For decades, humans have pondered whether a towering, hairy, bipedal creature roams our forests. Some call him Bigfoot. Some refer to him as sasquatch. Normally, his existence is debated only among paranormal enthusiasts. But thanks to some newly uncovered government files, we now know the Federal Bureau of Investigation once performed some forensic testing to see if Bigfoot was living among us.

According to the Seattle Times, the agency was contacted by a Bigfoot investigator named Peter C. Byrne in 1976 with a request to test a hair sample Byrne had collected in Oregon. The 15 hairs were attached to a small piece of skin, which Byrne and his colleagues at the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition were unable to identify. The hairs came from a search of a site where two U.S. Forest Service employees claimed to have seen the creature. In addition to the hair, there were 14-inch footprints.

Incredibly, the FBI was amenable to the request. Jay Cochran Jr., assistant director for the FBI’s scientific and technical services division, wrote Byrne and said that although the agency is interested primarily in criminal matters, he would make an exception. Though their office may have doubted the existence of Bigfoot, it had been asked to make inquiries in the past. It was possible they wanted to settle the matter once and for all.

If Byrne held out hope his sample might produce a definitive answer as to Bigfoot's existence, he was disappointed. Cochran revealed to him that the hairs came from a deer, although the correspondence was lost in transit and Byrne never actually read the reply until this past week. Speaking with The Washington Post, the 93-year-old expressed slight disappointment. "If the FBI says it's deer hair, I guess that's it," he said. "For now."

[h/t Seattle Times]

Art is supposed to be a highly subjective experience, contradicting science's focus on objective conclusions. But a team of neuroscientists believe they've arrived at a definitive interpretation about Leonardo da Vinci's famous Mona Lisa. According to their research, the subject in the painting is putting on a forced smile.

In a paper published in the journal Cortex, researchers from the U.S. and Europe set out to examine the smirk of the painting's subject, believed to be a woman named Lisa Gherardini, whose husband commissioned the painting as a gift. First, they created chimeric images of the Mona Lisa's expression by bisecting her face and mirror-imaging the left or right sides to create full smiles. Then, they asked 42 study participants to describe the images from a list of six different emotions. Thirty-nine said the left side was expressing happiness. No one in the group labeled the right side as appearing happy. Most said it was neutral, while five said it was actually displaying disgust.

Conclusion? The happiness of the smile appeared only on the left, and was therefore asymmetrical and "non-genuine."

Coupled with their observation that the face of the Mona Lisa appears expressionless around the cheeks and eyes, the researchers surmised that the woman in the painting was appearing to be insincere. They argue that Leonardo likely took his model's blank expression and added a slight smirk on the left side: perhaps Gherardini simply couldn't maintain a pleased expression while sitting for the duration of the work. They also speculate that Leonardo may have known an asymmetrical smile was thought to be non-genuine and purposely depicted it to draw more reactions out of the painting's viewers.

It's also possible that none of these theories is correct. Like any great work of art, its meaning could remain enigmatic for another five centuries at least.

[h/t Geek.com]