be discovered, probably not.

3: c-value enigma.  the complexity of organisms was thought to be related to the complexity of the DNA that produced them.  But it turns out that there's a lot of "junk" DNA in a lot of organisms and complexity of DNA doesn't correlate well with the complexity of the organism.  If you understand what junk DNA is, this is not a mystery at all.  There's a small mystery in why some simple organisms have simple DNA. My guess is that larger organisms (and their immune systems) tend to protect junk DNA, while single celled ones are much more susceptible to the junk causing problems and evolutionary pressure eliminates them.  There might be a new understanding of DNA in there, so it's worth figuring it out.

2: Cold Fusion.  This is an engineering problem, not really a scientific mystery.  Some people think that nuclear fusion can be done in a context contained enough that we can get useful energy out and there have been suggestive experiments that it might be, although so far they've all been a bust or worse.   But it remains an unsolved engineering problem, and it may for a long time.   It sure would be great if somebody figured it out though.

1a:  Dark Matter:  Galaxies hold together in a way that suggests they have at least 20 times the mass that can be observed.  Something that is presently unobservable is in there.  It might be black holes, or it may be something else.  Definitely a big mystery, but not as big a mystery as dark energy, which is unrelated, apart from having also been discovered by astronomers and given the term "dark"

1b: Dark Energy:  The universe can be seen to be expanding in a way which contradicts inertia.  Something is pushing.  What it is is the biggest mystery of physics.  There are several attempted explanations, none of which fit the "standard" model, which would require a substantial rewriting to fit it.   (the last time we had such a rewriting of the laws of physics (by Einstein and others), the atomic bomb, the transistor and a lot more came out of it.  the time before (by Faraday and Maxwell), most of what we know about electricity came out of it, including electric motors, radio, and more.)