Last year, scientists achieved a historic first by providing a patient with the first-ever corneal implant made solely of human cells grown in the lab.

Corneal transplants are used to treat severe corneal scarring and inflammation, eye injuries and complications from eye surgeries. They replace the clear dome at the front of the eye, and usually, the tissues for the procedure are collected from organ donors after death. But in this case, one donor's corneal tissue was used to create hundreds of implants through sophisticated laboratory culture techniques and 3D bioprinting.

This technology, created by Precise Bio, an Israeli regenerative medicine company also based in North Carolina, produces a transparent, layered structure that resembles a healthy, natural cornea. The approach could help to reduce the scarcity of donor corneas worldwide, the company says. An early-stage trial, known as a Phase I trial, is currently underway to evaluate the technique's safety in human patients.

To learn more about the science behind the 3D-printed corneas and the next steps for development, Live Science spoke with Precise Bio co-founders Aryeh Batt and Dr. Anthony Atala.

Neelanjana Rai: How are most corneas for transplants sourced and prepared, currently?

Anthony Atala: They are typically recovered from deceased donors within a few hours of death and then banked. They go through screening and testing, and are then preserved until implanted — usually within a couple of weeks — before being transplanted to patients in need.

NR: Are there problems or limitations with this approach?

AA: Absolutely. In fact, availability is a major challenge. There is a very limited donor supply and a significant worldwide shortage of transplantable corneas, meaning a lot of patients lack access to corneas for implantation, which is a huge deficit.

Aryeh Batt: Today, for every cornea transplant performed worldwide, roughly 70 people remain without one because there are not enough donor corneas. There are between 12 million to 15 million people worldwide in need of a cornea transplant who do not have access to donor tissue.

AA: The ultimate goal is to completely eliminate the shortage of these corneas.

NR: How does Precise Bio's approach aim to solve those problems?

AB: At Precise Bio, what we do is fabricate tissues, starting with a donor cornea as our first product. We begin by isolating the cells and developing a proprietary process for proliferating and expanding them. From a single donor tissue, we are able to generate enough cells, a bank of cells, to fabricate over 400 new corneas, which can effectively solve the shortage of donor tissue related to corneal transplants.

​There are various other advantages to our tissue as well. For example, it is much easier to transplant than donor tissue. We engineered it with very unique mechanical properties, which shorten operating times and make the procedure much easier for the surgeon.

Another advantage is that, because we print the cells, we can precisely define the cell density of the tissue. While a standard donor tissue provides about 2,000 to 2,500 cells per square millimeter, our tissue has over 4,000 cells per square millimeter. This means the optical outcome of our tissue is expected to be superior to donor tissue.

[Editor's note: Laboratory and animal studies show promising results regarding the ease of the surgery to insert the implants, as well as the cell density within the printed tissue. However, human clinical trials are still ongoing, and therefore, claims that this printed tissue performs better than human donor tissue still need to be confirmed.]

Another important advantage of our tissue, in addition to the availability, is the fact that it is fully tested. We have a production line. And in the production line, the tissue goes to a full quality control test, which also includes viruses and fungus. So when you receive a cornea from our production line versus a donor cornea, ours is fully tested and quality controlled. There's no chance that you're going to have a virus or a fungus that later will affect the tissue in the patient's eye. So these are the advantages of our tissue versus a traditional donor tissue that exists as a treatment today.

[Editor’s note: Traditional donor corneas already undergo rigorous safety screening, including blood testing of the donor for infectious diseases, such as HIV and hepatitis, along with tissue-culture checks of the transplant for fungal and bacterial contamination. Precise Bio's manufacturing model allows for controlled batch testing throughout production and up to transplantation.]

NR: How does the technology work, and how does your printing system ensure that the cornea is uniform and smooth so light can pass through?

AB: The technology is not just the printer; the printer is simply the production tool with which we fabricate the tissue. The technology is a combination of many elements. When we look at natural body tissues, they are composed of cells and the ECM [extracellular matrix], which is the structural material. When we fabricate a tissue, we start from these two components, trying to stay as close as possible to natural tissue by using human cells and natural materials [such as collagen and ECM].

The fabrication process combines the ECM — in most cases, a human collagen-based material — into two layers. One layer is made of collagen, and upon that collagen layer, we print the cells. When I talk about printing cells, think of a standard color printer with red, green and blue cartridges; in our printer, we load human endothelial cells [flat cells that form linings in the body]. We flow these cells through the printhead inside a material called bio-ink, and every laser pulse deposits the cells. This enables us to arrange the cells in the exact anatomical structure they occupy in the body. Post-printing, we manually transfer the tissue from the printer into an incubator, though this final handling will be fully robotic and automated in the future.

NR: The implant can be rolled up, loaded into an injector, and then unrolled inside the eye. What makes the printed material flexible enough to do this without breaking?

AA: Basically, we're using the same material that is present in your very own cornea [collagen] to maintain flexibility, and the printer allows us to deposit the cells precisely where they are needed.

NR: The platform has "single-cell resolution."Why is that important?

AB: The fact that we can arrange cell by cell enables us to mimic the anatomical structure, the exact structure of the tissue of our body. Depositing cells one at a time at very high viability gives us a major advantage in replicating what the body naturally expects.

AA: The best way to explain it is that nature has already figured out the best design through evolution. What this technology does is effectively replicate what nature has already achieved.

NR: You say these implants could be frozen and shipped worldwide — has that been tested?

AB: While we are currently conducting our Phase I study in Israel, product development has included extensive testing on shipment. We shipped the product from the Middle East to the U.S. and back and transplanted the tissue into animals to verify that it functions after international transit. We had to evaluate shipment times, transport environments and how to maintain tissue properties on a plane.

To assist that, we also developed various technologies related to cryopreservation of the cells and prior preservation of the tissues, which enables us to, at the end of the day, have a supply-on-demand mechanism so we can manufacture anywhere and ship it anywhere in the world for the patient's benefit worldwide. Currently, our tissue is shipped very similar to the tissue that is shipped from a donor tissue, where we have a shelf life of around four or five days.

NR: You've recently conducted the world's first transplant of these new corneas as part of the trial. Could you describe the procedure and how well it worked?

AA: The first patient had been legally blind [in the treated eye] for 14 years.

AB: This specific patient had a non-functioning cornea and could not even count fingers [before the procedure]. This was due to pseudophakic bullous keratopathy, a condition where the cornea swells permanently and forms fluid blisters following cataract surgery.

She is close to nine months now since her transplantation, and she sees well. After several weeks, she was already able to read the menu in a restaurant and subtitles on the television. The most important outcome of this is that now, she can see normally — with her new cornea.

We continue to follow her progress and we will follow up again at the nine-month point and then at the year point. This is essentially the way we do with all of our patients. Now, we already have five patients [who have gotten the new transplants].

AA: [Based on the trial participants they've treated so far] patients recover similarly to those receiving a traditional corneal transplant; visual recovery occurs quickly at first, but continues to improve over time, with initial recovery taking place within days to weeks.

NR: Is there a risk of immune rejection with this kind of implant?

AA: With current techniques using corneas from deceased donors, the cornea is considered "immune privileged," meaning it has features that reduce immune response. Because it lacks blood vessels and lymphatic vessels, the risk of rejection is much lower than with other transplanted organs.

Of course, a small risk always exists with any medical procedure, but even with human bio-printed corneas, the risk is very low and most rejection episodes can be reversed if treated promptly.

AB: There is always some risk of rejection in the eye, but this is taken care of with very mild steroids. In the first weeks, the frequency of the drops is higher, then as the patient moves forward we reduce the need for these steroids.

NR: What are the next steps for developing this treatment?

AB: We are in the process of developing longer cryopreservation of the tissue, and we will be completing the Phase I trial in 2026, completing the transplants. And then we will move forward to a more advanced stage. We are planning to transplant an additional 10 patients until the end of the year [as part of the ongoing trial].

After Phase I, we will be submitting an Investigational New Drug [IND]application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where we are targeting to do the more advanced studies. [Approved IND applications grant permission to give a new, unapproved medicine or biological product to clinical trial participants.] The primary focus of this study will be in the U.S., while continuing clinical sites in Europe and Israel, and exploring regions with high demand like India.

In the future, the extended studies that are planned for 2027 will open up to other patients also with other health indications [such as diabetes or high blood pressure].

NR: What timeline do you foresee for getting these new bioprinted corneas fully approved?

AB: We anticipate commercial distribution of our corneas in the U.S. by 2030, followed by expansions into Europe and other regions.

AA: These current studies are still in their very early stages, which is why we are carefully assessing the technology and following patients long-term to ensure the approach can be successfully expanded. As soon as that groundwork is complete, the next phase will move forward in the U.S.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

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

Despite being one of the remotest places on Earth, more than 100,000 people journey to Antarctica every year. And within the next few years, the number of tourists flocking to the continent each summer could reach 450,000. That's far fewer people than visit the Great Barrier Reef or Grand Canyon National Park, but Antarctic tourism comes with a colossal carbon footprint — and the frozen continent is a particularly vulnerable place.

A study published online July 8 in the journal Annals of Tourism Research reveals the impacts of Antarctic tourism from the perspectives of 25 former guides who, year after year, took visitors on cruise ships to some of the most remote locations on Earth. What these guides witnessed eventually made them quit, the study and an accompanying article in The Conversation show.

To find out exactly what drove the tour guides to leave their roles and whether such individual choices make a difference to Antarctica's overall condition, Live Science spoke with two of the study's authors: social anthropologist Zdenka Sokolickova and polar tourism researcher Liz Cooper, who both work at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Sokolickova and Cooper divided the interviews between them, speaking with 14 male guides and 11 female guides about their experiences. Together, those conversations shone a light on the reality of Antarctic cruises and the huge emotional toll of quitting a dream job.

Sascha Pare: How did you get the idea to interview former Antarctic tour guides?

Zdenka Sokolickova: We both started to work as postdocs on this project. We started with interviewing current Antarctic tour guides, because we wanted to know more about the industry, and about how they felt about the tourism development. The industry is booming; it's growing rapidly. And with more vessels, more tour operators and more people wanting to go and visit on a guided tour, there is also a bigger need for guides. So more people are accepted into the industry, and that comes with consequences; for example, the industry might need to lower the standards for qualifications, or there are safety risks coming with people who have less experience.

But we also heard that, at the same time, some tour guides are leaving the industry. We felt that it could be interesting to get to talk to these quitters, because they are likely critical and without vested interests in the industry, since they have deliberately left. We posted ads or calls for participants on closed Facebook groups, because we also know that the polar-guiding identity is quite strong and people tend to stay connected to the community, at least digitally or virtually. Within six days, we had 30 sign-ups. It went really fast, which kind of confirmed that there is a need within the community to voice some concerns.

Liz Cooper: We were also motivated to do this study because, generally speaking, tourism research usually incorporates the voices of people who are connected to the industry. It's not so common to see the voices of people who have removed themselves from the industry or refuse to engage with the tourism industry.

Antarctic tourism is, on a global level, a small industry. Around 120,000 people per year go to Antarctica [as of 2025/2026]. But the really interesting thing about Antarctic tourism is, of course, that this is the most remote place on Earth that you can visit as a tourist. This means also that it's the most carbon-intensive form of tourism that you can engage in on Earth. And, of course, it's an extremely fragile place, as well. So you have enormous global environmental impacts from the emissions from long-haul flights and from cruise ships, and then you have wildlife populations and a very fragile ecosystem there that is easily pitched out of balance. We also don't know very much about how tourism impacts the ecosystem in Antarctica either. We do know that it's bad, but we don't really know how bad. It's, in those terms, a risky practice, I would say.

SP: Did the former guides mention specific events that contributed to, or propelled, their decision to leave the industry?

ZS: In the "Mind the gaps" paper [the Annals of Tourism Research study published July 8], we speak about these tipping points that can be external or internal. External means that something in the outer world happens that makes you realize that you cannot continue like this any longer. We had quite strong accounts of that happening, like the cruise ship breaking the sea ice for the sake of the guests' experience so that they could land on the ice, for example, and observe wildlife or get to a place.

Many of these former Antarctic tour guides were polar tour guides, meaning that they also worked in the Arctic. For some of them, this decision happened through experiencing both Arctic and Antarctic tourism, so some of these tipping points happened in the Arctic. But we still felt it's relevant for our analysis, because polar tourism is connected, even though geographically, these are separated regions. We had a very strong account of something that happened in the Arctic, where the cruise ship hit a whale, even though the tour guide saw it and he was trying to communicate that. But there is a hierarchy in the chain of command that he couldn't break. He ran to the bridge and told off the captain, and then, after that incident, he quit.

There was a story about someone finding a little penguin chick in a boot hole. Normally, when you're trampling over snow in Antarctica, you're wearing these snowshoes — boots — and you're supposed to cover up the holes when you're leaving the place. But, obviously, not everyone does that. And so this person found a little chick that was struggling and couldn't climb up the boot hole. That also was a tipping point; it was the moment when that person realized, "I don't want to participate in this any longer, because if I weren't here, this little creature would have died."

LC: The most striking story that I remember was a participant who was talking about how the ship that they were working on sometimes would try and find a place on the sea ice to land, so that they can get the guests out walking on the sea ice. Not all companies do this, but some do. And then, they have to put the gangway down onto the ice so that people can walk directly out onto it. This piece of ice that they had chosen was apparently too thin, or too unstable or something. Where the gangway was connected to the ice, the ice kept breaking, so the ship kept having to move farther into this ice floe to get a secure holding.

On this piece of ice, the participant remembers that there were penguins with their chicks. And penguin chicks, when they're born, have fluffy down feathers, which are not waterproof, so they can't swim until these feathers have molted and they grow waterproof feathers. What this participant recalled was that, as the ship was moving in to get a hold on the ice, it broke this ice floe into many parts. Penguin chicks became isolated on smaller ice floes. Our participant remembered thinking, "That chick is not going to shed its down feather before this small ice floe melts." Essentially, our participant came to the conclusion that these chicks wouldn't make it.

SP: Emotionally, how easy was it for these guides to quit their jobs?

ZS: For some people, it was more difficult internally, emotionally, to make that decision, and for others, it was easier. We think that for those who were more environmentally concerned, it was, maybe a bit counterintuitively, more difficult to take that decision. Now we could speculate [about why]: Was that bond with the place stronger? Also, the emotions that were felt upon quitting were very mixed, I would say. It was a mixture of both feeling angry and feeling sad with feeling relieved — a "weight lifted," as someone put it.

But it definitely was, for many people, a struggle that took a long time in terms of years — from when you realize that your values actually cannot reconcile with what you engage in; through you realizing that there is a radical solution to that, and that you cannot muddle through or find alternative justifications; to deciding to quit; and still from there, to actually quitting. There is a path to walk. You can have decided, but you still can be doing the job, not feeling good about that.

SP: Has it been easy for these people to find new jobs that are more aligned with their values?

LC: We found that many of those who had quit primarily for environmental reasons and had gone through this particularly difficult decision-making process then made it their life objective, or aim, to do something good for the environment. We have a group of participants who actually moved into environmentally focused jobs. We have somebody who went on to set up an environmental NGO [nongovernmental organization]; we have somebody who went on to fight wildfires; various sustainability positions. It was, for some of the participants, not just a difficult and life-changing decision in the sense that it was hard to do but also because it changed the trajectory of their lives into becoming somebody who's more actively pro-environmental in the world.

SP: Did any of them regret their decision to quit?

ZS: Many of them did, until this day. Since it was a difficult decision to make and to act upon, it still triggers emotions, and people still think back. Yes, some of them do resent and regret and wish it was less environmentally harmful and wish they still could be having that dream job.

SP: Did any of the former guides reflect on the effectiveness of their decision, given that someone else could have potentially replaced them in their job the very next day?

LC: Yes. As I recall, many of our participants actually didn't really believe that their decision would make an impact in the overall environmental state of Antarctica. I don't agree with that. But there was a general feeling that, "OK, my individual choice isn't going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things" — also because, like you say, they expect that they will just be replaced, and probably replaced by somebody who's less environmentally concerned than them and might engage with Antarctic tourism practices in a less environmentally responsible way, which actually might make things worse. But in those cases, the decision to leave was basically mainly based on this internal conflict — this uneasiness that got so monumental that they couldn't live anymore doing this job.

What we do in the paper, now on a bit more of an academic level, is we argue that even though, yes, a single choice of an individual really makes an incremental change to the enormous problem of the climate crisis, these decisions [can be framed as] high-impact, pro-environmental behaviors. Because when you look at other individual behaviors that people are encouraged to do in their lives to reduce their carbon footprint, reduction of long-haul flying is one of the most impactful things you can do. And these guides were traveling several times per year — long-haul, back and forth — to South America, and then on cruise ships a lot, which are also carbon-intensive. Their reduction in their carbon footprint by making that choice has been massive. Even though they were feeling personally like maybe they weren't making that much of a difference, I do think that their choices have made a big difference.

SP: Was there anything in the interviews that surprised you?

ZS: Several of them said that they felt alone when they were going through this process of deciding and after [they quit]. They said that the fact that we asked for their opinions and their stories made them feel that they're actually part of a bigger community of people. It made me feel like we're actually responding to a need that exists in the field and that these people actually want to be heard. They want their concerns to be public, but they maybe had feared repercussions, or had even faced some repercussions, when they were being critical while still working in the industry.

SP: Did your interviews touch on other popular destinations where tourism may be doing more harm than good? I'm thinking, for example, of the Galápagos Islands and "last-chance" tourism in the Arctic.

ZS: They actually did. Some of the participants who quit in Antarctica still guide in the Arctic. So what we often heard was this juxtaposition, or comparing what it's like to be guiding in Antarctica and in the Arctic. The often-repeated argument, which I resonate with, is that in the Arctic, there are human communities. If it's their desire to choose this tourism path, tourism can be benefiting the human communities. In Antarctica, there are no permanent human settlements, and the nonhuman Indigenous inhabitants of Antarctica have no voice. Who asks the penguins, or the krill, or the orcas whether they want tourism there? If we could ask them, they would probably say no. Also, many of the guides live either in Northern Europe or North America, so the travel is shorter to the Arctic. It just makes more sense for them to stay in the business up there and quit in the South.

I actually did have one guide who also had experience from Bali, for example, and other regions in Southeast Asia. There, the reflections were actually around how destructive tourism can be in Indigenous regions, where people have no say and they don't benefit from tourism; they're just being "consumed" as a resource, as a sightseeing item, basically. That person quit cruise guiding overall, because they felt it was destructive.

LC: We also had a few people who, in their life after the decision, still worked in tourism but deliberately only in very local tourism. They, for example, set up a kayaking company in the local area where they lived, because they're still passionate about showing people beautiful places and connecting people with nature, but they simply couldn't reconcile taking people so far to create that connection with nature.

SP: Having done this work, what do you think people should consider when booking their next vacation?

LC: I would like people to properly research the impacts and consider, if the impact is significant, whether they really need to go or whether they can go in a low-impact way. For example, can you take the train instead of a plane? And if you have to take a plane, do you really have to go?

ZS: Several of the tour guides actually said they wished people asked themselves, "Why am I going to this place?" If it's just to tick off the seventh continent or the 75th country, or if it's just to show off on social media that you have a selfie from the Antarctic continent, then it's not worth this enormous carbon footprint.

If it's to feel a connection with nature and be away from the urban, hectic life, you definitely do not need to go to a place that is this remote. Perhaps you have a place where you can feel that connection with nature just a couple of kilometers away.

If it's this lifelong dream, I don't feel entitled to say, "You shouldn't go," because for those people, it really plays a big role in their lives. But the "bucket listers," as the guides often called them — the guides felt like these people actually don't belong, and maybe even they don't deserve this beauty and this breathtaking fragility, to be consumed and to be forgotten the next month, when another intercontinental holiday is happening.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Social media has upended how people engage with healthcare, as it provides a platform for people to share their experiences, find support groups, and learn more about symptoms and conditions. But it's also given nefarious actors a platform to promote products, spread misinformation and prey on people's fears. Meanwhile, algorithms deliver users an individually tailored stream of content, promoting and prioritizing the most engaging posts with little oversight.

In her book "Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health" (Oneworld Publications, 2026), author Dr. Deborah Cohen, a broadcaster, journalist and editor who has a medical degree from the University of Manchester in the U.K., examines how social media platforms and influencers have transformed people's views of healthcare, from the proliferation of weight-loss drugs and hormone therapies to billionaires seeking immortality.

Cohen spoke with Live Science about her book, the shifting landscape of healthcare discussions moving online, and how health literacy is now key. "Bad Influence" has been short-listed for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Read an excerpt: 'A fine line between reducing stigma and trivialising conditions': Social media, self-diagnosis and the glamorization of ADHD

Hannah Osborne: You wrote in the book that we're in the middle of a global experiment in public health that will take years to understand. What do you think the results are going to be?

Deborah Cohen: What we know about healthcare is our ideas, concerns and expectations shape health. So if you go to a doctor, what they're trying to establish is what your ideas might be about your particular condition, your concerns and what you want to take away from that particular consultation. Obviously, our ideas and concerns or expectations are very much shaped by the information environment, and this is going to change again when we're adding large language models [LLMs] into the mix. We're going to have a new wave of health literacy.

My concern from writing the book is there's possibly a lack of understanding of what healthcare can always deliver. One of the challenges I felt was when you go to social media and it provides you with certainty and often quick fixes, but then you go to the Health Service [the National Health Service (NHS), the U.K.'s health system], where they can't really provide you with certainty, and there's complex solutions or there isn't an obvious solution. You're balancing competing risks, benefits and harms.

I do wonder about how realistic our expectations [are] about what health and science can actually deliver ‪—‬ our expectations about what a health professional should do, or how much time they have available. You know, our tech is available 24/7. And particularly with large language models, you can query that at any time of the day or night. What does that do to trust? We think there are quick fixes for stuff where inherently there isn't.

I think our experiment really underpinning all of that is, what do we want from our Health Service? What do we want health to look like or to be? What do we want from our doctors or our therapists? What do we want those relationships to do or be, on top of the tech that is going to be more and more widespread? What's going to be the role of the doctor in all of this? These are very live questions.

I suspect it's going to be different for different generations, different cultures, different within different health services as well. If you've got an abundant Health Service, which no country has, perhaps there's less need for these tools to bridge the gaps.

HO: We have strained healthcare systems. Is the gap between doctors and patients widening because of social media, or is social media filling a gap?

DC: It's both. And that's what the problem is — the gap is filled, but not necessarily by the right things. If you are looking for support, does it have to be on TikTok? Are there other ways of having forums and that kind of support delivered on a digital device? Are there other, safer ways of doing this online?

Equally, there's something about the way the content is delivered there that appeals. It's the short storytelling, and [health authorities are] having to compete against that. What's the solution? It's multifaceted, but if people are used to getting their information on TikTok or Instagram, and then you look at the NHS website, which is as dull as dishwater, it's no wonder social media is more appealing.

You've probably got to change how you deliver information. Maybe you need more storytelling rather than really dry content. If people are used to getting that, and that's what they respond to, then you need to think about that. It's a connection. What does that tell us more broadly about our society? How do we better deliver information in the way people need? That might be an LLM, [but] again, that's a whole other debate.

HO: You spoke to a lot of people about how they use social media for their health. Did you find an overriding theme in what they were looking for?

DC: It was women. It was a lot of feeling unseen and unheard. You have whacking great lists of gynecological issues. There's a sense that female health has been massively underfunded — and it has. But I guess it's, what fills the gap? That doesn't mean "femtech" in all its glory fills that gap. Empowerment isn't fully evidenced interventions. It's like, we've got this app, no idea what it does; it actually might do you harm, but it's filling a gap. That's not good healthcare.

It's a variety of issues. One of the issues of social media is that people passively consume information — health information as well — so it will bring up information you didn't even know you were necessarily interested in. You hear repeatedly that "the algorithm knows me better than me." There's a sense that these algorithms are objective and they get to know you.

One psychologist told me, "they know your neurosis better than you do." But is that really true about the algorithm? That's where one of the challenges of diagnosis is. These will be questions for large language models for diagnostic purposes.

Then, for others, it's more active. They'll have active people that they follow who provide health information, particularly around menopause, longevity, ADHD ‪—‬ stuff like that.

HO: In terms of those algorithms and how they increase anxieties, is there any way of backpedaling when, as an industry, it's making people a lot of money?

DC: What was interesting was how people now do ADHD on TikTok according to what's going viral, because they want more engagement — and we know engagement drives money. It's as linear as that in many ways. Part of the problem, then, is if you start to see a particular condition on social media, what does that do to our understanding of that particular condition?

They're all the broader questions about how the algorithm behaves. But what do you do about it? The algorithm needs sorting. When we talk about what tech companies can do, I think the algorithm potentially is one of the more harmful aspects of social media.

HO: While you were researching and writing, was there anything that really surprised or shocked you?

DC: I've been an investigative journalist for so long that little shocks me these days. Where there's a gap, people will step in and make money. We live in a capitalist society.

For me, as someone with a medical background, it's the behavior of doctors who should know better. That is the bit that doesn't sit very well with me. I think the GMC [General Medical Council, an independent regulator of doctors, physician associates and anesthesia associates in the U.K.] needs to start thinking about what to do because one of the techniques that influencers use is parasocial relationships, where they lean into the artificial relationships that feel real to the followers, and there's all sorts of techniques they do to enhance that. There are doctors doing that.

Then, they lean into authority bias and say, "Well, actually, I'm a doctor, and this is what I do, and this is how I use my treatment; this is how I treat myself." Using that to promote a product is really uncomfortable.

Yet that is employed on social media. They tell the similar hero's journey. "I have terrible symptoms; then I did this, and it totally transformed me and changed my life." It's when it's a health professional and they use social media as a front gate to their clinics, and advertising their platform to their clinics to offer interventions that lack an evidence base or are potentially harmful.

It's not shocking, because I've been in the depths of all sorts of investigations ‪—‬ but I thought that was pretty ick.

HO: The book isn't all negative. There are positive stories about support groups and help groups. Is there any way to separate the bad from the good?

DC: It's really hard. What I say to people is to ask why that person on the platform is telling you what they're telling you. What's this person trying to tell me? There's a lot of people on there who are genuinely trying to do good, who want to either share their journey or help people understand the complexities of health and science.

But ask, are they trying to sell me something? How are they making their money? Are they promoting something? Just ask yourself, why should I believe you? Why should I listen to you? Why should I trust you? What are they getting? Is it fame? Are they getting their 15 minutes and more on social media? Are they getting a little bit of a dopamine hit from that?

I use the dopamine here advisedly because hormones and neurotransmitters are totally misused on social media — we're just a bag of hormones or neurotransmitters when we're far more complicated, really.

If they're telling you about the benefits of the treatment, are they telling you about the harms? Because nothing is harm-free. What's the risk of doing this thing, or what happens if I do nothing? What are the alternatives to what I'm being sold? It's just basic health literacy and skepticism.

HO: We've touched on this a bit, but with the emergence of LLMs, how do you see the landscape shifting in the next five to 10 years?

DC: We're still working out how the information environment fits together. There are potential benefits with LLMs — we've got to know where the information is provided, and we all know about the hallucinations. But can they help people interpret medical information, medical jargon better? Can they use them to sort of brainstorm what treatment they want?

On the other hand, are they more uncertain? We know there's been concerns over them [AI chatbots] being sycophantic. How does this all fit together?

When I wrote the book, I thought it's going to be out of date because LLMs have come along and no one's going to be using social media. But then research from about a month ago found that 50% of Americans under 50 use social media as a source of information about health.

It's going to fit together in different, complex ways for different people. They might hear about something on social media and then use LLMs to explore it further, and then use that to help guide treatment or diagnosis.

How it all fits together is still a bit of a conundrum.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Throughout his career as a composer, Jim Nollman has worked with unorthodox partners to create music. Instead of collaborating solely with human musicians, the artist has expanded his cast to include animal bandmates, and they've been making melodies together for more than 50 years.

Nollman's new album, "Orcas' Greatest Hits," will be released Aug. 14 by the music label Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. As the title suggests, the album is a collection of songs centered around orca (Orcinus orca) vocalizations.

Nollman now lives in Friday Harbor, Washington, but he recorded these sounds off the coast of British Columbia between 1985 and 2002, using underwater microphones called hydrophones. The vocalizations weren't random calls that Nollman overheard; rather, he prompted the orcas to "sing" by broadcasting his and fellow musicians' music into the water via underwater speakers. The artists kept the volume at a reasonable level to protect the orcas and performed after dark to avoid motorboat sounds.

However, orcas weren't Nollman's first animal bandmates. Fresh out of Tufts University in the 1970s, he made music with various animals, including turkeys, wolves and dolphins. To learn more, we spoke with Nollman about his career, including several years he spent consulting with the U.S. Navy, and the extraordinary interactions he's had with whales and other creatures.

Sascha Pare: How did you first start making music with animals?

Jim Nollman: In my latter year at university, I got involved in the theater, doing all the music for all their plays. I soon got into John Cage [an American composer known for his innovative approaches to sound] ‪—‬ first in Boston, and then in the San Francisco Bay Area when I moved there. I got to know some of the avant-garde music people, especially in Berkeley, because there was a big movement there [centered around California's KPFA Radio].

I'd been in Mexico, playing flute, and the turkeys next door would always gobble on a certain high note and at a certain volume. I said [to an editor at KPFA], "Why don't you send me to a turkey farm? I'd like to do a Thanksgiving Day piece." He gave me a sound man and a Nagra tape recorder. I remember vividly, because having a Nagra after just getting out of college was a big deal for me. I was into technology. [Editor's note: Nagra is a Swiss brand of portable audio recorders.]

The turkey farm had 300 turkeys, and I immediately learned from the owner that it's really only the males that gobble. He kept the males and the females separate, so he put me into the fenced-in area where the males were. I started singing, and I could control them. The turkeys closest to me would start, and the gobble would go out to the edge of the 300 birds. And then it would come back, and then they would all stop. I was singing "Froggie Went A-Courtin'," which is an old American folk song [originally from Scotland] about animals. I sang 30 or 40 verses of this song and controlled the turkeys.

I was around 24 years old, and I had a hit. I knew I wanted to be a musician, but I had some major flaws to be a performer, because I didn't like being the center of attention. I'm kind of an introvert. That's a loser if you're trying to be a singer-songwriter. I loved writing tunes and playing them, but not in front of a big audience. This [recording tunes in nature with animals] was a way to get into music.

After the turkeys, I wondered if I should try making music with animals again. I tried it with kangaroo rats [Dipodomys deserti], which build these burrows like Trinidad steel drums. Kangaroo rats only come out at night, and they thump to each other in their burrow systems, which are tuned — it seemed to me, anyway, that each place in the burrow had a different tone — and they communicate with one another.

Then, I went to a wolf preserve. I realized that the wolves did two or three howl sessions in the morning around dawn and two or three at night. The wolves wouldn't play with me if I was out of their key. If I played a flat note, they would stop and basically tell me, "We don't mind if you're playing in our pack, but you've got to do it right." That was a big lesson for me, and that's how I got into it.

SP: Your new album features orcas. Did you always have a sweet spot for orcas, or is there another animal you preferred working with?

JN: No, I don't have a sweet spot for orcas. I recorded orcas for 15 years, and I had lots of recordings, most of which I never really listened to, because I didn't know what to do with them. At some point, I decided that "I can't do anything more with the orcas, and I don't like going to whale conferences and being this authority," because it wasn't about that for me.

[After years of recording orcas], I started going to the Arctic ‪—‬ because I wanted to go to the Arctic and because beluga whales [Delphinapterus leucas] were there, and they seemed like the opposites of orcas. The orcas were very much in tight families traveling together and making very simple calls that had deep meaning. To have their echolocation against a speaker at midnight could be like being in a war zone. It was so loud; we had speakers blow out sometimes.

The beluga whales were the antithesis of that. It seemed like they all were talking at the same time, and they all seemed to know what everybody else was saying. This is my speculation. They used sound as their family anchor, and I had no idea if they all understood each other talking. But it was very much more animated than what the orcas were doing. I would say 50% of the orca calls were just two notes; they were D to C, and back to D. And they would do that all day long, some of them. Beluga whales sometimes sounded like belly laughs. They made the weirdest sounds, and I loved it.

I went everywhere in the Arctic. I started out in the first year going to Nome [Alaska] in the Bering Strait, and then I went east to the Mackenzie River delta in northern Canada on the Beaufort Sea. Then, I went to Baffin Island in the Canadian High Arctic. In every place I went, limited beluga populations were crashing. At some point, I realized this was a complete loser. I pretty much gave it up until I met some people from Finland who said, "You should try it in Russia." The Soviet Union had recently crashed, and they were opening up all the places where they had their gulags [forced labor camps] and their nuclear fleet. The Solovetsky Islands were loaded with beluga whales that hadn't seen people in 70 years. I went there, and I had a great time with the beluga whales.

SP: What is your favorite memory of working with orcas or beluga whales?

JN: Six or eight years ago, somebody brought me and a bunch of other artists up to Hudson Bay [in Canada], basically to emulate what I'd done for so many years [artistic residencies to experiment with whale sounds]. I was the mentor for everybody. I liked that role. We were confronted with beluga whales, and I said, "I don't really want to play the guitar or the mandolin with the beluga whales, because I've tried that all over the Arctic and I've never had much success. I'm going to put my head in the water and blow bubbles."

The beluga whale came up, and it wrapped its mouth around my face. It did the same thing to the woman who was blowing bubbles on the other side of the kayak we were on. That was maybe the most fun thing I ever did with cetaceans. I wasn't worried at all. I've had the same thing happen with giraffes. I was in Texas at this game farm, and this giraffe came and licked my whole face with its giant tongue. It was really quite wonderful.

SP: The oldest recordings in the new album are 40 years old, and you said you hadn't listened to all of them before making the album. What was it like hearing them after all these years?

JN: I had 65 hours of tapes, and I listened to them over three or four months. Ninety percent of it was rubbish; it was just repetitive, and the whales would get into their D-to-C-to-D call routine. I wanted something where there was a groove, or some kind of magic going on that was inexplicable.

I started choosing some sequences. I thought it was only a certain level of connection that we'd created, but a couple of the things that I listened to when I was in that process blew me away. The one where I was playing James Brown riffs into the water ‪—‬ that was very strong for me. I'd never heard that before. I was discovering new stuff by giving it a close listen.

There's one where I was being filmed by National Geographic, and it was just me and a guy on a big boat cruising the waters. I started playing a country blues bottleneck on the guitar. [Editor's note: A bottleneck in country blues is a guitar-playing technique where a hard object is placed on a finger and glided along the strings.] The whales only did this a couple of times, but they would come in with a chord change. Say I'm playing in a key of D; they would come up and play the G in perfect time. I was impressed by that.

SP: Did you ever play the recordings of you and the orcas back to the orcas?

JN: No, because the recording can't answer the whales. I was trying to make a telephone connection, so it has to be two things talking to each other. To play a recording would be like me saying, "Let's stop this interview now, and I'm going to put on something of me giving an interview to somebody I spoke to yesterday." You wouldn't like that, and I don't think the whales would have liked that either if I did it to them. It had to be direct. I had many people who were very ardent or passionate about singing or reciting poetry — one guy wanted to sing Jewish death prayers to the whales. But the whales didn't come.

SP: Is part of why you've been so successful at making music with animals that they particularly like you?

JN: Some animals like me. I definitely got through to the orcas. I could tell that, because I had an interim of eight years between doing it with the big communities [of artists] and going out alone with the orcas. They were the same orcas, and they definitely knew who I was the first time I put sound in the water again. That's when that country blues episode happened. We were all much more relaxed with each other. The second time was great. It was also a tragedy, because the whales had lost their residence to the loss of salmon [in the northeast Pacific Ocean], and they were way out of their range.

SP: Your work with orcas and other whales landed you a job with the U.S. Navy in 2011. How did that happen, and what was your role?

JN: I was doing underwater concerts in the 1990s. I was invited to Kodiak Island, which is a large island off the coast of southern Alaska. They wanted me to do an underwater concert. At the time of this festival, in which I was performing, the U.S. Navy was sending ballistic missiles from Southern California to the waters off Kodiak Island for testing. This was destroying the halibut [Hippoglossus stenolepis] fishery on Kodiak Island, because the fishermen couldn't go into this area, suddenly.

The Navy sent a guy who was part of this ballistic missile thing but also had a PR background. He said, "Can I speak before your concert?" I said, "You can speak about whatever you want, but you've got to get in the water. That's the payment you have to give me: Get in the water and hear all this music that I've created."

He was blown away. I had a fan. He took me out for dinner and asked me if I had any ideas about solving this great scandal that was enveloping the Navy at the time, which was the killing of mostly beaked whales during mid-frequency sonar exercises, mostly in the Bahamas, in this hole in the ocean that's there. Nobody had a solution, so he wanted me to be on the team. I said, "Sure, I'll be on the team." It was like somebody asking me to play for the New York Yankees or something — completely odd, but I thought, "OK, I'll try that."

He called me back two years later, saying, "We have our money, and we want you to come to the Groton submarine base [in Connecticut], where we'll have our first meeting with submarine captains, Ph.D. sonar engineers and a few whale biologists." That went on for seven years. I took the job seriously. I told them that I thought we could solve it in five minutes. I said, "All you need to do is take care. If you see whales in the vicinity, don't exercise on that day." This sounds so totally obvious, but the fact was that he [the PR man] was contending with a Navy establishment that believed that the Navy could do anything to save the American people from being bombed or wrecked. They didn't see whales as anything but collateral damage.

SP: Do you have a favorite song on the new album?

JN: I like "The Three Jimmies." I never knew that James Brown's guitar player was named Jimmy Nolen — I mean, that's really outrageous. So, it's the three Jimmies, right? I really like the music, and I like the piano player [Jonathan Churcher], who plays one note every three or four bars. The response of the whales is also brilliant, I think. There's one part where the whale starts to echolocate, which is the way they see the world; it's their perceptional tool. The whale starts clicking in time with the beat that I'm playing on the guitar. That only happened once in 65 hours of recordings, and I thought that was pretty unusual.

SP: What's next for you after "Orcas' Greatest Hits"?

JN: I'm composing new music, and I'm hoping I'm at least breaking even [with the new album] so that they [Smithsonian Folkways Recordings] can do the next one, which is called the "Cowbird Variations." The cowbirds are basically the bottom voice, maybe the part that's played by bass in pop music. Everything else is other birds and insects called treehoppers. It has this very primitive sound to it.

I love doing this music with cowbirds, because cowbirds have a horrible reputation. They lay their eggs in other birds' nests, and when the eggs hatch, the baby cowbirds knock all the birds in the nest out and kill them. Then, the parents — juncos, where I live — end up raising the cowbirds. These birds have a terrible reputation, but they make one of the strangest sounds in nature — so that's why I chose them.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Long before chemistry was a formal science, humans were experimenting with substances to solve problems, cure illnesses and make money. In his book "The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry" (Profile Books, 2026), author Kit Chapman, a science journalist and honorary researcher at Falmouth University in the U.K., traces how this ancient, protoscientific tradition shaped the world.

From our ancestors' early use of fire to some accidental — and disastrous — pyrotechnics in the 14th-century French court of Charles VI, Chapman reveals how early innovations across the world paved the way for modern science.

Live Science spoke with Chapman about his book, which has been short-listed for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Read an excerpt: 'These were harder than any other blades, cut sharper and cost more': How ancient Sri Lankans created steel of legends by harnessing monsoons

Hannah Osborne: The book is full of brilliant historical anecdotes that bring all of these alchemy breakthroughs into context. What was your favorite one and why?

Kit Chapman: I mean, you can't go wrong with a man trying to turn his own urine into gold, I think. Hennig Brand [who accidentally discovered phosphorus in the 17th century] was one of my early touchstones. I've known about this story for a while. I've always thought, "How can I get this into a book? What's the link?" Obviously alchemy provides this fantastic base. He bankrupted two wives to try and fund his 1,500-gallon [5,700 liters] urine habit — and then he gets something [phosphorous], against the odds.

This is the first element we can actually put a name to. This is the first person we can say actually discovered a chemical element, and it's an alchemist in the purest sense of the word. Then, of course, he tries to keep it secret. He sells it, eventually, to a friend, and his urine goes on tour around Europe, showing the kings and queens this glowing pee, before suddenly, [chemist and philosopher] Robert Boyle actually works out exactly what's going on.

That, to me, sort of encompassed everything I was hoping for in the book. There's a fantastic story there that's about human connection. There's the unraveling of mythology, and theology and belief, and starting to look at science. But there's also real practical stuff going on there. He didn't know what he was doing. He just didn't know why he was doing it, and that I found fascinating.

HO: You make the point that these people weren't thinking, "Oh, I'm going to do chemistry." How important is that for understanding how these early innovations shaped modern knowledge of how things work?

KC: I think that's essential. We often look at science as something separate from the real world, and one of the things that I really wanted to do with this book was to illustrate that science is going on in every profession. It's going on in every home, continuously; it's going on in our bodies continuously. It's everywhere.

Science is a way to understand what's going on in the world. It is not a separate thing from culture, from belief, from trade, from globalization, from discovery, from just getting on with life. I wanted to bring in the potters, the weavers, the bakers, the urine salesmen — which was an entire thing that I didn't really know I had to go down. I found it fascinating.

And, of course, [there are] artisans. When we start looking at the first actual chemistry that's being done, it is people trying to create beautiful works of art, perfumes, things like that. It moves away from survival and into this ecstatic beauty, and that, to me, encompasses what I love about the history of science. It's bringing all of these threads together and making discoveries not necessarily where we think we're going to find them.

HO: You mentioned the beauty of it all, and the perfume. One of the chapters I really enjoyed was the first chemist who was a female perfume maker in ancient Assyria.

KC: Tappūtī Bēlet-ekallim. The fascinating thing is that the only reason we know her name is that she put it down in cuneiform. She wrote it down. She may well have been a slave; perfume makers were often slaves. She was certainly a woman who was working in the palace. She was working with another woman whose name, unfortunately, we've lost to time.

What I find fascinating is that we now have this person who was one of the working class, one of the underdogs, slaving for a week to make this potion that she wrote down because the recipe is incredibly detailed. And we remember her name, but we have no recollection of the lord or lady that she was actually making it for. It's kind of class warfare throughout the centuries.

HO: I found the extreme sort of secrecy really striking — that so many of these ancient texts were lost because they were being hidden. But then you also have the fall of civilizations, so we've lost all this knowledge.

KC: It's this combination of, as you mentioned, hiding the recipes because they are trade secrets. If you look at the first alchemy book that we actually know of — "Physika Kai Mystika" — it literally translates as "natural and secret questions" or trade secrets. These were craftsmen, and, of course, they didn't want to share it with rival craftsmen. If you've got a really good recipe for making something look like gold, you want to keep that to yourself.

They use these code words — and that went all the way through into what we think of as alchemy, that sort of Renaissance period where they're talking about taking the fiery sword from the belly of the dragon, which is just wonderful and descriptive.

But you also have things like Emperor Diocletian destroying the texts in Alexandria in 300 A.D. Why did he do it? Because it was a matter of survival for him. Twenty-five of his predecessors were murdered by their own guards or died of plague and things like that ‪—‬ horrible fates. He wanted to avoid that, and the idea that [someone] could turn something into gold terrified him. It would debase his currency, so it always brings in that politics. It brings in human nature and human curiosity.

HO: Do you think there are still things we're yet to discover from alchemy from the past?

KC: Yeah, without question. Whether or not we're going to discover some kind of new, groundbreaking technology that's going to change the world, I can't see that happening. But the one thing we could see is the use of natural products in a way that we hadn't necessarily thought [of].

A great example of that is [Nobel Prize-winning chemist] Tu Youyou and the discovery of artemisinin compounds [from the] qinghao [plant], which comes from a Chinese alchemist's herbal remedies book, essentially 1,700 years ago. The fact that the best defense we have against malaria, the best antimalarials possible, comes from this ancient alchemical source indicates that there's probably more to find.

There is almost certainly more to find in terms of how they [ancient alchemists] used recipes, how they would try and make gold. Their understanding of the world is something that we don't necessarily have a full grasp of, and we're still piecing it together. There's some wonderful work being done by Matteo Martinelli and others looking at the history of, particularly of Western alchemy emerging in Egypt.

We also have things like Greek fire. We have a pretty good idea how they did it, but if you're looking for what the exact recipe [is], we're still not 100% sure.

HO: It's interesting now, watching modern equivalents taking place. We still, to an extent, try to guard our own knowledge.

KC: Yeah, we do, and I think it's actually a pernicious thing in science. We have this publish-or -perish mentality, which is that if we don't get the paper out first, obviously we lose the patent, but wider than that, we lose the kudos. There's this kind of necessity to kind of hide things. You hear about all kinds of shenanigans ‪—‬ a reviewer delaying a paper until their paper comes out, things like that, all this kind of naughtiness going on.

We've got to recognize that science has moved on certainly from the "Great Man" idea. We're now working collaboratively in teams. That is the only way that modern science gets done. The second, if there is one lesson from the book, it's that if you try and hide science, you delay progress.

The moment you actually start spreading ideas, the real ignition for me for the Renaissance and for what becomes chemistry, is the printing press. It's the fact that ideas can then be shared and accessed by everybody. The moment we start realizing that science is a global endeavor, that everyone can do it ‪—‬ man, woman, child, it doesn't matter your nationality, [it] doesn't matter your ethnic ethnicity, it's for everybody ‪—‬ the sooner we're going to start seeing some major progress that we otherwise wouldn't make.

HO: We see loads of the advances in chemistry and alchemy within civilizational melting pots. What were some of the biggest surprises to you when you were researching the book?

KC: One thing that really annoyed me was, looking through textbooks, you can look at who made zinc, and you come up with a name that came from the 1700s, or how platinum was discovered — that's a fantastic example. Platinum was discovered by a conquistador who noticed that some natives were wearing platinum. But, of course, he didn't discover it; it was discovered by the Indigenous populations.

The amount of science that came out of Mesoamerica, Central America, and the way that science was also being developed in India, it's just kind of completely overlooked. If you look at the traditional story of science, we talk about Europe. Occasionally, we might bring in China. But India, Africa, Mesoamerica, South America, North America ‪—‬ every single continent was having scientific discoveries and developments.

They weren't necessarily developments that we think of in terms of leading to chemistry, but they were dealing with social problems that they had at the time. They were tackling what was in front of them, and we always need to remember when we're looking at history to look at the context of the discoveries.

HO: Which breakthrough did you think was most impressive in terms of the materials or facilities that were available?

KC: One thing that I found sort of striking was, there's a chap called Paracelsus who is absolutely fascinating, absolutely bonkers. Paracelsus is, for me, the archetypical alchemist because he was certainly trying to revitalize medicine and get rid of humor theory and come up with all these ideas. [Editor's note: Humor theory is the idea that human health and temperament were related to four fluids in the body — black and yellow bile, blood and phlegm.] But he also believed that mermaids were real and that they were just out to steal men's souls.

He was a drunk, he had a broadsword, and yet he's the guy that was able to combine what we think of as the traditional herbalist role and the doctors. At that point, doctors weren't even touching patients. They believed that the true skill of a medical man was that you didn't even need to examine a patient; you could just sort of look at them and you'd know what was wrong. He [Paracelsus] was able to say, "No, that's not right; you need to actually test things, and you need to try things." The moment we actually combine those two different threads together is when we actually started to get what becomes of modern medicine. The number of lives that saves is incalculable, so I think that that's one of the great moments.

The other one that always comes to me is Antoine Lavoisier in the French Revolution. He made several great discoveries — the fact that matter can only be changed; it can't be destroyed [at least at low energies]. The idea that if you take something, then obviously there's got to be components to that; you're not making it out of thin air. And coming up with a list of elements in the French Revolution or just before the French Revolution, unfortunately dies, from the guillotine [when Lavoisier was executed].

That, for me, was when we started to get true chemistry. That's when all of the magic is dispelled. I think he [Lavoisier] is, for me, the French equivalent of Isaac Newton. He's incredible.

HO: For you personally, throughout researching and writing the book, what was your biggest takeaway and what was the biggest surprise?

KC: My biggest takeaway is that science happens everywhere continuously through everyone. I traveled around the world for this book; I went to pretty much all of the continents. I didn't go down to Australia; that's about it. Wherever you go, there are discoveries being made. There are people who are trying to make their worlds better.

Science is not for this elite group; it's for everyone. One of the things I try to do with this book is to show people that even if you think that science isn't for you, it absolutely is; you're doing science continuously.

There've been so many [surprises]. One of the things — this is purely because of the way that I was taught and these inherent biases that we have — but it's so easy to overlook the role of women. When you start delving into the role of women in science … You've mentioned Tappūtī; we also have Mary the Jewess. Throughout the Renaissance, we have people like Caterina Sforza and [the] very famous Queen Christina of Sweden, which I didn't mention in the book because I just didn't have space.

The one shocker for me is this book "The Secrets of Isabella Cortese," which was a man pretending to be a woman to sell his science book. For me, [it] just kind of unravels this whole idea that science isn't for everyone.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

The Caspian Sea, the world's largest inland body of water, is in major trouble. Since the mid-1990s, this saline lake, located between Europe and Asia, has lost an area nearly the size of Sicily. But until now, it wasn't clear why.

Researchers finally provided answers in a study published June 5 in the journal Earth's Future. Using ground- and satellite-based observations, they connected falling water levels to a drastic drop in river inputs from Iran, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia, all of which border the Caspian Sea.

The team particularly highlighted losses from Russia's Volga River, the longest river in Europe, which supplies roughly 80% of the Caspian's inflow.

To find out why the Volga is discharging less water into the Caspian Sea now than it did 30 years ago, we spoke with Amir AghaKouchak, a co-author of the study and professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

AghaKouchak, who directs UC Irvine's Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing, explained why river inputs have dropped and how decades of water withdrawals have put the Caspian Sea on a path to collapse. He also touched on a solution to this crisis — and revealed why Russia's hunger for ammunition to attack Ukraine is making it harder to save the Caspian Sea.

Sascha Pare: Falling water levels in the Caspian Sea have been attributed to natural variability, and more recently, there's been a focus on climate change and increased evaporation due to rising temperatures. But what did the results of your study show?

Amir AghaKouchak: People quickly jump to conclusions about climate change. Of course, that is important, but it cannot explain the change that we have observed. Over the last 30 years, water levels in the Caspian Sea have shrunk by around 2 meters [6.5 feet] or so. Just to put things in perspective, this translates to about 24,000 square kilometers [9,300 square miles] of sea area loss — about 5%. When we look at drivers, we notice that rainfall hasn't changed significantly over the lake and upstream, so the decline cannot be explained simply by changes in rain.

Evaporation has increased, so it explains maybe about one-third of the change. There is less water in the lake, and that indicates there's probably some water lost along the way. We don't have a lot of human-related data ‪—‬ for example, water withdrawal for irrigation or groundwater wells. That area is very difficult; the countries are not open to sharing data. A lot of our results are based on looking at proxies. Our interpretation is that temperature caused about 30% of the change and the rest is probably because of human activities.

SP: Which human activities does your research suggest are responsible for the Caspian Sea's decline?

AA: Several of the countries on the Caspian Sea have built large dams — Russia, for example. They are all desperate for hydropower. All of the countries around the lake [have also built infrastructure to supply agriculture], and one reason is that they want to create jobs and improve the local economy. Water demand is increasing in all those countries around the Caspian Sea. It's not surprising to see lakes drying or groundwater levels falling.

It's hard to find data about how much water countries are using; they keep data very private, especially places like Russia. We don't have detailed information, but the Volga-Don Canal in Russia is one of the projects that is contributing to this crisis. [Editor's note: The Volga-Don Canal is a ship canal that connects the Volga and Don rivers at their closest points.]

But we cannot blame this whole thing on that. We have to be careful with our language; we can't say one project is responsible. Most likely, this is the collective impact of many different small withdrawals from here and there, overall contributing to a significant decline in the Volga River outflow into the lake. In the paper, we have different rivers, but the Volga dominates because it's the largest river. The Volga has a higher impact than all the other rivers combined. There are lots of demands along that river basin.

SP: Did you expect human activities to play such a big role, or were you surprised?

AA: We did not have any expectations at the beginning. In fact, when we started this project, I reached out to a lot of colleagues from neighboring countries around the Caspian Sea. We didn't want to do it on our own, sitting in California, looking at another area of the world, without having local people involved. If you look at the co-authors, you see people from Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan — so, we have local experts. We thought this was really important to have those perspectives. I didn't want to reflect the opinions of only one research group. What we have here is the collective opinion of people who have not met in person; we only exchanged emails to look at the results, and then we came up with those conclusions.

We do have a Russian involved, but not from an official Russian institution. I thought this was really important, because there's more back-and-forth [with a large group of people]. If two people have to convince themselves of an idea, it's much easier than with 20. Also, we brought in people from other countries who had projects in the area; for example, there is one group from Finland and another group from Germany. We tried to come up with something that this large group of people could agree on. It was not easy, but it worked out.

SP: What is the worst-case future scenario for the Caspian Sea if shoreline countries fail to decrease their water demands?

AA: My concern is that, in the same general area, we have the Aral Sea, which is now about 5% to 10% of what it used to be, and Lake Urmia, in northwest Iran, that has also shrunk really fast and is now very small, with low levels of ecological activity. So we have two smaller lakes in a very similar climate that, from an ecological perspective, are dead. Because we have seen those degrade, we have to consider that this is the worst-case scenario for the Caspian Sea, too.

The Caspian Sea is much, much bigger. I hope it doesn't happen, but it's on the same path. Again, it's much larger, so it would probably take 100 years [to shrink as much as the Aral Sea and Lake Urmia], even with the current trend. But because we have seen those lakes shrink really fast, it deserves attention. Due to the size of this lake, the potential impacts will be huge. Even if 20% of the Caspian Sea dries out, the consequences will be very significant. It would be a disaster.

SP: You mentioned that drying lakes can become ecologically "dead." What other impacts could the Caspian Sea's falling water levels have on the surrounding landscape and people?

AA: The lake's retreat will expose the lake bed, and because it's saline, you have all kinds of minerals that will be exposed. With the next strong wind, they will go into the air. The health impacts include respiratory diseases, and even eye diseases, that are linked to salt minerals in the atmosphere. Those are the immediate consequences. Additionally, those minerals can travel long distances. In general, salt deposition on agricultural land reduces productivity. It takes a while, but if those lands are exposed for a long time, this will have an impact on the agricultural sector in those areas, which means potential food security issues. We don't exactly know what those materials are on the lake bed, so it's hard to know precisely what the consequences will be.

There is also serious shipping happening in this region. Right now, most of the shrinking is happening in the Caspian Sea's northern part, which is shallower [than the rest of the lake]. The drop in water levels is about 2 meters, and you can imagine that if you have a port and water levels drop more, you won't be able to operate. You'll need to extend your shipping routes southward; you'll need to invest and spend a lot of money to use other ports and docking sites. We have evidence of that around the Aral Sea and also Lake Urmia. There used to be these docking sites and ports, but those are now far away from the water.

SP: What must bordering countries do to save the Caspian Sea and prevent these negative effects?

AA: Demand management is absolutely critical. Demand management doesn't get a lot of attention, because unlike big projects that make the news, management means you have to cut things and do things that people don't notice. Some people argue that politicians don't show a lot of interest in demand management, but it's something that we have control over. The technological opportunities are there.

But when you look at that area, there is a big war ‪—‬ so probably it's not the priority to invest in management. There are a lot of things that we don't talk about in the paper that are relevant. I recently learned through discussions with people from the region — this is something that came to us from co-authors and collaborators — that many countries in that area grow cotton, which uses a lot of water. It has a lot of applications, but apparently, one of them is military. Cotton is used to produce ammunition. Russia needs a lot of ammunition, so not only are they growing it themselves, but they also bought neighboring reserves from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. So now, even those countries have an incentive to grow more cotton. This is driving more irrigation, more groundwater extraction, more surface water depletion, and probably more impacts on the Caspian Sea.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Forecasters are warning that the ongoing El Niño is likely to become supercharged in the coming months and inject potentially unprecedented heat into our already warming world.

El Niño is the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern, but models suggest this year's cycle will be exceptionally intense. Super El Niño conditions could contribute to temperature extremes until next year, but scientists are warning that it may also pose longer-term threats.

Jong-Seong Kug, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Seoul National University in South Korea, uses observational data and artificial intelligence to model El Niño events.

Kug has found that super El Niño events can drive sudden, dramatic and even irreversible climate regime shifts. Live Science spoke with Kug to learn more about climate regime shifts and the long-term threats posed by this year's ongoing El Niño.

Patrick Pester: Last year, you published a study that found super El Niño events significantly increase the likelihood of potentially irreversible climate regime shifts. With a super El Niño now looking very likely, how concerned should we be?

Jong-Seong Kug: We should be concerned but not alarmist, because our study does not suggest that every super El Niño inevitably causes a climate regime shift. Rather, a super El Niño can push an already-stressed climate ecosystem across a critical threshold. If a system is near a critical threshold, then strong forcing can induce irreversible change.

Current forecasts indicate a very strong El Niño is increasingly likely later this year. We need to watch vulnerable regions closely, particularly those that are already experiencing severe warming, drying, ecosystem degradation or ocean stress.

PP: What kind of climate regime shift do you fear most?

J-S K: I am particularly concerned about the persistent shift in major ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest moving toward a much drier and degraded state. You know, a long time ago the Amazon was a savannah area, so we are now approaching this kind of tipping point. Also, in the Amazon, this drying can weaken [or] even reverse the forest's role as a carbon sink.

The Amazon is a carbon sink, but imagine it becomes drier and drier, and there's some die-back of the forest. Now, [carbon] sink becomes source. This could amplify global warming long after an El Niño event.

PP: Is there anything we can do to mitigate the threat of extreme climate and weather events in the coming months?

J-S K: We cannot stop El Niño. But we can greatly reduce its human impact or ecosystem impact. Governments should use precision forecasts to strengthen our heat health plan, water and food management and flood and wildfire preparedness. In the long term, a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions remains essential because every additional degree of warming increases this possibility that an extreme natural event will trigger lasting damage.

PP: Do you think a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is likely, given where we are now?

J-S K: I don't think so. It's very difficult.

PP: So, where does that leave us?

J-S K: I don't know. There are some additional techniques we may use at a critical point. Have you heard about climate engineering? Like stratospheric aerosol injection [reflecting solar radiation back into space]. If we cannot do anything, then we have to choose that kind of technology. I don't want this kind of situation, but maybe in the near future we have to decide.

There are two kinds of climate engineering. One is carbon mitigation, just direct air capture [taking carbon out of the atmosphere]. That is a safe way. The other is solar energy management. We can deflect more solar energy from the surface.

So, the easiest way is just to inject an aerosol into the stratosphere; then this aerosol reflects solar radiation, and then global temperatures will decrease. It's like a volcano: After a big eruption of a volcano, the global mean temperature drops by about 0.6 degrees [Celsius, or 1 degree Fahrenheit] because there is volcano aerosol [in the atmosphere]. Instead of volcano aerosol, artificially we can inject aerosol into the stratosphere. Then global temperature can easily decrease.

But there are many side effects. Some we already know, but some we don't know. Like climate inequality. If we artificially decrease temperatures, then some countries will have a drought or a flood. And then how will we compensate?

Obviously, if you want some kind of climate mitigation, we need a kind of consensus across the countries.

PP: Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't covered?

J-S K: This year, super El Niño is developing in an already exceptionally warm climate. We are already seeing widespread heat waves this year, so we cannot attribute every individual event to this El Niño. But El Niño will intensify toward the end of this year, so it is likely to further increase the risk of extreme events in many regions, so we need to prepare.

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

Climate change's impacts are being felt everywhere, from health and food security to extreme weather, sea level rise and collapsing ecosystems. World leaders have been slow to adapt to the warnings, despite an ever-growing body of evidence showing the compounding risks of greenhouse gas emissions.

But despite fossil fuels remaining the world's primary source of energy and emissions continuing to rise, there are changes afoot.

In his book "Despite it All" (Granta, 2026), author and journalist Fred Pearce looks at the shifts that have taken place over the last 40 years, highlighting how far humanity has come in the green transition. He believes this progress gives us reason to hope that we can eventually overcome the challenges we face today.

Pearce spoke with Live Science about his book, which has been shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Hannah Osborne: There are a lot of positive environmental stories throughout the book, including those that aren't necessarily being told. Do you think that there is a growing appetite for positive climate news now? And will it help us?

Fred Pearce: I detect a kind of desire to be told something other than it's all hopeless and there's nothing we can do. Some people are therefore saying, "Well, what can I do?" And they're very sort of personal stories about how they can contribute. But also people who think more, if you like, strategically: What can the world do, what can governments do, what, how can we influence that?

I try not to write what I think people want to read. I try to write what I want to say. And it seems to me that we do so many things so badly, whether it's managing our resources or water or handling forests or the climate, or pollution or whatever. We do things so badly that there is a great deal of scope for doing things a lot better. So, we need optimists and we need pessimists. We need pessimists to point out the problems. We need optimists to come up with some solutions or suggest where [there are] half open doors that we can push open.

I wrote this book in that kind of spirit to say "Look, yes, things are bad, yes, I'm not denying that they're bad, but there's an awful lot that we can do about it and in some cases are doing about it." That then divides into whether we're talking about human activity, our technical solutions to climate change. Tech fixes are good, not bad, which is something that can be a hard sell in the environment community sometimes, so I want to stress that.

I went to the Earth Summit 30 years ago where they agreed [upon] the original climate change convention. Back then they said we [need to] prevent dangerous climate change, but they really didn't know much about how to do it. Wind turbines were just, you know, a few masts on a hill in California. Nobody was dealing much in solar power because it was just so expensive. It had been developed for powering satellites and electric cars. Nobody was talking about [it].

We have made quite a lot of progress and it's not fast enough and CO₂ emissions are stable, they're not going down. We need to do a hell of a lot more and we may have passed climate tipping points. I'm not denying any of that, but rather than throwing up our hands or saying it's hopeless, let's get on with the tech, let's also recognize that nature is very good at recovering. You destroy a forest, a rainforest, it doesn't mean that it's destroyed forever. It will, given the chance, come back if we give it room. So let's give forests room to recover.

In large parts of the world it's already happening — in Europe, even in North America. Agricultural land is being abandoned, and when it's abandoned nature comes back and not necessarily in the sort of ways that we might think. But nature does come back, stuff regrows. We can see how evolution is being kickstarted, if you like, by the chaos that we're creating. That's not to say we shouldn't stop creating the chaos, but we can see how nature recovers.

These are things that we can recognize and respond to; giving nature room to recover, rewilding projects, therefore I'm all in favor of [them]. We're not rewilding where we're trying to garden nature to get back to some sort of perfected past, a pristine system where we thought that everything was great — pre-industrial revolution or before Europeans arrived in North America or whatever it might be. But, we can give nature room to evolve and adapt and change. We can see that nature's doing that all the time, with or without climate change and with or without humans. Nature is constantly, if you like, remaking itself.

I'm not saying nature always comes back in ways that we approve of. Let's recognize the distinction between our sort of slightly romanticized idea of what nature should be and what nature actually is.

HO: You talk about rewilding and letting nature take its course, but how do humans fit in with this? Can we adapt our own perceptions of what nature is allowed and what's not?

FP: I think we can probably forget about what's allowed and what's not. Nature will do what it wants to do. We pride ourselves on our ability to garden nature in a way, or manage ecosystems. We're not really very good at it. Nature will very often take over and do what it wants to do.

Some of the world's biggest rewilding projects have gone quite badly wrong because we haven't quite thought it through. The one I'm thinking of really is the large project in the Netherlands where they're trying to sort of recreate ancient European ecosystems and they ended up with mass deaths of animals because their conception of the ecosystem didn't quite figure out. They then largely abandoned the project because they didn't like to see large numbers of animals dying.

A hardline rewilder would say let nature take its course. I see the case for that, and often I would support that, but we have our own sensibilities and our own concerns and we are living in a world where we are very much in charge of what's going on. So while I'm in favor of standing back and letting nature take its course, we have our own sensibilities, and it's not wrong for us to want to intervene sometimes.

HO: There's a chapter on human population and fertility rates, and how this is very much a climate change story as well. We're now seeing a lot of the rhetoric around this, and rights being stripped back and taken away. What's it like for you, having seen the changes from the UN International Conference on Population in Mexico in the 80s, to Cairo in the 90s to now?

FP: It's an extraordinary story. I've been working on these issues for 40 years now so I've seen a number of changes. Some of the changes I've seen are how technical fixes somehow became a reality when they seemed very distant a while ago.

But our perceptions change too on many things. We are, in many ways, more attuned to environmental issues now than we were 30 or 40 years ago. One of the big changes that I've seen is the notion of the population bomb, which for much of the 20th century was seen as the number one issue. People would say, "Well, there's no point in fixing the climate, there's no point in reducing our pollution because there are more and more people on the planet, and we're kind of doomed for that reason."

Well, it hasn't [happened]. When I went to my first international conference, which was the UN Population Conference in Mexico City in 1984, that was all the rage. They gave the UN Population prize to the mastermind of China's one child policy, which — in terms of human rights and what I would regard as acceptable human behavior — was dreadful. But such was the concern about population issues that they wanted to give a prize to the operator of that program.

A lot has changed. A feminist agenda, if I could put it that way, and I would say that approvingly, has taken over in reproductive politics. I saw it at a UN population conference in Cairo in 1994, 10 years after the Mexico event, that we need to assert reproductive rights. Many environmentalists said that's a cop out. It was all "it's feminist perspective, but it's dooming us."

Well, it didn't, because what we found was that by and large, women wanted to have smaller families because their children got to grow up. Medical improvements meant that you didn't have to have four or five children to secure the next generation. Two would usually do, sometimes you just wanted one. Women wanted to have lives outside the home. The population people seemed to be a bit surprised by that.

The environmental agenda was a very male-dominated one for a long time. So that came as a bit of a surprise, but the net result is that we've halved our fertility rates. They're more or less down to replacement levels [of reproduction] now globally.

I'm not just talking about Europe or North America. I'm talking about almost everywhere except Africa, and African levels have come down. Sometimes they're coming down to super low levels, so that people are now talking about not having enough babies and how we can encourage people to have babies. There are parts of the world where we're down to one child per woman and even a bit less.

My argument is that we need to carry on. Not take a sort of Elon Musk approach [or] send the women back to the home and [do] reproduction and that's what their job is. We need to complete the feminist revolution so that women have more rights, can make better choices, and indeed couples can make more and better choices about the family size that they want. We can arrange things so that it is possible to have children and a career, or make it easier to do that, and at that point probably reproduction levels will come back up.

What I'm really saying is that the agenda is now vastly different from what it was as recently as the 1980s and, and into the 1990s. The population bomb is being defused, to put it simply, there's a residual momentum effect which means that our numbers will carry on going up a bit. Sure, that creates strains on the planet, but we're not now talking about double the world population every 30 years, which is what was being talked about back in the mid 20th century. It's tailing off.

We now have, if you like, a consumption bomb more than a population bomb. The global issue is consumption in the rich world, and that's what's stressing the planet now — not too many babies in poor parts of the world.

HO: Inequality between the super rich and people in developing countries is becoming more and more stark. How do we bridge the gap to make sure there's a reasonable living standard for regular people without a huge cost to the environment?

FP: The truth is, and the numbers have been done by a number of different people, a reasonable standard of living for everybody on the planet is perfectly feasible without destroying the planet.

We need to do some things better, we need to have better technology, but for me, right up there with climate change is an issue of global inequality. When I was young, it was taken [that] inequalities were diminishing and it was taken almost as read that they would carry on diminishing, and a lot of aid policies were directed towards that. That's kind of disappeared since the sort of Reaganomics of the 1980s, all the changes in the finance system and perhaps the fall of the Berlin Wall, which meant that the sort of socialist or, or equality-based agendas collapsed politically.

We're now finding increased inequality, and that, it seems to me, is a threat to the lives of millions and billions of humans, but also to global stability and our ability perhaps to manage.

Serious global issues like climate change and many others are all undermined by the political stresses and economic stresses created by rising inequality. I see them going together.

It's also clear that it's important to level up, but also level down from the obscene riches that we see among a small number of individuals, who seem to be accumulating a greater share of the world's wealth, whether we're talking about dollars or natural resources.

HO: You have a whole chapter on renewables and how they're outpacing fossil fuels. They're the cheaper alternative. How do you see the political opposition to clean energy panning out over the next five to 10 years?

FP: It's fizzling out. It's a weird political backlash and yes, any big social trend or economic trend, they all have backlashes and it feels to me like this is it. What we see in the real world is that the U.S. — not just the U.S., but principally the U.S. — are in a state of near denial about climate and they're wanting to go back to fossil fuels.

In the rest of the world, if you look at it in terms of geopolitics of [the] U.S. versus China, then the U.S. is pushing this rather old agenda of fossil fuels, and China is absolutely going to reap the benefits in many, many ways in its drive towards renewables. China has been a really bad story in the past with its coal burning — and it's still building a few coal-fired power stations. But the really big story is how China has been principally responsible for bringing down the costs of renewable energy, particularly solar power.

You can now go to the most remote corners of rural Africa and you find people putting up their solar panels to recharge car batteries so that they can run their lights in the evening or whatever it is. And then you've got megacities operating using increasing amounts of solar power. India is getting on the bandwagon as well. It's got the fastest growing solar energy economy in the world.

In the real world, renewable [energy] is mostly cheaper than fossil fuels. It is also quicker to install, you don't have to build a huge power station, you can do it in bits and pieces, bolt bits on.

Yes, there are grid issues and they need to be addressed, and there are limits on operating. There are challenges, but renewables are just growing so fast, and it is growing so fast because it is so cheap.

And it's become so cheap, to put it very simply, because the Chinese 20 or 30 years ago decided this is what's going to happen. While everybody else was sort of talking about it and fussing about it and doing it in research labs, the Chinese kind of got to grips with it. I remember back in the 1990s talking about people who were going into China and coming back and telling me stories about how the Chinese are really serious about renewable energy. To be honest, I didn't quite believe them, but they were right, and 30 years on, the world is living with the benefits. That's true whether you're talking about Europe or rural Africa or big cities in Asia or wherever. It's coming.

There will be different solutions in different places and there are undoubtedly things that are harder to do than, you know, running our national grids on renewable energy, which is becoming really quite easy and something that everybody wants to do. The cement industries, fertilizers perhaps, some of these industries will take some more technical innovation. But it's happening, these are technical fixes that are working in the real world. Will we do it in time? Well, we're a bit late on the case, but we are on the case.

HO: We're now seeing a massive rise in AI data centers as well. Is this bad tech, shall we say?

FP: It's a serious issue. Partly because they're growing so fast — they can't just plug into the grid because the grid really can't deliver, so these companies are developing their own energy systems. Even in the U.S. they are very often renewable systems because they're cheaper. If you've got a data center out in Texas, then you're going to use wind power or solar power because it's cheaper and you're in control of it.

I suppose we reach a point where [we have to decide], do we want to reduce our use of energy or have almost as much energy as we want, but just green it and green it very fast. It is true that if all the renewable investment is going into electricity for data centers, that leaves less investment for other sectors of the economy, so I'm sure there are trade-offs, and I'm not saying that we should embrace data centers. But they can be a driving force for adoption of different forms of energy, renewable energy, and for perhaps changes in the grid systems as well.

I think we can have both. I think we need to have both because we're probably not going to stop the data engines, so we've got to find ways of greening them. There are issues and there are challenges ahead, and I don't want to diminish any of those, but you know, let's, let's be hopeful.

The title of the book uses the word hopeful rather than optimist because I don't want to sound Panglossian, but I do want to inject some hope.

HO: When you started writing the book, what did you hope people would take from it, and did that change after you'd finished?

FP: Well it kind of evolved. It began as an idea to sort of [be a] retrospective of my reporting, and then the publisher said, "Well, the story changes rather a lot along the way, so rather than just showcasing your reporting over 40 years, why don't you showcase the change, and be hopeful in the context of how things have changed over the last 40 years?"

That was [the] kind of starting point, and we sharpened up on it, as we went along it did become "Despite It All" and you know, the title is important, and not diminishing the "All." There's a lot of bad stuff out there, but despite it all we can have hope and we can find, develop and demand solutions.

HO: Did you find anything during the process of writing the book that surprised you?

FP: As I say, it started as a sort of retrospective project and going through it, [there were places I went years ago] and it did look bad, then I checked up on what had happened over the intervening years and suddenly things looked a lot better.

I went to Alaska and saw how the conflicts over managing caribou herds and the huge migrations that go on and it felt like that was doomed. I was talking to people who were hunting the animals and they were trying to protect them because they wanted to hunt them, therefore they wanted them still to be there, which is kind of counterintuitive for many environmentalists, but you know, they were the best defenders of the caribou because they ate them.

But it felt doomed, and yet 20 years later I checked out the numbers and the population of that herd has doubled and tripled. So stuff does happen and I suppose my surprise was how much good change I found when I looked into it further. Maybe that's me being better at looking for good news stories. I've written quite a lot of "bad news" books over the years and done a lot of "bad news" journalism over the years, so I certainly don't discount that. But if you step back and you think, well did good stuff happen? Well, yeah, sometimes it did.

The bison herds are coming back on the plains of parts of North America, if you go to Montana. The ranches are disappearing and big areas are being set aside for bison, and I've been seeing how farmland in parts of southern and eastern Europe has been abandoned over the years. It's not necessarily good news that we're abandoning farmland, but again, the way that nature comes back and woodlands are growing, there are more forests in Europe than there have been for probably centuries.

There's a lot of bad stuff to say. But it does seem to me that we have to not just cling onto, but embrace good stuff and try [to] take it forward.

Something I really hadn't thought about till I went back was what were the big issues in the 1980s, 1970s when I started out. Well, all our industrial rivers in Britain were filthy. Now our industrial rivers are relatively clean. It's our agricultural rivers that are filthy, so, I mean, there's been a big change there.

Nobody has to talk much about the ozone layer now. That was the number one issue in the mid 1980s, and the absolutely terrifying prospect if we hadn't fixed that. But it's been fixed.

We banned the chemicals that were doing it.

Remember acid rain, lead in petrol. They were hot topics, headline news, part of the rise of the environmental agenda in the 1980s — and they're the ones that we don't have to talk about anymore.

Now we're talking about climate change. I think there are other things coming up. I think the issue of nitrogen pollution is a fast growing one, and we need technical solutions to that.

The green revolution of crops, the high-yielding crops, which got us out of a cycle of ever worsening hunger and famines in the mid 20 century. That was a solution which created new problems. Those crops grew very well, but they required large amounts of inputs, including water, and water is now a growing issue — finding enough irrigation water, but also fertilizer and other agrichemicals. We're now reaping some of the bad effects of that, and we need to solve that. Scientists I know are working on, if you like, high-yielding crops that don't require so much fertilizer and don't require so much water.

It's doable because as I think I said at the start, we do a lot of things really very badly, but that does give us a lot of scope to do things a lot better, so let's get on with it.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Gun violence is a uniquely American epidemic, according to Dr. Selwyn Rogers Jr., the founding director of the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center.

Rogers helped found the trauma center in 2018 on Chicago's South Side, which had lacked a local adult trauma center since 1991. For nearly 30 years, people injured on the South Side had to endure long ambulance rides to access care elsewhere in the city, and lives were lost as a result.

Since founding the new trauma center, Rogers has cared for many victims of gun violence. In a new book — "Healing the Gun Violence Epidemic: Ending Violence, Rebuilding Communities, and a Trauma Surgeon's Vision for Restoring Hope" (North Atlantic Books, 2026) — he tells their stories, along with those of advocates and organizations working to confront the underlying factors that drive gun violence in the first place. The book unpacks how we got here, and what we must do next, drawing on Rogers' experience as a witness to gun violence's toll.

Live Science spoke to Rogers about his work, new book and vision for how Americans should tackle this epidemic.

Nicoletta Lanese: In the book, you trace this trajectory of how we arrived here and what the future could look like, when it seems that strong gun legislation is unlikely. To put it plainly, what gives you hope for the future as a person who sees the impacts of gun violence daily?

Dr. Selwyn Rogers Jr.: I'll start off by saying, I'm pathologically optimistic. Otherwise I couldn't do what I do as a trauma surgeon, where I see some of the worst things.

What makes me hopeful, despite the current political headwinds, are people. When I see a mother who is grieving her son, who just died from gun violence, who says to me, "I have to keep going for my other kids." That gives me hope. When I see someone who acknowledges that they used to hurt others with a firearm, who now is passionate about prevention of other people getting hurt. That brings me hope. When I see the bugged out eyes of a five-year-old Black boy looking at me in my white coat, going, "Are you a doctor?" I say, yes, I am. That brings me hope.

There are all of these moments of human connection. If we just look for them, they're all around us. That brings me hope every time.

NL: The book draws on your experience as a trauma surgeon and also highlights societal factors driving gun violence. When did you begin thinking about treatment that goes beyond the operating room?

SR: I trained in Boston at the time of the crack epidemic in the early 1990s, and Boston, like many cities in the United States, had a fair bit of penetrating trauma. (We separate trauma into "blunt" and "penetrating": "blunt" meaning events where there's no penetration of the skin by a missile or a projectile, and "penetrating" where there is some projectile that violates the skin and causes internal damage.)

During that time, I was particularly struck that those who suffered penetrating trauma disproportionately look like me. I happen to be African-American, they happened to be mostly African-American or Hispanic. They happened to be mostly male. Something about that connected with me as I wanted to be part of helping to solve that problem over the course of my career.

That brought me to Vanderbilt and Meharry Medical College in Nashville, which is where I took my first job. I earned a Master's in Public Health at Vanderbilt School of Medicine, and as part of that experience, I had to do a practicum that involved real-life work trying to understand healthcare outcome differences across a two-mile difference in space: I was at Vanderbilt, a traditional academic medical center, and Meharry Medical College's county hospital, Nashville General Hospital.

Two people could have the same exact diagnosis and have very disparate outcomes, and trying to understand those differences and how you can make a difference in that space was very informative.

NL: How do you think about those social drivers of health in relation to trauma surgery?

SR: When I was in training early on, as well as when I was a junior faculty, it was really striking to me that there were some patients who would come back again and again after traumatic injury. Thinking about how we treat other conditions that are not trauma — for example, heart disease — if I had a heart attack, blockage of my coronary blood vessels supplying my heart, I would today get a stent and get antithrombotic, antiplatelet therapy to reopen my heart. But if at the same time it was discovered that I had high cholesterol, I was overweight, I had a sedentary lifestyle, I smoked, those risk factors would also be addressed as part of my holistic recovery.

For trauma, we don't treat it that way; for the most part, we treat it as an event. Something happened, and we will take care of you.

But we don't look at all the other factors that put you at risk in the first place. And because we often don't do that, when people leave the hospital, the four walls of the emergency department or the trauma center, their risk factors haven't changed. Why would we think that they're not going to be re-injured again? So bringing that framing has been a very fundamental part of my both professional journey and my academic journey.

NL: And those paired interests eventually brought you to your role in Chicago?

SR: In many ways, I've been preparing my entire career to be in Chicago. My current role combines both my technical interest in helping people using my skills and training as a surgeon, but also the social drivers of health and healthcare disparities.

All of those things culminated in a knock on the door where the chair of the Department of Surgery at University of Chicago, said, "Hey, we have an opportunity to open a brand-new adult trauma center on the South Side of Chicago." Before that call in 2016, I did not know that there was no adult trauma center on the South Side of Chicago since 1991.

I've been here nine years now, and I love the city of Chicago. I love what I do; I love the patients I take care of; I love the community. I can't imagine doing anything else.

NL: Can you clarify what services a trauma center offers, as opposed to an emergency room?

SR: The distinction is that the emergency room, emergency ward, emergency department is a place. It's a place where people who are the most severely ill go to seek care. Now, in our healthcare system, people also seek care in the emergency department because they don't know where else to go. They may not have a primary care doctor, they may not have health insurance, so the ED becomes a place where they go.

A trauma center is not that. A trauma center is a system of care incorporating operating rooms, interventional radiology, social workers, anesthesiologists, trauma surgeons, orthopedic — basically a whole team of people that surround the individual and their injuries and try to restore them to health.

For traumatically injured patients, time is critical and minutes mean life or loss of function. Let's say you fell off your bicycle and you lacerated, or cut, your brachial artery, the artery that supplies your arm. If you don't go to a trauma center within a short period of time — minutes, maybe an hour max — you will likely die from that relatively straightforward injury.

The two things that trauma centers are very good at is stopping bleeding that will lead to death, and controlling complications of trauma. Those require a coordinated set of team members to do all those things in a short period of time.

In 1991, when there was no adult trauma center on the South Side, people who were injured on the South Side of Chicago would go to other adult trauma centers throughout the city. Chicago, as you know, is a pretty big city. You can drive for an hour and still be in Chicago. It's hard for me to calculate the number of lives lost [because of the time it took to reach a trauma center].

That's exactly what happened to a kid by the name of Damien Turner. He was an 18-year-old community activist advocating for rent control and other social issues on the South Side, and unfortunately, he was shot on August 15, 2010, literally four blocks from the University of Chicago. He was transported to Northwestern, where he arrived dead. His mother said that, "If the South Side had an adult trauma center, my son would still be alive."

You can debate whether or not that may be true, but it's hard to debate the reality that time matters if you're shot and actively bleeding to death. Because Damien Turner led a youth group called Fearless Leading by the Youth, in his honor, that organization mobilized around a simple slogan: Trauma center now.

NL: What do you think people often get wrong about gun violence in Chicago?

SR: Chicago has an outsized influence in this country, for better or for worse, right? It's in the middle of the Midwest. It has very high visibility as the third largest city. We've had mayors and governors and presidential candidates and presidents of the United States. All those things have put a lot of spotlight on Chicago.

With this framing that Chicago has all this violence, this is all a Democratic city problem — urban blight became synonymous with Chicago, which is far from the truth. One of the things that made me write the book is to dispel those myths. But also to bring the stories to change the narrative that this problem of gun violence in America is not unsolvable, it's not intractable.

If we bring a public health lens, we can solve this problem, just like we've solved so many others.

NL: What would it mean to bring a public health lens?

SR: Going back to 2005, when I was in training in Boston, I was very struck by people who came back over and over again, injured. So we developed a violence recovery program that was hospital-based. The number of these programs have grown over the past 20 years to basically embed people with lived experiences — some of whom have been shot themselves, some of whom have been justice-involved — as credible messengers to help connect people with services, provide psychological support, and change the arc or trajectory of people's lives.

That's what I would call secondary prevention. Something has already happened; how can we lower the risk? It's no different than someone who has an opiate addiction, and we make sure that they have access to naloxone so that they don't overdose and die. That's a public health risk mitigation strategy. Having a team of credible, trusted messengers to help transition that person from injured to recovered is something that every hospital should invest in.

Ideally, we would also invest in programs to prevent people from being injured in the first place. Those are harder because they're not constrained within the four walls of an emergency department or the many, many walls of a health system. They're, if you will, societal.

I think that there is an important opportunity for surgeons in particular, plus emergency medicine, physicians, nurses, and other healthcare providers, to bring voice to the voiceless. Oftentimes, people who are injured who come into our emergency departments, they don't have the agency that a physician or nurse or other healthcare provider has. How can we bring their voice to the forefront, often realizing that people who are the closest to the problem can often be the source of some of those solutions?

Our opportunity for primary prevention that I see is that we could approach gun violence not as a criminal problem, but as a public health one, for which we need to determine risk factors, protective factors, mitigation factors to lower people's risk.

NL: What do secondary prevention programs look like for the patients?

SR: There are probably 80 or so hospital-based violence intervention programs across the country with a blueprint that's been coordinated by a nonprofit called the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention. It hires individuals who are not necessarily social workers or pastoral care (though they can be), but often people with lived experience from the community that can relate to and can connect with the person because they've either been in the situation themselves, or they're from the neighborhood, from the community.

That's the first thing, to create that trusted relationship. The next thing that happens is you're getting out of the hospital. What's your life look like afterwards? If you were on the margin and living paycheck to paycheck, and now you're not working, now you can't pay your rent. Where's the next meal gonna come from?

Turns out there's a whole host of community-based organizations that are doing great secondary prevention work. Our violence recovery team can be the connector.

It's not like we're creating new services; there is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, there is the Victims of Crime Act, which is a fund, but people don't know about it and don't know how to access it. A violence recovery team serves as a connective tissue or bridge to those services to get people access to things that they need to keep on progressing and recovering.

There are also a number of more established secondary prevention efforts. Oftentimes, street outreach organizations like Institute for Nonviolence Chicago have credibility to interrupt those cycles of violence. And there are others, like Cure Violence, that take people with lived experience, who are justice-involved, have spent time in prison or jail, and want to do something positive.

Those people are incredibly strong proponents; they don't want their son, their brother to be injured like they were injured. Those people can be important interrupters to the cycle of violence. They know many of the people in the community that are involved, and sometimes, it's literally a conversation to prevent a retaliatory shooting.

With that framing, you take folks who have been injured, shot themselves or [who have] shot others, and you wrap around a set of services to take them from the illegal economy into the legal economy. That might involve trauma-informed care, cognitive behavioral therapy, and skills development. I think those are all things that have evolved very intentionally in the city of Chicago over the past decade.

NL: We're currently seeing social support being weakened at the federal level. Do you see that as a place for cities to step up in new ways?

SR: In Chicago, I'll give a specific example for the community violence intervention ecosystem. The civic business community have put their money where their mouth is. They've put in $100 million over the past several years; that's new funding that wasn't there before.

Holistically, no matter what's going on at the federal, state, municipal, local level, at the end of the day, it is about the human connection, right? It's about what we do for the person next to us. It's what we do for our neighbor. If your neighbor is sick and shut in, do we actually show up for our neighbor and say, "Hey, can I bring you a cup of soup?" How much does that really cost?

You don't need the federal government to do that.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Fifty years after Southern California's Salton Sea formed due to an engineering mishap in 1905, the giant salt lake became a booming vacation destination. Nicknamed the "miracle in the desert," the lake offered watersports and boating, while its shores were lined with yacht clubs, vacation homes, shops and nightclubs.

However, by the 1970s, the Salton Sea had begun shrinking due to high evaporation rates and flow reductions in the Colorado River, which had fed the lake. The lake's retreat exposed muddy sediments imbued with pesticides and other agricultural chemicals from large cotton, alfalfa and vegetable farms in the Imperial and Coachella valleys.

Today, the Salton Sea is a ghost of its former self, but the lake looms larger in the lives of local residents than ever before. Its shrinking shoreline releases toxic particles so tiny that they can penetrate deep into human lungs and enter the bloodstream. Exposure to these particles can raise the risk of a range of respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, including asthma, impaired lung function and heart attacks.

The communities most affected by this pollution are low-income, racial and ethnic minorities that, for socioeconomic reasons, cannot move away or adequately protect themselves.

A study published July 1 in the journal BMC Environmental Science reveals just how bad living conditions are for some communities near the Salton Sea. The authors examined air quality and respiratory health in Latinx and Indigenous Mexican families in the Eastern Coachella Valley, finding that families must change their daily routines to protect themselves from harmful dust events.

To find out more, we spoke with study co-author Ann Cheney, a professor of social medicine, population and public health at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine. Cheney, who oversees a free clinic for underserved minority communities in the Eastern Coachella Valley, described the daily struggles of families living near the Salton Sea and some of the measures that are needed to improve their quality of life.

Sascha Pare: The Salton Sea has shrunk by 65 square miles (168 square kilometers) and dropped by 14.6 feet (4.5 meters) over the past few decades. Why is that, and how does it affect local residents?

Ann Cheney: The Salton Sea occupies an ancient lake bed that, over the millennia, has been filled, and then dried up again. In the early 1900s, because of an engineering mistake, part of that lake bed filled, and it created the Salton Sea. [Editor's note: The sea formed when Colorado River floodwater breached an irrigation canal that was under construction in the Imperial Valley.]

Then, over decades, there were changes in the composition of the sea because the main source of water was agricultural runoff. The sea is located in the inland southern Californian desert region. In the 1940s and 1950s, there was a boom in agribusiness. This remade the landscape, and all of those chemicals and pesticides from the agricultural land seeped into the lake bed.

With [water management] decision-making around the Colorado River waters, that then meant that another source of water, which had been the Colorado River, ceased to enter into the Salton Sea. 2018 was the last time that water from the Colorado River touched the Salton Sea.

Because there is the primary source of agricultural runoff going into the sea and no new fresh water coming in — and with climate change [boosting evaporation] — it's created this environment in which you have a drying sea. Over decades, there have been chemicals and heavy metals seeping into the playa [dry lake bed], and now it's exposed. It's the desert, so there's a lot of dust storms, and the winds take the exposed playa and bring it into the air, which is then breathed by the local residents.

For me, what's most concerning is that the local residents who are most affected by the poor air quality are Latinx and Indigenous Mexicans, many of whom are undocumented and have very little political voice.

SP: You asked caregivers of children with asthma and other respiratory conditions to document their experiences of living near the Salton Sea. What did those submissions reveal?

AC: When I first started doing this work, I thought about it as solely the Salton Sea [affecting people]. But it's the environment in which the Salton Sea is one contributor to poor air quality [that impacts local residents].

The caregivers perceive the Salton Sea as being a contributor to the poor respiratory health of their children. But also, this area has many disenfranchised communities that are interspersed on tribal lands, and there are different rules on these tribal lands. There is a lot of dumping and a lot of burning of trash. What we heard from caregivers is that it's not just the exposure to the toxic dust, but also the fires [that are causing issues].

In that article that we published [July 1 in BMC Environmental Science], there was an incident in which there was a fire — I think it was related to tire burning — in very close proximity to one of the apartments that one of the caregivers and her family were living in. These things happen commonly. So, from the perspective of the caregivers, there are multiple different factors that contribute to their children's poor respiratory health.

SP: Can you take me through a day in the life of one of these caregivers, based on the evidence you gathered?

AC: It could be a beautiful day. The caregiver walks outside. It's sunny; everything's beautiful. In my opinion, this environment is very beautiful. Maybe, later on in the day, there is a pickup of wind, and there's dust. Let's say the caregiver is a mother with a child who has asthma who's at school. The children are outside on the playground. Her child is going to be highly affected by the dust that's being picked up by the wind. What's going to happen is, the school will bring the child inside, and if the child doesn't have too severe of a respiratory distress, the child could stay at school. Otherwise, the caregiver will get called and have to come to school and pick up their child.

Most folks in that region are farm laborers. They're not owners of farms; they are the ones who are working the land for the owners. Many individuals who are living in very impoverished conditions — for instance, the Purépecha community, which is the Indigenous community we worked with that's from Michoacán in Mexico — are pickers. They are in the lowest-social-ranking jobs within farm labor, and, in part, that's because they may be monolingual Purépecha. That means they don't speak Spanish or English, and that limits the type of employment they can have.

In a situation where you have this very precarious employment, if your child needs to be taken out of school and you are the caregiver, then you risk losing your job. That's the type of dynamic that's at play among many of the families that we work with.

SP: What are the long-term consequences of living day after day in these conditions?

AC: It's a really poor quality of life for children, especially. There's a picture that a caregiver took of her child that I think exemplifies so well the experience of children and their quality of life. The child is just lying on the floor in their home. The photo illustrates the child's lethargy and the boredom and the fact that caregivers often choose to have their children stay inside, because they can better control the indoor air quality. They can't necessarily control what's going to happen outside, but they can control indoor air quality.

The problem is, if the family doesn't have the resources to have an air filter to clean and purify the air, for instance, then what we've noticed in our research is that there can still be very poor indoor air quality, particularly when there's more extreme weather events like fires or dust storms.

With the research, I anticipated very poor quality of life for children. But what I understood less was that it also means poor quality of life for their families, and particularly for mothers, who are often the primary caregivers. It really affects their mental health and well-being.

SP: Currently, are there any measures in place to protect these families?

AC: There has been Assembly Bill 617, which was a measure to engage members of the communities that are most affected by the Salton Sea environment in a process of mitigating the effects of the sea. From that, there have been a lot of community meetings. Years ago, I started to participate as one of the advisory board members. It became a bit frustrating — and I think this illustrates the history of frustration in this region — because government entities come in with resources and money. But it's very top-down, and often the community gets upset and frustrated because they don't see these agencies making changes in the community. There's a lot of talk and very little action.

There are also monies that have been dedicated to Salton Sea restoration, and there's been an ongoing conversation about a 10-year plan to mitigate the effects of the drying of the sea. But the focus has been primarily on wildlife, not human health. Only more recently have there been conversations about human health and the public health implications.

For individuals who have a specific diagnosis of asthma, they may qualify for retrofitting. That means they will receive money through their health insurance to be able to invest in improving their home. That might mean taking out carpet [which can capture dust], or maybe fortifying windows or doors ‪—‬ things like that. But it's a really small amount of money. It can help to a certain degree, but I think in this community, in particular, they may not always know how to navigate the healthcare system to get access to that type of resource. In addition, the most vulnerable people in this community don't have access to health insurance.

SP: What more could be done to improve people's quality of life in this community?

AC: We installed air-quality monitors in people's homes, and we spent a lot of time collaborating with communities in this region. Some live in apartment complexes; some live in single-family homes. But the majority live in mobile home parks, in which they're living in very old, dilapidated trailers. The land is dirt. It's an area that is very impoverished.

So, when I think about these communities, in particular, they can't protect themselves from the external environment. In terms of policies, [I wonder] how we can put money toward building housing that is not trailers and can really protect people from the dust. Right now, the wind is bringing dust into the homes. We need to find ways to actually keep the homes sealed.

SP: The Salton Sea is a hotspot for lithium, and although there are currently no active lithium mines in the region, policymakers and private companies are investigating the sea's potential to host one. How might lithium mining affect the families you worked with?

AC: That conversation's been going on for several years now. At the moment, it's not as much a community concern, because there's been very little movement [to open mines]. There was a lot of action and movement about three or four years ago. But it's been a few years since they've been testing the prototype, and it doesn't seem like it's gone to scale, where they would have been able to commercialize it.

Initially, the community was quite upset, because it's just another example of the lands being exploited and other people benefiting. Typically, the beneficiaries are individuals who are not originally from the community and who have professional degrees. They get the resources, and they get to make decisions about the resources. Then, the conversation was, "Well, but if we have this type of business coming in, then it can create jobs." But we know that it creates jobs for individuals who have professional degrees, or they'll have to get some type of training; they're not jobs for farmworkers or individuals who are undocumented.

It takes a lot of water to do lithium mining, so that also has implications for the continuation of the shrinking of the Salton Sea.

SP: Other lakes around the U.S., including Utah's Great Salt Lake, are shrinking and exposing toxic sediments that are then blown into residential areas. Do those drying lakes have similar effects on local communities?

AC: There is a film director [Abby Ellis from around the Great Salt Lake] who, I think two years ago, came to the Eastern Coachella Valley and met with myself and my team members. She said, "I want to get a sense of what's going on here, because this is essentially where we are going to be 10 or 15 years from now."

I had the opportunity to very briefly chat with her, but also view the trailer for her documentary. One of the distinctions between the communities surrounding the Great Salt Lake and the Salton Sea is the color of the skin of those living around these bodies of water. In Utah, it seems to be more so individuals who maybe are middle class, or have a certain access to resources — people who can have a political voice and organize and say, "We don't want this to happen." It will be interesting to see if there can be more change in communities where there are more affluent people living near these bodies of water.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

The skeleton of a wolf or bat you admire at the natural history museum may look pristine, but it wasn't always that way ‪—‬ there's a good chance flesh-eating beetles helped prepare those bones for display. For decades, many museums have relied on colonies of dermestid beetles to strip soft tissue, like skin and muscles, from skeletons. Unlike the harsh chemicals that would otherwise be used for bone preparation, these beetles can be gentler and clean hard-to-reach areas. But these colonies are a hassle to keep up, and escaped beetles can even be dangerous for valuable museum specimens that don't need their skin removed. Now, researchers may have found an even better biological cleanup crew.

In a new study published July 1 in the journal PLOS One, scientists found that superworms (Zophobas morio) — large beetle larvae commonly sold as pet food — can clean skeletons just as effectively while offering practical advantages. The larvae removed soft tissue from animals ranging from tiny bats to a 9-pound (4.2 kilograms) wolf without damaging even the most delicate bones.

Two of the paper's authors, Niloofar Alaei Kakhki, a postdoctoral researcher at the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart in Germany, and Morteza Monfared, a researcher at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran, answered our questions via email about what makes superworms unique and how they could be used in laboratories and museums.

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry: Why are these critters called "superworms?" What makes them different from other beetle larvae?

Niloofar Alaei Kakhki and Morteza Monfared: Compared with the larvae of many other beetles, Zophobas morio larvae are much larger, which is one of the reasons they are so effective at removing soft tissue from bones.

What makes them truly unique, however, is their life cycle. Most beetle larvae pupate automatically once they reach the appropriate size. In contrast, superworms require an additional trigger: They must be isolated individually before they will pupate and develop into adult beetles. As long as they remain together in crowded conditions, they stay in the larval stage for several months.

This characteristic provides a major advantage for skeleton preparation. Because the larvae remain larvae for an extended period, they can be used repeatedly for cleaning specimens without rapidly developing into adult beetles. After each cleaning cycle, they can simply be fed a vegetable-based diet, allowed to recover, and then used again.

This also makes them safer than beetles commonly used for skeleton preparation, such as Dermestes. Adult dermestid beetles can reproduce, and females may lay eggs on ‪—‬ or even inside ‪—‬ skeletal specimens. If eggs or larvae are accidentally introduced into museum collections, they can become a serious pest and damage valuable specimens. Since superworms do not develop into adults unless they are intentionally isolated, this risk is greatly reduced, making the method safer for museum collections.

KHC: How did you figure out that the worms could clean the skeletons? Was that surprising?

NAK and MM: Several years ago, we started keeping a colony of Zophobas morio larvae (superworm) as live food for birds. As bird-watchers, we were often asked to help care for injured wild birds, so maintaining our own colony was more practical than purchasing larvae repeatedly. We fed the larvae mainly with vegetable scraps, such as cucumber, potato and banana peels.

One day, we ran out of vegetable waste. After lunch, we placed a leftover chicken bone with a small amount of meat still attached into the colony. To our surprise, the larvae gathered around it almost immediately and removed the remaining tissue with remarkable speed. Watching hundreds of larvae work together so efficiently was fascinating, and it immediately made us wonder whether they could be useful for something beyond animal feed.

At the same time, we were volunteering at the Zoology Museum of Ferdowsi University (ZMFUM), where preparing skeletal specimens was one of our regular responsibilities. We had experience with conventional preparation methods, including manual cleaning, boiling and burial. Although effective, these methods were often time-consuming and carried the risk of damaging delicate bones or losing small skeletal elements.

After observing how efficiently the larvae cleaned the chicken bone, we decided to test whether they could also prepare skeletal specimens. The first trials were remarkably successful. Within only a few hours, the larvae removed the soft tissues while leaving even delicate bones intact. Seeing the quality of the cleaned specimens was genuinely surprising and convinced us that this approach had real potential.

From that point on, whenever suitable animal specimens became available, we continued testing the method under different conditions, gradually refining it and optimizing the protocol. Over the following years, these observations evolved into the standardized, efficient and safe skeleton preparation method presented in our study. Yes, we were genuinely surprised. We already knew that superworms could consume a wide variety of organic materials, but we did not expect them to clean skeletons so quickly, so thoroughly, and with so little damage to even the most delicate bones.

KHC: How do these superworms compare to other skeleton-cleaning products, like chemical cleaners? Are the worms better or worse at this task?

NAK and MM: Based on our experience, superworms offer several important advantages over existing skeleton preparation methods.

Compared with dermestid beetles, one of the biggest advantages is colony management. Because superworms only pupate when they are isolated individually, their life cycle can be controlled much more easily. As long as they are kept together, they remain as larvae and continue cleaning specimens. This greatly reduces the risk of accidentally introducing adult beetles or their eggs into museum collections, which is a major concern when working with dermestid beetles.

Compared with traditional methods such as boiling, manual cleaning or burial, the larvae also save a great deal of time and effort. Manual cleaning, especially for delicate specimens, can take many hours and always carries the risk of breaking or losing small bones. In contrast, the larvae can remove soft tissues efficiently while preserving even fragile skeletal elements.

Every preparation method has its own strengths and limitations, and the best choice depends on the type of specimen and the goals of the researcher. However, based on our experience using a wide range of preparation techniques, we believe that superworms provide an efficient, safe and practical alternative for many museum and research applications.

Rather than replacing every existing method, we see this technique as a valuable new tool that museums, universities and research laboratories can adopt and adapt according to their own needs.

KHC: On average, how much does it cost to use the worms?

NAK and MM: It is difficult to estimate an average cost because prices vary considerably between countries and suppliers. Rather than the initial purchase price, the long-term maintenance cost is what makes this method attractive.

A colony can be established from a relatively small number of superworms. Once the larvae reach the appropriate stage, a portion of them can be isolated to pupate and develop into adult beetles. These adults reproduce and generate new larvae, allowing the colony to become self-sustaining over time.

The equipment required is also quite simple. The colony can be maintained in plastic or glass containers with wheat bran as the bedding, at approximately 25 degrees Celsius [77 degrees Fahrenheit]. Between skeleton preparation cycles, the larvae can be fed inexpensive vegetable scraps, allowing them to recover before being used again. Larvae can remain in the larval stage for several months, meaning the same colony can be used repeatedly.

Another advantage is that the colony size can easily be adjusted to meet the needs of different users. A museum or laboratory processing a large number of specimens can maintain a larger colony, while smaller collections can operate with far fewer larvae.

Overall, we find the method is relatively inexpensive to establish and maintain, especially when compared with the time, labor and specialized facilities often required for traditional skeleton preparation methods.

KHC: Do you envision museums and laboratories implementing these superworm cleaners in the future? Why or why not? Is the cost worth it?

NAK and MM: We believe this method has the potential to be adopted by many museums, universities and research laboratories, particularly those that regularly prepare skeletal specimens.

One of its greatest advantages is that it combines efficiency, safety and relatively low operating costs. Compared with some traditional approaches, it requires only basic equipment and does not rely on expensive chemicals or specialized enzymatic treatments. This makes it especially attractive for smaller museums and institutions with limited resources.

We also see advantages in terms of colony management. Because the life cycle of superworms can be controlled, the risk of introducing damaging museum pests is much lower than with some other biological cleaning methods. At the same time, the larvae can be reused repeatedly over several months, making the system practical for long-term use.

Ultimately, whether this method is worthwhile depends on the needs of each institution. However, based on our experience, we believe it offers an excellent balance between cost, efficiency, safety and specimen quality. Perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects of this approach is that it works with a natural biological process rather than against it. Instead of relying on harsh treatments, the soft tissues become a food source that supports the growth of another organism, creating a sustainable cycle while producing clean skeletal specimens. We believe this is one of the most appealing aspects of the method.

KHC: Are there any fun stories from your research you can share?

NAK and MM: We have collected quite a few memorable stories over the years!

One of the funniest happened while we were experimenting with burial as a skeleton preparation method. We buried the head of a Persian onager (Equus hemionus) on the university campus. Unfortunately, the specimen had already begun to decompose and had a very strong smell. Even after it was buried, we knew exactly where it was because that part of the campus still smelled terrible. We avoided walking past it whenever possible, but anyone who happened to pass by immediately noticed the odor. At one point, campus security even came over to ask what we were doing, probably wondering why we were digging a hole and burying something on university grounds!

Another memorable story involved our superworms colony itself. In the early days, we kept the larvae in our office at the Zoology Museum (ZMFUM). Almost everyone who entered the room was startled by the sight of thousands of large larvae constantly moving around in their containers. Many people kept their distance at first. But over time, as we explained their biology and demonstrated how useful they were for our research, people's reactions changed. Some visitors even became genuinely interested in the colony, and a few who were initially afraid eventually asked to hold the larvae themselves.

Those moments reminded us that science is not only about experiments and data; it can also change the way people think about animals that are often misunderstood.

KHC: If there's one thing you want our readers to take away from your work, what would it be?

NAK and MM: If there is one message we hope readers take away from our work, it is that nature often has far more to offer than we initially realize.

Many organisms are known for a single, well-established application. Zophobas morio, for example, is widely recognized as animal feed and, more recently, for its ability to consume certain plastics. Our work shows that the same species can also provide an entirely different and unexpected solution to a practical problem in museum science.

This reminds us that the first known application of an organism is not necessarily its most valuable one. Sometimes, its second or even third application can have an even greater impact. Discovering those possibilities begins with curiosity, careful observation and a willingness to ask new questions.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Extreme coastal flooding events are occurring far more frequently in our warming world than ever before, threatening countless communities that will only become more vulnerable as climate change intensifies.

A recent study found that once-in-a-century flooding events now strike on our planet about once a decade. The study, published June 10 in the journal Nature Climate Change, also found that human-driven climate change has quadrupled the frequency of coastal sea level extremes since 1900.

The findings were released alongside another study by a separate team, published in the journal Science Advances, that found human-caused sea level rise was clearly measurable at 97% of sites sampled around the world, and was responsible for around 58% of the observed daily extreme water level exceedances between 2000 and 2018. In other words, human activities are the primary drivers behind sea level extremes — which include storm surges, high tides and rising sea level anomalies.

As the ocean's potential to devastate coastal communities surges, Live Science spoke with Sönke Dangendorf, lead author of the Nature Climate Change study, to learn more about what's to come. Here's what he had to say.

Patrick Pester: How do you separate human-driven sea level rise from natural forces?

Sönke Dangendorf: The absolute basis for doing these kinds of investigations is to work with observations, but observations are unfortunately sparse. We have a few more than 100 tide gauges [distributed worldwide] that offer long, century-scale records of sea level change since the early 20th century. We see that sea levels are changing at those locations, but we cannot tell a whole lot about what is happening elsewhere. So, what we can do is use the same climate models that we use to produce future projections of sea level change.

If you compare observations with the models, then the models need to be able to reproduce what the observations have shown. That was the first step we did, and indeed we proved in this study that the climate models are capable of reproducing observed climate. The nice thing with climate models then is that if you are able to reproduce what has been observed, you can start doing experiments. For instance, you can keep greenhouse gases constant in the modeling and then assess the influence of natural climate variability on the changes that we have observed. That's what we did in the study.

We found that we have seen already a 12-fold increase on average globally in what used to be a once-in-100-year event in 1900. And when we do these forcing experiments, we have also seen that anthropogenic forcing [human-driven change], in particular since the 1970s, has become the dominant force.

PP: What does this mean for coastal communities around the world?

SD: A couple of centimeters of sea level rise doesn't sound like a whole lot in theory, but if you live along the coast, it hits you much harder than you might think. Just an example: I used to live along the U.S. East Coast in Norfolk, Virginia. The community was built along the water, and they used to be fine in the 1950s and 1960s; they wouldn't see flooding at all, or maybe just once every five or six years. But due to sea level rise, what happens now is that high tide leads to flooding. You see flooded streets, and that affects your commute, so people increasingly cannot make it to work.

It affects your daily life suddenly. And then it makes it very hard for you and your coastal community because you have increasing insurance costs — the accumulated costs of these events can easily be as much as a major hurricane making landfall. So, this is a daily experience that many people already have, and it's a direct impact of sea level rise.

With respect to what we assessed in these more extreme events, people may absorb a once-in-a-100-year event once in their lifetime. They may experience something like a Storm Sandy, and they may be able to recover from that, but if you think about recovering from that basically every eight years — the frequency of these events nowadays compared to 1900 — that's of course way more difficult and not feasible for many people.

PP: What can we do?

SD: We can adapt. The silver lining here is that we have shown humans are the dominant forcing factor behind these changes. That's the silver lining because it means if we react, we can do something about it.

The reaction to changes in climate is often delayed, so we have sea level rise that we are already committed to. For instance, if you look into projections, they all agree with respect to what happens until around 2060, independently of how much greenhouse gases are emitted. There's no way around that. We could stop emitting greenhouse gases today, and we would still experience it. So, we need to adapt to that sea level rise, but if we mitigate climate change, if we stop emitting greenhouse gases, then we can avoid dangerous sea level rise, and that's very important.

PP: What will the world look like in 2060 with the committed sea level rise?

SD: According to the last IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, what used to be a once-in-a-100-year event in the present day will occur annually at 19% to 31% of tide gauge locations by 2050. So, at about a quarter of the locations, you will experience these once-in-a-100-year events annually, and that is something that is just mind-blowing.

The changes are happening much quicker in low-latitude locations. The reason is that in the tropics you typically have a less variable climate. You don't have these massive swings all the time. For instance, in the North Sea, we have a storm season, and we have huge tide ranges. We are already adapted to pretty massive changes of multiple meters, so a couple of centimeters of sea level rise do not play out that hard, but in the tropics, where it's more calm, it makes a huge difference.

As an analogy, think about two hurdle runners. You have one hurdle runner that's compared to the tropics; he jumps very consistently but always below the hurdle, so he never makes it over. Then you have another hurdle runner that's the North Sea type of guy. His jumps are very variable. Sometimes he's very high and makes it over that hurdle, but very often he also jumps very low. Now think about lowering that hurdle, which is comparable to increasing sea levels. Suddenly, that hurdle runner who is very consistent makes it over all of the time, while the guy from the North Sea may jump over the hurdle a couple more times, but he also still has the very extreme lows. So, the constant jumper is way more sensitive to these changes.

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

On April 6, the four crewmembers of NASA's Artemis II mission swooped around the far side of the moon in their Orion spacecraft, disappearing from Earth's sight and losing all contact with humanity for roughly 40 minutes.

At the same time, some 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away, Chris White, the mission's lead communications officer, was nervously pacing the halls of NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, waiting for the chance to do his job again.

"It was all nerves," White, the lead integrated communications officer (INCO) on Artemis II, told Live Science. In addition to maintaining communication with the Orion spacecraft (an impossible task while the moon blocked every signal), the INCO team also controlled its exterior cameras — a job White had previously done for the International Space Station (ISS).

The team knew for over a year what Orion's lunar flyby would entail, and which shots the cameras should capture. They had sent a checklist of nearly 300 commands to Orion that morning, telling the cameras exactly what to do after the spacecraft vanished behind the moon. All that remained was to wait.

After 40 minutes, bits of telemetry data started popping up on White's monitor as the Orion crew reemerged safely from behind the moon. Voice contact soon followed. But it would still take another day for Orion's flyby photos to traverse the space between the moon and Houston. When White finally opened the file the next morning, his body failed him.

"I opened a photo — the eclipse photo — and I couldn't breathe," White said. "I was like, 'There's no way that this turned out this well on the first try.'"

The INCO team's incredible Orion spacecraft photos have now been viewed by tens of millions of Earthlings. Live Science recently spoke with White to get the inside story of the images and the entire Artemis II mission as it was seen from NASA mission control.

Brandon Specktor: In a nutshell, what was your job on the Artemis II mission?

Chris White: During the mission, the INCO console manages all of the communication systems on the spacecraft, as the name kind of implies. We handle not just the video and the camera system but also the onboard audio system — which was the first flight for that — the system for radio communication and the optical communication system, which was a laser system on Artemis II. We also handle a couple of other minor systems.

BS: What was the vibe during liftoff?

CW: So, for liftoff, I was in the back, in a support room. The vibe was intense. Everybody was laser-focused on the task at hand. During simulations leading up to it, we had fake, simulated CGI views [of liftoff] to give us an idea of what we were going to see. I always thought, "Man, it's going to look so much cooler in real time." But then during liftoff, I looked up from my console screen zero times to look at the live video. So I didn't see a lot of that footage until the next day, when I had a chance to breathe.

The INCO team was basically flat-out busy for at least the first three flight days. For a lot of my team, it wasn't until after flight day three where things — and I'm going to use air quotes — loosely "calmed down." I don't think any of us truly relaxed until the vehicle was safely in the water.

BS: Let's talk about the lunar flyby. What was your experience watching along with the crew as they got closer and closer to the moon?

CW: It was incredible. I've seen the moon through the ISS cameras, and I'd watched the moon, over the course of the previous five flight days, slowly get larger and larger. But there was something logarithmic — almost like it just got really large very quickly on flight day six as we got close to the moon.

And the moon looked wrong, which sounds kind of crazy to say. We're so used to the way that the moon looks from our perspective here on the Earth, that when the vehicle was coming at it from an angle, you could see more of the backside of the moon. So you're in awe of it approaching and getting larger and realizing what's about to happen ‪—‬ but also my brain hurt trying to reconcile what I was seeing, because it didn't look correct. The shape and texture were different than what my brain expected.

BS: And the colors too, based on what the astronauts said. Did you notice anything unusual about the moon's coloration?

CW: It was hard to tell. The bandwidth limitations of being that far away from Earth made it hard to distinguish a lot of those finer details. But there was a moment where we looked at it and we were like, "I think we can tweak the exposure on this." It was a little too dark, and then we bumped it up a little bit. And all of a sudden, these muted grays became a little bit more brown. I was not expecting to be able to see that from our cameras.

You see it much more in some of the high-res photos that the crew took. But it was honestly shocking to see how much more color shows up even just a little bit as you get closer.

BS: As you were doing that flyby, did you have a strict checklist of shots you had to take?

CW: Yeah, absolutely. Flyby was a heavily choreographed event for the Orion cameras, as well as the crew and the science community. But we had started working on that plan well over one year earlier, and we knew exactly what shots we wanted and when we wanted them. The timing of all that shifts slightly, depending on exactly when you launch. So we had a framework in place, and then we just tweaked the timing in the 24 hours leading up to the events.

I think it was something like 290 total commands over the course of eight hours. We just scripted and time-tagged and put them on the vehicle, so it just clicked through them.

BS: How does that work during the eclipse phase, when you were out of contact?

CW: So we knew when Earthset ‪—‬ and, therefore, the start of the loss of signal (LOS) ‪—‬ would be and when Earthrise would be. And so we had the cameras flip into kind of a time-lapse mode at that point and then take a 30-second interval time lapse as the Earth got smaller and smaller and smaller behind the moon. All of that was scripted.

And then, behind the moon, during the LOS, it continued to take photos at a slower pace. I think it was like once every few minutes. We had all that on a timer, basically.

BS: How soon after the lunar flyby did you get to see the images?

CW: Luckily, we had a great optical comm pass that same night. So all those photos came down via laser to the Earth, and I saw them the next day. I didn't see them in the moment; I saw them the next day.

And I opened that photo — the eclipse photo — and I couldn't breathe. I was like, "There's no way that this turned out this well on the first try."

BS: Is that the photo that stands out most to you from the flyby?

CW: Yeah, it absolutely is. A lot of the photos you take in space, people are like, "Oh, where are the stars?" And it's because you have to expose the camera to the very bright, shiny spacecraft in front of you, and all the stars fade away into the blackness in the background.

But because the sun was behind the moon, you have the moon in the foreground in focus, the sun kind of bleeding out from behind it. The stars and the planets are all there. You can see Venus; you can see Saturn; you can see Mars. And then you have the glow of the spacecraft — it's not lit by the sun, but by the Earth — in the foreground. It was an incredible photo.

BS: What were you guys doing during that loss-of-signal phase? What was the vibe like then?

CW: I was pacing around the control center. The INCO team is responsible for keeping communication with the vehicle as much as we can, and there's not really much that we can do about that when you put a celestial body between us and the crew.

It's all nerves. It's all of the, "Hey, did we configure everything correctly? Are communications going to come back on the other side?" So just to distract myself for the 40 minutes that we were at LOS, I just kind of walked around the building and chatted with other people, just to try to keep myself distracted.

It wasn't until about three or four minutes after Earthrise that we started getting stable video, and then the crew called down. And that was really when I breathed a sigh of relief, once I heard voice coming down from the vehicle again.

BS: Do you feel different after this mission?

CW: People keep asking me that. I don't know that I've had quite enough time to fully unpack the mission. But I think it's slowly sinking in that we just sent four people around the moon, literally further away from Earth than ever. And I think, not only did we change them and the flight control team from that experience, but I think we changed a lot of people's perceptions of the moon, which is awesome.

BS: Do you know what your role for Artemis III is going to be?

CW: I definitely still plan to be on the INCO team for Artemis III. I will not be the lead for that mission. But I definitely still plan to be on console and hope to take some even more incredible photos during that mission.

BS: Any closing thoughts?

CW: I just want to stress what a team effort this was. The vehicle cameras had a script and a plan that involved not just the INCO team. But to point these cameras, I have to get the solar arrays swung forward in a specific direction, so I have to coordinate with the power guys. I have to sometimes ask the GNC [guidance, navigation and control] team to rotate the vehicle itself, which is entirely different from how we do things on ISS. There was our imagery team handling camera settings and proper exposure. There's the engineers who developed these systems.

This was not just me and the INCO team on console. It was truly a full flight control team effort to get these.

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

Are you a NASA nerd? See how well you score on our Artemis quiz to find out!

Most archaeologists spend time digging in the dirt or piecing together broken artifacts or bones in the lab, attempting to make sense of the past in a painstakingly slow process. But others use that information — and a little ingenuity — to re-create the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of ancient societies through a practice called experimental archaeology.

In his book "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations" (Little, Brown and Co., 2025), author Sam Kean delves into the overloaded sensory world of experimental archaeology practitioners. Along the way, he learns to knap a stone tool like early Homo sapiens did, create an intricate hairstyle that would make a Roman woman proud, tattoo someone using ancient tools, play an Aztec ball game, and bake the kind of sourdough loaf that King Tut once ate.

Kean spoke with Live Science about his book, which was a finalist for the 2026 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and was named one of The New Yorker's best books of 2025.

Related: Read an excerpt from Kean's book, "Dinner with King Tut."

Kristina Killgrove: What intrigued you about experimental archaeology?

Sam Kean: There was sort of a conflict within me because, on the one hand, I really love the questions that archaeology brings up. There's some big, meaty questions about who we are as a species, how we spread across the Earth, how we changed as we spread across the Earth ‪—‬ these really important, big questions about human history. But whenever I would go to an actual archaeological site, it just seemed to me like the most boring work I could imagine. It's just people sitting around in the dirt with toothbrushes or dental picks or whatever, picking up potsherds, and it just seemed so tedious to me.

Experimental archaeology seemed like a lot more lively, sensory-rich field because archaeologists in this field are actually doing things. They're re-creating stone tools, making ancient foods. You can smell the past. So it was just a lot more exciting way for me to get into archaeology.

KK: Tell me about your research process for this book. Did you "embed" with archaeologists and participate in their experiments?

SK: Each chapter is set in a different time and place, so you're really immersed in a day in the life of that person. There was a lot of reading about traditional archaeology and what we've learned from that, because we have learned a lot from it. But then I would go talk to experimental archaeologists and go through the process of brain-tanning leather or getting on a ship that they would have sailed on, and I just experienced it in the way that they're doing their research and experienced it more like people would have in the past too.

KK: Did you have a favorite experiment that you learned about or a favorite archaeologist you embedded with?

SK: There's a guy out in Utah who built a trebuchet — a giant medieval catapult. It was about 30 or 40 feet [9 to 12 meters] tall, I think. And we just spent a lovely day flinging these giant garden stones around at this palisade that he had built, as a stand-in for a fort, essentially. And we just spent a day flinging these huge stones at this fort and watching it smash in and splinter the wood and try to destroy this little fort. Getting to pull the trigger on this catapult — it was just like this majestic dragon coming to life, almost, as it started to fling these balls. And it was like a whip cracking of the sling as it would fling the stone out. That was just a really lovely memory, partly because everything worked properly that day.

A lot of the book was actually me floundering around, failing to complete the projects or figuring out what I was doing wrong. And I think that was a good learning method. I did learn a lot by flailing around, probably more than I would have had I gotten things correct the first time immediately. But it was nice when things went right every once in a while. And the catapult was a good example of that.

KK: That sounds so cool! And in the excerpt that we are publishing on Live Science from your book "Dinner with King Tut," you talk to people who used ancient Egyptian mummification techniques on a real human body. What did you learn from talking to these people? And did you get to try mummifying a body yourself?

SK: Not a body, but I did do a little mummification myself. I didn't know this before I started writing the book, but the Egyptians mummified a lot of animals, a huge variety of animals, dozens of different types, and on a big, big scale. There's one grave site they found with something like 4 million bird mummies. So there have been a fair number of archaeologists in modern times who have tried to — and succeeded in — mummifying different animals, even though the Egyptians didn't write down a whole lot about the process. We don't know if it was lost to time or if it was just sort of a guild secret where they didn't write things down. So they would do this to learn about the mummification process with animals.

But, of course, the thing that really intrigues us about ancient Egypt are the human mummies. And everyone thought we couldn't actually make a human mummy until two guys did in the '90s. It was one Egyptologist [Bob Brier] and the guy who was in charge of the Maryland state anatomy board [Ronn Wade], who got to decide where cadavers went that had been donated to science. He decided this was a worthwhile project.

The donor remains anonymous, but he was a 76-year-old man from Baltimore who had died of a heart attack. They went all out to be authentic for this project. They went to Egypt to get the mineral natron that they would have used to mummify him. They had ancient tools made, and they went through all the steps that were known in mummification and turned this person into a mummy.

KK: Did these researchers learn more than what is in the historical records? What did they learn from doing this themselves?

SK: It was a controversial project. People said, when you donate your body to science, that's not a blank check to do whatever you want. Some people called it horrifying. And some people said that they didn't think it had any scientific value. I understand the ethical concerns, but I don't think it's true that we didn't learn anything.

One thing that sticks out in my mind that I was surprised about is how they used authentic tools. Archaeologists have found obsidian blades with mummies — those are volcanic glass — and they found copper tools associated with them. So, when these guys were trying to open the body up initially, it turned out that the copper blades they had were not good at all. They could not get through the skin and the muscle of the abdomen very well. The obsidian tools turned out to be much better at that task, which surprised me. I wouldn't have thought that the stone tools would have been better than the metal tools. That's something we wouldn't have learned had we not gone through the process.

Also, the iconic look of the mummy: It has retracted teeth and sparse hair and a forehead pulled very tight. Bob Brier, the Egyptologist involved, had seen a lot of mummies, and he always wanted to know, do they look like that because they've been sitting in Egypt, a dry environment, for 3,000 years, or is it the mummification process that gives them that look? And he said that even after about five weeks, when they took a peek at the body, they could tell it had that classic iconic mummy look. He said it looked exactly like Ramesses the Great to him. So we did learn things about the mummification process through this that we just wouldn't have known otherwise.

KK: That's amazing that this controversial experiment produced new knowledge. You mentioned you mummified something — tell me about it.

SK: I did mummify a fish for the book. That was kind of a fun process, and it was a surprisingly easy thing to do. You can rub the oils in, wrap them up, include little spells like they did back then. But the basic process is just using natron — which is baking soda and salt — and you just put the fish or whatever you want to mummify underneath this. Then it just does the work on its own.

KK: Then I guess the real question is, did you eat that fish that you mummified?

SK: No, but it's sitting on my shelf still as a little memento. I did accumulate quite a nice collection of artifacts and things – stone tools I made, I opened and ate an ostrich egg. I made tapa or kapa — which is a type of Polynesian bark cloth. So I did get to do and make and take home a lot of cool souvenirs from this.

KK: That's so fun! And your book is a little different from some other popular science books because you include these fictional narratives based in archaeological and historical fact. In the introduction, you call them a "form of time travel." Tell me a bit more about why you chose this unusual structure for the book and what you hope readers will get out of that.

SK: What I really value about experimental archaeology is that it's pretty immersive, especially the sensory aspects of it. You do get to feel — to some degree, at least — that you are there and that you are doing the things that people back then were doing. I thought that fiction would allow me to take that even one step further and really get in the minds and be in the world that those people lived in. So you get to wake up where they did, eat the foods that they did, and experience their society. Something like religion or their beliefs in the supernatural or spiritual beliefs are not going to be amenable to experimental archaeology, but you can do that in fiction. And so it allowed me to take it one step further, and it was just fun to try and fun to write as well.

KK: Is experimental archaeology going to be something you cover more in a future book?

SK: I think I could do it if I wanted to revisit it because there were other cultures that, for various reasons, I decided to not include. People are doing work in ancient Greece, but that didn't make it into the book. I do have one chapter in sub-Saharan Africa tens of thousands of years ago, but that was the Cradle of Humankind. I could certainly do other aspects of that. There's definitely fodder out there for another book, especially as these techniques get more accepted. It has been heartening to see that people are more accepting of experimental archaeology, and even people on traditional digs now are running maybe an experiment or two. So they're not going all the way to experimental archaeology, but they're incorporating these practices.

It's just such a fun field. I really would encourage people to get involved with it and to try it out, because you can do a lot of basic things like gather acorns and try to make a recipe out of those. Or research some ancient Roman or Greek food and try to re-create that stuff ‪—‬ just little experiments and things you can do to get people excited about it and bring the past alive in a new way.

And I have a new book coming out in the fall called "The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished From History" [National Geographic, 2026]. It's about the greatest lost treasures in history and has some interesting archaeological angles in there.

KK: I'll look forward to reading that. Thanks for chatting with me!

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

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NL: What are some factors that shape that dynamic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BS: Which feed will you be watching most closely?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It takes a dozen or so hours for the mushroom to kick in. Then, the hallucinations are unlike any others known to science.

On this trip, there are none of the heightened colors, breathing or pulsing objects, nor geometrical patterns typically reported by users of psychedelic substances. In fact, the hundreds of people who enter clinics in China's Yunnan province during each year's summer mushroom season tend to say their vision is clear and largely unaltered.

Well, aside from one major exception: nearly all users see visions of hundreds to thousands of highly-rendered miniature people, dressed in bright colors like elves, gnomes, clowns or other fairy-like figures. The hallucinated sprites wriggle under doors, dive off spoons into soup bowls and make lewd and mischievous gestures, among other strange behaviors.

These visions are reported by 90% of those who come down sick after consuming a single species of bolete mushroom, called Lanmaoa asiatica, in its raw or undercooked form. Yet despite decades of anecdotal reports, the fantastical claims were dismissed by western scientists as a form of "mushroom madness" — until Colin Domnauer, an undergraduate student taking an optional university module on funguses, caught wind of the rumors.

Domnauer, now a doctoral student at the University of Utah, made finding and analyzing the mushroom the purpose of his PhD, a goal that took him to China and the northern Philippines on the trail of a hallucinogenic compound that is likely completely unknown to science.

Live Science sat down with Domnauer to discuss L. asiatica, the bizarre revelations it could hold for how we perceive reality, and the barely-discovered fungal universe that surrounds us. Here's what he had to say.

Ben Turner: Let's start by introducing this mushroom. What is Lanmaoa asiatica?

Colin Domnauer: Lanmaoa asiatica is a species of mushroom from Yunnan, China. It was described to science only 10 years ago in 2015, so it's a relatively newly discovered species, but it was actually being sold in the markets in Yunnan for decades before scientists realized it was its own species.

Through the work I've been doing, we've come to the conclusion that this species is responsible for really strange reports of hallucinations that people are getting after eating wild mushrooms in China, and elsewhere in the world as well.

It's a species that grows with pine trees. It has a symbiotic relationship called a mycorrhizal relationship and so, for that reason, it's something that can't be cultivated artificially. And it's still only found in its wild habitats, so it's difficult to distribute in that sense. But it's still relatively common and popular in the places that it is found.

BT: The mushroom is growing in notoriety because of the uniquely bizarre hallucinations it's reported to cause. Let’s say I ingest a significant dose of raw or undercooked L. asiatica right now, what's my next week gonna look like?

CD: Alright, so we don't know exactly the amount of mushroom that's required to get this effect, because in all these cultures they're eating it accidentally, or they're eating it just as food, but they're not intentionally pursuing the psychoactive effects. These effects are seen as an accidental side effect of eating too much, or if they're not cooked enough.

But if you do have a substantial amount, what we do know is that after about 12 to 24 hours you're going to start getting Lilliputian hallucinations, which is a clinically defined syndrome that's characterized by seeing little people or animals all around your environment.

And these aren't like some vague hallucinations, these are like three-dimensionally-rendered, highly-detailed figures inhabiting your exterior world. And they're also interacting with objects in the real world — like crawling up chairs and tables or under doorways, people say. So there's a very strange and specific type of reality-grounded, projected hallucination.

Even to this day science doesn't understand what's going on in the brain to cause this, or how to treat it, and this mushroom is the only thing that we currently know of to reliably produce this effect.

BT: Okay, so immediately there's a lot I want to ask you. Firstly, these tiny people are pretty reliably reported, right?

CD: At first scientists dismissed it as a folk tale or something, because it sounds so impossible, but this is actually something that affects hundreds of people every year in Yunnan, China, and there's many hospital reports of people getting affected in this way. In fact, one study looked at about 400 cases in a year of people who were affected by this mushroom, and 90% of them said that they had these Lilliputian hallucinations. It's a hallmark symptom of this mushroom.

BT: From the case reports we have hundreds to thousands of clearly-rendered, often brightly-colored, gnome or fairy-like teeny people clambering about and crawling under things. What else are they doing? Are they talking to the people having the hallucinations, is there much interaction going on?

CD: That's something that's not as commonly reported, but it has been mentioned in a handful of cases, both in China and in other cultures where this phenomenon has been noted.

The little people are said to typically like teasing, playing with or harassing the person seeing them, so there is some level of interaction there.

They're typically viewed to be amusing, mischievous, that sort of attitude. They're not usually seen as threatening, although in a few cases people felt that way.

BT: Are there any other clinically-reported effects on the mind and body?

CD: Yeah, there are. The Lilliputian hallucinations are the most striking symptom, but there's other things as well. About 50% of people reported having some gastrointestinal upset after eating this mushroom. It's not clear exactly the severity of that, because this was just a statistic that was noted in these papers, and it's also not clear if it was caused by this mushroom specifically or other things they were eating in the meal. So these aren't really robust studies in that sense, they're just collecting data of people who happen to get these effects.

And then another key thing that a lot of people note is that they seem to be typically weakened, more tired and delirious, so this could give us a hint as to the mechanisms that this unknown compound is working through. So it sounds quite different from the known psychedelic compounds.

And it's not only because of that. This is actually something I forgot to mention, but these hallucinations can last several days long. So it's not something that is experienced over a few hours like other compounds.

BT: If people are hallucinating thousands of miniature people taunting them for several days, are there any injuries or fatalities linked to cases? Or is it just unpleasant and irritating, but harmless?

CD: Yeah, that's something I really was curious about, because it sounded like it must be quite harmful if it's something that's sticking around in the body for several days and having these strong effects.

But interestingly, all those hundreds of hospital reports reported zero deaths or fatalities. They also reported no abnormalities in vital organ function, so it seems to be physiologically safe. But then, at the same time, we don't know if that's because those people were admitted to the hospital and they were getting proper treatment, or if we only have the records of people that were committed to the hospital. So it might be a skewed sample.

BT: You mentioned that this mushroom is found in China's Yunnan province. And you personally also identified it in the northern Philippines too. I was wondering how widespread and integrated into the cultures of these regions it is. How widely known is it? Is it treated as a mischief of little significance, or has it been integrated into any religious practices?

CD: In all these places, the mushroom is viewed as a very prized edible. It tastes very good and has a great flavor, but it's never been integrated into any spiritual or religious practices for the psychoactive effects. The psychoactive effects are like an accidental side effect of the food, and they're viewed as sort of an amusing side effect of that. They're not something that they intentionally pursue, but it's also not something that they feel fearful of and avoid.

Everyone knows that this mushroom has this property and can make you see little people, but they'll continue to eat it anyway, because they're just not afraid of that effect. But they're also not pursuing it, if that makes sense. It's sort of a middle ground viewpoint they have.

BT: And that's so strange. I mean you're a scientist, I'm a science journalist, to me this thing is so fundamentally bizarre that I struggle to understand how it has flown under the radar for so long. It was only scientifically described 10 years ago, and even then without much mention of the psychoactive properties. Why are we only just talking about this now?

CD: The first reports of psychoactive boletes actually go back to the 1930s to 1960s in Papua New Guinea. That's actually a time before we even knew about psilocybin mushrooms, and yet psilocybin mushrooms have exploded in the last century to become globally popular.

But this mushroom went the opposite way and faded into obscurity. And I think the reason for that is twofold. One, the scientists who were initially studying this mushroom in Papua New Guinea were unable to isolate any psychoactive compounds and couldn't determine the species responsible for the effects. And secondly, because these symptoms sounded so bizarre and fantasy-like — seeing little people — I think this biased them toward believing that it wasn't possible.

In fact, they concluded that this whole phenomenon of "mushroom madness" was all just a social act, a myth, or a way for the people to behave in ways they ordinarily wouldn't. But they concluded the mushrooms were just like a scapegoat, they weren't actually physiologically active, it was just an excuse to do these things. It sounded so impossible, and we just couldn't figure out the chemistry of these mushrooms.

But since that time, we've had more reports coming from other cultures — from China, and now over the last two years from the Philippines. That's multiple independent cultures reporting the same specific type of hallucination.

And what I was able to show was that they were due to the same mushroom, verified by DNA sequencing. It wasn't just random attribution, it was the same species. That, to me, confirms that there's an underlying physical cause of this.

BT: How did you first hear about L. asiatica?

CD: I first heard about this when I was an undergraduate student taking an elective course about mushrooms, and the teacher briefly mentioned one paper writing about these mushrooms in China that have this effect.

It was written sort of as an anecdotal story. The mycologist was traveling in Yunnan, and the local people told him: "Oh, these mushrooms will make you see little people if you don't cook them." But in that paper he was unable to identify the mushrooms, and he shared his story and said this is something that needs more attention. I tried to look more into it after hearing about that, and I found that, amazingly, no-one was studying it. It had gone just unnoticed or dismissed for decades.

This sounded so weird and groundbreaking to me that, even if it had a small chance of being true, it was something worth pursuing and I needed to know everything I could about it. So that's when I decided to do a whole PhD research project to try to answer that question.

BT: So what did you do next?

CD: My first task was to go to China, because that's where it was most popular and most well known. And, upon getting there, it was immediately obvious that the local people knew much more about it than we scientists did. It was actually a very well-known and common phenomenon. Everyone there was very open and welcoming and happy to talk about everything they knew about this mushroom with me. So I learned a lot just speaking with the local people who were selling this mushroom.

I just asked them: "Which ones will make you see little people?" they pointed to them, and I collected them. After getting back to my lab here in Utah, I was able to sequence the mushrooms to determine their identity, and it turns out they were all this one species, so that was a first big hint.

BT: There must have been a moment when you went from hearing about this as a tall tale to realizing it was the real deal. What was that like?

CD: Going into my whole PhD was sort've a wild goose chase — a long shot. We didn't even know if this was real, and even when I made this trip to China, as I was traveling there I asked myself: "Am I even going to find anything? Is this going to be a whole waste of time?"

But it was immediately obvious that it was incredibly well known. As soon as I started talking with the locals and mentioning this mushroom, their faces lit up, and they started sharing amazing stories. It wasn't some obscure, lesser-known myth. It was a big part of their mushroom knowledge and practices, and that just built up over the days as I was in China, and talked to more people, and just confirmed how integral and well known this psychoactive mushroom is to them. It felt like it was too popular to be dismissed as a folk tale.

The real smoking gun then came a few years later when I heard some remarkably similar reports of mushrooms causing Lilliputian hallucinations in a completely different part of the world in the northern Philippines.

That really got my attention. I wanted to know if this is the same species as the one in China, or something completely different? But no-one had ever sequenced or studied the mushrooms in those regions, we just didn't know what it was. So I traveled there, went into the forest and on the last day was able to finally find the mushroom that the local people said was the one that made you see little people. At first when I collected it I couldn't tell if it was the same as the one in China.

When I got the DNA sequencing back it was one of the most exciting moments of my whole research. It was actually the same species as the one in China, which was completely unexpected, because that species, L. asiatica, was thought to only be found in China. Now we have a whole new record in a country that has independently discovered the same specific psychoactive properties belonging to it.

BT: Skipping forward to the more recent research that you've published this month, what have you found out about the pharmacology behind the mushroom's psychoactive properties?

CD: Just this month I was finally able to publish research that sequenced the whole genomes of not just L. asiatica, but actually all of the species in this group. I did that because I wanted to understand what psychoactive chemicals might be causing this effect and if it’s something that's found more widely in the mushroom kingdom, or only in this one species; so I needed to understand the whole evolutionary relationships and history of the group.

By sequencing the whole genome, we could look for genes within it that we know are responsible for synthesizing psychoactive compounds. For example, we know the genes that are needed to make psilocybin, and we looked for those genes and they were notably absent. We then confirmed this by looking at a chemical extract of the mushroom and screening all the compounds within it, finding again that there was no psilocybin.

There weren't even any known psychoactive compounds, so it seemed like this must be some new hallucinogenic compound waiting to be discovered, because there's nothing that matches anything in our database.

BT: What work are you doing now to isolate the psychoactive compound?

CD: It can be a long and painstaking process to go from a complicated organism that has hundreds of molecules in it to one causing a single effect. We've been screening the chemical extracts in mice, for example. We give them an extract of this mushroom, and we also give them an extract of a placebo or a blank control and we watch how their behavior changes. With L. asiatica, they behave strikingly differently than in the control, so that shows that there is a bioactive effect going on.

We then take an extract and split it into like 20 fractions, with each fraction containing a different subset of the mushroom’s chemicals. Then we test each of those 20 in the mice, and we see, okay, 19 of these have no effect, and then one of them does have an effect. That way we can narrow down the chemical responsible.

There's also other more complicated methods that we're pursuing. But still to this day we haven't definitively found the actual chemical responsible.

BT: Do you at least have a few candidates?

CD: I'll say this: We’ve narrowed down whatever is causing the activity in mice to a few candidates, but we don't know if the thing that's causing activity in mice is the same thing causing hallucinations in humans.

Mushrooms can have a variety of different bioactive effects, and there's going to be more testing needed to confirm that it actually has the specific hallucinogenic property. It could all just be a red herring that we're chasing, and so that's one of the reasons why it takes a long time to definitively determine an active biochemical.

BT: I know you’re approaching this from the mycology side, but the same visions being consistently reported between cases implies one or more regions of the brain responsible for seeing little people. What work has been done on the neuroscience behind Lilliputian hallucinations? Has anyone identified the regions of the brain it's hitting?

CD: I mean, that's a great question. As far as I know there's really nothing known about the parts of the brain that are being activated. Lilliputian hallucinations have been documented for over 100 years from causes outside of mushrooms — people get them sometimes during alcohol withdrawals or certain neurological conditions associated with old age, like dementia or Charles Bonnet syndrome.

But in all those cases, psychiatrists and neurologists don't really have a treatment for those people because they don't know how it works in the brain. If you don't understand the mechanisms involved, you can't treat it, so it remains a mystery to this day. Hopefully more neuroscientists can use this mushroom to study it, because that's one of the reasons it's remained mysterious. We didn't have a tool that could produce these effects reliably. It was all random, inconsistent occurrences.

But now, hopefully, this mushroom can provide a tool that can reliably produce these effects and give us insights into the brain and body mechanisms causing these Lilliputian hallucinations.

BT: DMT, LSD, magic mushrooms — most psychedelics usually hit serotonin receptors, yet weirdly there's no sign of that here. Is there any possibility it's doing something upstream with the same effect?

CD: I would say we're not sure, but I'll say that there are very unique effects of these symptoms — that they take 12 to 24 hours to kick in, and then can last several days — that are unlike any known receptor interaction classical psychedelics work through. So it might be something more complicated going on in the body than just a single receptor being activated.

BT: Have you spoken to anyone who has suspicions of what parts of the brain might be involved?

CD: I haven't. However, I'll say that the very striking visual hallucinations of something being completely integrated with the real world environment around you can be a great tool to understand the mechanisms of perception, and how we perceive reality in the absence of this drug.

I mean, this is... I don't know of anything else like this that can produce these very realistic hallucinations integrated with the real world. So, hopefully, it can give us insight into how we perceive reality normally.

BT: With other psychedelics, people report seeing real objects altered or patterns appearing that aren't there. But the source of all that is a warped version of stuff you're already seeing. Here, your visual field is unaltered, except, of course, that there are hundreds of mischievous tiny people fooling about in it.

CD: It's really different, yeah. Like you said, either the objects that are normally there are changed in some way, or people go to a different world in their minds, behind closed eyelids.

But to see, with your eyes open, the world as it normally appears with the addition of very realistically-rendered people, that others don't perceive, is really striking.

BT: So there have been scant reports of similar hallucinations occurring elsewhere. Papua New Guinea is a strong lead, right? Does that mean that L. asiatica is also there, or could there be another mushroom that's kind of having effects?

CD: That's one of the most exciting questions that I'm interested in. It still remains a big question mark. What mushroom in Papua New Guinea is causing these effects? There's no records of L. asiatica even occurring in Papua New Guinea, but it could be that mycologists just haven't documented it there. Mycology is still a very young discipline, and there's a lot of parts of the world where we still don't even know the mushrooms that exist there.

Or it could be a completely different mushroom, which would be exciting for its own reason — it would show that whatever compound is causing this is perhaps more widespread, and it's not just found in one species. More research needs to be done, for sure.

The cultural use and consumption of these wild mushrooms in Papua New Guinea has faded since the 1960s, when they were prevalent and reported. There's been no cases of this "mushroom madness" for decades. The reasons could be twofold, either the local people have lost that tradition and practice, or the forests have also been deforested. It's still a big question mark as to what's going on in Papua New Guinea.

BT: On mycology being a young field, the estimates for the world's fungal species that have been described float between 3% and 10%. It makes one wonder what else could be out there. Have you heard any other intriguing mushroom rumours?

CD: Who knows what else is out there waiting to be discovered. That’s what got me into this field. I was actually initially in astronomy, because I was so captivated by exploring the unknown. And then I realized there's a whole universe of life here on Earth that is still unexplored, the fungi, and so that's when I started studying them.

So I'm sure there are other crazy, promising, interesting fungi out there just like this. But I can't think of specific cases to cite. I mean, if it's unknown, it's unknown.

BT: I was wondering if you were close to performing the same trick twice.

CD: Yeah, hopefully others can.

BT: Do you think the window for them will exist for much longer? You mentioned these things grow symbiotically with trees through mycorrhizal networks. It's not just in Papua New Guinea where humans are chopping a lot of those forests down.

CD: Yeah, absolutely. Not only are the forests being lost, but also the cultures that have this traditional knowledge are also being decimated, so we're losing a lot of knowledge about the natural world that has taken thousands of years of experimentation to accumulate, and it's a tragedy.

It's like burning down a library, but the library contains millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of cultural knowledge. I'm sure there's mushrooms every day that are going extinct, and those might be holding promising new medicines or strange new drugs that can change our understanding of ourselves and the world, or have solutions to environmental problems.

It is definitely a race against time, and certainly the reason why I think fungal conservation and cultural conservation and respect is needed.

BT: Finally, I can’t get to the end of this interview and not ask you. Have you eaten raw or undercooked L. asiatica? Have you seen the tiny people?

CD: Of course I’ve been tempted to. But I haven't actually eaten it raw intentionally for two reasons. One, the effects last several days, and also apparently cause a delirium that might not be so pleasant. So, it's a pretty serious undertaking, I'd say.

Then secondly, we also just don't know anything about the dose of the mushroom that causes the effects, because people are just eating this in a meal, and then in some cases they get these psychoactive effects. We don't know how much is required, so there'd be a lot of careful experimentation of consuming raw mushrooms and then increasing the amount. That would take, I think, a lot of time and mushrooms to go through.

I'm certainly super curious, and that’s why I'm studying this in the first place. But there's already hundreds of reports out there, I don't feel like I need to prove anything. Personally, at this point, I just don't feel like it's not worth the commitment to be having these hallucinations for several days.

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

Energy used to power artificial intelligence (AI) could jump to 3% of global electricity demand by 2030, guzzling as much water as the 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa consume in one year to meet their domestic water needs.

Those are the conclusions of a recent United Nations report that estimated the land use, water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions associated with AI's breakneck expansion. If the data centers that underpin AI formed a country, they would rank 11th in the world for energy use due to their high infrastructure and electricity needs to train ever more complicated models and satisfy users, the report found.

By 2030, data centers could rise to sixth in the world for energy consumption, which would have a land footprint the size of Connecticut and release emissions comparable to those of the U.K. in 2025, depending on how much renewable energy is in the mix.

The findings highlight how much additional pressure AI and the infrastructure that supports it could put on the environment and the climate within the next few years. But why does AI have such a huge footprint, who is benefiting or being left out from the opportunities linked to AI's growth, and what can be done to limit the damage?

To find out more, we spoke with Kaveh Madani, lead investigator for the U.N. report; director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health; and the recipient of this year's Stockholm Water Prize.

Sascha Pare: What would you say is the main takeaway from the report?

Kaveh Madani: The main takeaway of this report is that although in the general discourse AI is perceived as something virtual, or digital, or up in the clouds, there is [a] massive physicality to AI and the supply chains and infrastructure that back it up. And that's one thing that this report has tried to do: to remind people that behind every prompt, every use, every interaction, there is some level of impact on the environment. This is because from the top of the supply chain, where the extraction of critical minerals happens, to the point of manufacturing the hardware, the construction of the data centers, then the operation of data centers, and then dealing with the e-waste, there are major environmental impacts. If we take all of those into account, then we realize that what's digital is not necessarily free of impact. There is always some footprint associated with it, and we have to remember that.

SP: Why does AI have such massive land and water footprints, specifically?

KM: The report outlines the carbon, water and land footprints of AI's energy use. All along the supply chain, from the extraction of critical minerals to the point of disposing and dealing with the electronic waste, we have actions and interventions that require water, require land, and are associated with carbon emissions. So, if you think about, for example, the extraction of critical minerals, we know that during the process, a lot of water is being used and a lot of water is being polluted and poisoned. We published a report in April about the water injustice implications of the critical minerals, showing exactly what is happening where we have the extraction of critical minerals.

But let's not forget that the [new] report is focused on AI's energy use, and then tries to argue that the energy production process itself requires also a lot of water and land. If you are using hydropower to provide energy to your data center, you're using a lot of land and a lot of water. This applies to all sorts of energy sources, regardless of being clean or not, or if you consider them renewable or not — they all require water and land. On top of this, of course, you need to build data centers on land, but also you need water for cooling. That's why, throughout the supply chain, throughout the life cycle of AI, we have a lot of water and land use, in addition to carbon emissions.

SP: The report is packed with jaw-dropping statistics about how big AI's environmental footprint could get by 2030. But how significant are the impacts?

KM: First of all, it is very hard to estimate exactly how much energy AI is currently using, but we know that roughly 20% of the current load of data centers can be attributed to AI. We are expecting that to be 40% within a few years. And by then, the data centers that back AI's operations are expected to have an energy demand that is about 3% of the total energy demand of the world. This is equivalent to being the sixth-most-energy-intensive country in the world. The water demand of that is also huge; the water footprint associated with that is enough to satisfy the domestic water needs of 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa.

SP: Can the environment and communities cope with the projected levels of energy and water consumption needed for AI?

KM: There would be places in the world where big decisions must be made, meaning that you have to decide if you want to continue using your water for agriculture or if you want to put it into data centers. Those would be decisions for the communities — and if the communities are not involved, then the most vulnerable, the poor, will be dealing with the consequences.

At the same time, we know that the world's electricity consumption keeps increasing. That's a major problem, because although we are trying to add more and more renewables to the energy supply systems, the renewables cannot keep up with the increasing electricity demand. This means that not only can we not retire the old systems, but we might also need to use more fossil energy to satisfy this growing demand. And of course, that means more pressure on the fragile environment.

We know some of the data centers are being placed in locations that are already dry or suffering from what we refer to as "water bankruptcy," based on the report we published in January. These are major issues. More pressure on the environment [puts] more pressure on humans, and this recipe means [we could have] a kind of reinforcing degradation loop that would jeopardize both nature and human society.

SP: Who is benefiting the most from AI's expansion, and who is being excluded?

KM: AI expansion is benefiting humanity as a whole. It has changed our lifestyle; it has provided a lot of opportunities and improvements. But at the same time, it has some consequences. The issue that we see right now is that the richer communities and countries of the world are the ones that are benefiting from it the most, and within those communities and countries, it's the rich who are also profiting more from the expansion. If you look at the investment landscape of AI, you can see that there is a lot of push from a number of strong players and private investors. And they don't bear the costs when it comes to pollution, water bankruptcy, land degradation and so on.

If you think about the emissions, they are contributing to global warming, and everybody would suffer from it. Even the countries that don't have AI infrastructure are affected: If you think about where the critical minerals come from, you see a lot of poor communities, poor countries and poor regions in Africa, South America, parts of Asia, where people don't have basic infrastructure — they don't even have clean drinking water and energy infrastructure. They don't benefit from this expansion and the profits and utilities it provides. It's the most vulnerable communities and the poor economies that are going to suffer the consequences, while the other ones will benefit more.

SP: How did you estimate AI's growth by 2030, and how likely is it that your numbers will come true, given the fears that AI is a bubble that's about to catastrophically burst?

KM: We were looking at the data centers, and we still think that our projections are conservative. There is a lot of push from the private sector to further growth. Countries are also seeing investment in AI and data centers as an investment in security, sovereignty and other matters, so there's also a competition there. Some of the investments — some of the decisions about expanding AI — are not necessarily based on comprehensive assessments. Investments remain a bid to stay in the race, and that means more and more push. So we think that what we have projected is probably very conservative.

SP: China is scaling up its energy capacity together with data center buildout, and it is putting data centers in the ocean to try to solve the hardware cooling issue. What do you make of this strategy, and should other countries learn from it?

KM: China's more centralized decision-making system provides advantages, but I think we need to be careful about generalizing the information of one or two projects highlighted by the media to the overall strategy.

We know that China has been expanding its renewable energy production capacity, and that's definitely a good thing. We have to make sure that the additional load of AI would not mean more fossil energy and would not compromise the decarbonization process. But at the same time, we should note that just scaling up renewables is not sufficient if you're thinking about decarbonization. We need a massive addition of renewables if we're going to reverse climate change, and we are not seeing strong enough signs of that around the world. So that's something that we have to be worried about.

That has been the challenge created for the world because of the expansion of AI. When it comes to putting things under the ocean, I think we do not yet have enough information and enough experience to judge if those things come with less environmental impact. What we hide would not be impact-free; there are also other impacts to worry about.

SP: What are some other solutions to the pressures AI is putting on the environment and people? How should we approach the rapid expansion to ensure it is fair?

KM: We offer a framework based on a number of principles about making the AI governance system more fair and transparent and sustainable. So, those are the principles suggested, and they bring responsibility to all stakeholders, including the developers and service providers — those who provide the technology and have responsibilities of ensuring that their systems are more transparent and efficient.

Then, we have the governments that have the responsibility of ensuring that information becomes available, that footprints are properly monitored and disclosed and regulated. They can use a range of incentives, mechanisms or penalties to ensure that footprints are reduced across the supply chain — and I insist on that — from the mines to the landfill. So, that can be done; pollution taxes can be charged and so on. [Governments should ensure] that those who have to deal with the consequences also benefit from the profits and the opportunities that data centers bring to their communities. Decisions must be made based on resource availability and the environmental consequences taken into account.

Users also can do a better job of making smarter choices by using AI more responsibly and only when it's absolutely necessary. When using AI, choose the right models, and be mindful of what is happening behind the scenes. Is it really necessary to generate another image? Is it really necessary to generate a video? Is it necessary to use the model in the "thinking mode"? Together, all the stakeholders can make a difference, and users can also call for more transparency and force governments to take action to force the service providers to provide more information and be more transparent.

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

Corvids, including ravens and crows, have earned a reputation for being some of the smartest birds on Earth. They can recognize human faces, use tools, solve multistep puzzles and even hold funerals.

In recent years, scientists have added another surprising skill to the list: a grasp of numbers. Research suggests that corvids can distinguish between different quantities and, in some cases, even perform statistical analysis.

These discoveries have raised a provocative question: How deep do the roots of mathematical thinking go? While modern humans are the only known species to develop formal mathematics, studies of crows, monkeys and other animals suggest that the cognitive building blocks of math may have evolved hundreds of millions of years before people began doing calculations.

Few researchers have done more to uncover these abilities than Andreas Nieder, a professor of animal physiology and the director of the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. By examining the neural activity of both monkeys and crows, Nieder has found evidence that very different animal brains can process numerical information in surprisingly similar ways. Live Science spoke with Nieder about how these findings may reveal that the origins of mathematics are far older than our species.

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry: How did you get into researching crows and primates?

Andreas Nieder: After studying the auditory and visual systems for several years as a student, I realized that I wanted to focus on the neuronal foundations of intelligence and cognitive control functions. How does the brain give rise to abstract concepts, working memory, or the ability to follow complex rules deliberately? Of course, to study intelligence, you need intelligence specialists. I therefore began working with primates ‪—‬ more specifically, rhesus monkeys, arguably among the most intelligent mammals. They are closely related to humans, possess relatively similar brains, and share many cognitive abilities with us.

However, as a trained biologist, I was always interested in a broader evolutionary question: Are sophisticated cognitive abilities unique to mammals, or can they emerge in very different brains? Crows provided an ideal comparative species. Birds diverged from mammals more than 360 million years ago — roughly six times longer ago than the extinction of the dinosaurs. Yet despite this immense evolutionary distance, corvids display remarkably flexible behavior; in many ways, they are the feathered primates of the air.

KHC: Are crows difficult to study? Are they fun? Do they have personalities?

AN: Both primates and crows are demanding to study. Because they are highly intelligent, they require special housing and care. Since we investigate cognitive abilities under tightly controlled experimental conditions, they also require extensive behavioral training by skilled personnel. And, of course, the regulations governing research with these species are particularly strict.

At the same time, they are fascinating research subjects. Individual monkeys and crows differ noticeably in temperament and behavior. Some are curious and adventurous, others are cautious and reserved, and some learn new tasks much faster than others.

Their qualities can be quite striking. Some are reliable, highly motivated workers that perform consistently day after day. Others are sensitive divas who seem to require special treatment before they are willing to cooperate. Researchers generally avoid anthropomorphizing, but there is little doubt that individual animals exhibit stable behavioral traits that we would reasonably describe as distinct characters.

KHC: You've found that crows understand the concept of zero. How do we know this?

AN: We trained crows to recognize different numbers — sets containing one, two, three, four objects, and so forth. We then included trials in which no items appeared at all. The remarkable finding was that the birds treated an empty set as a quantity and as part of the numerical continuum. They behaved as though the empty set belonged before "one." Their error patterns were particularly revealing: They confused zero more often with one than with larger numbers, exactly as one would expect if zero were mentally represented as a numerical quantity next to one. In addition, recordings from neurons in the crow brain showed cells that responded selectively to empty sets. This suggests that zero is not merely a behavioral trick but is represented neurally as a meaningful numerical category.

KHC: To play devil's advocate, is the ability to recognize the difference between something and the lack of something really that surprising? Is it akin to the human concept of zero?

AN: That's an important question. Simply recognizing that nothing is present or absent is not surprising. Many animals can distinguish between the presence and absence of objects. The key issue is whether they treat "nothing" as a quantity that can be compared to other quantities.

Our experiments suggest that crows do more than detect absence. They position empty sets within an ordered numerical sequence, at the low end of the number line, and show distance effects similar to those observed with other numbers. For example, they find it easier to distinguish zero from two than zero from one.

That said, we should not claim that crows possess the full human mathematical concept of zero. Humans use symbolic zero in arithmetic, algebra, calculus and formal mathematics. What we have demonstrated is a foundational precursor: a nonsymbolic numerical representation of zero. This may represent an evolutionary building block from which more sophisticated human concepts eventually developed.

KHC: You've also found that crows can perform statistical analysis. Tell me more about these findings and what you showed.

AN: We trained carrion crows [Corvus corone] to associate a series of arbitrary visual signs, colored geometric images displayed on a touch screen, with different reward probabilities. One sign might yield a food reward 90% of the time, another 70%, another 50%, and so on down to 10%. Importantly, the signs themselves carried no inherent meaning; the birds had to learn these probabilities through experience.

Once the birds had learned these sign-probability associations, we presented them with pairs of signs and asked them to choose one. To maximize their rewards, they should select the sign associated with the higher reward probability. The crows did exactly that. Even when confronted with many novel pairings, they reliably chose the statistically more favorable option.

This does not mean that crows perform formal statistics in the human sense. They are not calculating percentages or solving probability equations. However, the results show that they can extract probabilistic regularities from experience, store this information in memory, and use it flexibly to make reward-maximizing decisions under uncertainty. These are fundamental ingredients of statistical reasoning and are highly valuable in natural environments, where animals constantly have to make decisions based on incomplete information.

KHC: Have researchers tried similar tests on babies or young humans, and if so, how do we stack up?

AN: Yes. Developmental psychologists have conducted many related studies with infants and young children. Even before learning language, infants show sensitivity to quantities, numerical differences and simple probabilistic information. By around 4 years of age, children also display an intuitive understanding of empty sets.

What is striking is that the behavioral signatures observed in crows resemble those seen in preverbal human infants and nonhuman primates. Of course, human children eventually develop symbolic mathematics through language, education and culture, which takes them far beyond the abilities observed in animals.

KHC: Can these findings tell us anything about how the human understanding of math evolved?

AN: They suggest that some foundations of mathematics may predate humans by a very long evolutionary timescale. Humans did not invent numerical intuition from scratch. Rather, we appear to have inherited ancient cognitive systems that allow brains to estimate quantities, compare numbers, and represent concepts such as zero approximately.

The fact that crows and primates — two distantly related groups — show similar numerical abilities suggests that these capacities may emerge whenever evolution favors flexible intelligence. Human mathematics likely built upon these ancient cognitive foundations and then expanded dramatically through language, symbols and culture.

KHC: What's something a general audience might be surprised to learn about crows?

Many people are surprised to learn that crows are songbirds. Most people associate songbirds with melodic singers such as nightingales or blackbirds, not with the harsh cawing of a crow. Yet crows do learn a significant part of their vocal repertoire and are even known as apt imitators, even of human speech sounds — the internet is full of funny videos in which crows imitate human speech.

What makes this particularly interesting is that their vocalizations are not merely reflexive calls. In our experiments, we found that crows can exert volitional control over their vocal behavior. They can learn to produce vocalizations in response to arbitrary cues and withhold them when required, demonstrating a level of cognitive control over vocal output that is considered an important prerequisite for complex communication and, ultimately, language.

More recently, we showed that crows can even use their vocalizations to count. In a recent study published in [the journal] Science, we trained crows to produce a specific number of calls — between one and four — in response to visual or auditory cues. Remarkably, they not only generated the correct number of vocalizations but also appeared to prepare the intended number before they started calling. This suggests that they can represent numerical information and use it to guide a self-generated sequence of vocal actions.

Taken together, these findings show that crow vocalizations are far more sophisticated than most people assume. Their characteristic "caw" is not just a simple call — it can be brought under deliberate cognitive control and even used to express numerical information. For a bird, that is a remarkably advanced ability.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Are you a bird nerd? Find out with our bird quiz!

At age 19, John McFall thought he might never walk again after his right leg was amputated above the knee following a motorcycle accident. Fast-forward more than two decades, and he is now on the verge of becoming the first physically disabled person in space.

McFall, 45, is a British surgeon and former Paralympic athlete who won multiple medals as a T42-class sprinter. In 2022, he joined the European Space Agency's (ESA) Fly! program, which aimed to see if a person with a physical disability could live and work in low Earth orbit. And in February 2025, he became the first member of the program to be cleared for a potential future mission to space.

More recently, on June 2, the U.K. government announced that McFall had been selected as a prospective member of the first crew to live on Haven-1, an upcoming commercial space station from U.S. company Vast that is scheduled to be the first of its kind in low Earth orbit, if it launches on time early next year.

If everything goes according to plan, the roughly 30-day mission will help answer a series of interesting questions about how living in space might be both challenging and advantageous for people with physical disabilities.

Live Science spoke with McFall about what it would mean to break new ground, wearing a prosthesis in space and how microgravity might uniquely affect him.

Harry Baker: How did it feel to get the news that you might be going to space next year?

John McFall: Awesome. Very awesome, very exciting. And it feels like we're one step closer to realizing this amazing opportunity and achieving this very exciting milestone in human space exploration.

HB: What would it mean to you personally to become the first physically disabled astronaut in space?

JM: To me personally, it doesn't make a difference. In terms of "what an achievement for me," I don't tend to think of it like that. However, I am very aware that the broader message that it sends to wider society about what people are capable of — whether they have a disability or not — is very interesting and powerful. So I'm proud to be a very small part of that movement, if you like, and the journey of making society a more tolerant and inclusive place.

HB: What advantages do you think your disability might give you in space compared with other astronauts?

JM: It's a good question because we don't actually know. We can hypothesize, but until we actually get into space and conduct some science that's specifically relevant to my disability, we won't know. But there are some theoretical benefits.

One is that when you live in microgravity, you get a shift of fluid from the lower part of your body up into the upper part of your body and your cranium. This can cause swelling of the optic disk, which can temporarily affect vision. It's called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome (SANS), and it affects around 70-75% of astronauts. I would hypothesize that, having a reduced lower limb volume to start with, you're going to get a proportionally smaller fluid shift in microgravity, relative to your physiological capacity to process it, reducing the risk of things like SANS.

Another is that in microgravity, because you're weightless, you're not using your bones as much, and your body naturally resorbs them. So your bones get weaker and thinner. And one of the byproducts of this is that you have to excrete a lot of calcium, and you do this via peeing it out. As it [calcium] passes through your renal system, or kidneys, this causes an increased risk of kidney stones in microgravity. So again, having lower bone mass to start with — but retaining the same physiological capacity to metabolically process calcium — there is potentially a lower risk of kidney stones.

So those are two small-but-hypothetical benefits of my particular disability in space. But the real answer is, we don't know until we do the science (i.e., urine samples, blood samples and eye examinations in orbit).

HB: How might space be more challenging for you than for other astronauts?

JM: Again, we don't know. The question is, do you really need both your lower limbs to help you stabilize and support yourself whilst your hands are doing tasks? And is having two legs useful in what we would call normal intravehicular operations [conducted inside the spacecraft], whether it be cargo operations, maintenance, this sort of stuff?

When we went through the feasibility initiative, trying to think of and work out all these scenarios, we couldn't really think of a disadvantage other than maybe having to work slightly harder.

HB: Will you be wearing a prosthesis in space?

JM: The plan is to wear a prosthesis. We deemed quite early on that wearing a prosthesis in a spacecraft would be a necessity, mainly at launch time. If there was an emergency that required me to get out of the spacecraft and get off the crew access arm and away from the launch site, it would be ideal wearing a prosthesis to do that.

But in space, we don't know whether it's going to be an advantage or be required for these intravehicular activities. Where I would definitely need to use one is on a long-duration mission where I need to exercise lots. I use a prosthesis to exercise on Earth, and I would use a prosthesis to exercise in orbit. However, short-duration missions [like this one] do not.

The prosthetics I use are modular, so I wear a socket — that's what's left of my leg goes inside — and then the hardware, what we call the terminal device, is attached to the socket. What I would envisage doing is always wearing the socket, because that way, you maintain consistency. But [for] the terminal device itself, I have a quick-change adapter that you can just unplug the device, and you can take it off and, likewise, put it back in again.

It's "plug and play," if you like, and [it will allow me to] make assessments of whether it's useful or not.

HB: Will your prosthesis need to be specially made for the trip?

JM: Not really. We are certifying a number of prosthetic hardware items to fly, but they're all what we call "commercial, off-the-shelf items." So they're products that are widely available.

However, there are some very small changes that we need to make to make them compliant with the safety requirements of the space station environment and the spacecraft, such as fireproof tape around certain parts of the device or changing the hydraulic fluid so it's less toxic in case there is a leak.

We're also doing a small amount of redesigning to the shape of the foot to make it more ergonomic to interface with things like rails and straps inside the space station, because you often slip your foot under rails and straps.

HB: Could anything you learn from your mission help physically disabled people back on Earth?

JM: Yeah, I think so, certainly from a prosthetics point of view. There are prosthetic developments that we have made that will benefit other prosthetic users in the future.

I mentioned this quick-change adapter. We have revised or reengineered this particular device to perform in a certain way, which I think will have advantages for a whole range of lower-limb amputees. The socket technology ‪—‬ the interface between my stump and the prosthesis ‪—‬ is [also] going to be redesigned and potentially has very beneficial applications for lower-limb amputees again.

HB: Are you hoping to be selected for more missions in the future? And would you like to become the first physically disabled person on the International Space Station (ISS) or the moon?

JM: Yeah, absolutely. I hope that we use this opportunity to demonstrate that it is very feasible, and I hope that that would put me in line for selection of missions in the future.

I would love to, in the future, potentially spend longer in space, demonstrating that it's possible for someone with a disability to live and work in space and cope with everything that comes with that.

And absolutely, I would love to go to the moon. You know, someone with a lower-limb disability, when you propose that against walking on the moon, it's quite a powerful statement, and I would love to do that.

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

The United States successfully eliminated measles decades ago by taking measures to ensure the virus stopped spreading consistently within the country — but now, it's likely that measles is back.

Toward the end of 2025, experts cautioned that the U.S. could lose its "measles elimination status" within months as various outbreaks raged across the country. If the U.S. does officially lose this status — meaning the country will have experienced sustained measles spread for over a year — it would join a list of countries, including the U.K. and Canada, that have also seen local resurgences of measles as their vaccination rates have declined.

An assessment of the United States' elimination status is scheduled for November. In the meantime, experts have issued a progress report for the nation. Live Science spoke with two authors of the report from Boston Children's Hospital — Dr. Anne Bischops, a pediatrician and postdoctoral research fellow, and Maimuna Majumder, a distinguished scholar in the Computational Health Informatics Program — to understand where America's elimination status stands and what to expect in coming months.

Nicoletta Lanese: We saw measles cases start to rise in the U.S. around January 2025. Were you concerned at that point about the country losing its elimination status?

Maimuna Majumder: I've personally been working on measles for over a decade, and given that, what I will say is that my concerns around elimination status far predate even January 2025.

When January 2025 picked up, I felt like this might be the point of no return. But it was not in any way the first red flag. I do want to just stress that measles elimination has always been a tenuous prospect, and it is, by design, tenuous. Maintaining elimination status is, by design, difficult.

When you start to see these clusters turn into outbreaks that threaten to spill over into neighboring states, when you see the rapidity with which small outbreaks become larger outbreaks — those tend to be the signals that [say] "I don't think that we're going to be able to get the cat back in the bag here."

Dr. Anne Bischops: The trend of the increase of vaccine-preventable diseases has been ongoing for several years already, and it's something that has spilled into the daily life working in the ER. We've seen increasing cases of measles. And especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, we have this increase of vaccine fatigue adding to that.

This has been, globally, an increasingly important topic. For the current outbreak in the U.S., our study team has been closely monitoring that from the beginning.

NL: What factors set our current situation apart from past measles outbreaks?

MM: My very first domestic measles response was during the Disneyland measles outbreak in [late 2014 and] 2015. It was a different time. It was a radically different political administration; it was a radically different time, culturally, for how the United States felt about vaccines. It was an optimal time to make strides in policies that would help ensure that we didn't lose our elimination status.

In response to the Disneyland outbreak, we ended up passing SB-277 in California and a number of other important vaccination bills across the United States that allowed us to get rid of personal belief exemptions, for example. That really led to fantastic strides in reclaiming our measles protection, as a whole.

Now, in the 10 years that have since passed, a lot of things have changed. We are now in the second Trump administration, and there has been a massive pandemic in between that eroded the public's trust in public health and vaccines. A lot of that is driven by the pervasiveness of misinformation that's run rampant.

When the Disneyland outbreak happened, we largely had a feeling of hope that, "We can use this opportunity to pass bills that are going to protect the American people." What happened when the [2025] Texas outbreak started was the opposite of that. That's when the likelihood that you're going to lose your status becomes imminent, because the levers that you would typically use to rescue elimination status are no longer viable.

NL: In your report, you describe seven indicators that should be met for a country to achieve elimination status, noting that the U.S. has now missed — or essentially, failed — four out of seven. Why is it useful to define these indicators?

AB: The Pan American Health Organization [PAHO] has these recertification meetings [such as the one planned for November] where very detailed, granular data for every single transmission chain are presented, and this is very time-intensive.

We saw that the meeting had been moved from April to November, so our goal with the seven indicators was to provide an early warning framework ahead of that decision, using readily available data that we can use now. We have looked on the broad national level, using only national estimates. We really see it as a rapid assessment before then, in November, when a very detailed analysis will be done on the transmission-chain level, where every single transmission chain will be followed.

NL: For the indicators that haven't been "missed" yet, do we suspect they've been missed but just don't yet have the data to show that?

AB: Exactly. For example, for the genotyping criteria, we have some samples where we can already see that they all share the same genotype, but we are lacking the detailed genotyping data for every single transmission chain. So we can assume that this has been missed, but we need to confirm with the detailed analysis.

For vaccine coverage, we only have the kindergartners' estimates [regarding the percentage of kindergarteners who are up to date on measles vaccination], and we don't have immunity data. But based on the data available, we could think that has already been missed.

NL: Experts have said we're likely undercounting our current measles cases. Is that a fair assessment?

MM: I personally agree that it is very likely an undercount. One reason is that measles in general does not have to be super severe in pathology. So sometimes, kids will get sick and their parents may not take them in to get looked at. When we think about the way that infectious disease surveillance is done in the U.S., in order for mandatory reportable diseases like measles to be reported, there needs to be an encounter with the healthcare system. If you have a disease where that may not always happen, then certainly, by default, you're going to be undercounting the disease.

Our best indicator is wastewater surveillance [where germs are screened for in wastewater], and right now, we don't do a ton of wastewater surveillance for measles. The next question would be, how do we track this better? That is perhaps one of the better solutions.

NL: Do you think wastewater surveillance is something that could be feasibly expanded? I know our current coverage differs state to state.

MM: The technology is there, so this is possible. What is challenging — and this is true for all wastewater surveillance, not just measles — is that our interpretability of wastewater signals is, mind my language, still very much in the shitter.

We see numbers go up in the wastewater, so we know that numbers are going up in the community. To what degree that scaling factor is true is dependent on so many things that it's really difficult to have kind of a 1:1 [translation] based off of what the wastewater signal says — just how many cases there are in a given community at the time.

One of the big factors, of course, is that wastewater is very, very vulnerable to rainwater fall [in that rainfall dilutes wastewater and must be taken into account to interpret the results]. So there are a lot of physical engineering components to this that we have not fully figured out yet. It's harder to say, "Oh, there are exactly this number of cases because there's this much wastewater indication of this disease in this location." We can't do that yet, not in a meaningful way.

What we can do is use wastewater to predict when hospitalizations for respiratory disease will increase, when we might expect upticks and people seeking PCP [primary care provider] care for a given disease — this is something that the wastewater is very, very useful for. That is where I do believe that there is room for improvement, and this is something that can be done.

Massachusetts is one of the leaders in wastewater surveillance, and we have our own dedicated wastewater surveillance teams. So if I were to think of states that would probably be leaders in this, states like Massachusetts would probably be the most likely to pilot a measles wastewater program.

NL: Your report indicates we're on the brink of losing elimination status, and getting vaccination rates up is a key solution. Will that effort mostly be at the state and local levels, given the federal government's stance?

MM: All of our states operate as their own little entities that manage their own state's health, so we don't have a ton of programs that are universal, national. Even if Trump were not in office, we would expect most vaccination campaigns to happen at a more localized level. That has always been the case.

However, now you have a federal government that is pretty staunchly anti-vaccine, even when RFK Jr. is reneging and saying, "Actually, vaccines are alright." There's quite a bit of waffling even at the federal government level that we should acknowledge. I would not call it vaccine hesitancy at the federal government level; I would call it skepticism. What that does is that it seeds doubt. That has a trickle-down effect to the individual who is living in a given state.

The public discourse around vaccines is very, very heavily influenced by federal discourse.

While federal discourse does not affect states' rights to pass bills that are going to protect their public by encouraging more vaccination, what it does do is affect the way that individuals in those states perceive vaccines. The vast majority of people in this country are more aware about federal politics than they are about state politics; that is the reality of the situation that we live in.

You end up with a situation where, even though the federal government does not really have much control over what the state will mandate is required for a child to enter public schools, there is a control that is exerted through the communication strategy that is used by the federal government to reach individuals across the United States.

AB: From the pediatrician perspective, we can see day to day, there can be 10 positive vaccine-promoting campaigns, but it only takes one short online comment to spread doubts everywhere. So, for me as a pediatrician, it's very important to be very careful with health communication about that — I think we need efforts on all levels.

NL: Is there anything else you hope people take away from your progress report?

MM: Because we see this global resurgence of measles and we have a bunch of other countries that have also lost their status or who are also on the brink, we think that this [framework] might also be applicable to other countries who could use it as an early warning.

It's not just the U.S. that is dealing with this problem; it's not something that's happening in a vacuum.

The politics across most high-income countries are exhibiting similarities across the board that are absolutely influencing the pervasiveness of this issue, and the fact that many high-income countries have lost their measles elimination status in the last year is a very, very good indicator of that. But I'd like to stress that it's not entirely politics, either. Part of it is system memory.

What I mean by that is, the people that are having kids right now are people who have never known a person who has been gravely affected by measles. They have no clue that in previous generations, people died from this disease or were left with terrible post-acute conditions that have plagued them for the rest of their lives. That lack of exposure makes it seem like it's not that serious.

When public health works, nobody knows that it's working — that's a statement that we often make in this discipline. The reason nobody died from measles when I was a kid is because everybody was vaccinated. This particular thing is very difficult; it's very human to start questioning the severity of something when you haven't seen that severity yourself.

NL: To date, all signals seem to point to the U.S. losing its status in November. Would you agree?

MM: I would be very surprised to see it turn out otherwise. I would be delighted if we can turn it around, but it is unlikely.

Why that might happen is if we as a society decide that the strict criteria that we have been using to date are no longer the criteria we want to use. We could say we still have elimination status because we're changing what the criteria are; we're moving the benchmark. If that happens, I will be extremely unhappy.

Either we lose the status because we kept the criteria the same and nothing changed, which seems like the most likely circumstance, or we don't lose status because we changed the criteria, because we don't want to be seen as failures. The least likely but the most positive option is somehow we manage to get it together in the next six months and we don't change the criteria.

AB: There's no standardized criteria or cutoff points for deciding elimination status. In the end, it's completely up to the expert panel in November, so we don't know what exact cutoffs they will use. But based on the data we saw, for now, I think it's highly likely that we will, sadly, lose status.

NL: Could the expert panel move the benchmarks, like you said?

AB: So, the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has determined an expert panel that runs the analysis and will then present to the Pan American Health Organization meeting in November.

MM: That's why I'm saying that that second option is a possibility. There are people [on the panel] that can decide that the criteria are different.

NL: But if the PAHO doesn't think the presented data is valid, could they say that?

MM: They can do it — will they do it is a different question. The World Health Organization [WHO] and its ancillary branches [like the PAHO] are not typically shy about making statements when they believe that certain governments are not being truthful. This tends to happen in highly politicized situations where you are expecting that the data coming out of the country are not fully viable.

So the WHO has absolutely made statements in the past to this effect. The U.S. is a different type of entity though, right? I think that we're now getting into the question of "Does it harm the WHO and PAHO too much to take a stand against the CDC?" It's a very interesting question that I don't think that there is a very clear answer to yet.

To answer that question, can they do that? They can. There is precedent for other countries. But the U.S. is not just any country, and we need to acknowledge that.

As a region, we've already lost that status [given that Canada lost its elimination status already]. My hope is that that would make everybody more honest. I do feel that the situation would be significantly more tense if the U.S. was going to be the "make or break" for whether or not the Americas lost their elimination status.

Editor's note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Live Science spoke with Bischops and Majumder in May, so the text may not reflect more recent developments.

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

Most archaeologists study the things that past people left behind to recreate a picture of a bygone culture. Researchers are now applying those same archaeological techniques to more modern — and extreme — environments.

Justin Walsh, an archaeologist at Chapman University in California, is an innovator in the field of "space archaeology," or the study of human activity in the space environment, defined as 100 kilometers [62 miles] above Earth and beyond. Since the founding of the ISS Archaeological Project in 2015, Walsh has been studying how astronauts experience the International Space Station. Shawn Graham, a digital archaeologist at Carleton University in Canada, joined the project in 2023.

Now, Walsh and Graham are launching a new project — Archaeology Impossible — that looks at the things humans leave behind on Mount Everest. Live Science spoke with the duo about their ISS work and about why humans are obsessed with conquering extreme environments, like the highest spot on Earth.

Kristina Killgrove: You both started your careers in traditional archaeology but now you're doing something very different. Tell me about space archaeology.

Justin Walsh: My background is in Greek archaeology. But in 2008, I had a student in a cultural heritage seminar ask me a question: What about stuff in space? Is that heritage? And this question just completely blew my mind. I had never considered for a second that this idea could extend beyond Earth. But as soon as she asked the question, it was obvious. Yes, absolutely, there's stuff in space!

KK: So you're not using classic trowels and brushes to excavate artifacts?

JW: Space archaeology can use traditional archaeological tools and methods and techniques, but it also can require us to develop completely new methods and techniques.

KK: I assume you're not going up in a spaceship to record information at the International Space Station?

JW: It's now $75 million to pay Axiom Space for a seat to go to ISS for two weeks. There's no grant that's going to allow me to do that. So we had to come up with other ideas. I knew NASA was trying to develop a mission to Mars that's going to take three years, and they're going to put people in a tin can for that long. If you don't know the first thing about how that crew creates its own little society and culture and you can't support them effectively, how can you expect to have a successful mission? I wanted to try to show them what they were missing out on.

The inspiration for the ISS Archaeological Project was [UCLA anthropologist] Jason De León's Undocumented Migration Project, where he was using all kinds of creative ways of digging into the lived experience of migrants crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. One of them was giving disposable film cameras to the migrants in Mexico and retrieving them in the U.S. so that the migrants could take images of the obstacles they faced that he couldn't otherwise observe. And that was another light bulb moment for me.

Here we have, in the case of the ISS, tens of thousands of digital photographs that NASA has made public that show people doing things in the space station and show the places that they're occupying and the objects and the tools that they're using. And if we put the photos in order and track that change over time, it is possible to study the material culture of a space habitat over the very long term.

Shawn Graham: My background is in Roman archaeology, but I became a digital archaeologist. One of my previous projects was looking at human remains being bought and sold online with my colleague Damien Huffer [an osteoarchaeologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia]. We were looking at tens of thousands of images and trying to understand: What are the large-scale patterns? What are the changes over time? How do you map that?

Given my interests, Justin called me up and said, so we've got these photographs and we're trying to map change over time and to understand stratigraphy. Is there a way we can do that?

KK: What can you learn about humans in space from just photographs?

JW: From photos, we were able to map the distribution of population groups across the space station because, at that time in 2020, there had been about 250 people. We can easily find out information about them: their gender, their space agency affiliation, their nationality. The gender split at the time was 84% men, 16% women. And the U.S. had sent something like 35 women at that point.

On the U.S. side of the space station, we saw that women were underrepresented in the photographs of areas for science, eating, sleeping and exercise. There was one area where they were overrepresented: the cupola — the beautiful panoramic window looking out onto Earth. Women were 24% of the people in the published cupola photographs — 50% higher than you would expect based on the population.

So what this indicates is that NASA Public Affairs has at least an unconscious bias in selecting images of women in this aesthetically appealing location and not choosing the images of them in those other areas where they're working, living, and being human. That was interesting.

SG: Correct me if I'm wrong, Justin, but aren't the interior spaces of the station hyper-managed? But the actual archaeological investigations show that the astronauts aren't behaving the way the mission planners want them to.

JW: You're exactly right, Shawn. In one experiment, we had ISS crew members take a photo of each of six locations for 60 days. The clearest example is an area that's called the Maintenance Work Area. It's basically a workbench with a folding table and a blue aluminum panel with 40 pieces of Velcro on it. If you read the design protocol for this work station, NASA has delineated seven ranked priorities. Number one is the maintenance of equipment. Number two is science that doesn't need to be done in a specific kind of facility. And then there are others.

We actually found that, over 60 days, this location was never used for maintenance that we could see. It was used for science on four or five occasions. The rest of the time it was just a pegboard in your garage or your basement where you store things that don't have a better home elsewhere because there's a ton of Velcro there.

KK: You found that the ISS needs a junk drawer, basically?

JW: Yes, absolutely! That's a great way of putting it. The space agencies wouldn't have known that this wasn't being used in the way it was designed because, if you look at the historic photographs, there's always somebody doing science or maintenance there, but nobody takes a photograph of that space when nobody's working there. We did — and it showed a pattern.

KK: What do the ISS astronauts think about this?

JW: We got to debrief the crew that carried this out after they came home. They were just really interested in the idea that, by observing these spaces, we could improve future space habitats. And I can say that we actually have. The space station company Vast has told me that they have used our published research, and it has influenced the design of the interior of what's called Haven-1. That's really gratifying and exciting!

KK: That's awesome! I understand that you're both working on a new project that uses similar techniques but applied to Mount Everest. What do you want to learn about the mountain and the humans who attempt to climb it?

SG: If you look at photographs of Machu Picchu, there's this beautiful pristine view. But if you turned around the other way, you'd see the line of 200 tourists waiting for their two minutes on it. Climbing Everest is like that.

If we can pay attention to incidental details in people's photographs, we can map those over time and figure out how climbers construct a society there. By looking at all of these photographs and adapting the method from the ISS project, that gives us this opportunity to see how humans adapt in this impossible place where we have no business going.

KK: What kinds of artifacts or objects are you looking to document? What kinds of things do people deposit on Everest?

SG: There's oxygen tanks, there's human waste, food packaging, tents, prayer flags, poles, respirators.

JW: I've been reading a history of Everest and noting every time I see somebody encountering something that was left behind by somebody else who was exhausted or on the verge of death. But even in more orderly retreats, the early mountaineers made no effort whatsoever to bring things back. They're leaving mementos on the top of the mountain. You have all these different routes, different campsites, and different materials.

SG: Base camp has a couple of landmarks that appear in hundreds of photos. There's this boulder that has spray painted on it, "Everest Base Camp." It gets repainted periodically and there's always lots of different stuff around that boulder. I'm really interested in that boulder because it is a very clear point that we can keep an eye on and how that changes.

JW: There's an area with monuments to the deceased below and farther away from the mountain. It has also changed over time, of course, as memorials have been added and as people have died, but also as people have brought things to honor the dead.

KK: On the ISS, you found differences in the way nations were using their space. Mount Everest is also an extreme environment with international people coming and going. Do you think you're going to find cultural differences when you start looking at the photos?

SG: Any place I've ever traveled, Canadians are annoying because they always have a flag stuck on every piece of their clothing. So I would expect to see some knuckleheads doing that. [Graham is Canadian.]

JW: Nationalism has been a huge part of Everest expeditioning. Until the 1990s, it was all about which nation could do which route first, in the most extreme way. Nationalism is really significant in this environment, just as it is in space.

KK: Are you starting a new subfield of extreme or impossible archaeology? Are there other environments that you think would benefit from your approach?

JW: Some people have asked me about Antarctic research stations. Also oil rigs, submarines — places that humans go and carry out activities but archaeologists can't go. There's obviously a kind of macho-ness about the discipline of archaeology — we go to these distant places and live in crowded dig houses and ride around in falling-apart cars in 120-degree Fahrenheit [49 degrees Celsius] weather. But because of the ISS project, I volunteer as part of a nonprofit group called AstroAccess, which is actively working to open up space to people with disabilities. Everybody who goes to space is disabled by virtue of the space environment, which is also true of Everest —you are not at your full capacity when you're climbing.

So I'm really interested in how the perspectives of people with disabilities can open up new avenues of interacting with these environments and how we can open up the field of archaeology to people who have traditionally been excluded.

The other thing I would mention is we are developing a crowdsourcing project because we want folks who have been to Everest to submit their images so we can analyze them. Once we get that approved, we will be moving forward. So people should stay tuned!

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

See how much you know about human exploration into space with our spaceflight quiz!

Long before Neil Armstrong piloted the first crewed lunar lander onto the moon and uttered his now-famous words "The Eagle has landed," there were grave concerns that any craft attempting to land on the moon would be swallowed up by an unforgiving ocean of dust.

"It would have been one of the most anticlimactic and horrific moments in history," radio astronomer Emma Chapman, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham in England, told Live Science. "And I doubt the space program would have continued."

Luckily, radio astronomy existed. By the 1960s, scientists knew the moon was not made of quicksand (or cheese, for that matter) because radio astronomers had been mapping it for decades by bouncing invisible particles of light off of its surface and then studying the slightly altered light that returned to their receivers on Earth. In this way, it was radio astronomers who made "first contact" with the moon, Chapman wrote in her new book, "The Echoing Universe: How Radio Astronomy Helps Us See the Invisible Cosmos" (Basic Books, 2026) — making the dream of the Apollo era possible.

But it's not just the moon. From probing violent supernovas to sending peaceful messages to (hypothetical) intelligent aliens, radio astronomy touches every murky and mysterious corner of the universe. In her new book, Chapman briefly peels back the dark shroud of the optical universe to give us a rare view of the invisible beauty beneath. Live Science recently spoke with her about her book, the benefits of radio astronomy, and why she's optimistic that extraterrestrials are waiting for us to answer their call.

Brandon Specktor: If human eyes could see radio light, what would the sky look like by day and by night?

Emma Chapman: If you had radio eyes, the sun would all but disappear. And the moon would always look full.

You would just see a swath of galaxy — like the Milky Way at night in a very dark location, but much brighter. You'd be seeing the gas, not the stars. The way I like to think of it is, if you had a black sheet of paper and you had pinpricks letting light in from the other side, that's kind of what you see with your optical eyes and the pinpricks of the stars. But the radio world is reversed, and you see the scaffolding, all of that gas. And so it's like seeing in between all of it.

All of that seemingly empty space suddenly fills up, and you see, for example, big lines, which are magnetic-field lines. You see spinning stars that have been kicked out of their own individual solar systems. You see them running; you see their trails. You see supernovae — exploding stars — and you see the shells of those stars kind of expanding very, very slowly.

And at nighttime, you'd see something exactly similar. And that's the point — because you do not need the sun to go down to do radio astronomy.

BS: It'd probably be a little overwhelming to see all that, all the time.

EC: I mean, can you imagine? Even in this room, I'd be seeing all of the text messages and the Wi-Fi signals and the radio stations. … It would be horrendous. Like, thank God nobody can sense these things in any way. That's the wonderful thing about radio signals: They just pass straight through, and nobody's wiser.

BS: In your book, you write that radio astronomers made "first contact" with the moon long before the Apollo astronauts actually landed there. How do radio waves help us explore the moon?

EC: I watched Artemis II launch live, and I was as overwhelmed as every other space fan. I'm a huge proponent of space exploration. I recognize it's hugely expensive — but it's worth it. And it's also quite dangerous. It takes some very brave people to do that.

What you can do with radio astronomy, and what we did in the 1950s, was we can send photons instead. We can use a big antenna to send little packets of radio light to the moon, and it takes about 1.5 seconds for them to get there. They bounce off the surface of the moon, it takes 1.5 seconds to get them back, and we've barely had time to blink. And the way in which that light has changed — for example, its intensity or its polarization, which we can think of as the direction that the light is traveling — can tell us something about the surface of the moon, or the shape of it, or what it's made of.

We can also do an active form of astronomy where we send [radio waves] with a radar. Why this is important now more than in the Apollo era is that this form of astronomy can dig. And it can get into every crevice and cranny and cave on the lunar surface, bounce around, and basically give you an underground scan.

Now it's very early days, it's still quite a crude technology, but you can get underground scans of lava tubes on the lunar surface. That's important because Artemis IV, and any missions after where humans stay on the moon for any length of time ‪—‬ they need to know where the hell to run if there's a big solar storm. With just a few seconds of radio astronomy, you can start getting an idea of where are the best places to land and where are the best places to build long-lasting human settlements.

BS: NASA is talking about building a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. Why would that be useful?

EC: I have major skin in the game in this one, so a big personal bias. But the reason that you'd want to put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon is because Earth is getting really noisy with radio waves, and has been for many, many, many, many decades. But with Starlink, it's gotten really noisy. And radio waves are very, very faint. So we need the quietest place in the solar system to listen, and that is the far side of the moon.

Even on the moon, it's getting noisier very quickly, which is concerning. But there are plenty of very good, exciting plans. Do you know Arecibo, the big 300-meter [980 feet], beautiful dish set in the Puerto Rican jungle [until it collapsed in 2020]? One idea is to use a moon crater instead of a dish, like Arecibo. So to fly up just a few incredibly lightweight boxes, basically, which autonomously land at the side of the crater, unfurl copper wire, which is like the big antenna that's going to receive all the light, and the crater acts as a dish, focusing the radio light and gathering huge amounts of it.

Now, that's just utterly cool. And I think that could easily get funded. I could easily see it happening within a decade, which is very short for a space mission.

BS: You said the moon is getting noisier. How?

EC: Because a lot of people are going up there ‪—‬ for example, Artemis and all of the other national space agencies are sending exploratory probes. China is landing; India is landing. All of these landers and probes need to communicate with their owners on Earth. And to do that, you need a relay satellite orbiting the moon, and then relaying, amplifying and transmitting radio signals back to Earth — and that's bloody noisy. It's like having a radio antenna for the national news next to your house.

BS: That's an unfortunate paradox of space exploration: The more space infrastructure we build, the more noise we introduce into observations.

EC: Yeah, but I think there's a middle ground. I'm not completely against satellite constellations like Starlink. I think they do wonderful things for equalizing Wi-Fi access across developing countries. I think it's fabulous for that. My argument is always: OK, but why do we need a million satellites from 10 different companies? Why can't we work together a little bit more? Because it does cause environmental damage.

I wish more people would consider space and the exploration of it as our environment, and we need to do it in a sustainable and ethical fashion. Does that mean profits can't still be made? No, it means that we're balancing it, just as we balance profiteering on Earth.

We don't always get that right — by a long, long, long way — but there are laws. So I'm willing to lose a percentage of my radio data from the far side of the moon in order to further space exploration. But can we just work together to make sure it's not all of the data, please?

BS: The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is arguably the most famous use of radio astronomy. Where does SETI stand today?

EC: I think it's a very patient search. SETI scientists are some of the most patient and reflective scientists I've met. They know very well that this is a very long experiment. This is an experiment where we are relying on an external party to have made that communication and guessing where in the sky that communication has come from and when. That's very, very difficult.

And the more dishes, the more telescopes, the more wavelengths that you can scan at once, the faster you can create a survey, which really ups the probability of us picking up the phone just as somebody calls. But it's a numbers game. That's what fascinates me with this area, is that it could be this afternoon. It could be 6 p.m. this afternoon that this happens, or it could be in 200 years. It depends on us looking at the right place at the right time.

BS: Do you personally think there is extraterrestrial intelligence out there?

EC: Yes, I do. I think more and more now, we're seeing that almost every star like the sun has multiple planets. We are finding more and more planets that are a whisker away from being within the habitable zone, and we haven't even got the telescopes that are perfectly tuned for finding those perfect habitable zone planets. Soon, I think we'll start finding habitable planets everywhere we look when we get those more powerful telescopes.

And then it comes down to the fact that physics is the same everywhere. And so any intelligent life that does form is going to want to communicate over long distances. How do they do that? Radio waves. OK, but radio waves can escape the atmosphere. Brilliant! That means that they don't even have to want to contact us; they are leaking radio waves, just like we are leaking radio broadcasts. It would take an enormously powerful antenna to pick it up, but it is within the realm of possibility.

But to be very clear, do I believe there has ever been a visitation from an extraterrestrial intelligence? Absolutely not. No respected SETI researcher does.

BS: What if the call does come tomorrow? Say we get a radio signal from a billion light-years away and we're able to confirm it's some kind of alien message. Where do we go from there?

EC: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, there are protocols within individual collaborations of scientists. So first of all, a load of scientists is going to check their answer. So, if they hear something funny, they're going to check that it's repeated. They're going to check that nothing in nature as we know it could create that, and then they're going to work out whether there is a planet from that area.

But if they're now at the point where we think this is intelligence, then I'm not sure. Would they have to let the president know first? Would they have to put it on Facebook? Like, can you even imagine if they were like, "You know what? We're going to really troll the government, and we're just going to subtly drop an Instagram reel."

And then the question is, what would we do? Like, what would you do? Would you riot? Would you panic? Would you call your partner? Would you bring your kids home? Would you be like, "Hey, that's cool," and get on with your day? I don't have an answer.

BS: It would change everything — and yet we still have to go on being humans here on Earth.

EC: Yeah, and to be more serious, I think there would be a huge responsibility on every capable science communicator out there. Because anybody without an understanding of this area would quite rightly start to think, "Oh my God, it's ‘Mars Attacks!’"

But let's say it comes from one of the closest kinds of habitable planets, 70 light-years away. OK, so they sent that message 70 years ago. And anything that we could send back is going to take 70 years to get there. This is not something which could happen in a human lifetime, and the aliens certainly just can't rock up suddenly, unannounced — because, again, physics is the same everywhere. We can't create the kind of technology to have warp drives or the energy required for that. Stars output the same amount of energy everywhere. I don't want to close my mind off completely to physics that I have not come across yet, but the likelihood is, they'd never visit.

We'd become pen pals at most. That's a crazy idea: just really long-distance pen pals. It takes like a whole generation to send and receive one message. Imagine if we were like, "Hey, guys, have you worked out nuclear fusion, because we've got a really big energy crisis right now," and it'd be like 70 years along the line, and then we'd get an answer like, "Oh, we hadn't actually worked it out yet. Thanks!" That would be amazing.

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

Epigenetics, which means "above genetics," results in changes to the way an individual's genes act without involving changes to the DNA itself. For example, by adding molecules called methyl groups to DNA — a process called DNA methylation — epigenetics may turn genes on or off, or increase or decrease their activity.

Environmental factors ‪—‬ such as stress, diet and smoking ‪—‬ can fuel epigenetic modifications which can, in turn, lead to conditions such as colorectal cancer and heart disease.

But some of these epigenetic modifications can be reversed. This means that epigenetics can reveal potentially new and targeted ways of modifying disease risk, Alika Maunakea, a professor of anatomy, biochemistry and physiology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Live Science.

Having grown up subsistence-living on a homestead in Hawaii, Maunakea said he learned from a young age that the environment plays a major role in shaping the health of the community.

Now, Maunakea has been researching epigenetics for over 20 years and heads the Maunakea Lab, which focuses on how environmental and epigenetic factors act at the molecular level to fuel health disparities. Live Science spoke with Maunakea to unpack how epigenetics affects health and what his research is uncovering about how epigenetics plays a role in driving health disparities in Native Hawaiians.

Sophie Berdugo: Can you explain how genetics and epigenetics interact in a health context?

Alika Maunakea: It's a little complicated because there's a lot of nuanced differences and variability in understanding the context behind disease risk that's not just shaped by genetic predisposition but also environmental factors and lifestyle, and even things that our grandparents experienced. That's where epigenetics comes in.

Epigenetics is this intermediate state between the environment and the genome, and it helps to regulate the genome. So, even if you carry a genetic risk, it doesn't necessarily mean that risk will play out.

They [genetics and epigenetics] relate to each other because there are certain regions in the genome where if there's a polymorphism — a change — in the sequence, that can sometimes cause a change in the epigenetic patterning. So there's this intertwined connection between the two. In some cases, it's hard to separate completely the genetic variability that's conferring a risk of a particular outcome with epigenetic variability that's contributing to that same risk.

If a lot of the epigenetic variability is contributing to that risk — rather than genetic variability — then there's a chance that there are lifestyle changes, things that you can modify at the individual level to reshape the epigenome, that would then help to reduce that risk. So there's still a lot of work [to be done] around understanding that connection, and it will require a multidisciplinary approach and integrating multiple types of data.

SB: What got you interested in this field?

AM: My great-grandmother was a Hawaiian healer — what we call "kahuna la'au lapa'au" — and she taught me "nā mea Hawai'i," so "all the things Hawaiian." There was a deep understanding and recognition for how maintaining a healthy built and natural environment around us actually does shape our own health and well-being.

I was really interested in understanding why our population, Native Hawaiians, has a higher prevalence of specific chronic conditions which we never had before Westernization, and trying to understand, why do we see it earlier, at a younger age, in our population compared to other populations? That was something that really bothered me. I wanted to understand that more at the cell and gene level, so I think I just gravitated naturally towards epigenetics because I think it explains that phenomenon.

My main goal is really to apply that information into more of a clinical, community-based setting where that information can be used to enable tools and approaches that would help reduce the onset of these disorders in our community.

What we're learning now is that, indeed, epigenetic processes can precede disease symptoms. We can actually identify some of the earlier indicators of disease trajectories before our clinical diagnosis, using epigenetic analyses. Trying to understand how that can play a role in enabling prevention is a real big thing in my lab right now.

SB: Which health conditions do you look at in your research?

AM: One of the conditions that we're looking at is type 2 diabetes, which has such a high prevalence amongst Native Hawaiians. It's three times higher than in other populations in the state, as well as an earlier onset of disorder: about 10 to 15 years younger where Native Hawaiians are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes compared to other populations in the state. [They also have] higher rates of mortality due to type 2 diabetes and other chronic conditions.

Pre-colonization [pre-Western contact in 1778], we never had [chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes] as an issue in our population. Our "kahuna la'au lapa'au" [Hawaiian healer], like my great-grandmother, had to invent new terms for them based on the phenotype [how the condition is presenting]. So we call it [type 2 diabetes] "mimi koko," which is "sweet blood."

It's unclear how much of our genotype is really related to that disease risk, but we think that environmental factors and the changes that happened after colonization and Westernization, and the changes in our lifestyle and our society — disruption and especially displacement — really drove us to this state where there's this higher incidence now of these conditions. And so we're trying to understand what, at the molecular level, is shaping those outcomes and how we can use that information to prevent that from happening in the first place.

One of the questions that really immediately came out was, what's really behind the earlier age of onset? Why do we not only have a higher prevalence, but why is it happening at a younger age? That question still remains to be clarified, but we think that certain traits, like obesity, modify that risk.

To get at that question, then, we really need to understand, at the molecular level, are there disruptions to the aging process in this population? Are there differences in vulnerabilities to aging in this population versus other populations that might be influenced by these environmental factors?

There's a phenomenon called "epigenetic aging," which Steve Horvath back in 2013 initially published a paper around, and identified that there are certain sites in the genome that are epigenetically regulated — by DNA methylation, in particular — that correlate with chronological age really well in a healthy population.

But there were some individuals that exhibited what we would call outliers in this relationship, where there were cases where individuals seem to have higher estimated epigenetic age compared to their chronological age. So they would seem [to be] biologically aging faster than they should be normally. And then there were also people at the opposite end, where their estimated epigenetic age actually appeared younger than their chronological age. And we think that corresponds to health in general.

We found something similar in the Native Hawaiian population: There's a higher frequency of individuals in the Native Hawaiian population that seem to be, at the molecular level, aging faster than they should be compared to other populations, such as white populations and Japanese American populations in the state of Hawaii.

And we know that corresponds to the higher prevalence of these chronic conditions that we see, like diabetes in the Native Hawaiians compared to these other populations, as well as some of these risk factors, like obesity. And we've seen it in our community. Individuals that are in socioeconomically poorer neighborhoods tend to have this accelerated aging.

We're learning that there are certain individual-level lifestyle factors that can actually potentially modify that [epigenetic] risk. We have identified that even amongst Native Hawaiians that are living in socioeconomically poorer areas, at the individual level, if there's a higher degree of physical activity as well as education — and even in some cases, nutrition — there tends to be closer-to-normal biological aging amongst those individuals even within that population.

And so that told us that while there's a higher risk for individuals that have this accelerated aging of diseases like diabetes, that risk could be potentially modified by engaging in healthier lifestyle changes.

Now we're not only seeing that there's this disparity and potentially a mechanism that might underlie that disparity but some clues into potentially what types of environmental factors might be shaping that molecular process.

We have one pilot study that we published a few years ago showing clearly that amongst Native Hawaiians that are diabetic, when they engage in a lifestyle intervention that includes social support, in particular, they not only improve their glycemic control — which is the main purpose of this intervention, really — through this lifestyle modification over a 12-week period, but we also showed that the cells that relate to inflammation, the behavior of those cells, is actually modified by that intervention, and they actually seem to be less inflamed. [Glycemic control is the management of blood glucose levels.]

The epigenomes of those cells are also being modified to a pattern that's similar to a nondiabetic-like state.

So we think those cells play a role in the pathology and the etiology [cause] of the disease and metabolic dysregulation in diabetic individuals. But we also think that modifying their inflammatory state might actually help with improving the glycemic control. So we're trying to understand how much of the epigenetic patterning might be associated with that [inflammation].

We're finding very clear associations that indicate that potentially we can use that information also to identify more effective interventions that might actually target this [epigenetic] process, where we can reduce the inflammatory state of these individuals at the cellular and molecular level.

We're really hoping that it can be useful for prevention, because we can identify these really early, before the clinical diagnosis. [Editor's note: These findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.] And we think that if we can do that at the individual level, especially in a high-risk population, then we can recommend appropriate interventions — or optimize those interventions that exist — to target changes in the epigenome that then have this effect on the physiology and the outcomes of the condition itself. So that's something we're trying to develop further.

SB: How resource-intensive is it to inspect an individual's epigenome?

AM: It is resource-heavy, unfortunately, at this stage. So I think that it will take time to develop new technologies and tools that are more targeted and that can be used in more of a clinical setting.

But with genome sequencing being more cost-effective than it ever was before and the reduced cost that it's now moving towards, that does increase the feasibility to adopt some of these approaches.

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

When a cluster of hantavirus infections struck the cruise ship MV Hondius, about two dozen American passengers were on board. At least seven disembarked before health authorities were informed of the outbreak and headed home to the United States; 17 others remained on the ship for several weeks and have only just been repatriated. Meanwhile, a few Americans who had never been on the ship may have been exposed to the virus while on board an international flight.

Officials with the World Health Organization (WHO) say they've been in consistent communication with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), coordinating plans for the American passengers and exchanging technical information about hantaviruses. But this is an unusual time for the CDC, and the agency is not behaving as it usually would in such outbreaks, Jodie Guest, senior vice chair of epidemiology at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, told Live Science.

The U.S. is no longer a WHO member state, and the CDC has endured deep staffing cuts at the hands of the second Trump administration. The agency has been slow to issue public statements about its efforts to manage the hantavirus outbreak, and on the few occasions they've spoken with the press, CDC representatives have often been vague or imprecise.

Live Science spoke with Guest — who led Emory's COVID-19 Outbreak Response Team within Georgia and advised Atlanta city officials during the mpox outbreak — about the country's management of this outbreak. We discussed whether the CDC, once considered the world's premier public health agency, may no longer be equipped to handle infectious disease outbreaks.

Nicoletta Lanese: What is different about how the CDC is responding to this outbreak compared with prior ones?

Jodie Guest: I definitely believe that the CDC's response is less visible than we would normally anticipate. CDC normally plays a leadership role and is extremely involved in the original investigation, as well as decisions about how to move people, etc., and WHO took the lead on that, in CDC's absence.

NL: WHO officials have said they're communicating with CDC leaders. But is there less communication than we'd expect?

JG: I can't speak to what communication they've had, but what I can say is that we were multiple weeks into this outbreak before CDC issued any sort of announcement about it. Additionally, it was only last Friday [May 8] that they put out a health alert to the HAN, the Health Alert Network, to clinicians in the United States. [HAN is the CDC's primary method of sharing time-sensitive, urgent public health information with officials, doctors and labs.]

While it's unusual to not have had that health alert sent out much earlier, I will say the risk to the general population is so incredibly low [in this instance]. That HAN is important to go out as a matter of procedure, but at the same time, we don't anticipate clinicians will be seeing people with hantavirus that are not already under surveillance.

The low transmission rate of the virus is definitely working in our favor, on that.

NL: What do you think is behind the CDC's delayed response?

JG: I think one of them is our removal from the WHO. So, when the U.S. left the WHO in January, that really changed our relationship, being at the table with leadership decisions and helping design protocols, surveillance, etc.

I do believe that CDC employees were there as the last disembarkment happened [on May 10 in the Canary Islands]. But generally, we would see the CDC taking the lead on how that disembarkment would happen, where they would go, how we would transfer people, and the overall international set of protocols.

There's certainly a huge amount of workforce reductions that have happened at CDC, as well as a kind of a back-and-forth with the workforce [being fired and rehired]. So some people have not been consistently employed; some people have been brought back. But there are generally about 18% fewer CDC employees than we previously saw, including outbreak investigators and specialists for things like cruise ship sanitation and port health.

NL: Thinking back to prior outbreaks, is there a good comparison to draw to this current situation? I was thinking of the Ebola cases in 2014, for instance.

JG: I do think that Ebola is probably the best example. There's a lot of differences between the two diseases, but from a response model standpoint, the CDC's posture for Ebola was an extremely large amount of global leadership. And at this point in time for hantavirus, I would say the international leadership is limited, and it's mostly domestic monitoring — which is extremely important; I do want to highlight that.

So I think it's reduced visibility and influence, as opposed to leading a global response.

NL: Given the U.S. is taking a back seat, do you think that's hindered the WHO's response at all?

JD: I think that there was some slow uptake at the beginning, and I don't know that that's anything other than hantavirus not being what you would anticipate on a cruise ship. You know, the original case was not tested for hantavirus; testing for hantavirus is not common and not available in all locations. It's not a routine clinical test. With all of those things, it doesn't matter who was leading the effort; that's going to delay everything. It's not going to be in your top diagnostic list of things to be looking for.

But I do think that there was some additional lag that happened that perhaps the CDC could have filled in. It's a counterfactual, so we will never know for sure. But I also believe that the WHO's efforts in their surveillance and their consistent communication has been excellent. They have been very, very communicative about what is happening, and they have been doing a wonderful job taking the lead on this.

NL: In the immediate term, do you feel the sluggishness we're seeing from the CDC places Americans in danger? Or is it more of a long-term issue?

JG: I think we have a response model problem. But at this point in time, I wouldn't say that this had any impact on the actual disease risk, including the care of the people who were passengers on that ship. So that's the great news. The immediate impact of these changes for the disease burden is really very, very low.

It's more about the visibility of response and strategic initiatives for the next thing that will happen that is most concerning. My biggest concerns are about our preparedness in times when we don't have an outbreak. Our systematic response in regards to how we're always looking for signals of something that is amiss — we want to make sure that is a fully staffed and fully capable group at the table with all the international leadership, all doing the same thing. Our surveillance systems are critical to the health of our population.

Big picture, I would say at the moment, we're less prepared for contagious pathogens and outbreaks than we normally anticipate being. Part of that is our withdrawal from WHO and not being a leader in the conversations but instead being a secondary method of getting information.

NL: Compared with our previous relationship with the WHO, what are we missing out on?

JG: Membership in WHO means that you get the early warning messages before they are available for public consumption. When you're not a member, you cannot be guaranteed that you have access to that. You don't have access to the immediate real-time surveillance and contact tracing data that you'd have had if you were a member.

It also means you're not part of the leadership of thought, and so you don't get to be part of the conversations about how we should disembark from this cruise ship, etc. We no longer have scientists who are embedded in the WHO-led teams that include virus sequencing, field investigations and things like that.

By no means do I think the WHO is actively keeping information from the CDC. I don't want that to be the message — but membership in WHO is critical. It's critical for thought leadership, but it's also critical for speed and depth of information and the flow of that information.

NL: Are there any pathogens you're particularly worried about regarding future outbreaks?

JG: I don't have any that I would name — you know, I would not have put hantavirus on a bingo card for 2026. And so, I wouldn't put a list together, but I would say that we are spinning out outbreaks like this more commonly, given our close contact with each other, our decreasing vaccine rates for some things, and just our global travel patterns. These factors are incredibly important to take into account, as well as climate change.

NL: Do you think the CDC could regain its capacity quickly, given investment, or could it take a long time to rebuild?

JG: I hope it will be in short order. There are extraordinary scientists that are still employed at CDC, who are the best of the best at work like this. My concern is it does take longer to build back something that was dismantled than it takes to keep something going.

I also have two other concerns. We've lost a lot of really important leadership at CDC and some very high-level experts, based on the current climate. That is unfortunate, to lose thought leaders. Then, going with that, the impact on the pipeline of new people going into public health — it is the exact time where we need everyone in public health to join us, but we do have a lot of concerns from students: "Will there be a career for me in this?" And the answer is absolutely yes, but we need to make sure we are showing them that.

In a moment when there is less investment in the public health infrastructure in the United States, you can understand why they would have questions.

NL: I assume that concern also extends to international students coming to the U.S. to train?

JG: Absolutely. When you make it harder to teach and to partner with other people in public health, that is going against what we know are the best practices. Public health is a team science. We need to all be doing this together to move the health of everyone forward. We cannot look at one particular area and say we're only going to focus on that without recognizing that the health of people everywhere affects all of us.

NL: One message leaders keep reiterating in this current outbreak is that "this is not COVID." Could you compare the two viruses?

JD: A couple of huge differences between the two: First of all, hantavirus is a known virus. We do have experience with it. It is also a rare virus. COVID was a novel virus [SARS-CoV-2] that we were learning about in real time in front of everyone. It also was not rare once it began; COVID is extremely transmittable from person to person.

What we call the R0 [pronounced R-naught], which is the reproductive number, is very high for COVID. It is very low for hantavirus. One infected person with the Andes strain [the type of hantavirus implicated in the cruise outbreak] will infect maybe 1.19 people, additionally. So the transmission rate is very, very slow, which is a good thing.

[In a previous outbreak, the median R0 across the whole outbreak was 1.19, while it was around 2.1 at the outbreak's start and 0.96 after containment measures were employed.]

The fatality rate of COVID at the beginning was, unfortunately, quite high, but it never reached the fatality rate of what we see with hantavirus, either.

Another comparison with COVID is, because so few people get [hantavirus], we don't need to be worried about mutational changes the way we saw with COVID. The more people that have it, the more ability a virus has to mutate, and we just don't have enough cases of hantavirus to be concerned about the instability of the virus and it mutating.

NL: During a past outbreak in Argentina involving transmission at a birthday party, the R0 of the Andes virus was estimated to be higher. What makes the difference there?

JD: The more general R0 [of 1.19] is aggregated across our traditional, although unusual [infrequent], outbreaks of Andes virus. The one at the birthday party in Argentina was a bit higher because of the close contact in the situation. You don't often see an outbreak like this, where multiple people are going to have that level of close contact.

I think that's the role that the cruise ship is also playing in this particular outbreak. Again, cruise ships are not where we would think about hantavirus, but given that it came onto a cruise ship, there was this closed environment where, particularly in the weather that they were in, where people were not outdoors all the time. And so you were inside, in close quarters, and more people ended up being a close contact than we would normally expect to see.

NL: With the Andes virus, what degree of interaction is a concern? And how is "close contact" defined?

JD: For hantavirus, it appears to be about a 24-hour window at the onset of symptoms that someone has enough virus that they're shedding to transmit to another person. So, it's a fairly small window.

But "close contact" in previous hantavirus outbreaks and this one so far does appear to be contact where you are sleeping in the same room with someone, sharing meals for long periods of time in a smaller space than the entirety of a cruise ship, for example, [or] if you are a health professional who has been taking care of a person during that time period. So it's about prolonged time together during that window when you're most likely to transmit the virus to another person.

NL: Would "prolonged" mean a couple of hours?

JG: I don't actually know that we have a better definition on hours. When we think of a person who shares a bedroom with someone else, those are long hours that you're together, but it doesn't necessarily have to be eight hours.

In the Argentina outbreak with the birthday party, they knew how long people were in this room at this birthday party, and there's actually even tracking of exactly where everyone was situated at the tables while they were consuming food, which is another great way to transmit if it's a respiratory illness and the room is closed. [The index patient in that case was reportedly at the event for 90 minutes and had a fever.]

All of those things are going to contribute to this close contact. Close contact outdoors is really different than close contact indoors.

NL: How are we confident that asymptomatic spread isn't a likely scenario?

JG: We've not seen any human-to-human transmission from someone who's been asymptomatic. So as long as people are remaining asymptomatic, their risk of transmitting it to another human appears extremely low, if not nonexistent.

It's what we would call just basic surveillance, "shoe leather" epidemiology. It's tracking all these cases [during outbreaks]. To wrap back to the HAN, this is one of the reasons why it's important that a health alert does go out; while we don't anticipate there would be cases that aren't related to the cruise ship, we would need to know if there are any.

So the monitoring tracks each individual person who you had contact with and then ranks the type of contact it is. Doing that monitoring while people are asymptomatic, as well as if and when they become symptomatic — it is that tracking during the asymptomatic time frame that helps us feel confident that we've not seen any transmission.

NL: So, in past outbreaks, it has always come back to a symptomatic person?

JG: Yes.

NL: Do you have any final messages you'd like to share?

JG: I will just highlight one more time that, while we may be somewhat conspicuously absent from the international efforts, this does not appear to have impacted the general health of Americans at this point in time. So that's the good news.

Editor's note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Live Science spoke with Jodie Guest on May 12, 2026; developments in the hantavirus outbreak that took place after that date may not be reflected.

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

As the planet warms due to climate change, extreme heat is threatening global food security by harming crops and livestock and reducing the number of hours farmers can work.

A recent report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Meteorological Organization warned that the impacts of extreme heat are pushing agricultural systems to the brink. The agencies found that half a trillion working hours are lost due to extreme heat each year — and the impacts will only worsen as global temperatures continue to climb.

The U.N.'s warning came the day after the Lancet Countdown ‪—‬ an international research collaboration that monitors key indicators of health and climate change ‪—‬ published its own report on health and climate change in Europe. Among its findings, the report highlighted that climate change is already causing heat-related deaths, unsafe working hours and food insecurity.

Live Science spoke with Shouro Dasgupta, an environmental economist and a co-author of the Lancet Countdown report, about extreme heat and agriculture in the wake of the new reports. Here's what he had to say.

Patrick Pester: How does extreme heat impact food production?

Shouro Dasgupta: Our crops are productive when the temperature is within a certain range. With extreme heat, we often see this range being breached. The other part is that, with high heat, crops wither, so many of them don't even get close to being harvested. Those are the two most common extreme heat impacts. Drought is another one. In many parts of the world, we now see prolonged droughts or droughts unprecedented in the history of that region.

PP: What does the U.N. report reveal that we didn't know already?

SD: This report is more for synthesis. It brings together the body of knowledge that currently exists, and it also focuses on several aspects of crop production. There are numerous case studies from all over the world — from the impact of heat on certain types of crops, all the way to livestock. It has a very detailed chapter on livestock, which is often not as well researched as crops.

PP: So animals aren't as productive when it's hot?

SD: Exactly, and it's dangerous for their health. For millions of farmers, their livelihoods and income depend solely on livestock, and as extreme heat generally kills livestock around the world, it's not just the supply of food that is being affected, but at a very human level, the livelihoods of these farmers are being destroyed.

PP: And it's going to be harder for farmers to work if it's very hot.

SD: It reduces their productivity because they have to take frequent breaks to protect their health, which brings us to the fact that agricultural workers also tend to have the least amount of social protection. They don't usually have contracts, and for millions of agricultural workers, unless they're working, they're not earning anything. So they often have to sacrifice their health in order to keep working.

PP: You published your Lancet report the same week as the U.N. report was released. What's different about your report, and what have you found?

SD: The Lancet Countdown is focused on indicators. Two of the indicators are very relevant to the discussion we're having. The first one is the impact on food insecurity in Europe, which is access to food. Our results show that compared to the 1981 to 2010 baseline, a higher frequency of heat waves and droughts has resulted in 1 million additional people becoming food insecure in 2023 alone. So the message is, food insecurity is no longer just about low-income countries. This is happening now in Europe.

The second indicator that I want to mention is the impact of warming on high-exposure sector workers. This is where we focus on working hours in agriculture and construction sectors in Europe. Our result shows that, due to warming between 2020 and 2023, on average, warming has resulted in a reduction of 24 hours per worker per year ‪—‬ so workers are having to reduce their working hours to protect their health. When they reduce their working hours, they earn less, which affects their livelihoods. And when they earn less, the profits of the company or the farm they work for also declines. This is transmitted to lower output and, eventually, lower economic growth.

PP: Is everyone going to be impacted by this if it's a global issue?

SD: At some point, yes. There is a lag between shocks on the workforce and the price we pay in the supermarket. But eventually, these impacts will be transmitted through the supply chain. At the same time, food production itself is being affected by extreme heat, and the joint effect of this results in increasing prices.

PP: How do we address this? Can we address this?

SD: Yes. I think it's important that we give a positive message.

There are policies that can be implemented to protect the agriculture sector and agricultural workers — safety nets. By safety nets, I mean proactive safety nets. We need to anticipate food insecurity events before they become famine. And safety nets — whether in the form of cash benefits, cash transfer or food assistance — have to be anticipated. We can no longer rely on reacting after an event has taken place.

Other policies, especially in the agricultural sector, would be investing in climate-resilient crops and salinity-resilient crops. In these cases, there can actually be learning from Global South to North. Countries such as Bangladesh, where I'm from, have more than three decades of experience in developing climate-resilient and salinity-resilient crops.

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

Our warming world is set to enter an El Niño period as early as May, with a high likelihood of southern North America experiencing supercharged temperatures.

One of the three phases of the natural El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle in the Pacific Ocean, El Niño events occur every two to seven years, driving up sea surface temperatures across the Pacific Ocean and increasing global temperature. The last El Niño partially explains why 2024 was the hottest year on record.

The knock-on effects of past El Niño events have been profound, with studies linking them to famine in Europe; civil wars in tropical regions; and droughts, floods and forest fires around the world.

And there's a good chance this year's El Niño will be particularly intense, with current forecasts indicating a 25% chance that El Niño will be "very strong" by November ‪—‬ meaning sea surface temperatures will rise by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above average.

To get a better idea of what the upcoming El Niño will look like and what it could mean for Earth's climate and weather, Live Science spoke with Nathaniel Johnson, a research meteorologist and member of the ENSO seasonal forecast team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center. Here's what he had to say.

Sophie Berdugo: How does NOAA predict and classify El Niño?

Nathaniel Johnson: Our basic classification of El Niño is based on the relative sea surface temperatures in this Eastern Central equatorial Pacific. And by relative, it means relative to the tropical average.

So, when the East Central tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures are more than 0.5 C [0.9 degrees Fahrenheit] above the tropical average, then we have El Niño conditions.

We can further subdivide El Niño into weak, moderate and strong. So that's more of an unofficial subdivision just based on how warm the ocean surface is in the east central tropical Pacific.

SB: What are the thresholds for those unofficial subdivisions, and how rare is each category?

NJ: El Niño is declared when the Relative Oceanic Niño Index — that's a measure of the ocean temperatures in the east central tropical Pacific box — is more than 0.5 C above the tropical average.

So between 0.5 C and 1 C [1.8 F], that would be a weak El Niño. El Niño, on average, occurs about every three to four years. Many times, it's a weak El Niño. If this index is between 1 C and 1.5 C [2.7°F], then we say it's a moderate event.

If it's 1.5 C to 2 C, we consider it a strong event. And then above 2 C is a very strong event. A very strong event is the sort of event that happens maybe once every 10 to 20 years.

What is the current forecast for the upcoming El Niño, and how certain is it?

NJ: Currently, NOAA predicts about a 90% chance that El Niño will develop by this fall. Usually, it's more difficult to make a forecast for El Niño in the spring: we have a so-called spring predictability barrier where forecasts tend to be less confident in the spring. So the fact that NOAA predicts a 90% chance is unusual for this time of year.

And there's about a 50% chance that it will at least be a strong event ‪—‬ (so, again, that index above 1.5°C ‪—‬ and about a 25% chance that'll be a very strong event, so above that 2°C.

There's still a lot of uncertainty about how strong this event will be. But I'd say it's still unusually confident that we will have an El Niño given that, this time of year, it's often difficult to be very precise about our El Niño forecast.

SB: Why is it tricky to forecast this time of year? And what does the fact that we've already got quite a high certainty that it's coming mean for this impending El Niño?

NJ: El Niño requires cooperation between the atmosphere and the ocean, so there has to be certain feedbacks between the tropical atmosphere and ocean. And coupling between the ocean and atmosphere is weaker this time of year, just because of seasonal changes in the average sea surface temperature.

So, for example, there's less of an east-west contrast between the Western Pacific and the Eastern Pacific. And that contrast between the East and West is what's important for this coupling between the tropical atmosphere and ocean.

So what that means is that it's easier to disrupt the development of an El Niño by just chaotic weather. So things that we cannot predict more than a few weeks in advance, for example, if we suddenly had strong winds coming from the East to West, that could help disrupt an El Niño.

The fact that we're this confident that El Niño will develop just tells us that, despite these uncertainties, despite the compounding impacts of the chaotic weather, the conditions are really well aligned for this El Niño to develop. We haven't seen anything, any signs that this progression is being disrupted. Everything so far seems to be aligning with this rapid change from the La Niña conditions we had last boreal winter [winter in the Northern Hemisphere]. We're now neutral, but the Eastern Pacific is warming up pretty quickly right now.

SB: Is it unusual how rapidly we've got this new El Niño approaching?

NJ: Yes, it is actually pretty unusual. The other way around is not so unusual. It's actually pretty common to go from, say we have a strong El Niño, to rapidly transition to a La Niña. But the other way around, going from a weak to almost moderate La Niña into El Niño and potentially a strong El Niño, that is more rare.

And, in fact, if this does turn out to be a very strong El Niño, it might be one of the most rapid transitions that I've seen in the record ‪—‬ maybe the most rapid. Because, to go from a weak-to-moderate La Niña to a strong-to-very-strong El Niño within one calendar year is just not something we see very often.

SB: So what could be causing that?

NJ: It's something that's going to have to be diagnosed after the event if it does turn out that way.

I'll just note that over the past century, we have seen an increase in these more rapid swings from one state to the other. So there's some suggestion that potentially climate change could play a role in making these swings more rapid between El Niño and La Niña. It's something that will take more investigation.

SB: What impact could a very strong El Niño event have on climate and food systems this year?

NJ: If we did have a very strong El Niño, it would have, for example, impacts on our fisheries. If we had a very strong El Niño, we could have a collapse of the Eastern equatorial Pacific "cold tongue," so that would reduce the amount of nutrient-rich water that gets upwelled. [Editor's note: The Eastern equatorial Pacific "cold tongue" is a nutrient-rich body of surface water in the Pacific Ocean.]

That would have potentially a very significant negative impact on, say, anchovy fisheries in Peru. We tend to see a migration of warm-water fish to warmer waters, like tropical fish migrating northward or to the West Coast of North America. Maybe cold-water species may see a decline of fish like salmon.

We see, potentially, negative impacts on crops where there's drought, so places like from Indonesia to Australia to northern South America tend to have drought. Those are some of the big impacts on food.

The wildfire risk would be increased over places including Australia, Indonesia, northern Brazil, parts of maybe western Canada and northern U.S., where the conditions are expected to be drier.

A very strong event just generally means much warmer tropical waters in general. So, coral bleaching could potentially be quite severe. So it's a lot of potentially strong ecological impacts from a very strong event.

SB: The most recent El Niño lasted from 2023 to 2024, and 2024 became the hottest year on record. What can we expect in terms of global temperatures for this upcoming El Niño?

NJ: El Niños tend to bring a temporary spike in the global mean temperature. If it turns out to be a strong event, then that would tend to be an even bigger spike on top of the long-term warming trends. So, if we were to have a stronger El Niño, then it would just increase the likelihood that we could have a new record in global mean temperatures.

SB: What will the impacts be on the U.S., parts of which are already facing severe drought conditions even before summer?

NJ: The impacts on the U.S. would tend to be strongest in our winter, although beforehand, the first notable impact would be on the hurricane season. Typically, during El Niño, we see a suppression of the Atlantic hurricane season and an enhancement of the Eastern Pacific season — so overall, maybe a reduced risk of tropical cyclones in the summer and fall.

But then, typically in the winter, we see enhanced rainfall and snowfall over the Southern tier of the U.S. So that would be potentially good news for the drought-stricken regions of the Southern part of the U.S.

But that shift to the storm track south would mean that drought in the more Northern areas may persist. So it would enhance the probability of persisting drought over the Northern parts that have been affected.

SB: So could El Niño bringing heightened winter rainfall to drought-stricken Southern parts of the U.S. lead to a greater risk of flooding?

NJ: Drought relief obviously would be great, but there is a potential heightened risk of floods. Particularly if we have a strong to very strong event, what we see is that the subtropical jet stream gets extended more to the East, more towards the North American continent. That could lead to more frequent, say, atmospheric rivers over parts of the West Coast — places like California.

And those atmospheric rivers, of course, bring beneficial rain and snowfall ‪—‬ you know, snowpack to the Midwest‪ —‬ but they also bring flooding and destruction from winds. And so there's always both positives and negatives that they can potentially counterbalance each other.

SB: What should people and governments do to prepare?

NJ: I think, at this point, they [should] just prepare for the enhanced risks that are associated with an El Niño of various strengths ‪—‬ understanding that there's still uncertainty in terms of the amplitude, as I mentioned, but there is a potential for a strong to very strong event. All these risks that are associated with El Niño, just be prepared to devote the resources necessary to address those risks.

Again, it's not certain — there's always other factors — but the stronger the event, the more likely it is that this El Niño is going to dominate over the other factors that could be influencing our weather and climate.

SB: There's been a lot of talk about there being a "super" El Niño and what the potential impacts will be. What is your closing message to readers?

NJ: I guess my message would be to try to filter out the hype and just focus on the solid science. Have a rational viewpoint of the forecast, which is, an El Niño is likely; there's still uncertainty in terms of how strong it will be. Just be aware of the potential impacts that may come, and note that we're going to continue to fine-tune the forecast in the months ahead.

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

Research suggests we are on the brink of crossing several ecological "tipping points" that could derail ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest and permafrost-covered tundras. But just as humans can cause these negative tipping points, we can also trigger positive ones that restore ecosystems, says Tim Lenton, a professor of climate change and Earth system science at the University of Exeter in the U.K.

In a new perspective article, Lenton argues that positive tipping points are key to hitting targets enshrined in various biodiversity and ecological restoration frameworks, including the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030. Examples of these targets include restoring 30% of all degraded ecosystems and conserving 30% of land and water by 2030.

Lenton's article was published Monday (April 27) in the journal Nature Sustainability. Live Science spoke with him about what constitutes a positive tipping point, the most encouraging examples we've seen, and the actions people can take to help restore ecosystems.

Sascha Pare: We often hear scientists talking about tipping points that unleash undesirable ecosystem changes that harm biodiversity. But what is a positive tipping point, as opposed to a negative one?

Tim Lenton: A tipping point, in general, is where a small change makes a big difference to a system, because you pass a threshold where some amplifying feedback, typically within that system, gets strong enough to support a self-propelling change from one state of the system to another. That sort of change tends to be self-accelerating, initially; it tends to be abrupt; it tends to be hard to reverse. And that applies whether the change is a good one or a bad one.

I've spent a lot of time working on what we might call negative tipping points in the climate and the biosphere. But a positive tipping point is one that we're going to normatively decide is good. I've written extensively about positive tipping points to get us to zero greenhouse gas emissions, but this particular paper is focusing on what tipping points are positive for nature. We're still net destroying nature at the moment, but various governments have signed up to the idea that we need to be regenerating nature. So, in this case, I try to define a positive tipping point for nature as something that ecologists would agree was a shift in the state of an ecosystem or even a big biome that was nature-positive.

If we take a canonical case like the dieback of coral reefs and their replacement with a macroalgal or seaweed goo, generally ecologists and people who fish in the surrounding area would all agree that it's a positive if you could tip back to the thriving, flourishing coral reef. With the Amazon case, if we've destroyed the Amazon for cattle ranching, then from a nature point of view, the positive tipping would be back to a healthy, fire-suppressing, rainfall-recycling forest.

SP: Can you give some examples of positive tipping points where we can see that the ecosystem has undergone positive change?

TL: A classic case is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. When the last wolf was hunted to local extinction [around 1926], it then unleashed the population of elk and other grazers to go wild and eat down the saplings of many tree species. So then, you had a lot less wooded or forested [areas in] Yellowstone Park. But when the wolves were reintroduced [in 1995 to 1996], it triggered what's called a trophic cascade, where you saw record-breaking recovery, especially of the riparian vegetation — the vegetation around water courses and shallow bits of the landscape.

Another famous one is sea otters off the Pacific West Coast of North America. They were hunted to local extermination [in the 18th and 19th centuries]. What you saw when you lost the otters is that urchins that the otters loved to eat went crazy and ate down all the kelp and destroyed this wonderful kelp forest, which changed the whole ecosystem. As the population has begun to recover through less hunting and deliberate reintroductions in the Alaskan region, otters come back, eat urchins; kelp bounces back; and the whole ecosystem is reinstated.

I touch on a bunch of other ones [in the article], too. There was the eutrophication of the Norfolk Broads [in England] and other shallow lakes. [Eutrophication is an excessive enrichment of water with nutrients.] It was a long journey, but by controlling the nutrient inputs — the runoff — into those waterways, we eventually managed to, in some cases, tip recovery of clear waters and flourishing, more complex ecosystems. Those are all tipping points in nature.

I also talk about cases of positive tipping for nature, but the tipping might be in society. We see the positive tipping of the spread of, say, marine protected areas, or some [other] nature-conserving or regenerating activity.

And then I get into the territory of, could we positively tip the drivers of nature destruction? The simple one is that people eat too much meat, especially red meat. Is there the potential to positively tip change? There's trends in the right direction in the U.K. and several other rich nations, with people eating less red meat. And then there's India — a country where, for cultural reasons, there's way less meat consumption. That shows that an alternative stable state of diet is possible.

SP: In your recent book, "Positive Tipping Points: How to Fix the Climate Crisis" (Oxford University Press, 2025), you write about positive tipping points that could accelerate the energy transition away from fossil fuels. What are some of those tipping points?

TL: There are a lot of important amplifying feedbacks in society that have been enabling a spread of clean, zero-emission technologies, whether it's electric vehicles or the adoption of solar panels. These amplifying feedbacks include things like the fact that the more people who adopt the clean, green alternative, the more they can influence other people to adopt it.

We tend to learn from each other. But actually, the beauty of those technologies is that the more solar panels or electric vehicle batteries we make, the better and cheaper they tend to get. There's something we call the increasing returns: The more who adopt [something], the more attractive it becomes for the next person to adopt, because the thing is more affordable, more attractive in its performance, and more accessible, usually, as well. Those feedbacks really help to create a self-propelling change.

SP: What do you hope people will take away from knowing there are these positive tipping points and not just negative ones?

TL: I want people to take away a sense of empowerment or agency. There are demonstrated cases — loads of them that I touch on in the paper — where, at different scales, individuals, households, communities have come together and worked with the feedbacks that are in nature to positively tip to a better state.

SP: You write in the article that it took more otters to bring back the kelp forests on the West Coast than there were to begin with. With that in mind, how difficult is it to reverse a negative tipping point?

TL: If you want to tip back [to a nature-positive state], you've got to get to the point where you destabilize the undesirable state or give the system a big shove. It's that idea of alternative stable states [such as a thriving coral reef or a seaweed-choked one] that always tends to bring with it this quality that you have to work harder to positively tip recovery, in terms of the drivers, than to get the bad state. And that was true, for example, for the nutrient loading of shallow lakes in the Norfolk Broads. If you dial the phosphorus runoff back down again to the level at which you tipped the creation of this horrible eutrophic stew, I'm afraid you wouldn't get the system back; you have to dial it a lot further.

Mathematically, we talk about these alternative stable states having attraction; they maintain themselves, so you have to break the feedbacks that are self-maintaining for the bad state, just like the ones for the good state eventually got broken. But then, when you have tipped recovery, the good thing to know about is that that has its own irreversibility. It cuts both ways.

SP: Which negative tipping points are you most concerned about?

TL: The collapse of the great Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC for short, is my greatest source of concern because of the carnage that would cause for societies all over the world, but not least in the U.K., where I live. In the biosphere, I would say that our report [showing] that we may already have passed a tipping point for widespread coral reef dieback is pretty concerning. I guess I might be even more concerned if I felt we were reaching the tipping point to lose the Amazon rainforest or large parts of it. The coral reefs one is pretty bad, when you think about it from both the biodiversity point of view (it's at least a quarter of marine biodiversity) and the human point of view. Estimates differ, but there are always hundreds of millions of people who depend on these reefs for their livelihoods, so that's a huge issue.

SP: Do you think geoengineering could help us reach some of these positive tipping points?

TL: I think we should keep researching the global geoengineering possibilities to know what they're capable of and what their limitations and side effects are. But before we consider that, we should do everything in our power to do the things we know will work to accelerate the change to zero emissions to stop the underlying problem.

In the space of nature, there is no magical geoengineering solution for stopping the fundamental driver of people, on average, eating more meat, which is leading to the net destruction of nature. So again, let's focus on what it takes to change the crucial drivers, because the geoengineering only really matches up against things that are threatened by the rising temperature.

SP: What can individual people do to help trigger positive tipping points?

TL: Anyone can ask themselves about their dietary choices. I'm not saying everybody needs to go vegetarian or vegan, but just by reducing particularly our red meat consumption, we can [create] a disproportionate benefit for nature. We might all be inspired to be part of some nature-regenerating activity or initiative in our locale. Maybe we're part of a community garden movement; maybe we get a bit involved with wildlife trusts or something in replanting or regenerating the ecosystem. If those initiatives think about the amplifying feedbacks that they can activate to help the initiative spread, then being part of those could be the seeds of wider change. And loads of people already are part of those initiatives, which is great to see.

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

Birds have spread their wings the world over, but they first took flight at least 150 million years ago, during the dinosaur age.

In his new book "The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present" (Mariner Books, 2026), Steve Brusatte, who is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, takes readers on a wild ride from the oldest known bird, Archaeopteryx from Jurassic Germany, through the eras, explaining how two-legged theropod dinosaurs evolved into the more than 10,000 species of birds alive today.

Around 66 million years ago, some of these small, winged creatures survived the asteroid that killed the nonavian dinosaurs. While many birds stayed small, others grew to huge sizes . Brusatte describes a bevy of lost giants, including colossus penguins, which were gorilla-size apex predators who prowled the oceans, elephant birds that stood as high as a basketball hoop and laid watermelon-size eggs, and terror birds that hammered their prey into submission with razor beaks.

Like Brusatte's other books, "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World" (William Morrow, 2018) — which landed him the role as scientific advisor on the "Jurassic World" movies — and "The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us" (Mariner Books, 2022), he starts each new section with a vignette, drawing readers into past worlds. You can read an excerpt on Live Science, detailing the discovery of the first known fossilized dinosaur feathers.

Live Science sat down with Brusatte to discuss the original purpose of feathers, how bird flight was an evolutionary accident, and why the modern era may present the biggest threat to birds since the dino-killing asteroid wiped out their relatives.

Laura Geggel: Alright, this is the big question: Are birds dinosaurs?

Steve Brusatte: Birds are dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs in the same way that a T. rex or a Triceratops is a dinosaur. And that is because birds evolved from other dinosaurs. They are part of the family tree. They are just a peculiar group of flying dinosaurs. Just like bats are a strange group of flying mammals.

LG: It's thought that birds evolved from shrinking, two-legged theropod dinosaurs. How did this come about?

SB: Birds did not evolve by, let's say, a T. rex mutating into a chicken one day. That's not how evolution works. And what we see from the fossil record is a whole series of transitional fossils of dinosaurs that lived tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of years ago, evolving one by one. [They evolved] the keystone features of birds: feathers, wings, wishbones, hollow bones and big chest muscles for flying. But these things didn't all just evolve at once. They did not evolve for flying. Almost all of these things evolve for other reasons.

We see things like feathers first turn up in dinosaurs that were too big to fly that lived on the ground. These feathers are much simpler than the feathers of birds today. So, we can actually tell that a lot of the things that birds need to fly, the things that make birds, are things that actually evolved in dinosaurs. They are dinosaur features that were repurposed later on by evolution to make a flying bird.

LG: What do feathers do for an animal? Why do we think dinosaurs had them in the first place?

SB: There is nothing else alive today that has feathers. They are a bird hallmark, a calling card for birds. But what we see from fossils is that the ancestors of birds first evolved feathers. Lots of dinosaurs had feathers, so they're really a dinosaur feature.

And the incredible thing is that we see that a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. It isn't just one or two dinosaurs. And it's not even just the dinosaurs that are most birdlike or were the immediate ancestors of birds. It's many dinosaurs. There are meat-eating dinosaurs with feathers, there's plant-eating dinosaurs with feathers. There's little dinosaurs with feathers. Some of the raptor dinosaurs like Velociraptor [had feathers]. There are big dinosaurs with feathers. There's a tyrannosaur from China, a cousin of T. rex that was like 30 feet [9 meters] long that weighed something like a ton. Its body is covered in feathers.

So, if you map this onto the dinosaur family tree, really the only conclusion you can draw is that feathers were normal for dinosaurs. The common ancestor of dinosaurs would have had some kind of feather. But most of these feathers were very simple — they were not quill pens. They didn't make up wings. There's no way they could be used for flying. They looked a lot more like hair, just individual little strands similar to our hair.

The direct evidence from the fossil record [is] that feathers evolved in a simpler form. They must have been used for something else. We don't know exactly, but the best idea is that they evolved for the same reason that hair evolved in mammals, and that was to help regulate the temperature, to keep the body warm. We wouldn't really know that without the fossils. To me, as a paleontologist, that's the really cool part of the story. This is the evidence from many millions of years ago of how birds evolved.

LG: You've actually studied a number of fossils with feathers.

SB: I write about this in the story, the first time I saw a dinosaur wing. And I know it sounds hyperbolic, but it really was kind of a transcendent experience. And I'll explain why. So I was a college student at the time. I was in undergrad and I was on a trip with my mentor with Paul Sereno who's a very famous dinosaur hunter who's discovered dinosaurs all around the world. He brought me along as a research assistant and we were in China, and my god this was the first time I'd been to China, so far away from home. I grew up in the middle part of America. It was just sensory overload.

We were at the museum in Beijing and from across the room I saw on a limestone slab of rock, a dinosaur beautifully preserved. All the bones were there and it was surrounded by a halo of feathers and the arms were lined with quill pens that looked just like the feathers of modern birds.

Now, I had studied dinosaurs by this point. I was building a career in paleontology. I'd read all about birds and bird evolution. I knew that a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. But until it was in front of my own eyes, and until I saw just how similar those feathers were to the feathers of modern birds, how they formed a wing — but it wasn't a bird, it was a raptor dinosaur. Until that moment, it didn't really hit home.

So, I completely understand how this idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs or birds are dinosaurs, that can be a bit off-putting to people, a bit confusing. It just makes your head spin. But when you see it, you really see it. And since then, I've been very fortunate to go back to China to work with many great Chinese colleagues. To work at some of the museums where farmers from northeastern China bring in the fossils of these feathered covered dinosaurs. These were fossils that were formed about 125 million years ago. Volcanoes buried these entire ecosystems; they locked the soft tissues, the fine details into stone, and now the farmers in Liaoning province in China find these in abundance and bring them to museums.

It's been an incredible thing to play a small role alongside a lot of my good friends in China in studying some of these astounding animals that really capture evolution in action.

LG: The birds' reptile cousins, the pterosaurs, were already flying around when birds emerged. Did birds face much competition from their cousins?

SB: Yeah, it's a great question. A lot of people, rightly so, by the way, think that pterosaurs or pterodactyls, are dinosaurs. I mean, you often see them in dinosaur movies, you see them on the dinosaur posters and the dinosaur toy sets — but they're not actually dinosaurs. They're a separate group of reptiles that flew. They're close cousins to dinosaurs, but they are not dinosaurs, the same way a crocodile isn't a lizard.

Remarkably though, it was the pterodactyls that were the first animals with bones to ever evolve powered flight. And by that, I mean the type of flying where you have wings and you actively move those wings up and down to generate the lift and the thrust that you need for flying.

Plenty of animals can more passively fly and glide — flying squirrels, flying fish. But it's only been the pterodactyls, then later the birds, and then the bats among animals with bones that have evolved powered flight. And the pterodactyls did it by at least about 230 million years ago.

There are fossils of that age of fully formed pterodactyls with big wings, not wings made out of feathers. They did it differently. Their wings were made out of skin. They were attached to a single long finger like an E.T. finger. It was the fourth finger, the ring finger.

Now, Archaeopteryx is still the oldest bird [from] about 150 million years ago. That means that for about 80 million years, give or take, the pterosaurs were there alone in the air. I mean there would have been insects and other things, but among animals with bones, they were the only flyers.

So when birds came on the scene, when dinosaurs started to properly fly they were really interlopers in a pterodactyl world, and they really mounted an insurgency. They didn't just take over the world right away. For a long time, birds and pterodactyls lived together. And in fact, the pterodactyls only died when the rest of the non-bird dinosaurs died when the asteroid hit at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago.

Again, you can do the math. That means that for more than 80 million years, there were birds and pterodactyls living together. Ultimately, really, it was just that asteroid that made the birds victorious. If not for that quirk of prehistory, who knows what the modern world might be like.

LG: There were multiple bird lineages, but only one survived the mass extinction. What set it apart?

SB: The day the asteroid hit, the 6-mile-wide [10 km] rock fell out of the sky and triggered earthquakes and tsunamis and wildfires and blocked out the sun for many years, plunging the Earth into a long nuclear winter. I mean, this was carnage.

And 75% of all species died. Among the species that died, [were] yes, T. rex and Triceratops and the long-neck dinosaurs and the duck bill dinosaurs, but also all of the more primitive birds — the ones that still had teeth, that still had long tails, that still had big claws on their hands, like raptor dinosaurs. A whole bunch of those birds were living on the day the asteroid hit, and they didn't make it through.

The only birds that survived are the modern-style birds, the ones that we know. But these are the birds that have beaks instead of teeth. They're the birds that have big wings and big chest muscles so they can fly really well. They're the birds that grow really fast. We don't really see baby birds very much in nature. They are there. You can hear them sometimes in the nest, squawking for their parents to bring them food, but they stay babies for maybe a few months at most. So birds grow super quickly.

These are all things that probably would have helped them stare down that asteroid because when the asteroid hit, you had to confront that with whatever features you had, with whatever the reality of your anatomy or biology was. There was no time for natural selection to slowly, gradually, change you generation by generation. You had to deal with the fires and the earthquakes and the acid rain and the nuclear winter. It all came at you.

If you were able to grow fast, that would help you. You could get through childhood more quickly. You could turn over the generations more quickly [to reproduce and evolve]. If you could fly, that could help you. If you were small — and these birds were small — you could hide away more easily [from predators and the hazardous, post-asteroid world]. And if you had a beak, you could eat seeds. And we know a lot of these birds could eat seeds. We find the fossil gut contents, the last meal fossilized sometimes.

Eating seeds is actually quite difficult to do. There's not a whole lot of animals that specialize in seeds, but it would have been very important if you could do it when the asteroid hit, because when the sun was blocked for a few years by all the soot from the fires and the dust and the grime from the collision, the Earth really would have gone into a winter that lasted several years. It was dark. It was cold. There was very little if any sunlight for plants to photosynthesize. And so ecosystems collapsed like houses of cards.

If you were a plant eater and you ate parts of a growing plant like leaves or fruits or flowers, you'd be in trouble. I mean, that stuff would soon be gone. But we know from modern disasters, forest fires and volcanic eruptions and so on, that seeds can last in the soil longer than any other part of a plant. That's how forests regenerate after a natural disaster.

If you could eat seeds, that might have been your ticket to survive a little bit longer. You had food that other animals couldn't get.

LG: If you fast forward to today, birds are facing many challenges. Do you want to talk about a few and why their numbers are dropping?

SB: I think birds today are facing their greatest challenge since they stared down the asteroid. There have been a number of birds that have gone extinct within human history. And many of those birds only lived in one place, often on one island. They're quite quirky birds, idiosyncratic birds, things like dodos, but also things like moas in New Zealand or elephant birds in Madagascar or a huge number of birds in Hawaii.

But extinction, I think, is really only part of the story. I mean, extinction is extinction. It's final. If the last member of a species dies, it's done. But you can have a species endure, but in a very wounded state.

That seems to be what's happening to a lot of birds, just since the time that my parents graduated from high school in the early 70s. There's been a loss of billions of birds in the standing population of North America. A lot of these species of birds, whether they're robins, different types of song birds, different types of owls or hawks or eagles … it's not that they've gone extinct, it's just that their populations have crashed. And it really is because of land use, it's because of fertilizer, it's because of pollution, it's because of climate change.

First of all, we just have to admit it's an issue, and then we have to find ways to try to mitigate against this. And I think that's where the fossil record comes in. If we have information from past extinctions or information from past episodes of environmental change, we can better understand which types of birds are more vulnerable when the climate changes or land use changes.

It is awesome to study T. rex, of course, but we do study fossils because we see them as relevant to understanding what's happening in the world today. They're clues from prehistory that give us insight. So that's where we're with birds. It is worrying, but I choose to be optimistic, for two reasons mainly.

First is that — bald eagles [and] California condors being two great examples — when we've realized that certain birds are in dire straits, we have done things to protect them. Bald eagles were super rare when I was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, but by the end of the 90s, they were very common in northern Illinois, especially along the Illinois River, where I'm from.

Now they have these tourist packages, especially in the winter, where you go and you just watch the eagles. There's so many of them fishing on the river. So, that's a great success story, and that gives me optimism.

The other thing that gives me optimism is [that] birds are survivors. If they got through the asteroid, they're survivors. If they've survived the gauntlet of climate change and volcanic eruptions and drifting continents and rising and falling seas and all the other things that have befallen the Earth over the last 150 million years, then at least some birds, I think, will be able to face whatever humans throw at them.

That's not an excuse for us to be completely disrespectful to the environment, but it does mean that in many ways I'm more hopeful that birds can endure than maybe even our own species. We might think it's the age of mammals. We're a mammal, of course. But at least in that way, we're still in the age of dinosaurs.

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