Scientists Say They've Found Huge Number of Mysterious Circles Around the World

Using artificial intelligence, researchers have discovered mysterious "fairy circles" in hundreds of locations across the globe. The international research team trained a neural network by feeding it more than 15,000 satellite images of locations in Namibia and Australia, roughly half of which contained fairy circles. The AI identified more fairy circles across 263 dryland locations in 15 countries, similar to those previously identified in Namibia and Australia. The topic of fairy circles remains a "hotly debated topic," as co-author Fernando Maestre, an ecologist at the University of Alicante in Spain, conceded to the NYT. Some experts questioned whether the newly identified sites even fell under the current, albeit loose, definition of fairy circles.