Early Christian communities in Sweden often buried children in the same grave with adults, but archaeologists have found that these individuals rarely shared close biological ties, raising the question of how medieval people interred their dead.

In a new study, researchers analyzed the DNA of 142 skeletons from three cemeteries in Sweden dating to the 10th to 14th centuries, focusing on collective burials in which two or more people were buried in the same tomb.

"We often assume that adults and children sharing a grave were parents and children or other close family members," study first author Maja Krzewińska, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University, said in a statement. "In most cases, that was not what we found."

The researchers determined that most burials containing multiple individuals held both adults and children and that the people buried together were usually of the same sex — a woman buried with a girl or a man buried with a boy. But the DNA analysis held a surprise: People buried together rarely exhibited close biological kinship, the researchers wrote.

When Christianity spread across Scandinavia starting in the late 10th century, burial practices became more uniform. Graves were oriented east to west, and people were buried in a simple shroud without any grave goods. Baptized individuals were allowed to be interred in consecrated cemetery grounds, while babies who died before they could be baptized were excluded.

"We have previously analyzed a burial containing an adult and the remains of a fetus, which we believe represents an unbaptized individual," Krzewińska told Live Science in an email.

These unusual burial arrangements likely point to early Christian traditions. For instance, some of the children buried with adults in the new study may have been unbaptized. Normally ineligible for burial in the cemetery, the children may have been opportunistically interred with an adult to get around religious norms. Other burials may reflect unrelated people buried together in the spring after passing away in the winter, when burial in the frozen ground was impossible.

"We also believe, based on more distant genetic affinity, that some co-burials represent more distant family relations, or even non-biological kin group relations," Krzewińska said.

In early medieval Scandinavia, households often included extended relatives, servants, employees and enslaved individuals, the researchers wrote. While biological kinship played a large role in the organization of society, membership in the local Christian community may have been equally important in determining where and with whom to bury a deceased person.

"Archaeologists have debated the relationships between people buried together in this type of grave for a long time," study co-author Anna Kjellström, an archaeologist at Stockholm University, said in the statement. "Ancient DNA has finally given us the tool we have been waiting for to test these interpretations directly."

We are family

In addition to collective burials of unrelated people, the archaeologists discovered evidence that some families were buried within the same cemetery over several generations. One burial, known as Lady 56, was a Christian pilgrim who anchored three generations of relatives.

Lady 56 died when she was around 30 years old. She was buried with a rare scallop shell, a symbol of the apostle James, that she obtained after completing a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, a town in northwest Spain on the edge of Christian Europe.

The researchers also identified Lady 56's kin group, which was of particular importance to the community and stretched over generations in the Västerhus cemetery, Krzewińska said. The DNA analysis revealed that Lady 56's parents, brother and daughters were also buried in the same cemetery, but in different places.

Västerhus was part of a wealthy landowner's farm from the 11th to 14th centuries, and the cemetery contained the remains of more than a dozen members of a biologically related group, many of whom were interred with members of a different kin group.

The DNA connections between the main Västerhus family and other kin groups in the cemetery support the special status of the main family. These close-kin burials highlight the importance of ancient-DNA testing, as different burials from the same time and region can follow very different traditions.

What do you know about Jesus Christ, the man? Test your knowledge of biblical archaeology with our Jesus Christ quiz!

A new upgrade to the International Space Station's (ISS) quantum laboratory is enabling NASA to probe the behavior of atoms further than ever before, the space agency has announced.

Combining the ISS's newly upgraded "Cold Atom Laboratory" with the near zero-gravity of low Earth orbit, scientists are attempting to understand the properties of so-called "ultracold" atoms in an environment impossible to replicate on Earth. The aim of the mission is to study how clouds of atoms behave at temperatures close to absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) — the coldest possible temperature in the universe, where atoms lose all their energy of motion.

"At the coldest temperatures, matter behaves drastically different from anything we have experienced," Jason Williams, project scientist for the Cold Atom Lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built the facility, said in a statement. "The wavelike nature of matter dominates, and ultracold matter can behave in ways that are not only unexpected, but that also enable extremely precise measurements of time, gravity, and motion. The lab has lots of tools — especially with this latest upgrade — to let us probe the nature of the universe."

Rule-breaking particles

Atoms and their subatomic particles are quantum mechanical objects whose behavior is fundamentally different from that of the large-scale world. For example, the laws of quantum mechanics predict that particles can be in more than one place at the same time (quantum superposition); can be mysteriously linked with each other over great distances (quantum entanglement); and move through spacetime as waves as well as moving like fixed, solid objects.

But observing these behaviors is notoriously difficult. Firstly, atoms are so tiny that if an atom were the size of a golf ball, then a human teeing one off would stand roughly as tall as the distance from Earth to the moon. Secondly, it’s impossible to isolate measurements of these behaviors for atoms in "normal" environments (like on Earth), as the desired quantum behavior is disturbed by energy from heat and gravity.

To overcome these challenges, the ISS's Cold Atom Laboratory — which is the size of a mini-fridge — uses lasers to cool gases of rubidium and potassium to just above absolute zero. At these temperatures, atoms form a state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, in which many atoms behave like a single wave of quantum matter.

Not only does this setup allow scientists to observe quantum behaviors on a much larger scale than that of single atoms, but the reduced gravity enables the condensate matter waves to expand and evolve undisturbed for much longer periods than would be possible on Earth.

This is the fourth major upgrade to NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory since it arrived aboard the ISS in 2018. According to NASA, the significant improvements in this most recent upgrade include a redesigned magnetic trap to contain the cloud of atoms, improved atom sources, and better measurement capabilities.

Scientists launched these upgrades to the ISS in April 2026, and they have since been installed, switched on, and started making state-of-the-art measurements. As well as enabling novel tests of fundamental physics, measurements of these effects are critical in demonstrating future, space-based, highly precise quantum technologies related to positioning, navigation, timing, and gravity sensing. These technologies could one day enable astronauts to navigate on the moon without GPS and produce high-precision maps of Earth’s gravity.

"In the previous century, there was a quantum revolution that led to lasers, cellphones, and MRIs for medical imaging," Ethan Elliott, deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said in the statement. "We’re performing Quantum 2.0 – direct manipulation of large quantum states – and we hope for similar gains in quantum technology by advancing this science in orbit."

Researchers in China have announced a radical sodium metal battery (SMB) design that can fully charge in just four minutes and will retain its capacity for years of use.

SMBs are a form of ultrafast-charging, stable batteries that scientists say could one day be a cheap alternative to today's lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which rely on geographically concentrated metals and easily catch fire. SMBs also differ from sodium-ion (Na-ion) batteries in that they use a metallic sodium anode rather than a graphite or hard carbon anode.

However, SMBs remain largely theoretical because they are prone to a type of degradation known as dendrite formation. This is when the sodium ions passing through the electrode deposit onto the highly reactive, pure-metal sodium anode in spiky, stalagmite-like structures. Over time, this forms a bridge between the cathode and the anode, short-circuiting the battery.

Dendrite formation is especially common in sodium batteries because sodium is a highly reactive metal. When charge runs through a Li-ion, Na-ion, or sodium metal battery, the anode always reacts with the electrolyte to form an oxide layer known as the SEI. This is typically 10 to 50 nanometers thick — about as wide as a small virus — but generally harmless. But with sodium, the SEI often cracks, forming bumps that attract sodium ions, which pile into dendrites.

Now, researchers say they have solved this issue by using a tough, quasi-solid gel electrolyte — dubbed Sn-FB QSE — which strengthens the battery against punctures and provides a semisolid internal structure that prevents dendrites from forming. They outlined their findings in a study published May 21 in the journal Nano-Micro Letters.

To confirm the longevity of this approach, the scientists charged and discharged the battery for over 6,000 hours without dendrites short-circuiting the battery. They also noted that when they charged the battery from zero to 100% capacity in just four minutes, it retained electrical charge, measured in milliampere-hours per gram (mAh g^–1), of 80.1. This is the equivalent of around half that retained in Li-ion batteries.

When charged at a slightly slower rate of zero to 100% in 20 minutes, the battery retained 90% of its charge capacity over 2,000 cycles — matching the theoretical limits for Li-ion batteries, the scientists said in the study. This slower speed lowered the cost and improved the safety.

This is notable because the scientists achieved this in the new battery while still charging it quicker than Li-ion batteries can be charged. This is relevant because charging speed remains a sticking point for battery deployment in electric vehicles (EVs). The fastest charging EV today is the BYD Denza, which the Chinese automaker says can go from 10-70% in just five minutes. But this requires highly specialised, 1MW proprietary chargers.

Most EVs charge much slower — Tesla representatives say its Model 3 can recharge from 10-70% in approximately 15 minutes using Tesla’s own 250kW flash chargers, but representatives from the EV routing platform Zapmap say the same vehicle will take 90 minutes to charge to 80% on 50kW chargers.

Indeed, most batteries used for modern technologies, such as smartphones and EVs, are Li-ion. However, Li-ion batteries are expensive to produce because they contain the hard-to-obtain metals lithium and cobalt, and they are prone to catching fire.

Increasingly, battery manufacturers are looking to bring Na-ion batteries to commercial scale because they are cheaper and safer. However, they are heavier and larger than Li-on batteries.

SMBs are the focus of intense research because they theoretically combine the best of both types of batteries. Because SMBs use a sodium anode, rather Na-ion batteries that use graphite or hard carbon anode, they are lighter and cheaper to produce and therefore much more comparable to Li-ion in terms of size and weight. They are also safer because they operate using sodium ions, which are bulky and cannot flow to breaches in a battery wall fast enough to cause thermal runaway. This is the self-sustaining chain reaction that causes batteries to ignite when damaged.

If the issues of dendrite formation and stability at lower temperatures can be resolved, replicated and scaled, SMBs could reshape the economics of battery deployment over the next decade, the scientists said.

SMBs could be excellent choices for EVs in public transport or within commuter cars, the scientists belive, because although they have lower ranges than Na-ion and Li-ion vehicles do, they charge faster. However, they won't be available for some time, either in vehicles or smaller devices like consumer electronics.

That's because devices like smartphones are subject to harsh temperature changes that affect the internal chemistry of batteries that rely on gel electrolytes. The research must first be replicated before manufacturers feel comfortable using pure sodium metal in place of well-understood graphite configurations.

The Canon EOS R6 III is Canon's newest full-frame camera. We absolutely loved the R6 II when we reviewed it, and the Mark III's improved 32.5MP resolution, 7K video capability and CFexpress compatibility build on that strong foundation to take this camera from the beginner and enthusiast level straight into the serious intermediate camera category.

We primarily tested it for wildlife photography with Canon's 100-300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, but the R6 III is such an impressive all-rounder, it can easily turn its hand to astrophotography, sports or event photography, too.

Canon EOS R6 III: Design

• Comfortable grip to accommodate larger lenses
• Identical layout to previous model
• One SD card slot, one CFexpress card slot

Existing Canon users will feel right at home with the Canon EOS R6 III, as the build and button layout are nearly identical to the R6 II, and similar to many other R-series bodies. We tested the R6 III with the Canon RF 100-300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens and found it comfortable to get a good grip on, and it feels satisfying in the hand, especially when paired with bigger lenses.

The LCD screen and viewfinder are exactly the same as the Mark II, but there are a couple of small differences elsewhere in the design. The R6 III now has a CFexpress Type B card slot as well as an SD card slot, allowing for faster workflows and data transfer. However, considering this camera sits in the more intermediate level, we have to question whether two SD slots would be more useful for the majority of users, especially because CFexpress cards are more expensive. Plus, we used fast SD cards during our tests and encountered no problems at all with the write speed or buffer.

Canon EOS R6 III: Performance

• An absolute joy for wildlife photography
• 32.5MP sensor is a very welcome improvement over the Mark II
• Autofocus and subject detection are accurate and sticky

The Canon EOS R6 III features more advanced AI-powered autofocus, which enables it to track people, animals and vehicles more easily compared with the Mark II. When we were photographing animals at a zoo, the autofocus was generally very good, although there were a few occasions when the camera got confused. The focus jumped between the giraffe’s eyes, nostrils and ossicones, and the camera couldn’t quite figure out what to focus on, even when the animal was facing towards the camera with the eyes in view. There were also a few unfortunate occasions when the camera would find and track an "eye" on the — how do we put this — wrong end of the animal. Generally, though, it was fast and accurate.

In our review of the previous model, the Canon EOS R6 II, we said, "Considering it's the next step up from the Canon EOS R8, we'd hoped for a bump in resolution. Matching the 32.5MP resolution of the crop-sensor Canon R7 would have given the R6 II an even sweeter spot between the R8 and the 45MP powerhouse Canon EOS R5 II." It seems Canon was listening, as the 32.5MP sensor in the Canon EOS R6 III sits perfectly between the beginner and professional lineups. The images are clean, detailed and not too noisy, making this camera a compelling choice for photographic styles that require excellent resolution without excessive noise.

Canon EOS R6 III: Functionality

• Canon claims battery life allows for around 620 shots (CIPA) — we took around 6,000
• Blackout-free burst shooting up to 40FPS
• Pre-continuous shooting

For wildlife photography, blackout-free shooting enables you to follow the subject a lot easier as it's moving, to ensure you can keep the subject centered and maintain your composition. What's more, with the R6 III, you can shoot up to a massive 40 frames per second (FPS) blackout-free, which is perfect for fast-moving wildlife. (Keep in mind, this means you need to hone your timing to avoid the "spray and pray" method and end up with tons of photos of the exact same moment). This is one feature of a wildlife camera that makes a big difference.

The R6 III also features pre-continuous shooting, where it'll record up to 20 frames (approx 0.5 seconds) before the shutter is fully pressed — another useful feature for wildlife and sports photographers who need to capture fleeting moments.

The Mark III uses the upgraded LP-E6P battery, shared with the R5 II, which offers significantly more shots per charge than the LP-E6NH in the R6 II. That said, it means that if you're upgrading from a different Canon model, your current spare batteries won't work in the R6 III, so you'll need to invest in a few spares. However, we managed to get more than 6,000 photos without having to swap out the battery, so you won't need to worry about the battery running out unless you're shooting all day for multiple days.

Should you buy the Canon EOS R6 III?

We can confidently say: yes, you should buy it. It seems to tick all the boxes for a lot of shooting scenarios, whether it's your main wildlife camera or a backup body for weddings. The 32.5MP sensor produces beautiful images with minimal noise and accurate color reproduction; it's lightning fast with a 40FPS burst speed and can capture up to 7K 60p video. However, if you're looking for a more serious pro-level camera, perhaps opt for the R1 or R3 instead.

If this camera isn't for you

A years-long malaria control campaign in the Brazilian Amazon nearly eliminated the disease from a city — but then cases rebounded. Now, scientists think they've uncovered why.

The campaign took place in northern Brazil during the construction of the Belo Monte Dam in the Xingu River, one of the largest hydroelectric dams in the world. From 2013 to 2017, the initiative slashed annual malaria rates from more than 1,200 cases to fewer than 60. But the program ended, and within a few years, infections had rebounded to more than 700 cases a year. This time, they were concentrated in the rural communities surrounding the river in the city of Altamira.

In a study published Thursday (July 9) in the journal GeoHealth, scientists analyzed 15 years of malaria surveillance records alongside satellite images of forests around Altamira. Earlier studies have pointed to deforestation and dam construction as a driver of malaria because they can provide habitats for mosquito larvae, which inhabit the forest edge. In Altamira, large stretches of rainforest have been cleared for cattle ranching, logging and settlement along the Xingu River in the decades since the region was first opened up by road-building, leaving a patchwork of cleared land pressed up against the remaining forest.

However, the study found that the malaria resurgence wasn't simply a result of how much forest had been cut down. Instead, cases tracked most closely with the forest edge, the boundary where intact forest meets cleared or open land. There, mosquitoes get everything they need to thrive: shade from the tree line, sunlit pools of standing water for their larvae, and people living or working close by.

The findings highlight how the environment contributes to malaria risk, suggesting that maintaining surveillance in these high-risk landscapes could be just as important as driving cases down in the first place.

"What made Altamira compelling was that the timing gave us something rare, close to a natural experiment," study co-author Eloise Skinner, an epidemiologist and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia, told Live Science in an email. The results of that natural experiment could help Brazil in its efforts to eliminate malaria from the country in the next decade, she said.

A program tied to temporary funding

The researchers tracked malaria trends before, during and after the construction of the Belo Monte Dam. Before construction began, malaria was already a persistent problem in the region; Altamira city alone reported more than 1,200 cases a year.

As thousands of workers moved in, local health authorities and the dam's developers rolled out an intensive control program that involved spraying insecticides indoors, using mosquito nets, and deploying rapid diagnosis and treatment when cases did emerge. The goal was to head off outbreaks spread by Nyssorhynchus darlingi, the mosquito that carries the malaria-causing parasite in the Brazilian Amazon.

Mosquitoes pick up the parasite that causes malaria by feeding on the blood of infected people, and they can then spread that parasite to others they bite. Treating infected people quickly can help break that chain of transmission.

Cases plummeted despite the influx of workers, but once construction wrapped up and the program lost its funding, malaria came back.

To understand what drove the resurgence, the researchers combined three streams of data. Case records came from Brazil's national malaria surveillance system and covered 150 health centers in Altamira over 15 years. The team layered on temperature, forest cover and rainfall data, since both shape how favorable an area is for mosquito breeding and how efficiently the malaria parasite develops inside mosquitos. Plus, they added an estimate of travel time between each cluster of cases and the nearest town, as a proxy for how easily people and the diseases they carry might move around.

From the observations, the forest edge consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of increased malaria cases. For every 1% increase in the perimeter of the forest edge, malaria cases rose by roughly 0.7%; for every 1% increase in Altamira's population, who are located at the forest edge, cases rose by about 1.4%.

The rebound wasn't evenly distributed. Before the dam was built, most of Altamira's malaria cases came from clusters inside the city itself. Afterward, that pattern flipped: by 2020, the roughly 700 annual cases were concentrated almost entirely in remote, rural clusters near forest edges. Meanwhile, Altamira's urban center stayed comparatively protected, much as it had during construction.

"When the funded program wound down, malaria came back to the communities that are hardest for the health system to reach," Skinner said. "The city stayed protected, most likely because fast diagnosis and treatment are easier to deliver and keep going in a town."

That leaves the same communities exposed twice over, Skinner said. The places that are already the hardest to reach with health services also sit where the ecological risk is the highest.

But this pattern could point to solutions. The resurgence didn't scatter unpredictably. It came back to the same kind of place — rural communities at the forest edge — each time. That's the kind of risk that can be anticipated in the future.

Brazil aims to eliminate locally acquired malaria by 2035. Skinner said Altamira's near elimination of the disease, and its rebound within a few years of the control program ending, is a warning for that effort. When a community contains a strong environmental driver for malaria, like forest-edge ecosystems, stopping a control program short is sure to let the disease climb back.

"Because the resurgence wasn't diffuse, we can predict where malaria is likely to return first," Skinner said. "The message for a 2035 goal isn't only that elimination needs sustained investment. It is that where the environment drives risk, that risk is predictable, and planning for it from the start is what lets the money go where it matters most."

A metal detectorist in Norway dismissed a rare 900-year-old silver coin as a button, before researchers realized it was a one-of-a-kind piece linked to Magnus Barefoot (also known as Magnus Berrføtt), the warrior ruler often called Norway's last Viking king.

The coin, found in a field near Utstein Monastery in southwest Norway, dates to Barefoot's reign from 1093 to 1103. It is the first coin of its type ever discovered on Norwegian soil, according to a December 2025 translated statement from the University of Stavanger Museum of Archaeology.

"It is a fascinating thought that we may be just one large treasure find away from having a completely different view of Magnus Berrføtt's coinage as well, and it underlines the importance of all new discoveries that are made," museum representatives said in the statement.

The button that wasn't

The metal detectorist, Morten Eek, found the object in April 2025. It came from the plow layer in the soil, about 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) below the surface.

One side looked bright and silvery, but the other was covered by copper and had a dark spot in the middle, giving it a button-like appearance. Eek took it home and placed it with other buttons, worn modern coins and pieces of scrap metal he had collected.

It was only months later, when Eek showed his treasures to his fellow metal detectorists, that they noticed the silver side looked like a medieval coin. Its design resembled an illustration in the 1865 reference work "Norge's Coins from the Middle Ages," by C.I. Schive.

The detectorists then contacted the University of Stavanger Museum of Archaeology, where researchers took a closer look.

A coin with a second life

To the experts, the coin seemed strange because someone had altered it after it was minted. A copper plate had been placed over one side, and the coin's outer edge had been folded around it. Two rounded notches on the edge show where a chain or loop may have been attached, suggesting the coin was later worn as jewelry.

Researchers could have removed the copper plate to see what was underneath, but doing so would have damaged the object's fragile state.

The artifact's unique transformation reveals "something about people's relationship to what was initially a coin," museum representatives said in the statement.

To investigate the coin's covered side, the team X-rayed it. The scan revealed a griffin, a mythical creature with the body of a lion and features of a bird of prey. The motif has sometimes been interpreted as the lion of St. Mark, a Christian symbol, but the museum noted that the animal on these coins closely resembles a griffin. In medieval Christian art, griffins were used to symbolize Christ's dual nature as both human and divine.

The visible side revealed a "cross-over-cross" motif, with double-lined arms and small semicircles or bowl shapes at the ends. The pairing of the cross and griffin is what makes the coin so rare.

"Two-sided coins with the motif combination of griffin and cross over cross are only known from four copies," the statement said, with one coin from the Sandur hoard, found in the Faroe Islands in 1863, and three others from Denmark's Mørstad hoard, which was found this past spring and contains nearly 5,000 coins.

The rarity of such coins "may tell us something about the extent of Magnus Berrføtt's minting," museum representatives said in the statement.

In total, about 100 coins, spread across 12 discoveries, are known from Magnus Barefoot's reign, according to the museum. That makes every new example valuable for understanding how coins were produced and circulated in Norway in the late Viking Age and early Middle Ages.

Who was Magnus Barefoot?

Magnus Barefoot is sometimes called Magnus Barelegs, thanks to the kilts he wore. He became king in 1093 after the death of his father, Olav Kyrre (also called Olaf III of Norway), whose reign was remembered as a relatively peaceful period. Barefoot followed a different path. Like his grandfather Harald Hardrada, the Norwegian king killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, Barefoot built his reputation through warfare.

Barefoot spent much of his reign campaigning overseas. He sought to extend Norwegian power across the western sea routes, including the Isle of Man and parts of the Irish Sea. The museum noted that he was associated with the saying that a king was meant "for honor and glory, and not a long life." His death reflected this, as he died at around age 30, in 1103, when he was ambushed and killed during a campaign in Ireland.

The coin points to more than Barefoot's military ambitions. According to the museum, it also reflected one of his domestic reforms. Earlier Norwegian rulers had reduced the silver content of their coins, but Barefoot restored a high silver standard, with coins that were around 90% silver.

Whether the coin was lost at the Utstein Monastery during Barefoot's lifetime is impossible to know. Because it was turned into jewelry at some point, it may have circulated for years, or even generations, after it stopped being used as money.

See how much you know about ancient norsemen with our Viking quiz!

On paper, doctors should know better — antibiotics treat only bacterial infections, and yet, physicians sometimes give them to patients who have viral infections. For patients, an unnecessary antibiotic can mean short-term side effects, like diarrhea, or more-persistent impacts, like microbiome disruption. But on a grand scale, the overuse and misuse of antibiotics pressure bacteria to gain resistance, the ability to thwart the drugs intended to kill them.

That can fuel the evolution of "superbugs" that evade most, if not all, antibiotics. In the worst-case scenario, this could contribute to tens of millions of extra deaths over the next 15 years, caused by illnesses that were once easily treated.

Given that antibiotic resistance is one of the world's leading public health threats, earlier this year, I went to Japan to investigate a program that has been remarkably effective at curbing the overuse and misuse of the drugs. I wanted to understand why doctors sometimes prescribe antibiotics when they're not needed and what approaches have been shown to improve their prescribing habits.

To answer those questions, I took a deep dive into the research on the topic and found the work of Julia Szymczak, a medical sociologist at the University of Utah School of Medicine, whose studies shed light on why doctors prescribe these medicines when they're not needed. I spoke with Szymczak about the complex social dynamics behind this behavior and whether there are reliable strategies for reining in antibiotic misuse.

Nicoletta Lanese: Could you explain the focus of your work?

Julia Szymczak: All of my work is really focused on two things. One, understanding why it is difficult for clinicians in real-world practice to use antibiotics the way that medical guidelines or evidence suggests they should be used. And then, more recently in my career, it's focused on developing interventions or strategies to help clinicians apply evidence that's informed by all that work.

I think about the decision-making about how an antibiotic is used as not simply a decision that is about pathophysiology or microbiology — it's about social dynamics. Clinicians are sensitive to a lot of other features in the care delivery environment beyond what they know to be true about antibiotics, what they know to be true or apparent about the potential infection that a patient has.

NL: What are some factors that shape that dynamic?

JS: Diagnostic uncertainty is a major challenge for clinicians. Differentiating viral versus bacterial is not [straightforward] — you don't have a slam-dunk perfect test. There are attempts to develop things to help, but the diagnostic uncertainty piece is really challenging.

Then there's the organizational characteristics around clinician decision-making, which is that everybody is incredibly time pressured, and so decision-making about antibiotics happens very quickly.

In the ambulatory or the outpatient setting, where the vast majority of human antibiotic use occurs, one of the more common themes that you will hear when you talk to clinicians is that patients often want antibiotics that are not needed. That relationship is more complicated than it appears on its face, but that is a major pressure point for clinicians.

NL: Are there other pressures that are unique to the outpatient setting, where most antibiotics are used?

JS: The major one is time pressure. I had a pediatrician who said they had — I can't remember the figure, but it was like 800 seconds for a sick visit. They broke it down into seconds. Their experience of time in the outpatient setting is so intense. Certainly clinicians in the inpatient setting [hospitals] feel time pressure, but the decision-making is distributed over an admission, which still might only be two days, but two days is different than literally five minutes.

The other thing is your interaction with that patient. That clinical encounter is very transactional, particularly in the United States, particularly for those clinicians who work in, for example, telemedicine, which is a whole other context but has similar features to urgent care or sick visits. This idea that "I'm trying to provide you with something of value" [is a big factor]. That could be a proper diagnosis. That could be the provision of a prescription. It could be reassurance that you're going to be fine. In some scenarios, people are looking for information that they can share with their employer.

Someone is coming to you to get something for a problem. Oftentimes, your assumption is that what they're coming to you for is an antibiotic. The encounter is already shaped by the patient's expectation — or your [the doctor's] expectation of the patient's expectation. There's literature that shows that, in many scenarios, clinicians might perceive that a patient wants an antibiotic when the patient actually doesn't.

Oftentimes, clinicians will say that [when] somebody has what is very likely a viral infection and they don't need antibiotics, the act of explaining why they don't need antibiotics is very difficult, particularly if they seem to want them or if they've had multiple similar episodes and they've always gotten antibiotics in the past. That discussion, the literal conversation, is difficult. It takes time. It's draining.

Then, you're in an environment where there are competing priorities around how that patient is going to evaluate your care. If a patient is unhappy because you didn't give them an antibiotic and you're concerned about the patient-satisfaction score, which is being watched by your leadership, but no one's monitoring your antibiotic use, that could tip you into the prescription of an antibiotic that isn't needed.

Then, of course, there's also the fear of missing something. On the off chance the patient has an infection and it helps them, that staves off a whole bunch of other imagined or real bad scenarios down the line.

NL: You said it's often difficult for doctors to explain their reasoning around antibiotics. Do you think that's because the technicalities of resistance are hard to explain, or something else?

JS: I don't think it's necessarily that they aren't confident in the medical explanation. A paper of mine called "I Never Get Better Without an Antibiotic" goes through all the reasons why the discussion is difficult.

Briefly: The biomedical stuff is often not the hard part. What's difficult is countering a patient who you think has already made up their mind about what they need and convincing them that they don't need it. It involves not just the provision of microbiological facts but having to explain why their past diagnoses might not have been accurate or their previous clinicians didn't make a good decision. Or people might talk about their social network: "Well, so and so got antibiotics for that." And it's like, I'm not their doctor. I didn't see them. I'm making a decision about you.

There are social reasons why that discussion is just difficult, and then you throw that into the time pressure and potentially add in even the glimmer of antagonism or conflict, and people just don't want to go there because they're exhausted.

I don't think it's about the education, about the likelihood of this being viral and "antibiotics don't work for viral infections." It's a lot more countering beliefs that aren't necessarily accurate [such as antibiotics always being needed for certain symptoms] and dealing with social awkwardness.

NL: I feel like that breaks with the common stereotype of doctors being very cold, calculating and logical.

JS: In my life of explaining to people, mostly clinical and epidemiologic audiences, there is a bit of a professional pride about evidence-based practice. Clinicians are educated deeply, and they're experts; they should be applying this evidence to every patient every time. But I always start [by saying], "You guys are human too, right?"

With antibiotics, emotions play a large role in how people are using these drugs. I've had many clinicians describe antibiotics as some of the best anti-anxiolytics — so like it's an anti-anxiety medicine for the clinician.

This idea of the cold, logical, rational actor, I mean, doesn't apply anywhere in medicine. But in particular, I think this is a great [example of a] scenario where that perfect model of decision-making just gets completely upended by contextual and structural factors, as well as social and emotional factors.

NL: Are there additional factors to consider in the context of pediatrics?

JS: A lot of my portfolio is in pediatrics, and in fact, that's where I started my work. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, so I have spent a lot of time doing pediatric research.

As pediatricians say, "We have two patients: there's the child and the caregiver, the parent or the guardian." Maybe two. And so you're navigating the patient and their parents, and the interactions have a lot of complexity. There's often the challenge where the patient can't communicate what's wrong; it's difficult to convey symptoms. It adds a layer to the diagnostic uncertainty.

Then, of course, the fragility of children [is a factor], and the concern of the illness going off the rails. That feels more fearful than it does for a middle-aged adult.

But I would say one thing with pediatrics is that parents are more open to the idea of not wanting to give their kids medication that they don't need. The origins of that may come from different places than what an antibiotic steward would necessarily think of as the main reason why you want to avoid antibiotics, because it's often just about avoiding any medication. But I think that parents can be a partner in stewardship, engaging with clinicians around whether or not an antibiotic is necessary or potentially being open to this "watch and wait" — this idea of holding off to see if the body fights off the infection on its own.

When you look nationally [in the U.S.], pediatricians have done the best at improving their prescribing. Some of the biggest leaps and bounds in outpatient stewardship, it started in pediatrics. So pediatricians tend to be on the cutting edge, I would say.

NL: In pediatric outpatient settings, are there any strategies that work really well?

JS: One of the most common ones is the use of "audit with feedback," this idea of prescribing report cards where you give clinicians information at regular intervals about how well they use antibiotics and then compare it to their colleagues in their practice or in their entire health system. That's been demonstrated to work, but not in isolation.

[Editor's note: Szymczak's research suggests that certain social factors make this approach more likely to work. For instance, clinicians who respond best trust that the data they're being given is accurate, feel supported by their leadership, don't feel overly stressed or surveilled by the feedback, and are comfortable fielding patients' demands for antibiotics.]

Another piece that has been demonstrated to work, if clinicians use it, is that many electronic health records have pathways or order sets or guidelines embedded. So, if a clinician's like, "I'm going to diagnose [urinary tract infection] UTI in this patient," there's a UTI pathway that they can click on that will give them evidence-based laboratory testing and management strategies. It takes them fewer clicks to get the stuff that they need.

So, it's multifactorial, but [effective stewardship] usually involves some combination of data, education and making the right choice the easy choice.

NL: When it comes to interventions for outpatient settings, are there strategies that just don't seem to work?

JS: Education on its own, targeting clinicians or patients, is not sufficient to move the needle on prescribing.

NL: Could you elaborate on why educating patients isn't the best approach?

JS: Patient education is important but has not been demonstrated to move the needle very much. I think partially that is because the approach we have taken to education has been connected to abstract concepts like antimicrobial resistance, which is important at the population level, of course, but can be difficult to understand for the lay public and can be less motivating [for them to change their personal behaviors].

I do think we are seeing more interest from the lay public in things like the microbiome and gut health and the role of antibiotics in potentially disrupting those things. I think education to the public that directly connects to individual-level harms is more motivating than population-level harms.

NL: When it comes to interventions, do you think the surrounding cultural context affects which strategies work best? I'm thinking of the U.S. versus Japan, for instance.

JS: I do think that the surrounding cultural context will always play a role, to some degree, in how interventions to improve clinical decision-making will fare. I have also written a bit about that in another commentary that delves into the observation in the United States that we have considerable regional variation in antibiotic use that is not explained by clinical factors.

I am cautious, though, about how we think about the concept of "culture" in relation to clinical decision-making. When it comes to antibiotic prescribing, I do think there are universal factors that shape how people respond to efforts to intervene, including the management of diagnostic uncertainty; fears of missing something, leading to "just in case" prescribing; a desire to offer patients something of value; and the difficulty explaining why antibiotics are needed or not.

NL: Regarding Japan's incentive program, which pays pediatricians "tips" for improving their antibiotic use, do you think a similar approach would be motivating for U.S. pediatricians? Would it be feasible to implement that kind of strategy here?

JS: I think it could be difficult to implement here, but the details of how the program is operationalized would be very important.

We know, in general, that financial incentives have [a] mixed impact on physician decision-making. You especially have to be careful about unintended consequences. For antibiotics, it would be very important to have a clear definition of the outcome that will be incentivized and how it would be measured. With antibiotics, there can be gray areas and you don't want to incentivize undertreatment, especially if it is individual-level financial incentives.

A better approach may be in aggregate and [to] reward health systems or clinics for improved antibiotic use for conditions in which antibiotics are never needed, for example.

Editor's note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

For the first time, physicists have built a working version of quantum mechanics without complex numbers — numbers that have been considered essential to the theory for nearly a century.

Complex numbers combine a regular "real" number with an "imaginary" one — a multiple of the square root of -1, represented by the symbol i — into a single value, like 3 + 4i. The square root of -1 doesn't correspond to any quantity you could count or measure directly (you can't have negative one apple, for instance), which is why mathematicians call it imaginary.

Still, complex numbers have many useful applications. Engineers use them to describe alternating electrical current. Physicists use them to describe waves. And ever since quantum mechanics was first documented in the 1920s, complex numbers have been built directly into its equations. Quantum mechanics describes particles using something called a wave function, and that description relies on complex numbers.

In 2021, a team of physicists predicted that a version of quantum mechanics built with only real numbers would make incorrect predictions in certain experiments involving multiple particles. The following year, other researchers ran those experiments, and the results matched standard quantum mechanics, not the real-number version. Complex numbers seemed unavoidable.

But that 2021 result rested on one specific assumption: a particular mathematical rule for combining particles. That led physicists to ask a question: Are complex numbers actually necessary to describe reality at the quantum level, or are they just a convenience?

Now, in a new study published June 18 in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers have found a way around the 2021 result.

"Complex numbers are not needed for quantum mechanics," study first author Pedro Barrios Hita, a theoretical physicist and doctoral student at the German Aerospace Center and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, told Live Science.

A different rule

The 2021 result relied on a specific mathematical rule called the tensor product, which combines two separate quantum systems into one. If you have two particles and you want to combine them into a single mathematical description, you can use the tensor product. It's a rule taught in every quantum mechanics textbook.

It works well for ordinary complex-number quantum mechanics, but past attempts to build a real-number version around that same rule ran into trouble. They couldn't reproduce the correlations seen in experiments involving three or more entangled particles.

In their new study, Barrios Hita and his colleagues found that the tensor product isn't the only option. They built quantum mechanics around a different rule based on an idea: An action taken on one part of a system shouldn't have any effect on a separate part of it.

In ordinary quantum mechanics, multiplying a particle's state by i is undetectable on its own. But when two particles combine, that i can shuffle over and effectively attach itself to the other particle instead. Physicists call this phase kickback, and it's built automatically into the tensor product.

Barrios Hita's team had to recreate that shuffling using only real numbers. They attached a small "flag" to each particle to keep track of what the imaginary part used to store. Then, they treated certain flag combinations as physically identical, even though they looked different on paper. That grouping step allowed their real-number version to match every prediction of standard quantum mechanics, including the multiparticle cases that had tripped up earlier attempts.

At its core, the trick is simple. A complex number, like 3 + 4i, is really just a pair of ordinary real numbers (3 and 4) — the i is only a label marking which one is the imaginary part. "A complex number is nothing but two real numbers," Barrios Hita said. His team essentially built a bookkeeping system that tracks those two real numbers separately, instead of combining them into one complex number. It took a long time to figure out how to make that work consistently across multiple combined particles. But once they did, Barrios Hita said, the underlying structure turned out to be elegant.

The result puts quantum mechanics in the same boat as other physics theories that are often written using complex numbers purely for convenience, Barrios Hita said.

"There are many other theories, like, for example, electromagnetism," Barrios Hita added, "which has complex numbers at its core. So, these theories are formulated using complex numbers, but [they] are not fundamental. They're just helpful tools to help express equations."

The work doesn't change any experimental predictions or point to new quantum technology. It's also currently limited to systems with a finite number of quantum states. Extending it to infinite-dimensional systems, which show up in many real physics problems, is a natural next step, and other researchers are already looking into it. Barrios Hita is moving on to different research, on how quantum properties like entanglement can be used as a resource.

Still, the study settles a decades-long debate. Complex numbers make quantum mechanics easier to write down, but they aren't required to make it work.

Two of the Milky Way's gigantic spiral arms appear to be much farther away than we realized, scientists have discovered after listening to the echoes of distant cosmic explosions. The findings could potentially force us to reconsider our galaxy's mass and maybe even its shape, researchers say.

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy made up of a dense central region containing a supermassive black hole (dubbed Sagittarius A*), orbited by four major arms — the Sagitarrius arm, the Scutum-Centaurus arm, the Perseus arm and the Outer arm — that curve and stretch outward like a giant pinwheel. Most of our galaxy's stars and gas are tightly packed together in these cosmic limbs, although some stars, including the sun, exist in the gaps between them or within other smaller structures.

Until now, researchers have estimated the size of these arms based on the Milky Way's rotation rate, because it is impossible to see our galaxy's entirety from Earth's position inside the galaxy. This, in turn, has helped us estimate the galaxy's total size (around 100,000 light-years across) and its mass, which is equivalent to around 1.5 trillion suns, according to NASA.

However, this way of measuring the massive structures is not foolproof and has led to several uncertainties about our galaxy since we first discovered its spiral shape around 175 years ago, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

"We usually model the Milky Way's outer arms indirectly based on what we know of how our galaxy rotates, but doing it this way leaves room for error," study first author Beatrice Vaia, a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics who led the new study as part of her doctorate, said in a statement. The farther away from the galactic center, the more uncertain the measurements become, she added.

In the new study, published June 19 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers came up with a new method of measuring the arms using the most powerful and luminous explosions in the universe, known as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). As X-ray light from these cosmic outbursts passes through dense clouds of gas, like those within our galaxy's arms, it creates luminous rings, or echoes, whose size corresponds to their distance from Earth.

The team used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory (both of which orbit Earth) to analyze echoes from three different GRBs that shone through gas clouds in the Perseus, Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms, respectively. This revealed that both the Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms are likely around 10% farther from Earth than we thought. This may not sound like much, but it equates to several thousand light-years.

The biggest potential implication of this discovery is that our galaxy is wider and, therefore, probably more massive than we realized, which could have major knock-on effects for our understanding of our cosmic neighborhood.

"The differences are small, but any revision of these distances is important because they are so fundamental for understanding our galaxy," study co-author Ilaria Fornasiero, an astronomer at the University of Bologna in Italy, said in a separate statement. "For example, this could mean that astronomers have to revise estimates of the mass of the galaxy, because that affects how wide the arms stretch."

Animations released alongside the new paper show how the Milky Way might look based on the new data, revealing the Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms extending farther into intergalactic space, making our galaxy look more like a lopsided snail's shell than a perfect spiral.

These visualizations do not necessarily show the true shape of the galaxy, as the Sagitarrius arm and other minor galactic limbs have not been measured using the same methodology. However, the fact that the Perseus arm was not as distant as the other two GRB-illuminated limbs hints at a surprising asymmetry throughout our galaxy that cannot be easily explained.

The researchers are now on the hunt for more GRBs that can be used to map out the rest of our galaxy's shape and help us better understand what our cosmic neighborhood actually looks like. However, finding these cosmic explosions is easier said than done.

"We're relying on the universe to provide us with these events, and so far, over 25 years, we've only found a handful that we can use," study co-author Andrea Tiengo, an astronomer at Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pavia in Italy, said in the statement. "That said, we will continue to be on the lookout for more."

Engineers have designed a waterproof "diving suit" for cyborg cockroaches that enables the hybrid insects to survive and roam underwater for up to three hours. This function expands the capabilities of cyborg insects and could one day be deployed in disaster zones, according to the team.

A built-in oxygen generator and silicone tubes deliver the gas directly to a cockroach's breathing holes, known as spiracles. The design is adapted for use in low-oxygen conditions as well as submerged environments, the researchers said in a new study published June 29 in the journal Nature Communications.

"Our approach combines a soft waterproof shell with a simple yet reliable chemical oxygen generator," study co-author Shinjiro Umezu, a professor in the School of Creative Science and Engineering at Waseda University in Japan, said in a statement. "This allows the insect to retain its natural mobility while being protected from an environment that it cannot normally survive in."

Cyborg insects are living insects that have been fitted with electronic controllers that guide their movements. Researchers have previously used them in search-and-rescue operations to access and investigate hard-to-reach areas; for example, they were used in rescue efforts after the devastating magnitude 7.7 earthquake in Myanmar in March 2025 that killed at least 3,700 people and injured 4,800 more. The advantage of cyborg insects over tiny robots is that the former employ insects' muscles to move, whereas the latter rely on high-power batteries that consume energy and can run out of steam.

The cyborg insects deployed in Myanmar were developed in the laboratory of Hirotaka Sato, senior author of the new study and a professor in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

Sato has spent more than a decade pioneering cyborg insect technology. He and colleagues hope the new diving suit will extend cyborg insects' operational range to include flooded and partially submerged areas in disaster zones.

The suit consists of a flexible shell, four silicone tubes that attach to the spiracles and a transparent, 3D-printed oxygen tank. To make the tank produce oxygen, the researchers sprinkled manganese dioxide onto a highly absorbent sponge inside the tank. They then injected a small amount of diluted hydrogen peroxide, which breaks down slowly in the presence of manganese dioxide to produce oxygen. Finally, the team sealed the tank with ultraviolet adhesive to prevent leaks.

"The key engineering challenge was to build a system that was small, light and flexible enough for the insect to wear, while still producing enough oxygen for long-duration underwater movement," Umezu said.

The silicone tubes send oxygen straight into the thoracic spiracles, while the abdominal spiracles, which are lower down the insects' bodies, take in the oxygen contained in the suit.

"Our new insect diving suit works like the oxygen tank used by human divers," Sato said in the statement. The silicone tubes can be attached and removed without pain or harm to the insect, the researchers added.

The researchers tested the suit on a cyborg Madagascar hissing cockroach (Gromphadorhina portentosa), which they placed in a water tank and later sent into a plastic tube that simulated submerged and low-oxygen environments.

The suit enabled the cockroaches to roam underwater for up to three hours, raising the prospect that cyborg insects, including locusts and beetles, could one day be used to inspect flooded pipes, drains, tunnels and other hard-to-access places.

Next steps include improving the diving suit to potentially include sensors and a navigation system; and testing the design in simulated disaster environments, according to the statement.

Using a quantum computer alongside a supercomputer, scientists have developed a breakthrough pathway for modeling the physics inside a fusion reactor. The world-first experiment could help clear a path to developing clean, abundant nuclear power and solving the global energy crisis, the researchers said.

Using hybrid quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI) methods, scientists with IBM and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have blueprinted how to make tritium, an extremely rare isotope of hydrogen that's critical to the fusion process.

Although their research — uploaded June 29 to the preprint server arXiv — has not been peer-reviewed, the researchers say it's the first time that different kinds of computing elements have come together to propose the most effective way to create this material.

Fusion reactors are experimental power sources that create energy by fusing atomic nuclei. The heat produced in the subsequent nuclear reaction is then harnessed as energy. This method produces no carbon byproducts or long-lived radioactive waste, making it one of the cleanest potential forms of mass energy production.

It's projected that, at scale, a single fusion reactor could produce about 4 million times as much energy as a coal-burning facility and around four times the amount of energy as a modern nuclear fission reactor.

Current attempts at building a viable fusion reactor have resulted in numerous laboratory experiments that prove the technology works, with magnetic confinement reactors, such as tokamaks, widely considered the front-runner. But many engineering challenges remain before the first commercial reactors could come online.

Turning seawater into fuel

The base fuel for nuclear fusion reactors is a hydrogen isotope called deuterium, which is commonly found in seawater. It's estimated that there are 33 grams of deuterium in every cubic meter of seawater.

But deuterium is only half of the equation. Nuclear fusion also requires tritium — a heavier hydrogen isotope — and the fusion released from just 1 gram (0.04 ounces) of deuterium-tritium fuel equals the energy from about 2,400 gallons (9,100 liters) of oil, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Unfortunately, tritium, a radioactive isotope, is extremely rare; only 44 pounds (20 kilograms) of it is produced on Earth each year, and its 12-year half-life makes it difficult to use in nuclear power plants.

Instead, scientists must painstakingly produce tritium in nuclear reactors by bombarding lithium atoms with neutrons. It's then superheated and bound with powerful magnets into a whirling ring of plasma within a tokamak, a special fusion chamber designed to shape and heat plasma using magnetic fields.

Scientists add more deuterium and then bash the tritium and deuterium together, causing them to fuse into helium. The force of this reaction creates heat that's converted into energy.

The current bottleneck lies in creating enough tritium to sustain fusion long enough to produce energy. But modeling the particle physics and chemical reactions involved in the tritium-creation process has proved beyond the capabilities of classical supercomputers.

In the new study, however, scientists say they have addressed this bottleneck by simulating nine molecular configurations of a liquid salt that contains fluorine, lithium and beryllium (FLiBe) — one of the leading candidate materials for extracting tritium.

This is the first time quantum computers have been used to model reactions inside a fusion reactor. If perfected, FLiBe could provide a near-limitless source of fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, they said, but the chemistry involved is incredibly complex.

Demystifying complex chemistry

A "blanket of molten salt" made of FLiBe is wrapped around the nuclear reaction inside a fusion reactor, IBM researchers told Live Science. This provides both a fuel source and a thermal shield for the device.

To create enough tritium, the researchers had to calculate the physics involved while a process called "neutron bombardment" constantly altered the blanket's chemistry. Designing a salt that holds up under competing demands and keeps releasing tritium is a key problem in building this kind of reactor.

"If tritium grabs onto fluorine in the salt, it forms tritium fluoride, which is corrosive and stubborn to remove," the researchers explained. "If it binds to another tritium atom to form a gas, it bubbles out on its own. Predicting which way the reaction goes means modeling the interaction between tritium and the salt with high precision and accuracy that is challenging for classical methods."

Because no ordinary computer can perform the necessary calculations, the team used a combination of AI running on the Frontier supercomputer at ORNL, alongside quantum computing algorithms running on an IBM Quantum Heron quantum processing unit (QPU) in New York. The resulting workflow demonstrated a proof of concept for offloading complex chemistry computations to a quantum computer.

That workflow relied on a technique called wave-function-based embedding, which fragments the calculation into easier-to-calculate clusters, the scientists said in the study. They used classical computers to solve the smaller clusters and passed off the more difficult chunks to a quantum computer. The classical computers then stitched the molecule back together.

This is a method that study co-author Kenneth Merz, a biochemist and principal investigator at Cleveland Clinic Research, pioneered in previous research. Earlier this year, in collaboration with IBM and the Japanese national research institute RIKEN, he used quantum computers to calculate the structure of a 12,635-atom protein.

Fusing quantum and AI

In the new study, the researchers tested their model against known molecular configurations that were already solved by a nonhybrid classical system and determined that the accuracy was maintained with the addition of quantum computations.

This proof of concept should serve as a direct pathway for scaling the models used to predict tritium production within fusion reactors, potentially solving what may be the biggest hurdle to large-scale fusion energy production.

The broader workflow the scientists outlined in a technical blog post involved three stages. First, AI agents proposed and screened many candidate salts from the ORNL database, and for each candidate, calculations estimated various qualities in the tritium breeding process, including how much fuel the salt would make under neutron bombardment.

The most promising salts then went to a supercomputer, which modeled them atom by atom, using the density functional theory (DFT) process to approximate how a molecule's electrons would arrange themselves. These are expensive simulations, so the scientists used "AI stand-ins" trained to reproduce the physics to run them fast enough to be useful. The third stage brought in the quantum computer to figure out where the tritium would bind, which is a shortcoming for DFT.

In the future, the research team will model larger molten-salt systems and study more molecular configurations before evaluating whether AI can slash the time it will take to find a promising molten-salt material.

The wider aim, the scientists told Live Science, is to build a reliable computational pathway for fusion-materials discovery that can help researchers predict how well a blanket material breeds tritium, whether that tritium can be recovered, and how the material may perform in the extreme environment of a fusion reactor.

Can you match these ancient devices to their pictures? Find out with our computing quiz!

Scientists have invented a soft robotic heart that could give them a new way to study a mysterious condition that accounts for roughly half of all heart failure cases.

This form of heart failure, called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), is a condition in which the heart pumps out a normal amount of blood but becomes too stiff to relax and refill properly between beats. Over 3 million Americans have the condition, but researchers still don't fully understand why it develops, making it difficult to design treatments that directly target the disease.

The new device, described June 1 in the journal Nature Communications, is the first soft robotic heart model that can actively adjust how it responds to changes in pressure. It tightens or relaxes its artificial muscles, enabling researchers to control how stiff the heart becomes. This allows it to better mimic a diseased human heart.

Current laboratory models of HFpEF have drawbacks. Traditional "mock circulation loops" use rigid pumps and tubing to recreate blood flow but don't physically resemble a beating heart. Lab animals capture more realistic biology but are expensive and don't perfectly mirror human disease, said study co-author Thanh Nho Do, a biomedical engineer and associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

"HFpEF has been notoriously difficult to study and treat," Nho Do told Live Science in an email.

Earlier versions of the robotic heart could realistically recreate cardiac movement, but they followed present commands that didn't adapt to changing conditions. The new system attempts to solve that limitation by allowing the artificial muscle fibers to "feel" the pressure created by the fluid they are pumping and dynamically contract or relax against it.

That feedback is critical for reproducing HFpEF, in which abnormal stiffness — rather than weakened pumping — lies at the core of the disease.

The researchers built a silicone replica of the left side of the human heart and wrapped it in artificial muscle fibers made from rubber tubes reinforced with spring coils. The model continuously senses the pressure generated by the fluid flowing through it and adjusts the force of its artificial muscles in response. By changing how much the muscles resist being stretched as the heart fills, researchers can dial in different levels of stiffness.

Instead of modeling a single snapshot of HFpEF, the researchers recreated several stages of the disease's progression. In early stages, patients' hearts start to show impaired relaxation between beats, while in more advanced forms, the heat is so stiff that it can't adequately fill with blood before the next contraction.

"If we can model its progression pathway, we might be able to use models like ours to develop medical devices that interrupt that trajectory, rather than just treating end-stage disease," Nho Do said.

Current treatment for HFpEF focuses largely on managing symptoms and associated conditions, such as high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes. In recent years, drugs known as SGLT2 inhibitors have been shown to reduce the risk of hospitalization in many patients by reducing excess fluid in the body. But there are still few therapies that directly target the stiffening of the heart muscle.

The researchers hope their new model might pave the way, but they emphasized that the work is an early proof of concept. Looking ahead, they hope to develop increasingly sophisticated robot heart models that can complement other data on HFpEF, including that from computer simulations, animal studies and clinical testing.

"We hope the biggest impact will be in understanding HFpEF mechanisms and improving the way we develop cardiovascular devices," Nho Do said.

Heart quiz: What do you know about the body's hardest-working muscle?

At least 20 people across 17 states have been hospitalized due to severe gastrointestinal illness as more than 1,000 cases of the parasitic infection cyclosporiasis have been reported across the country, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports.

The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are investigating several clusters of the illness in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas, according to CNN. However, the worst-hit state so far is Michigan, with 1,251 cases reported as of July 9, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) reported. According to the Associated Press (AP), this marks the biggest cyclosporiasis outbreak in the state's history.

Cyclosporiasis is a gastrointestinal illness caused by the protozoan parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which can enter the body when someone consumes food or water contaminated with the parasite. It then infects the small intestines, invading epithelial cells that line the gut, causing inflammation and leading to watery and often "explosive" diarrhea, according to the CDC. Symptoms usually kick in around a week after infection and can last over a month without antibiotic treatment. While the illness can go away on its own, it is also common for symptoms to disappear for a bit and then return.

Cyclosporiasis is not usually life-threatening, but it can cause severe illness and dehydration, particularly in young children, older adults and people with compromised immune systems. In rare cases, the condition may lead to complications like biliary disease, in which the flow of bile gets blocked and impacts the liver and digestive health, according to the MDHHS.

As of July 1, there was no evidence of a single, multistate outbreak of cyclosporiasis, but the CDC is investigating several clusters. According to an email from the health agency, many of the clusters appear to be linked to Mexican-style restaurants, a chain of grocery stores and a catered event, CNN reported. The FDA is conducting trace-back investigations on white and green onions, cucumbers and cilantro, according to CNN.

Meanwhile, the MDHHS warned that, while the source of the current outbreak is still uncertain, previous Cyclospora outbreaks have been linked to contaminated fresh produce, including raspberries, basil and bagged salad.

Cyclosporiasis cases tend to rise during the spring and summer, with May 1 to Aug. 31 considered "cyclosporiasis season," according to the CDC. However, there have been more cases than usual this year: Whereas Michigan typically reports 50 cases over a whole year, the state has seen over 1,000 cases in just a few weeks, the AP reported.

Compared with outbreaks of E. coli and Salmonella, clusters of Cyclospora are much harder to trace back to their source. This is because the parasite can reproduce sexually, meaning its genetic material is mixed up with each generation, according to Charles River Laboratories. However, Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan's chief medical executive, told the AP that "there is clearly a linked outbreak happening right now."

To minimize your risk of becoming infected with Cyclospora, wash all fruits and vegetables thoroughly before eating them; cut away any bruised or damaged areas; and refrigerate cut, peeled or cooked produce as soon as possible, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development recommends. If you are experiencing sudden gastrointestinal issues, health officials suggest you visit your local health care provider.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

For decades, cities have been designed around "gray infrastructure." Roads move people. Bridges connect communities. Water systems protect public health. These systems are governed by engineering standards because society recognizes that safety cannot depend on good intentions alone.

Urban nature deserves the same recognition.

In June, a heat wave gripped Europe, breaking temperature records across the continent. In France, officials reported over 2,000 excess deaths. In the U.K., hospitals declared critical incidents and machinery and IT systems failed. In the U.S., a heat dome over the Midwest and East Coast disrupted Fourth of July celebrations, with at least 25 heat-related deaths over Independence Day weekend.

Cities are being tested by a warming climate. Yet one of our most effective forms of climate infrastructure is being lost — not because it does not work but because we still do not treat it as infrastructure.

My view is simple: Urban nature ‪—‬ including street trees, parks, wetlands and other urban green spaces ‪—‬ should be categorized and managed as essential infrastructure, with minimum standards for its protection, quality and long-term maintenance. Just as we regulate roads, bridges and drinking water, we need standards that ensure all urban residents benefit from healthy and thriving urban nature. Without such standards, cities will become hotter, less resilient and increasingly unequal as climate change accelerates.

Scientific research shows that urban trees and green spaces cool cities during heat waves, reduce flooding by absorbing stormwater, improve air quality, store carbon, support biodiversity, and improve both physical and mental health. During extreme heat, neighborhoods with mature tree canopies can be several degrees cooler than nearby streets dominated by concrete and asphalt. Those few degrees can mean the difference between manageable discomfort and dangerous heat exposure, particularly for older adults, children and people with existing health conditions.

But while the science is strong, our governance is not.

Cities enthusiastically announce ambitious tree-planting campaigns, biodiversity strategies and new greening targets. These initiatives are valuable, but they often focus on what is easy to count rather than what truly matters. Planting a tree is not the same as growing a healthy urban forest. Creating a park does not guarantee biodiversity. A green roof delivers little value if it fails during drought.

The real measure of success is whether urban nature continues providing benefits decades after trees are planted and established.

This is where cities are still falling short.

Unlike buildings or transport systems, urban nature rarely operates under consistent minimum standards. Many cities have no requirements for minimum tree canopy cover, adequate rooting space, soil quality, biodiversity targets, long-term maintenance or even whether newly planted trees survive. As a result, access to nature depends heavily on where people live. Wealthier neighborhoods often enjoy mature tree canopy and high-quality parks, while disadvantaged communities experience hotter streets, fewer green spaces and greater exposure to climate risks.

That is not simply an environmental issue. It is a public health issue, a climate adaptation issue, and an issue of social equity.

The solution is not simply to plant more trees. It is to establish urban nature standards that recognize nature as essential infrastructure.

These standards would not prescribe the same solution for every city. Instead, they would establish minimum expectations based on scientific evidence. They could include targets for accessible green space, minimum tree canopy cover, sufficient soil volume for healthy tree growth, biodiversity outcomes, long-term maintenance funding and routine monitoring to ensure that urban nature continues delivering benefits to communities.

Importantly, these standards should focus on outcomes rather than simple planting targets. Counting how many trees are planted tells us little about whether cities are becoming more resilient. Measuring survival, canopy development, ecosystem health and equitable access provides a much better picture of whether investments in urban nature are actually returning dividends.

Some critics argue that cities cannot afford stronger standards for urban nature. Municipal budgets are already stretched by housing, transport and aging infrastructure. But this argument overlooks a fundamental reality: We already spend enormous sums responding to the consequences of extreme heat, flooding, poor air quality and declining public health. Healthy urban ecosystems help reduce these costs while delivering multiple benefits simultaneously.

As climate change accelerates, the distinction between gray and green infrastructure becomes increasingly blurred. Trees cool buildings and reduce energy demand. Wetlands decrease flood damage. Parks improve public health and strengthen communities. These are not optional amenities. They are functioning components of urban infrastructure that deserve the same level of planning, investment and accountability as any engineered system.

Building codes transformed the safety of our cities because they established minimum standards that every development had to meet. Climate resilience now demands a similar transformation for urban nature.

The next generation of resilient cities will not be defined simply by how many trees they plant but by the standards they adopt to protect, restore and sustain the living infrastructure urban life depends on.

The real question is not whether cities can afford to invest in urban nature; it is whether they can afford not to.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

Around 100,000 years ago, an early Homo sapiens man was probably stabbed in the face with a sharp stone tool and later buried in a cave in what is now Israel, archaeologists have determined. The Stone Age cold case appears to be the earliest evidence of this kind of interpersonal violence, according to the research team.

In a study published June 30 in the journal Scientific Reports, the international team of researchers closely examined the skull and lower jaw of a person who was deliberately buried in Qafzeh cave in Israel during the Middle Paleolithic period.

At least 27 people were buried in Qafzeh cave between about 145,000 and 92,000 years ago, making them some of the earliest members of our species to be found outside Africa. Previous analysis of the skeletons, which were excavated between the 1930s and 1970s, revealed that two people had head injuries resulting from blunt trauma.

But the new analysis, which employed microscopic and micro-CT scanning techniques, revealed that Qafzeh 25, an adult male, had a cut mark across his lower left jaw that affected one of his bicuspids and part of his upper jaw. The jawbone showed signs of healing, suggesting that the man lived for a significant amount of time after being injured, the researchers wrote in the study.

Archaeologists had previously identified only a few cases of trauma caused by sharp weapons or projectiles in Middle Paleolithic skeletons. Although these injuries could have resulted from hunting accidents, the researchers wrote, they have generally been interpreted as evidence of interpersonal violence.

The cut mark on the jaw of Qafzeh 25 was found on the left side of his face, lending further support to the idea that the injury was not an accident.

It's not clear what kind of tool made the cut mark, but stone tools found at Qafzeh included flint scrapers and sharp points that could have been fashioned into spear tips.

"Forensic studies of modern human populations have reported that craniofacial injuries resulting from blows are more frequently observed on the left side of the skull, a distribution commonly attributed to the predominance of right-handed assailants in face-to-face confrontations," the researchers wrote.

If the researchers' interpretation of the cut mark is correct, it "would represent the earliest documented case of sharp force trauma in the archaeological record," they wrote.

Qafzeh cave is already well known within archaeology for its clear evidence that early humans buried their dead. The new discovery confirms that the earliest human groups left Africa with a complex culture.

"These results provide new data to the debate on the origin of complex behaviors such as interpersonal violence, the care of injured or sick individuals and funeral practices," study first author Ana Pantoja Pérez, a paleoanthropologist at Spain's National Research Center for Human Evolution, said in a statement.

See how much you know about early humans with our human evolution quiz!

The brain's memory center may come "prewired," rather than being built from scratch after birth, a new study in mice finds.

The research, published in April in the journal Nature Communications, offers a new perspective on a long-standing question in neuroscience: Does the brain begin as a blank slate and build memories by adding connections through experience, or does it come with built-in wiring? The new research focused on the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain that's essential for forming memories.

Rather than supporting either theory directly, the research points to the latter idea but adds a significant twist.

The researchers focused on a region of the hippocampus called cornu ammonis 3 (CA3), which plays a central role in storing and recalling memories. A trait known as plasticity enables neurons within CA3 to continuously strengthen and weaken their connections and thus strengthen or weaken different memories.

The team examined mouse brain tissue collected shortly after birth, during adolescence or during adulthood. They found that early in life, hippocampal networks are densely wired, with many neurons hyperconnected in a seemingly random pattern. As the brain matures, these haphazard networks become sparser yet more structured as connections are pruned. This pruning begins soon after birth, with significant declines in connectivity by adolescence.

The finding discounts the idea that the hippocampus starts out as a blank slate, or "tabula rasa."

"We find, in a nutshell, that the system is not a tabula rasa, as we thought originally, where you can just write information and then at some point, this information fills the system," said study co-author Peter Jonas, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. "Rather, it starts out as a tabula plena [full slate] and then becomes more sparser and specifically connected."​​

This pattern may help to explain why we remember so little from infancy.

Memories are thought to be stored within networks of neurons that fire together, representing specific experiences. In a young brain, however, these connections between neurons, called synapses, behave differently, the study suggests. In young brain tissue, a single input could cause a neuron to fire, the team found, while in mature networks, neurons typically require multiple inputs to fire.

Jonas said the team was surprised by not only the early pruning of connections but also how strong those early connections were. "You might think that early in development, you have poor synapses and weak synapses, but we found the opposite," he told Live Science.

This excitability comes at a cost, however: When neurons are activated too easily, different experiences can trigger overlapping patterns of activity. If that overlap is too great, the brain may struggle to distinguish one memory from another. Instead of forming distinct networks, it may generate broader, less-specific memories. In other words, the system is very active but not very precise.

This imprecision may affect behavior, too. For example, rodent studies show that young animals learn to fear an area of a cage where they received a mild shock, freezing when they return to it. But unlike adults, who freeze at that exact location, young animals also have this response in similar environments — so the memory is there, but it's not precise.

As the brain matures, neurons become more selective and require multiple inputs to fire. The result is more distinct, separate networks that translate to specific and stable memories. So in regard to the inability to recall early childhood, it may be that our earliest memories are too poorly defined to be retained in the long term.

The findings are consistent with a growing body of research on how memory develops, said Hauður Freyja Ólafsdóttir, an assistant professor at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

"It's exciting on multiple fronts," Ólafsdóttir, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "There is plenty of developmental psychology work that suggests that memory becomes more specific with age. And so it's kind of interesting that now, at the circuit level, we're also seeing that the connectivity patterns are becoming sparser."

So what drives brain wiring before birth? That dense, early connectivity may result from a genetically programmed developmental process. Then, after birth, experience refines the wiring, Jonas suggested.

The findings do not rule out the possibility that experiences before birth leave lasting traces in the brain. But Ólafsdóttir thinks those early forms of learning rely on different neural systems than mature hippocampal circuits.

"I'm not disputing that they're there and that they have influence," she said, referencing prenatal experiences. "They leave a trace, let's say, in our brain and probably in our psychology even." But those traces may not resemble the detailed memories formed later in life.

When asked whether the connections that form before birth represent true memories or are just a byproduct of prenatal development, Jonas said, "The latter is more likely."

The "full slate" may give the brain a crucial head start by enabling neurons to quickly link different types of information, such as sights, sounds and smells. If the brain began as a blank slate, neurons might be too sparsely connected to find each other, making early communication difficult, the study authors think.

By starting with an overconnected network, the hippocampus may ensure that the necessary wiring is already in place, Jonas theorized.

This article was first published May 6, 2026.

See how much you know about the most complex organ in the human body with our brain quiz!

A secretive Chinese spacecraft has captured the first-ever close-up photo of one of Earth's temporary "quasi-moons" after arriving there for a potential first-of-its-kind landing.

The space probe is supposed to scoop up samples from the newly imaged space rock and return them to Earth next year. However, the blurry photo and the timing of its release hint that this may be trickier than initially thought.

The Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) probe, named Tianwen-2, launched from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southern China on May 28, 2025, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. Its primary target is Kamo'oalewa, also known as 2016 HO3, a fast-spinning asteroid that is classified as a quasi-satellite of Earth. That means it circles the sun alongside our planet, making it appear as if it were gravitationally bound to Earth when, in fact, it isn't. (This is only a temporary association; Kamo'oalewa will eventually fall out of sync with Earth and drift away from us.)

The CNSA has released minimal information about the parameters and timeline of the Tianwen-2 mission and only shared the first photo of the spacecraft several weeks after its launch. Based on one unverified timeline, Live Science previously reported that the probe had most likely arrived at Kamo'oalewa on June 7. However, Chinese officials have remained tight-lipped about the probe's progress.

But on Monday (July 6), the CNSA finally confirmed that, after a roughly 400-day-long journey spanning more than 600,000 miles (1 million kilometers), Tianwen-2 is now circling Kamo'oalewa, according to the state-run news outlet Xinhua. The agency also revealed that the probe first inserted itself into the asteroid's orbit on June 7, as originally predicted.

The announcement was accompanied by the first clear photograph of Kamo'oalewa, captured at a distance of around 12.5 miles (20 km) from the quasi-moon. The blurry image suggests the space rock is around 130 feet (40 meters) across, according to the South China Morning Post, which is on the lower end of previous estimates that suggested the asteroid was up to 330 feet (100 m) wide.

Initial readings also suggest that Kamo'oalewa is a rubble-pile asteroid, which means it is loosely bound together and has an unstable surface. Until now, researchers were unsure of the asteroid's composition and hoped it had a solid, rocky surface, which would have allowed the spacecraft to attempt a first-of-its-kind landing using an "anchor and drill" technique. (It now seems unlikely that this sampling method will be used.)

The asteroid's small size, fragile composition and fast spin will make it harder for the probe to collect samples from the space rock's surface, even with other tried-and-true techniques. The new image also hints that there are few flat spots on the space rock where the probe could land safely.

"This greatly increases the complexity of the sampling process and the risk of the mission, making it much more difficult," CNSA representatives wrote in a report, according to the South China Morning Post.

The unverified mission timeline, which correctly predicted the probe's arrival date, stated that the sampling attempt would commence July 4. However, the fact that this has seemingly not happened yet further suggests that Chinese scientists are struggling to figure out how to collect their desired samples.

CNSA officials wrote that the probe "will progressively conduct more detailed scientific exploration to acquire data on the asteroid's morphology, material composition and internal structure, laying the groundwork for subsequent sample collection operations."

If Tianwen-2 does manage to snag some samples, the probe will release them in a capsule during a flyby of Earth in November 2027, and they will reenter the atmosphere at around 27,000 mph (43,500 km/h). This would make China the third country to successfully collect and return asteroid samples to Earth, following Japan, which returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020, and the U.S., which acquired material from the space rock Bennu in 2023.

Researchers hope the returned samples will help unravel the secrets of the early solar system and potentially shed light on how key compounds, such as organic molecules and water, ended up on Earth. They may also shed light on the seven other quasi-moons that are currently known to co-orbit the sun with our planet.

Some experts previously theorized that Kamo'oalewa may be a fragment of the moon that was knocked loose from our permanent companion by an ancient meteor strike. Others have even attempted to pinpoint which crater the asteroid may have come from and hope that the samples will help confirm their hypothesis.

"I am curious to find out the answer about its origin, since the debate on its [potential] lunar origin is still very open," Marco Fenucci, a mathematician at the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre who has co-authored multiple studies on Kamo'oalewa, previously told Live Science. Any returned samples should "definitely give us an answer to this matter," he added.

After its close approach to Earth next year, Tianwen-2 will slingshot farther into the solar system to begin its secondary mission to study 311P/PanSTARRS — a peculiar object beyond Mars that displays characteristics of both comets and asteroids — in 2035.

The patient: A woman in her early 50s in Canada

The symptoms: The woman started occasionally hearing her name being called when she was alone, usually in quiet surroundings. Later, the sounds evolved into indistinct murmurs. These voices seemed to come from outside her head rather than from her own thoughts. They never spoke directly to her, commented on her actions or gave commands.

What happened next: In the next two years after she began hearing voices, the woman made several trips to emergency departments and had brief psychiatric admissions. Because hearing voices is commonly associated with psychosis — symptoms that occur when people experience a disconnect from reality — doctors diagnosed her with "unspecified psychosis" and attempted various treatments.

They first tried the antipsychotic risperidone, gradually increasing the dose, but the voices did not go away. Doctors then switched the patient to aripiprazole, but the hallucinations remained unchanged. Next, they tried haloperidol, and although the woman said the medication made her feel calmer and less distressed, the voices persisted.

As they conducted further psychiatric evaluations, the doctors noticed that the woman frequently leaned forward during conversations, cupped an ear and asked people to repeat themselves. About four to six months after her first contact with a psychiatric team, she was referred for hearing tests. These tests revealed hearing loss in both ears, ranging from moderate to severe in one ear and mild to profound in the other.

About two months later, the woman was fitted with hearing aids in both ears, which improved her hearing. The voices did not go away, however.

Brain scans showed no abnormalities, and blood tests came back normal. Neurological evaluations turned up no evidence of other explanations. Meanwhile, the woman continued working full time, managing her household and maintaining an active social life. She showed no signs of paranoia, delusions, disorganized thinking or the decline in daily functioning that doctors would typically expect to be associated with a psychotic disorder.

The diagnosis: Based on the woman's stable functioning, hearing impairment and lack of other clinical abnormalities, the doctors concluded that her auditory hallucinations stemmed from sensory deprivation caused by hearing loss.

Reduced sound input from the ears can make auditory regions of the brain unusually active, causing them to "fill in" missing sounds, the doctors explained in a report of the case. A related phenomenon is known as musical hallucinosis, in which people with hearing impairments hear songs, melodies or other forms of music that are not actually playing.

The treatment: Because neither antipsychotic medications nor hearing aids eliminated the patient's hallucinations, doctors shifted their focus toward helping the woman cope with them.

They taught her about the connection between hearing loss and hallucinations and advised her to pursue psychotherapy aimed at reducing the distress associated with the voices and improving her coping strategies for dealing with their persistence. At the time the report was published, in May 2026, she was waiting to begin this therapy.

What makes the case unique: In their report, the doctors noted that most published accounts of this phenomenon have described patients' hallucinations improving or resolving after their hearing impairment was treated. Persistent hallucinations after treatment are rare. In the woman's case, however, the voices persisted despite the use of hearing aids.

The doctors suggest that prolonged hearing loss may cause lasting changes in the brain that do not immediately reverse once hearing improves. (The case report does not note how long the woman's hearing had likely been impaired.)

The case also serves as a reminder that hearing voices does not always indicate psychosis, the doctors concluded. Because the woman's hearing loss was recognized only after years of symptoms and several unsuccessful medication trials, the report authors argued that doctors should consider running hearing assessments early in patients with isolated auditory hallucinations, especially when their insight and daily functioning remain intact.

For more intriguing medical cases, check out our Diagnostic Dilemma archives.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Can you guess the diagnosis in these strange medical cases? Find out with our diagnostic dilemma quiz!

A team of conservationists has discovered and restored the tombstone of Sebastian, a formerly enslaved man who died free in 1729.

"That discovery is likely one of the oldest gravestones of a free Black person in America," Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, said in a July 4 speech. "It's been there all along. We just had to go look and share the story."

The stone marker is inscribed with Sebastian's chosen name, Boston, and features an image common in 17th- and early 18th-century tombstones in New England: the death's head. The symbol includes a stylized skull flanked by wings, which were possibly intended to symbolize spiritual resurrection.

On the tombstone, a simple, five-line inscription reads:

In 18th-century American writing, the word "the" was often abbreviated with a Y-shaped letter form called a "thorn" representing the "th" sound. Tombstones also frequently abbreviated "deceased" and the month. Somewhat confusingly, before 1752, the American colonies regularly used the Julian calendar, as did Britain, in which the new year started on March 25. Boston's year of death is listed on the tombstone as 1728, but his February 28 death was actually in 1729 in our modern Gregorian calendar.

Kelly Thomas, the director of the Historic Burying Grounds Initiative for the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, told WBZ News Radio that she identified the gravestone during a restoration project at the Granary Burying Ground, the city's third-oldest cemetery. Established in 1660, the cemetery includes over 5,000 graves, including the final resting places of Declaration of Independence signers Samuel Adams and John Hancock; the U.S. Revolutionary War officer Paul Revere; and Crispus Attucks, a sailor of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry who is thought to be the first American killed in the Boston Massacre.

"I was reviewing the photos of headstones, and then I noticed that the stone only had one name," rather than a first and last name, Thomas told WBZ News Radio, suggesting that Boston was either enslaved or free when he died. Based on a search of historical records, Thomas determined that Boston's enslaved name was Sebastian and that he also went by Bastian.

A surprising amount of information was recorded about Boston and his wife, Jane Lake. In 1701, they had their daughter, also named Jane, baptized at First Church in Boston, where they regularly attended worship services. But while the two were married with children, they were also both enslaved and lived in different households, historian Gloria Whiting wrote in a 2016 study.

Boston was likely freed in the early 18th century, some time after the 1702 death of John Waite, who had held him in slavery. By 1708, a list of free Black people included the name Boston, and he had gained a reputation in the city as a hardworking handyman, according to Whiting's study. He had been freed for roughly 30 years when he died in 1729 and was well-known enough to have an obituary published for him in the New-England Weekly Journal, a rare occurrence for enslaved or freed Black people in colonial America.

Wu also said that, in recent weeks, archaeologists in Boston had discovered musket balls and gun flints from the infamous Battle of Bunker Hill that took place on June 17, 1775. The battle was fought by British Crown forces and New England troops in the first stage of the American Revolutionary War.

See if you know what these mysterious artifacts are with our archaeological fragments quiz!

The fragile and battered remains of an infant who lived about 6,000 years in Mesopotamia may be the oldest documented case of child abuse from the Middle East and one of the oldest known cases of its kind in the world, a new study finds.

Researchers unearthed the infant's remains in Syria, but at the time the infant died, sometime between 4200 and 3900 B.C., it was buried in Tell Brak, one of the world's earliest cities. It's possible that the difficulties associated with early urbanization played a role in the child's abuse, the researchers noted.

The team determined that, based on the infant's tooth development, the child was 6 to 9 months old at death. An analysis of the remains, which were interred in a children's burial ground within a Late Copper Age workshop district, revealed that the infant had four fractured ribs near the breastbone. The right thigh bone had abnormal growth, while both sides of the skull bore active, porous lesions. These injuries point to the bones being subject to intense and repetitive external forces, and the nature of the lesions don't fit easily with an accidental fall, the researchers said.

"Ribs shouldn't break" in such a small child, study co-author Aleksandra Grzegorska, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Warsaw, told Live Science. Although rib fractures are relatively common in adults, they suggest child abuse in young infants, she said.

In the study, published May 21 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, Grzegorska and her colleagues systematically ruled out other explanations for the injuries, including rickets, scurvy, birth trauma and violent coughing from illnesses such as tuberculosis. Vitamin deficiencies were unlikely, the researchers noted, given that ancient Mesopotamia had ample sunlight and fresh produce due to the fertile land between the two rivers. Birth-related fractures typically heal within weeks in infants, and bone density and growth measurements for the baby matched those of its peers from that time, indicating that the child didn't have an underlying skeletal condition.

To gauge how unusual the injuries were, the team compared the infant to other children excavated from the same burial area. None of the other youngsters with substantial rib preservation showed similar fractures, making the infant's injuries an outlier in the local population.

It appears that the infant likely experienced "caregiver-induced violence," Grzegorska said. This term is used because the evidence can't identify who caused the harm or confirm intent, Grzegorska said. "We don't want to point fingers at any specific individual," she said, noting that in many ancient cultures, multiple family members, not just parents, helped raise children.

Other clues that might shed light on the infant's injuries are missing from this case, she added. Unlike modern clinicians, bioarchaeologists can't interview a living patient or bystander, or examine soft tissue that might reveal more about the abuse. The partially healed state of the fractures suggest the infant survived for some time after the injuries were inflicted, Grzegorska found — an indication that the trauma was not immediately fatal.

Around the time the infant died, Tell Brak was transforming into a city, so the authors suggested that the stresses of early urbanization and possibly less support from extended kin could have contributed to the violence. Centuries after the infant died, upheavals related to city building appear to have led to mass deaths that were likely caused by violent conflict, Grzegorska noted.

Documented cases of child abuse remain exceptionally rare in the archaeological record, with only a handful previously identified in places such as Egypt, France and Lithuania.

For the first time, a physicist has experimentally watched time emerge from within an isolated quantum system — by creating a “mini-universe.” This bizarre experiment raises an intriguing question: If the universe has nothing outside it, where does time come from?

In a new study published June 11 in the journal Physical Review Research, Giovanni Barontini, an experimental physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., used a cloud of ultracold atoms to build his mini-universe. The system was so well isolated from its surroundings that, like the universe itself, it had nothing external to use as a clock. He split that system in two and ignored one half — what he called the "dark sector" — to show that time could arise entirely from within the system.

The result offers the first experimental look on why the universe has time at all. "When you put everything together, things really start to make sense," Barontini told Live Science. "How time inside the system was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping — this was quite surprising, how well everything came together. Very neatly, in a way. Which is something that doesn't happen that often in experiments."

The work is an experimental verification of ideas that have been floating around in quantum cosmology and thermodynamics for decades. This is not a bombshell claim that time is an illusion, but it is the first time anyone has put those ideas to a direct, quantitative test in the lab.

A universe with nothing outside

Barontini set out to look at a problem that physicists have puzzled over for nearly 60 years. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation — a central equation in quantum gravity, the field that seeks to unify Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics — describes the universe as a whole system with no external time parameter. There is no cosmic clock ticking away outside the universe. So where does our experience of time come from?

One influential idea, called relational time, says that time doesn't exist as a fundamental ingredient of reality. Instead, it emerges from relationships inside the universe, with one part of the system acting as a clock for another. But this idea had never been tested directly in the lab.

Barontini's inspiration came from watching his son play with building toys. "I thought that it's something very similar to what we do in our labs," he told Live Science. "We play with very expensive toys. We create our own small samples of reality."

In his lab, that sample is a Bose-Einstein condensate — a state of matter that forms only at near absolute zero. In a Bose-Einstein condensate, thousands of atoms slow to a near standstill and blur together into a single quantum object, behaving as one.

The dark side of time

To mimic a universe with nothing outside it, Barontini placed the condensate in a trap and divided it down the middle with a thin sheet of laser light. He watched one half, the "bright sector," closely and deliberately ignored the other half, which he called the "dark sector."

The atoms in the bright sector sloshed back and forth in the trap, periodically spilling over the barrier and back again. Barontini called the moments when atoms flooded into the bright sector the "Big Bang" and the times when they drained out the "Big Crunch" (the nickname for one theory of how the universe will end, with the universe collapsing in on itself). Then, he tracked how entropy — a measure of disorder, or how spread out energy is within a system — was exchanged between the two halves as atoms crossed the barrier.

Instead of using laboratory time to order events, he built an "entropic time" — a clock defined entirely by how much entropy was flowing between the two halves of the system. If entropy was flowing, time was ticking. If no entropy was exchanged, time stopped. "The entropy exchange between the two systems could be transformed into an internal time variable," Barontini said.

Time speeds up, slows down and stops

What surprised Barontini most was how cleanly everything fit together. The internal, entropic time reliably ordered events in the bright sector. It matched the sequence seen in laboratory time, but it flowed at a different rate.

When entropy was flooding between the sectors, entropic time ran fast. When the exchange slowed, so did the clock. And when the two halves reached equilibrium (no more entropy flowing), the internal clock stopped altogether.

"Time was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping, depending on what the system was doing," Barontini said.

He then went a step further: Using this internal time, he derived a version of the Schrödinger equation and showed it accurately reproduced what he saw in the experiment. "This was quite surprising, how well everything came together," he said — "very neatly, in a way, which is something that doesn't happen that often in experiments."

Both time itself and the arrow of time — why time flows in one direction rather than the other — may arise from the same source: an observer giving up information. When Barontini chose not to look at the dark sector, he gave up knowledge of that half of the system. That act of ignorance, encoded in entropy, is what gave rise to time in the other half.

"Both time and the arrow of time — maybe they just are born from ignorance," Barontini said. "To have time and to observe, you have to give up some degrees of freedom."

Barontini sees this as just the beginning. The same cold-atom tool kit that generated a miniature Big Bang and Big Crunch in his trap could, in principle, be engineered to simulate far more exotic phenomena, such as black hole analogues, the conditions of the early universe, and what will happen at the moment of the Big Crunch itself.

"These are things we can do very simply, using the tools we already have to engineer our systems," he said.

The study is a proof of concept ‪—‬ a first demonstration that controlled quantum systems can serve as a test bed for some unanswered questions in physics. For now, those questions remain open.

Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed the royal tomb of a pre-Roman "warrior-prince" along with the remains of his chariot and weapons. The tomb was just one part of an extensive sixth-century B.C. burial ground and reveals new information about the funerals of elite rulers from this mysterious civilization.

The funerary complex was found in the municipality of Sirolo, a small town on the Adriatic Sea on Italy's east coast, according to a translated July 1 statement from the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Provinces of Ancona, Pesaro and Urbino.

In the sixth century B.C., an Italic group called the Piceni or Picentes lived in the area, bordered to the north by the Etruscans. The Piceni left few written records, so much of what is known about the enigmatic group comes from archaeological excavations. In 2020, a "princely tomb" complete with an iron-wheeled chariot, a cache of weapons and a helmet was discovered in the Pini cemetery. Now, archaeologists have found a second one.

At the center of a monumental circular palisade, researchers unearthed a large male burial with a wooden "currus" — a two-wheeled chariot that had been buried intact with the nobleman around 2,500 years ago. The warrior prince was also buried with a helmet and an ax, as well as several bronze vessels sealed with ceramic lids and filled with organic remains, which may represent the traces of a funeral banquet or food offerings for the afterlife.

Next to the warrior prince was the tomb of a woman who was buried with textiles, shoes and numerous "fibulae" — ancient metal safety pins that likely fastened her clothing and burial shroud. An enormous fibula with a hunk of amber had been placed on or near her head, possibly as part of her hairstyle or a headdress. This burial is not far from the "Queen's Tomb" in the Pini necropolis, where, in 1989, archaeologists discovered a Piceni woman buried with two chariots, two mules and a large quantity of personal belongings.

While royal burials had been discovered in the Sirolo area for decades, the newly discovered cemetery surprised archaeologists because of its unprecedented shape. Previously discovered burial grounds in the territory of the Piceni were ringed with a ditch, symbolizing the separation of the dead from the living. But the newly discovered cemetery was ringed with a wooden palisade instead of a ditch, and it had been placed on a slight hill, possibly to emphasize its monumental character and symbolic value, according to the statement.

This is the the first time that archaeologists have observed "an entire aristocratic nucleus" of the Piceni, and the discovery can provide "new perspectives on the structure of the elites that led to the great Piceni center," archaeologist Stefano Finocchi, the director of the new excavation, said in the statement.

Although many of the artifacts are still being analyzed, the quantity and quality of the grave goods already recovered reveal that the "ruling groups integrated into a dense network of relationships connecting the central Adriatic with the principal centers of central Italy," Finocchi said.

From Augustus to Nero, see how much you know about ancient Rome's famous leaders with our Roman emperor quiz!

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope has spotted 31 previously unknown quasars dating to the universe's earliest chapter, including the two oldest ever found.

The discoveries, described July 6 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, more than double the number of known quasars from that primordial era and could help astronomers unravel one of cosmology's biggest mysteries: how supermassive black holes grew so enormous so quickly after the Big Bang.

"It's a big step towards understanding these fascinating objects on a more fundamental level," Antonio La Marca, an ESA research fellow on the Euclid team, said in a statement.

Quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe. They form when gas and dust spiral into a galaxy's central supermassive black hole, heating up and releasing enormous amounts of energy that can outshine the galaxy itself. Each of the two most ancient quasars detected in the new study shone with the light of a trillion suns, according to the researchers.

Euclid spotted the quasars while surveying the distant universe. Twelve of them have redshifts of 7 or higher, meaning their light has traveled for more than 13 billion years and dates to the universe's first 770 million years. Two of the objects, with redshifts of 7.77 and 7.69, are the most ancient quasars ever identified, shining just 670 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only about 5% of its current age.

"These early quasars date back to the Universe's infancy," Daming Yang, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands and first author of the new study, said in the statement. "By finding and studying them, we can better understand how these enormous systems formed and grew so quickly — one of the greatest mysteries in astrophysics."

Finding quasars from the early universe has long been difficult because they are rare and incredibly distant. Until now, astronomers had identified only the brightest examples, making it difficult to understand the broader population during this early era. Euclid's wide-field survey is changing that by detecting fainter quasars across huge swaths of the sky.

The latest discoveries represent only a fraction of what the telescope is expected to find during its six-year mission, which will cover more than one-third of the total sky once complete. Mounted with a pair of instruments that see in visible and near-infrared light, Euclid is currently assembling the largest-ever 3D map of the universe. Scientists expect the survey to uncover hundreds of similarly ancient quasars, providing an unprecedented look at how the universe's earliest galaxies and supermassive black holes evolved.

Euclid has also taken some time to study the nearby universe, revealing more than 60 million individual stars packed into the Milky Way's center in a sparkling image released in late June.

Black hole quiz: How supermassive is your knowledge of the universe?

This ethereal satellite snap shows beautiful, "painting-like" folds within an ancient underwater structure in the Bahamas.

The Great Bahama Bank (GBB) is a massive submerged platform stretching around 330 miles (530 kilometers) across a shallow ocean channel between Andros Island and the Exuma islands, according to Britannica. The crescent-shaped bank surrounds a darkly colored ocean drop-off known as "The Tongue of the Ocean," which plunges to depths of 6,500 feet (2,000 meters), according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The photographed section of the GBB is around 23 miles (37 km) across and features a series of submerged sandbanks — most of which are covered with dense seagrass beds — that lie between 7 and 40 feet (2 to 12 m) below the ocean's surface.

The varying water depth and seagrass concentration cause multiple hues of green and blue to shine across the sandbanks, which have been carved into smooth, folding ribbons by ocean currents over thousands of years.

"The varying colors and curves remind us of graceful strokes on a painting," Earth Observatory representatives wrote.

This section of the GBB was first photographed in 2001 by the Landsat 7 satellite and has often appeared on lists of the most iconic aerial images of our planet.

"There are many nice seagrass and sand patterns worldwide, but none like this anywhere on Earth," Serge Andréfouet, an oceanographer at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development who first shared the 2001 image, told the Earth Observatory. "I am not surprised it is still a favorite, especially for people who see it for the first time."

The sandbanks are like giant underwater dunes carved out by ocean currents.

"Tides and ocean currents in the Bahamas sculpted the sand and seaweed beds into these multicolored, fluted patterns in much the same way that winds sculpted the vast sand dunes in the Sahara Desert," Earth Observatory representatives wrote in 2001.

The GBB lies atop a roughly 3-mile-thick (5 km) bed of limestone dating to the age of the dinosaurs, more than 65 million years ago. This hefty mass, made up of the remains of long-dead coral reefs, is so large that Earth's crust directly below the GBB has "sagged under the weight," according to the University of Texas at Austin's Marine Science Institute.

Before the end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago, this limestone slab had risen to more than 400 feet (120 m) above sea level and only resubmerged as global sea levels rose due to the melting of glaciers, according to the Marine Science Institute.

The Bahamas has more than 3,000 islands and smaller cays and is home to several other intriguing oceanographic features, including deep tidal channels off the coast of Great Exuma Island (which once harbored famous pirate ships) and a series of aurora-like sandbanks that appear to shine along the nation's northernmost islands.

See more Earth from space

Scientists say they have built a "synthetic cell" that can eat, grow and divide in a way that's remarkably similar to living cells.

The research, released to the preprint database bioRxiv July 2, has not been peer-reviewed yet. It introduces SpudCell, a new type of artificial cell, and marks a striking step toward creating living cells from scratch. But for study co-author Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota, that's far from the most interesting part of the work.

"I do not believe [SpudCell] is alive," Adamala told Live Science. Instead, she describes the system as a framework that could generate "all the chemicals we need for our civilization with biology." The thought is that SpudCell could serve as a tiny factory, pumping out medicines, fertilizers, plastics or any number of other compounds.

The work's announcement has sparked some controversy, with some scientists seeing it as a ploy to gain media attention for the simultaneous launch of the author's nonprofit Biotic, which aims to raise money to further develop the SpudCell platform. Adamala does not take umbrage to that criticism, as she is keen to bring more attention and funding to her field. If a synthetic cell can be perfected, she thinks, it could help humanity generate chemicals without relying as heavily on petroleum products.

"I feel this incredible stressful urgency that if we don't get to work on it now, then we're going to run out of time," she said, referring to the climate crisis. "We need to highlight that bioengineering can offer a solution. That's why I'm doing it."

A synthetic cell and a big promise

According to the preprint, Adamala and her team produced a lifelike system that closely resembles a living cell. To do so, they combined 36 purified enzymes and a fatty membrane with a pared-back genome about 50 times smaller than that of an average bacterial cell. By mixing these human-made elements together, the scientists generated a cell that could feed, grow, and divide — so, in essence, they created a full cell cycle in a petri dish.

"We built a cell-like system that is fully chemically defined, so there are no unknown building blocks in it," Adamala said. "It's capable of doing things that people up until now used to think only natural living cells can do." They call the system "SpudCell" because it looks similar to a potato, The New York Times reported. The name is also a nod to the Sputnik satellite, per CNN.

The concept of recreating the cell cycle in a dish is not entirely new. The J. Craig Venter Institute's 2016 "minimal cell" paper flirted with the concept by stripping as many genes from a bacterium as possible to leave only a minimal cell that could still replicate. However, the new study is the first time scientists have achieved feeding, growing and division using a "bottom-up" approach.

The work marks "a great advancement," said Mauro Rinaldi, a lecturer in biotechnology and biochemistry at the University of Hull in the U.K. who was not involved in the work. "It moves the needle because one of the key things about cells is division."

But there are important caveats. For one, the cells cannot yet create their own energy as our cells do with mitochondria. They also rely on externally provided fats, sugars and enzymes. The cells cannot make their own ribosomes, the machinery that turns genetic instructions into working parts of the cell. That means it relies on proteins being delivered from the outside.

Another difference is that SpudCell's genome is spread out over bits of DNA called plasmids, rather than being neatly packaged in chromosomes. It does not possess the skeleton that cells typically use to neatly split DNA during cell division, so consequently, the division of SpudCell's DNA to its daughter cells can be somewhat haphazard.

"The description of the results leaves me with substantial technical questions regarding the nature and the robustness of the findings," said Cees Dekker, a biophysicist at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. "[Its] approach uses some ingenious engineering tricks as shortcuts to achieve complex functions such as growth, but a major challenge remains to create a truly autonomous cell that executes all these functions without external help," he said.

Dekker is among the scientists who would have preferred that the research made the news after being published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. "If these findings are solid, that great media attention is definitely warranted; if peer review would, however, reveal weaknesses or issues, all the current media reporting is premature," he argued.

From cell to manufacturing platform

Adamala sees SpudCell as a blank slate for engineering. "We believe that if we make a cell from scratch, that's fully engineerable," she said.

Cells have long been used to produce chemicals for human use. Millions of people use synthetic insulin made in bacteria and yeast cells, for example. But cells resist making chemicals that could be harmful to them, and through evolution, they've developed systems to prevent them from doing so. A SpudCell-like system could circumvent those natural hurdles, Adamala and her colleagues think.

That kind of platform could also be useful for making newer generations of medicines, such as those based on mRNA or peptides. These drugs use molecular building blocks, like amino acids or nucleotides, that have been chemically tweaked to make the molecules more stable or harder for the body to break down. SpudCell could be engineered to produce such modified components directly, rather than scientists having to synthesize them in traditional chemistry labs. This could potentially shorten development timelines and lower costs, the team thinks.

Adamala and her colleagues also envision the cells being used as easily shippable laboratories. They could be dried out, shipped, stored without refrigeration, and then activated on-site to make chemicals, vaccines or proteins when and where they are needed.

But there's still a long road ahead. For now, SpudCell is only a proof of principle, and many hurdles must be addressed before it could become an industrial platform.

"[SpudCell] is not an engineering platform that can give you any useful product, but it's step one," Adamala said. "It's probably at least a couple of decades from now when we can actually scale it up to the point where we can replace all the petrochemicals with biology, but I do believe it's doable."

Adamala hopes the nonprofit Biotic will help funnel donations from philanthropists directly to research. "Biotic is a funding agency that is going to globally fund this work," she said.

While the technology is promising, "it needs to go through peer review," Rinaldi said. "I expect a lot of the hype and some of the terms that they're using to go away after a couple of years have passed."

Deep in a limestone cave on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that Neanderthals and the modern humans who moved in later left behind surprisingly similar traces of their daily lives — evidence that they hunted the same animals, crafted the same stone tools and collected the same type of seashells.

The findings, published Monday (July 6) in the journal PNAS, feed into some of the biggest questions in human evolution: How similar were the cultures of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, given that we're so closely related? And did we share information with one another?

A series of archaeological finds over the past few decades, including the new paper's finding that the two had similar cultural practices, suggests that Neanderthals and H. sapiens behaved far more similarly in the Middle East than once assumed.

The new evidence comes from Üçağızlı II Cave (pronounced Ooch-ah-UHZ'-luh), on a stretch of coastline just north of Syria that served as a prehistoric corridor between the Levant (an area of land east of the Mediterranean) and Eurasia. Although the team found only teeth and a partial jawbone within the cave, they were able to distinguish between the remains of Neanderthals and H. sapiens by analyzing the internal structure of the fossilized teeth. Meanwhile, they dated the sediment at the site using optically stimulated luminescence, a technique that reveals how long ago buried mineral grains last saw sunlight.

The team found that the Neanderthals had lived within the cave between approximately 77,000 and 59,000 years ago, while H. sapiens stayed there between about 59,000 and 47,000 years ago. Despite the different time periods, the layers from both of these periods show "substantially uniform hunting-gathering strategies and lithic technology," showing how similar the Neanderthals and H. sapiens were in their hunting-gathering strategies and stone-tool use, the team wrote in the study.

What's more, Neanderthals and H. sapiens got raw materials, such as flint, from the same local sources and hunted the same prey: wild goats (Capra aegagrus), fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and wild boar (Sus scrofa). Layer after layer also turned up 29 shells of a small marine snail, Columbella rustica, carried into the cave not for food but seemingly as ornaments. Some were pierced as if meant to be strung, and one shell dating to the Neanderthal occupation showed signs of deliberate heating that altered its color.

"Our findings indicate a deep level of cultural interaction," study co-author Naoki Morimoto, paleoanthropologist at Kyoto University, said in a statement. "These two distinct but closely related human groups were not just adapting to the same environment: they were probably sharing symbolic preferences."

That pattern breaks from findings at Mandrin Cave in France, where Neanderthals and modern humans are thought to have alternated occupation in distinct pulses from about 56,800 and 41,500 years ago, but did not leave evidence of a continuous culture. Instead, it echoes evidence from Tinshemet Cave in Israel, where researchers recently reported similar signs of shared behavior between the two groups tens of thousands of years earlier, from about 130,000 to 80,000 years ago.

Üçağızlı II Cave in Turkey and Tinshemet Cave in Israel suggest that even though there was a "biological" turnover as the caves went from being occupied by Neanderthal groups to modern humans, there weren't major cultural turnovers, too.

"Rather, we hypothesize that the two human species that coexisted in the region were in contact and shared cultural aspects," the researchers wrote in the study.

"A fascinating region"

Sites like these are forcing a rethink of how these two types of human were culturally related to each other, April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email. "By demonstrating cultural continuity and elevated levels of interaction, sites such as Tinshemet and Üçağızlı II are changing what we thought we knew about Neandertals, Homo sapiens and other contemporary Homo groups … a fascinating region just got even more so!" she said.

But that cultural continuity only heightens the mystery of how modern humans and Neanderthals interacted, with Neanderthals eventually going extinct around 40,000 years ago. Two types of human can't occupy the same ecological niche indefinitely, Nowell noted, and some research into Neanderthal cognition suggests Neanderthals were less-flexible thinkers than modern humans, with more limited capacity for language and less of the kind of self-awareness and creativity that may have given H. sapiens an edge. (However, there is pushback against the idea that Neanderthals weren't as cognitively complex as H. sapiens.)

If the archaeological record at sites like Üçağızlı II shows this much overlap in behavior, Nowell said, the real differences between the two may be ones the fossil record simply hasn't revealed yet.

The authors noted that many big questions remain, including when and where these shared cultural practices took place and whether these cultural similarities happened because modern humans mated with Neanderthals.

Ongoing and future excavations at sites like Üçağızlı II Cave may help to answer these questions and build a "more comprehensive picture of human evolution and cultural development during the Late Pleistocene," the team wrote in the study.

How much do you know about our closest relatives? Find out with our Neanderthal quiz!

Scientists uncovered a link between mild heart trouble and microscopic signs of brain damage that may raise the risk of memory problems down the line.

The new study, published Monday (July 6) in The Journal of Neuroscience, did not prove that the heart issues directly caused memory problems. But it "adds to the overall picture that preserving healthy brain-heart communication is key for healthy aging," said Dr. Jan Scheitz, a consultant stroke neurologist and head of the Brain-Heart Lab at the Charité University Hospital in Germany, who was not involved in the study.

"A healthy lifestyle that protects the cardiovascular system will not only benefit the heart but also the brain," he told Live Science in an email.

The work could one day help doctors identify patients at risk of memory problems early on through routine heart-function tests, said study co-author Dr. Xia Zhang, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany.

"The broader implication is that the brain may show subtle tissue-level changes related to cardiac dysfunction before we see obvious brain shrinkage or clinical dementia," Zhang told Live Science in an email.

Early warning signs

Researchers already knew that heart and brain function are closely interconnected. Heart diseases such as heart failure, atrial fibrillation and heart attack impair communication between the heart and the brain. This can contribute to thinking problems and dementia by restricting blood flow to the brain and causing chronic inflammation.

So far, though, scientists have only studied changes in the brain in people already diagnosed with heart conditions. They haven't necessarily assessed the changes that take place earlier on.

In the new study, researchers followed 73 patients who had sought care for heart-related symptoms at the Heart Center Leipzig in Germany, some of whom had confirmed coronary artery disease and/or heart failure. They also assessed 95 people without any heart-related symptoms. The researchers measured heart function at the start of the study. Then, about 3.5 years later, they performed cognitive testing and an MRI scan of the brain to take a snapshot of its structure.

Among all 168 study participants, those whose hearts pumped blood less efficiently at the start of the study showed greater signs of tissue damage in their gray matter years later. This was true regardless of whether or not they had diagnosed heart failure.

The cognitive tests were given only to the heart-disease patients, and they assessed attention, executive function, learning and memory. Only memory showed a link to weaker heart pumping. The participants with weaker heart pumping showed more microscopic damage in memory-related brain regions, and those brain changes correlated with worse memory scores.

The degree of brain damage also correlated with the levels of stress hormones released by the heart, but this link was only seen in patients who already had heart failure.

"What surprised us most" was that subtle reductions in the heart's ability to pump were tied to later brain changes, even in patients who did not meet clinical criteria for heart failure, Zhang said.

One limitation of the study is that the researchers didn't take MRI scans at the start. That means "we do not know whether some changes were already present at the beginning of the study period," Scheitz noted. This is something that Zhang and her colleagues plan to test in future studies.

"The next step for the field is replication in larger cohorts with multiple time points, so that cardiac function, brain microstructure, and cognition can be followed more precisely over time," she said.

The brain damage flagged in the 73 patients happened in parts of the brain that are important for memory and are vulnerable in Alzheimer's disease. "These regions helped identify a possible brain pathway through which poorer cardiac function may contribute to later memory problems," Zhang said.

However, until this idea is tested directly in future studies, it is too soon to say if the heart function-related brain changes seen on the MRI scans point to a higher risk of Alzheimer's, Zhang cautioned. The team did not measure proteins related to Alzheimer's, so they cannot conclude that the patients with measurable brain changes are developing Alzheimer's disease.

The study also did not directly test the effect of exercise on heart and brain health, but the findings may help explain why regular exercise is often linked to better brain health and cognitive aging, Zhang said.

"Regular exercise supports cardiovascular function, vascular health, and cerebral blood-flow regulation," she said, "all of which may help protect brain tissue over time."

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

What do you know about the body's hardest-working muscle? Find out with our heart quiz!

Scientists have found evidence that gravitational waves from a spectacular black hole collision carry signals from the very edge of the newly formed black hole. If confirmed by future observations, the discovery could provide an entirely new way to investigate what happens in the immediate vicinity of a black hole without ever observing it directly.

In a new study, the researchers analyzed an exceptionally strong gravitational wave event known as GW250114. They identified a "direct wave," a subtle feature of the total gravitational wave signal predicted by theory but never previously detected in real data. The signal appears to contain information from extremely close to the black hole's event horizon, the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.

The findings, published June 24 in the journal Nature, suggest that gravitational wave observatories may eventually allow astronomers to probe regions that have remained inaccessible since black holes were first predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Listening to the edge of a black hole

Although astronomers have photographed the glowing material surrounding some supermassive black holes and have detected dozens of black hole mergers through gravitational waves, the event horizon itself has remained frustratingly difficult to study.

Unlike ordinary light, gravitational waves are tiny ripples in space-time produced when massive objects accelerate. They pass almost undisturbed through the universe, carrying information about violent cosmic events that would otherwise remain hidden.

According to study co-author Sizheng Ma, a postdoctoral researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, the newly identified signal offers a rare glimpse of what happens immediately after two black holes collide.

"When two black holes merge, they violently shake space-time itself," Ma told Live Science. "For a brief moment, the region very close to the newly formed black hole's horizon is swept into a fast, fading swirl."

Ma explained that the direct wave is the portion of the gravitational wave signal produced near the horizon and carries the imprint of that motion outward through space.

"That is why it is so interesting," he said. "It may let us 'listen' to what happens near the horizon, a region we cannot see directly with light."

A remarkable black hole collision

The team focused on GW250114, a black hole merger detected on Jan. 14, 2025, by the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana.

"Our earlier theoretical work predicted that black hole mergers should produce a direct-wave signal from the near-horizon region," Ma said. "The big question was whether this effect could actually be seen in real data."

GW250114 turned out to provide exactly the conditions needed to test that prediction.

"It was strong enough, clean enough, and close enough to the theoretical situation where this signal should be visible," he said.

To search for the elusive feature, the researchers first removed the best-understood part of the gravitational wave signal, which comes from the newly formed black hole settling down after the merger. Then, they examined the remaining data to determine whether it consisted only of detector noise or contained another physical signal.

"What we found was striking," Ma said. "The remaining signal followed the expected rhythm and fading pattern of a wave shaped by the region very close to the final black hole's horizon."

The team concluded that the leftover signal matches the behavior expected for a direct wave predicted by previous theoretical studies.

A new way to explore extreme gravity

The researchers stressed that their findings do not reveal what lies inside a black hole. Instead, they're providing a new observational tool for investigating the region immediately outside the event horizon.

"The gravitational wave data appear to carry an imprint from very close to the newly formed black hole's horizon — the famous point of no return," Ma said.

He explained that the measurements are consistent with space-time near the horizon being rapidly dragged around by the spinning black hole while the signal fades because of the intense gravitational field.

"For us, the exciting message is that gravitational waves may be giving us a new way to study the edge of a black hole using real observational data," Ma said.

Ma believes the method could eventually become useful for exploring ideas such as quantum gravity — which seeks to unite Einstein's theory of gravity with quantum mechanics — or the black hole information paradox, the longstanding puzzle of whether information that falls into a black hole is truly lost. However, it cannot test those questions directly yet.

"If quantum effects, or any deviations from the standard black-hole picture, leave a measurable imprint there, then direct waves could, in principle, help us search for them in the future," he said.

More observations will be needed

The researchers cautioned that the discovery is based on a single gravitational wave event. While GW250114 provided exceptionally favorable conditions, much stronger evidence will come only if similar signals are found in many additional black hole mergers.

"There are two main directions," Ma said. "The first is theory."

Current models capture the essential physics but remain simplified, and more realistic descriptions of black hole mergers will be needed.

"The second is observation," he added. "This result comes from one exceptionally loud and clean event, so the strongest confirmation would come from seeing the same kind of pattern in other black hole mergers."

As gravitational wave observatories continue to improve and detect increasing numbers of mergers, researchers hope to determine whether direct waves are a universal feature of black hole collisions.

"If the pattern appears repeatedly in the way general relativity predicts," Ma said, "direct waves could become a new way to study black hole horizons or the regions very close to them, and to test Einstein's theory in one of the most extreme environments in the universe."

If future observations confirm the team's results, scientists may have gained something they have sought for decades: a direct observational window into the very edge of a black hole.

See how much you know about black holes with our black hole quiz!

The patient: A 63-year-old woman in Massachusetts

The symptoms: The patient went to the emergency department after experiencing nausea and vomiting for about a month, along with decreased appetite. She told doctors that she'd also experienced a burning pain in her upper abdomen and right side of her torso, which wrapped around to her back. She'd tried treating these symptoms with two common over-the-counter medications for acid reflux, but the treatments didn't help.

In the year prior, the patient had started taking semaglutide, a type of drug known as a GLP-1 receptor agonist — the same class of drug as Ozempic. These injected drugs are used to treat type 2 diabetes and assist in chronic weight management; in this case, the woman had a history of type 2 diabetes and obesity. Since starting the medication, she'd lost about 40 pounds (18 kilograms), but notably, that weight loss had accelerated over the previous month, she noted.

What happened next: Doctors took a CT scan of the patient's abdomen and pelvis. This revealed that the bile ducts, which move bile from the liver to the gallbladder and small intestine, were slightly dilated. The woman also had "heavy stool burden" but no signs of obstructions in her bowels, and her stomach was slightly stretched out due to carrying "semisolid material."

To take a closer look, the medical team then used magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography, a noninvasive scan that examines the bile ducts, gallbladder, pancreas and pancreatic ducts. The scan confirmed that the bile ducts were dilated and revealed a mass in the stomach that appeared to be trapped air. The doctors then examined the upper digestive tract, from the esophagus to the top of the small intestine, with an endoscope.

The diagnosis: The endoscopy revealed a large mass in the woman's stomach, known as a gastric bezoar. These masses are tightly packed blobs of partially digested or undigested materials.

The treatment: Semaglutide and other GLP-1 agonists typically cause delayed gastric emptying, which means they slow the rate at which the stomach empties its contents into the intestines. The woman was taken off that medication upon hospital admission.

The next step with a bezoar is to try and dissolve the mass while it's still in the stomach — and evidence suggests a good way to do this is to give the patient soda.

"Existing evidence, largely from case series and anecdotal experiences, supports the administration of 3 liters [0.8 gallons] of cola, either orally or through a nasogastric tube, within a 12-hour window," doctors noted in a report of the case. "It is not well understood whether acidity, carbonation, or another mechanism accounts for dissolution of the bezoar."

Due to the patient's history of diabetes, she was given diet cola. She also didn't enjoy carbonated beverages, so the typical prescription of 3 liters of soda was cut down to 1.5 liters (0.4 gallons). On the second day after starting this treatment, the patient noted a "tugging" sensation in her abdomen followed by relief of her nausea and abdominal discomfort. An endoscopic exam revealed that the bezoar was no longer stuck in her stomach.

The woman then transitioned to a typical diet in the hospital, and by the time she was discharged, she had no nausea, vomiting or abdominal pain. She did not restart semaglutide but was prescribed acid reflux medication to take daily. She reported that her appetite increased after hospital discharge and her weight rebounded a bit over the following months. Her abdominal symptoms had not returned within a few months of discharge.

What makes the case unique: Gastric bezoars are fairly rare, the report noted. They are found in less than 0.5% of endoscopies of the upper digestive tract. Common symptoms of the condition, such as pain, nausea, vomiting and abdominal discomfort, also appear in many more-common disorders, so they don't necessarily point to the presence of a bezoar in all cases.

The most common type of gastric bezoar is formed of plant fibers and called a "phytobezoar." Eating lots of certain foods, such as persimmons, pineapples, raisins or celery, can raise the risk of phytobezoars because the plants contain a high concentration of indigestible components, such as cellulose, lignins and certain tannins.

However, various medical conditions, procedures and drugs can also raise the risk of bezoars. These include anatomical changes related to bariatric or other gastric surgeries, autonomic nerve damage, and medications that cause delayed gastric emptying, such as GLP-1s. In the woman's case, semaglutide was likely to blame for her bezoar, and discontinuing the treatment helped resolve the problem.

The cola she consumed also helped. Although that course of treatment sounds strange on paper, it is the preferred first-line treatment over using a scope to physically break up the bezoar in the patient's stomach.

"Bezoars formed from food material may be initially managed with oral administration of cola in patients in a clinically stable condition," the report said. "This intervention is generally cost-effective and is associated with a lower risk of complications than invasive procedures."

For more intriguing medical cases, check out our Diagnostic Dilemma archives.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

This article was first published Oct. 15, 2025.

Astronomers have reconstructed the "skeleton" of the cosmos in unprecedented detail, thanks to the largest-ever survey conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The resulting map reveals how galaxies have evolved since the universe's infancy around 13 billion years ago and how they fall together in a vast structure called the cosmic web.

The cosmic web is the largest known structure in existence, home to countless galaxy clusters and clusters of clusters. It is the framework of the universe, a scaffolding of gas filaments, stars, voids and sheets of dark matter that trace the entire large-scale organization of the cosmos.

In a paper published May 6 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), utilized a treasure trove of JWST data to reveal how the universe has evolved.

How to sculpt a universe from scratch

The new research shows how intrinsic and extrinsic factors influence the formation and death of stars — and, therefore, galaxies and galactic clusters — throughout vast swathes of cosmic time.

Yet in what may seem like a wistful twist, the peak era of star formation is many billions of years behind us. The new research offers additional evidence of how the universe's structural framework facilitated this transition.

"We show how the cosmic web helped shape galaxy growth before, during, and after that peak era," study co-author and UCR astronomer Hossein Hatamnia told Live Science via email. "At earlier times, dense regions appear to be sites of rapid galaxy growth, while at later times dense environments are associated with the shutdown of star formation."

Such revelations come courtesy of COSMOS-Web, the grandest JWST survey yet: a 255-hour program spanning a contiguous area of the sky about the size of three full moons.

Compared with the previous COSMOS2020 survey, shared in 2021 and conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope and other facilities, the JWST-derived COSMOS-Web boasts better redshift precision and includes more galaxies — including fainter, lower-mass and more-distant objects. (Redshift is a measure of cosmic distance and time based on how light shifts to redder wavelengths as it crosses the universe.)

Compared with the JWST-derived image below, which shows a slice of the cosmos as it appeared 11.5 billion years ago, previous cosmic maps were sparser, more diffuse, and lacking in cosmic structures.

Additionally, the older COSMOS2020 survey tended to overestimate the depth in especially dense cosmic regions, where galaxies grow earlier and larger, and underestimate the depth of the least-dense spatial regions, the researchers said.

Revealing celestial birth and death

Yet JWST's cosmic map preserves the relative contrast across cosmic regions. It also shows that "massive galaxies in dense environments are more likely to be quiescent" — dying and quenched of their star-forming potential.

This may be because those galaxies are too massive, the team theorized. Once the dark matter halos that anchor galaxies grow to 1 trillion solar masses, they energize gas and prevent it from forming new stars. Additionally, active supermassive black holes quench star formation by energizing gas with their lethal, near-light-speed jets.

Such "mass-related" star-killing mechanisms dominated up to around 7 billion years ago — around half the age of the universe, the team found.

In the more recent universe, star formation is dominantly quenched by the environment around galaxies, which may strip them of material or prevent cold gas from accumulating and coalescing into stars.

Thanks to JWST's capabilities, the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe have been made clearer than ever, resolving blurry blobs into dim, ancient galaxies.

"The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST," co-author Bahram Mobasher, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, concluded in a statement.

The catalog of 164,000 galaxies used to build the map of the cosmic web is publicly available.

This article was first published May 18, 2026.

This small, abstract sculpture of a woman, carved from milky-white marble, is known as The Stargazer because her head is tilted back and her eyes appear to stare skyward. Only about 30 figurines of this type have ever been found; all of them date to about 3000 B.C. and were crafted by a culture that left no written records of the figurines' meaning, according to art historian Amanda Mikolic.

This particular stargazer figurine was once owned by philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller, a member of the wealthy industrial family and vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford. It is now in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA).

The marble figurine is roughly 6.8 inches (17.2 centimeters) tall and weighs about 1 pound (454 grams). Clearly carved into human form but lacking a mouth, the statuette likely represents a woman, with the incised lines below the waist representing her pubic triangle. Her large, oval head is tilted back, and her tiny, dot-like eyes look upward.

Most stargazer figurines that have been discovered in western Anatolia (present-day Turkey) were broken at the neck before being buried in the ground millennia ago, making the CMA example one of the finest and most complete stargazer statuettes ever found.

But the meaning of the woman portrayed in The Stargazer figurine is unclear, since the culture that created it did not leave any written language explaining their art.

The figurine cannot stand on its own, suggesting that it was meant to be held or placed flat, according to Mikolic. "Deliberately rendered as female, she may be associated with fertility and abundance," she wrote. The statuette may be part of a trend of simplistic female figurines in the Mediterranean area linked to female fertility and the life cycle, such as the Cycladic figurines, according to The Getty, which has a stargazer figurine in its collection.

Regardless of the woman's specific meaning, "she must have been an important devotional object to some long-lost culture," Arielle Kozloff, former curator of ancient art at the CMA, wrote in the CMA Members Magazine.

Abstract female figurines like The Stargazer and other Neolithic examples are known to have inspired early-20th-century cubist masters, Kozloff wrote. This gives her "a sense of timelessness," according to Mikolic, "encouraging the viewer to think of humankind’s place and role in a larger cosmos."

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

A simple method to thicken Arctic sea ice has shown promising results in its very first field experiment, performed in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada.

Researchers are considering several controversial geoengineering techniques to slow the catastrophic melt of Arctic sea ice, including stratospheric aerosol injection, which involves shooting tiny sulfur particles into the sky to blot out the sun. But in a new study, scientists evaluated the merits of a much safer and more straightforward approach: pumping seawater onto existing sea ice in winter and letting it freeze into a reinforcing layer.

Known as sea ice thickening, this method has been used by Nordic and Arctic communities for decades, and ice hockey rinks employ a similar technique to keep their ice sturdy, two of the study's authors told Live Science in an email.

"Practical applications [that already exist] include building ice roads and creating platforms for offshore oil exploration," said Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, a research associate professor in the University of Washington's Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and Andrea Ceccolini, an honorary professor at University College London and the CEO of the startup Real Ice, which studies artificial sea ice thickening methods and receives funding from the U.K. government.

Modeling work hints that sea ice thickening could become a climate adaptation tool for Arctic communities by limiting coastal erosion near towns, facilitating travel and supporting animal migrations and hunting.

Now, researchers have assessed the method's efficacy in the field for the first time. Their results, published May 22 in the journal Earth's Future, indicate that both the thickness and brightness of sea ice can be enhanced significantly on small scales — making the ice more reflective, and therefore more resilient to melting.

In the experiment, the team set up eight test areas and three control sites in Cambridge Bay during the winter of 2024 to 2025. Using submersible pumps that each consume less power than a toaster, they flooded the test areas either once or twice with up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) of seawater, while the control sites were never flooded. In spring, one control site was used for a melt pond drainage experiment, which involved drilling small holes in the ice to remove meltwater and expose the brighter ice underneath.

Overall, the test areas grew up to 12.6 inches (32 cm) thicker than the control sites by the end of winter, which is roughly equivalent to the ice thinning that has happened in the Arctic over the past 50 years, according to the study. Test areas that were flooded twice showed greater thickening than those flooded once. And in the melt period from late May to September, sea ice in the test areas appeared brighter and had slower melt rates, remaining thicker than the ice in the control sites. The melt pond drainage experiment also resulted in brighter sea ice than the other control sites.

When water is pumped onto sea ice, it saturates the snow that sits on top of the ice. "The snow-water mixture freezes into a new layer of ice, while the reduction in snow insulation allows colder atmospheric temperatures to accelerate natural ice growth from below," Blanchard-Wrigglesworth and Ceccolini explained.

Thicker sea ice is usually brighter than thin sea ice, which boosts the amount of sunlight that is reflected back into space. "The broader implication is that these effects could enhance the Arctic's reflectivity through both increased surface brightness and longer-lasting sea ice," the researchers said. "If similar results could eventually be achieved at larger scales, increased Arctic albedo could contribute to regional cooling, with potential knock-on benefits such as slowing permafrost thaw and reducing ice loss from Greenland."

However, there is still a big question mark over how scalable and economically viable sea ice thickening is, given that it requires people and machines working in the field. According to a 2016 study, 10 million wind-powered pumps would be needed to cover just 10% of the Arctic Ocean, and 100 million to cover the entire Arctic. "It is reasonable to ask whether such an endeavor is financially feasible or even logistically possible," the authors of that study wrote.

Yearly sea ice extent in the Arctic has shrunk by 20% since 1979, and this loss is accelerating with global warming. Therefore, if we want Arctic sea ice thickening to work at a large scale, "the pumps must be deployed almost immediately, while there is still a sufficient area of sea ice over which to flood," researchers wrote in a 2021 study.

The ecological and social impacts of Arctic sea ice thickening are not well understood, and further research will delay deployment, meaning it might be too late to roll out sea ice thickening by the time scientists have the data they need to ensure its safety and feasibility.

For these reasons and others, including governance issues and high maintenance needs, "sea-ice thickening is simply not feasible for use at a scale and at a rate that would be meaningful for sea ice protection," researchers wrote in a review published last year.

Deployment on anything but local scales would be challenging, Blanchard-Wrigglesworth and Ceccolini agreed. Nevertheless, the researchers said their most recent winter trials, which have yet to be published, showed encouraging results. In those trials, the sea ice in test areas grew 20 inches (50 cm) thicker than in control sites, The Guardian reported.

"We expect to have a clearer picture once the current melt season is complete," the researchers told Live Science. "In parallel, we are developing underwater robotic technology that could support autonomous deployments. Earlier this year, we conducted the first Arctic field tests of a prototype re-icing drone in Finland."

The drone is currently being refined in collaboration with the BioRobotics Institute in Pisa, Italy, according to The Guardian.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is continuing to have a disruptive impact on ever more parts of humanity. But what does it mean in the long run? A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Austrian researcher Sergey Ivliev, extrapolates what the wide scale adoption of AI means for the future of humanity in space — and in particular what it means for the ultimate question of whether we're truly alone in the galaxy or not.

A framework for much of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence came from famous physicist Enrico Fermi, who simply asked "Where is everybody?" at a lunchtime discussion at Los Alamos in the 1950s. Though never officially published, Fermi's lunch partners from that day have passed down an oral history of that conversation that has cemented it into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), at least until Michael Hart formally laid out the argument and mathematics for the underlying question in a paper in 1975.

There are plenty of potential answers to the Fermi Paradox, many of which can be found floating around the internet — and some are likely more valid than others. But Ivliev, a Ph.D. in Mathematical Economics and founder of environmental project consultancies such as Peatland Ecosystems and Vlinder, suggests a new resolution: the Quiet Expansion filter.

The central argument of the paper is that there aren't thousands of alien mega-structures lighting up the night sky because once a civilization reaches the threshold of Autonomous AI-Cosmoindustry (AICI), "loud", resource-hungry empires motivated by prestige or romance become irrational. However, this does not mean expansion stops; instead, it shifts to a "quiet" mode driven by rational goals like survival diversification, knowledge preservation, and scientific observation.

The AICI threshold is reached when a civilization possesses a self-sustaining off-planet industrial and computational system capable of designing, manufacturing, repairing and launching space hardware through AI-mediated autonomy. We're already taking tentative steps in this direction with the advent of space-based data centers, but true AICI —where a civilization can extend its infrastructure beyond its home planet without continuous biological intervention — is leaps and bounds beyond our current capabilities.

In this vein, Ivliev is drawing on work done by astrophysicists Sergey Popov, who noted that a truly rational AI system would reject human-like motivations for space travel — such as romance, conquest, or prestige. Instead, AI would view space expansion as simple risk management.

To an AI, putting all your eggs in one basket — whether that basket is a single planet, solar system, or even galaxy, can lead to a single point of failure. Therefore, expansion is highly logical as a way of mitigating the risk posed by that single point of failure. At the point where we have reached AICI, the cost for sending a 10kg interstellar probe to another star at 1% of the speed of light is roughly 4.5x10^13 Joules — a tiny fraction of the overall energy budget of such a civilization.

One key aspect is that the 10 kg probe doesn't contain any actual people — it simply holds the "seeds" to restart life elsewhere in case a catastrophe happens back in the home system. It would contain a civilization's knowledge, and possibly some of its biological material, enabling a sufficiently advanced AI to rebuild the entire civilization from scratch. This is the "Quiet Expansion" where an AI sends low-mass and hard to detect "seed systems" instead of moving millions of biological entities around in massive interstellar space ships.

There are some additional constraints on this method of expansion, including selecting promising exoplanets discovered by remote sensing and deploying minimal local resources to maintain themselves until needed. Additionally, the AI would restrict self-replication of the probes in order to avoid any "grey goo" scenario with a probe attempting to take over entire swathes of the galaxy.

This has obvious implications for why we've never found "loud" technosignatures. In this scenario, a "null" result of being unable to find the thermal signature of a Kardashev-III scale civilization doesn't mean a galaxy is empty. It just means that the successful civilizations are residing in a "quiet" state in case its back-up plans are needed.

But there's another, more ominous implication from this framework. If interstellar backups are cheap to make, and we haven't found any in our own backyard, that means either we're one of the first civilizations to make it to that point or the transition from a planetary industrial society to a space-based one is a narrow path to tread. Admittedly the probes such civilizations would send out are probably hard to find even in our own solar systems, but if we're unable to, it means we're ending uncharted territory — and might just run into a filter that had silenced the rest of the galaxy. That's a sobering thought, but one to keep in mind as we start to advance our own AI capabilities.

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

Are you a UFO fanatic? Find out with our extraterrestrials quiz!

NASA has marked the 250th birthday of the U.S. with a striking new collection of cosmic images from its Chandra X-ray Observatory, presenting four deep-space objects in red, white and blue.

The image set combines X-ray data from Chandra — which has been orbiting Earth since 1999 — with observations from NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (JWST), as well as multiple ground-based observatories. Together, the images showcase some of the universe’s most dramatic environments, from the remains of an exploded star to a massive galaxy cluster shaped by dark matter — each rendered in patriotic colors.

Arguably the image most reminiscent of Fourth of July fireworks is that of Cassiopeia A, a famous supernova remnant about 11,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia (top left). Chandra’s X-ray data, shown in blue and purple, reveal the blast wave from a massive stellar explosion and trace elements such as iron, calcium and oxygen. Meanwhile, infrared data from JWST has been overlaid in red and white, highlighting the expanding shell of debris and cosmic dust. It’s all the result of a massive star that exploded about 340 years ago, according to NASA.

On the top-right is NGC 3603, a giant nebula 20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way. Here it appears as a glowing field of highly active, newly formed stars. Chandra’s X-ray observations reveal the light coming from the nebula, while Hubble data in optical, infrared and ultraviolet light show its glittering array of stars, as well as dust and gas. NGC 3603 is the largest nebula seen in visible light in our galaxy.

NGC 4736, also known as M94, is something else entirely. Pictured bottom-right, it’s a spiral galaxy about 19 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. Its famed for the faint arms outside of its oval-shaped core region — known as a "starburst ring," where new stars are forming. It’s shown here with Chandra’s X-ray data layered with visible-light imagery captured by ground-based astrophotographers.

The final image features ZwCl 0024+1652 (bottom-left), a distant galaxy cluster where Hubble data has helped astronomers infer the presence of dark matter. About five billion light-years away in the constellation Pisces, Chandra’s X-rays reveal a vast reservoir of superheated gas in ZwCl 0024+1652 — shown in red — that contains more mass than the cluster’s galaxies combined.

The release of the new photos also includes novel sonifications for NGC 3603, NGC 4736 and ZwCl 0024+1652, transforming astronomical data into sound. The project allows audiences to experience space through both sight and hearing.

See more space photos of the week:

With violent conflicts happening across the world right now, war feels like a permanent condition. But have humans ever lived without war?

The answer depends on how you define "war." If war means a fight between two governments, then yes, there have been peaceful periods "because for nearly 99% of human history, there were no governments," said Ian Morris, a historian at Stanford University and author of "War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

Violence, on the other hand, has always been with us. If the question becomes "Have people ever lived without violence?" then "the answer is pretty clearly no — people have always fought and killed each other," Morris told Live Science in an email.

The theory of a peaceful prehistory

According to a review of studies published in 2022, war was rare or nonexistent in early human history when people lived as nomadic hunter gatherers. Peter Stearns, a professor emeritus of history at George Mason University and author of "Peace in World History" (Routledge, 2014), agrees with this idea. There was "little or no war in hunting and gathering [cultures] before the rise of agriculture," he told Live Science in an email.

This idea is based on archaeological records. Researchers examining ancient human bones from around the world have looked for skeletal evidence of war injuries, for instance of multiple individuals with unhealed wounds from stabbing, slicing and blunt force trauma who were buried in mass graves. However, they found little evidence of war injuries before 8000 B.C. After that, when humans began transitioning from nomadic life to permanent settlements, such injuries appeared widely.

This doesn't mean that lethal violence was absent in prehistoric societies. Researchers in Kenya found 27 skeletons dating to 10,000 years ago at the archaeological site of Nataruk; these skeletons show signs of violent death, which some anthropologists interpret as evidence of intergroup violence among early hunter-gatherers. And at Jebel Sahaba, a prehistoric cemetery in Sudan, archaeologists unearthed 13,000-year-old remains bearing signs of intergroup attacks.

But these cases of interpersonal violence don't count as war, because of how researchers usually define it. "Researchers who focus on war as a specific category of violence usually define it by saying it has to be violence organized by a government or else collective violence that kills more than a certain number of people," Morris said. "Prehistoric societies rarely had formal governments and hunter-gatherer bands rarely had more than a few dozen members, so if you define war as a conflict run by a government or one that kills >100 people, then by definition there can't have been wars in [early] prehistory."

David Christian, a historian and professor emeritus in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University in Australia, echoed this idea. "For much of human history communities were so small that it is not clear if we can equate violence with war," he told Live Science in an email. "I guess we can say that humans have always been capable of violence and as communities got larger that violence began to take on forms that we might want to describe as 'war.'"

Peace between rival powers

Once large kingdoms and empires appeared, war became very common. A doctoral thesis written by Jared Morgan McKinney, now an assistant professor of international security studies at Air War College in Alabama, focused on periods of peace between major powers. He concluded that war was basically the norm throughout history and that famous "peaceful" eras, like the Pax Romana (Roman Peace), usually just meant one powerful group had beaten everyone else into submission.

But there were exceptions. "Wars are expensive and risky," said Peter Frankopan, a professor of global history at the University of Oxford. "So in many periods in history, stability and peace have been achieved by rivals, adversaries and neighbors being able to match each other's capabilities."

McKinney's thesis identified several periods when rival powers managed to avoid war.

From around 1400 to 1200 B.C., the big powers of the ancient Middle East — mainly Egypt and the Hittite Empire, an ancient civilization in modern-day Turkey — went through two unusually long stretches without major wars. Peace was possible because the "Great Kings" recognized one another as equals and settled their territorial and political differences through formal treaties rather than war.

For most of their history, Rome and Persia were at war. Then, from roughly A.D. 387 to around 501, the two superpowers mostly stopped fighting. Historians call this the "Long Fifth Century" and have put forward many explanations for this period of peace, including that both sides faced serious outside threats that made fighting less affordable and that the two sides developed a language of "brotherhood" that acknowledged each other as equals rather than enemies, McKinney wrote in his thesis.

Between roughly A.D. 1000 and 1200, the rich Song dynasty in China secured peace with its militant northern neighbors ‪—‬ the Liao and the Jin‪ —‬ by paying them regularly to keep the peace. Although these monetary gifts (or bribes) looked like weakness, the payments were tiny compared with what China was earning through trade, according to McKinney.

Another example, according to Morris, is the "long peace" between China, Korea and Japan between about 1600 and 1850. While European states spent those centuries competing for power and territory through war, the East Asian states lived in relative peace. "In Europe, we've tended to be a lot more aggressive and competitive — which gives the impression that war is a 'natural state' of being," Frankopan said.

A notable period of relative peace in North America was the Long Peace among the Iroquois nations, McKinney told Live Science in an email. For roughly three centuries, from about 1450 to 1777, five (and later six) Native American nations who had previously engaged in violent and costly conflict forged a peaceful relationship known as the "Haudenosaunee Confederacy" or "League of Five Nations."

In South America, McKinney pointed to the South American Long Peace. This refers to the absence of major interstate wars between sovereign nations in South America ever since 1935.

"War is 'normal' in history," McKinney said. But, as these examples show, "patterns have exceptions."

Can you identify these historical objects of war? Test your smarts with our weapons of the world quiz.

Want to speed up your recovery after an injury or a workout? Some influencers are fans of shots of BPC-157 and TB-500 for that. Want scar-free, youthful skin and thick hair? Reddit posts rave about GHK-Cu and KPV. Want to build beautiful, bulky biceps? Some fitness influencers swear shots of ipamorelin will do wonders. This is the world of peptides — an assortment of chemicals that promise to boost your body and health — and people are self-injecting them in a growing wellness trend.

Promoted by bodybuilders and influencers, supporters of the "Make America Healthy Again" movement and Silicon Valley early adopters, peptides promise results that leave people better than well, fitter than fit. Yet despite getting glowing reviews on social media, most peptides have limited clinical evidence to support health benefits, whether it's helping to heal a rotator cuff injury, improving libido or building muscles. There's not much information out there on the drugs' effectiveness and even less on their safety.

In 2023 the Food and Drug Administration banned several peptides, including BPC-157, GHK-Cu, KPV and ipamorelin, from being produced in the U.S. by compounding pharmacies — facilities that legally make non-FDA-approved medications for individual use — because of "significant safety risks." Many peptides are imported from outside of the country, and many made here are marketed for research use only. People who desperately want the promise contained in the tiny vials seek them out on online on legally dubious gray markets.

But accessing the shots might soon get easier. On the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience on February 27, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, proposed legalizing the compounding of 14 peptides — and the FDA seems poised to grant his wish. Earlier this week the agency released plans to hold a meeting with independent advisers in July to review whether some U.S. pharmacies should be allowed to manufacture certain peptides, including BPC-157, TB-500 and KPV.

If the lift on peptides happens, a flood of people could start using the drugs, regardless of any safety concerns.

A Peptide by Many Names

A peptide is a chain of two or more amino acids — building blocks of proteins. The body's cells can produce numerous peptides, which perform various tasks or serve as signaling molecules.

Insulin is a peptide. So is human growth hormone — and semaglutide, the active ingredient in glucagonlike peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy. (GLP-1s are FDA-approved for managing type 2 diabetes and for weight loss). Buzzy new injections such as BPC-157 and GHK-Cu — touted for tissue repair — are derivations or synthetic versions of naturally occurring peptides. The public and online health retailers are starting to use "peptides" as a catchall term for any chemical taken for well-being, energy, exercise recovery, and more, says Luke Turnock, a criminologist who studies how people use enhancement drugs at the University of Lincoln in England.

And while people are using them as treatments, peptides aren't often described as drugs. "'Drug' has a certain stigma or negative connotation attached to it," Turnock says. The popularity of peptides has its roots in the bodybuilding and powerlifting communities, he explains, where "drug" has historically been tied to steroids — which are generally banned for professional athletes.

The term "peptides," meanwhile, stresses the natural origin of the molecules, says Flynn McGuire, who studies sports medicine at the University of Utah. "Because it's 'natural,' it is better or different, even though they're just drugs," McGuire says.

A Surge in Popularity

In the past few years, orthopedic surgeon Omar Rahman has seen a spike in interest in peptides. "I'm seeing more patients asking about peptides, often driven by the longevity and wellness space," says Rahman, who practices at Pacific Coast Sports Medicine in Los Angeles.

Because peptides encompass many products — some available by prescription, others on the gray market — the exact number of people trying them is hard to pin down. The subreddit r/peptides currently has more than 70,000 weekly visitors, and the related subreddit r/biohackers, which frequently hosts conversations on peptides, has more than 600,000. A scroll through TikTok offers pages of people sharing their "stacks" — combinations of injections people take to meet their personal goals, from muscle-building and exercise recovery to increased brainpower or a better tan.

"The real cultural tipping point in my mind seems to have been around 2022, when the GLP-1s really blew up," says Turnock, who is researching the peptide boom. He says injecting drugs became "normalized" when GLP-1 drugs approved to treat diabetes, such as Ozempic, were also shown to be effective for weight loss — and eventually became an approved treatment for obesity.

Some are turning to peptides because they feel doctors aren't giving them the help they need, says Dan Cushman, a sports medicine doctor at the University of Utah. Injuries to certain tissues, such as tendons, "are very slow to heal" with conventional treatments, he says. Mainstream treatment can also be expensive and painful. To someone desperate for relief, peptides might seem worth a try.

Peptide use is also linked to a growing interest in health autonomy, Turnock says. This is the idea "that doctors, if they're not prescribing what you ask for or they're not offering you these solutions, are acting as a barrier to your good health."

Stacking Up

McGuire, Cushman and colleagues published a review last year on one peptide they encountered frequently: BPC-157. The peptide is promoted as a way to stimulate multiple cellular pathways involved in blood vessel formation, cell growth, muscle repair and inflammation. Their review, however, found that most of the evidence of such health effects was from rodent studies, and only three small pilot studies had looked at BPC-157 use in humans.

In a regimen called the "Wolverine" stack, many people combine BPC-157 with injections of TB-500, another peptide that is supposed to promote healing but has even less research behind it. The "Wolverine" stack is named after the rapidly healing X-Men character. Add injections of GHK-Cu and KPV, and the stack is called "glow" or "KLOW." People claim that GHK-Cu increases wound healing, decreases scarring and helps regenerate collagen — and that KPV, derived from a hormone naturally found in the body, reduces inflammation. GHK-Cu is found in blood plasma and is an FDA-approved ingredient in topical antiaging cosmetics — but it is currently banned as an injectable because of safety concerns, such as the risk of immune reactions caused by impurities.

For muscle-building, the peptides ipamorelin and CJC-1295 are advertised as stimulating growth hormone release. Both have little clinical evidence behind them, however. Some people stack ipamorelin with GLP-1 drugs to try to lose fat while building muscle, though the effects of taking these injections together have not been studied.

Use at Your Own Risk

Clinical trial data for most of these peptides are thin. Not only are the effects anecdotal, but so are the doses. FDA-approved drugs, Cushman says, have been tested and reviewed not just for their efficacy but also for their safety. There is very little existing information on most of these peptides, he says, let alone on what happens if they are combined.

In many cases, the provenance of these peptides is even grayer than the gray market would suggest. "Patients are accessing peptides through online vendors, wellness clinics and compounding pharmacies," Rahman says. "That variability in sourcing is one of the biggest concerns, particularly when it comes to purity, dosing consistency and overall quality control."

The FDA does not allow production of BPC-157, GHK-Cu, KPV and ipamorelin in the U.S., for example, by compounding pharmacies because of safety concerns, so people are ordering them from overseas — usually from China. Some are buying peptides labeled as "for research only." Not all are stuck in the legal gray areas; other peptides are available from compounding pharmacies.

In Kennedy's February remarks about his aim to allow compounding of more than a dozen peptides in the U.S., he suggested that peptides made within the country would be safer than ones acquired abroad.

"Americans deserve to know the quality of the products they are buying and deserve drugs that have been proven to be safe and effective," an HHS spokesperson told Scientific American in response to questions about Kennedy's comment and the timing of the lift. "The FDA's goal is to ensure that patients can obtain FDA-approved products, and when those aren't available or can't work because of a patient's unique situation, are made by licensed U.S. pharmacies."

But even if Kennedy's plan to make some peptides easier to compound in the U.S. is enacted, it does not necessarily mean the drugs are safe or effective. The FDA does not approve or review drugs from compounding pharmacies — it just monitors the active ingredients the facilities use.

If peptides become more readily available in the U.S. market, Cushman predicts, more "people are going to just start trying [them]" — whether there are data to back them up or not. The public may experience any benefits — and perils — of peptides before scientists quantify them in the clinic.

This article was first published at Scientific American. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow on TikTok and Instagram, X and Facebook.

This week's science news was all about goings on in space, with reports that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) picked up a signal from a mysterious, never-before-seen substance on Pluto and Titan.

The space telescope detected a specific absorption line in the spectra of these worlds' atmospheres, revealing the characteristic trace of a unique and unknown molecule. It's unclear exactly what the molecule could be, and the mystery is made even more compelling by the fact that the environments of Pluto and Titan are very distinct.

Farther afield, the JWST's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, spotted "impossible" light from a galaxy we shouldn't even be able to see. And in the busy skies surrounding our own planet, scientists are dreaming up a scheme to drop a giant "airbag" that could protect us from solar storms, sending spacecraft into orbit to save doomed telescopes, and also giving answers to why metal sticks together in space.

And just in time for Independence Day weekend, the sun has launched a string of eruptions to Earth that will likely paint the night skies with colorful auroras.

China's 'Great Green Wall' grows faster than natural forests

66 billion trees have been planted in China's Great Green Wall — and they appear to be growing faster than natural forests

China is no stranger to engineering projects designed to bring its environment to heel; we've recently covered the Asian powerhouse's attempts to tame nature through the creation of atmospheric rivers, the world's biggest dam and water transfers. But these are hardly China's only forays into sculpting its natural environment, with the country having planted more than 66 billion trees along its northern borders to halt the advance of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts.

Now, new research has revealed a startling detail about the trees in this "Great Green Wall": they're growing significantly faster than natural forests. Exactly why remains a mystery, but, as Live Science contributor Brian Owens reveals, it could be due to a stronger response from the trees to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Discover more planet Earth news

—'It sounds so impossible': Student studying fungus that makes users hallucinate tiny people may be on the verge of a scientific breakthrough

—'Uncharted territory': Record high ocean temperatures confirmed for June as El Niño strengthens its grip

—Study suggests life on Earth has around 1.8 billion years left — but the biosphere might evolve to survive even longer

Life's Little Mysteries

Are CAPTCHAs obsolete in the age of AI?

Are you a robot? It used to be a question that only humans could answer — by clicking on traffic lights or strings of warped and grainy characters, or Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs). But what happens now that autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents can ace some of these trials without detection? Have they made CAPTCHAs obsolete?

—If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life's Little Mysteries newsletter

Medici murder mystery solved

Ancient-DNA analysis solves 500-year-old mystery of what killed 2 Medici brothers

The Medici family ruled Renaissance Tuscany with an iron fist, fulfilling their ruthless ambitions with methods so underhand that the name of their most famous advisor, Niccolò Machiavelli, became a synonym for skulduggery.

So, when two brothers from the infamous family died under mysterious circumstances, it was believed for 500 years that they were murdered, possibly by arsenic poisoning. Now, science has revealed the true culprit behind the medieval cold case, and it's not what we expected.

Discover more archaeology news

—Ancient ring discovered underground in Scotland could be a Stonehenge-like monument

—500-year-old freeze-dried potato snacks discovered in Inca storage room in Peru

—2,000-year-old scrolls buried by Mount Vesuvius eruption finally deciphered with help from AI

Also in science news this week

—Chinese supercomputer leapfrogs best US machines to be ranked world's fastest

—The hantavirus outbreak is over, WHO declares

—Rise in cancer in younger adults may be explained by faster 'biological aging,' early study hints

—Dead-end bitcoin mining wastes as much energy as Switzerland's entire hydropower generation capacity

—CERN shuts down Large Hadron Collider until 2030, upgrading the atom smasher to its most powerful form yet

—Scientists figured out how to shrink huge ultrafast lasers so they fit on a tiny chip ‪‪—‬ the 'holy grail' of the field

Science Spotlight

Japan's bold experiment to curb antibiotic misuse has been a huge success. Could it work in the US?

Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat in the U.S., with more than 2.8 million Americans developing antimicrobial-resistant infections each year. The solutions to this worrying trend can be very complex— such as moving agricultural systems away from their overreliance on antibiotics, or preventing the rapid spread of superbugs through international travel.

But stopping doctors from overprescribing antibiotics is one of the easiest strategies in the battle against this "silent pandemic." And it turns out that Japan has already fought it with some success, driving down antibiotic overuse with an innovative new policy. To investigate further and ask what notes the U.S. should be taking, Live Science's health editor Nicoletta Lanese visited Japan and reported back on their investigation.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here are a smattering of our best expert opinion pieces, alongside a crossword, an interview and a quiz, that we published this week.

— Computer scientists are rushing to tame AI's voracious appetite for energy [Opinion]

—'It's more than a hope, it's a guarantee': The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's 10-year movie of the universe is about to 'blow our minds,' chief scientist Tony Tyson says [Interview]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #50: Longest-serving president in US history — 1 across [Crossword]

—Ancient empires quiz: Can you match these lands to the historical powers that ruled them? [Quiz]

Science photo of the week

Bull's-eye! Enormous 'bow and arrow' galaxy is unlike anything radio astronomers have ever seen

If you ask me, it looks more like a rusty anchor, or a blurry deep-sea fish. But whichever way you see it, the newly discovered "bow and arrow" galaxy — or, more formally, the RAD-Bow-And-Arrow Radio Galaxy (RAD-BAARG) — is an oddball unlike any other recorded.

The galaxy's unique structure is likely the result of gravity, which is warping RAD-BAARG into a funhouse mirror version of its former self as it falls into a nearby galaxy cluster. A shock front from this plunge surrounds the galaxy as it moves through hot gas.

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A hefty "super Earth" lurking in one of the closest star systems to our planet may be much better suited to supporting extraterrestrial life than scientists initially thought, a new study suggests. The alien world's relative proximity to Earth, and the nature of its home star, make it a prime candidate for follow-up observations, researchers say.

The exoplanet, dubbed GJ 3378b, was discovered in 2024 and orbits a red dwarf star around 25 light-years from our planet. The alien world circles its star every 21.5 days at a distance around 10 times closer than Earth orbits the sun, which would make it completely inhospitable in our solar system. But because the red dwarf emits around 90% less radiation than the sun does, GJ 3378b is slap bang in the middle of this star system’s "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist on the exoplanet's surface.

Researchers initially thought that GJ 3378b was around five times more massive than Earth. If the planet is rocky like ours, it would qualify as a "super Earth" — often considered the best candidates for sustaining extraterrestrial life. However, it was hard to tell if this world had a solid surface or was actually a mini gas giant. And even if it was rocky, its immense size would probably mean that its atmospheric pressure would be crushing, making it less likely to harbor life.

But in a new study, published June 30 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers recalculated the exoplanet's size, using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder instrument attached to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. This device measures subtle wobbles in the host star, caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets, and can be used to calculate the planet’s mass and trajectory.

This revealed that GJ 3378b is actually only 2.3 times more massive than Earth, which almost guarantees it is a rocky world and means it could have an atmosphere with a similar pressure to our own, raising the chances that extraterrestrial lifeforms could thrive there.

While researchers have found several other exoplanets that could harbor life, the fact that GJ 3378b is so close to us makes it particularly intriguing, as it will be easier to confirm whether it is truly habitable.

"This one’s exciting," study first author Paul Robertson, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. "25 light-years sounds like a long way, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, so in that respect it’s our next-door neighbor."

Before we get too carried away, there is still no evidence that GJ 3378b has an atmosphere or liquid water. Its proximity to its home star may mean that any atmosphere it once had was stripped away by stellar winds, similar to how solar radiation likely stripped Mars of its atmosphere and ancient oceans.

Therefore, more observations are needed. But if an atmosphere is detected, GJ 3378b would likely jump to near the front of the queue of exoplanets that researchers want to study further.

"If a planet in the habitable zone has a proper atmosphere, we can justify further research looking for biosignatures, liquid water or other signs of life," study co-author Gogod James, an undergraduate student at UC Irvine, said in the statement.

The fact that GJ 3378b orbits a red dwarf also makes it more appealing for future study because this is the most common star type in the Milky Way, so experts are keen to learn more about these stars' planetary systems and potential to nurture life.

"About 70% of stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs, so they represent the standard," study co-author Michael Endl, an astronomer at the McDonald Observatory and the University of Texas at Austin, said in another statement. "It’s really important that we understand the planet population around these stars."

When you click to enter a website or try to log in or fill out a form, you may be asked to identify motorcycles from a grid of grainy images, decipher a string of convoluted characters, or click a box that states "I am not a robot."

These tests are called CAPTCHAs, which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." As their name suggests, they are meant to help a website distinguish if an action is coming from a human or a bot, since the aforementioned tasks are theoretically easy for a human and difficult for automated software to perform. This, in turn, blocks bots from spamming comments, downloading files, taking over accounts, or executing any other action on a website.

But as computer models increasingly gain the ability to solve CAPTCHAs, thanks to advancing artificial intelligence (AI) — and with puzzles getting weirder and more difficult for humans to complete — does this mean CAPTCHAs are still useful?

CAPTCHAs were introduced in the late 1990s to address "a very simple, but very difficult problem," Andreas Plesner, a computer scientist at ETH Zurich, told Live Science. "If I don't interact with a person physically … is it a computer? Or is it human?" Some of the first CAPTCHAs, still common on websites today, were composed of distorted text, since text-reading software at that time had trouble interpreting warped words.

But over time, text-reading software improved and new types of CAPTCHAs were developed. For instance, reCAPTCHA, one of the most popular CAPTCHA services, has an image-based test that asks users to identify objects such as traffic lights, motorcycles or bicycles from a grid of Google Street View photos. This was developed after Google acquired the service in 2009.

"The bet was that recognizing objects in messy, real-world photos was still a uniquely human skill," Ng Chong, chief of information technology and director of United Nations University's Campus Computing Centre in Tokyo, told Live Science in an email.

As time went on, CAPTCHA design continued to advance. In 2014, Google came out with reCAPTCHA v2, which analyzed computer mouse behavior by asking people to click a checkbox to test if a user was human. If the behavior is deemed suspicious, determined by factors like how a user interacts with the site beforehand or the timing of their click, the street-image grid pops up as an additional puzzle.

However, more recently, technology has improved to a point where image recognition is no longer a human-specific skill. As early as 2016, researchers found that low-cost deep learning technologies could solve reCAPTCHAv2 around 70% of the time. By 2024, Plesner and his colleagues developed an AI model that could solve the puzzles correctly 100% of the time. Earlier in 2026, Chong noted that he built a tool that could mimic human-like browsing behavior and sometimes bypass reCAPTCHA v2 without triggering the image grid at all. When the grid was triggered, the tool used AI to solve it within a few tries.

"When both the challenge and the behavioral layer are defeated by commodity tools running on a single laptop, the fundamental premise of CAPTCHA, that there are tasks humans can do but machines can't, stops holding," Chong wrote.

Looking ahead

So does that mean CAPTCHAs are completely obsolete? Not quite. Although the model Plesner and his colleagues developed breezed past reCAPTCHAv2, "there were a lot of the safety measures that were not tied to being able to solve it, but more tied to how you solve it," he said. For example, while conducting their research, Plesner noted that his team used a virtual private network (VPN) that changed IP addresses for each test, since a single IP address with a high volume of solved CAPTCHAs faced tasks with increasing difficulty, or got blocked entirely.

Modern CAPTCHAs focus on these background clues and tactics, rather than the puzzle itself. This includes Google's reCAPTCHA v3, Friendly CAPTCHA, hCAPTCHA and Cloudflare's Turnstile, among others, which run without sending a puzzle at all. They instead look at whether the action is coming from a real attested device (rather than from automated code), whether an IP address has had a high volume of automated requests in the past, how a user navigates a webpage, what the user's cookie history is, and a slew of other factors to determine possible malicious intent.

As the tug-of-war continues, CAPTCHA puzzles are still widespread. After all, they’ve been the status quo for decades, are easy to set up and are relatively cost-effective, Chong said. But these tasks have some other drawbacks. Although bots can increasingly solve the puzzles with ease, CAPTCHAs can be a headache to get through for humans and can be seen as discriminatory against those with disabilities, notably visual disabilities, as a researcher noted in a 2022 conference paper.

The crescendoing complexity of CAPTCHA puzzles has even been the subject of parody, with developer Neal Agarwal creating a free satirical game called "I'm Not a Robot." Users must solve a series of increasingly convoluted verification checks — scoring a point for each stage they pass, which eventually transcend into the absurd.

So, as machines get smarter, the answer may not be to find more difficult puzzles. "If a CAPTCHA can only be solved by someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics, then it's not very useful," Plesner said. "The internet needs to be used by everyone."

Can you match these ancient devices to their pictures? Find out with our computing quiz!

The diminutive, now-extinct humans known as the "hobbits" were scavengers who dined on dwarf elephants after Komodo dragons took the best cuts, archaeologists have discovered. The finding upends the assumption that Homo floresiensis, a human species that arrived on the Indonesian island of Flores at least 700,000 years ago, hunted big game.

First discovered in 2003, H. floresiensis has been nicknamed the hobbit because of its small size, averaging around 3 feet, 6 inches (106 centimeters) tall, along with its small brain, large teeth and big feet. But archaeologists also found stone tools, animal bones with cut marks, and charred bones that seemed to add up to sophisticated behavior common within our genus, Homo. The hobbits disappeared around 50,000 years ago as Homo sapiens began spreading around Southeast Asia.

But in a study published Friday (July 3) in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers questions whether the behavior of H. floresiensis was really as advanced as previously assumed.

The researchers looked at fossil bones of Stegodon florensis insularis, an extinct dwarf species of elephant relative discovered at Liang Bua cave, where bones from H. floresiensis and stone tools have also been found, to determine whether the cut marks were from hunting Stegodon meat or from scavenging the remains of the feasts of the only other carnivore on the island: the Komodo dragons (Varanus komodensis).

To distinguish the hobbit cut marks from Komodo dragon tooth marks, the researchers first conducted an experiment, feeding a goat carcass to a captive Komodo dragon at Zoo Atlanta. Then, they recovered the goat skeleton and painstakingly documented all of the marks, pits, notches and furrows the Komodo dragon's teeth made in the bones. The tooth marks were concentrated in areas with substantial amounts of goat flesh, the researchers wrote in the study, suggesting the Komodo dragon had a preference for meaty areas.

The researchers then investigated the ancient Stegodon bones for evidence of cut marks made by H. floresiensis' stone tools and tooth marks from Komodo dragons. They found 54 cut marks on the Stegodon bones and nearly twice as many Komodo dragon tooth marks. More importantly, they discovered that the Komodo dragon marks were focused on meaty areas, while the human cut marks were made primarily in areas without a lot of meat, suggesting H. floresiensis did not hunt and kill the Stegodon.

The overall patterns of cut marks and tooth marks suggest "a combination of mostly primary access by Komodo dragons and secondary access by H. floresiensis where both predators consumed Stegodon," the researchers wrote. And the hobbits likely ate this meat raw, according to the researchers, as they found no evidence on the Stegodon bones that they had been cooked. Nor did they find any evidence of burning on over 4,000 mouse bones from the site, suggesting the previous evidence of charring was actually natural manganese staining.

A lack of hunting and fire-making technology suggests that the hobbits were not as behaviorally sophisticated as previously thought and raises questions about their ancestry, the researchers said.

It's possible that the ancestor of H. floresiensis branched from the Homo genus before humans accomplished the control of fire and hunting, study first author E. Grace Veatch, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science in an email.

One hypothesis for the origin of the hobbits is island dwarfism, which occurs when a large species' average body size evolves to be smaller over generations due to the limited availability of natural resources. Another theory is that hobbits descended from an earlier Homo species that was already small-bodied.

"I think our study highlights the importance of considering behavior in these debates," Veatch said. "Our study suggests that H. floresiensis evolved from a hominin population that did not require these dietary strategies [of hunting and cooking], such as a form of early Homo."

But the new study has not entirely settled the debate about the hobbits' ancestry, because very little is known about the behavior of early hominins in Southeast Asia, such as Homo erectus on Java and other areas of Sunda or Sundaland, a landmass between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean that has been exposed off and on over the past 2.6 million years.

If H. floresiensis really did branch off from H. erectus, that would suggest many evolutionary changes occurred.

"Taking place on an island that was cut off from contact with the Sunda mainland, this evolution from Homo erectus to Homo floresiensis may have involved not just profound anatomical transformations, such as reduced body size and brain volume, but also behavioural adaptations," Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

"Flores was clearly a wild card in the story of early human evolution, the sort of place where almost anything could have happened — including, potentially, the loss of deeply-rooted hominin behaviours, such as hunting and fire use," Brumm added.

Where H. floresiensis fits in with the rest of the Homo genus is still an open question, Veatch said. "Importantly, this study highlights the contribution of taphonomy [the study of what happens to organic remains after death] to speak to these larger questions about ancestry."

What do you know about early humans? Test your knowledge with our human origins quiz!

The enigmatic Scythians, a diverse group of nomadic tribes known for their ferocity in battle, were organized around elite dynasties of powerful men and women over 2,500 years ago, a new DNA study finds. The results reveal that social inequality arose in these nomadic groups around 900 B.C., during the Iron Age.

Most of what archaeologists know about the Scythians comes from ancient Greek and Roman accounts of the accomplished equestrians and from their large, mound-shaped tombs, called kurgans, that dot the Eurasian steppe grassland. The Scythians' tattooed mummies and intricate, animal-themed jewelry were as well-known in ancient times as their women warriors, who may have inspired the myth of the Amazons. But the Scythians left no written records of their own and were likely absorbed by other cultural groups after suffering several military defeats around 200 B.C.

In a study published Friday (July 3) in the journal Science Advances, researchers sequenced DNA from 85 Iron Age Scythians to better understand how these geographically spread-out groups were related and how their society was politically structured. They discovered that elite family dynasties ruled the nomadic groups from centralized locations, revealing the origin of social inequality among the Scythians.

The researchers generated genomes from the skeletons of 38 elite and 47 non-elite people buried in kurgan tombs across 20 archaeological sites between 900 and 200 B.C. The non-elite tombs were smaller than the elite tombs, and they lacked the impressive weapons and gold artifacts of the elite tombs.

Based on DNA, the researchers discovered that elite people were 11 times more likely to be related to each other than they were to be related to non-elite people, suggesting there was a powerful extended family group that ruled the steppe nomads.

Among the elite, they discovered two pairs of biological brothers, a brother and a sister, and a parent and child. In one case, the two brothers were buried at different sites some distance apart. They also found two elite grandfathers and grandsons buried in different cemeteries. But the elite people were still buried closer together than the non-elite people were.

"It is possible that this indicates some degree of geographic centralization of the elite burials being on average closer to each other," study co-author Ainash Childebayeva, a genetic anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science in an email. "For example, in Siberia there is an area known as the 'Valley of the Kings' that contains many large mounds that are likely elite of the similar time period as in our study."

The researchers also investigated the historical claim by Greek authors such as Herodotus that women held high-status positions.

"An important observation from our study was the noticeable presence of elite women," study first author Ayshin Ghalichi, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said in a statement. "Nearly half of the elite individuals in our dataset were female, indicating that women held high social status within Iron Age Scythian society."

Mysterious "Golden Man"

DNA evidence also solved a long-standing question about the "Golden Man." This skeleton of a teenager, discovered in 1969 in a kurgan in Kazakhstan, was found with more than 4,000 gold ornaments and a silver bowl with an inscription that has never been deciphered. Although the skeleton's sex could not be determined based on the bones, experts assumed the person was a powerful male warrior, even though women held nearly equal power among the Scythians.

"Although the data we were able to generate is low coverage, we found that the individual was a lot more likely to be genetically male than female," Childebayeva said, but "we did not identify any relatedness for the Golden Man."

The young age of the Golden Man – 17 based on his bones – and his elite burial status together provide clear evidence of elite dynastic rule, Childebayeva noted. An additional example that is "even more striking" comes from the pairing of a grandfather and his 1-year-old grandson, both buried in elite kurgans, Childebayeva said. These burials of elite children reinforce the conclusion that Iron Age steppe nomads inherited their social status.

"The results presented here further our understanding of the rise of social inequality and differentiation among ancient Eurasian nomadic groups and highlight the practices of the earliest nomadic groups of Central Eurasia in the first millennium BCE," the researchers wrote in the study.

Can you identify these historical objects of war? Test your smarts with our weapons of the world quiz!

Fourth of July celebrations across the United States this weekend could be accompanied by light shows in the night skies, as a string of powerful solar eruptions appear set to strike Earth.

The sun has been especially hyperactive over the past few days — firing off 10 M-class solar flares over 24 hours that have been accompanied by multiple coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are set to slam into Earth on July 3 and July 5.

CMEs are large, fast-moving clouds of magnetized plasma and solar radiation that occasionally get flung into space with solar flares when kinks in the sun's magnetic field snap. If CMEs smash into Earth, they cause disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, called geomagnetic storms, that can trigger partial radio blackouts and produce vibrant aurora displays farther away from Earth's magnetic poles than usual.

"Machine-Gun Sun! More than 5 storms on their way to Earth and 3 of them offer good chances for aurora views," Tamitha Skov, a space weather physicist at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a July 2 post on the social platform X. "NOAA and NASA model predictions do not show all the storms yet (it's hard to keep up with the rapid-fire storm launches!) but the first should hit before noon July 3 UTC."

The CMEs are expected to give a glancing blow to our planet, creating conditions for a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. It's also possible that these storms will strengthen to become strong (G3), depending on how they interact with Earth's magnetic field.

Auroras resulting from G3-class geomagnetic storms are often visible in northern parts of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Maine, according to NOAA. Skywatchers farther south in Oregon, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire will also have a chance of catching the light show. In any case, skywatchers interested in seeing or photographing the auroras will need to get as far from artificial light sources as possible.

The weekend storms might not be the last activity we see from the sun in the coming days, as two gigantic sunspots currently pimpling its face are displaying "beta-gamma-delta" magnetic fields — the most tangled and unstable type. This means these sunspots harbor the potential to launch powerful X-class flares, according to spaceweather.com.

The last few years have seen a record number of powerful X-class flares explode from the sun's surface, hitting Earth with several major solar storms, including 2024's Mother's Day storm. This record comes partly from improvements to scientists' solar monitoring technologies, but also due to the sun reaching its 11-year peak in sunspot production, or solar maximum, in 2024.

Following this peak, the sun has now entered a period known as the "battle zone," a relatively understudied solar phase where instabilities across our star's newly flipped magnetic field ramp up the production of solar holes, gigantic, highly-tangled sunspots and subsequent geomagnetic storms.

The worst-case scenario for a solar storm is a superstorm like the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles set telegraph systems around the world on fire and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.

The Carrington Event unleashed a roughly X45 magnitude solar flare that remains a record, yet it's likely far from the worst the sun can muster — with ancient tree rings harboring evidence of even more powerful blasts that occurred long before humans existed.

On a dark mountaintop in Chile, the world's largest digital camera has begun filming its masterpiece.

This Tuesday (June 30), scientists with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory announced that the facility's ambitious Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) officially began. Every night for the next 10 years, the observatory's car-size LSST Camera will capture a 3,200-megapixel image of the southern sky — then another, then another, slowly filling in a mosaic of the universe 30 seconds at a time.

"In a sense, we're taking a digital color motion picture of the universe," Tony Tyson, a professor of cosmology at the University of California Davis and LSST's chief scientist and former founding director of the Rubin Observatory, told Live Science.

Strafing across the sky in stop-motion, the survey is expected to spot between 7 million and 8 million changes among the stars each night — from flashing supernovas and streaking comets to colliding galaxies and dim, tumbling asteroids. Within minutes of each exposure, alerts to any peculiar changes will become publicly available for astronomers and space enthusiasts around the world to study.

"Rubin is an automated facility, so scientists don't come here to use it," Tyson said. "But tens of trillions of observations is enough data for everybody in the world."

Tyson is hoping the firehose of data will unmask theinvisible 95% of the universe that is composed of dark matter and dark energy.

While there are still some technical bugs to work out — and the looming threat of ultra-bright corporate satellites to contend with — Tyson and his colleagues are ready to roll out the survey, "gradually increasing our sky area and image quality" over the next few months, he added.

Live Science spoke with Tyson about the LSST and what it may find in the coming years.

Brandon Specktor: You're about to spend 10 years observing the southern sky with the largest digital camera ever. What will a typical night of the survey look like?

Tony Tyson: In a sense, we're making a digital color motion picture of the universe. We'll take thousands of 30-second exposures every night. Within two minutes of the shutter closing on an exposure, we will process all the data, [compare] it from the archival sky of that piece of the sky, and — if something explodes, or pops off, or moves in the sky in a way we don't understand — issue an alert. The alerts go to the world.

I made the decision early on to make the data available to everyone. The alerts will also go to eight data brokers, which specialize in things like cosmology, supernovae, etc., and the public can sign up to the feed from their favorite brokers.

BS: Which feed will you be watching most closely?

TT: My most interesting data broker is one which will come up with a classification of "unknown." I'm more interested in the unknown, unclassifiable things that go on in the universe. But there's a sort of a live stream of catalog information that's going to be available to people — and we're excited for writing up a lot of new discoveries.

My hope at this time is that we will discover something unexpected that will revolutionize astronomy. I think it's more than a hope, I think it's a guarantee.

BS: What kind of revolution would that be? Is there one big question you hope Rubin will answer?

TT: I'm a cosmologist, so my hope is that we'll get closer to understanding the physics of dark energy and dark matter.

But to be frank, I think we'll be remembered 100 years from now for something else in addition. And discovering something totally new in the time domain, something that blows our minds, that we did not expect — some kind of new object that's out there. There's examples of this in radio astronomy with the FRBs [fast radio bursts], for example. And I think that that's going to be how we will be remembered.

BS: The Rubin Observatory observes in optical light. Are there any strange optical phenomena you have your eye on?

TT: There's already a pretty strong hint, actually, that there is a population of very faint bursting objects that just pop off. The ones we know about are typically pretty bright — supernovae, which last for a long time, and gamma-ray bursts, which are bright but they don't last very long. But there's a big question mark in this unique area that we're going to explore, of faint things that are very short-lived. And there's evidence now from a team in Japan that there is a population of very faint things that explode just once. They don't repeat. And so I'm keeping my eye on that.

BS: What are the Rubin Observatory's main science goals?

TT: There's a lot of areas of science that we can address — and that was really the main selling point for us with the agencies. For one, we'll be looking at cosmology and the history of the expansion of the universe. Just by itself, we will have enough data to measure key parameters in cosmology to eliminate models of dark matter and dark energy, which is exciting.

Another area is looking at new kinds of stars in our galaxy, so we can look at the history of our galaxy and the history of star formation in our galaxy. At even lower redshift, an interesting area is looking at both comets and potentially Earth-threatening asteroids. Every night we detect about a thousand new asteroids.

And we will be able to uniquely look for those, if we can get rid of the interfering low-Earth-orbiting satellites, which really make that impossible. And so I've been unfortunately sidetracked into worrying a lot about that in the recent year.

BS: Are you talking about companies like Reflect Orbital, which essentially want to put giant mirrors in low Earth orbit? We've written about how satellites like that could totally compromise the LSST.

Yes. There's a proposed class of extremely ultra-bright satellites that are going to be launched that are incompatible with the LSST science, totally incompatible. The skies will no longer be dark for anybody, anywhere.

Reflect Orbital is one example. The other example is these orbiting AI [artificial intelligence] computational centers, which will be exceedingly bright. We've met with all these companies. They say that they feel our pain, but their board of directors or their investors say that they're going to go forward.

I've been working with SpaceX, though. They're really trying very hard to eliminate some of these effects, but nothing is perfect. It's going to be tough.

BS: So if these companies are moving forward, what are you going to do?

What I'm trying to do is work very closely with Congress and the American Astronomical Society and other bodies — the United Nations, the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] — to see what we can do.

I'm inherently an optimist. I think the Reflect Orbital is a failed business model, but they're going to try doing it anyway. So they'll put a lot of junk up there for a while.

BS: I truly wish you the best with that. But since you're an optimist, let's end on something positive. You've championed this observatory for more than 20 years — first as its founding director and now its chief scientist. How does it feel now that the LSST is finally operational?

It's quite gratifying, after all this time, to have something that actually works. It's a hugely complicated system, and nothing so complicated as that works perfectly all the time.

I was the original founding director, I am now the chief scientist, and it is my day job to worry about what's going wrong with this or that. And there's a laundry list of things that we're worried about. But it's working, and it's working quite well. And so that's quite gratifying.

Editor's Note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. The article was updated with a new headline on July 6 at 1 p.m. ET.

Astronomers have spotted an ancient galaxy shining through the cosmic fog of the early universe, revealing a detailed view that was thought to be impossible.

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, along with data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers detected "ionizing" ultraviolet photons — energetic light capable of stripping electrons from hydrogen atoms — coming from the galaxy, called MXDFz4.4. It's the earliest such detection on record, arriving only around 250 million years after the end of a major cosmic transition called the Epoch of Reionization, the researchers explained in a study published June 23 in The Astrophysical Journal.

For hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the space between galaxies was filled with a fog of neutral hydrogen gas that blocked this kind of light. Over time, radiation from the first stars and galaxies ionized that gas, clearing the fog and letting light travel freely across the universe — a process astronomers are still working to fully understand.

"This was thought to be impossible," Ilias Goovaerts, a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore and first author of the new study, said to Live Science. "What’s really special about this galaxy is that it’s getting through so much of the intergalactic medium [the ionized plasma between galaxies]. It’s the furthest away so it has the most intergalactic medium to get through."

What makes MXDFz4.4 unusual is its combination of size and star-formation rate. The galaxy is roughly 100 times smaller by area than the Milky Way, yet it forms stars around 10 times faster, packing a large number of massive young stars into a compact space. According to Goovaerts, that crowding effect helps the galaxy punch clear channels through its surrounding gas, letting ionizing light escape both the galaxy and, eventually, the murky space between galaxies. The team estimates that somewhere between half and all of the galaxy's ionizing light is escaping.

The discovery, made in October, came about somewhat by chance. While preparing an unrelated funding proposal just days before a major deadline, Goovaerts examined an existing, deep Hubble image to check whether anyone had looked for this kind of signal there before. Within a couple of hours, he had a promising signal. "It was very, very quick from us having the idea to me going, okay, there’s something here and this is exciting," Goovaerts said. "We were excited from day one, but then it took months for it to mature and to extract all the properties about the galaxy."

The finding relied on an unusually rich set of observations: an extremely deep Hubble image taken from 40 hours of observations; JWST imaging across many wavelengths, used to characterize the galaxy's stars and star-formation history; and one of the deepest spectra ever taken of a single patch of sky, gathered over roughly six days of observing time with the VLT's Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument. That spectrum confirmed the galaxy's distance through its Lyman-alpha emission line — which serves as a "hydrogen fingerprint," or a glow given off by excited hydrogen gas, that astronomers can use to measure cosmic distance and time.

No other galaxy from this early period had previously shown detectable ionizing light, making MXDFz4.4 one of a kind so far, study co-author Marc Rafelski, deputy mission head for the Hubble Space Telescope at STScI, noted in the statement. .

Researchers say bursts of vigorous star formation like the one seen in MXDFz4.4 may have played an important role in clearing the early universe's hydrogen fog and that more galaxies like it are likely still waiting to be found.

James Webb Space Telescope quiz: How well do you know the world's most powerful telescope?

The hantavirus outbreak that struck a cruise ship in April, killing three people and sparking fears of further spread, is over, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced.

"Today, the final contact of a person exposed to hantavirus on the cruise ship MV Hondius completed their quarantine period, tested negative and returned home. No further cases have been reported since the 25th of May," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO's director-general, said in his opening remarks at a news conference Thursday (July 2). "We are therefore very pleased to say that WHO considers the outbreak of hantavirus over."

The total number of cases linked to the outbreak was 13. All those affected were either passengers or crew on the ship.

The outbreak began aboard the Dutch-flagged cruise ship MV Hondius after it departed southern Argentina on April 1. It involved the Andes virus, the only known hantavirus that can spread between people.

Hantaviruses are rodent-borne viruses that are found in the Americas, Europe and Asia and spread to humans relatively rarely, usually via contact with the urine, droppings or saliva of infected rodents. The Andes virus, however, has sparked short chains of human-to-human transmission in the past.

Before public health authorities were informed of the cases on MV Hondius, several dozen people disembarked the vessel on the island of St. Helena. To find them, authorities launched an international contact-tracing operation, tracking down more than 650 contacts in total who were then followed by health authorities in 33 countries and territories, according to the WHO.

Additionally, health authorities coordinated the monitoring, care and transport of the remaining passengers and crew aboard MV Hondius.

Of these contacts, those considered at the highest risk of infection were then quarantined and monitored for up to 42 days, because sometimes, hantavirus symptoms don't show up until weeks after exposure to the virus. Depending on their jurisdiction and degree of exposure, some contacts quarantined at home while others stayed in specialized facilities.

The initial unchecked travel of some contacts, alongside the virus's long incubation period, prompted concern from the public that the cluster of cases could explode into an enormous outbreak, or even a global pandemic. Many infectious-disease experts emphasized that the Andes virus does not spread easily between people and that the containment effort was going well, so the risk of a large outbreak was low. Still, some experts raised concerns that the international travel of contacts could trigger pockets of the deadly disease, and some argued that the Andes virus does have "pandemic potential."

Now, with the final contact having completed their quarantine period and no further cases reported, the WHO has declared the outbreak over. All of the contacts who were repatriated to the U.S. completed their quarantine period by June 21.

"WHO will continue working with governments and partners to advance our understanding of this outbreak and of hantavirus more generally," Tedros said. "We are also coordinating a study involving 21 countries to understand how the disease develops, which will support the development of diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines for future outbreaks."

Besides rigorous contact tracing, the WHO credited the coordinated actions of national public health bodies as being vital to preventing the further spread of the disease. These measures included the response of the Spanish government, which created a safe zone on the island of Tenerife for the ship's remaining passengers to disembark before they were repatriated under quarantine.

As the hantavirus outbreak concludes, there's an ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and an outbreak of the Marburg virus in Uganda. These and future outbreaks will require similarly robust international cooperation, the WHO emphasized.

"The outbreaks of hantavirus, Ebola and Marburg all show why there is no alternative to international cooperation in the face of international threats," Tedros said. "No country alone can fight."

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

June global sea surface temperatures have climbed to record highs, prompting concerns over extreme weather, flooding, sea level rise and stress to global ocean ecosystems.

The record, announced by the European Union's Copernicus Earth observation program on July 1, surpassed the previous record set in June 2024, with experts warning that more temperature records will likely be set over the coming months.

"Current conditions could indicate the beginning of a new phase, leading, once more, to uncharted territory," Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), said in a statement. "With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we are likely to see more temperature records fall in the coming months.”

The record temperature was set on June 21, when the Copernicus Climate Change Service recorded global ocean surface temperatures of 20.86 degrees Celsius (69.55 degrees Fahrenheit), beating the record temperature of 20.83 C (69.49 F) set in 2023 and 2024. This measurement was corroborated by the Copernicus Marine Service, an independent dataset that reported temperatures of 21.0 C (69.8 F).

The recent sea surface heating did not occur evenly across the globe. In some areas, such as the Mediterranean, temperatures in June were up to 8 C (14.4 F) higher than average for the period from 1990 to 2020, as per data recorded on June 29, according to the European Space Agency.

The most significant rises in temperature were set in the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, bands across the Pacific and off the coasts of Northern Canada.

Warmer ocean temperatures have wide-ranging impacts. "Higher ocean temperatures keep the atmosphere warm for longer, provide extra energy to storms and increase evaporation, thus enhancing the potential for extreme precipitation and flooding," Copernicus Climate Change Service representatives said in the statement. "Ocean warming also contributes to sea level rise and ice melt, and stresses marine ecosystems."

According to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the newly declared El Niño in the Pacific Ocean — the warm phase of a natural climate cycle. This El Niño is likely to reach levels that have not been seen in decades, with more temperature records expected to be set over the coming months as this Pacific heat is injected into an already warming world.

The service added that it remains to be seen whether these temperature spikes are temporary or indicative of longer term trends.

A mysterious wavelength of light is missing from the dwarf planet Pluto and Saturn's supersized moon Titan, new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations show. The surprising discovery hints that these worlds harbor an unknown molecule that has not been seen in any other solar system world or exoplanet so far.

Every element or molecule in the universe absorbs unique wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Therefore, one of the main ways astronomers study distant worlds — both inside and outside the solar system — is by closely examining the light that reflects off them and searching for dark "absorption lines" that correspond to the wavelengths of known chemical compounds.

For example, molecular oxygen absorbs light at 230 nanometers, so if the electromagnetic spectrum of a faraway exoplanet has an absorption line at this frequency, researchers can be confident that its atmosphere contains oxygen, according to a 2021 study.

JWST has proved to be exceptionally good at capturing electromagnetic spectra and identifying specific chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres, around distant stars and within primitive galaxies. It has even identified a molecule on one alien world that could point to extraterrestrial life.

In a new study, uploaded June 11 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers analyzed JWST data from Pluto and Titan, focusing on very small wavelengths that have been relatively unexplored until now. This revealed a specific absorption line at around 5.11 micrometers in both worlds' spectra. (These findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet.)

The team pored through similar studies on other planetary spectra but "did not find any band referenced in these publications that corresponds to the location of the observed absorption in Titan and Pluto," the researchers wrote in the paper.

A molecular mystery

The discovery is even stranger because there are very few similarities between Pluto and Titan that could explain why they share a molecule not found anywhere else.

Titan is the largest of Saturn's many moons and is even larger than Mercury. It is also the only solar system world, other than Earth, that is known to have liquid rivers and oceans on its surface. Pluto, on the other hand, is a completely frozen world that's around half the size of Titan and roughly four times farther from the sun than Saturn's satellite is.

Both worlds do have similar atmospheres that are rich in methane and nitrogen. However, the researchers are confident that the molecule responsible for the 5.11-micrometer absorption line is located on both worlds' surfaces, not in their atmospheres.

Pluto's absorption line is around three times thicker than Titan's, meaning the mystery molecule is likely much more abundant on the dwarf planet. But on Titan, the molecule seems to be unevenly distributed, with a stronger absorption line on its trailing side — the hemisphere opposite to its forward momentum around Saturn — than on its leading side.

The researchers proposed that it could be benzene — a ring-shaped hydrocarbon — mixed with an unknown molecule, or some form of acetylene or ketene ice. However, much more work is needed to prove that any of these potential candidates are responsible for absorbing this specific wavelength, they wrote.

NASA's Dragonfly spacecraft, which is set to launch no earlier than 2028 and fly through Titan's atmosphere in 2034, could eventually shed more light on the situation. The helicopter-like craft's onboard spectrograph could identify the mystery molecule on Saturn's moon, which would also help reveal if it is viable on Pluto, the researchers suggested. But in the meantime, we'll have to wait to unravel this curious cosmic conundrum.

See how well you know our planetary neighborhood with our solar system quiz!

While scanning one of Scotland's richest prehistoric landscapes, archaeologists uncovered evidence of what may be a newfound stone or timber circle buried beneath a peat moorland. The find may add another monument to a ceremonial structure that has fascinated researchers for more than a century.

The possible circle lies beneath the surface of Machrie Moor on Scotland's Isle of Arran, a landscape already famous for its towering standing stones, burial monuments and ceremonial sites dating to between roughly 3500 and 1500 B.C. Researchers from Historic Environment Scotland identified the possible circle using geophysical survey equipment, which is wheeled aboveground and detects subtle magnetic changes underground without disturbing any archaeological remains.

The discovery emerged from a survey designed to test how well modern archaeological instruments work in peat-covered landscapes, but instead the project revealed the unexpected subterranean circle.

"We know that there is a lot of archaeology yet to uncover at Machrie Moor, but the discovery of a new circle completely surpassed our expectations," Nick Hannon, senior heritage recording manager at Historic Environment Scotland, said in a statement released June 30.

While Stonehenge is the world's most famous prehistoric circle, it is only one monument among hundreds built across Britain and mainland Europe during the Neolithic and Bronze ages. Machrie Moor is among the best-preserved examples of these ritual landscapes, with six ceremonial circles already identified since the 1980s.

In fact, the archaeologists found there was more to learn about some of the previously known circles. At Machrie Moor Circle 2, for instance, the team identified a ring of anomalies suggesting the circle may have had 14 stones instead of the seven or eight previously reconstructed.

The circles also share a striking orientation: They align with a notch at the head of nearby Machrie Glen where the midsummer sun would have risen, which suggesting astronomical observations may have played a role in ceremonies held there.

Archaeological anomalies

Unlike the circles that had already been discovered at the site, the newly detected monument has not been excavated yet. Instead, researchers identified a ring of magnetic anomalies ‪—‬ subtle disturbances in the soil that often indicate archaeological features such as pits or postholes.

According to the survey report, the feature consists of 12 circular, pit-like anomalies arranged in a circle approximately 92 feet (28 meters) across. The pits are spaced around 21 feet (6.5 m) apart, with two unusually wide gaps that the researchers say could represent the locations of two additional pits that are now decayed. If so, the monument may have originally contained 14 posts or standing stones.

"There is no indication that any of these anomalies contain a stone" at this time, the researchers noted in the report, so the circle could have been built from either timber posts or standing stones that were later removed.

Previous excavations have already revealed that several of the other stone circles at Machrie Moor were originally built as timber circles before the wooden posts were replaced with stones around 2000 B.C. Human cremations and bodily burials were later placed within some of the circles, suggesting the monuments' functions changed over time.

"It is likely that the newly-discovered circle dates from a similar period as the other circles still standing," representatives of Historic Environment Scotland said in the statement.

See how much you know about Stonehenge with our Stonehenge quiz!

An 11-year-old boy in Ontario, Canada, has died after being bitten by a rabid bat that was resting on his face as he slept. The boy had no obvious bite or scratch marks and didn't show symptoms for the first 19 days after the incident, his doctors report.

While on vacation with his parents at a cottage in northern Ontario in 2024, the boy was woken up in the night by a bat on his nose and mouth, according to a report published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on June 29. His father caught the bat in a cooking pot and released it outside, and because the child had no visible injuries and the bat did not seem to be particularly aggressive, his parents decided not to seek a medical assessment, the report noted.

A few weeks later, the child began to experience tingling, numbness and swelling on the right side of his face. When he was examined at his local hospital his vital signs appeared to be normal, aside from an elevated heart rate and white blood cell count.

The next day, the boy's symptoms worsened: he lost feeling in the right side of his face and his speech was beginning to slur. While waiting in hospital, he developed a fever, confusion, hallucinations and difficulty swallowing, followed by excessive production of saliva.

After four days in intensive care at McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, the child tested positive for rabies, and after five days his brain stem reflexes were absent, indicating a total loss of brain stem function. Seventeen days after admission, following a consultation between his family and medical experts, he was taken off life support and died.

Rabies is a viral disease that primarily affects the central nervous system, according to the CDC. It is mainly spread through bites and scratches from infected animals, with bats accounting for the majority of cases in North America, according to the boy's doctors.

"Bats pose a particular risk because bites or scratches may be small and are easily overlooked, and patients may not recollect or recognize a bat exposure," the medical team wrote in their report.

According to a report in the Journal of Virology in 2013, silver-haired bats (Lasionycteris noctivagans), are responsible for the majority of rabies cases in Canada. Skunks, foxes and raccoons also often carry the disease.

The rabies virus must travel to the brain before symptoms can occur, but once a patient develops symptoms the infection is almost 100% fatal, with most deaths occurring within one to two weeks of symptom development. However, prompt treatment after exposure — including wound cleaning, antibody administration and a series of vaccines — is nearly always effective at preventing the disease, according to the CDC.

Rabies in humans is very rare in North America, with fewer than 10 deaths reported in the U.S. every year, according to the CDC. In Canada, only 28 human fatalities have been reported since 1924, according to the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association. Even so, the boy's doctors have emphasized the importance of prompt medical attention following exposure to bats and other animals that could carry the disease.

"Early recognition of exposure and timely PEP [postexposure prophylaxis] remain the only effective means of rabies prevention," they wrote. "Any direct human contact with a bat, even in the absence of a visible bite or scratch, is an indication for PEP."

They added that rabid bats do not always display the classic symptoms commonly associated with rabies, such as aggressive behavior and frothing at the mouth. "Any direct human contact with [a] bat is considered high risk," they added.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 06:53 EDT on July 3 with news that the mission has launched and reached orbit.

A rescue spacecraft set to speed toward a NASA telescope to prevent it from falling into Earth's atmosphere has launched into orbit.

The first-of-its-kind mission reached orbit after launching at 4:36 a.m. EDT (0836 GMT) Friday (July 3) from the Marshall Islands, carrying a robot-arm spacecraft named Link into the sky aboard a modified Lockheed Martin L-1011 airliner. In midair, a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket fired Link into orbit, where it will now rendezvous with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray telescope that has been slowly falling toward Earth and headed for an untimely demise.

The launch follows two consecutive scrubs that caused delays to the mission on July 2 and 3, the first due to weather conditions and the second a software fault. Now that Link has reached orbit, mission engineers are working to acquire a signal from the craft to confirm that its solar panels have deployed and its power systems are working, NASA wrote in an update.

Link was developed by private company Katalyst Space for $30 million. Katalyst's goal is to meet up with the falling Swift Observatory, which launched in 2004, and pull it to a higher orbit, using Link's robotic arms and thrusters. Swift is still scientifically useful but is rapidly losing altitude due to the natural drag of Earth's atmosphere. Without help, Swift will likely meet its demise later this year, scientists say.

"This is a high-risk, high-reward mission," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, said in a statement. "We have much to gain by attempting this boost, which is more affordable than trying to replace Swift's capabilities, and allows NASA to advance the nation's satellite servicing industry, for the benefit of all."

Swift cost $250 million in 2004, which is roughly $450 million today when accounting for inflation — a relatively cheap observatory compared with the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope. The Swift mission was originally designed to study gamma-ray bursts ‪—‬ cosmic explosions that occur when a massive, dying star collapses into a black hole. Swift has made many observations of these bursts in the past 20-plus years while also watching for other signs of stellar activity, like X-ray flares or supernova explosions, as well as transient objects, like comets and asteroids.

In sum, Swift helps us see how the universe is changing over short periods.

"Swift is NASA's multitool when it comes to studying the cosmos," S. Bradley Cenko, Swift's principal investigator and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. "It observes the sky using a wide range of light, and rapidly points at short-lived outbursts, alerting other facilities in space and on the ground to help coordinate follow-up observations."

High-risk rescue mission

The rescue mission comes with several challenges. Swift was not designed to be serviced when it launched, making the logistics of the mission something of a puzzle. Moreover, NASA only gave the contract to Katalyst in September, after high solar activity in recent years ballooned Earth's atmosphere and unexpectedly accelerated the spacecraft's fall due to increased drag. This meant the mission had to be ready for space in less than a year after the usual punishing requirements of design, build and testing.

Katalyst accepted the challenge because the company hopes to do this kind of work more often. "If we're going to build an enduring presence beyond Earth, we need the capability to manipulate our environment in space," Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said in the statement. "That means deploying robotic spacecraft that can reposition, repair, refuel, and refit satellites after launch."

Unless Swift altered its operations plan, however, the spacecraft would have been irrecoverable in July. So, to give Link as much time as possible to rescue Swift, the operations team at Penn State's Eberly College of Science made some changes.

For example, Swift's science was minimized so that the spacecraft looks at targets only if the telescope is put in a "streamlined position" to minimize drag, NASA explained. Power consumption has also been slashed to let Swift's solar panels fly "in a more aerodynamic orientation," which also reduces the drag that is making the spacecraft fall into the atmosphere.

These changes will allow Swift to stay above the minimum rescue altitude of 185 miles (298 kilometers) until autumn, agency models suggest. Katalyst will use that time to do the usual spacecraft "commissioning" on Link to make sure all systems are well. It will take Link about a month to rendezvous with Swift, according to NASA.

Following those steps, Link will approach Swift for evaluation, and Katalyst will use Link's robotic arms to latch onto the NASA observatory. Link will then use its propulsion system to gradually bring Swift's orbit to about 370 miles (595 km) ‪—‬ well above the pathway of the International Space Station, which orbits roughly 250 miles (400 km) over Earth.

NASA did not say how much longer Swift would be able to keep observing, should it reach its new altitude safely. However, figures from the European Space Agency suggest that spacecraft at an altitude of 310 miles (500 km) reenter the atmosphere within about 25 years. This would suggest that as long as Swift's instruments hold out, scientists would have many years of observations to look forward to.