This eye-catching astronaut photo shows the fractured surface of the world's highest frozen lake lurking in the lofty climbs of the Tibetan Plateau. The smooth, white line where the ice meets the water closely follows a disputed border between China and India.

The elevated lake, known as Pangong Lake or Pangong Tso, sits at an altitude of 13,862 feet (4,225 meters), according to NASA's Earth Observatory. It is long and thin, stretching 83 miles (134 kilometers) across Ladakh, part of the Kashmir region administered by India; and Tibet, an autonomous region of China.

This photo shows a roughly 9.5-mile-long (15 km) section of the river, located around a third of the way along its length from west to east. This is also where the most widely accepted border between Ladakh (on the left of the photo) and Tibet (right side of the photo) lies. However, the exact position of the divide, commonly known as the Line of Actual Control, is poorly defined and has shifted in recent decades, according to The New York Times.

Pangong Lake is endorheic, meaning it has no outflow, and the only way water can escape is via evaporation. As a result, the lake's waters have built up an unusually high concentration of salt over thousands of years. This would usually prevent it from freezing. However, the temperature in the region can drop to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 25 degrees Celsius), according to a local travel site, which is cold enough for the salty water to freeze over.

It is unclear why the lake's ice is fracturing in the photo. Normally, the entire body of water is completely frozen in January, when this photo was taken in 2024.

Although Pangong Lake has no major outflow, it is connected to several inflowing rivers, including one on the bottom left of this image. The river's delta has largely frozen over (visible as the large, white patch on land), but you can still see a small plume of water entering the river.

On the opposite bank of the delta, there is a beach littered with several striations parallel to the water. These are ancient shorelines left over from when the lake had a higher water level, according to the Earth Observatory.

Pangong Lake was likely once part of the Indus River, which stretches nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 km) across South and Central Asia. However, it was likely cut off from the waterway millions of years ago as the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates collided and the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayas formed.

Disputed border

The Line of Actual Control was first established in 1959 but was largely set in its current position in 1962 after the Sino-Indian War. Although the countries have technically been at peace ever since, frequent and occasionally deadly skirmishes have broken out along the border, including on the shores of Pangong Lake, according to the BBC.

Nonetheless, the lake frequently draws tourists from both China and India, particularly bird-watchers, who travel there to see the large groups of bar-headed geese (Anser indicus) and Brahminy ducks (Tadorna ferruginea, also called ruddy shelducks) that breed there, according to the Earth Observatory.

On the Ladakh side of Pangong Lake, extreme-sports enthusiasts run long distances across the lake's ice. In February 2023, dozens of runners gathered there to participate in the highest-altitude frozen lake half-marathon ever recorded, according to Guinness World Records.

See more Earth from space

One winter night in 2011, pediatrician Dr. Masahiko Sakamoto met two parents and a feverish infant who would shape the course of his career.

Sakamoto was working at a rural hospital in Japan's Fukushima prefecture, roughly 160 miles (260 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo. Around midnight, as a heavy snowfall coated the ground outside, two parents arrived with their young child. The infant had a mild fever but was otherwise in good shape, Sakamoto determined. There were no signs of an emergency that warranted a doctor's attention.

Then, Sakamoto learned that the parents had driven 1.5 hours from a small mountain village to reach the hospital.

"Driving a car, with such snow accumulated on the road ‪—‬ that's a very risky behavior," Sakamoto said. He told me he was shocked by the "imbalance" between the infant's mild case and the parents' decision to make a three-hour round trip on dangerous roads out of concern that their child might need emergency medical care.

The experience alerted Sakamoto to a broader pattern: Parents with a limited understanding of childhood illnesses can become especially anxious when their child gets sick and end up seeking unnecessary medical care. Pediatricians in both Japan and the U.S. have described a similar trend to me in the context of antibiotics; parents sometimes request antibiotics that aren't needed, in part because they believe the drugs will alleviate their child's suffering.

Many doctors make the effort to explain the basics of childhood illnesses and appropriate antibiotic use to children's caregivers. But given that they're pressed for time and those conversations can be tricky to navigate, doctors told me that it would be helpful if parents came to appointments equipped with that information. Since that snowy night, Sakamoto has made it his mission to help educate parents about childhood illnesses before they arrive at a medical facility.

"What I am currently most interested in as a pediatrician," he said, "is how to provide accurate medical information to the parents or guardians of the children."

Building a pocket-size doctor

By the time parents arrive at a doctor's office or hospital, the chance to avert an unnecessary visit has been missed, Sakamoto recognized. So he wanted to help give caregivers the information needed to weigh whether a visit is necessary. He hoped to relay which symptoms of serious disease should prompt medical intervention and teach them appropriate at-home care for mild symptoms.

He started giving public lectures on these topics. Later, he wrote manuals of childhood illness, featuring adorable illustrations and plain-language explanations. In 2016, those manuals went digital. The free "Oshiete! Doctor" app, whose name translates to "Teach me! Doctor," has been downloaded more than 500,000 times in Japan, with approximately 100,000 active users, Sakamoto told me.

"It's quite famous around here," Risa*, a mother of two in Saku, Japan, said of the app. Sakamoto now works at Saku Central Hospital, and the city provides funding for the app's operation and promotes its use at health centers and events aimed at children and their caregivers.

"As a parent, I'm really grateful to have something like that — a resource that makes it easy to access information — right at my fingertips," said Rie Shinohara, another mother of two in Saku.

The app's content gets updated annually and applies to children and teens up to about 15 years old. It provides information on hygiene, immunization schedules and disaster preparedness, such as how to care for kids' health while evacuating for a natural disaster. (The team translated the app's disaster preparedness content for caregivers affected by the war in Ukraine.)

The app also includes guidance on when children should visit a hospital and explanations of common childhood illnesses and injuries, such as what medications might reasonably be prescribed and how to manage mild symptoms at home.

For similar help with differentiating emergencies from minor ailments, parents in Japan can also look to online resources from The Japan Pediatric Society, or call #8000, a hotline that gives caregivers advice about whether to bring their child to a hospital. Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has recognized the "Oshiete! Doctor" app as a helpful complement to its national #8000 hotline and also awarded the app's developers for its design and impact.

Sakamoto and colleagues have studied the app's impact on caregivers. For instance, they've found evidence that app users utilize the emergency department more appropriately than nonusers do. In that study, 87% of users said the app made it easier to decide whether to visit the hospital, and 94% said they'd recommend it to others.

Challenges of educating parents

The team has also studied how the app's users feel about fever — the symptom that compelled the infant's parents to drive on snow-laden roads that night.

"The phenomenon known as 'fever phobia' among parents has long been recognized, and it is not unique to Japan," Sakamoto said. Notably, the American Academy of Pediatrics offers similar guidance to the "Oshiete! Doctor" app regarding fever, emphasizing that the symptom doesn't always require medical care and giving tips for when a doctor should be called.

Parents' worries about pediatric fever can be outsize compared with the threat it poses. Most fevers in kids are caused by viral infections that go away on their own, Sakamoto said, but caregivers can be compelled to seek care because they're concerned about fever triggering seizures or brain damage. This is especially true of first-time parents and parents with other children who'd had febrile seizures in the past, he added.

"With the first child, you just don't know. Why does he have a fever?" Shinohara noted. Of her firstborn, she added, "I probably took him to the doctor more often than necessary." But by her second, she felt she developed a better sense of when to seek medical care. Sakamoto's hope is that his app can help fill that information gap sooner.

In a survey-based study, Sakamoto and colleagues polled hundreds of caregivers in Saku about their understanding of fever, taking stock of which parents had downloaded "Oshiete! Doctor." Between 2017 and 2024, a greater proportion of parents understood that fever alone does not necessarily mean a child needs medical care. Plus, a lower percentage of parents thought that antibiotics are always needed to treat fever. On the latter point, users of the app were most likely to answer correctly, although nonusers also improved between the two survey years.

Sakamoto credits some of that improvement to the incentive offered to pediatricians to avoid unnecessary antibiotics, which requires that doctors explain appropriate antibiotic use to caregivers. He thinks the message is likely more powerful for parents when it comes from their pediatrician, rather than government information campaigns. That said, Sakamoto emphasized that it's important to have strong educational materials available to help support doctors' explanations to parents.

Despite these improvements, Sakamoto also observed that parental anxiety about fever complications increased between the two survey years — although, notably, the COVID-19 pandemic took place in that time frame, which could be a piece of the puzzle.

"Their knowledge about fever, how to manage fever, and also the appropriate use of antibiotics was enhanced, whereas the fear about the children's fevers worsened," Sakamoto said. "Even when knowledge improves, emotional anxiety does not easily disappear; this is one of the challenges of public education."

Other challenges include the rising use of AI chatbots among parents, Sakamoto noted. He's encountered parents whose anxiety was triggered by erroneous information from a chatbot that suggested their child's prognosis was worse than it was, for instance. "It is rather rare to see that the parents have holistically accurate information from AI," he told me.

If he can secure more funding for "Oshiete! Doctor," Sakamoto hopes to someday make the app multilingual. In the long run, he remains committed to providing parents with this vetted information to both alleviate their worries and optimize their use of the healthcare system.

"We have the responsibility to check how the information is delivered to the parents or guardians and how it leads to behavioral changes," Sakamoto said. "So it is not just us disseminating information but whether or not it is truly received."

Editor's note: Risa (marked with an asterisk) asked that only her first name be used for privacy.

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

When the famous Chicxulub asteroid struck what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, it ended the reign of the nonavian dinosaurs. As ecosystems recovered, small, adaptable mammals rapidly spread into newly vacant niches, evolving new diets, larger bodies and more diverse ways of life until they dominated the land within a few million years.

Now, new evidence suggests that even before the asteroid hit, Earth was already beginning to rot.

A study published May 12 in the journal PNAS found evidence of environmental fungal blooms before and after the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event. Looking at microscopic fossils from rocks dating to the K-Pg event in North America, a team of researchers led by Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology Department at Johns Hopkins University, identified an earlier fungal bloom dating to roughly 30,000 to 100,000 years before the asteroid hit, during a period of cooling linked to intense volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in what is now India.

The researchers also found a fungal spike immediately after the Chicxulub impact exactly when dead plants and animals would have littered devastated ecosystems. The finding adds to earlier evidence from New Zealand that suggests the fungal bloom wasn't just a local event.

This idea feeds into a controversial idea called the fungal infection-mammalian selection (FIMS) hypothesis. First proposed two decades ago by Casadevall and subsequently updated in 2018 and 2026 papers, the FIMS hypothesis suggests that the abundance of fungus before the asteroid impact may have helped mammals gain an evolutionary advantage over the dinosaurs that remained after that cataclysm.

The hypothesis doesn't argue that fungus wiped out the dinosaurs. Instead, it proposes that mammals' live births and immune systems may have helped them withstand the rise of fungus in ways egg-laying reptiles and nonavian dinosaurs could not, thereby giving them the upper hand in disrupted ecosystems full of rot, cold, starvation and polluted air.

"The fungal infection mammalian selection hypothesis is focused on how the mammals became the dominant land animals," Casadevall told Live Science via email, "not dinosaur extinction."

But not all experts are convinced. Mary O'Connell, the Chair of the Zoology department at the University of Manchester told Live Science via email that the hypothesis doesn't fit all the evidence and that "it emerges from a chain of plausibility arguments rather than direct evidence, and the links in the chain are weaker than the framing may suggest."

A fungal world before the asteroid

To find this pre-asteroid fungal bloom in their new study, Casadevall and Rosanna Baker, who researches fungus at Johns Hopkins, focused on palynomorphs — tiny fossilized organic remains, including fungal spores, fungal hyphae and plant pollen — preserved in ancient sediment layers from the Denver Basin in Colorado dating back to the K-Pg extinction.

Baker counted between 100 and 500 microfossils per sample across sediment layers spanning about 60,000 years before the K-Pg mass extinction event to 30,000 years after it. Most samples were dominated by plant material, but some layers contained 50% or more fungal spores. The researchers interpreted this high proportion of fungal spores as a sign of ecological disturbance ‪—‬ more dead material and more fungi feeding on it, especially after the dinosaur-killing asteroid.

Baker and Casadevall also found an earlier fungal bloom dating to roughly 10,000 to 30,000 years before the asteroid impact.

"What surprised us was the proliferation in association with Deccan volcanism, which implies ecological disruption prior to [the] meteor impact," Casadevall told Live Science via email.

In other words, ecosystems may have already been under stress — and faced with a fungal overgrowth — before the asteroid delivered the final blow.

The case for FIMS

When Casadevall first proposed the FIMS hypothesis, it rested on a simple observation: Mammals are unusually resistant to invasive fungal diseases.

Fungi are major pathogens of plants, insects, amphibians and many reptiles, but life-threatening systemic fungal infections are relatively rare in mammals with healthy immune systems. Casadevall argued that mammals' relative resistance to fungi came from their sophisticated immune systems. In mammals, first-line, relatively nonspecific defenses such as neutrophils recognize fungal cell walls, engulf spores and attack invasive filaments, while the adaptive arm of the immune system excels at building customized antibodies that selectively target specific fungi, and then creating immune memory so the invaders are recognized the next time they're encountered.

Casadevall also initially believed that mammals' high, stable body temperatures — generally around 97 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (36 to 40 degrees Celsius) — could prevent many environmental fungi from growing well enough to establish an infection.

"The success of mammals made no sense given their high energy needs and this idea provided a plausible mechanism for their success," Casadevall said.

After the asteroid hit, forests burned, plants died, darkness fell and dead matter piled up, providing a feast for fungi. If fungal spores filled the air, surviving animals may have inhaled enormous, possibly dangerous doses.

However, the FIMS hypothesis proposes that mammals had several possible adaptations against these fungal invaders that other animals did not. In addition to having warm body temperatures and complex immune systems, mammals who could maintain stable body temperatures could forage during the cold "impact winter," ‪when ash and dust blocked out the light of the sun. Meanwhile the dinosaurs, who were originally thought to be the "cold-blooded," would have struggled to stay active and find food, leading them to become weaker and more susceptible to disease.

Differences in gestation may have mattered, too. Many mammals protect developing embryos inside the mother's body, where warmth and immunity could shield them from fungi. In contrast, all dinosaurs laid eggs. Those eggs developed in nests, which were often in contact with soil and decaying plant matter ‪—‬ the exact environments where fungi thrive. Modern fungi can invade reptile eggs, and fossilized hyphae, a type of fungus, was described in dinosaur eggshells in a 2008 study.

That does not prove fungi wiped out dinosaur nests. Fossilized hyphae could suggest either that fungi invaded a living egg, or that fungi colonized the egg after death. Still, eggshells provide one clue that fungi were a problem for the survival of dinosaur young..

A sick sauropod

Another potential line of evidence to buttress the FIMS hypothesis came from dinosaur bones that showed evidence of fungal infection.

In 2022, a team led by Cary Woodruff, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Miami, described a Late Jurassic sauropod fossil from Montana with unusual lesions in its neck vertebrae. The dinosaur, an immature diplodocine known as MOR 7029, lived roughly 150 million years ago, long before the asteroid impact.

Sauropods had long, air-filled neck bones connected to their respiratory system. In fossils of healthy sauropods, the places where air-sac tissue met bone are smooth, sometimes glass-like, Woodruff told Live Science.

But in this animal, the normally smooth sockets were rough and irregular. "Coming out of the socket — like imagine coming out towards you —it looked like fossilized heads of broccoli florets," Woodruff said. "And I had never seen that."

Unsure what he was looking at, Woodruff posted a photo online and asked whether anyone had seen anything similar. Other anatomists and paleontologists quickly weighed in. Their response, he recalled, was essentially, "That's exactly what we would have predicted a respiratory infection to look like," he said.

By comparing the fossil lesions with respiratory diseases in modern birds, which are living dinosaurs, the team tentatively flagged the condition as airsacculitis with associated osteomyelitis ‪—‬ air-sac inflammation that had spread to nearby bone.

However, the researchers could not identify the exact disease that caused the inflammation. In modern birds, airsacculitis can be caused by fungal infections such as aspergillosis, but also by bacterial infections. Without preserved soft tissue or fungal structures, they stopped short of confirming a fungal infection diagnosis.

Either way, Woodruff thinks the sauropod was probably sick enough that the infection contributed to its death. It may have become too weak to keep up, too ill to eat or drink properly, or too vulnerable to escape predators.

The case against FIMS

Even so, many experts remain skeptical of Casadevall's hypothesis. For one thing, the asteroid and its aftermath already explain a tremendous amount. The impact triggered tsunamis, earthquakes and a global food-web collapse. Those disasters alone would have killed off large dinosaurs at the top of disrupted food chains.

Another problem revolves around body temperature. In 2005, when Casadevall first proposed his hypothesis, dinosaurs were often thought of as "cold-blooded," while mammals were "warm-blooded." But over the years, research has uncovered that many nonavian dinosaurs, such as Velociraptor, T. rex and Brachiosaurus, were likely warm-blooded, too ‪—‬ so body temperature wouldn't explain why fungus would have been a big problem for many dinosaurs.

Complicating the picture, birds — the only surviving dinosaurs — often have higher body temperatures than mammals do. So the FIMS theory rests on an assumption that living examples of dinosaurs don't support, Flynn said.

Around the time of the asteroid impact, cold-blooded creatures like turtles and crocodilians that lived in the water "don't really suffer as severely as other groups, even including mammals," Andrew Flynn, an assistant professor of paleobotany at New Mexico State University, told Live Science. "Clearly this fungal thing is not probably what's causing mammals to rise up and go on to dominate the ecosystem."

The FIMS hypothesis also has a contradiction at its heart, said Jingmai O'Connor, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago.

"It's just a hypothesis I had vaguely heard about but was not popular, not often mentioned, and I guess I would say 'out of favor,'" O'Connor told Live Science via email. "If everything we know that suggests dinosaurs are more susceptible to fungal infections is based on living dinosaurs (birds) and they survived, doesn't that rather undermine this hypothesis?"

Dr. Isabel Jimenez, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University and a proponent of FIMS, agrees that this discrepancy must be explained.

"For the FIMS hypothesis to still hold water, we have to consider alternative mechanisms by which dinosaurs could have been more susceptible to fungal diseases than mammals," Jimenez told Live Science in an email.

Modern-day birds are avian theropods — the surviving branch of the dinosaur family tree — and likely faced the same fungal pressures as their extinct relatives. More recently, in 2026, Jimenez and Casadevall have suggested a tweak to their theory: that some of the small-bodied, beaked, flying or semiflying theropods may have been able to pull through, despite some baseline higher susceptibility to fungal disease. That's because they were small, had feathers to better insulate their bodies, and maintained generalist diets that enabled them to use more food sources than the dinosaur lineages that died out.

Working with Jimenez, Casadevall outlined an updated version of the FIMS hypothesis in a paper published earlier this year. In it, they propose that dinosaurs' respiratory systems may have made them more at risk than their mammalian counterparts.

Whereas mammals breathe by expanding and contracting flexible lungs filled with blood-rich alveoli, modern birds — and probably many dinosaurs — have rigid lungs ventilated by a network of thin-walled air sacs. The air sacs act as bellows, maintaining one-way airflow through the lungs, but they perform little gas exchange and have relatively poor blood supply. This system could have also carried inhaled fungal spores deep into the respiratory tract, where they may have settled in air sacs that are harder for circulating immune cells to reach and clear.

While birds have a similar sophisticated immune system as mammals — including macrophages and antibodies — their air sacs extend throughout the body and sometimes into the bones, making fungal infections easier to spread beyond just the respiratory system.

This possible weakness is what Jimenez and Casadevall suggest is what made air-sac-bearing dinosaurs vulnerable to fungal infections, similar to modern birds.

After the asteroid strike, there would have been soot and sulfur polluting the air and dinosaurs would have been nutritionally stressed. "So secondary fungal infections are certainly possible," Jimenez said, referring to infections that take root after the body's defenses are weakened.

But skeptics argue that even with these updates in the FIMS hypothesis, more evidence is needed to show it's not just possible but likely.

The idea that their air-sac respiratory systems made them more vulnerable to fungus is "a more testable claim," but its likely impact on dinosaurs would also be more limited, because of competing environmental factors, O'Connell said.

And because only a handful of fungal species actually cause disease in animals, to show that fungi worsened dinosaur deaths, researchers would need to find evidence of elevated fungal disease in dinosaur fossils from right after the asteroid struck, O'Connell said.

"We would also need to be able to identify elevation of pathogenic fungal spores in the sedimentary record at that boundary, rather than just more spores," she said.

Overall, "the fungal infection-mammalian selection hypothesis feels like a conjecture in search of any supporting evidence," paleontologist and science writer Riley Black, told Live Science in an email.

How much do you know about the king of the dinosaurs? Test your knowledge with our T. rex quiz!

A century ago, American archaeologists excavating at a cave site in France unearthed a cache of seven rock crystal tools made by Neanderthals. The discovery was one of the first to prove that Neanderthals were not the unintelligent brutes that many scientists of the time believed they were.

This rare quartz scraper was found at the archaeological site of Abri Des Merveilles in the Dordogne region of France in 1924 by a team from the American School of Prehistoric Research (now a department at Harvard University) led by George MacCurdy. The unique tool is now in the collection of France's National Archaeological Museum.

Neanderthals typically crafted their stone tools from flint or chert because these rocks would predictably fracture into sharp edges. But a small handful of Neanderthal sites in Europe have yielded tools made from microcrystalline quartz, also known as rock crystal, resulting in stunningly clear scrapers and points.

According to MacCurdy's April 1931 excavation report, this was the first rock crystal tool the team discovered. It is transparent but yellow-tinged, and it may have been used as a combination scraper and point. In addition to six other rock crystal tools, MacCurdy found tiny rock crystal chips that meant the tools were likely fashioned on-site in the cave. The rocks may have tumbled downstream from the headwaters of the Vézère, a tributary of the Dordogne River that runs near the site. Abri des Merveilles has never been precisely dated. However, based on stratigraphy, tool types and the presence of a Neanderthal molar, the rock crystal tools were likely made between 45,000 and 80,000 years ago.

MacCurdy's discovery proved that Neanderthals, not modern humans (Homo sapiens), were the first to create innovative tools from rock crystal ‪—‬ a conclusion that surprised many scientists of the time.

A century ago, most experts believed that Neanderthals were ape-like and unintelligent, thanks in large part to paleoanthropologist Marcellin Boule's 1909 analysis of a Neanderthal skeleton from the site of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France. The skeleton of an older male Neanderthal with osteoarthritis influenced Boule's incorrect characterization of Neanderthals as knuckle-dragging cavemen. This perception of Neanderthals lasted well into the 21st century, when paleogeneticists finally proved that Neanderthals and modern humans mated.

MacCurdy, however, saw the rock crystal tools as an indication that Neanderthals had a sense of aesthetics. "We are accustomed to think of Neandertal man as devoid of the artistic sense," he wrote, because, a century ago, archaeologists had not yet found evidence of Neanderthal rock art, carved artifacts, engravings or use of pigments.

The Neanderthal "was not an artist in the strict sense; that he had an eye for beauty of form and color is evident from even the limited use he made of rock crystal," MacCurdy wrote in the journal PNAS in November 1931. "Neandertal man must also be given credit for discernment of beauty and quality of the material employed in his industry."

According to France's National Archaeological Museum, which profiled this tool as their Object of the Month in September 2025, MacCurdy drew highly innovative conclusions about Neanderthals from the rock crystal tools, which helped pave the way for our modern understanding of our enigmatic extinct cousins.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Andromeda is the only major galaxy in the universe that is speeding closer to the Milky Way as all the others rush away. Now, a new analysis of Hubble Space Telescope data hints that our galactic next-door neighbor may be winding down from a big burst of activity as it draws toward a possible collision with our galaxy.

The new study found that the Andromeda galaxy (M31) has been steadily slowing its production of new stars over the past 500 million years. The findings suggest that the galaxy is naturally winding down after a more active period, offering astronomers valuable clues about how large spiral galaxies evolve.

Andromeda is a giant spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way, but with around twice its mass. As the nearest large spiral galaxy to Earth, it provides an ideal laboratory for studying galaxy formation and evolution. An understanding of when and where stars form is essential for explaining how galaxies develop and change over time.

The new research, published July 27 in The Astrophysical Journal, combines two major Hubble surveys that mapped roughly two-thirds of Andromeda's disk, including around 200 million stars. It's already known that Andromeda experienced a dramatic burst of star formation about 2 billion years ago, which is thought to have formed about a fifth of all the stars in the galaxy. That starburst is thought to be the result of a merger with another galaxy, probably the compact elliptical galaxy M32, which now orbits Andromeda.

The new study found that Andromeda formed stars at a rate of around one solar mass per year 500 million years ago. By 40 million years ago, that rate had halved, while today the rate has fallen to just one-fifth of a solar mass each year. Researchers found that most recent star formation in Andromeda has been concentrated within a ring about 32,000 light-years from the galaxy's center and that the decreasing activity within this region is largely responsible for the overall decline. That suggests the galaxy is gradually winding down from its previous burst of star formation rather than suddenly running out of material.

Scientists also investigated whether M32 may have contributed to the slowdown. Regions closest to M32 show a more recent decline in star formation, making the companion galaxy a possible influence, although the evidence remains inconclusive.

"We need to measure the individual stars because they are the fossil record of the galaxy's formation," study co-author Ben Williams, an astronomer at the University of Washington, said in a NASA statement. "Hubble is the only telescope that can give you high enough spatial resolution over a large enough area to be able to do that in Andromeda."Although the team will continue studying Hubble's archive, they will also target observations from NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket as soon as Aug. 30. With a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, Roman will survey the entire Andromeda galaxy and its surrounding halo in unprecedented detail.

Andromeda is best observed in November and is visible to the naked eye, even from locations with moderate light pollution. The galaxy may collide with the Milky Way about 5 billion years from now, though its ultimate trajectory is still uncertain.

Biodiversity loss has been recognized as a threat to global stability for decades. The decline in overall diversity of species on our planet, either through extinction or a fall in abundance, can culminate in ecosystem collapse.

But in this excerpt from "Despite it All" (Granta, 2026), author and journalist Fred Pearce looks at the remarkable resilience of nature. If we can put aside our notions of what should and shouldn't be in a given environment and leave nature to adapt and thrive, we may begin to see the gains needed to support a healthy biosphere.

"Despite it All" has been shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

If we are serious about rewilding, then we need to accept that it will take its own course.

Often invasive species are just the first stage of an ecological resurgence. They are the first movers, and their infestations are short-lived. In time, diversity usually returns — even if it's not always the same diversity as was there before. We should recognize that. We need to be as adaptable as nature itself, and jettison our more romantic notions about biodiversity and pristine environments.

So do many oldschool ecologists, says Chris Thomas, an ecologist at the University of York. They too often simply ignore any bits of nature that do not meet their expectations of what "should" be present. "The establishment of successful species in new locations is commonly interpreted as further evidence that the Earth's system is departing from a more desirable state," he told me.

So when biodiversity assessments are conducted, "alien" species lurking in the undergrowth are simply not counted. As outsiders, they are deemed not to belong to the ecosystem they inhabit. Thomas says that, in Britain, official records show biodiversity in decline, even though, if we add all losses and all gains together, "it is unequivocally true that the total number of species in Britain is increasing."

Most of the gains — the weeds, pests and alien species — are kept off the biodiversity books. This amounts to an ecological catch-22. Biodiversity can only ever decrease, as new species are seen as inimical to the local environment, and each year millions of pounds, dollars and euros are being spent to eliminate them.

Of course, it sometimes makes practical sense to eradicate invaders. I don't say we shouldn't try to keep out pests that cause short-term ecological mayhem and economic damage. But if we choose to get rid of new species, we can't then hold up our hands in horror at declining biodiversity. And besides, ecologically as much as socially, migrants can stir things up to good effect. They interact with other species — eating or being eaten, pollinating, and rotting after death to nurture new organisms.

We should embrace novel ecosystems that contain both what we regard as native species and the feral, opportunistic interlopers that find their new environment congenial. In his book about weeds, British naturalist Richard Mabey celebrated what he called these "outlaw plants" and showed how they have had a hand in shaping not only our landscape but our civilization, becoming crops, medicines and sources of beauty and creative inspiration.

It is easy to be nostalgic about past ecosystems as a golden age. But what we imagine to be the perfect ecological state — a supposedly natural order of things that often gets called "the balance of nature" — was mostly itself a passing phase. Nature is always moving on. And more often than we realize, humans have had a hand in what we now like to regard as natural.

Environmental scientist Erle Ellis, who runs the Anthroecology Lab of the University of Maryland, argues persuasively that most of the planet has been heavily influenced by human activity for thousands of years, including places such as the Amazon that we often think of as untouched. We have, in effect, long lived on a "used planet," and humans and nature have not historically been at odds. The most biodiverse places are often those where people have lived the longest. By constantly tending the land, past civilizations created ever-changing mosaics of habitats where more species thrived than in places with less human interference.

So, we should be careful not to let our reverence for the pristine blind us to the environmental potential of today's wastelands, backwoods, abandoned fields, scrublands and no-go areas. In a Good Anthropocene we are likely to need more of them.

There is a final reason for believing that nature is equipped for recovery from almost anything we can throw at it. The apparent chaos of the Anthropocene is turbocharging evolution itself. Every perturbation of our environment creates an opportunity for existing species to adapt or for new ones to evolve, says Chris Thomas.

I first met Thomas in 2004, when he had just published an influential paper warning that climate change could wipe out a quarter of the world's species this century. He called it "terrifying." It was headline news. Two decades later, he has not changed that forecast, but he has added an important rider. Despite the coming extinction holocaust, he told me, "the Anthropocene could raise biological diversity."

His research is showing that evolution in the twenty-first century is speeding up to fill the gaps left by the extinctions — delivering new and better-adapted species. "The seeds of recovery are already visible," he told me. "Genes are jumping around. New species are beginning to emerge." Rob Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, agrees. In his book "A Natural History of the Future," he says that this evolutionary spurt is happening fastest in urban landscapes, where species are adapting to city life with almost as much alacrity as newly arrived humans.

This urban ecological renaissance resembles the story of the finches on the Galápagos archipelago, which Charles Darwin observed to have evolved different beaks to match the food on the different islands. In modern cities, house mice have evolved to produce saliva with a chemical make-up better able to digest the carbohydrates available in urban food; cockroaches and bedbugs have developed resistance to pesticides and even learned to avoid sugar-impregnated bait; London's pigeons have learned to commute on the Underground. We have clothes moths and carpet beetles.

Such natural innovations may not always be cuddly, but they do show that nature is on the prowl in the Anthropocene. So where is biodiversity headed? It is undeniable that most species of plants and animals are currently in numerical decline in a human-centric world.

This global disturbance is favouring some generalists — so-called superspecies — that can occupy a wide range of habitats, displacing local, rare and specialist species. Locally, however, biodiversity has sometimes increased substantially, especially in the rich kaleidoscopes of gardens, parks, toxic brownfield sites, roadside verges and so on that humanity has helped create.

Such places may become crucibles for a biodiversity rebound. Understanding this reality should change how we do conservation. We should not abandon nature to its fate. Some of our favourite species will pass into history unless we act to save them, and I'd vote for action any day. But it does mean embracing rather than rejecting the processes of change. Change in the Anthropocene is good. We should be grateful that nature is finding a way.

This is an extract from Despite it All by Fred Pearce, published by Granta.

The ancient Celts thrived in Europe, earning a reputation as fierce warriors. They sacked Rome around 390 B.C. and, decades later, were received by Alexander the Great while he was conquering his empire.

It's no surprise, then, that archaeologists find many weapons in Celtic graves. However, over the decades, some of those weapons have been found in burials of women, hinting that they may have used these weapons. What's more, recent genetic studies suggest that elite Celts inherited power through maternal lines.

The Celts lived throughout Europe, from what is now Spain to Turkey. They shared a similar language and culture, and clues of female power have been found throughout their old lands and hinted at in ancient texts. This raises an interesting question: Did the Celts have women who fought in battle?

Opinions vary, but some experts Live Science interviewed thought it was possible that Celtic women could have fought in battle, although perhaps not regularly. One problem is that there is an ongoing debate among scholars as to whether the inhabitants of the British Isles around 2,000 years ago were, in fact, Celtic.

Genetic hints

Although it's not directly related to answering the question about Celtic women warriors, a few recent genetic studies have found that elite Celtic women held powerful roles. A 2024 study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour that looked at ancient DNA in several Celtic burials from Germany found a matrilineal inheritance of power, and a 2025 study of burials from Iron Age England revealed that men married into local, powerful female lineages.

This supports textual evidence that Celtic women had more power than many of their female counterparts across Europe. Women "of the Celts did generally enjoy more freedom and opportunity than their counterparts in the Greek and Roman world," Philip Freeman, a humanities professor at Pepperdine University, wrote in his book "War, Women and Druids: Eyewitness Reports and Early Accounts of the Celts" (University of Texas Press, 2002). "It is hard to imagine a Greek wife joining her husband on the battlefield or even leading an army, as did the British queen Boudicca."

"Flashing-eyed" women

Another piece of possible evidence is a particularly colorful ancient quote about the Gauls, a Celtic group that lived in what is now France.

The Roman soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus (who lived circa A.D. 330 to 395) wrote in his book "Res Gestae" ("Achievements") that "a whole group of foreigners cannot stand against one of them in a quarrel if he involves his wife, stronger than him by far and flashing-eyed — least of all when she swells her neck and gnashes her teeth and, swinging her vast, white arms, proceeds to rain down punches mixed with kicks, like shots discharged from the twisted cords of a catapult" (translation by Gavin Kelly).

In other words, don't mess with a Gallic wife.

But we have to be careful with the Ammianus quote as it refers to brawling rather than warfare, said Gavin Kelly, a professor of Latin literature and Roman history at the University of Edinburgh. We shouldn't take the quote to mean that Celtic women fought in battle, Kelly said. He doesn't know if Celtic women fought in battle but, if they did, Kelly suspects it was rare.

Weapons in burials

Rachel Pope, an archaeology professor at the University of Liverpool who has studied the Celts extensively, told Live Science in an email that "we have good evidence now across Europe that a small number of women were buried with weapons." In a 2021 Journal of Archaeological Research study, she mentioned cases in which women were buried with daggers or spears, including a 2,500-year-old cemetery in eastern France where some women were buried with daggers.

Some of the best evidence is from Britain, where "we have osteological evidence from three hillforts now that [some] women took part in combat," Pope said, noting that there "is evidence too for women fighters in northern Britain, where women are buried with chariots."

Simon Mays, a senior human skeletal biologist at Historic England who has studied a woman buried with weapons on the Isles of Scilly, off the southwest coast of Britain, said women in the region were probably involved in battle. There "is little doubt that violence was a routine part of Iron Age life, and [thus] female involvement is likely," Mays told Live Science in an email.

However, just because someone fought in battle doesn't make them a "warrior," Emmet Taylor, a lecturer at the School of Irish Learning at University College Cork, told Live Science in an email. Taylor noted that it "is important for us to think about martial identities complexly," and in ancient and early medieval Ireland, there is little evidence that women were allowed to join social groups that could be considered warriors.

Can ancient Britons be considered Celts?

Most famously, there is Boudica (sometimes spelled Boudicca), a queen of the Iceni (a people in England) who led a revolt against the Roman Empire around A.D. 60. She led her forces to several victories against the Romans before being defeated at the Battle of Watling Street in A.D. 61, after which she died — either by illness or by taking poison to avoid being captured by the Romans.

However, whether the Iceni or other ancient groups in Britain were Celtic is a matter of debate among scholars. The ancient geographer Strabo (who lived circa 64 B.C. to A.D. 24) actually "distinguished Britons from Celts," John Collis, a professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of Sheffield, wrote in his book "The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions" (Tempus, 2003).

Terms such as "Celt" and "Gaul" were "never used for the inhabitants of the British Isles except in the most general way for all the inhabitants of western Europe including non Indo-European speakers such as Basques," Collis wrote.

However, although ancient writers didn't refer to people in Britain as Celts, they did note their cultural and linguistic similarities, Freeman wrote. Following this line of thought, it's not too far-fetched to call Boudica a Celt.

Miranda Aldhouse-Green, a professor emeritus of archaeology at Cardiff University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email that she prefers "to refer to Boudica as British rather than Celtic" but noted that Boudica's rebellion is part of substantial evidence for warrior women in Britain.

"There is archaeological evidence for war-women in Britain in the form of Iron Age chariot [burials]," she said. For example, she noted the story of Cartimandua of the Brigantes in Yorkshire, who allied herself with Rome and fought against anti-Roman groups in the region.

"So yes, women did fight particularly in Britain," Aldhouse-Green said. But there is "less evidence" on the European continent for women fighting in battle, she noted.

In Britain the evidence for women in battle is very strong. "In the texts, we have Boudica, raising an army and razing three cities, and [the ancient writer] Tacitus tells us women commanding combat was not unusual," Pope said.

See how much you know about the celts with our Celtic quiz!

Cats are known for the whiskers on their faces. However, if you look closely, you can see that they also have whiskers on their legs. So why do cats have leg whiskers?

To answer why they're useful, it's important to understand what whiskers are. Technically known as vibrissae, whiskers are specialized hairs that are stiffer and several times thicker than other hairs. Although whiskers themselves do not contain nerves, their bases are rooted in specialized receptacles loaded with nerve endings, making whiskers very sensitive.

"Facial whiskers are as sensitive as human fingertips," Robyn Grant, a sensory biologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the U.K., told Live Science.

A cat's whiskers around the nose, which are also known as the mystacial vibrissae, are the longest whiskers they have, according to the veterinary reference book "The Feline Patient" (Wiley, 2025). Although there is variation among cats, on average there are 12 mystacial whiskers set in four rows on each side of the muzzle.

Facial whiskers help cats hunt when light is limited or when their vision is poor. Although cats are good at seeing distant objects, "cats can't really focus on anything less than 10 inches (25 centimeters) from their eyes, so they use their whiskers to figure out where things are," Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023), told Live Science.

In addition, cats have a tuft of whiskers known as superciliary vibrissae above each eye. These whiskers help protect the cat's vision by triggering a blink when stimulated by anything that might fly into their eye, according to The Feline Patient.

Cats also have chin whiskers (mandibular vibrissae) and whiskers on each side of the head, between the ear and chin (genal vibrissae). These also help cats stay aware of the space around them.

Leg whiskers

Cats also possess a tuft of four to six whiskers on the back of each front leg, each about 0.8 to 1.2 inches (2 to 3 centimeters) long. These are known as carpal vibrissae.

"Carpal refers to the bones that, in humans, are in our wrists," Losos said. "Carpal whiskers are attached to cat forelegs near the carpal bones." However, in cats, the carpal bones are not located in the same place as the human wrist. Rather, they "are further up the leg, because cats essentially walk on their toes and not their palms," he explained.

Cats are not the only animals with carpal whiskers. "Most carnivores have them, and many rodents do, as do lemurs and armadillos," Losos said. "Dogs don't have them, but other canine species do. Rabbits don't have them either, nor do ungulates — that is, hooved animals, such as horses and cattle."

The species that have carpal whiskers "tend to be the ones that either grasp things with their forelimbs or climb up trees," Losos said. "The idea is that if it's hard for the animals to see what they're grasping, carpal whiskers can help supplement their vision. Perhaps cats have them and dogs don't because cats can move their forearms laterally from side to side and put their palms together to grab things, whereas dogs can't."

It remains uncertain what role carpal whiskers play in cats, but they likely "guide locomotion — that is, safe forepaw placement — especially during complex locomotion, such as climbing," Grant said. "They might guide prey handling too."

How much of a cat fan are you? Find out by taking our cat quiz!

Surfer, spear-fisher and free-diver Riley Elliott and marine biologist, shark diver and underwater photographer Kori Burkhardt put themselves in harm's way in don't-try-this-at-home "Shark Week" 2026 special "Secrets of the Great White Kill", and Live Science is here with all the TV and streaming details.

It doesn't always go to plan, as this seal uprising and vengeful turtle demonstrate, but great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are known for attacking prey from below with such frightening speed and power it can propel their enormous bodies clear out of the water and stun or even kill their prey upon impact.

However, closer inspection has revealed that they can be a little more subtle when the need arises

In "Secrets of the Great White Kill," Eliott and Burkhardt aim to capture and unpack the full range of great white hunting techniques, including one or two surprising methods, the nuances of which have never been fully appreciated before.

How to watch "Secrets of the Great White Kill" in the U.S.

"Secrets of the Great White Kill" airs on Discovery at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Friday, July 31.

If you don't have the Discovery channel on cable, it's available on a streaming basis from several cable alternatives. Best of all, many of the services offer a free trial to new customers.

YouTube TV usually costs $82.99 per month but comes with a free trial and $15 off each of your first five months.

The DirecTV MyEntertainment genre pack costs $42.99 per month after a 5-day free trial, and Hulu + Live TV costs $89.99 per month after a 3-day free trial.

Alternatively, the HBO Max streaming service starts at $10.99 per month.

Can you watch "Secrets of the Great White Kill" in the U.K.?

"Shark Week" programming typically airs on Discovery+ in the U.K. at a later date.

At the time of publication, plans for "Secrets of the Great White Kill" and the other 2026 specials are still firmly under wraps.

If you're currently in the U.K. for work or on vacation from the U.S., you can still catch "Secrets of the Great White Kill" by using a VPN, such as Surfshark.

Watch "Secrets of the Great White Kill" from anywhere

If you're travelling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Science word of the day: Covalent

Pronunciation: Coh-VAY'-lent

What it means: In chemistry, a covalent bond occurs when two atoms share a pair of electrons. Electrons zip around atomic nuclei at different energy levels, or "shells." An atom fills its shells with electrons starting from the lowest-energy shell to the highest-energy one, which is called the valence shell. Valence-shell electrons can interact with the valence shells of other atoms. When two atoms get close enough, their valence electrons can feel the pull from both nuclei at once, binding the two atoms together into a stable molecule.

How to use it in a sentence: When atoms share electrons in a covalent bond, they form some of the most stable bonds in chemistry ‪—‬ which is good news, because these bonds are also the basis of most organic molecules and organisms, including you.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Inflammation may be behind a mysterious phenomenon known as dissociation, a mental state that includes "out-of-body" experiences and the feeling that the world is "unreal," emerging research suggests.

Scientists have long known that this altered state of consciousness is often triggered by trauma. But new research hints at how: Trauma triggers a stress response, which dials up chronic inflammation. The findings are part of a broader shift in psychiatric research as experts increasingly examine how the immune system may play a role in mental health conditions.

The research, which has been accepted for publication and is currently under peer review, is still preliminary, and it is based on correlations between blood markers and symptoms, which cannot prove inflammation causes dissociation. But if follow-up work shows inflammation fuels dissociation, that raises the possibility that anti-inflammatory drugs could treat disorders in which people spend much of their time feeling detached from themselves or reality, experts told Live Science. Interventions that broadly target reducing inflammation could also be beneficial, the study suggests.

Research in this area could provide a "whole new avenue for potential treatment options," study lead author Evelyn Dilkes, a psychology researcher at the University of Essex in England, told Live Science.

A common experience, a rare disorder

Dissociation encompasses both out-of-body experiences, known as depersonalization, and the feeling that everything around you is unreal, called derealization, said Dr. Ruth Lanius, a psychiatry professor and Harris-Woodman chair of mind-body medicine at Western University in Ontario. Both of these experiences are related to a person's sense of self and embodiment.

As a short-term phenomenon, it is common; between a quarter and three-quarters of the population may experience dissociation at some point in their lives. It can also be a symptom of many conditions, such as schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, panic disorders and epilepsy.

In around 1% of the population, people may experience prolonged dissociation, in what's known as depersonalization-derealization disorder (DPDR). People with this condition may frequently feel detached from their body or from reality for hours, weeks, months or years at a stretch.

Research suggests DPDR is often associated with past trauma, such as a life-threatening event or childhood abuse. During a traumatic event, dissociation may be helpful because it may offer "a psychological escape when a physical escape is not possible," Lanius told Live Science. It may also help a person stay calm and focused on the threat at hand.

The problem arises when dissociation continues after the threat has passed.

"[Dissociation] helps you to survive, but in the aftermath of trauma, it leaves you detached from all of your emotions, positive and negative, and so often individuals lose the capacity to feel fully alive," Lanius said.

So why does dissociation linger long past the immediate trauma for some people?

From stress to inflammation and then dissociation

Past research showed that inflammation, which can be the immune system's response to infection or injury, seems to be dysregulated in individuals with dissociative conditions. So Dilkes wondered whether the link between trauma and prolonged dissociation runs through the body's response to stress as a kind of "biological embedding," in which life experiences alter a person's physiology. That hypothesis proposes that trauma initially triggers a stress response. When that stress response doesn't subside, the body's stress system stays activated, continually releasing the hormone cortisol from the adrenal glands.

Cortisol is typically anti-inflammatory in short exposures, but when it remains elevated over long periods, it can contribute to chronic inflammation. This can show up in blood levels of interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein.

So Dilkes' lab looked for those inflammatory markers in the blood of children in the U.K. who were followed, starting in the 1990s, as part of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. The study collected samples at age 9 and 12 and again at age 17 and 24. The study asked participants when they were adults whether they “ever felt that they were not a real person, not part of the living world,” or if they “ever felt that the world was unreal, that things around them were like a stage set.”

Early results suggest that high interleukin-6 levels at age 9 seem to be correlated with people experiencing depersonalization in adulthood, while elevated C-reactive protein levels in earlier childhood, but lower ones in adulthood, are linked with experiencing derealization as an adult.

In the latter case, the study authors suggest that chronic stressors could dampen the immune response, leading C-reactive protein levels to drop over time even as symptoms linger.

The researchers also speculated that interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein may differentially act on the different brain regions affected in depersonalization and derealization, respectively. These findings may reflect differences in how stress and immune activity shift across the lifespan following trauma. "It's suggestive of a very intricate system," Dilkes said.

Affected brain regions and networks

Dilkes' research can't answer which brain regions and networks are likely affected, but past research suggests dissociation involves emotional blunting in the brain. In this response, the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in planning and decision-making, acts as a brake on the limbic system, which helps people experience emotions, Lanius said.

According to this theory, dissociation occurs because circuits in the amygdala, the fear-processing part of the brain, hyperactivate the prefrontal cortex. The overactive prefrontal cortex then disrupts normal signaling to the limbic system. The overall result is a dampening of emotions, which may enable people to stay focused and rational during a scary event.

This brain activation pattern, which is characteristic of DPDR, is the opposite of that classically found in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in which the amygdala is hyperactive, while parts of the prefrontal cortex are underactive. (There is, however, a subtype of PTSD associated with dissociation.)

Some early research hints that the default mode network and the temporoparietal junction, which are thought to be involved in maintaining a sense of self, may be affected in dissociation.

In the new study, the researchers speculate that interleukin-6 exposure in youth may influence the development of the default mode network, which could result in depersonalization symptoms later in life.

Many unanswered questions

While Dilkes' findings are intriguing, outside experts cautioned against overinterpreting early results.

Extrapolating results from studies that investigate dissociative disorders is difficult because patient groups with different diagnoses differ a lot from each other, said Judith K. Daniels, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. What's more, many symptoms can overlap between different dissociative disorders. Dissociation fueled by childhood abuse may differ biologically from dissociation found in a panic disorder, but current research isn't able to distinguish these groups.

What's more, biomarkers of inflammation like C-reactive protein and interleukin-6 are often elevated in other inflammatory and autoimmune conditions ‪—‬ such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and multiple sclerosis, while, most people who experience trauma do not develop a dissociative disorder, which suggests that additional genetic or environmental factors are likely involved, Lanius said.

The nonspecific nature of these blood markers would also make it challenging to use them to diagnose DPDR, though in the future they could potentially be used alongside traditional DPDR screening tools, experts told Live Science.

One big limitation is that scientists do not yet fully understand how the brain constructs conscious reality in the first place.

"In my opinion, if we don't understand altered states of consciousness and dissociation, we can't understand psychopathology fully," Lanius said.

For now, more research is needed to determine whether therapies targeting inflammation would benefit people with dissociative disorders. Conditions like DPDR are thought to be rare, but symptoms are often overlooked, which can make it hard to both determine how common it is and to find study participants. But Dilkes thinks dissociation is underdiagnosed.

"So many people experience this, but no one has the words or knowledge of what it is," Dilkes said.

Editor's Note: This article was produced as part of the Dalla Lana Fellowship in Journalism and Health Impact program at the University of Toronto.

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

One of the biggest misconceptions about solar eclipses is that enjoying them requires expensive solar gear. Telescopes, tracking mounts, cameras, telephoto lenses and solar filters are all part of the kitbag for serious eclipse photographers, but the reality is that many travel with surprisingly little equipment.

That will be especially true on Aug. 12, 2026. The total solar eclipse crossing Greenland, Iceland and Spain is the headline attraction that day — closely followed by a partial solar eclipse across Europe and in Canada and the U.S. Northeast — but it won't be the only celestial event worth seeing. Just hours later, the Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak beneath moonless skies. So any eclipse kit built for the Aug. 12 eclipse should therefore be designed with one eye on a night-shoot capturing "shooting stars."

Here's what to buy for your eclipse-meets-Perseids double-header, according to your budget.

Under $50: Keep it simple

If your budget is less than $50, the good news is that you're not excluded from the eclipse experience. In fact, you can assemble everything necessary for a memorable eclipse day without spending very much at all.

The first purchase should always be certified eclipse glasses. Find some safe suppliers that meet the ISO 12312-2 standard for solar viewers, and consider buying more than you need (somebody nearby will almost certainly forget theirs). A handheld solar viewer is a worthwhile alternative, offering a slightly larger and often more comfortable view than eclipse glasses alone.

With the remaining budget, I'd focus less on astronomy equipment and more on practicality. A compact power bank and a reclining lawn chair (handy for the eclipse and the Perseids) could all be within your budget. Eclipse day involves a great deal of waiting, but if you're standing in the path of totality — or primed to see a partial eclipse — eclipse glasses and a clear sky are all you really need to experience something extraordinary.

Under $200: The biggest upgrade you can make

Once your budget reaches around $200, I'd start thinking about binoculars. For many people, the single best upgrade is a pair of dedicated solar binoculars. You can get mini pairs, such as the Celestron EclipSmart 10x25 and Lunt 6x30 Mini Sunoculars, or more substantial pairs like the Celestron Eclipsmart 10x42 and Celestron EclipSmart 20x50. We've tried them all, and can tell you that the Lunt 8x32 SUNoculars are the best (and easiest to find the sun with, which beginners always find is surprisingly small in the sky).

Unlike eclipse glasses, which show the sun as a small orange or white disk, solar binoculars reveal sunspots and make the moon's gradual progress across the solar surface much more engaging. They offer far more detail without introducing the complexity of a telescope. These are the best upgrades you can make if you're not in the path of totality and want to maximize your view of the partial phases of the eclipse.

If you're in the path of totality awaiting a total solar eclipse, forgo the solar binoculars and get yourself a good pair of conventional binoculars. The reason is simple: the partial eclipse will be interesting to watch through your eclipse glasses, but it's the totally eclipsed sun — and the beautiful solar corona that's revealed when it gets dark — which is the star attraction. You can safely see it with the naked eye or through conventional binoculars (but ONLY when the entire disk of the sun is blocked during totality, which will be for a minute or two).

A good choice would be a pair of 10x42 or 10x50, not only because you'll get a great view of the solar corona and prominences — loops of plasma from the sun's surface — but because they'll double as excellent stargazing binoculars for sweeping across the Milky Way's rich star fields, bright clusters and countless stars when it gets dark. Using products like DayStar Filters and Baader AstroSolar Safety Film ND 5.0, you can make any pair of conventional binoculars into temporary solar binoculars (use a solar filter for one lens and cap the other).

Under $500: Enter the smart telescope

At around $500, a completely different category of equipment becomes available. If we were building an eclipse kit from scratch, this is probably the budget level that would tempt us most because it opens the door to smart telescopes. Devices such as the Seestar S30 and Seestar S30 Pro (as well as the upcoming Seestar S30 Pro Eclipse Edition), DwarfLab Dwarf Mini and Vaonis Vespera Pro are portable and can automatically track the sun. All either have solar filters in the box, or their makers sell them separately (or you can make your own — see above).

The appeal of a smart telescope is that it can track the sun and photograph the eclipse while demanding relatively little attention from the user. With a solar filter fitted, a smart telescope can safely image the partial phases. For those in the path of totality, the totally eclipsed sun can also be imaged — just remember to take the solar filter off, and put it back on again when totality ends. You can then switch to capturing deep-sky objects at night, something you can do without much fuss while you watch the Perseid meteor shower peak with your naked eyes (the only way).

Over $1,000: Getting a close-up

Once you move beyond the $1,000 mark, your options are myriad. Personally, we would go straight for some image-stabilized binoculars. Models such as the Canon 10x42L IS WP, Canon 15x50 IS All Weather or Canon 12x36 IS III are among the most impressive astronomical instruments available to eclipse chasers because they combine premium optics with stabilization technology that effectively removes hand shake.

When you're standing in the path of totality looking at the sun's corona in close-up, image stabilization is absolutely what you want. If you chase solar eclipses every few years, they're worth buying for the few minutes of totality you get to experience. For the partial phases, we use a homemade solar filter on one lens and cap the other lens. Alongside those binoculars, we'd be tempted by a smart telescope for getting basic, but impressive images.

If you like a challenge, you could, of course, go straight for manual photography. Get a mirrorless or DSLR camera and a zoom lens, and you can have a go at imaging the solar corona yourself. You could also consider pairing a camera with a telescope and a star (or solar) tracking mount that can automatically track the sun. You'll also need to add a quality tripod and solar filters. If you fancy imaging the Perseid meteor shower later that night — or for any landscape astrophotography and the Milky Way — you'll also need a wide-angle lens.

Research, rehearse, prepare

The danger at this budget level is believing that more equipment automatically produces a better experience. It doesn't. Every eclipse attracts photographers and observers carrying thousands of dollars' worth of gear, but many — typically first-timers — spend totality worrying about camera settings instead of looking at the sky.

Whatever gear you buy, the best investment is always time — time to research, rehearse and prepare, and also to arrive early enough to settle into your observing location. That applies to whatever kind of solar eclipse you're in line for.

Whether your budget is $50 or $5,000, the perfect eclipse kit is the one that allows you to experience a solar eclipse — and if that includes totality, know that it will be a priceless experience.

Science word of the day: Coprolite

Pronunciation: KAHP'-ruh-lite

What it means: Coprolites are fossilized poop. Scientists have found coprolites from animals as diverse as fish, dinosaurs and saber-toothed cats. Teeth in the saber-toothed cat poop indicated that it had been eating baby sloths, which frankly feels a bit unfair from a creature with 11-inch-long (28 centimeters) teeth.

These fossils form when poop gets rapidly buried and mineralized instead of rotting away. Coprolites can be hard to match to the animal that produced them, but undigested bones and teeth in the fossilized poop can often provide clues to the kinds of animals that other animals eat.

How to use it in a sentence: If you're ever in a science museum and a volunteer, with a twinkle in their eye, asks you what you think a chunky, rock-looking thing is, the answer is always coprolite.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

"Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" – a "Shark Week" 2026 special – sees biologist Phil Torres and "Expedition X" host Heather Amaro explore the islands' waters, including Troy's Coral Head, to establish if nuclear fallout could be behind reports of sharks displaying unusual and highly aggressive behaviors.

The U.S. military detonated 67 nuclear bombs at Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll over 12 years from 1946 to 1958, which inflicted catastrophic and irreversible harm on the local populace and environment. Cancer rates among residents increased significantly, and local produce was rendered unfit for consumption.

Half a century later, however, the Marshall Islands became the site of the world's largest shark sanctuary.

How to watch "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" in the U.S.

"Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" airs on Discovery at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Wednesday, July 29.

If you don't have the Discovery channel on cable, it's available on a streaming basis from several cable alternatives. Best of all, many of the services offer a free trial to new customers.

YouTube TV usually costs $82.99 per month but comes with a free trial and $15 off each of your first five months.

The DirecTV MyEntertainment genre pack costs $42.99 per month after a 5-day free trial, and Hulu + Live TV costs $89.99 per month after a 3-day free trial.

Alternatively, the HBO Max streaming service starts at $10.99 per month.

Can you watch "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" in the U.K.?

"Shark Week" programming typically airs on Discovery+ in the U.K. at a later date.

At the time of publication, plans for "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" and the other 2026 specials are still firmly under wraps.

If you're currently in the U.K. for work or on vacation from the U.S., you can still catch "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" by using a VPN, such as Surfshark.

Watch "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" from anywhere

If you're traveling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

The total solar eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026, will attract millions of viewers across northern Spain, western Iceland and eastern Greenland, while a deep partial eclipse will be visible across much of Europe, and a smaller partial eclipse will reach parts of northeastern North America.

If you're planning to watch, one question matters more than almost any other: how are you going to observe it safely?

The answer depends on where you are, your budget and what kind of experience you're after. Some people want to simply look up and enjoy the spectacle. Others want to study sunspots, photograph the eclipse or capture loved ones gazing at the eclipsed sun. Many away from the path will stay at home and livestream it. There is no correct way to watch a solar eclipse, but it's important to stay safe. Here are eight ways to safely view the Aug. 12, 2026, solar eclipse.

1. Eclipse glasses for viewing from land

If you're planning to watch any part of the eclipse with your own eyes, eclipse glasses should be your first purchase. Certified eclipse glasses that comply with the ISO 12312-2 standard block more than 99.999% of sunlight, making it safe to look directly at the sun during the partial phases.

Without them, even a brief glance at the uneclipsed or partially eclipsed sun can cause permanent eye damage. Through them, the sun appears as either a bright orange or a whitish disk against a black background. As the moon gradually moves across it, the changing crescent shape becomes immediately obvious. During the final minutes before totality, the solar crescent shrinks to an impossibly thin sliver.

For observers in Britain, Europe and North America outside the path of totality, eclipse glasses are arguably all you need. The entire eclipse remains partial, so the glasses stay on from beginning to end. Even if you're traveling to Iceland, Greenland or Spain for totality, eclipse glasses remain essential throughout the partial phases before and after totality, when the sun is still dangerously bright.

However, you should buy them early. Before every major eclipse, supplies tighten and some retailers sell out entirely. For reputable sellers, check out the American Astronomical Society's list of safe products. Recommended manufacturers include American Paper Optics, Rainbow Symphony and Thousand Oaks in the U.S. and Baader in Europe.

2. Handheld solar viewers for cruise ships

Many eclipse chasers prefer handheld solar viewers to eclipse glasses. These use the same safe solar-filter material and are made by the same manufacturers, but provide a larger viewing window. They typically hang around your neck on a lanyard, which makes them essential if you want to observe an eclipse from a cruise ship — it stops them from blowing into the sea. The actual view is almost identical to what you'll see through eclipse glasses.

3. Totality with the naked eye

If you're fortunate enough to observe from within the path of totality, there is one viewing method that rules all others during totality only — the naked eye. Although you must never look at the sun without eclipse glasses during the partial phases, during totality it's not only perfectly safe, but also the only sane thing to do.

During totality, you MUST take your eclipse glasses off to see the solar corona — one of nature's most extraordinary sights. The naked eye will also help you find bright planets around the eclipsed sun and the horizon glowing with twilight colors in every direction. If this is your first total solar eclipse, make a promise to yourself beforehand: spend at least some of totality doing nothing except looking up.

4. Solar binoculars

If observing the eclipsed sun through eclipse glasses and solar viewers leaves you unimpressed, you can upgrade your experience by opting for dedicated solar binoculars, which have permanently attached solar filters. They offer a significant jump in detail over eclipse glasses without introducing the complexity of a telescope. Sunspots become obvious, and you can more easily see them get covered by the advancing edge of the moon.

All kinds of magnifications are offered, but 10x42 is about the limit. Any more and they not only become hard to hold steady, but the eclipse then gets more difficult to find in the sky.

Since you can't use them during totality, solar binoculars are best seen as a good upgrade for observers outside the path of totality.

5. Regular binoculars

Normal binoculars are arguably a better choice if you plan to be within the path of totality. This is what experienced eclipse watchers do, and with good reason — they simply add solar filters for the partial phases, then remove them during totality for a close-up of the solar corona.

For the partial phases, solar filters must completely cover the front objective lenses. Never place filters over the eyepieces and never rely on improvised materials such as sunglasses, smoked glass or photographic filters — you must use dedicated solar eclipse filters.

However, since objective lenses come in all shapes and sizes, it's often easier to make your own solar filters using Baader AstroSolar Film. Typically, users will make a solar filter for one lens and cap the other, removing both during totality.

Image-stabilized binoculars deserve special mention. Models from Canon and other manufacturers can provide remarkably steady views of the eclipse without requiring a tripod, making them particularly attractive for travel.

6. Telescopes

The same applies to telescopes as applies to binoculars — you can buy a solar telescope with a permanently attached solar filter, or (a more popular method) put a solar filter on any telescope. However, there is another unusual option here — a dedicated hydrogen-alpha solar telescope, which reveals an entirely different side of the sun.

Rather than showing the photosphere, they isolate light emitted by hydrogen atoms in the chromosphere and show prominences arching above the solar limb as well as dark filaments across the disk. The downside is that hydrogen-alpha instruments are among the most specialized and expensive telescopes in amateur astronomy.

7. Smart telescopes

Few areas of amateur astronomy have changed as rapidly as smart telescopes. Devices such as the Unistellar Odyssey Pro, ZWO Seestar S30, DwarfLab Dwarf Mini and Celestron Origin have introduced a new generation of observers to astronomy by automating much of the traditional setup and operation.

For eclipse observing, the appeal is obvious. Once fitted with a solar filter, these systems can automatically track the sun, display images on a smartphone or tablet and save photographs with minimal fuss.

For eclipse travelers heading to Iceland, Greenland or Spain, smart telescopes can also reduce some of the stress associated with eclipse photography. Many users plan to have the telescope automatically capture the eclipse during the partial phases, then simply enjoy totality with their own eyes. Just don't spend the entire eclipse staring at a smartphone!

8. Livestreams

What if you can't travel? Or if it's cloudy? The Aug. 12, 2026, eclipse will be streamed by observatories, astronomy organizations and media outlets around the world. A livestream can never replace standing beneath the moon's shadow, but it guarantees you'll see totality even if clouds intervene.

Confirmed live streams so far include the total solar eclipse by TimeAndDate and the European Space Agency, while partial solar eclipse images will come from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, U.K. When cell signal allows, some eclipse observers keep a livestream running on a nearby phone while observing the real eclipse overhead, and/or livestream views from their own telescope on social media.

What's the best way to look at the eclipse?

The best viewing method for a solar eclipse depends entirely on what you want to get from it. Just remember that the purpose of the technology is to support the experience, not replace it — no instrument can replace the experience of seeing the solar corona with your own eyes if you're within the path of totality. Choose the viewing method that helps you do that — and spend as much time as possible simply looking up.

The patient: An 8-year-old girl in the U.S.

The symptoms: The girl arrived at an emergency department after waking up with sudden, severe pain in her upper back. Within hours of the pain emerging, she developed rapidly worsening weakness in all four limbs, making it impossible for her to stand or walk.

She also reported painful tingling and loss of sensation in her hands, and doctors discovered that she had diminished reflexes and sensory changes beginning at her upper chest and moving down her body. In multiple instances at the hospital, she lost control of her bladder and bowels.

The combination of acute paralysis, severe back pain and incontinence suggested damage to the spinal cord, but the cause wasn't immediately clear, her doctors wrote in a report of the case.

What happened next: The medical team launched an extensive search for the underlying cause. An MRI of her neck and torso showed evidence of extensive inflammation or injury that stretched from her lower neck to the middle of her back. The scan also showed a small tear in one of the disks in her lower neck, with a small amount of disk material pushing outward.

However, the girl and her parents did not report any recent falls or injuries, and the MRI alone couldn't determine what had caused this apparent damage.

The girl's medical team then performed blood tests, a spinal fluid analysis and more imaging to look for signs of infections, autoimmune diseases or other inflammatory conditions that can trigger acute paralysis in children. These tests all came back negative.

While clinicians continued investigating, the girl was treated with intravenous steroids and underwent a procedure called plasmapheresis, during which blood is drawn from the patient into a machine which separates blood plasma (the liquid portion of blood) from blood cells and then returns the blood cells to the patient mixed with fresh plasma from donors. This process helps to filter out harmful antibodies and abnormal proteins that can be present in people with autoimmune or blood disorders.

Over the following days, the girl gradually regained her ability to feel, walk and control her bladder. However, repeat MRI scans showed worsening inflammation, which didn't seem to match the girl's improving condition.

The diagnosis: Throughout her hospital stay, the medical team suspected a diagnosis of transverse myelitis, which is a rare neurological disorder that involves swelling in the spinal cord. However, as infectious and autoimmune causes became increasingly unlikely, the physicians changed their minds.

They instead concluded that the girl had experienced a spinal cord infarction, or essentially a stroke affecting the spinal cord. This blood-flow blockage was most likely caused by an exceptionally rare condition called fibrocartilaginous embolism (FCE).

In FCE, a small piece of jelly-like material from the soft center of an intervertebral disk breaks off, enters the bloodstream and blocks one of the arteries supplying the spinal cord. The resulting loss of blood flow can cause sudden paralysis, sensory loss and bowel and bladder dysfunction.

It's unknown exactly how many people experience FCE, as it's difficult to diagnose and frequently underreported. One literature review found only 30 suspected cases and 41 confirmed cases of FCE that had been documented in the U.S.

The case study notes that FCE is most common in children and young adults ages 10 to 20, and that rate also jumps up later in adulthood, around ages 40 to 60. It is slightly more common among female patients than male. While slightly younger than the most commonly affected demographic, the 8-year-old patient in this case otherwise fit this description.

FCE is difficult to diagnose because there is no definitive laboratory or imaging test for it. Instead, physicians must rule out more common causes of spinal cord injury while looking for imaging findings and clinical signs and symptoms that might fit the diagnosis of FCE.

The treatment: There isn't a specific treatment for FCE; instead, care focuses on managing the symptoms caused by the spinal stroke.

The patient was treated with corticosteroids to reduce inflammation, medications to manage pain and plasmapheresis. After a few weeks, and with extensive rehabilitation therapy, the girl regained nearly all of her strength and functional abilities. Her only lingering symptom was weakness in her hands.

What makes the case unique: The case study notes that FCE is often linked to minor trauma to the spine, such as that caused by heavy lifting or other activities that briefly increase pressure inside the spinal disks. In this case, however, the medical team was unable to identify a clear triggering event, and the girl was otherwise healthy and had no reported history of physical trauma. The girl simply woke up with symptoms, which made the diagnosis even more unexpected.

The case also highlights that, although FCE is rare and often carries a poor prognosis — as many patients experience long-term disability and some may even die from complications — meaningful recovery is also possible. The case report authors concluded that, with early recognition and supportive treatment, patients with FCE may achieve improved outcomes and a return to their normal activities.

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.

Kakadiya, J., Lakhani, D. A., Gaddamanugu, S., Goncalves, F. G., & Mullen, A. J. (2026). Presumed fibrocartilaginous embolism causing spinal cord infarct in 8-year-old female: A case report. Radiology Case Reports. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radcr.2026.03.047

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

Science word of the day: Allele

Pronunciation: Ah-LEEL'

What it means: Genes contain the instructions for the various proteins that determine traits, such as eye color or blood type. An allele is a specific variant of a gene. Alleles come in pairs, one from each parent. Some are dominant, meaning that copy will override any instruction from the other allele in the pair, and some are recessive, meaning there have to be two copies of that particular allele for those instructions to translate into an observable feature. Of course, not all inheritance is as simple as dominant and recessive patterns, particularly for traits that arise from combinations of hundreds of genes.

How to use it in a sentence: We learned in grade school that alleles for brown eyes are dominant over alleles for blue eyes, leaving the kids with hazel eyes feeling lost and confused.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

We've all heard of the fearsome megalodon, the largest known shark to have ever lived, but how about its predecessors, contemporaries and successors? Shark Week premiere "Jurassic Sharks" uses CGI to flesh out the fossils of ancient cartilaginous fish, and Live Science is here with all the TV and streaming details.

Using fossil records and "cutting-edge" visual effects, "Jurassic Sharks" will attempt to trace the ancestry of modern-day species back through millions of years, and build a picture of the prehistoric ocean, complete with superpredators that are both weird and awe-inspiring.

It's a must-watch for budding palaeontologists and animal fans alike.

How to watch "Jurassic Sharks" in the U.S.

"Jurassic Sharks" airs on Discovery at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Tuesday, July 28.

If you don't have the Discovery channel on cable, it's available on a streaming basis from several cable alternatives. Best of all, many of the services offer a free trial to new customers.

YouTube TV usually costs $82.99 per month but comes with a free trial and $15 off each of your first five months.

The DirecTV MyEntertainment genre pack costs $42.99 per month after a 5-day free trial, and Hulu + Live TV costs $89.99 per month after a 3-day free trial.

Alternatively, the HBO Max streaming service starts at $10.99 per month.

Can you watch "Jurassic Sharks" in the U.K.?

"Shark Week" programming typically airs on Discovery+ in the U.K. at a later date.

At the time of publication, plans for "Jurassic Sharks" and the other 2026 "Shark Week" specials are still firmly under wraps.

If you're currently in the U.K. for work or on vacation from the U.S., you can still catch "Jurassic Sharks" by using a VPN, such as Surfshark.

Watch "Jurassic Sharks" from anywhere

If you're traveling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Aug. 12, 2026, promises to be a big day for anyone interested in the sky. By day, a solar eclipse will be visible across parts of North America and Europe. For most, it will be partial, but for those within the path of totality in eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain, the moon will completely block the sun.

Hours later, the sky show continues with the peak of the Perseid meteor shower on the night of Aug. 12-13. The shower occurs when Earth passes through debris left behind by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, producing bright meteors and occasional fireballs. In 2026, the timing could hardly be better. The same new moon that makes the solar eclipse possible will also create moonless skies for meteor-watching, with observers under dark skies potentially seeing 30 to 50 "shooting stars" per hour.

All of that happens after the eclipse. As a bonus, Venus will blaze low in the west during twilight, the Milky Way will stretch overhead after dark and, in Iceland, there is even a slim possibility of an early-season aurora display. Many visitors will spend 12 hours or more outdoors, arriving long before first contact and remaining under the stars until after midnight. Here’s what to consider buying for this very special day and night beneath the sky.

This striking satellite photo shows a multicolor "fan" of folded rocks sculpted by a longtime collision between two of Earth's tectonic plates.

The geological feature, known as an imbricate fan, is located around 3 miles (5 kilometers) east of the town of Murgha Kibzai in Pakistan's Balochistan province. The photographed section of folded rocks measures around 9 miles (15 km) across, but the fan stretches up to 55 miles (89 km) from end to end, well beyond the area in this image.

The dramatic structure sits at an altitude of around 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) in the Sulaiman Range, a series of mountains that covers around 2,500 square miles (6,500 square kilometers) of Pakistan and Afghanistan. ("Sulaiman" means "of Solomon," in reference to the biblical figure King Solomon, and the range's largest peak is Takht-e-Sulaiman, which translates to "Throne of Solomon.")

This is one of several unique features that emerged along the boundary between the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, which have been colliding for more than 60 million years. At one point during this tectonic tug-of-war, the two plates became somewhat intertwined, allowing the fan to take shape, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

"As India moved northward, it began to rotate in a counter-clockwise direction, wrenching the northwestern part of the Indian plate backwards into part of the Eurasian plate," Earth Observatory representatives wrote. "The countervailing forces put the rocks of the Sulaiman Range in a unique compressional vice, causing many of its faults to curve and stretch in convoluted ways."

The fan is made up of alternating layers of sandstone, which appear dark in the image, and limestone, which has a much lighter hue. These sedimentary rocks were formed by "thrust faults" that shot upward from the boundary between the Eurasian and Indian plates and became entangled as the boundary moved back and forth.

The satellite image is false-color, meaning it includes wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that are not normally visible to humans. This helps to accentuate the differences between the two rock types, although they can also be easily distinguished with the naked eye. Pockets of vegetation appear in red throughout the image.

The photo is a small part of a larger, wide-field image (see above), which showcases several other intriguing geological features across the Sulaiman Range in false color.

Continental collision

The collision between the Eurasian and Indian plates became inevitable around 80 million years ago, when dinosaurs still ruled Earth, according to the Earth Observatory. At this point, the pair became locked on a collision course, with each plate moving more than 8 inches (20 centimeters) per year — around twice the speed of the fastest tectonic plates today.

Around 60 million years ago, the plates slowly slammed together. Normally, this would cause the smallest tectonic plate to sink below the other. However, the two plates' massive size meant neither receded. Instead, the continental crust along the boundary grew thicker, and the ground buckled, folded and pushed upward.

This process created not only the Sulaiman Range but also the Karakoram (a huge mountain range that spans the borders of China, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan) and the Himalayas — the two tallest mountain ranges on Earth, according to the Earth Observatory.

This collision continued at full speed for around 30 million years, before eventually slowing down. However, the two plates are still technically colliding today, making the region a major earthquake hotspot.

See more Earth from space

Science word of the day: Seamount

Pronunciation: SEE'-mount

What it means: A seamount is an undersea mountain that rises at least 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) above the seafloor but does not come close to breaking the surface. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there are at least 100,000 seamounts in the oceans, and less than 0.1% of them have been explored. Seamounts typically form from volcanic activity, and many host dramatic communities of sea life ‪—‬ from coral, to sharks, to an assortment of weird jellyfish-looking things.

How to use it in a sentence: Every time marine biologists explore a seamount with their remotely operated vehicles, they seem to discover a new universe of strange and blobby deep-sea creatures.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

The total solar eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026, will bring thousands of photographers to a narrow path of totality through eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain. For many, it will be their first opportunity to witness totality, the brief period when the moon completely covers the sun and reveals its delicate corona, a wonder of nature that normally remains hidden by sunlight.

Some first-time eclipse chasers heading to the path of totality pack expensive gear they've never used before, hoping to capture expert-level images without any preparation. Others just take a smartphone. Guess who usually comes back with the best images? Practice and rehearsal — or simplicity — are key.

Remember, you should never look at the sun directly without specialist solar equipment (unless you are in totality), or you risk permanent damage to your sight.

Preparing for totality

Photographing a solar eclipse is unlike photographing anything else. Solar safety matters, exposure changes dramatically, and totality lasts only a few precious minutes. Despite that, memorable eclipse photographs can be taken with almost any camera. The best approach depends on your equipment, your experience and what kind of memory you want to bring home.

However, you don't need to stand in the path of totality to photograph some of the event. Across much of Europe, a deep partial eclipse will occur near sunset, with more than 90% of the sun obscured in many locations. In northeastern North America, observers will see a smaller partial eclipse during the afternoon. While neither experience matches the drama of totality, both offer opportunities for striking photography.

1. Take a souvenir shot through eclipse glasses

To watch any partial solar eclipse, you'll need a pair of eclipse glasses or solar viewers; the former you wear and the latter you look through. Either works well as a solar filter for a smartphone. Simply wrap some eclipse glasses around your phone's camera lens or hold a solar viewer in front, and you can take basic images of a partial eclipse.

The way to get more than just a rough souvenir shot is to put your smartphone on a tripod or purchase a Solar Snap, which not only provides a solar filter that attaches to your phone with Velcro but also includes an app that zooms in on the eclipse.

If you want pinpoint sharpness without having to spend too much or travel with much gear, get yourself a smart telescope like the ZWO SeeStar S30 Pro, DwarfLab Dwarf Mini or Vanois Vespera Pro.

2. Use a smartphone during totality

If you're traveling to Greenland, Iceland or Spain to see the total solar eclipse, take a simple smartphone photograph during totality. A smartphone cannot compete with a camera's zoom lens for close-up detail, but it's perfect for recording a wide view of the landscape you're in.

In Greenland and Iceland, the eclipsed sun will hang about 25 degrees above the western horizon, making it possible to include fjords, volcanic landscapes or distant mountains in the frame. In Spain, where totality occurs late in the day, the low altitude of the sun offers opportunities to photograph the eclipse above villages, church towers, castles and mountain ridges.

Before the eclipse, switch off auto-flash and enable RAW images if your phone offers them. Burst mode works well — as does filming the event in 4K from a tripod and extracting stills later.

3. Take a wide-angle shot during totality

Many photographers using a manual mirrorless or DSLR camera become obsessed with the corona and forget that the eclipse affects the entire environment. The resulting images often feel disconnected from the actual experience. A well-composed landscape photograph can communicate the atmosphere of totality far more effectively.

The image above was shot by expert eclipse photographer Alan Dyer, author of How to Capture the Coming Solar Eclipses, in Teton Valley, Wyoming, during the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse. It was shot with a Canon 6D and a 14mm SP Rokinon lens at f/25 for 1/10 second at ISO 100. It's one shot from a 700-frame time-lapse and was taken just as totality began, moments after the diamond ring ended, and the dark shadow of the moon is approaching from the west.

4. Capture crescent suns

When a partial solar eclipse reaches about 50% — something it will only do in extreme northeast Canada and Europe on Aug. 12, 2026 — it's possible to project crescent suns through anything with defined holes. It works really well through a colander or spaghetti spoon.

By projecting crescent suns onto the floor, the walls and people around you, unique portrait images of eclipse chasers can be created. Unlike photographs of the corona, which thousands of people will capture, photographs like this, which document the human experience of an eclipse, can be really special.

• Read: Astrotourism, dark-sky and Northern Lights travel essentials

5. Take a close-up of the solar corona

This is the classic eclipse photography setup and the one most commonly used by experienced eclipse chasers — though it demands some serious equipment, commitment and practice.

A camera fitted with a telephoto lens between 200mm and 600mm provides enough magnification to reveal detail in the corona while remaining portable enough for travel. At 400mm, the eclipsed sun fills a useful portion of the frame. At 600mm, the corona becomes significantly more prominent and fine detail begins to emerge. Lenses like the Canon RF 200-800mm f/6.3-9 IS USM, Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS and SIGMA 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG DN OS Sport would be good options.

Focus carefully on the partially eclipsed sun through a solar filter, and leave the focus untouched thereafter. With a camera set to ISO 100 and f/5-f/8 aperture, exposure bracketing is essential because the corona spans an enormous range of brightness. Automated exposure sequences, or bracketing, allow photographers to capture multiple exposure levels to combine later, if desired.

It's always best to rehearse in advance; the excitement of totality very often leads to basic errors — the classic being leaving the solar filter on during totality.

6. Shoot a close-up sequence of the eclipse

If you want to shoot a sequence throughout the entire solar eclipse that shows all of the various stages, you need to be in position, ready to take images as soon as first contact occurs, and stay there until fourth contact.

Since the size of the sun won't be huge in your finished image, you don't need a huge telephoto lens. Instead, concentrate on imaging the partial eclipse at very specific times before and after totality, so that you can produce a mirror image on either side of an image of the solar corona.

7. Shoot a wide-angle sequence of the eclipse

A wide-angle eclipse sequence is a different kind of image, showing not just the changing shape of the sun, but the landscape. Start with a base exposure taken during totality, when the eclipsed sun sits in a darkened twilight sky, then layer in the partial phases at regular intervals from first contact to fourth contact.

The result can show the sun's path across the sky, the moon appearing to bite across it in the opposite direction, and even bright planets nearby. It's a powerful way to tell the whole story of an eclipse in one frame, especially if you include water, mountains, people or a dramatic horizon.

Dyer's image above is a single exposure taken with a Canon EOS Ra and a Canon RF15-35mm lens at ISO 125, f/2.8 and 1/6s. The partial phases were photographed every five minutes from start to finish of the eclipse.

• Read: Best lenses for astrophotography 2026

The ancient Egyptians sometimes reused crafted materials. This block, which features a battle scene, was likely created during the reign of Amenhotep II between 1427 and 1400 B.C., during the 18th dynasty. But when it was discovered, the block was being used as part of the foundation of the unfinished mortuary temple of Ramesses IV (who ruled from 1153 to 1147 B.C., during the 20th dynasty).

The painted sandstone slab was discovered in Luxor in 1912 by Egyptologist Herbert E. Winlock, who later became the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the block in its collection. In his original publication describing the artifact, Winlock wrote that it featured a scene of an Egyptian pharaoh slaying his enemies with a bow and arrow. "The block may be taken as one of the best preserved specimens of the great imperial pictorial-relief yet discovered," he wrote.

The excellent preservation of the artifact and its vibrant colors was likely due to its reuse in Ramesses IV's temple foundations, Catharine Roehrig, the Met's curator emerita of Egyptian art, wrote in a 2008 explanation of the relief fragment.

Measuring roughly 24 by 45 inches (61 by 115 centimeters), the painted sandstone carving was likely part of a larger scene depicting an Egyptian pharaoh vanquishing an enemy army, according to Roehrig. The pharaoh's chariot and horses appear in the upper-right corner, while a rival soldier tries to avoid being trampled to death. Three of the enemies have been pierced by arrows.

The pointed beards and distinctive clothing suggest the enemies were ancient Syrians or possibly the Hyksos, a Semitic-speaking foreign dynasty that ruled Egypt from around 1640 to 1530 B.C., during the Second Intermediate Period, James P. Allen, former curator of Egyptian art at the Met, wrote in 2005. The battle scene may therefore reflect historical conflicts fought between dynasty 18 pharaohs like Amenhotep II and Asiatic rulers.

But the relief was unlikely to have been created as a commemoration of a specific historical battle. "Their primary purpose was to portray the pharaoh in his role as the victorious defender of Egypt," Roehrig wrote.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Science word of the day: Pando

Pronunciation: PAN'-doh

What it means: In Latin, "Pando" means "I spread." And boy, does it. Pando is a clonal stand of aspen trees in Utah that weighs about 13 million pounds (6 million kilograms), making it the world's heaviest living organism ever found. Its 40,000 trees cover 106 acres (43 hectares) in Fishlake National Forest, and they're all connected by a single, sprawling root system. Some DNA analysis suggests that this many-fingered megatree is tens of thousands of years old.

How to use it in a sentence: When you walk through Pando, what seems like a normal stroll through an aspen grove is actually a trip through a single, ancient living being.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Great white sharks can launch themselves clear out of the ocean, but why they breach so dramatically remains one of marine biology's biggest mysteries. "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach", premiering during "Shark Week" 2026, follows a team of filmmakers and scientists as they investigate the shark's behavior.

"Shark Week" is now in its 25th year, and to mark this milestone, Jeff Kurr and marine biologist Alison Towner head to the Californian coast, which has seen an unexpected surge of great whites (Carcharodon carcharias) breaching the surface.

With cinematographer Andy Casagrande in tow, "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" aims to capture this behavior in full glory, and to establish why breaching great whites have entered American waters.

How to watch "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" in the U.S.

"Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" airs on Discovery at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday, July 26.

If you don't have the Discovery channel on cable, it's available on a streaming basis from several cable alternatives. Best of all, many of the services offer a free trial to new customers.

YouTube TV usually costs $82.99 per month but comes with a free trial and $15 off each of your first five months.

The DirecTV MyEntertainment genre pack costs $42.99 per month after a 5-day free trial, and Hulu + Live TV costs $89.99 per month after a 3-day free trial.

Alternatively, the HBO Max streaming service starts at $10.99 per month.

Can you watch "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" in the U.K.?

"Shark Week" programming typically airs on Discovery+ in the U.K. at a later date.

At the time of publication, plans for "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" and the other 2026 specials are still firmly under wraps.

If you're currently in the U.K. for work or on vacation from the U.S., you can still catch "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" by using a VPN, such as Surfshark.

Watch "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach" from anywhere

If you're traveling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

For thousands of years, humans looked at Mars and wondered what lay on its surface. Fifty years ago this week, we finally found out when NASA's Viking 1 became the first spacecraft ever to land on the Red Planet and transmit images from its surface. It was humanity's first view from the surface of another planet.

Viking 1 had been programmed to take its first image just 25 seconds after touchdown, according to NASA. It occurred at 7:53 a.m. EDT on July 20, 1976 — exactly seven years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon. It was supposed to coincide with the U.S. Bicentennial on July 4, 1976, but the landing was delayed by the search for a flat landing zone.

Although the spacecraft landed safely at Chryse Planitia, north of the equator, mission controllers still had to wait another 19 minutes for the radio signal confirming success to cross the 212 million miles (340 km) between Mars and Earth.

Forty minutes after touchdown, the confirming image began appearing on monitors at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, slowly building line by line from left to right. Dr. Thomas Mutch, leader of the Viking lander imaging team, never forgot the moment.

"I studied the black screen, waiting for that narrow strip that will signal the first few lines of the first picture," he said. "Rocks and sand are visible and — finally at the far right — one of the spacecraft foot pads, a symbolic artifact that stamps our accomplishment with the sign of reality … Time and time again I repeat, 'It's incredible.'"

The image revealed a solid, slightly rocky surface, with dust and pebbles thrown up by the landing already settling back onto the spacecraft. Viking’s first color image came the next day, with a panorama following a few days later.

The Viking mission consisted of four spacecraft: two orbiters and two landers. Viking 1 was joined six weeks later on the surface by Viking 2, which landed in Utopia Planitia, also in the northern hemisphere. Meanwhile, the two orbiters mapped Mars and relayed data — including more than 52,000 orbital images and 4,500 photographs from the surface — back to Earth.

Viking transformed our understanding of Mars, but its most intriguing scientific result remains unresolved. The landers carried the first experiments designed to detect life directly in Martian soil. Although the mission's official conclusion was that no convincing evidence of life had been found, some scientists have continued to argue that one of the experiments produced a genuine biological signal; others argue that Viking’s experiments destroyed the very evidence of life that they sought to prove. Discoveries by later missions — including organic molecules detected by Curiosity and perchlorate salts found by Phoenix — have prompted some researchers to revisit the Viking data.

Viking 1 fell silent in 1982, two years after Viking 2, following a software error during an update. The intrepid spacecraft showed us the surface of another planet for the first time, but whether Viking 1 also found the first hints of life off-Earth remains one of planetary science's most enduring mysteries.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

Redheads are a rare breed, with people who sport ginger locks making up less than 2% of the global population. With such low numbers, would it be possible for red hair to go "extinct," leaving people with natural hair hues ranging from black to blond, with nary a hint of red?

In a word, no. Experts told Live Science about how the genetics of red hair means the trait is sticking around.

"There is no evidence that redheads are going extinct," said Katerina Zorina-Lichtenwalter, a research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder's Institute for Behavioral Genetics who has studied red hair inheritance. She told Live Science that the genes responsible for red hair "are harmless, they do not interfere with reproduction and they are not linked to a disease that would prevent people from reaching reproductive age."

Nevertheless, the myth of an impending red hair extinction isn't a new one.

"The 'Is red hair becoming extinct?' question has been around for decades," Ian Jackson, a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Genetics and Cancer, told Live Science. "There have also been extinction stories about blond hair that go back to the mid-19th century."

The logic behind the supposed redhead extinction usually goes something like this: Red hair is rare; in the world's redhead hotspots in the United Kingdom and Ireland, only about 10% of the population is categorized as redheads. And red hair is a recessive trait, meaning two redhead carriers have to have get together to have redheaded children.

There's even the question of whether potentially deadly conditions, such as melanoma, might wipe out redheads, who are especially susceptible to sunburn. While there are people of color with red hair (Malcolm X famously had reddish hair), red hair is often linked with pale skin and, therefore, elevated skin-cancer risk. Redheads' higher melanoma risk isn't only because they burn more easily. It's also due to harmful chemistry from pheomelanin, the pigment that helps create the reddish hair hue, and reduced DNA‑repair protection, which is linked to variants of the gene that causes red hair.

Keeping the flame alive

But these issues won't doom redheads to extinction, experts said.

First, let's look at genetics. A person needs to inherit the recessive version of MC1R — a gene involved in pigment production — from both parents. Someone with only one copy may not have red hair at all, but they can still pass the variant to their children. So, the role of carrying red hair genes through the generations is shared by people of all hair colors, not just redheads.

This hidden-carrier effect is why a recessive trait can remain in a population even when it is uncommon to see. Jackson gave a simple example: If a variant is carried by half the population, only about a quarter of couples would both carry it. Among those couples, roughly one-quarter of children would inherit two copies.

For red hair to truly disappear, the relevant variants would have to be steadily removed from the gene pool. In evolutionary terms, that would usually mean people carrying these variants — or people with red hair — were having fewer children than everyone else.

"The only reason things go extinct in large populations is because you don't produce as many kids as the others, to put it in blunt terms, and I don't know that there's any evidence for that," Jonathan Rees, professor emeritus of dermatology at the University of Edinburgh, told Live Science.

Second, let's look at skin cancer risk. Rees said people with MC1R variants have a greater skin-cancer risk "somewhere in the region of two to four fold."

But skin cancer risk does not automatically equal evolutionary decline. Many skin cancers occur after people have already had children. Mortality rates for melanoma in the U.K. are the highest in people aged 90 and older, according to Cancer Research UK, after they've had more than enough time to pass on their genes.

Theoretically, before the invention of sunscreen and modern medicine, it may have been more likely for redheads to have died of skin cancer before they had children. Given that the trait has persisted, though, are there any evolutionary benefits to having red hair?

Red hair may carry surprising health advantages. For instance, recent research suggested the red‑hair pigment pheomelanin can help regulate excess cellular cysteine, which can be harmful at high concentrations.

"The vitamin D story is the one that people most often peddle," Rees said. The idea being that lighter pigmentation of the skin (and red hair being linked to lighter skin) increases the amount of vitamin D that people can make during the gloomy winters. But he added that the evidence there is lacking, especially because it can be hard to define who, exactly, is a redhead. It's a spectrum: where does red hair end and strawberry blond hair begin? That makes it hard to study without sequencing the genomes of large swathes of the population.

However, the frequency of red hair could still fluctuate. Jackson said the frequency may "go down somewhat as people become more mobile" and have children with partners from regions where MC1R variants are less common. But that would be a change in frequency, not extinction.

As long as MC1R variants persist silently in carriers — and as long as redheads are not having significantly fewer children than everyone else — the world's redheads are not about to disappear.

Science word of the day: Cenozoic

Pronunciation: See-noh-ZOH'-ihk

What it means: The ascendency of mammals, the birth of the Himalayas, the diversification of birds ‪—‬ Earth's in its Cenozoic era, baby!

The Cenozoic is the geological era happening right now. It started 66 million years ago with the abrupt mass extinction known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, when a massive asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs. It's been a busy few tens of millions of years, ushering in such hits as Earth's first cacti, whales and most (if not all) of the Grand Canyon.

How to use it in a sentence: The Cenozoic is called the Age of Mammals, but the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley would like you to know it could have been called the Age of Teleost Fish, if mammals weren't so dang self-centered.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Shark Week 2026 is here! This year's highlights include experiments testing great white intelligence, Molly Carlson's death-defying freefall dive into a reef shark feeding frenzy, and a deep-dive on the thresher’s tail strike. The 20-strong lineup of shows airs across seven nights, and Live Science is here with all the TV and streaming details.

Shark Week still packages its science with ominous music and blockbuster titles, but its strongest moments challenge the familiar "mindless killer" myth, presenting sharks instead as intelligent, highly specialized predators whose decline could destabilize the world’s oceans.

Look out for a great study of the highly aggressive and erratic sharks in the waters off Marshall Islands, where the United States military detonated 67 nuclear bombs between 1946 and 1958.

And if you're a tech fan, there's plenty of new camera systems and tagging technology to discover.

Read on as we explain how to watch "Shark Week" 2026 from anywhere.

How to watch "Shark Week" 2026 in the U.S.

"Shark Week" 2026 comprises 20 brand-new TV specials that will air on Discovery from 8 p.m. ET/PT every evening from Sunday, July 26 to Saturday, Aug. 1.

If you don't have the Discovery channel on cable, it's available on a streaming basis from several cable alternatives. Best of all, many offer a free trial to new customers.

YouTube TV usually costs $82.99 per month but comes with a free trial and $15 off each of your first five months.

The DirecTV MyEntertainment genre pack costs $42.99 per month after a 5-day free trial, and Hulu + Live TV costs $89.99 per month after a 3-day free trial.

Alternatively, you can watch Shark Week 2026 on HBO Max (from $10.99 per month).

Can you watch "Shark Week" 2026 in the U.K.?

"Shark Week" programming typically airs on Discovery Plus in the U.K. at a later date.

At the time of publication, plans for the 2026 slate of specials are still firmly under wraps.

If you're currently in the U.K. for work or on vacation from the U.S., you can still catch "Shark Week" 2026 by using a VPN, such as Surfshark.

Watch "Shark Week" 2026 from anywhere

If you're traveling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

"Shark Week" 2026 trailer

When is "Shark Week" 2026?

"Shark Week" 2026 runs from Sunday, July 26 to Saturday, Aug. 1 in the United States.

"Shark Week" 2026 episodes

Sunday, July 26

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "K-Pop Shark Heroes"

After a recent series of shark encounters off the Korean Peninsula, actor and comedian Ken Jeong joins forces with Grammy-nominated singer and lifetime shark lover Rei Ami on a mission to reshape the perception of sharks across East Asia and around the globe, fueled by the power of K-pop.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "Air Jaws: Red, White and Breach"

A new phenomenon is emerging as great white sharks are captured on film breaching in California like never before. Filmmaker Jeff Kurr, marine biologist Alison Towner, and cinematographer Andy Casagrande set out to capture this unprecedented behavior and uncover the secrets behind the Great American Breach.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "Invasion of the Mega Sharks"

Shark researcher Neil Hammerschlag, joined by Shark Week expert Paul de Gelder, leads a team to track down Big Rose, a record-breaking great white believed to be one of largest predators in the North Atlantic. Using innovative tagging technology and daring field operations, they venture to a newly discovered shark hotspot off Nova Scotia aiming to transform our understanding of these ocean giants.

Monday, July 27

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "Bull Shark Dinner Bell"

Shark attack survivor and advocate Paul De Gelder teams up with apex predator specialist Rosie Moore in Jupiter, Florida to investigate what triggers giant bull sharks to confront humans. The team tests how human behavior in the ocean, extreme weather events and prey preferences influence shark attacks.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "House of Sharks"

Off the coast of New Zealand lies a hidden shark battleground, where three distinct groups of great whites organize into competing "houses" and may be competing with one another to gain control of a major seal feeding ground. Marine biologist Tristan Guttridge and underwater cinematographer Kina Scollay venture into the middle of the action on an epic expedition. As they investigate, they uncover the possibility that these clans of great whites recognize their kin and return season after season to their ancestral territories, raising the theory that these predators aren't solitary hunters but rival dynasties at war.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "Biggest Mako on Earth"

For decades, rumors have swirled about massive, 15- to 20-foot-long (4 to 6 meters) mako sharks patrolling the deep waters off Southern California. Long dismissed as fishers' tales, new footage, along with a recently published photo capturing a mako that appears to stretch 15 feet, is now forcing scientists to rethink everything they know about these oceanic apex predators. Marine biologist Tristan Guttridge, alongside conservationist Kendyl Berna and shark tagger Keith Poe, go on an investigation to determine whether the world's biggest mako is real — and hunting in the coastal waters of Santa Catalina.

Tuesday, July 28

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "Jurassic Sharks"

In a Shark Week first, revolutionary CGI resurrects the ocean's most bizarre Jurassic (201 million to 143 million years ago) sharks, bringing them to life like never before. Guided by the rare living sharks that once shared their seas, real-world expeditions seamlessly merge with cutting-edge visual effects to uncover stories from the deep and prehistoric seas in ways never before possible.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "Jaws vs Orca"

For millennia, the great white shark has reigned as the ocean's ultimate apex predator. But now, a new challenger is emerging: the orca. Around the world, sharks are washing ashore with their livers removed with chilling precision while in the Strait of Gibraltar, orcas are targeting sailboats — ramming hulls, crippling rudders and sinking vessels. To investigate this shift in behavior, Tristan Guttridge explores orcas' attacks on boats to reveal how these predators hunt and how they may be taking down great white sharks.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "Chum Island: Catching a Killer"

In this Shark Week whodunnit, a rare surge of highly aggressive shark attacks hit a tight-knit community off Australia’s southern coast, prompting marine biologist Riley Elliott to find and tag the oceanic suspects. But when he discovers this could be a new, elusive population of sharks, he builds the world's first "chum island" to lure them in and uncover if they are the ones responsible for the attacks.

Wednesday, July 29

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks"

Phil Torres and Heather Amaro travel 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) west of the U.S. to the remote Marshall Islands, home to the world's largest shark sanctuary, where apex predators are exhibiting highly aggressive behaviors and erratic swimming patterns. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States military detonated 67 nuclear bombs around the island, raising questions about their lasting impact on marine life. Now, the team dives into these dangerous waters to investigate reports of "mutant" sharks and uncover whether atomic blasts could be to blame.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "Expedition Unknown: Shark Secrets"

Global explorer Josh Gates travels back in time and dives into the history behind some of the world’s most infamous shark encounters, from the earliest known shark attack to the mystery surrounding the shark feeding frenzy faced by sailors following the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. He also investigates the legendary "Stronsay Beast," a mysterious creature that washed ashore in Scotland in 1808.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "Alien Sharks: Untamed America"

In celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, wildlife biologist Forrest Galante embarks on a nationwide quest to find the nation’s most bizarre and dangerous "alien" sharks – from glowing swell sharks to elusive sawfish.

Thursday, July 30

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "What Shark Attacked?"

Shark attacks are extremely rare, but when they happen, the first question is always the same: What kind of shark was it? Leading shark scientists Tom Hird and Rosie Moore, alongside conservationist Kinga Philipps, investigate mysterious attacks from around the world using cutting-edge forensic analysis – including bite pattern comparison, geographic profiling, video evidence, and eyewitness testimony – to identify the species responsible and uncover why these life-threatening encounters occur.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "How to Train a Great White"

Tristan Guttridge ventures into shark-infested waters off New Zealand to answer a provocative question: Can sharks be trained? Using techniques pioneered by the U.S. Navy to train dolphins in complex cognitive tasks, the team tests whether these apex predators can learn, solve problems and respond to cues. If successful, the experiment can potentially redefine shark intelligence and transform our understanding of one of the ocean's most misunderstood predators.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "Ultimate Shark Dive"

World-class Red Bull high diver Molly Carlson leaps from a helicopter hovering above the open ocean, targeting a narrow plexiglass cage surrounded by circling reef sharks, or risking a direct plunge into a chum-filled feeding frenzy. From concept to execution, Carlson pushes herself to the limit with a record-setting stunt that no high diver has ever attempted.

Friday, July 31

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "Secrets of the Great White Kill"

For centuries, great whites were believed to simply stalk their prey. Now, groundbreaking science suggests that these alpha sharks are highly intelligent predators that adapt their hunting techniques in real time. In this program, the full range of great white hunting tactics is revealed, reinforcing the species' status as one of the ocean's top predators.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "Sharkzilla Takes New York"

After a wave of mauled marine life washes ashore in New York, conservation biologist Craig O'Connell launches an investigation to find the culprit. When it leads to an old nuclear dumping ground teaming with great whites and makos, he is left with the theory that the predator may be radioactive. A deeper dive reveals an unexpected hotspot for massive makos off the coast of the Hamptons, suggesting that these waters may be hiding something even bigger beneath the surface.

► 10 p.m. ET/PT – "My Strange Shark Addiction"

How far will people go to fuel their fascination with sharks? For four devoted shark "fin-atics," their obsession shapes every aspect of their lives. From a dentist who spends every spare moment searching for life-size shark replicas to a woman who insists she has a special connection with her shark "boyfriend," and a world-record holder covered in shark tattoos, this special explores how their daily routines, relationships and finances revolve entirely around sharks.

Saturday, August 1

► 8 p.m. ET/PT – "Great White Highway"

Great white sharks are pushing farther up the East coast than ever before and in far greater numbers, leading to close encounters and forcing beach closures. Now, a team of shark scientists races to install high-tech receivers and tag as many great whites as possible.

► 9 p.m. ET/PT – "Thresher Shark: Stun to Kill"

The physics behind the thresher shark’s devastating tail strike has long remained a mystery — until now. For the first time ever, the discovery of a shallow-water feeding ground has made observing this behavior possible. Now, shark scientist Craig O’Connell and marine biologist Aliah Banchik dive into the direct line of fire as they attempt to reveal exactly how these predators use their tails to stun and kill.

Is there a "Shark Week" 2026 host?

John Cena and Jason Momoa have hosted recent editions of "Shark Week", but the 2026 incarnation won't have a single overarching presenter stitching its constituent parts together.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Beyond familiar particles such as electrons and protons, scientists have discovered a zoo of "quasiparticles" with exotic names, such as magnons, angulons, dropletons and polaritons. But what are quasiparticles, exactly? And given the "quasi" in their name, are they considered real particles?

One way to understand quasiparticles is to explore what a particle is. The standard mental picture of a particle "is of a discrete object, like a ball," Douglas Natelson, a condensed matter physicist at Rice University in Houston, told Live Science. However, this classic image of particles changed with the advent of quantum physics, which revealed that the universe becomes fuzzy at its smallest levels. For example, in 1924, French physicist Louis de Broglie showed that particles such as electrons could also behave as waves ‪—‬ a discovery that earned him a Nobel Prize.

Modern physics suggests that particles are excitations in fields that permeate the entire universe, a bit like a ripple in a pond, Ross McKenzie, a theoretical condensed matter physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Queensland in Australia, told Live Science. Each type of particle has its own corresponding field. For instance, photons of light are ripples of the electromagnetic field, McKenzie noted.

The quantum nature of particles means they can not only fly through an empty vacuum but also ripple through matter. For instance, photons can zip through transparent and translucent materials, and electrons can flow inside wires.

If you can picture a standard particle, such as an electron, as a ripple traveling within a material, you can also envision other kinds of excitations within matter. These other types of ripples are quasiparticles.

For example, think of "the wave" done at a sporting event. "You can watch it propagate around a football stadium; it has a location and a speed," Natelson said. "It only exists within the stadium, though, and it's made up of the collective response of all the interacting fans."

In much the same way, "quasiparticles can only exist within some medium or material, because they are built up from the response of that material's constituents or building blocks," Natelson said; in contrast, particles such as electrons and protons "can exist in free space."

In other words, quasiparticles can't exist in a vacuum and they can't exist on their own. They're reliant on particles acting together and being in a material where they can emerge, just as a wave carried out in a stadium can only exist when there is a group of people there who can perform it.

A philosophical question concerning quasiparticles is whether they are real, McKenzie noted. After all, "quasi" in Latin means "almost."

"Fundamental particles can exist in isolation in a vacuum, and quasiparticles need many interacting particles to exist," McKenzie said. "Still, I would say quasiparticles are, for all intents and purposes, just as real as particles, in how you can detect them and manipulate them."

A zoo of quasiparticles

The concept of quasiparticles originated with theoretical physicist Lev Landau in the 1950s, McKenzie said, and the idea ultimately helped Landau win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1962. Scientists have now proposed the existence of dozens of quasiparticle types, including the following:

• The phonon, which is a quasiparticle of sound — it is the smallest packet of vibrational energy that makes up sound in matter, McKenzie said.
• The electron hole, often simply called a hole, is the positively charged vacancy left behind once an electron has left its original place, McKenzie noted.
• The electron quasiparticle, which essentially consists of an electron and its interactions with its surrounding environment. This combined package means the electron quasiparticle requires more force to move, so it effectively has more mass than a regular electron, McKenzie explained.
• The exciton, a quasiparticle made of an electron and a hole orbiting each other.
• The anyon, a kind of quasiparticle so far only seen in two-dimensional systems, which may carry only a fraction of an electric charge.

"How many kinds of quasiparticles are there?" McKenzie said. "Just like there are an infinite number of possible states of matter, I would say that, in principle, there are an infinite number of types of quasiparticles."

Scientists describe activity in material as quasiparticles "because it simplifies everything dramatically," McKenzie said. In the same vein, Natelson said that "very often the math behind physical phenomena in solids is described well by quasiparticles."

Quasiparticles are not simply useful for bookkeeping. For instance, researchers typically describe the behavior of electricity in electronic devices in forms of quasiparticles such as holes and excitons, Natelson said.

All in all, the answer to the question of whether quasiparticles are real is a matter of interpretation. If the question is whether or not a quasiparticle is an elementary particle such as an electron, the answer is no — they cannot exist on their own, and they depend on the materials in which they manifest.

However, if the question is whether or not quasiparticles are real phenomena, the answer is yes — they are things that scientists can measure that can behave like particles and effectively have many of the same properties that other particles do.

Science word of the day: Lithics

Pronunciation: LITH'-iks

What it means: In archaeology, lithics refers to artifacts made of stone. Scientists used to think Homo sapiens was the only human species to make stone tools. But like many oversimplified stories about human evolution, this one turned out to be a bust. Humans in Indonesia were making sharp-edge stone flakes 1.5 million years ago, before our species even existed.

How to use it in a sentence: Lithics preserve well, so scientists base a lot of what we know about ancient civilizations on their stone tools, while artifacts such as textiles or leather rot away.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Science word of the day: Parsec

Pronunciation: PAHR'-sek

What it means: Ah, the humble parsec, thorn in the side of George Lucas. In 1977, Lucas' "Star Wars: Episode IV ‪—‬ A New Hope" script had Han Solo bragging that the Millennium Falcon completed the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. The problem? Parsecs are a unit of distance, not a unit of time. This has caused angst among Star Wars fans for 49 years and counting.

But when we hit you with this definition, you're going to forgive Lucas for assuming the parsec was some sort of extra-fancy space second. Here it goes: A parsec is a unit of distance required to cause a heliocentric parallax of one arc second. Ouch.

Let's break it down. Heliocentric parallax is a way to measure the distance to a far-off object, such as a star, by measuring how it appears to move in comparison to another distant object (usually another star). An arc second is a fragment of an angle of an arc equal to 1/3600 of a degree.

This means a parsec is a unit of distance that makes a star seem to move 1/3600 of a degree compared with another distant star. It turns out that this equals 206,265 times the distance of Earth to the sun, or 3.26 light-years.

How to use it in a sentence: The 2018 movie "Solo: A Star Wars Story" tries to retcon Han Solo's brag about parsecs by claiming he was talking about distance all along ‪—‬ but we're not sure we're buying it.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

It's a Tuesday morning, and you're getting your toddler ready for daycare. But as you brush her hair into a ponytail, you notice that her cheeks are flushed, her nose is runny and her breathing is phlegmy. Instead of daycare, you head to your pediatrician, who offers a solution: a prescription for antibiotics.

This scenario has played out many times in clinics around the world. The problem is that most common childhood infections are caused by viruses, which antibiotics don't treat. In the long term, unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions can foster resistance in bacteria, thereby reducing the drugs' potency and fueling the rise of dangerous superbugs.

That's why, in recent years, there's been a huge push in many countries to raise awareness of antibiotic misuse among doctors and to reduce the overprescription of these drugs. In Japan, the government noticed that the country's pediatricians were prescribing too many antibiotics, especially to young children, and offered them a financial incentive to break the habit.

It's been working remarkably well. Among young kids directly affected by the incentive, it slashed antibiotic prescriptions by 20%; it also contributed to a spillover effect in older kids and teens, as under-20s have seen a 50% reduction in prescriptions in recent years. I went to Japan to examine why the program has been so effective and to learn whether similar approaches could work in the U.S.

Understanding why a fairly modest incentive of 800 yen (about $5) a visit is so effective requires unpacking why Japanese doctors overused antibiotics in the first place. If doctors face similar pressures stateside, maybe the same strategy could work here too.

A culture of overprescription

Japan started out with a big problem of antibiotic misuse, especially among prescriptions for kids. From 2013 to 2016, over 30% of children with respiratory tract infections were given antibiotics, despite most of those infections being viral. (The U.S. started at a slightly better baseline regarding antibiotics given for respiratory conditions, with about 23% of outpatient prescriptions being unnecessary.)

For decades, it was common in Japan to routinely prescribe antibiotics for sniffles and tummy bugs, Dr. Takemi Murai, deputy head of the Infectious Diseases Division at Nagano Children's Hospital in Azumino, told me. That's in part because medical education there didn't emphasize the risk of "superbugs," meaning bacteria that can withstand many antibiotics.

"When I trained, antimicrobial stewardship wasn't yet a formalized part of the curriculum in the way it is now," said Murai, who finished medical school in 2006.

There also may be a generational divide, Dr. Tatsuki Ikuse, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the National Center for Child Health and Development in Tokyo, told me. Ikuse, who finished medical school in 2013, suspects that older doctors "experienced many cases of bacterial infections when there was no vaccination."

Now that vaccines for whooping cough, diphtheria and pneumococcal disease are routine, children face a lower risk from the bacteria that cause those illnesses. But those early experiences treating children with serious bacterial infections may still be shaping doctors' prescribing patterns, even decades later, Ikuse thinks.

Surveys conducted in Japan suggest that doctors under 50 are more likely than doctors over 50 to see antimicrobial resistance as an urgent issue. Clinic doctors — those likeliest to see kids as outpatients for acute illnesses — also skew older than doctors in hospitals; in 2024, clinic doctors averaged about 60 years old, while those in academic and nonacademic hospitals averaged 40 and 48 years old, respectively.

Historically, Japanese doctors also had a strong bias toward prescribing antibiotics for "feverish" diseases, noted Dr. Norio Ohmagari, director of disease control and prevention at Japan's National Center for Global Health and Medicine.

Murai agreed with that sentiment. "If doctors saw a fever and a high CRP level [a sign of inflammation], they prescribed antibiotics," Murai said. "Doctors were following such a practice for a long time, so they didn't question it."

Concerns over secondary infections were also a big driver of unnecessary antibiotic use, said Dr. Masahiko Sakamoto, a hospital pediatrician in Saku, a highland city about an hour northwest of Tokyo by bullet train. Even if doctors suspected a viral infection, like the common cold, they worried that the illness could open the door for secondary bacterial infections, such as bacterial pneumonia. However, recent studies suggest this scenario is uncommon and shouldn't prompt doctors to use antibiotics preventatively.

Is antibiotic misuse still a problem in the U.S.?

Young children in the U.S. were once the most likely group to receive unneeded antibiotics, but now, those unnecessary prescriptions have "dropped dramatically," Dr. Sarah Kabbani, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Office of Antibiotic Stewardship, told me in an email.

Between 2011 and 2016, children's antibiotic prescriptions decreased 13% overall. "Overall declines in antibiotic use over the past decade have been driven in large part by reductions in prescribing for children," Kabbani noted.

Japan has also decreased its overall antibiotic use in younger populations, halving its outpatient prescription rates for patients under 20 between 2011 and 2022, Dr. Yusuke Okubo, division chief of clinical epidemiology and health services research at the National Center for Child Health and Development in Tokyo, told me.

The decrease in antibiotics overuse syncs with parents' lived experiences in both countries.

"I was taking antibiotics quite often" as a kid, Tatsuya Kanno, a software engineer and father of two in Tokyo, told me. "Nowadays, we don't get really prescribed those antibiotics easily."

"It has definitely been different from my childhood," said Gabby Brown, an apparel consultant and mother of two in Littleton, Colorado. "There was always a bottle of pink stuff in the fridge, you know? And now they're very hesitant to give it out."

Brown's pediatrician actually has an explicit policy on their website stating that they don't overprescribe antibiotics and instead follow evidence-based guidelines to determine when the drugs are truly necessary. I've found a number of other U.S. pediatric clinics that do the same.

One reason U.S. pediatricians have been able to improve several key metrics of antibiotic use is that the issue has been on their radar for a while.

"Antibiotic stewardship was a core tenet of my residency training 20 years ago," Dr. Morgan Leafe, a U.S.-based pediatrician who worked in inpatient and outpatient settings for 11 years after residency, told me in a direct message. "So I would say it's not new in pediatrics."

But there remains room for improvement.

Prescription rates vary widely among states and among different types of outpatient facilities, such as community practices versus those affiliated with academic medical centers. Rural communities often use antibiotics at higher rates and log more inappropriate use, compared with urban areas. These regional variations are "not explained by clinical factors," said Julia Szymczak, a medical sociologist and associate professor in the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

Nowadays in the U.S., urgent care clinics might be a hotspot for antibiotic misuse. These and other walk-in clinics serve an increasing number of pediatric patients, with an estimated 26% of children visiting one in the past 12 months. Urgent cares may prescribe antibiotics to children at a higher rate than other ambulatory settings do; in one study, 42% of the children seen at urgent cares were prescribed antibiotics at their visit, while the national average across all pediatric ambulatory visits is 21%.

It may be that urgent cares are more likely to prescribe antibiotics for conditions that they're explicitly not recommended for. One national analysis found that urgent cares prescribed antibiotics for 20% of allergy cases, 42% of viral upper respiratory infections and 52% of uncomplicated ear infections, while doctor's offices wrote far fewer of these inappropriate prescriptions. Other studies highlight similar patterns.

Among children, inappropriate prescriptions are less likely at urgent cares that specialize in pediatrics, highlighting doctors at general clinics as a potential population to target. Additionally, research has found that visits with nurses or physician assistants are more likely to end in an antibiotic prescription than those with doctors. (Only licensed doctors can write prescriptions in Japan, so this factor is more unique to the U.S.)

Different systems, similar pressures

Japan's nationalized healthcare provides a staggering degree of choice, because insurance coverage doesn't tie you to specific clinics or require you to get referrals to access certain care. Young children's care is virtually free thanks to national and local subsidies. So on paper, parents can easily shop around for a pediatrician that best suits their family's needs, as well as pop into any healthcare facility with flexibility should the need arise.

While this system is convenient, it has its downsides, some parents told me.

"In the U.S. and in Switzerland, they try to get to know you and know your child," said Reid, a fundraiser and father of two based in Okinawa, who recently moved to Japan with his sons and husband. "They don't at all in Japan."

In contrast, about 9 in 10 children in the U.S. have a primary care provider, although that percentage has fallen in recent years as the use of urgent care has increased. Primary care providers can be a go-to for sick visits as well as an ongoing monitor of kids' health via annual check-ups. (Annual check-ups in Japan are handled by local municipalities, not by children's regular doctors, Reid noted.)

In some ways, pediatric clinics in Japan can be considered more analogous to urgent care in the U.S., in that they're intended to address acute cases of illness as they emerge. For more serious illnesses, caregivers bring their children to hospitals, parents in Japan told me.

Diagnostic uncertainty

For a typical respiratory or tummy bug, doctors in both the U.S. and Japan make diagnoses based largely on a patient's symptoms and timeline of illness. In the U.S., most minor infections are "generally assumed to be viral unless certain criteria are present," Leafe said. These criteria are spelled out in manuals used by pediatricians.

The criteria enable doctors to "feel reassured" that they've correctly classified an infection as viral or bacterial, even in the absence of a highly sensitive diagnostic test, said Dr. Ilan Shapiro, a community pediatrician at AltaMed Health Services, a nonprofit health network in Southern California.

Rapid tests are available for only a handful of bacteria, including Streptococcus pyogenes (also called group A strep), a common culprit behind strep throat and scarlet fever. These tests are "definitely underutilized" by Japanese clinics, Ohmagari noted, while U.S. clinicians are encouraged to use them more widely.

"For strep throat, we never treat [give antibiotics], now, without a positive test," said Dr. Jennifer Shu, a pediatrician with Children's Medical Group, a group of pediatric offices in the Atlanta metropolitan area. (That said, electronic medical records suggest that not all doctors' offices use these tests before prescribing antibiotics, despite these recommendations.)

In both countries, doctors can use rapid tests to diagnose common viral infections, such as influenza and RSV. But those tests don't always catch every case. And even if they come back positive, they can't rule out the possibility of simultaneous infections with viruses and bacteria, Shu noted.

Shu's practice also uses a 20-minute test that looks for multiple viruses and bacteria in the nose and throat, including the bacteria behind whooping cough and Mycoplasma, which causes "walking pneumonia." Not all clinics use this type of test, though, because they require a special certification and equipment to run on-site, Shu said.

Such panel tests can be helpful but also tricky to interpret. Bacteria can sometimes be detected in a patient's nose without being the cause of their symptoms. "That's where clinical judgment comes in," Shu said, emphasizing that a doctor must combine test results with the timeline of a patient's symptoms.

Time crunches

The lack of quick, surefire diagnostic tests for bacterial infections can leave doctors with a degree of uncertainty, which can sometimes prompt unnecessary prescriptions, Szymczak said.

"Our number one motivation is to not harm somebody; that's the main thing," said Dr. Shruti Gohil, an infectious-disease specialist at UCI Health who designs interventions to improve doctors' antibiotics use. Worries about potential missed diagnoses can prompt doctors to reach for an antibiotic now "in exchange for a potential future, untoward consequence," such as a greater chance of resistant infections, she said.

In both countries, doctors must make diagnoses and treatment plans in a limited amount of time. "Pediatric outpatients in Japan are very busy and can only secure a few minutes for each patient," Ikuse told me.

Such time crunches are common in the U.S., too.

"I had a pediatrician who said they had — I can't remember the figure — but it was like 800 seconds for a sick visit," said Szymczak, who studies the factors that drive clinicians to misuse antibiotics. "They broke it down into seconds."

Given that antibiotics are generally very safe drugs, pediatricians can be tempted to prescribe them "just in case" in these situations, even if the need isn't certain, a 2019 review found. In these scenarios, patients end up taking courses of antibiotics they likely don't need.

Doctor shopping and bad reviews

One factor driving antibiotic misuse that might be unique to Japan is the competition between clinics and the customer service culture it motivates.

Japan's mandatory national health insurance makes it easy to "doctor shop." Depending on where a family is based, there may be a glut of pediatric specialists to choose from — as in metropolitan centers like Tokyo — or very few. For instance, in Okinawa, general family doctors are easier to come by than pediatricians, said Sandra Miller*, a researcher and mother of one based in the prefecture.

But across all settings, families can still flexibly choose which clinic they go to. Meanwhile, pediatricians in Japan, who make less than their peers who care for adults, can worry about losing clients to nearby practices.

Japanese clinicians used to worry that, after being denied antibiotics for their sick kids, dissatisfied parents would leave poor reviews online — particularly in Google Reviews — and thus drive away business, Okubo said. "They feared such clinic reviews."

Parents frequently used to demand antibiotics from their children's pediatricians, Okubo added. "Ten years ago, it was a common situation," he told me.

Among the clientele of Shu's Atlanta clinic, she's "seeing a trend where people aren't asking for antibiotics as much." But still, parents sometimes request the drugs when she's determined they're not needed. These requests often stem from the parents' past experiences.

"They'll say, 'Well, last time they took an antibiotic they got better faster, the next day,'" Shu said. Because mild viral infections often go away on their own in a few days, that timing could have just been a coincidence, but it leaves an impression on the caregiver nonetheless.

A parent in Japan told me about the other side of this conversation.

Kanno once brought his daughter into a clinic after she developed a bad cough after catching the flu. Their doctor prescribed antibiotics, and the cough resolved within days. Later, Kanno's son had similar symptoms, but the doctor didn't recommend an antibiotic in his case. When his son's coughing and wheezing persisted, "I asked him to prescribe that antibiotic, the same one that my daughter took," Kanno said.

The pediatrician said it likely wouldn't help but didn't explain why. The doctor said he would provide the antibiotic if the family wanted it. He ultimately prescribed it, and it didn't help. "He got my trust after that," Kanno said.

Szymczak's research has identified this "it-helped-last-time" bias as a common driver of patients' antibiotic requests that can be difficult for doctors to negotiate.

Parents' understanding of antibiotic resistance

In Japan, parents' awareness of antibiotic resistance has grown in recent years, Japanese doctors told me, but research suggests many still don't know much about it.

"I don't think parents generally understand that antibiotics don't work for colds, much less [understand] antibiotic resistance," said Dr. Yusuke Shibata of the Shibata Pediatric Clinic in Tokyo. "Explaining antibiotic resistance to parents is difficult," though he still tries to do so, he told me in an email after I visited his clinic.

Studies of U.S. parents suggest that many don't understand resistance or proper antibiotic use and that a misunderstanding of the purpose of antibiotics can drive requests for the drugs. In my interviews, I found that parents in both countries had some grasp of the concept of antibiotic resistance, but the depth of that understanding varied.

Tomomi Sato*, a New York City-based teacher and mother of two who lived in Japan as a child, said she'd heard that taking antibiotics too often could make it so your body didn't respond to them well in the future. She likened it to an urban legend about roaches that she heard from her mother and others from her hometown of Tokyo.

"You know how they talk about, in Japan, roaches are getting bigger and bigger?" she said. "They just build immunity … they don't respond to the old type of roach spray, so you have to get a new version."

Some parents are cautious about overusing medications in general but don't worry about antibiotic resistance, specifically.

"I want them to recover by trusting their own immunity, rather than relying on medication," said Risa, an HR representative and mother of two in Saku, Japan. But that said, "if it's something that's difficult to heal naturally, I think professional judgment and a prescription are necessary," she added.

Risa told me she thinks antibiotics may be medically appropriate when an illness is particularly severe or prolonged. She doesn't weigh whether the cause is likely viral or bacterial, even though antibiotics don't treat viral illnesses.

"I think that's probably the general mindset," said Fumie Kuchiba, a mother of one in Saitama, Japan, who previously worked as a registered pharmaceutical salesperson.

Other parents have a clear sense of the threat resistance poses.

"Resistance is a threat because if something is powerful enough to beat our current modern medicine, then it can wreak real havoc," said Malcolm, an editor and father of one in Atlanta. On the individual scale, he knows that resistance can emerge within an individual, potentially raising their personal risk of resistant infections. But on a global scale, he thinks of resistance as a threat as formidable as that posed by viral pandemics, such as COVID-19.

Difficult conversations

When parents seek an antibiotic that isn't medically needed, that can prompt difficult conversations with their children's doctors.

A Philadelphia-based doctor summed up the dynamic in an interview with researchers: "If patients feel like they need an antibiotic, it's very, very hard to talk them down from that. So, antibiotics are definitely overprescribed. And, you know, it's easier to say yes rather than taking time and, like, so much time to say no." This doctor and several other participants in that study felt they had "little autonomy to stand up to patient demand."

Some studies find that, when a pediatrician withholds antibiotics and a parent questions them, doctors can perceive that as negative pushback and give the drug against their initial judgment. But if a pediatrician denies antibiotics while also providing guidance for symptom relief, that conflict can be avoided and prescription becomes less likely.

Shapiro, the pediatrician in California, told me he handles such requests by walking parents through his diagnostic process and explaining the downsides of using unnecessary prescriptions. He also offers options for seeking further care — via phone, telehealth or an in-person visit — should the infection not improve as expected.

These conversations take time, and they can stir up conflict, which Shapiro said he's grown more comfortable navigating over his career. Early on, "you don't want conflict; you feel that conflict is bad, and you want everybody to be happy," he said. But ultimately, "the objective is for them to be healthy."

Multiple parents in Japan told me their doctors don't usually talk through their reasoning for checking for a given symptom or prescribing X drug over Y. "If we don't ask, he won't explain," Kanno said of their current pediatrician; but if prompted, their doctor provides good explanations, he said.

Similarly, Japanese parents told me their doctors don't often say whether or why they suspect an infection is viral or bacterial — a clarification that might help caregivers feel more comfortable forgoing an antibiotic.

Notably, Japan's antibiotic incentive program, which allows pediatricians to earn "tips" for withholding unnecessary antibiotics, provides the payment only if the doctors also explain responsible antibiotic use to children's caregivers. That requirement may be necessary to prompt that conversation.

Some doctors in Japan who claim the incentive provide verbal explanations about resistance or give parents a slip of paper that explains the basics and includes links to further information. Dr. Atsushi Miyahara of the Karugamo Clinic in Tokyo told me that, over time, his clients have become more knowledgeable about antibiotics, and insurance data related to the incentive also hints that this learning takes place. But it's unclear if these interactions can always move the needle.

Fielding parents' concerns

Shu, the Atlanta-based pediatrician, finds that some parents ask for antibiotics because they think the drugs will speed their child's recovery, without considering whether a bacterium is the culprit. Caregivers in both the U.S. and Japan also told me that they know parents who seek antibiotics as a quick remedy for illnesses.

Parents I spoke to who understood that antibiotics only treat bacterial infections added that it can be frustrating that there aren't many medicines available for viral ailments. Waiting for an infection to clear up can be stressful because you don't want your child to suffer, parents said, and the sickness also disrupts the family's normal routine of work, school or daycare.

"When your kid gets sick, things just kind of fall apart, and you need your life to get back to normal," said Katie, a journalist and mother of one in Jacksonville, Florida, who added that many parents may lack support that would help them take time off to care for their kids.

In both countries, pediatricians feel pressure to leave caregivers satisfied. While clinics in the U.S. aren't necessarily competing for patients in the same way Japanese clinics are, there is still a degree of customer service at play, Szymczak said. "That clinical encounter is very transactional, particularly in the United States," she said.

Doctors want to provide something of value — a diagnosis, medicine, reassurance — in exchange for the caregiver's time and money. Sometimes, pediatricians assume that what the caregiver wants is antibiotics, when really, they want a treatment plan to help their child, Szymczak said.

Could incentives motivate change?

While the U.S. has made progress in curbing antibiotic misuse, there's room for improvement. Could we close those gaps by using a similar approach to Japan's 800-yen incentive?

Similar dynamics are at play in both countries, with parents and pediatricians in both places dealing with similar issues. But while these pressures are similar in the clinic, a key difference sets America's situation apart: Our complex healthcare system, funded through a patchwork of insurers, can be difficult for patients and doctors to fully trust.

In the final installment, I'll talk with U.S. doctors to see what they think about Japan's approach and explain solutions that would suit our own fragmented healthcare system.

Editor's note: The names of some parents quoted in this story have been abbreviated or changed to protect their privacy. Altered names are marked with asterisks (*). This article was updated on Aug. 4, 2026, to note that the panel test used at Shu's practice takes about 20 minutes to run, not 45 minutes.

Science word of the day: Abiotic

Pronunciation: Ay-bye-AH'-tik

What it means: Abiotic means "without living organisms." Scientists typically use the term when referring to nonliving aspects of an ecosystem that affect organisms' growth or reproduction. Some abiotic factors might be light, water, fertilizer, nutrients or chemical elements, such as oxygen or sulfur. Others include the tides or rain. Sometimes, "abiotic" is used to describe the origin of a particular chemical. Abiotic methane, for example, comes from chemical reactions between rocks and water in Earth's crust, unlike biotic methane, which comes from decaying organic matter as well as microbes living in your gut.

How to use it in a sentence: A new "gold rush" of exploration is on for abiotic hydrogen, which forms when rocks react with water deep underground and could be a renewable, carbon-free fuel of the future.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

The patient: A 6-year-old boy in the Netherlands

The symptoms: The child was receiving a blood transfusion as a treatment for lymphoblastic leukemia, a type of blood cancer that originates in bone marrow, when he experienced a severe allergic reaction. His blood pressure dropped, and he developed a rash. Swelling appeared around his lips, tongue and eyelids, and he had difficulty breathing. This type of allergic response, known as anaphylaxis, can be life-threatening.

What happened next: Doctors treated the patient with the hormone epinephrine (also called adrenaline), which quickly reduces tissue swelling caused by anaphylaxis while also raising blood pressure and easing restricted breathing. The child recovered after about 30 minutes.

His doctors collected blood samples immediately after the reaction, and these contained unusually high levels of a type of protein called mast-cell tryptase, which is released by certain immune cells during anaphylaxis. However, the physicians were puzzled as to what had caused the extreme reaction, they wrote in a report of the case.

The diagnosis: The patient's mother told the doctors that her child had a similar allergic response to peanuts when he was about 1 year old, and since then, they'd omitted peanuts from his diet. The doctors then contacted the five blood donors who had provided the boy's most recent transfusion, and they learned that three of the five donors had eaten handfuls of peanuts the evening before they donated blood.

A protein in peanuts called Ara h2 is one of the main allergens that set off allergic reactions in people's immune systems. One of the building blocks of the allergen, called DRP-Ara h2, takes more than 24 hours to digest and remains capable of binding to receptors and triggering an allergic response throughout that time.

To see if this allergen could have played a role in the patient's reaction, the doctors performed another blood test that detects antibodies and is used for identifying allergic sensitivities. The test confirmed that the patient was allergic to peanuts and that antibodies against Ara h2 and DRP-Ara h2m were present in his blood post-infusion. These antibodies would have been produced in response to Ara h2 entering the bloodstream.

"These data are consistent with the hypothesis that the consumption of peanuts by the donors before blood donation provided the trigger for this patient's transfusion reaction," the doctors reported.

The treatment: The patient didn't require any further treatment after the epinephrine that was administered immediately to reverse anaphylaxis.

What makes the case unique: Allergic reactions during blood transfusions are rare, although estimates of their exact frequency vary. Some estimates suggest that they occur in about 0.001% to 0.006% of transfusions, while others find they occur in 0.1% of transfusions.

The triggers that set off these allergic responses are seldom identified. Prior to this case, other researchers suggested that blood transfusions could passively transfer food allergens from the donor to the recipient. Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests that this may be more common than expected.

The child's response highlights the importance of identifying food allergies in people receiving blood transfusions, the child's doctors concluded, as well as the necessity of reviewing blood donors' recent diet histories to screen for potential allergens that could affect sensitive recipients.

"It is possible that allergens transferred in blood products to other patients have led to reactions that have gone unexplained and unreported," the doctors wrote in the case report.

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!

Science word of the day: Abiogenesis

Pronunciation: Ay-bye-oh-JEN'-ih-sis

What it means: Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving matter through chemical processes. Scientists still don't know exactly how abiogenesis happened on Earth. Theories range from lightning strikes that could have scrambled water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen into amino acids and sugars ‪—‬ the building blocks of life ‪—‬ to chemical reactions at deep-sea vents. Abiogenesis is not the same as spontaneous generation, which held that living organisms such as maggots formed directly from decaying matter. It was a compelling idea for anyone who had watched meat rot, but Louis Pasteur, inventor of pasteurization, disproved it in the 1860s by showing that microbes could only grow from preexisting microbes.

How to use it in a sentence: All life on Earth may owe itself to an incident of abiogenesis more than 3.7 billion years ago.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

One of the central assumptions of modern neuroscience research is that the brain's shape and structure affect behavior. Scientists have linked a thicker cortex (the brain's outer layer) to higher intelligence, certain brain wave patterns to better volleyball ability, and higher connectivity between parts of the brain to chess-playing skills. There's a vast number of these so-called brain-wide association studies (BWAS).

But when experts repeat these studies, they can't replicate the results.

This "replication crisis" suggests that a substantial amount of brain-behavior imaging research rests on a shaky foundation. There are myriad problems affecting this area of research, said Randy Ellis, a senior scientist at Oracle who wrote about these issues while working as a biomedical informatician at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Some of these issues aren't unique to neuroscience. They begin with what Ellis called the "original sin" of science: Academics are put under huge pressure to publish positive research findings.

But some of these factors do apply specifically to this field.

The problems are big enough that they are "halting the growth and development of science and the curing of diseases," Ellis told Live Science.

Tiny differences, small samples

Several brain studies that could not be reproduced in follow-up work show how problems can creep in. Each of the original papers has over 500 citations, with the number of citations reflecting how much these studies may influence thinking in the field.

For example, a landmark study in 2007 found that the brains of kids with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder took longer to mature. But a study published earlier this year found that this link vanished once the different rates of aging between boys and girls were taken into account. "That's what made the whole house of cards topple," Matthew Albaugh, co-author of the replication paper and a clinical neuroscientist at the University of Vermont, previously told Live Science.

In 2011, researchers at University College London published a study that found that the density of gray matter, the part of the brain where brain cell bodies are found, in several brain areas was linked to participants' number of Facebook friends. (In 2011, this was a vital social metric.)

A 2015 paper failed to replicate this finding, but the authors of the original paper argued that was because the follow-up study didn't follow the same protocol.

"It's hard to do exactly what was done in the original studies," said Sarah Genon, a neuroscientist at the Research Center Jülich in Germany who was not involved in either the Facebook study or its replication.

So, in 2019, Genon and her colleagues tried a different type of replication analysis.

They used a vast database and conducted more than 10,000 analyses of MRI scans from hundreds of volunteers. The median neuroimaging study sample size was around 25, so they divided this larger dataset into smaller ones and then looked for significant associations within each.

If one of these micro-studies reported a significant association between a behavior and a brain structure, the team tried to reach the same findings using a different subset of the data. Very few of the repeat studies replicated the results of the first. "It was clear evidence that the replicability of those brain-behavior associations is relatively weak," Genon said.

One of the key problems is that in healthy volunteers, variation among individual brains is relatively small, which means you need a large number of participants to detect average differences that tie to behavior, Genon said. That's similar to genome-wide association studies, which pick up the very tiny effects of individual genes, and they must sample tens or hundreds of thousands of people to find robust effects. To detect meaningful differences in brain-wide imaging studies, only sample sizes in the thousands would do the trick, a 2022 paper suggested. Because brain scans are expensive and time-consuming to capture, most studies have relied on much smaller samples.

Additionally, the behavioral tests used to establish psychological variables can be inconsistent, Genon said. What's more, some of these studies may be operating on the outdated assumption that small brain regions control complex characteristics like intelligence, she added. In reality, however, "those types of abilities are usually relatively distributed across the brain," she said. When researchers analyze multiple small brain areas with that assumption in mind using separate statistical tests, it can raise the risk of producing mirage associations.

Some of these studies may be flawed at the outset. A 2017 brain imaging study by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College explored whether MRI data could be used to stratify patients with depression. The researchers found that brain activity clustered into four "biotypes" of depression, each of which featured distinct, unusual activity patterns in key brain networks.

But a follow-up study found that the differences among the clusters weren't statistically significant, meaning they could have occurred by chance. Richard Dinga, a neuroscientist at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany who worked on the follow-up study, said the main problems lay in its design.

Its statistical approach, he said, essentially guaranteed that significant links would be detected. That's because of a problem called overfitting, in which a model is so well tuned to one set of data that it struggles to find real patterns in other datasets. This design correlated 17 clinical features of depression with 30,000 brain imaging features, but Dinga said the authors could have used "30,000 coin flips" and still produced the same strong correlation.

Conor Liston, a psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-author of the original paper, acknowledged the model's susceptibility to overfitting. "That was not at all our intention, but that was the result," Liston told Live Science

Still, he argued that the biotype finding they identified was real, pointing to later studies his team had published to back up their original finding. When asked why his team hadn't updated the original paper to acknowledge that their analysis method had serious flaws, Liston said their subsequent publications were sufficient to correct the record. "I think the message is out there, and I think the solutions to those overfitting issues are very clear," he said.

Solving the problem

The results of many studies that share the same issues as these papers will never be replicated and yet will be left to stand. For one thing, there's no money in replication efforts. "Grant agencies wouldn't be really excited" to fund a study whose goal was to confirm past work, Genon said. And even when these studies get done, they aren't as likely to get published when they undermine prior findings.

For Dinga, the way forward is to collect more data. "That's what solved the same irreproducibility problem in genetics," he said, referring to genome-wide association studies that have produced important findings over the past two decades by using sample sizes that have reached the millions. But it's also important to improve study design, he added, since bigger datasets won't fix studies with incorrect analysis approaches. "The methods just don't have a chance to produce something useful," he said.

Some researchers are leveraging large brain imaging datasets. Martin Hebart, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, and Luca Kämmer, a doctoral student in Hebart's lab, are developing re:vision, a project that is collecting imaging data ‪—‬ the largest initiative yet to capture how the brain responds to visual stimuli. They plan to make this information available to other researchers, who will then explore whether hypotheses tested in other papers can be replicated in re:vision's dataset.

Hebart and Kämmer said they have already received over a dozen applications for their project. Reception has been particularly positive among younger researchers in the field. But convincing senior scientists to retest their data might take more work because they have more to lose if their long-standing finding is ultimately not replicated, Kämmer said.

"Everybody always says that replication is great," he told Live Science. "But then when I suggest that their specific studies could be replicated, often they are a bit more skeptical."

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

Science word of the day: Cryptology

Pronunciation: Krip-TAH'-leh-jee

What it means: Cryptology is the study of secret codes ‪—‬ both making them (cryptography) and breaking them (cryptanalysis). Once associated with spy networks' secret codes and ciphers, cryptology now often refers to the computer algorithms used to encrypt data to protect passwords and personal information from prying eyes.

How to use it in a sentence: Native American soldiers known as "code talkers" harnessed cryptology in World War II by developing codes and ciphers based on their Indigenous languages.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

This eye-catching astronaut photo shows a cloud of sediment swirling into a giant, milky-green vortex in one of Europe's largest lakes.

Lake Skadar (also known as Shkodër, Shkodra or Scutari) is the largest lake in Southern Europe, with a surface area between 140 and 200 square miles (360 to 520 square kilometers), depending on the time of year. It is situated on the border between Montenegro, which surrounds the western half of the lake (left in the photo), and Albania, which encircles the lake's eastern shore. The body of water is split 65% to 35% in Montenegro's favor.

The lake's main water source is the Morača River, to the northwest, and its biggest outlets are the Bojana and Drin rivers, which start at the lake's easternmost point and eventually drain into the Adriatic Sea, which is partially visible in the bottom left of the photo. Skadar's southern shore is also hugged by a lofty mountain range, known as the Dinaric Alps.

During late winter and early spring, the lake's water level rises, and it usually fills with a milky-green substance that often gets whipped into a vortex by a combination of wind-driven surface currents and the natural flow of water between the lake's major inlets and outlets.

The swirling material looks very similar to blooming algae, but it is actually made of sediments — predominantly limestone and dolomite — that wash into the lake from the Dinaric Alps and other nearby mountains as the snow melts.

Skadar is a karst lake, meaning it was once a cave system that flooded and eventually collapsed, likely because the caves were made from the same easily erodible rocks that now swirl on the lake's surface, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. The lake is a "cryptodepression" because most of the lake's floor is below sea level.

The lake originally formed during the Cenozoic Era (66 million years ago to the present), according to the International Lake Environment Committee Foundation's World Lake Database. It is home to several small islands, some of which can be seen in the photo along the lake's southern shore. These include Beška, which is home to a pair of 600-year-old churches, and Grmožur, where the remains of a 19th-century fortification loom above the lake's surface.

The shipwreck of a paddle steamboat, named Skanderbeg, lies along the lake's western shore. Local partisans sank the vessel in 1942 after Italian soldiers commandeered it during the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia in World War II. When the lake's water levels are at their lowest, part of the shipwreck rises above the surface.

Skadar Lake is a biodiversity hotspot and has protected wildlife status on both sides of the Montenegro-Albania border. It is a particularly important site for birds; more than 280 avian species call it home, including the Dalmatian pelican (Pelecanus crispus) and several endemic species, according to BirdLife International.

The lake also hosts around 50 freshwater snail species ‪—‬ more than any other lake on Earth, according to a 2013 study.

This wooden mask, which is decorated with human hair and a textile headband, adorned an Andean mummy up to a millennium ago. Made by an artist of the Chancay people, the mask was also painted red with the mercury-containing pigment cinnabar.

The Chancay were a pre-Inca people who lived along the central coast of Peru in the Late Intermediate Period (1000 to 1450). A common tradition among the Chancay was the funerary bundle — the end result of wrapping their dead in layers of textiles, vegetal material and animal skin. The bundle was then buried in a pit along with grave goods such as tools, food and figurines. Because the bodies were usually wrapped in a fetal position, however, it was not always clear exactly where the head was located once the bundle was complete.

According to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which has this mask in its collection, "false heads" made from textiles or wood were sometimes tied onto the Chancay funerary bundles to act as a focal point for venerating the ancestor.

The mask is roughly life-size, measuring 12 by 8 inches (30.5 by 20.3 centimeters). Chancay funeral masks were not meant to be realistic. Instead, they had simplified features, such as the diamond-shaped eyes; triangular nose; and tiny, U-shaped smile on this mask. The wig was almost certainly made from human hair, according to a microscopic analysis The Walters Art Museum undertook in 2017.

The Chancay artist who made the mask painted it red using cinnabar, a toxic substance that is the brick-red form of mercury sulfide. Cinnabar was frequently used in Andean funerary rituals, and the color was associated with purification and commemoration rituals. But the mask was likely not placed on the outside of the bundle burial, as a patterned impression has been left on the cinnabar of this mask, probably from being wrapped in even more textiles, according to The Walters Art Museum.

Although the Chancay culture is not as well known as the Inca, recent research into the ceramics the Chancay left behind and the tattoos on their mummified ancestors has revealed that they were a complex society with a high degree of artistic talent.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Science word of the day: Heliosphere

Pronunciation: HEE'-lee-uhs-feer

What it means: The heliosphere is the region around the sun that's affected by the solar wind, a flow of charged particles emanating from the sun. Think of the heliosphere like a giant bubble encompassing the sun and planets, reaching out into space at three times the distance of Pluto. This bubble protects the solar system from radiation emanating from outer space, but the solar wind can also erode planetary atmospheres. Luckily, Earth is protected by its own bubble, the magnetosphere, which helps deflect the solar wind.

How to use it in a sentence: Because the entire solar system is traveling through space, scientists have long pictured the heliosphere as comet-shaped, but recent research suggests the bubble of solar wind looks more like a sad, deflated croissant.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Around 100 years ago, Albert Einstein made an audacious prediction about space. The frequently right (but occasionally wrong) physicist theorized that, just as the curved lens of a magnifying glass bends light to increase an object's apparent size, massive celestial objects can curve the very fabric of the universe with their gravity — causing distant sources of light to bend, warp, and appear magnified as their rays pass through the region on their way to Earth.

Today, this phenomenon — called gravitational lensing — has been confirmed through dozens of telescope observations, and is a crucial tool that observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) use to probe the light of the oldest, faintest galaxies in the universe. And in this newly released JWST image of a tumultuous young galaxy cluster, Einstein’s gravitational funhouse effect is on full display.

In the foreground, two bright white points of light ringed with white halos signify the gravitational center of MACS J0553.4-3342, a gargantuan collection of bound galaxies located in the constellation Columba (the dove). These two white beacons are massive elliptical galaxies, each wreathed in their own sub-cluster of smaller galaxies, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA). And the two clusters are not getting along.

Studying the galaxies’ light as it appeared roughly 4.4 billion years ago, astronomers can tell the clusters are in the messy process of merging together. The two principal elliptical galaxies have already slammed through each other once, and now sit at a distance of around 1 million light-years apart (that’s about 10 Milky Ways lined up in a row). Eventually, that gap will close as the massive galaxies swoop back toward each other, finally combining into one.

But the real jewels in this galactic trove are hidden in the contorted, orange arcs of light that bookend the cluster on either side. Here, the magnifying effect of gravitational lensing is acting in full force — allowing JWST to detect the light of several faint galaxies from less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

Three bright dots in the arc on the left are actually three repeated images of a single galaxy, according to ESA. The trippy effect appears several times throughout the image, with each elongated orange streak cracking open a warped window onto an ancient corner of the universe that would otherwise be impossible to see.

Through observations like these, scientists using JWST have discovered that the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe have grown larger and faster than our leading theories of cosmology predict should be possible. Using one cosmic oddity to uncover another, this gravitational lens could keep astronomers busy for decades to come.

See more space photos of the week:

Nowadays, the word "weapon" may evoke modern-day technologies such as firearms, blades and missiles. Yet archaeological evidence shows that weapons have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. Of course, early humans wielded weapons that looked quite different from those used today.

So what is the oldest weapon?

Generally, weapons are defined as objects used to impart violence on other living beings, said Ben Fitzhugh, a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. That includes objects used in interpersonal conflict among hominins (a group that includes modern Homo sapiens and our relatives that evolved following the split from chimps and bonobos) and for hunting, Fitzhugh told Live Science.

But archaeologists don't automatically consider just any object that could cause harm to be a weapon; context and intent matter, Rolf Warming, founding director of the Society for Combat Archaeology and a doctoral candidate in archaeology at Stockholm University, told Live Science in an email. For instance, experts excavating a site with potential weapons might look for evidence of hunting, such as butchered animal bones; or artifacts like pointed bone tools that can be used to craft weapons. They may also consider what objects were made out of and residue or wear marks on the weapons themselves, which can help determine how they were used.

According to Warming, archaeologists generally consider three finds as contenders for the oldest evidence of weaponry in the archaeological record: the Clacton spear, the Schöningen spears and throwing sticks, and the Kathu Pan 1 spear points.

Clacton spear

Scientists have estimated that the Clacton spear is over 400,000 years old. Experts think the uncovered 15-inch-long (37 centimeters) spear point was broken off from a longer shaft, perhaps by accident while the user was hunting, or deliberately as a ritual. It's made from yew wood and was worked with a tool to a sharp point on one end. The broken end was never found.

Excavated in 1911 from Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, England, the Clacton spear is now on display in London's Natural History Museum, where it is labeled as the oldest preserved wooden spear fragment in the world.

Archaeologists believe it was fashioned by either Homo heidelbergensis or Neanderthals — two hominins that predate H. sapiens. In fact, the spear appears to be older than our species, as the oldest known H. sapiens fossils date to around 300,000 years ago. The Clacton spear's shape, size and wood suggest that it was a thrusting weapon and that its makers engaged in cooperative hunting strategies.

Schöningen spears and throwing sticks

Since 1992, archaeologists have excavated between 20 and 25 wooden weapons at a site in Schöningen, Germany, including complete and fragmented spears, and throwing sticks made predominantly from spruce and pine wood.

They're considered the oldest completely preserved wooden weapons in the world, according to the Schöningen Research Museum; today, archaeologists' varying estimates place the weapons' age between 200,000 and 300,000 years old. Their creation has historically been attributed to H. heidelbergensis, an early human species that lived about 700,000 to 200,000 years ago throughout Europe, parts of Africa, and possibly in what is now China. More recent dating suggests the spears could potentially be the work of Neanderthals, according to a 2025 study.

Scientists think these spears, which average just over 6.6 feet (2 meters) long, were used as thrusting weapons, throwing weapons or some combination of both to hunt larger game mammals, like horses, according to a 2024 study. The shorter throwing sticks are believed to be projectile weapons and average around 26 inches (65 centimeters) long.

"In fact, the [Schöningen weapons] were found in association with butchered horses," Fitzhugh noted. The spears were sharpened, hardened and blackened using fire. "These things were shaped in a dynamically sophisticated way," he said.

According to Warming, the Schöningen weapons suggest hominins had clear material knowledge and used different hunting tactics depending how far they were from their target.

Kathu Pan 1 spear points

Hafted spear tips — stone points attached to some form of handle or shaft — became more common in the archaeological record between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago across Africa and Eurasia, and were previously thought to be created by Neanderthals or H. sapiens.

However, 500,000-year-old stone points excavated from the Kathu Pan archaeological site in South Africa have signs of wear on the edges, and the shape of their base is consistent with hafted spears, suggesting they were used as weapons. Their age predates both Neanderthals and H. sapiens, and the location they were found in suggests they could have been created by H. heidelbergensis, who lived in regions of southern Africa at that time. Archeologists think they could have been used as spear ambush weapons.

But some researchers have contested this evidence, arguing that it's "indirect" or even controversial, as no wooden shafts were uncovered with the spear points to solidify them as weapons as opposed to stone tools.

Something older?

These are some of the earliest examples of weapons in the archaeological record, but there may be older weapons that have not survived throughout time.

While hominins likely used organic materials like wood, sinew, fiber and adhesives to create objects and weapons, these materials break down or are destroyed over time, Warming noted.

Studying these ancient weapons gives us perspective about the present. After all, weapons are more than tools of harm: Warming said they are material clues that give us glimpses into how our early relatives combined materials, used their imaginations, shared knowledge and cooperated in groups.

Yet among these three important finds, Warming said that when inquiring about the oldest known weapon in the world, that "Clacton is the safest answer."

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

Science word of the day: Autotroph

Pronunciation: AW'-tuh-trohf

What it means: Autotrophs are organisms that can feed themselves with inorganic substances such as light (for plants) or methane (certain microbes). Autotrophs were the first single-celled life-forms to colonize the planet, thriving on chemicals bubbling up from the subsurface at deep-sea vents or figuring out how to harness the sun for energy. Heterotrophs (like you, me and all fungi), arrived on the scene later to feast on these DIY-ers.

How to use it in a sentence: Stromatolites, microbial mats built by cyanobacteria, are autotrophs that thrived in ancient shallow seas.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Much of the discourse around artificial intelligence (AI) focuses on grand ideas such as the rise of a hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence. Speculation swirls around the likelihood that the technology will thin out the job market, or even precipitate the death or evolution of human creativity. We haven't focused as much on the multitude of subtle yet hugely consequential ways in which AI is reshaping the social fabric of our society, and how we collectively imagine the future.

That's the argument sociologist and AI researcher Mona Sloane, an assistant professor of data science and media studies at the University of Virginia, puts at the center of her new book, "Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life" (University of California Press, 2026). Whether we consider email filtering, prediction markets or social media platforms, AI systems are embedded in the heart of how we interact with the digital world. Indeed, AI is so ubiquitously integrated into everyday interfaces that it's given rise to a new kind of "prediction logic" that makes assumptions about who we are and how we are likely to behave.

In this excerpt, Sloane compares the AI technology we use today with the oracles of ancient Greece, framing it as an omnipotent presence that has moved to organize society through the prism of prediction models. This in turn affects how we learn, live, love and even picture the future.

We live in a world of oracles. These oracles constantly feed us predictions that shape our social lives — how we socialize, love, work, gain access to resources. Like in ancient Greece, predictions occupy a prominent role in our society. We consider our oracles so mighty that their predictive power rules over the fate of whole economies and even geopolitical constellations. Where the oracle is, there is the center of the world.

But unlike in ancient Greece, our oracles aren't high priestesses delivering divine prophecies. They are artificial intelligence (AI) systems melted into the infrastructure of everyday life. Today, it is nearly impossible to evade the grasp of AI predictions. I voluntarily and involuntarily use AI on a constant basis: by using email providers that build on the predictive properties of AI for spam filters, by conducting online banking and getting enrolled into AI-automated fraud detection, or by using generative AI for supporting administrative chores. It has become part of how I experience the world.

It can be a relief when it helps me do things I dread or am bad at, such as produce a spreadsheet template I desperately need, help streamline language produced by different authors for a report, or generate a specific image for a presentation. Often, I must intently handhold the AI, checking and fixing its outputs. And sometimes, with deep frustration, I give up and start all over to complete my task manually.

The omnipresence of AI prediction can make it easy to think of these systems as inevitable, quasi-natural phenomena we are subject to, rather than a part of. But they are quantitative concepts that arise from social agreements about how we ought to capture and interpret the world around us.

"Quantitative concepts are not given by nature: they arise from our practice of applying numbers to natural phenomena," wrote Rudolf Carnap, a logician and professor of philosophy of science, in 1966. His point was that numbers can be useful, because they allow for information to travel more easily across contexts, as a sort of language. They also make mathematical predictions possible.

To him, this was first and foremost useful for engineering modern life: A quantitative language allows for the articulation of quantitative laws that, in turn, facilitate the routine generation of mathematicized predictions, particularly in the realm of physics. Being able to predict how energy, compounds, and materials will behave in certain configurations is the reason humans were able to build the conveniences of airplanes, cars, and telephones. For Carnap, predictions were simply instrumental in this way.

Today, almost 60 years later, this pragmatic approach to mathematical prediction has been turned on its head by AI. Prediction is no longer just a handy tool in physics or engineering. The promises of AI's oracular power have turned prediction into a logic for structuring social life. This is a dangerous proposition. It implies that AI is always necessary or even inevitable and diverts attention from the social forces shaping ideas around this technology in the first place.

AI systems are not natural phenomena that happen to us. They are collective expressions of society. As such, they are not just a hype or a deception concocted and executed by global tech elites. They indicate a wider shift in how we imagine and enact society. Many critical discussions of AI characterize this phenomenon chiefly as heightened surveillance and capitalist extraction. But this is a myopic diagnosis. AI's most powerful effect is the subtle yet comprehensive recalibration toward prediction as a guiding principle for organizing society. In this book, I call this phenomenon the prediction paradigm.

AI is something that we do as part of going about our lives and participating in society — it is social infrastructure, affecting how we relate to one another and how we act in public and in private. Like all infrastructures, AI allows resources and ideas to flow in certain directions, but not others. AI uses data from our collective past to predict our individual future. And because AI deals in futures, it solidifies a linear time regime that hardens our social commitment to causality: The past always predicts the future. The problem of AI is not the rise of intelligent machines, but the extraordinary social significance ascribed to this linearity, fetishizing the future and leaving little room for deliberations about what (other) futures may be possible or we may want.

Reprinted from Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social LIfe by Mona Sloane, courtesy of the University of California Press. Copyright 2026.

Animals come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, from spindly stick insects to blubbery whales. Round animals are harder to come by, but they're more common in the ocean than on land. So what is the roundest animal, and why are round animals uncommon?

At a glance, round animals might not seem that out of place on land. After all, small mammals like rabbits and pikas often look a bit spherical when their fur is puffed out and they're sitting. But Chris Law, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said this shape is mostly an illusion.

"They're physically not as round as they appear to be," he told Live Science.

A sphere has the lowest surface-area-to-volume ratio of any shape, which is ideal for heat conservation. Law said the ability to curl or scrunch into a sphere can be essential to the survival of small animals, which lose heat more quickly than larger animals do.

Rolling into a circle can also offer protection. To safeguard their vital organs, animals like armadillos and hedgehogs roll into balls when threatened, leaving only their armor or spikes exposed to predators. But when you look at the skeletons of these supposedly round critters and their shape when they're not scrunched up, they aren't round at all, Law said.

In fact, there are several reasons why round creatures are rarely found on land. Being perfectly round all the time would make it difficult to fit into small spaces, which is a key survival technique for avoiding predators, he added, and with the effects of gravity, having a lot of unsupported round mass puts strain on an animal's body. Overly round mammals, like obese cats and dogs, often suffer joint issues and other health problems.

"As a round animal, you're probably going to lose mobility, and you're going to be picked off by predators pretty easily," Law told Live Science.

There are exceptions, however. For example, beetles are small enough not to be affected as much by gravity and can fit into nooks and crannies without much wiggling. Their round shape coupled with their hard carapace makes them more difficult for predators to eat. And rain frogs puff up into a round shape to keep predators from removing them from their hiding spots.

If we're counting animals that are only round sometimes, then pill bugs (also known as rolly pollies) might take first place for the roundest land animal. But if not, rain frogs, and beetles like ladybugs, are the top contenders for the roundest land animal. But even these animals aren't perfectly round; ladybugs have flat bottoms to make it easier to move around, and rain frogs are less spherical when not puffed up.

Round sea animals

Being round at sea is a little more feasible than it is on land. In fact, sometimes, it's critical to survival.

Karly E. Cohen, a biomechanist at Friday Harbor Labs in Washington, studies lumpsuckers, a type of fish she describes as "quite round." These bulbous fish have suction cups made of enamel on their stomachs, which they use to latch on to surfaces at the bottom of the ocean. Lumpsuckers have armor, also made of enamel, covering their round shape. According to Cohen, lumpsuckers' roundness plays a huge part in keeping them attached to the seafloor or other surface. The curve of their bodies, coupled with the tooth armor, modifies the drag around the animal, creating a force that pushes them down rather than shooting them into the water column.

Although gravity still works underwater, buoyancy helps push objects up, meaning the effects of gravity do not feel as strong at sea as they do on land. According to Cohen, lumpsuckers can get around just fine, if a bit more slowly than their more streamlined neighbors. And like pufferfish and porcupine fish, lumpsuckers' round shape and uninviting exterior make them tough to swallow ‪—‬ literally.

"There's no real good way to eat an apple whole; you have to take a bite," Cohen told Live Science. "And then this thing is armored, so it's very hard to take a bite."

All about symmetry

Despite their spherical shape, lumpsuckers don't quite win the award for the roundest animal. Lumpsuckers, like most animals, have bilateral symmetry, which means they are divided into two symmetrical sides across one plane of symmetry. But there are animals that have radial symmetry, which means they are symmetrically arranged in a circle around a central point with multiple planes of symmetry.

Echinoderms ‪—‬ which include sea stars, sea urchins and sand dollars ‪—‬ have pentaradial symmetry, which means they have five planes of symmetry arranged around a central point. According to Laurent Formery, a developmental biologist at the Oceanological Observatory of Banyuls-sur-Mer in France who studies echinoderms, scientists aren't entirely sure of the benefits of pentaradial symmetry or why echinoderms are the only modern animals that have it.

However, Formery thinks being divided into five sections instead of two may give echinoderms better sensory perception than bilaterally symmetrical animals. Echinoderms have decentralized nervous systems, meaning that instead of a brain, they have a series of neurons distributed evenly across their body, and photoreceptors all over their skin.

"They are kind of like a big crawling eye and brain, so they are receiving information from everywhere," he told Live Science. "They have a completely different way, that is difficult for us to imagine, of interacting with their environment."

Because of this unique organization, radially symmetrical animals can sense predators from any direction. They can also easily switch which segment of their body is in the lead, making it easier for them to change directions to capture prey.

Discounting their spikes, certain species of sea urchin are almost perfectly spherical. Like lumpsuckers, sea urchins' spherical shape, coupled with their spines, makes them difficult meals for predators, Formery said. Sponges lack any symmetry, so they can develop all sorts of body shapes. One species, called the death ball sponge, looks like a Sputnik lamp, with many hook-covered spheres attached to its spindly "arms."'

Under the sea, urchins in the genus Histocidaris, like Histocidaris purpurata and Histocidaris formosa, are the closest to perfect spheres, making them the top candidate for roundest animal.

Although roundness might be uncommon in the animal kingdom, Cohen said it's fascinating to study these animals and the reasons for their adaptations.

"As somebody that's interested in the tools and ways organisms work in their environments," she said, "they're a real treasure trove of evolution."

What do you know about the animal kingdom? Test your knowledge with our animal quiz!

Science word of the day: Neuroplasticity

Pronunciation: Nur-roh-pla-STISS'-ih-tee

What it means: Neuroplasticity is the ability of the nervous system to adapt to the environment or to injuries by forming new connections and modifying and strengthening existing connections. Neuroplasticity can happen after an injury, such as a stroke or trauma to the brain, but it also occurs during ordinary learning. Just by reading this definition, you may be making new, sustainable brain connections.

How to use it in a sentence: Scientists used to think neuroplasticity was an ability only the the young had, but researchers are increasingly learning that aging brains can adapt throughout the lifespan, much to everyone's relief.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Heaven Lake is a crater lake at the top of Mount Changbaishan (also called Changbai Mountain) — a colossal, dormant volcano on the border between China and North Korea that formed through successive eruptions over the past 2.6 million years.

Known in China as Tianchi, the lake is the highest and largest crater lake in Northeast Asia, according to UNESCO. It is also the deepest lake in China, according to a study published in March. The lake sits at an elevation of around 7,200 feet (2,200 meters), covers roughly 3.6 square miles (9.2 square kilometers), and has a maximum depth of 1,224 feet (373 m), according to the study.

Heaven Lake is surrounded by 16 peaks that belong to Mount Changbaishan. The lake fills a caldera created by past eruptions, the biggest of which was the "millennium eruption" that took place in A.D. 946 and remains one of the largest eruptions in modern history.

Water started to pool on Mount Changbaishan's summit after the prehistoric Tianwenfeng eruption, which scientists dated to between 70,000 and 40,000 years ago. Heaven Lake has periodically emptied and refilled since then due to precipitation, snowmelt, and an active geothermal system beneath the volcano that forces water up through fault lines.

Although hundreds of reports in the early 2000s claimed there was a creature with a head shaped like that of a horse living in the water, scientists have repeatedly said they are skeptical that any large creature could survive in Heaven Lake.

Mount Changbaishan is one of the best-preserved stratovolcanoes from the past several million years, according to UNESCO. Stratovolcanoes, also known as composite volcanoes, are volcanic mountains built from alternating layers of solidified lava, volcanic ash and rocky debris. Mount Changbaishan is an "open-air classroom for volcanism" because it recorded the different stages of multiple eruptions in astounding detail.

In North Korea, Mount Changbaishan is known as Mount Paektu or Paeku Mountain, meaning "white-topped mountain." The volcano's Chinese name means "forever white mountain."

China, North Korea and South Korea have clashed over the volcano in the past, as the mountain holds cultural and geopolitical significance for the three countries. Two border treaties between China and North Korea in 1962 and 1964 divided the volcano and Heaven Lake roughly down the middle, with North Korea securing 54.5% of the lake.

In the 2000s, China moved to develop the region around the volcano, opening the Mount Changbai Airport and the Mount Changbai Eastern Railroad to connect the region with the rest of the country.

A geological park surrounding the Chinese site of the volcano was officially designated a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2024.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

The patient: A 14-year-old boy in the United Kingdom

The symptoms: The teen was brought to his family's general practitioner because he felt unusually tired. His doctor asked about the boy's eating habits and described him as a "fussy eater" in notes from the appointment. The doctor also indicated that the teen had no symptoms other than tiredness, according to a report of the case.

Tests revealed that the teen had mild anemia and low levels of vitamin B12, which comes from a person's diet because the body does not produce it. The body needs vitamin B12 for maintaining the health of red blood cells and the nervous system. The teen's doctor provided dietary advice and prescribed supplementary B12 injections.

What happened next: Later, at age 15, the teen began developing problems with his sight. An eye exam detected no abnormalities, and the ophthalmologist was unable to determine the cause of the vision loss, which worsened over time. When the patient was 17 years old, his general practitioner referred him to a neuro-ophthalmologist for further testing. (Neuro-ophthalmologists can assess vision problems related to the nervous system.)

Additional vision tests showed that the patient's visual acuity — a measurement of a person's ability to accurately see details from certain distances — was 20/200 in both eyes. In other words, objects that would be visible to a person with normal (20/20) vision at a distance of 200 feet were not clearly visible to him beyond a distance of 20 feet. Vision of 20/200 or lower falls within the parameters of legal blindness, according to the American Foundation for the Blind.

When asked, the patient denied using drugs, alcohol or tobacco, and his eyes showed no signs of disease, nor were they scarred or injured. The results of a neurological exam were normal.

However, blood tests showed that his red blood cells were enlarged, which can suggest vitamin deficiencies. His blood levels of copper and vitamin D were lower than normal. Furthermore, elevated concentrations of the amino acid homocysteine and methylmalonic acid — compounds that B12 helps to break down — further hinted that he was deficient in the vitamin, as at earlier examinations.

The diagnosis: The patient admitted that he was no longer taking the recommended B12 injections. (The case report did not indicate exactly when he had stopped.) His body mass index (BMI) was normal, and he was of average weight for his height. But because his B12 levels were low, the doctors questioned him about his diet.

He replied that he could not tolerate certain food textures; as a result, since elementary school, he had avoided most foods. For years, his daily diet consisted of fast-food french fries, white bread, potato chips, sausages and processed ham.

This diet lacked vital nutrients, leading to a condition called nutritional optic neuropathy, a rare type of vision loss that is often caused by severe deficits in B12 and other B vitamins. It causes atrophy of the optic nerve, which relays information from the eye to the parts of the brain that process vision. Copper deficiencies have also been linked to this type of optic neuropathy and to enlarged red blood cells, according to the report's authors.

The treatment: The doctors prescribed the teen supplements to correct his nutritional deficiencies and referred him to mental health services to treat his food aversions, which the doctors identified as a type of eating disorder.

Following treatment, the patient's vision did not deteriorate further. However, there was no improvement in his sight. Nutritional optic neuropathy may be reversed when caught early, but if the optic nerve becomes atrophied, the vision loss is permanent, the physicians explained in the report.

What makes the case unique: Nutritional optic neuropathy is rarely caused by dietary deficiencies alone. Historically, cases in the medical literature have generally been associated with malnutrition caused by war and famine. More recent cases have usually involved both nutritional deficits and smoking or abuse of alcohol or drugs.

In some instances, this type of neuropathy results from inflammatory bowel disease or bariatric surgery, which limit the body's absorption of certain nutrients. It can also stem from restrictive diets that are not adequately supplemented with missing vitamins and minerals.

The teen's case is also unusual because his normal BMI masked the vitamin deficiencies that caused his blindness. In other words, doctors may have overlooked his dietary deficits because his weight was within a normal range.

Moving forward, "nutritional optic neuropathy should be considered in any patient with unexplained vision symptoms and poor diet, regardless of BMI," the authors wrote in the report.

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!

This stunning astronaut photo shows the last time one of NASA's iconic space shuttles photobombed astronauts' view of Earth as the spacecraft docked with the ISS.

NASA's Space Shuttle Program included five plane-like spacecraft — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — which collectively completed 135 missions between 1981 and 2011, racking up more than 32,000 hours in space. During that time, they helped to construct the ISS and, later, ferry astronauts to and from the station. The space shuttles also helped to deploy and maintain several other important spacecraft, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

The last space shuttle to fly was Atlantis, which successfully completed 33 missions (the second-highest total, behind Discovery).

This photo shows Atlantis approaching the ISS for the last time as it passed over the distinctive turquoise waters of the Bahamas. The space shuttle's bay doors are open, exposing its cargo area. This was standard procedure for all space shuttles once they reached low Earth orbit because it prevented the spacecraft's radiators from overheating.

The open doors also enabled the shuttle's docking mechanism, located within its cargo bay, to attach to the ISS, thus creating a pressurized seal so that astronauts could move between the two spacecraft.

Atlantis' final flight began on July 8, 2011, when it launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida vertically strapped to a massive fuel tank and a pair of rocket boosters. It returned to Earth on July 21, gliding down to land onto a runway at the launch site. (The spacecraft is now on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.)

In addition to helping construct the ISS, NASA's space shuttles visited Russia's Mir space station, serviced Hubble, and deployed both the Magellan probe to Venus and the Galileo probe to Jupiter. In total, the space shuttle orbited Earth 4,848 times, traveling nearly 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) — more than 525 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

Astronaut photos of the space shuttles were popular because they offered "punctuated snapshots of distinct places on Earth" that were "framed by a human eye," NASA representatives wrote in 2011. "These images speak to people."

While the Space Shuttle Program achieved a lot during its 30-year history, it famously suffered two tragedies: the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters, which killed all crewmembers on board.

NASA eventually canceled the program in 2011, citing the high cost of maintaining the aging spacecraft and a reduced need for the vehicles after the completion of the ISS the same year. To this day, the space shuttles remain the only winged spacecraft to carry humans into space.

See more Earth from space