St. Louis Jane Doe: The Little Girl in the Basement
March 19, 2026
On February 28, 1983, police in St. Louis, Missouri, entered an abandoned apartment building to investigate a report of a strange odor. In the basement, they found the body of a young African American girl, estimated to be between 8 and 11 years old, decapitated, her hands bound, her clothing missing.
She became known as “Little Jane Doe” or “Hope”, a name chosen by investigators who refused to let her case fade.
The brutality of the crime stunned even seasoned detectives. The girl’s head was never found. Her identity remained unknown despite national media coverage, school record searches, and missing‑child comparisons across the country.
For decades, investigators revisited the case, hoping advances in DNA would bring answers. In 2023, her remains were exhumed for forensic genealogy, but as of now, her identity remains a mystery.
She is one of the youngest unidentified homicide victims in American history, a child whose life was stolen, whose name was lost, and whose story continues to haunt St. Louis.
In 1989, a Pennsylvania man bought a $4 painting at an Adamstown flea market just for its fancy frame, then found a Dunlap Broadside of the Declaration hidden behind the canvas. It was one of the 26 known surviving copies, and it sold at Sotheby’s in 1991 for $2.42 million.
This artist’s impression visualizes a variety of terrestrial planets.
There are several ways to find a planet, but most methods are best at discovering worlds that are gargantuan, ultra-close to their star, or both. Those toasty, star-hugging planets are fascinating, however astronomers want to find more familiar worlds too. One of the most mind-bending planet hunting methods, called microlensing, promises to reveal planets like those in our solar system thanks to tiny wrinkles in space-time.
Microlensing is a light-bending phenomenon that occurs because anything that has mass warps the fabric of space-time, sort of like the sag a bowling ball makes when set on a trampoline. The effect is extreme around the heftiest objects, like black holes and entire galaxies. But even stars and planets cause a detectable degree of warping.
This animation illustrates the concept of gravitational microlensing. When one star in the sky appears to pass nearly in front of another, the light rays of the background source star become bent due to the warped space-time around the foreground star. This star acts like a virtual magnifying glass, amplifying the brightness of the background source star. If the nearer star harbors a planetary system, then those planets can also act as lenses, each one producing a short deviation in the brightness of the source. When astronomers find planets this way, they can measure their mass and orbital distance from their host star.
Here’s how it works. Light travels in a straight line, but if space-time is bent — which happens near something massive, like a star — light follows the curve. Any time two stars align closely from our vantage point, light from the more distant star curves as it travels through the warped space-time around the nearer star.
If the alignment is especially close, the nearer star acts like a cosmic lens, focusing and amplifying light from the background star. Planets orbiting the foreground star may also modify the lensed light, acting as their own tiny magnifying glasses. Astronomers see the effect as a spike in the star’s brightness.
This animation illustrates how a star and orbiting planet can lens light from a farther star when they align from our vantage point.
Even for powerful telescopes, it’s extremely difficult to see these little surges of starlight. For one thing, they’re rare — they rely on chance alignments between two widely separated and unrelated stars drifting through space. And the signals often only last a few hours before disappearing forever, so there is some luck involved.
Telescopes on the ground also have to peer through Earth’s hazy atmosphere, which can make images too blurry to tell different stars apart. Put all that together, and it’s little surprise that less than 5% of known exoplanets have been found using this method so far.
A rogue planet drifts through the galaxy alone, untethered to a star.
But microlensing can reveal a wide variety of worlds, including ones too small or far from their host star for other methods to detect. While other techniques are biased toward bizarre planets, like lava worlds and hot Jupiters, microlensing is best suited to finding familiar ones — worlds in their star’s habitable zone and even farther out.
That includes ice giants, like Uranus and Neptune in our solar system, and even rogue planets — worlds freely roaming the galaxy unbound to any stars.
Most microlensing exoplanets discovered so far were found by ground based observatories, though our retired Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes found a few too. Soon our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will begin surveying the cosmos, and its wide, sharp view will take us from dozens of microlensing planets to more than a thousand! Who knows how many Earth-like planets will be among them?
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“Umarell” is an Italian folk term that refers specifically to elderly men, usually retired, who spend their time watching construction sites, often with their hands clasped behind their backs. The term originates from the Bologna dialect and has gained popularity across Italy.
These men are sometimes known for offering unsolicited advice to workers, despite having no professional expertise in construction. The word has even been used humorously in public policies, with some cities designating special areas for umarells to observe construction projects.
Vinjeboka, the oldest preserved handbook of magic in Norway. Via karl_eikrem
"There are approximately 100 “black books” (“Svarteboker“) in Norway dating between 1650 and 1850, but the paper in Vinjeboka is from 1480 and the text no later than 1520. It was found under the floorboards in Vinje Stave Church in 1796. The Vinje book is also unique in that it documents religiosity and mentality from before the Reformation in Norway. The content includes herbal medicine recipes and medical advice for common aliments of the time such as Jaundice. Also present is “the pentacle of Solomon the King” and numerous prayers and orations in Latin, all of which are heavily Catholic." [x]
Thousands of torches are placed in terraced fields by villagers during a local festival praying for good harvest at Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, on June 3, 2017.
Stringer
Poecilotheria metallica, also known as the Sapphire Gooty Ornamental Tarantula, is a rare but aggressive breed of tarantula found in India. The species is critically endangered. This one seen here was bred from captive tarantulas by keeper Daniel Valcárcel Muñoz de León.
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