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Chicago’s rat hole wasn’t made by a rat
Plus a retirement home for penguins and other weird things we learned this week.
Rachel Feltman
At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.
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![This image shows the location of Cloud-9, which is 2,000 light-years from Earth. The diffuse magenta is radio data from the ground-based Very Large Array (VLA) showing the presence of the cloud. The dashed circle marks the peak of radio emission,which is where researchers focused their search for stars. Follow-up observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys found no stars within the cloud. The few objects that appear within its boundaries are background galaxies. Before the Hubble observations, scientists could argue that Cloud-9 is a faint dwarf galaxy whose stars could not be seen with ground-based telescopes due to the lack of sensitivity. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys shows that, in reality, the failed galaxy contains no stars. [Image description: A region of space mostly filled with background galaxies, with one prominent star at upper left. A large blob of purple haze occupies much of the field. Within the purple region, an unremarkable area is outlined with a dashed white circle.]](https://www.popsci.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Location_of_Cloud-9.jpg?quality=85&w=768)
Mysterious space object is full of dark matter
The failed star factory is nicknamed ‘Cloud-9.’
Aquarium welcomes third endangered penguin chick in less than a month
This African penguin baby will sadly not be named after a hot dog.
‘King of Silver Dollars’ coin could fetch over $1M at auction
Coin collectors consider the rare 1804 dollar one of the field’s most desirable trophies.
Chess isn’t fair—so rearrange the pieces
A new study suggests the standard chessboard setup needs restructuring.
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