China controls some of the largest rivers in Asia, experiences heavy rain and has vast stores of water locked in glaciers in the west. But despite these abundant resources, China has a water problem. While central and southern regions are quenched by massive rivers like the Yangtze, the northeastern megacities like Beijing and Tianjin have endured serious water scarcity as agriculture, industry and population size rapidly increased.

To address the imbalance, China has undertaken one of the biggest engineering projects in the world: rerouting the flow of one of the world's mightiest rivers and its tributary, and ferrying the water thousands of miles from the center and south of the country to the thirsty north.

Called the South-to-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP), the vast system of canals, pipes, dams, reservoirs and pumps moves staggering amounts of water via two routes through central and eastern China.

"It binds into a single network four major river basins, six provinces, three megacities, myriad bureaucracies, and more than 700 million people," Michael Webber, a professor emeritus in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne who specializes in regional economic development in China, wrote in a 2023 journal article.

But even this is not enough to satisfy the water needs in the North: China is currently expanding these routes and is planning a third, western route for the project, which would snake through the Tibetan Plateau before feeding the water-parched north and east. The route is attractive to Chinese officials because the river-and-glacier-threaded plateau, dubbed the Water Tower of Asia, has abundant water resources and is the source of numerous major rivers.

However, experts say the routes could worsen conditions in parts farther south that provide the water. What's more, the Tibetan portion of the project has stoked fears and suspicion in neighbors, as unofficial plans swirl suggesting major transboundary rivers could be diverted away from other countries and further into China.

The huge plan is "unbelievable," Mark Wang, a professor of human geography at the University of Melbourne, told Live Science. "The proposals [have] underestimated the negative impacts — environmental, earthquakes, evaporation and economic cost," as well as the international impacts, Wang added.

Water imbalance

Construction of the SNWTP began in 2002. The eastern route has operated since 2013 and transports water from the mighty Yangtze from Yangzhou, near Shanghai, to the megacity Tianjin, which has a population of 15 million people. The central route, which goes from Danjiangkou to Beijing and Tianjin, began flowing the following year, carrying water from the Han River, or Hanjiang. Together, they have moved 21 cubic miles (88 cubic kilometers) of water more than 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) since they began operating, according to the Chinese government — more than double the maximum amount of water held in Lake Mead.

The motivation for this project is obvious: China must support nearly 20% of the world's population with just 6% of its freshwater reserves. And this water is not distributed evenly across the country. Northern China has nearly half of the country's population and more than half of its agriculture but just one-fifth of the country's freshwater reserves.

In some places, the imbalance is even more dramatic. Tibet, in the west, has 4.8 million cubic feet (136,800 cubic meters) of water per person, while Tianjin, in the Northeast, has just 3,990 cubic feet (113 cubic m) per person. The United Nations considers less than 1,000 cubic m (35,000 cubic feet) of fresh water available per person water scarcity and less than 500 cubic meters (18,000 cubic feet) per person as "absolute water scarcity." The average in the U.S. is 314,300 cubic feet (8,900 cubic m).

Water transfer

China has a long history of rerouting water to serve its needs. Parts of the eastern route, for instance, use the Grand Canal, which was first built in the fifth century B.C.

And the broad concept of transferring water from the south to the north was first laid out by Mao Zedong, China's first communist leader, in 1952.

"Control of water has been a key theme in Chinese history and mythology," Tom Harper, a lecturer at the University of East London specializing in Chinese foreign policy and international relations, told Live Science.

Currently, the eastern route, which stretches 715 miles (1,150 km) from the Yangtze River to eventually reach Tianjin, transfers around 4 cubic miles (15 cubic km) of water per year.

This water needs to travel 213 feet (65 m) uphill, meaning pumping stations have to raise the water along the route.

The central route, meanwhile, relies on gravity to channel around 3 cubic miles (13 cubic km) of water 790 miles (1,270 km) from Danjiangkou Reservoir, on the Han River in Hubei province, to eventually reach Tianjin.

The Danjiangkou Reservoir already existed before the commencement of the project, but it was significantly expanded to raise the water level — and required 350,000 people to be relocated as a result.

The routes are now key to providing water to Beijing and Tianjin. For example, around 70% of Beijing's water comes from the route, experts told Live Science.

Fixing the fixes

The Chinese government and many Chinese scientists have boasted that the project has increased the water supply to people in northern China, raised the groundwater table in northern regions, and increased economic activity and agriculture in the region.

A major part of the project also focused on improving water quality: Freshwater supplies in China are heavily polluted, which reduces the amount of drinkable water.

"These were reservoirs, these were rivers, these were groundwater resources that had severe pollution impacts," Darrin Magee, a dam expert at Western Washington University, told Live Science. "So in the south where we had abundant water resources, the quality tended to be very bad in some areas."

To rectify this, the SNWTP installed water-cleaning stations along the route and the government implemented measures to reduce water pollution, including shutting down or relocating hundreds of manufacturing businesses that dumped their waste into waterways along the routes.

Along the eastern route, "pollution was terrible," Wang noted. "The central government put in a lot of effort… and they have control of the pollution again in a short period of time," he noted, adding that the water quality has significantly improved along the routes.

However, experts have said that the massive project has damaged ecosystems, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and fueled saltwater intrusion into underground reserves in water-providing areas, as the Yangtze River's freshwater flow is reduced.

"When the South-North Water Transfer was being proposed, many, many Chinese scientists were also against it because you just create lots and lots of new problems, whatever you fix," Emily Yeh, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in Tibet, told Live Science. "Why not conserve water instead?"

Other experts agreed. "The water problem in China, it's not just physical water scarcity, it's the structural problem," Wang said. The biggest driver of water consumption is farming irrigation, which is water-intensive and leads to significant water loss. Conserving that water would go a long way to alleviating water scarcity, Wang added.

If China's "first priority is conservation, you won't need a large-scale, world's largest mega project," Wang said. Chinese authorities seem to be realizing this. They're also attempting large-scale water conservation policies, Wang said.

But the country is forging ahead with engineering projects.

The SNWTP's sources, particularly along the Han River, have less water per capita than the world's average, so siphoning off large amounts of the river's water could severely strain local areas. This has become such a problem that Chinese authorities are now undertaking even more engineering projects to alleviate the problem caused by the SNWTP. For instance, a new, smaller diversion is being added near the Danjiangkou reservoir, because people downstream are not getting sufficient water, Wang said.

The central route is further being extended to improve Danjiangkou's water levels. The central route relies on gravity, so a high water level is required for the route and the reservoir's dam to function. If water levels dip too low, as happened in 2011 during droughts, the dam stops working. So, engineers are connecting the Danjiangkou reservoir to the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest dam, on the Yangtze, to increase the water supply.

The project is "a fix to fix the fix to fix the fix," environmental researcher Stevan Harrell wrote in the Made in China Journal — emphasizing the ever-growing number of engineering projects to deal with poor water governance.

Western route

Even though the two existing routes provide vast amounts of water to the North, and other water-conservation measures are being rolled out, Chinese authorities say the supply to the North is still not enough to meet demand, and that more water diversion is necessary.

The SNWTP's planned western route through the Tibetan Plateau won't start operations until at least 2050, but since its earliest planning stages, it has been mired in controversy.

The western route's official path would take 4 cubic miles (17 cubic km) of water per year from the Tongtian, Yalong and Dadu rivers — all tributaries that eventually feed into the Yangtze. The route would cross about 190 miles (300 km) of the Tibetan Plateau to the Yellow River, which then flows to the water-scarce north and east. The government has commissioned more feasibility studies for this route as part of the country's newly announced five-year plan.

The construction of such a massive project is fraught with difficulty. The Tibetan Plateau rises 10,000 to 15,000 feet (3,000 to 4,500 m) above sea level. These high altitudes present several problems, such as challenges in construction and maintenance, and difficulties in preventing water from freezing.

To transfer water across the plateau, the route would require pumping stations, along with a series of 300- to 1,000-foot-tall (100 to 300 m) dams, which would rank among the tallest dams in the world. The project would also require cutting 200 miles (300 km) of tunnels through the mountains, including the Bayan Har Mountains, which separate the upper Yangtze and Yellow River drainage basins.

The Tibetan Plateau is very seismically active, meaning earthquakes could lead to collapses or landslides, potentially damaging the vast infrastructure.

In 2018, Chinese scientists attempted to overcome the difficult terrain by transferring water through the air. But the "Sky River," or Tianhe project, ultimately proved unfeasible and has been effectively cancelled.

But China has not been deterred by these obstacles. The ongoing construction of the Dianzhong Water Diversion Project, in Yunnan province in southwest China, provides a test case for transferring water across mountainous, earthquake-prone landscapes. The damless design relies on a 380-mile-long (610 km) series of 58 tunnels, as well as pumps, to carry water through the mountainous and seismically active terrain. It is the "the world's longest water tunnel that could fit two high speed trains" and is "seen as a pilot demonstration project that will inspire and inform the design for the Western Routes," according to the Hong Kong-based think tank CWR. The first stage of the Dianzhong project is due for completion later this year, with a second phase recently announced.

Red flag

While the official western route has yet to break ground, alternative proposals have caused serious concern in neighboring countries. One unofficial plan developed in the 1990s, which politicians and academics subsequently considered completely unworkable, suggested funneling 48 cubic miles (200 cubic km) of water (four times the flow of the Yellow River) away from the Brahmaputra River, which flows into India and Bangladesh, and diverting the water toward the Yellow River basin, which serves the North and East of China.

A second controversial proposal, known as the Red Flag River project, suggests diverting 14 cubic miles (60 cubic km) of water 3,700 miles (6,000 km) from the Lancang, Nu and Yarlung Tsangpo rivers (called the Mekong, Salween and Brahmaputra rivers when they leave China) across the Tibetan Plateau to the northern Xinjiang region, which has high water stress and is facing desertification. Officials suggested the plan could turn Xinjiang into China's "California." The diverted water could also potentially be rerouted toward Beijing, experts told Live Science.

Some experts have called these "semi-official" proposals, as they have no official government backing but have been discussed openly by researchers with heavy government backing and support in China, which the government wouldn't allow if these people were truly speaking out of turn, Wang said.

Despite no official government backing, the plans have worried neighboring countries, particularly India, due to fears that any water diversions on international rivers could significantly reduce vital downstream supplies. Massive water engineering projects are already being built in Tibet, such as the upcoming Motuo megadam on the Yarlung Tsangpo — close to the proposed starting point for the Red Flag River project.

"There's a lot of concern that there might be water diversion, because China has been talking about this for many, many years," Tenzin Norgay, a researcher at the nonprofit organization International Campaign for Tibet, told Live Science. "If it happens, it's going to be a huge risk to downstream countries."

Researchers have calculated that the Red Flag project would likely siphon around 20% of the rivers' upstream flows, though the overall water loss for the whole of each river is less than that. Regardless of the actual amount of diversion, the lack of international consultations and transparency is exacerbating suspicions, experts told Live Science.

A changing climate

While China is forging ahead with attempts to redistribute China's water and reduce water scarcity via the SNWTP, climate change could scramble those plans. An increased risk of droughts over the coming decades could compromise the SNWTP's ability to move water.

The Tibetan Plateau, which is a source of water for almost 2 billion people, is particularly at risk. The world's "Third Pole" is rapidly warming, leading its numerous glaciers to melt. This could lead to sudden flooding, followed decades later by reduced river flow as the glaciers disappear. Desertification, meanwhile, is also impacting the Tibetan Plateau.

"Short to medium term, [we'll] see an increase in runoff as melting begins earlier each year," Magee said. "But over the long term, decreased snowpack means less secure water resources for most of China."

Taming nature

China's water management approaches include vast dam-building projects, cloud seeding, monumental tree-planting schemes and water-transfer projects, all of which rely on technological and engineering solutions to control the natural world, experts told Live Science.

When it comes to megaprojects, "If there's any country that will do it, it's China," Magee said. "The People's Republic of Engineers."

Other experts agreed. "It is part of this idea that you can engineer your way out of these problems, even if it's with trees rather than with machines," Yeh said. "A large-scale engineering approach to the natural world has been a characteristic of Chinese approaches to perceived or real environmental problems."

This is particularly true for the Tibetan Plateau. "The government is really imagining Tibet as a source of ecological service for the rest of the country," Yeh said.

Other experts agreed that Chinese authorities typically take an engineering approach to attempt to manage nature.

But Wang noted that China faces big pressures, which is why its government is looking for big solutions.

"If you understand China's energy issues, you understand why China is doing this. If you understand the water and food security issues, you understand so many things China has done," Wang said.

A Chinese spacecraft has arrived at one of Earth's temporary "quasi-moons" and will soon attempt to land on the space rock to scoop up samples that will be returned to our planet next year. The ambitious mission could help researchers uncover secrets about Earth's main moon and provide clues that may benefit space exploration and planetary defense, experts say.

The Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) probe, named Tianwen-2, launched from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southern China on May 28, 2025, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported at the time. The car-sized spacecraft sent back its first images a few weeks later, giving us our first glimpse of its secretive design, followed by a selfie with Earth a few months later.

The mission's primary target is 469219 Kamo'oalewa — also known as 2016 HO3 or simply Kamo'oalewa — a near-Earth asteroid discovered in 2016 by astronomers at Hawaii's Haleakala Observatory. It likely spans somewhere between 130 and 330 feet (40 to 100 meters) across and is a "quasi-satellite" of our planet, meaning it's orbiting the sun right alongside Earth in a temporary partnership. (Kamo'oalewa means "oscillating celestial fragment" in Hawaiian.)

Tianwen-2 is predicted to have arrived at Kamo'oalewa on June 7 and inserted itself into an orbit alongside the asteroid, according to an unverified timeline shared by freelance journalist Andrew Jones, a leading expert on China's space program. Around a month later, on July 4, the probe is expected to descend upon the space rock to collect samples from its surface, potentially employing a never-before-seen drilling technique to do so. (The CNSA has not released an official timeline for the mission or shared any recent updates about its progress.)

If successful, the samples are expected to be returned to Earth on Nov. 29, 2027, according to the same timeline. At this point, Tianwen-2 will then slingshot around our planet and head farther out into the solar system for its secondary mission: to rendezvous with and study 311P/PanSTARRS — a peculiar object beyond Mars, which displays characteristics of both comets and asteroids — in 2035.

Samples from Kamo'oalewa could help answer many interesting questions, including the true origin of the object, which some experts believe may have broken off from the moon.

"What makes [this mission] extraordinary is that we don't yet know [the object's] composition or origin," Li Chunlai, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' National Astronomical Observatories and chief commander of Tianwen-2's ground application system, said in a state-sanctioned video translated to English. "We'll only obtain definitive answers after completing our exploration."

What is Kamo'oalewa?

There are currently eight known quasi-moons orbiting the sun alongside Earth, following the most recent quasi-moon discovery in September 2025. Unlike the similarly named "minimoons," which are asteroids that are briefly captured by Earth's gravity for a few months or years at a time, quasi-moons are temporary satellites that slowly circle our planet but are never gravitationally bound to it.

This relationship can last decades, or even centuries. For example, experts think Kamo'oalewa has been accompanying our planet for at least 100 years and could remain alongside it for another 300 years before it starts to fall out of sync with our solar orbit.

"The way Kamo'oalewa moves with Earth is kind of like a dog that might tag along with you for a while on a long walk through the woods, but it's not your dog," Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist and asteroid expert at MIT, told Live Science in an email.

The Ferris-wheel-size space rock is one of the closest quasi-moons to us, with a minimum distance of around 2.9 million miles (4.6 million kilometers) from Earth, or around 12 times farther away than our actual moon. It is also one of the fastest-spinning quasi-moons, rotating around its axis every 30 minutes. But unlike other quasi-moons, which likely originate from the solar system's main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, our current best guess is that Kamo'oalewa is actually a piece of the moon.

This hypothesis is based on observations from 2021 that showed Kamo'oalewa absorbs and reflects light similarly to the moon, hinting that the space rock may be a chunk of lunar material ejected by a long-ago meteor strike. More recently, in 2024, researchers narrowed down the most likely impact crater from which the asteroid originated: the 13.6-mile-wide (22 km) Giordano Bruno crater, located on the far side of the moon. However, there is still a chance that Kamo'oalewa is a main-belt asteroid that just happens to look an awful lot like lunar material.

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

Scientists are also unsure whether Kamo'oalewa is a "solid monolithic rock," like the $100,000 quadrillion asteroid Psyche (the target of NASA's ongoing Psyche mission), or a "rubble-pile-like asteroid," such as Bennu or Ryugu, both of which have been explored by sample-return missions in recent years, Fenucci said.

Scooping up samples

Having arrived at Kamo'oalewa, Tianwen-2 will spend the next few weeks mapping the asteroid's surface at altitudes between 1,000 feet and 12.5 miles (300 m to 20 km) above its surface, according to limited mission details revealed by Chinese scientists in a January study. The resulting map will allow researchers to estimate the asteroid's density and work out the best landing spot.

On July 4, the probe is expected to swoop down and scoop up around 3.5 ounces (100 grams) of surface material, or regolith, from the asteroid, which is slightly less than what NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission managed to grab from Bennu. However, there are multiple ways this sampling process could play out.

If the asteroid is a pile of rubble, the probe will utilize a touch-and-go approach, which involves hovering just above the surface and using a robotic arm to reach out and grab the sample. This method was also used by OSIRIS-REx for Bennu and by Japan's Hayabusa2 mission, which scooped up samples from Ryugu.

But if Kamo'oalewa has a more solid surface, Tianwen-2 will attempt to land directly on the space rock and anchor itself in place before drilling into the asteroid. This has never been attempted before and could allow for longer contact time and "more controlled sampling," according to The Planetary Society.

After collecting samples, the probe will remain alongside the asteroid and conduct further analysis of its size, shape and trajectory.

In late April 2027, Tianwen-2 will depart Kamo'oalewa and begin the six-month journey back to Earth, where it will dump its samples in a return capsule that will fall to our planet's surface as the probe begins its long journey to rendezvous with 311P/PanSTARRS.

The return capsule will reenter Earth's atmosphere at around 27,000 mph (43,500 km/h), researchers wrote in the January study. That's slightly faster than the Orion capsule carrying the Artemis II astronauts traveled as it fell back to Earth in April.

What could we learn from Tianwen-2?

In addition to ending the debate over Kamo'oalewa's origin, samples from Tianwen-2 could reveal more about the solar system and our place within it.

For example, previously returned asteroid samples have helped to "tell us where Earth's water came from, how complex organic molecules were distributed in the early solar system, and how surface processes like space weathering alter asteroid properties over time," Fenucci said. These samples can also be used to "establish a link to known meteorites found on Earth" and help us learn more about these space rocks, he added.

The proximity of quasi-moons and minimoons to Earth also makes them valuable assets for future space exploration missions. Some researchers have proposed using them as temporary bases or refueling stations that could serve as stops on the way to Mars or other faraway destinations. These objects "could become literal stepping stones for human missions to practice what it is like to leave the Earth-moon cradle," Binzel said.

One particular idea that scientists want to explore is whether water can be extracted from these objects. And if Kamo'oalewa is a piece of the moon, that could have implications for NASA's planned moon base. "Someday, it might be possible to extract that water to provide resources for thirsty astronauts or even generate usable rocket fuel from the hydrogen," Binzel said.

Some near-Earth objects also pose a potential risk to our planet. And while Kamo'oalewa will likely never hit us (and would probably only cause localized damage if it did), there are much larger nearby space rocks that could trigger global catastrophes if they were to impact our planet.

"Over the time scale of centuries, these kinds of objects have a chance of striking the Earth," said Binzel, who invented the Torino scale used to measure the impact potential of near-Earth objects. Therefore, a better understanding of space rocks like Kamo'oalewa "can prepare us in how to deal with a threatening object if one were ever discovered," he added.

Finally, this mission will likely provide another opportunity to assess China's space exploration capabilities, which could hint at whether the country could overtake the U.S. as the top nation in space, as some experts predict.

In southwest China, Chinese soldiers load and fire rockets toward the sky as aircraft and drones circle overhead, dropping their toxic cargo into the air. The weapons are not trained on an enemy, and the planes aren't dropping bombs. Instead, they are targeting the clouds hovering in the sky.

This footage is just a tiny snapshot of the massive, countrywide effort to seed the clouds with rain at an unprecedented scale.

More than 50 countries around the world use cloud seeding to modify the weather at small scales, including the United States.

But China is the world leader, employing around 50,000 people; using thousands of rocket launchers and dozens of planes; and investing the equivalent of billions of dollars in these initiatives, experts told Live Science.

In 2018, China embarked on its most ambitious cloud seeding plan. The Tianhe ("Sky River") project aimed to create a permanent airborne water "corridor" from one river basin to another on the Tibetan Plateau. The project was intended to be part of the country's much bigger South-North Water Transfer project — a massive effort to transfer water to China's highly populated and water-scarce North and East.

From the start, the Sky River faced scathing criticism from scientists who said the project was unworkable. Yet China forged ahead.

China's pursuit of such a scientifically questionable geoengineering technology shows just how far Chinese authorities are prepared to go to achieve the country's water and climate goals. It also reveals how the Chinese government views the natural world, experts have said.

"There is an impetus to control and to view the environment as a machine or an infrastructure that can be controlled," Emily Yeh, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Live Science.

The science of cloud seeding

China uses cloud seeding to produce precipitation to build up snowpack, help alleviate droughts, reduce the impact of hailstorms, and create skies clear of clouds and pollution for official events — as it did most famously during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, experts told Live science.

But cloud seeding can't create rain from an empty sky. Instead, it causes existing clouds to generate precipitation more efficiently by injecting particles into a cloud. Water droplets then coalesce around these particles, and the water eventually falls as rain or snow.

"Every single drop in any cloud you have ever seen — there's a particle in it," Rob Rauber, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science. Cloud seeding speeds up the raindrop-forming process by introducing more particles, he explained.

There are two main ways to do this, depending on whether the temperature of the clouds is above or below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). Warm-cloud seeding is known as hygroscopic seeding, while cold-cloud seeding is called glaciogenic seeding.

"They have the same general goals or approach," Jeff French, head of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming, told Live Science. "And that is to introduce something into the cloud that would increase the efficiency in which cloud droplets or ice crystals are able to grow to precipitation-size particles and fall out of cloud either as rain or as snow."

A salt such as sodium chloride is typically used for hygroscopic seeding to attract water droplets, French said. Glaciogenic seeding, by contrast, takes advantage of cold clouds' supercooled water — water that is liquid even when temperatures are below freezing — by introducing silver iodide. This substance has a similar structure to ice and collides with supercooled water in a cloud, causing it to freeze and eventually fall from the cloud, French said.

Scientists insert seeding particles into clouds in a number of ways, including by dropping them from planes and drones, firing shells or rockets into the clouds from the ground, or burning materials in chambers that release the combustion byproducts into the air.

Scientists are still learning exactly when and how to use these techniques most effectively. Rauber and French both noted that it's difficult to quantify cloud seeding's impact.

"It becomes kind of a quagmire when you ask that question: 'Does cloud seeding work?'," French said. For his research, he used airplanes, ground sensors and radar across the U.S. Mountain West to measure the effects of seeding from aircraft on the initiation and growth of crystals and eventual snowfall. "From a physical standpoint, I can say very confidently that cloud seeding works," French said.

However, that experiment was in cold, mountainous conditions, and the impact of cloud seeding depends on many conditions, so tracking whether cloud seeding increases precipitation over a longer period and in different conditions can be challenging.

"Not all clouds are created equal," French said. Some are colder or warmer, and the seeding material won't work as well; in others, the size or distribution of droplets makes precipitation less likely. Even within a small region, the snowfall varies tremendously from one point to another. And beyond a small region, all bets are off.

"If you have a very successful cloud seeding program, that is producing, maybe 7% or 9% or even 10% more precipitation over a mountain range, downstream of that mountain range, the impact may be 1%," French said. "But it is a really difficult number to get our arms around."

French added that scientists should be careful to not overpromise what cloud seeding can accomplish.

"If the promise is that cloud seeding is going to eliminate droughts even on a local level, the answer is no, it can't live up to that. There's no scientific evidence," French said. But if targeted properly, it can moderately increase natural precipitation, he said.

Cloud seeding on the Tibetan Plateau

Despite cloud seeding's limitations, China has established weather modification bureaus across the country.

"They have a whole campus of people who are working in the weather modification field," Rauber said. "They have a fleet of aircraft — they're on a whole different scale than anything that goes on anywhere else in the world."

Chinese researchers claim that the country has made huge strides in its weather modification. Reports from state-owned media suggested that weather modification efforts increased precipitation by 168 billion tons between 2020 and 2025, and that in experiments, just one cup of cloud seeding material generated 30 Olympic-size pools' worth of precipitation over an area the size of Yellowstone National Park in the arid Xinjiang region.

These weather modifications have also been conducted on the Tibetan Plateau. The vitally important region, nicknamed Asia's Water Tower, is the source of multiple major rivers that supply water to nearly 2 billion people across Asia. But the plateau is facing increasing desertification and glacier loss due to human-caused climate change and other human activities such as overgrazing animals.

China's cloud-seeding ambitions for the plateau reached a whole new level in 2018, when authorities announced the Sky River project. The controversial project aimed to use cloud seeding to create precipitation across a 620,000-square-mile (1.6 million square kilometers) area in the Tibetan Plateau — about the size of Alaska — to divert Indian monsoon rains above the Yangtze River basin and channel the water to the Yellow River basin. From the Tibetan Plateau, the Yellow River flows north and east into the parched northern regions of China, while the Yangtze flows south and east into less-water-scarce areas. The initial plan claimed the project would transfer up to 7% of the country's total annual water consumption, reports noted.

The atmospheric channel was intended to be part of the country's colossal South-North Water Transfer Project, circumventing the region's challenging terrain by moving the water in the sky instead.

The plan, due to be completed in 2025, called for seeding this atmospheric river using tens of thousands of silver iodide-burning chambers on the ground, linked to a series of meteorological satellites that would analyze the weather conditions. Information from these satellites would automatically trigger the burners when the conditions were suitable for cloud seeding.

However, the plan was immediately met with a barrage of criticism from scientists in China. In a translated statement, Hancheng Lu, a professor at the National University of Defense Technology's School of Meteorology and Oceanography, called the project "an absurd and fantastical project with neither scientific basis nor technological feasibility."

The project was unworkable because it is not possible to convert all atmospheric moisture to rain, or to channel moisture in this way, Yeh said.

As of 2022, researchers were working on a significantly scaled-back version of the project. However, China's official channels have gone dark on the topic.

China's newly announced five-year plan, which sets out the policy direction of the country from 2026 to 2030, references weather modification enhancements but doesn't mention this specific project, according to reports from Chinese media.

This has led experts to speculate that the project was quietly canceled.

"When one goes to China and asks atmospheric scientists not involved in it about it, they just sort of laugh, and it's like this embarrassing incident," Yeh said. "It was never possible."

To see whether the project was still going forward, Live Science reached out to several researchers involved in the project, but they did not reply by the time of publication.

The fears of cloud seeding

The pursuit of the Sky River project — despite the low likelihood that it would ever work —— has caused significant alarm in neighboring countries. India relies on the monsoon rains and rivers such as the Brahmaputra, which starts in the Tibetan Plateau before flowing through India and Bangladesh on a 1,800-mile-long (2,900 km) route to the sea. There are also suspicions about cloud seeding being used to cause flooding across borders.

Many of these fears are overblown, experts told Live Science. Rauber noted that cloud seeding can't influence weather enough to reduce water in a wider weather system.

"This is always a question of, 'Are you robbing Peter to pay Paul?'" Rauber said. But the amount of water in storm clouds "is way greater than anything cloud seeding is going to extract."

Climate geoengineering

China's all-in pursuit of technologies like cloud seeding — even on the internationally important and politically sensitive Tibetan Plateau — has raised concerns that China is prepared to go to extreme lengths to engineer its way out of its problems — even when it involves scientifically dubious geoengineering projects with massive risks.

China's determination to address climate change and investment in megaprojects that attempt to engineer the natural world, such as the upcoming Motuo megadam in Tibet and colossal tree-planting projects in northern China, are also signs that China is moving toward larger climate geoengineering, experts have suggested.

This may even involve attempts to change how much sunlight reaches the planet's surface, experts have speculated.

"Given similarities, weather modification could serve as a means to incrementally build legitimacy for solar radiation management, in China and beyond, which may ultimately make it possible to deploy it," researchers argued in a 2019 study.

However, there's no evidence that China is currently pursuing such climate modifications, and it's unlikely they'd do so without some cooperation or buy-in from other countries, researchers wrote in 2023.

"It is currently unlikely that China would deploy SRM unilaterally. But its weather modification programme does demonstrate the country's willingness and capability to undertake large-scale atmospheric intervention projects," the study authors wrote.

Solar radiation modification aims to release particles such as sulfur high into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space in an effort to limit global heating. It is being increasingly investigated by researchers and governments. The controversial concept has never been demonstrated on a large scale, and studies suggest it has many potential risks, such as the potential to shut down monsoon rains.

Scientists have already seen some of the negative impacts of natural solar radiation modification, for instance in the aftermath of large volcanic eruptions, such as Tambora in 1815. "It led to the suppression of the monsoon, because the monsoon is driven by heating from the sun, Rauber said. "And that cuts back on rain in tropical areas, and that causes droughts, which causes all sorts of diseases and can lead to mass starvation," he added.

"The evidence from nature is don't mess with Mother Nature," he said.

Towering 14,800 feet (4,500 meters) above sea level, the Tibetan Plateau, with its frigid temperatures and glacier-covered mountains, is the source of most of Asia's major rivers — the Yellow, Yangtze, Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) and Lancang (Mekong) — which supply almost 2 billion people downstream, including the two most populous countries on Earth: China and India.

For that reason, the Tibetan Plateau is often called the roof of the world, the third pole and Asia's water tower.

But in recent years, the region has also earned a new moniker: Asia's power tower, thanks to its huge, untapped potential for generating hydropower.

Faced with water scarcity in densely populated, industrialized and irrigated regions of China; an insatiable need for energy; and a drive to eliminate fossil fuel use, Chinese authorities are pursuing a number of hydropower projects in the region. Together, they will not only tap the region's vast power potential but also attain unprecedented levels of control over vital water sources its neighbors rely on.

The government's flagship project is the Motuo (also called Medog) megadam project on the Yarlung Tsangpo River. The project officially started construction in July 2025, and its costs are staggering — estimated at up to $168 billion.

The megadam is slated to be completed in less than a decade and will dwarf all other hydroelectric projects in the world with its estimated 300 terawatts of annual power output — three times the output of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, the world's current largest dam, and more than the entire U.S. produced in net hydropower in 2024.

The dam is just part of a bigger Chinese initiative to transform its environment.

"You have a modern, powerful China who is in a way very, very confident of taming nature," said Tenzin Norgay, a researcher at the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), a nongovernmental organization that works to promote human rights and democratic freedoms for the people of Tibet. The ICT is closely monitoring dam building in the region. "That's literally what they are trying to do, right?" Norgay told Live Science. "They are trying to tame nature."

But the massive project comes with huge risks for both people in Tibet and the hundreds of millions of people in countries downstream, including those in India and Bangladesh, experts told Live Science.

"Controlling [the] nature of the water or the river itself is a danger for the entire Himalayan belt particularly for countries like India, Bangladesh and to some extent also Nepal," said Jagannath Panda, head of the Stockholm Center for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs at the Institute for Security and Development Policy, told Live Science.

Project of the century

China is the world leader in dam building. The government has constructed around 98,000 dams and reservoirs across China, including 40% of the world's largest dams, and numerous dams outside the country as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. But this new project is different.

"There's nothing on this scale, and nothing close to it," Brian Eyler, director of the Southeast Asia and energy, water and sustainability programs at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, D.C., told Live Science.

The project will utilize Tibet's unique geography to full effect. In the project area, the Yarlung Tsangpo River (known as the Brahmaputra in India and Jamuna in Bangladesh) flows through the world's deepest canyon, called the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, and rapidly drops around the horseshoe-shaped "Great Bend," before continuing to flow down and into India and, eventually, Bangladesh.

The project will dam the upper section of the river and divert the water through a series of tunnels that will be cut through the 25,500-foot-tall (7,800 m) Mount Namcha Barwa, before returning the water to a lower section of the river, circumventing the Great Bend. The project will likely have five dams in total, with hydropower stations inside the tunnels. The water will drop 6,500 feet (2,000 m) within 30 miles (50 kilometers) of tunnels, thereby generating a huge amount of hydroelectric power.

"It's really incredible that this type of project can be built," Eyler added.

The cascading dam system will require huge amounts of water to run effectively, meaning there will likely be a reservoir at the beginning, and so during the dry season the Great Bend will effectively run dry, Eyler said.

Mega project, mega challenges

Building such a large project in this region is fraught with risk, experts noted.

The Tibetan Plateau is one of the most seismically active regions in the world, driven by the ongoing collision between the Indian and Eurasian plates. The region has recently been rocked by several major earthquakes, including the 7.1 magnitude Dingri quake in January 2025, which damaged five dams in the region, and the 7.8 magnitude Nepal earthquake in 2015 that damaged a fifth of the country's hydropower capacity.

Parts of the Himalayas are unsuitable for dam construction due to the high risk of seismicity and its effects, researchers have warned, noting that dams are particularly vulnerable to earthquake-induced landslides.

In addition to naturally caused earthquakes, large-scale projects involving land excavation, tunneling and water redirection have the potential to trigger seismic activity, while the creation of reservoirs has been strongly linked with earthquakes in China.

Other natural disasters could endanger people beyond Tibet.

Glacial lakes — bodies of water created by melting glaciers and permafrost — can pose a problem to people downstream if they suddenly release their water and overwhelm dams. This scenario happened in northeastern India in 2023, causing a large, newly built dam to catastrophically fail, killing at least 46 people and impacting 88,000 more.

Climate change is accelerating glacial melt, meaning the threat will only increase as the region's glaciers are further destabilized, experts have warned.

Climate change could also render the dam obsolete sooner than anticipated. Dams typically function for around 70 to 100 years, experts told Live Science. Water levels in the Yarlung Tsangpo are expected to peak in 2060, so when water levels start to fall after that, the whole dam could become useless during dry periods because the water level will be too low to produce hydropower — a status known as minimum pool elevation. Water levels could even drop so low that they can't pass through a dam. This situation, known as "dead pool," is already an issue for some dams on the Colorado River.

The project will also affect Tibetans. "From our viewpoint, displacement of people around that and submergence of cultural sites" are the biggest issues, Norgay told Live Science.

However, the area is sparsely populated, and the reservoirs needed will almost certainly not be as big or as deep as reservoirs of other megadams. So although there will be an impact, it won't be on the scale of the 1.3 million people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, Eyler noted.

Downstream impacts

Even without a climate-driven reduction in water, the river's flow will be transformed. To ensure a continuous, controlled flow of water through the dam, authorities typically fill reservoirs during the wet season and release water during the dry season. While this ensures that the hydroelectric dam can function, it inevitably impacts the river's natural flow and has knock-on effects for communities downstream. The filling-and-releasing process also raises the possibility of the upstream country — namely, China — "turning off the taps" to benefit the dam at the expense of other downstream water users.

"If a dam operator has an opportunity to take water during a time of drought, they're going to take at the expense of downstream users," Eyler said. "We've seen this happen in the Mekong, where the downstream was suffering drought, but China still filled its reservoirs," worsening drought in 2019 in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

In the case of the Motuo megadam, any change in water flow will affect India and Bangladesh. The Brahmaputra flows for about 1,800 miles (2,900 km), eventually joining with the massive Ganges River, and is a vital source of water and natural fertilizer for more than 130 million people. It provides India with 30% of its freshwater reserves, while Bangladesh is heavily dependent on the river to support its irrigated agriculture.

"The greatest ecological and environmental impact will be related to sediment flow. The Great Bend itself is a rich provider of sediment to the downstream [countries]," Eyler said. "Sediment is important for agricultural production. It's a very inexpensive natural fertilizer."

Sediment from the Brahmaputra is integral to building up the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, helping the low-lying region stay above rapidly rising sea levels. The delta is home to nearly 200 million people — including in the megacity of Kolkata — and is considered one of the places most at risk from sea level rise. The Yarlung Tsangpo in Chinese-controlled territory provides up to 50% of the river's downstream sediment flow.

"River deltas are built by sediment flows pushing land out into the ocean year after year," Eyler said. "And either the dams themselves or the lack of flow within the Great Bend will cause a great reduction in the amount of sediment coming down."

The potential reduction in sediment could threaten food security in the downstream countries.

"Millions of people's lives are dependent on this river," Norgay noted.

India also plans to build major dams on the waterway, Norgay added, which could itself have negative impacts downstream.

Not true "green power"

The Motuo megaproject is just one of several new dams planned or under construction in Tibet; the ICT counts at least 193 dams in the region that have been planned or built since 2000, when China embarked on a policy of expanding infrastructure projects in the region.

The surge in hydropower projects is intended to help China move away from fossil fuels, experts told Live Science.

"It is part of a more widespread strategic vision where China is trying to become more sustainable," said Tom Harper, a lecturer in international relations at the University of East London who specializes in China.

One key to China's strategic vision is phasing out coal.

"This dam has been described as the coal killer. There are numerous coal plants that can be taken offline as a result of this and retired permanently," Eyler said. "When you bring in China's carbon emissions reduction goals, through 2050, the dam makes a lot of sense."

However, hydropower is not as sustainable as it's often portrayed, and it has environmental impacts. Large dams can cause severe environmental damage to river ecosystems. The creation of reservoirs can also release greenhouse gases as trees and plants are covered with water and subsequently rot, though this is less of an issue in cold places like the Tibetan Plateau, Darrin Magee, a hydropower expert at Western Washington University, told Live Science.

Though the authorities claim there will be no significant environmental impact from the dam, that's hard to believe, Eyler said. "Typically, the larger the project, the greater the impacts, and this is the largest dam system ever created."

Scientists also question the necessity of using hydropower to meet sustainability goals, when the Tibetan Plateau has huge, untapped wind and solar power potential.

Experts had different theories of what China would do with such a vast amount of energy generated in such a remote and sparsely populated area.

"There's certainly no need for it, right now or in the foreseeable future in the area where Motuo Dam is sited," Magee said. "But China solves that problem by building ultra-high voltage DC transmission lines at, at a rate that no one in the world is matching." These high-voltage lines transport energy from the west to east, bypassing local grid networks, he added.

Norgay and Panda both think Tibetans are unlikely to benefit.

The power will likely be moved east to power Chinese industry, they said, and it could also align with the political goal of further integrating Tibet into China, Panda added.

Eyler, meanwhile, thinks it will be used to power data centers in Tibet, "which can be built around the super dam, in a naturally cool and cold environment."

Better cooperation needed

There is little official information about the megadam for Chinese authorities, Eyler noted, and the lack of transparency is fueling fears. For example, Indian politicians have expressed concern that the megadam will give China full control of the river, and that China could potentially weaponize ‬the river by deliberately reducing the flow of water or by releasing large amounts of water in one go, thereby devastating downstream communities. Some researchers have called this possibility a "water bomb."

Eyler, however, said that this risk is low, and that the dam system's design means it cannot hold back enough water to cut off supplies downstream.

"I don't think that there's some type of nefarious plot out there from Beijing to bring these countries to heel by controlling the upstream of the rivers," he said. "China's top priority is to develop its economy, bring stability to the country, and building large dams on rivers is one way to do that."

The expansion of hydropower is a key aim for China in the next few years, as the country embarks on the 15th five-year plan from 2026. With shared water resources in short supply, better cooperation among neighboring countries is vital, experts said. Yet China and India share only limited data, Panda noted.

Some of the concerns from neighbors could be mitigated by better communication between stakeholders, Magee said. "Be more transparent with the data, bring more voices into the conversation, have some realistic assessment of both need for the project and the impacts."

But even with better communication, the megadam and other upcoming dams means China will still largely control the region's water resources due to its upstream position.

"This is a dam project which actually gives China the upper hand," Panda said.

Archaeologists in Russia have discovered a rare elite burial of a medieval woman who was accompanied in death by a newborn child and a flayed horse. A mirror and silver stirrup found in the grave were decorated in the style of Chinese art, revealing multicultural connections in 10th-century Asia.

"It's quite clear that this is far from an ordinary burial," Andrey Poliakov, an archaeologist and director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for the History of Material Culture, who led the excavation, said in a translated statement. "There are no more than a few dozen similar burials in the entire Sayan-Altai region" in Inner Asia.

Archaeologists discovered the burial in 2014 as part of an excavation ahead of railway construction in the Sayan Mountains, a range in southern Siberia that runs through southeastern Russia and northern Mongolia. They found several dozen graves and small settlements spanning multiple centuries. But their excavation of one stone-ringed mound yielded the unique grave of a woman who was about 40 years old when she died. She was buried with the skeleton of a newborn child, the spine of a sheep and a "horse skin" — the skull, limbs and skin of a horse — a rare ritual practice among medieval steppe nomads.

Because of the uniqueness of the grave and the multitude of artifacts that had to be stabilized after excavation, a full analysis of the tomb took more than a decade to complete. Two studies detailing the unusual burial and the horse equipment were published recently in the journal Bulletin of Novosibirsk State University, Series: History, Philology.

The woman had been buried with only a few personal items, including a pair of gilt-bronze earrings, fragments of a ritually broken mirror, an iron knife and a stone spindle whorl used for hand-spinning wool, the archaeologists wrote in the burial study. The decoration on the mirror resembled a winding vine with grape clusters ‪—‬ a motif on mirrors found in elite Tang dynasty (A.D. 618 to 907) burials in China.

Among the dozens of pieces of horse equipment found in the burial was a pair of stirrups. One of these stirrups was decorated in the style of Chinese art, with influences from Indian and Persian art styles, and functioned as a "ceremonial" stirrup. Nomadic tradition in this time period was to have one stirrup on display on the most presentable side — generally the left — the researchers noted in the horse equipment study.

While radiocarbon dating gave the archaeologists a broad time frame for the burial — between the ninth and 13th centuries — based on the style of the artifacts in the grave, the archaeologists determined that the woman and child were most likely buried in the 10th century.

The huge number of multicultural artifacts found in the grave suggests the woman and child were part of the "highest aristocracy" of their society, the researchers wrote in the horse equipment study. But the woman probably didn't use the objects in her daily life, they added; it is more likely they were family relics that her clan offered as grave goods.

The nearly complete set of antique horse paraphernalia found in the grave is a "very rare combination for the region," study co-author Oleg Mitko, head of the Humanities Research Laboratory at Novosibirsk State University, said in the statement.

What do you know about the bones in your body? Test your knowledge with our human skeleton quiz!

A Chinese company has unveiled what its researchers are calling the world’s first "dual-core" quantum computer. It's a neutral-atom system designed to improve stability, efficiency and error correction by pairing two independent qubit arrays in a single machine.

The device, called "Hanyuan-2," is being promoted as a step toward more scalable quantum hardware. The Wuhan-based company CAS Cold Atom Technology announced the new machine in May, according to reports by ST Daily, a Chinese state media outlet, with technical details published on its website.

Gui-Guo Ge, a senior solutions expert at CAS Cold Atom Technology, the company behind the dual-core computer, told ST Daily that the system is built on independently controllable neutral-atom array technology. It works by conjoining two quantum arrays comprising a total of 200 qubits made from rubidium atoms (100 rubidium-87 atoms and 100 rubidium-85 atoms).

Ge added that the two cores are both complete arrays that can operate in parallel to boost computational efficiency or work in a "one main core and one auxiliary core" configuration to create more stable logical bits. That design is intended to address long-standing technical bottlenecks in single-core systems, including limited expansion and interference between neighboring qubits.

The dual-core architecture matters because quantum computers are notoriously fragile. Qubits are prone to "noise" in the form of small disturbances such as temperature fluctuations or electromagnetic interference, which can disrupt calculations. By splitting the system into two cooperating cores, Hanyuan-2 aims to reduce those problems by allowing the cores to correct each other's errors and divide tasks between them.

The setup offers a modular path to scaling up quantum processing units (QPUs), and the use of neutral atoms affords several advantages. For one, neutral atoms don't require massive dilution refrigerators that cool components to near absolute zero to function the way superconducting quantum computers, like those in use at IBM or Google machines do, meaning lower energy requirements.

Because neutral atoms are electrically neutral, they interact less with their environment than many other types of qubits, meaning qubits can, in theory, preserve quantum information for longer, with less decoherence — when calculations fail due to the collapse of superposition — and potentially improved error rates, providing longer coherence times.

Hanyuan-2 includes more than 500 optical tweezers arrays and a qubit lifetime of 100 seconds, according to the report. It also uses a standard rack-mounted design and needs only a small laser-cooling setup with power consumption below 7 kilowatts. This means it can be deployed in ordinary environments rather than specialized cryogenic facilities.

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

A newly discovered feathered dinosaur with four wing-like limbs may have prowled the lakeside forests of what is now northwestern China, gliding between trees like a flying squirrel and snatching some of the earliest birds out of the Cretaceous sky.

The predator, named Jian changmaensis, was a close cousin of Velociraptor and belonged to a strange group of small birdlike dinosaurs called microraptors. Unlike the large and scaly "Jurassic Park" version of raptors, these animals were feathered, lightweight and glided to get around. Based on fossil evidence, J. changmaensis had long feathers on both its arms and legs, giving it the look of a tiny dragon with four wings.

The fossil, described Thursday (June 4) in the journal Annals of Carnegie Museum, is only a partial left shoulder and forelimb. But those bones were enough to reveal a new dinosaur species, and possibly solve a longstanding mystery at China’s Changma Basin, a site packed with ancient bird fossils and broken bird bones that look a lot like the pellets coughed up by modern owls.

"Our team has recovered more than one hundred bird fossils at Changma, but only this single non-avian dinosaur specimen," study co-author Matthew Lamanna, a senior dinosaur researcher and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, in a statement.

"[Microraptors] provide a window into what the closest ancestors of the first birds were probably like," he told Live Science via email. "Studying them yields clues as to how birds got their start and how they learned to fly."

Finding a fossil among the fragments

Paleontologists uncovered the fossil in the Lower Cretaceous Xiagou formation near Changma village in the Gansu province. The rocks there were formed during the early Cretaceous period about 124 million to 120 millions ago, when the region held a large lake teeming with birds, fish, turtles and other ancient animals.

The site is famous for fossils of Gansus yumenesis, one of the first Mesozoic birds ever found in China. Since 2002, researchers have recovered more than 100 partial bird skeletons from Changma, including fossils with preserved soft tissue such as feathers, skin and claw sheaths.

"Our subsequent expeditions throughout the rest of the 2000s and into the 2010s established Changma as one of the world's most important fossil bird localities, Lamanna said. "It was an amazing thing to be a part of."

But until now, no one had found a non-avian dinosaur fossil from the basin.

That's what made J. changmaensis stand out. Amidst the fossil fragments, the specimen consisted of a fused shoulder blade, upper arm, radius and ulna. It was preserved in three dimensions, unlike many flattened microraptor fossils from the same area.

"Jian is one of the biggest microraptor specimens that has ever been found," Jingmai O’Connor, the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "The piece of its upper arm bone that we have is about 4 inches [10 centimeters] long, so the entire dinosaur probably had something like a four-foot [1.2 meter] wingspan, around the size of a barn owl."

Microraptors were not birds. But they were very close relatives of the dinosaur lineage that gave rise to birds. Their bodies have elements that seem to blur the line between bird and dinosaur, including claws, sickle-shaped raptor feet and feathers.

"This is neat, a new fossil of those dinosaurs that were basically on the cusp of becoming true birds," Steve Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study, told CNN.

The bird hunter

The Changma Basin may have been a buffet for a tree-climbing predator like J. changmaensis. The site was dominated by early birds, as is evidenced by the many pellet-like remains, possibly the dinner remains of the newfound microraptor species.

Researchers can't prove that Jian made those pellets. But it is the only non-bird body fossil found at Changma so far. Jian was also a carnivore, and was much larger than the birds preserved there.

Other microraptor fossils support the idea that these dinosaurs ate from a wide menu. Previous fossilised specimens have been found with remains of fish, lizards, mammals and birds in their guts, suggesting microraptors were opportunistic hunters rather than picky specialists.

For J. changmaensis, birds may have been especially easy targets. If the dinosaur lived partly in trees and could glide, it may have ambushed early birds from branches or moved through the canopy like a sugar glider, according to the researchers.

"We don’t have very much of Jian, just some bones from the shoulder and forelimb," Lamanna said. "It's enough to know that there was this interesting new microraptor living 120 million years ago in what's now northwestern China, but not enough to be able to learn everything we'd like to learn about these dinosaurs. Maybe one of your readers will eventually become a paleontologist and be the one who finds the rest of Jian."

China just launched its rival to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, reportedly without providing any advance safety warnings.

The 236-foot-tall (72 meters) March 12B rocket blasted off at 4.40 p.m. local time (4.40 a.m. EDT) on Monday (June 1), from the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Test Zone in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of northern China.

The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), a state-owned rocket and missile manufacturer, announced the launch after it had already happened. The rocket had recently been sighted on its launchpad, but there were no apparent airspace notices issued for a launch, SpaceNews reported.

International airspace and maritime notices are issued to warn aircraft and boats of hazards associated with a launch, such as the potential for falling debris. They are standard global safety procedures for rocket launches, though analysts have warned that China's space activities don't always follow international norms, Scientific American reported.

The Long March 12B is a reusable, commercial rocket designed to assist in China's internet satellite missions. In this case, the launch didn't include a recovery test, though a first-stage recovery test is planned for a later date, according to CASIC.

The Long March 12B is China's latest step toward developing reusable rockets that perform propulsive landings instead of being discarded after launch — a maneuver that has dramatically reduced the costs for SpaceX to build satellite megaconstellations in orbit. As a more powerful follow-on from last year's Long March 12A, the Long March 12B has a low Earth orbit payload capacity of about 22 tons (22 metric tonnes).

The rocket successfully carried the 10th batch of China's Qianfan, or "Thousand Sails," satellites into low Earth orbit. China is building a megaconstellation of internet service satellites to rival SpaceX's Starlink. And much like Starlink, the "Thousand Sails" satellites exceed brightness limits proposed by astronomical authorities, meaning they are a problem for astronomers studying the night sky.

The new space race

China is ramping up its rocket launches as part of a new space race with the U.S., which includes positioning key infrastructure in Earth's orbit and further afield. For example, both countries are planning to establish a permanent presence on the moon in the coming years. NASA's current schedule plans to put astronauts on the moon in 2028, while China intends to land its taikonauts on the lunar surface before 2030. However, there's no guarantee that the U.S. will colonize the moon first.

China pledged to accelerate its moon program in the wake of NASA's historic Artemis II lunar flyby, Asia Times reported. The country plans to send humans to the moon in the Mengzhou spacecraft, taken into space on a Long March 10A rocket — the Long March 12B's much larger crewed cousin, which was tested in February. Another rocket is then supposed to transport a Lanyue lunar lander to the moon on a separate flight, before rendezvousing with Mengzhou around the moon, Nature reported.

A 600-year-old set of surgical tools found in a tomb in China has revealed the world's first chemical evidence of a topical anesthetic. Used to numb the skin in surgical procedures, the anesthetic was made from the highly toxic plant Chinese wolfsbane. However, the toxic plant was likely detoxified first with urine, among other things.

"Six centuries ago, a Ming Dynasty surgeon performed an operation with a pair of iron scissors and tweezers, and today we have read the traces of anaesthetic medicine left on those instruments using a beam of laser light," study co-author Congcang Zhao, an archaeologist at Northwest University in China, said in a statement.

In a study published Tuesday (May 26) in the journal Antiquity, Zhao and colleagues analyzed two surgical implements discovered decades ago in the Ming Dynasty (circa 1368 to 1644) tomb of Xia Quan in the city of Jiangyin, roughly 90 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of Shanghai.

Based on an X-ray fluorescence analysis, which is a non-destructive technique that reveals the elemental composition of an object, the researchers determined the scissors and tweezers were both made from iron. Then, under a microscope, they selected three tiny particles of rust-colored residue on the tools with the hope of identifying traces of organic compounds.

To figure out the composition of the residue, the researchers used micro-Raman spectroscopy, a technique in which a laser is beamed at a sample, causing the sample's photons to scatter. The pattern of that scattering can then be analyzed to generate the structural fingerprint of the molecules in the sample.

The Raman spectroscopy analysis of the two surgical tools revealed the presence of the cyano functional group, which is found in hydrogen cyanide, as well as the organic components of oils and fats. Taken together, these results indicated "medicinal and potentially anaesthetic properties for the residues," the researchers wrote. "The alkaloid toxin aconitine is suggested as a probable component of the residues."

Aconitine is found in plants of the Aconitum genus, which are native to North America, Europe and Asia. Also known as aconite, monkshood and wolfsbane, the flowering plants are extremely poisonous — but they have also been used in traditional Asian medicine for centuries, primarily for their analgesic properties. Practitioners in the Ming Dynasty knew how to mitigate the plants' poison, the researchers wrote, by using acidic substances such as mung beans, vinegar or the urine of young boys to detoxify the aconite and turn it into an anesthetic powder or liquid.

"Ming physicians used iron surgical instruments and controlled the toxicity of aconitine through topical application, compound prescriptions and strict procedural controls, demonstrating a practical ability to balance drug potency with patient safety," Zhao said.

The 600-year-old iron implements were likely used in minor surgeries, the researchers noted. First, the practitioner would apply the numbing agent to the area, then use the tweezers to hold the skin and the scissors to trim away the outer layer. Anesthetic residue was present on both tools and was concentrated in functional areas consistent with application during surgery. It's likely that the anesthetic in this case was in liquid form; it may have splashed onto the iron implements, escaping cleaning and eventually corroding the metal.

This analysis represents the first time that researchers have found direct chemical evidence of anesthetics on ancient surgical tools. "Combined with records of anaesthetic prescriptions in Ming Dynasty medical texts, the study confirms that Aconitum was employed as a topical anaesthetic, safely and precisely applied during surgical procedures," Zhao said.

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

China has become the first nation to send "human artificial embryos" to space in a bid to better understand how microgravity and cosmic radiation may affect human reproduction. The results could have big implications for our ability to set up self-sustaining colonies on the moon and Mars.

The embryo-like structures, made from living human stem cells, arrived on the Tiangong ( "Heavenly Palace") space station in the early hours of May 11 as part of the Tianzhou-10 resupply mission, state officials revealed. The mission also delivered around 7 tons (6.3 metric tons) of cargo — including food, fuel, spacesuits and other scientific experiments — to the Chinese astronauts currently living on the station.

The Tianzhou-10 spacecraft, which is similar to the cargo ships that deliver supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), lifted off from Wenchang Space Launch Site around five hours earlier, at 8:14 p.m. EDT on May 10, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

Stem cells in orbit

The artificial embryos are made from collections of stem cells that can divide and multiply like a normal embryo but are unable to properly develop into a fetus or baby, allowing researchers to carry out their work with fewer ethical concerns.

"This is not a real human embryo and does not have the ability to develop into an individual," Leqian Yu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' (CAS) Institute of Zoology who is leading the experiment, said May 14 in a CAS statement. "However, it can serve as a model for studying early human development."

Two types of artificial embryos, representing different phases of embryonic development between 14 and 21 days after fertilization, were used in the experiment. The first is a peri-implantation model, which mimics the critical phase where an embryo attaches itself to the uterine wall. The second is a peri-gastrulation model, which replicates the point in early development when a single layer of cells reorganizes into distinct layers that will eventually form different tissues and organs.

The embryos will be allowed to grow for five days before they are frozen and later returned to Earth for analysis. "The experiment is going very well," Yu said in the statement. (By now, the embryos have likely already been put on ice.)

As the embryos were developing in space, researchers in China grew and froze identical artificial embryos, which will serve as the control group for the experiment. "We hope that by comparing the development of space and ground samples, we can identify the factors affecting early human embryonic growth in the space environment, and address the risks and challenges humans may face during long-term space habitation," Yu said.

Similar experiments involving zebrafish embryos and mouse embryos were also launched on board Tianzhou-10.

Making babies in space

The ability to reproduce in space will be crucial if humanity is to establish a permanent presence on the moon, Mars and other more distant worlds. However, several issues need to be overcome before this can happen, if it is even possible at all.

Experts have warned that as space tourism becomes more mainstream, non-astronauts will likely start having sex in space, which could lead to babies being conceived off-world.

Previous research has hinted that the high levels of radiation in space could damage developing embryos, while microgravity is also expected to be a major stumbling block.

Yu told state-run media that the artificial embryos "were brought to space to explore whether life, which has evolved under gravity for hundreds of millions of years, is affected by its sudden absence."

Studying the very early stages of embryonic development will be particularly important for determining the feasibility of natural reproduction under these conditions. It is "a critical window in early human development, during which the building blocks for future organs begin to form, and the entire body axis — which determines the head and the tail — is established," Yu told state-run media outlets.

A recent study also revealed that microgravity could disorient sperm cells, making it much less likely for egg fertilization to occur. And it's been known for a while that stem cells age much faster in space than they do on Earth, which could also be a serious issue.

Given these challenges, it may be necessary to turn to in vitro fertilization to help grow babies in space, which is an idea already being explored by several private space exploration companies.

Chinese engineers have built a mecha-style robot that can quickly transition from two legs to four while carrying people, resembling the power-loader exoskeletons from Aliens or the utility-style mobile suits from Japanese anime series Gundam SEED.

The robot's developer, Unitree, says the large, humanoid robot is intended for civilian transport. In a promotional video, the robot ‪—‬ called GD01 ‪—‬ walks upright, smashes down a high wall of cinder blocks, and reconfigures itself to stand on four limbs to traverse more difficult terrain.

Unitree representatives say the machine weighs around 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) with an operator on board and stands nearly 10 feet (3 meters) tall. People can even buy the robot, with prices starting at 3.9 million yuan ($572,000).

The core structure of the machine is a skeleton of titanium alloy and aerospace-grade aluminum surrounded by a carbon-fiber shell.

Unitree calls the GD01 the world's first mass-produced "transformable mecha," and has urged consumers to "be sure to use the robot in a friendly and safe manner," according to the written description for the promotional video.

Mounting the GD01 in its current incarnation isn't the most user-friendly process. In the video, an operator has to awkwardly scale up the leg of the machine to access the cockpit. Interestingly, although the GD01 is being marketed as a manned machine, the initial shots show it being controlled remotely, with no operator in the cockpit.

Unitree is a robotics startup headquartered in Hangzhou, China, and is best known for much more modestly sized humanoid and quadruped robots.

The company manufactures and sells several models ranging in price from $4,290 for the torso-only R1-D to $90,000 for the H1 — a general-purpose robot built with lidar and depth cameras and driven by Unitree's M107 joint motor, a high torque, high-endurance motor with a focus on agility, speed and load capacity.

At a spring gala hosted by Unitree in February, the company's humanoid robots were filmed performing impressive feats of acrobatics, synchronized and break dancing, and complex martial arts routines.

Unitree has not released a full technical paper on the GD01, but it's clear that the mecha builds on the company's experience building quadrupedal robots capable of traversing difficult terrain.

Four-legged models like the B2 are capable of climbing stairs, remaining upright when suffering heavy impacts, and even leaping across gaps. They can also be modified from straight-legged configurations to wheeled models.

Unitree's quadrupeds use multiple sets of fish-eye binocular depth-sensing cameras, which allow the robots to simultaneously view their surroundings from the front, bottom and sides.

According to Unitree's website, the company focuses on "self-researching key core robot components such as motors, reducers, controllers, Lidar and high-performance perception and motion control algorithms."

An energy company has successfully installed the world's largest single-unit floating offshore wind turbine off the coast of southern China.

The 16-megawatt system, known as Three Gorges Pilot, was completed in waters too deep for a traditional fixed-bottom foundation near Yangjiang in Guangdong province. Company representatives published a statement detailing the installation on May 3.

Floating wind turbines are designed to operate where depths make conventional offshore wind farms, which need to be anchored to the seafloor, impractical. Instead, the turbine sits atop a massive, floating platform that can be anchored in place, dramatically expanding the amount of ocean area available for wind power development.

A new engineering feat

Built by China Three Gorges (CTG) Corp., Three Gorges Pilot is a 16-megawatt turbine mounted atop a semisubmersible platform. The rotor spans 827 feet (252 meters), with the blade tip rising more than 886 feet (270 m) above the water.

The Three Gorges design follows on the heels of a turbine deployed last year by China Huaneng Group and Dongfang Electric Corp. Its primary improvements are at the structural and system engineering levels.

The new platform is designed to survive inclement conditions in the deep ocean, including waves higher than 66 feet (20 m) and wind speeds up to 164 mph (264 km/h) ‪—‬ the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane.

It utilizes a sophisticated mooring system that combines suction anchors, anchor chains and high-strength polyester lines, along with ballast and monitoring systems, to keep the platform stable and prevent undue drift, company representatives said in a statement.

The design also includes several features intended to help absorb and distribute the force of the wind and water, thereby increasing the platform's durability and extending its operational lifespan.

Generating more energy

Three Gorges engineers incorporated a 66-kilovolt dynamic subsea cable. It's a specialized underwater power cable designed to carry high-voltage electricity while moving and flexing with the rest of the submersible platform.

Adopting a wave-shaped design, it's engineered with high-flexibility conductors, reinforced armor layers for tensile strength and fatigue-resistant insulation and sheathing.

Most of the turbine's assembly was completed on land, at Tieshan Port in southern China. It was then towed offshore and connected in its final location for testing. At peak operational efficiency, the turbine is expected to generate about 44.65 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually.

For context, an average U.S. home consumes roughly 10,500 KWh of electricity per year, based on figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration — meaning the turbine could power around 4,200 homes annually.

The installation is notable not just for its scale but for the integration challenges engineers managed to tackle: large rotor loading, platform stability, dynamic mooring and offshore grid connection.

Floating turbines pose massive engineering challenges, as they are forced to endure constant motion from waves and currents without degrading drivetrain performance or blade clearance while also surviving extreme marine weather over long service lives.

For regions with a limited shallow continental shelf, projects like the Three Gorges Pilot could open up commercial-scale floating wind turbines for much deeper waters than fixed-bottom turbines can reach or survive.

In a first, researchers have sequenced genetic material from 400,000-year-old Homo erectus fossils — and the results reveal deep genetic links to both modern humans and the enigmatic Denisovans.

H. erectus was the earliest human ancestor to travel outside Africa and successfully spread into Europe, Asia and Oceania beginning 1.8 million years ago. With a relatively large brain and the ability to craft complex stone tools, H. erectus was the longest-lasting human ancestor until it disappeared around 108,000 years ago. But paleoanthropologists have long wondered if H. erectus overlapped and interbred with Homo sapiens, which evolved around 300,000 years ago in Africa.

In a new study published Wednesday (May 13) in the journal Nature, researchers detailed their analysis of dental enamel from six H. erectus skeletons discovered in three locations in China, all dating to about 400,000 years ago. The researchers extracted 11 different proteins from the enamel and identified hundreds of positions of amino acids, the building blocks of the proteins.

Two of those amino acid variants surprised the researchers — one was present in all six H. erectus individuals but not in any other human lineage, while the other was present in all H. erectus samples as well as in Denisovans, a group of archaic humans who lived in Asia and went extinct around 30,000 years ago. This amino acid variant was then passed from Denisovans to some H. sapiens groups through interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago.

The results are the first to show "deep genetic links" between these H. erectus individuals and present-day modern humans, the researchers wrote in a statement. The results are also a step forward for the relatively new technique called paleoproteomics, which allows scientists to sequence genetic material that lasts longer than DNA does.

"I don't believe that any previous DNA or proteomics have been done before" on H. erectus, study first author Qiaomei Fu, director of the Ancient DNA Laboratory at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, told Live Science in an email. But "how they evolved into modern humans and are related to the Denisovans, we really need to get DNA to understand that," she said.

DNA has a shorter shelf life than proteins do, and so far, researchers haven't found any H. erectus DNA that can be sequenced. However, Denisovan DNA has been sequenced.

The muddle in the middle

The Middle Pleistocene era (also called the Chibanian age) spanned from 774,000 to 129,000 years ago. During this era, a number of ancient human groups overlapped in Africa, Europe and Asia, including H. erectus, H. sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans, presenting paleoanthropologists with the difficult task of figuring out how they were all related — a confusion they call a "muddle."

"Scientists used to call this 'the muddle in the Middle Pleistocene,'" John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email, "and now we know that muddling is just mixing." The new study of 400,000-year-old enamel proteins shows that mixing of different evolutionary branches was important to our evolution, "even earlier than DNA evidence can show us," Hawks said.

But what exactly the new results mean for the evolution of H. erectus — and the possibility that it interbred with modern H. sapiens in Eurasia — is still murky. "I think this raises the question of whether we know what Homo erectus even is," Hawks said.

Paleoanthropologists often define an ancient human species based on a group's physical features, such as the size and shape of their bones and teeth ‪—‬ a method called the "morphological species concept." But that way of determining species has been complicated by the rise in genomic analysis over the past two decades, which has revealed interbreeding among groups such as Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans, proving that there is some biological overlap among these groups.

But whereas the genetic information shared among groups around 50,000 years ago in Europe and Asia is relatively clear-cut thanks to DNA and genomic analysis, the newly revealed amino acid variations in 400,000-year-old fossils from China are just the first step in clarifying the "muddle in the Middle Pleistocene."

"What I'm concluding is that probably paleoanthropologists of the past were too willing to glom these Middle Pleistocene fossils from China into Homo erectus," Hawks said. "Many of these fossils are probably Denisovan relatives, or possibly they came from other groups we've been calling 'erectus' just because we don't really understand them."

The bottom line, according to Hawks, is that the new study is a great piece of work. "It's tough to look at data like these and not be impressed with the uncertainty of boundaries and the mixing between them in these past people," he said.

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

The long-awaited launch of NASA's Artemis II mission dominated science news this week, with the excitement peaking Wednesday (April 1) as the space agency's first crewed mission to the moon in over 50 years blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Millions tuned in around the world as the towering Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule rose off the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 p.m. EDT. Live Science covered the launch live, with reporters following the action both remotely and directly from Florida's Space Coast.

The liftoff mostly went off without a hitch, though the launch team had to resolve one unusual range issue before takeoff. The four Artemis II crewmembers are now well into their 10-day journey around the moon, during which they'll run tests aimed at building NASA's capacity to execute its planned lunar surface missions. Live Science will be covering highlights from the mission, including its expected reentry on April 10, so stay tuned for updates.

Back in the realm of Earthbound science, chemists have discovered a method to turn breadcrumbs into hydrogen for use in chemical manufacturing. Archaeologists found the world's oldest evidence of gambling in the form of dice invented by Indigenous people in the western U.S. more than 12,000 years ago. Another archaeological discovery out of Vietnam may challenge the presumed history of syphilis. And a new study suggests that quantum computers don't need to be nearly as powerful as we thought to break the world's most secure encryption algorithms.

Scientists cured type 1 diabetes in mice

Scientists cured type 1 diabetes in mice by creating a blended immune system

In type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks cells that make insulin, leaving the body with too little of the blood-sugar-controlling hormone. Those insulin-making cells can be replaced, but the procedure typically requires patients to undergo lifelong immune suppression, which comes with its own serious health complications.

Now, in a new study, scientists explored a way to transplant insulin-making cells without the need for immunosuppression. So far, the approach has shown promise in lab mice, though much more work is needed to show it works in humans. But in theory, it could pave the way to a cure, experts told Live Science.

Discover more health news

—Scientists have discovered an 'Achilles' heel' in deadly superbugs

—Pig semen component could deliver chemotherapy to hard-to-reach eye cancer, mouse study suggests

—Teenager's hives turned out to be caused by rare water allergy

Life's Little Mysteries

What would happen to Earth if the sun suddenly vanished?

Life on Earth literally revolves around the sun's light and energy — but what would happen if our companion star suddenly winked out of existence? Live Science contributor Jesse Steinmetz tackles the question of what a suddenly sunless Earth might be like and which organisms might survive in such a cold, dark place.

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

China's push to reduce air pollution had unexpected results

China's huge push to reduce air pollution had an unexpected consequence in the Arctic

China launched an effort to clean up its air in 2013, and in the decade or so since, the country has lowered its sulfate aerosol emissions by about 75%. A new study took a look at the global impact of that impressive feat, showing that the loss of smog over China likely spared the Arctic from sea-ice-damaging cyclones. The smog previously detoured storms across the North Pacific, funneling them into the Arctic, where they would destroy ice in the Bering Sea.

However, it's not all good news: Aerosols cool the planet, so their disappearance can ultimately unmask greenhouse-gas-driven warming that was once offset by pollution's cooling effect. In short, it's a complicated picture that will take more research to fully understand.

Discover more planet Earth news

—Extreme wildfires, droughts and storms could happen even under moderate global warming, study finds

—Scientists discover potentially huge freshwater reservoir hidden beneath Great Salt Lake

—Earth's energy imbalance is much more extreme than climate models show ‪—‬ but scientists aren't sure why

Also in science news this week

—'It blew my mind': Long-lost ice-age ecosystem, including fossils of lion-size armadillo and giant ground sloth, discovered in Texas 'water cave'

—Farting comet seen reversing its spin for the first time ever —‬ and it may soon 'self-destruct'

—Tasmanian tigers discovered in Indigenous rock art in Australia, suggesting these marsupials lived there much longer than thought

—Rare 'sungrazer' comet MAPS will shine superbright on Saturday ‪—‬ if it survives a dangerous encounter with our star

—A new tweak to Einstein's relativity could transform our understanding of the Big Bang

Science long read

Astronauts can face 'nearly lethal doses' of solar radiation — so why launch Artemis II during the sun's peak of activity? Space scientist Patricia Reiff explains.

NASA's Artemis II mission will not only help the space agency prepare for its future trips to the lunar surface but also offer a unique opportunity to study the impacts of deep space on human health. With the sun having recently passed its peak in activity, called solar maximum, could the four-person crew face even more risk from radiation than they would otherwise?

To unpack the effects of space weather on the human body, Live Science trending news writer Patrick Pester spoke with Patricia Reiff, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University in Houston. Counterintuitively, she explained that solar maximum may be a better time for the Artemis II mission than you might assume.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best analyses, crosswords and opinion pieces published this week.

—'Not how you build a digital mind': How reasoning failures are preventing AI models from achieving human-level intelligence [Analysis]

—Homo habilis is the earliest named human. But is it even human? [Analysis]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #37: The seventh planet from the sun — 2 down [Crossword]

Science news in pictures

Scientists mapped all the nerves of the clitoris for the first time

Scientists recently unveiled the first 3D map of the clitoral nerves, which renders the tissues at micron-scale resolution. The effort involved CT scans stitched together from X-rays that used an extremely bright light source, called a synchrotron. Prior to this research, other scientists had studied the general structure of the clitoris using MRI and tallied up the 10,000 or so nerves in the organ. But the 3D map provides new insights into the nerves' structures that could be incredibly useful for surgeons to reference.

Concentric rocky rings adorned with ancient artwork wear a magma 'hat' in the Sahara — Earth from space

A photo snapped in 2025 by an astronaut shows concentric mountain ridges in the Libyan desert. Known as Mount Arkanu (sometimes spelled Arkenu), the colossal structure was once thought to be an ancient impact crater. But recent research suggests it actually formed from magma repeatedly rising toward the surface and intruding into the surrounding rock. Mount Arkanu bears ancient artworks depicting human figures, along with cattle and other tethered animals, such as giraffes.

Science in motion

NASA's Artemis II crew launches to the moon

If you couldn't watch the Artemis II launch live Wednesday, don't fret! NASA's coverage of the event can be found on the agency's YouTube channel. (And for detailed explanations of the science you're seeing, check out Live Science's live coverage.)

Besides witnessing the epic moment of liftoff, you can learn about NASA astronaut's wide array of prelaunch rituals, the menus the crew will tuck into on their venture, and the mission's official mascot, Rise, designed by 8-year-old Lucas Ye of California. The coverage also digs into all the details of how the Artemis II mission will proceed now that the astronauts have exited Earth's atmosphere.

Follow Live Science on social media

Want more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

A Chinese satellite equipped with a robotic "octopus arm" has passed a key refueling test in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to state-run media. The achievement highlights China's continued leadership with this particular technology, which NASA has not yet caught up with.

The experimental spacecraft will eventually deploy a giant balloon in LEO, which could help solve another important issue surrounding satellite "megaconstellations" like SpaceX's Starlink network.

The satellite, dubbed Hukeda-2 (also known as Yuxing-3 06 within China), launched March 16 aboard the Kuaizhou-11 rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, according to the website of Jonathan McDowell, a now-retired astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking the movements of Earth-orbiting spacecraft for more than two decades. It was one of eight satellites deployed during this mission, and it is now orbiting Earth at an altitude of around 335 miles (540 kilometers).

Hukeda-2 is a demonstration satellite intended to test new technologies in LEO. Its most notable attachment is an octopus-like robotic arm that "can curl, twist and wrap around objects to work in tight, complex spaces, with a nozzle-like tip at one end designed to line up and connect with a target port," according to the South China Morning Post.

The arm is made of a series of spring-like tubes threaded with cables attached to a motor, allowing it to bend in almost any direction and make the small adjustments needed to dock with another satellite while both spacecraft are traveling at speeds of around 16,800 mph (27,000 km/h).

On March 24, Chinese state media reported that Hukeda-2's robotic arm had successfully completed its first refueling test. It was initially unclear if this test involved another satellite. However, photos have since confirmed that the robotic arm instead docked with a target port located on Hukeda-2 itself.

This is the biggest milestone for satellite refueling since June 2025, when China's Shijian-25 satellite successfully connected to and refueled the Shijian-21 satellite, which had previously run out of fuel. This encounter occurred in a higher, geosynchronous orbit, around 22,000 miles (33,500 km) above Earth's surface, and was the first confirmed case of satellite-to-satellite refueling, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Refuel, reuse, recycle

When satellites run out of fuel, they can no longer maintain their altitude and are slowly pulled back toward Earth, before eventually burning up in the upper atmosphere. By refueling them, operators can keep the same spacecraft in orbit much longer, thus making them more cost-effective and sustainable, reducing the need to launch replacements. This has been a big aim for NASA and Western companies for several years, but has remained out of reach so far.

China will likely attempt to use similar refueling spacecraft to service its rapidly expanding Qianfan, or "Thousand Sails," constellation, which launched its first batch of satellites in 2024 and is set to rival Starlink in the coming years. (There are currently about 108 active Qianfan satellites in orbit, with plans to deploy 15,000 by 2030.)

SpaceX, on the other hand, does not appear interested in sustaining its active satellites. Instead, the company favors repeated launches of new spacecraft with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket to keep costs down.

Another issue with expanding constellations is that the number of dead spacecraft waiting to fall back to Earth is rising fast and taking up valuable space that could be occupied by new satellites. In an attempt to fix this, Hukeda-2 will deploy an 8-foot-wide (2.5 meters) balloon at the end of its mission, which will increase atmospheric drag and speed up its return to Earth.

If this works, future Chinese satellites could be deployed with similar devices that allow them to fall back to Earth without initiating a final deorbiting burn. However, it is unclear when Hukeda-2 will deploy its test balloon.

Although quick deorbiting of satellites is prudent, it is unlikely to fix the greater issue of overcrowding that is expected to occur in LEO in the coming decades, especially if SpaceX's controversial plan to launch 1 million orbital data centers comes to fruition.

Recent research has also revealed that satellite reentries release high levels of metal pollution in the upper atmosphere, which is likely triggering issues we are still not fully aware of.

"What goes up must come down," University of Regina astronomer and vocal megaconstellation critic Samantha Lawler recently wrote for Live Science.

China's significant reduction in air pollution may have had unexpected benefits in the Arctic: A new study shows that it diminished storms fueled by aerosols and, in turn, reduced sea ice loss. However, at the same time, this huge drop in aerosols may have accelerated global warming, experts say.

"The Chinese people suffered under bad air quality for decades," Bjørn Samset, a senior researcher at the CICERO Centre for International Climate Research in Norway, told Live Science. "This pollution temporarily slowed global warming and gave the rest of us a bit more time to adapt to a warmer climate. What is happening now is that we're seeing the full effects of greenhouse-gas-driven warming, which we would sooner or later have to face anyway."

In late January 2019, wind patterns over the North Pacific shifted, and a series of five powerful cyclones swept into the Bering Sea in rapid succession. Each one drove warm southerly winds across the ice, breaking it apart and pushing it northward. Air temperatures across the northern Bering Sea ran 21.6 to 28.8 degrees Fahrenheit (12 to 16 degrees Celsius) above normal. By early March, ice cover had shrunk by 82%. This represented a retreat of about 154,440 square miles (400,000 square kilometers) — the largest decline ever recorded by satellites at that time of the year.

Scientists have long known that cyclones can devastate Arctic sea ice. What they've been less sure about is what sends those storms there in the first place.

The new study, published March 18 in journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, offers an unexpected answer: From 2000 to 2014, smog billowing from Chinese smokestacks may have been steering winter storms northward across the North Pacific, funneling more of them into the Arctic and destroying ice in the Bering Sea.

To understand how soot and sulfate particles over Shanghai could influence ice off the coast of Alaska, it helps to think about what happens inside a storm. Every mid-latitude cyclone — the swirling, comma-shaped systems that generate much of the Northern Hemisphere's winter weather — runs on a kind of heat engine. Warm, moist air evaporates near the ocean surface, rises and condenses into clouds, releasing heat that fuels the storm's circulation.

Aerosols — the tiny particles that make up industrial haze — disrupt this engine in a subtle-but-consequential way. Water vapor normally condenses around a relatively small number of particles, forming large droplets that fall quickly as rain on the storm's southern flank. If the air is full of aerosols, however, each particle becomes a seed for a cloud droplet. The result is a vast number of smaller droplets that don't readily coalesce into raindrops. Rainfall on the storm’s southern flank is suppressed, and moisture travels farther along the storm's conveyor belt toward its northeastern flank, where it releases its heat — in exactly the right place to nudge the whole system poleward.

Lead author Dianbin Cao, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, and colleagues combined four decades of observational data with climate model simulations to examine how aerosol levels over East Asia influenced winter cyclone tracks across the North Pacific. Comparing 14 years of elevated aerosol loading between 2000 and 2014 against 15 lower-aerosol years from the preceding decades, the researchers found that cyclone tracks shifted northward by up to 1.23 degrees by the time the storms dissipated — enough to nearly double the number of cyclones crossing into the Arctic.

This aerosol-driven push on storm systems is "stronger than I might have suspected," said Alex Crawford, an Arctic climate scientist at the University of Manitoba who studies cyclone-sea ice interactions but was not involved in the study. "They've done a really good job of demonstrating the mechanism by which aerosols can impact extratropical cyclones."

When these storms arrive in the Bering Sea, their effects can be dramatic. A cyclone's counterclockwise winds shove ice back toward the Chukchi Sea, between Alaska and Russia. Waves break ice floes apart. Southerly gales bring warmer air that can, even in the depths of winter, tip temperatures above freezing, as happened so acutely in 2019.

There is a potential silver lining, however. China's air pollution cleanup, launched in 2013, has proved to be one of the most effective environmental interventions in history, slashing the country's sulfate aerosol emissions by roughly 75% in about a decade. The study suggests this reduction "could potentially mitigate the poleward migration of the storm track driven by global warming" — sparing the Arctic some of the damage from extratropical cyclones.

But the bigger picture is more complicated. Aerosols also cool the planet by reflecting solar radiation back into space and by making clouds brighter. As they disappear, their cooling effects vanish too, thereby unmasking decades of suppressed greenhouse gas warming. A 2025 study led by Samset, who was not involved in the new study, found that East Asian aerosol reductions have measurably accelerated global warming.

The same aerosol reductions that may ease the cyclone-driven pressure on the Bering Sea are simultaneously unmasking the full effects of global warming.

What this climatic tug-of-war will mean for Arctic sea ice remains to be seen, but Dan Westervelt, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a co-author on Samset’s 2025 study, thinks the warming effect will win out. "Unmasking warming will probably dominate, as it is more persistent and can occur during all seasons, while the storm-track changes are probably more episodic,” he told Live Science.

Westervelt said the study indicates that aerosols exert a greater and more complicated influence on Earth's climate than previously appreciated. "The speed of the aerosol reductions in East Asia is underappreciated," he said. "Emissions decreases that took three decades in North America and Europe are taking one decade in East Asia. What impact this has on cyclones and Arctic warming is going to be really interesting to study, and critical for climate mitigation and adaptation."

Could being a "morning person" improve your health … on the moon? Scientists have identified what appears to be a "cavity" of reduced cosmic radiation near Earth's moon. The finding could help lower astronauts' exposure to harmful radiation on future lunar missions by timing some surface operations for local morning hours.

The discovery, based on data from China's Chang'e-4 lunar lander, suggests Earth's magnetic field may affect distances in space farther than scientists previously expected. According to the researchers, the finding challenges the long-held assumption that galactic cosmic rays are roughly uniform throughout the space between Earth and the moon outside our planet's protective magnetic field.

The study, published Wednesday (March 25) in the journal Science Advances, analyzed measurements from the Lunar Lander Neutron and Dosimetry experiment aboard Chang'e-4. Researchers reported a region of reduced galactic cosmic rays during the moon's local morning, roughly a few hours after lunar sunrise.

Cosmic rays are among the biggest radiation hazards for astronauts traveling beyond low Earth orbit. These high-energy particles can penetrate spacecraft and human tissue, in turn damaging DNA and increasing the risk of cancer. With more crewed trips planned to the moon, starting with NASA's Artemis II mission launching as soon as April 1, researchers said a better map of radiation intensity could help mission planners reduce astronauts' radiation exposure during surface explorations.

"The next landings will probably be in the polar regions," which can be permanently sunlit, Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, a professor at the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics at Kiel University in Germany and a corresponding author of the study, told Live Science in an email. He said lunar morning appears to be the best time for excursions because it reduces the amount of radiation on astronauts' skin by about 20% compared to average radiation levels on the moon.

Calculating cosmic rays

To find this cosmic-ray cavity, the researchers analyzed data collected over 31 lunar cycles from January 2019 to January 2022, focusing on quiet times in the solar cycle, when the measured space radiation was predominantly from galactic cosmic rays. They looked for repeated changes in Chang'e-4's measured proton counts from the rays as the moon moved through different parts of its orbit around Earth.

The Lunar Lander Neutron and Dosimetry instrument recorded galactic cosmic ray protons in two energy ranges, which the researchers then grouped by lunar local time. They found that the lower-energy protons, in the 9.18 to 34.14 mega-electron-volt range, dropped by about 20% during the moon's local morning, during the moon's waxing gibbous phase (in the period between a new moon and a full moon) compared with later hours.

Because the decrease showed up in a specific, recurring part of the moon's waxing phase rather than across all times, the team inferred that the moon was passing through a real region of reduced cosmic ray radiation, which they believed was being created as Earth's magnetic field blocked some high-energy protons. To investigate this idea, they ran simulations of the protons' movement through the moon's orbit and found the same cavity.

"I had not expected to see this 'shadow' or cavity," Wimmer-Schweingruber said. "It makes absolute sense in retrospect, but I was very skeptical when I first saw this result," and that's why the team performed so many tests, he added.

Stretching Earth's magnetic influence

The findings point to a new picture of how cosmic radiation behaves between Earth and the moon. Scientists had generally believed that, once galactic cosmic rays crossed Earth's magnetosphere, they were spread fairly evenly throughout the Earth-moon space and were only minimally affected by Earth's magnetic field.

"Basically this result means that the Earth's magnetosphere influences space even beyond its extension," Wimmer-Schweingruber said. The team expected Earth to affect the moon in the magnetotail, the long stream of magnetic field extending away from the sun on Earth's nightside, he noted, but they did not predict the similar effect ahead of the magnetosphere on the sunward side

Wimmer-Schweingruber said future studies with bigger datasets could better define the size and behavior of this cavity, which could help pave the way for a more practical era of lunar exploration. He suggested a familiar rule of thumb may apply for safer moon missions: It's "best for astronauts to venture out onto the lunar surface in the local morning hours," Wimmer-Schweingruber said — "just like for humans on Earth!"

Moon quiz: What do you know about our nearest celestial neighbor?

For the first time in four decades, scientists have announced a confirmed sighting of a critically endangered hare in part of its native range, after spotting its completely flattened carcass on a roadside.

Researchers were traveling for fieldwork on Hainan, an island in southern China, when one member spotted the roadkill by chance. Despite the carcass's severely damaged condition, they immediately recognized it as the little-known Hainan hare (Lepus hainanus). The species, which is found only on Hainan, is among the world's most understudied lagomorphs, the mammal group that includes rabbits, hares and pikas.

The sighting occurred around 125 miles (200 kilometers) from the hare's only current known range in the island's northeast, according to a study published Dec. 15, 2025, in the journal Mammalia.

Although the hare is known to survive in some areas of western Hainan, particularly the Datian National Nature Reserve, the roadkill incident represents the first confirmed documentation of this species from northeastern Hainan since 1986, suggesting that an overlooked remnant population still exists in the region, according to the study.

"It provides hope for this nationally critically endangered species as its current range is wider than previously known," study first author Michael Hui, a conservation officer with the Hong Kong-based conservation group Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden (KFBG), told Live Science via email. "However, our article also provided updated information regarding the species' stronghold in the western region, which is not as secure as traditionally assumed."

Historically, L. hainanus is thought to have been widespread and abundant across most of Hainan's coastal lowlands, primarily in the northwest, west and south, according to the study.

In the 1950s, the species' population is thought to have been around 10,000 individuals. But a particularly sharp decline was observed in the 1970s and '80s, largely due to habitat loss and excessive hunting for their meat and fur.

A 2008 report estimated that there were likely no more than 250 to 500 individuals remaining on the island. Concerns over its status recently led to the Hainan hare being designated as a "critically endangered" species on China's Red List.

Outside Datian National Nature Reserve, the species is rarely reported, and even inside the reserve, everyday sightings are generally infrequent, Hui said. A recent "rapid survey" covering most of the hare's historical range in western and northwestern Hainan documented only one live individual and noted that the species was disappearing unnoticed. But a lack of systematic, island-wide survey data from the past few years means the total population is unknown.

L. hainanus is elusive, in part because it's nocturnal and most of its preferred lowland habitats lie outside protected areas, which have traditionally received little research attention, Hui said.

"We believe that every new record, even single incidental records, can help inform future surveys and proposed conservation actions," the authors wrote in the study.

Much of the hare's habitats are declining because of agricultural expansion and urban development. Therefore, an island-wide survey to understand its current status, distribution and threats is crucial for making informed conservation decisions, the study authors said.

NASA's Artemis II mission will soon send astronauts on a trip around the moon, if the current plans hold. But why is the U.S. so eager to revisit the moon for the first time in more than 50 years?

NASA has promised that returning to the moon will lead to new scientific discoveries, bring economic benefits, and inspire a new generation of explorers. It's also no secret that China threatens to overtake the U.S. as the leader in space exploration, and the U.S. doesn't want to fall behind.

From a scientific perspective, humanity still has much to learn about the moon. Earth's natural satellite has a long history preserved in its rocks, and it could help researchers better understand our own planet, the solar system and the universe at large.

The moon and Earth are like twins that have been dancing around each other since the beginning of the solar system around 4.5 billion years ago, said Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum in London. This means they have a shared history of impacts from asteroids, comets and other objects,

"It just has this 4-and-a-half-billion-year record of what has happened on its surface," Russell told Live Science. "We can see how affected it has been by impacts, which have also happened to the Earth, but we don't see evidence for that on the Earth so easily."

Biological processes and weather-fueled erosion obscure Earth's impact history. The moon, on the other hand, has a thin atmosphere, no weather and no life, so its impact craters can be preserved almost indefinitely. These conditions also provide other research opportunities.

"It's kind of a great laboratory about what happens to geology if there isn't any water or air," Russell said. "We can understand these very fundamental [geological] processes much more easily in many cases by looking at them on the moon."

Artemis

Artemis II is the second of five initial missions in the Artemis program, which aims to establish a long-term U.S. presence on the moon for the first time. The inaugural Artemis mission, Artemis I, was an uncrewed 26-day flight around the moon in 2022. Artemis II is the first crewed spaceflight in the program and is scheduled to send four astronauts on a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth as soon as April 1.

Each Artemis mission is meant to build on its predecessor. Artemis I laid the groundwork for Artemis II, and Artemis II is about testing systems ahead of Artemis III, Artemis IV and Artemis V. The latter two missions aim to put astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028, with Artemis V laying the foundation for what NASA claims will be a permanent lunar base.

NASA famously took 12 astronauts to the lunar surface as part of the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972. Russell noted that lunar samples collected during the Apollo missions have kept scientists busy for more than 50 years, but the Apollo astronauts explored only some of the lunar surface on the near side of the moon, and only its equatorial region.

"It's sort of like having several expeditions to the Sahara Desert and saying, OK, now we understand the Earth," Russell said. "That's why it's important to go back to the moon and, particularly, go to different areas. This is where Artemis is really exciting. The future Artemis mission will go to the lunar south pole, which is an area that really hasn't been explored before."

The moon's south pole is a prime location for water ice, which is thought to be concentrated in the polar regions of the lunar surface. Studying this water ice provides scientists with an opportunity to learn more about Earth's history with water.

"We want to know how the moon got that water, and the reason we want to know that is because how the moon got its water is probably how the Earth got its water," Russell said.

Traveling to the moon with a crew will also enable mission scientists to pursue another, perhaps more disturbing, goal of the Artemis program — investigating the effects of space travel on human physiology. The Artemis II flight is an opportunity for new studies of astronaut health, including how space travel influences the body, mind and behavior, and how those impacts could affect future missions, according to NASA. This is one of many ways the lunar missions are potential stepping stones to deeper space exploration.

That's because the Artemis program is meant to advance technologies and develop infrastructure that will be necessary for sending astronauts to Mars. Space exploration is difficult, dangerous and expensive, so NASA needs to test its systems and its astronauts on the moon before sending them to farther destinations. Establishing a lunar base could be key to traveling to Mars.

The moon has resources that should make space more accessible. For example, NASA has claimed that if it can harvest the moon's water, the space agency can use it to help make drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel — although this remains unproven. Shooting for the moon fulfills a broader strategy to find and use resources off Earth, which could make space exploration cheaper because not everything is made on Earth and transported elsewhere.

Speaking of money, there's a potential lunar economy to consider. NASA has said that its moon strategy stimulates the commercial space industry and creates business opportunities in ways that could foster a lunar economy. The lunar economy currently stems from NASA working with private companies that provide commercial deliveries to support the space agency's mission. Essentially, NASA pays companies to take stuff to the moon. The space agency currently has 15 of these commercial lunar delivery contracts scheduled to be completed by 2028, according to NASA. However, once humans start colonizsing the moon, it could also open up valuable mining opportunities.

Moon mining has the potential to become a billion-dollar industry. The moon harbors resources like rare earth elements, which are mined for electronics on Earth, as well as a potential gold mine in its stocks of helium-3, which could eventually be used in nuclear fusion reactors to make near-limitless clean energy.

The new space race

While the initial space race was between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century, nations are once again racing for control of the final frontier.

Although the U.S., China and Russia are the main competitors in the "new space race," more than 80 countries now have a presence in space, according to Royal Museums Greenwich in the U.K. Beyond commercial interests, access to space plays an increasingly important role in a nation's security ‪—‬ and so could the moon.

Robert Braun, head of the space exploration sector at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, recently described the moon as the "ultimate high ground." In a video released by the university, Braun said many nations are heading to the moon because there's a "nexus of security, exploration and economic objectives."

If the U.S. is to win this second race for the moon, then the upcoming Artemis missions will need to remain on schedule. China wants to land its own astronauts on the moon before 2030, which is at most two years after the first Artemis lunar surface missions, assuming they are a success.

A Chinese company successfully flew a 5-ton (4,536-kilogram) electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL) in a new feat for electric aircraft. Its makers at Fengfei Aviation claim it's the largest eVTOL to ever complete a test flight.

During the test flight, the V5000 aircraft lifted off in VTOL mode, switched to fixed-wing mode for a short flight, and then transitioned back to VTOL mode to safely land. VTOL vehicles mimic helicopters, enabling them to lift off and land on helipads or in other smaller spaces without requiring supporting infrastructure, such as the runways used by fixed-wing aircraft.

The test took place Feb. 5 at Kunshan Civil Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Test Flight Operation Base in Jiangsu Province, a site Fengfei Aviation uses for public demos and AP press flights.

There are several variants of the aircraft — a purely electric version can reach 155 miles (250 kilometers), and a hybrid-power alternative can fly for 932 miles (1,500 km), company representatives said in a statement posted to LinkedIn.

The V5000 also comes in two variants, depending on the cargo it's intended to transport. The passenger version, evocatively dubbed the "Sky Dragon," can haul up to 10 passengers. Fengfei's English brand, AutoFlight, has developed an alternate version called the V5000 Matrix, which can transport around a ton (907 kg) of freight.

Taking to the skies

Both versions are built around a 39-inch (20-meter) wide compound wing, supported by a three-surface aerodynamic layout and 20 lift motors. Including 20 motors in the design provides redundancy in case some fail.

Several companies have begun exploring eVTOLs for commercial taxi services, such as Joby Aviation, which has signed a six‑year exclusive deal to operate air taxis in Dubai, and EHang’s pilotless EH216‑S, approved for commercial low‑altitude tourism flights in China.

Although these vehicles are primarily in the four-to-six passenger urban shuttle range — and tend to be significantly lighter than the V5000. Most of them are designed for short-range urban hops, while the V5000 demonstrates the possibility for longer regional transport. Some, like Joby and Archer, are backed by major airlines (Delta in Joby's case, United in Archer's), giving them a leg up towards FAA certification.

No specific certification timeline for the V5000 Sky Dragon/Matrix after its test has been publicly announced, though the company's smaller V2000CG (2-ton cargo eVTOL) already holds key certifications in China for airworthiness alongside health and safety.

Fengfei — specifically AutoFlight — also has the advantage of a major investment from leading battery developer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Researchers in China have tested a next-generation solid-state battery capable of pushing electric vehicles far beyond current range limits: potentially more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) per charge, and even farther in future versions.

Scientists at Nankai University, Tianjin, developed a high-energy, solid-state battery system that they claim has already been installed in a real vehicle and tested for long-distance driving, institution representatives said in a statement.

The technology packs an energy density exceeding 500 watt-hours per kilogram — an increase of 30% over current leading lithium-ion batteries at 300 Wh/kg — according to the statement. Higher-density batteries mean more energy (and range) for less weight, and in a smaller form factor.

While details about the specific car the battery was tested in are scant, subsequent reporting indicates it was a prototype developed by China FAW Group's battery manufacturing subsidiary, China Automotive New Energy Battery (CANEB).

Solid-state batteries improve on their traditional counterparts in several ways, including safety, the scientists said. The liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries are flammable, while solid electrolytes are non-flammable and less prone to catastrophic failure. Solid electrolytes may also provide a longer lifespan due to a reduction in dendrite growth — metal spikes that cause short circuits — as well as degradation from liquid chemistry.

While still in the development phase, some solid-state battery materials may also permit faster charging, due to the higher ion conductivity of the solid electrolyte.

The new battery relies on a lithium-rich manganese cathode and a hybrid solid-liquid electrolyte system. The hybrid design combines the advantages of the solid-state architecture with a “super-wetting” composite electrolyte, which is intended to improve ionic conductivity and safety.

Super wetting refers to the electrolyte spread across and fully penetrating the surfaces and pores of battery materials, maximizing contact between itself and active materials so ions can move more efficiently. The battery also features lithium anode technology that's designed to reduce production costs by simplifying the manufacturing process.

The current battery pack has a total capacity of 142 kilowatt-hours (the pack’s total stored energy) and an energy density of 288 Wh/kg at the system level rather than 500 Wh/kg density taken in isolation — taking into account cooling systems, wiring, structural supports and safety hardware. This drop in density is normal and consistent with how EV batteries are reported industry-wide.

Developers say coming iterations could exceed 340 Wh/kg at the pack level and 200 kWh total capacity, pushing driving ranges past 1,000 miles (1,600 km). Demonstrations are expected to begin sometime this year, according to the statement.

A 1,000-mile range would be a significant increase over the range of even the most advanced EVs currently available. According to a report from EV.com, the median range of EVs manufactured in 2024 was 283 miles (455 km), with top models peaking at 512 miles (825 km). That top range is owned by the Lucid Air and has yet to be exceeded in 2026.

The solid-state battery results come from a university-industry collaboration and have not yet been independently verified in peer-reviewed research. That said, the work highlights how solid-state batteries are rapidly moving from lab experiments toward real-world testing, and could reshape the range, safety and performance of EVs.

Abrupt population drops over 3,000 years ago in the waning years of China's Shang dynasty were likely the result of a deadly increase in typhoons and related weather events, according to a new study that combined ancient texts, archaeological evidence and paleoclimate modeling.

These coastal typhoons likely caused disastrous climate events, such as massive floods, that hit China's Central Plains, sometimes called the "cradle of Chinese civilization." This area was home to a royal dynasty called the Shang that ruled the Yellow River valley from 1600 to 1046 B.C. The Shang dynasty is known for having the earliest evidence of writing, in the form of divination texts inscribed on "oracle bones" made from turtle shells and ox shoulder bones. In addition, tens of thousands of bronze, ceramic and jade artifacts have been unearthed at the Shang capital in the modern-day city of Anyang, revealing the wealth and power of the dynasty before it was overthrown by the Zhou people.

In a study published Wednesday (March 4) in the journal Science Advances, researchers investigated whether extreme climate events could have contributed to cultural changes in inland China around the time the Shang dynasty collapsed. The researchers correlated information from oracle bones and archaeological sites with paleoclimate models and discovered that intensified typhoons and related weather events might have been to blame.

First, the team counted the instances of weather-related writing on over 55,000 pieces of oracle bone scripts dated to between 1250 and 1046 B.C., the last two centuries of the Shang dynasty. The oracle bones included a larger proportion of divinations related to upcoming heavy rain and water-related disasters in the middle of the time period, suggesting an increase in the Shang society's concern about extreme rainfall events in the Central Plains, the researchers wrote in the study.

The Shang dynasty was not the only society experiencing a population decline in what is now central China. The team examined archaeological data for flood layers in the Chengdu Plain southwest of the Central Plains. Chengdu was occupied by the Shu kingdom, which existed at the same time as the Shang but lasted until 316 B.C. They found evidence of flood-damaged buildings dating to 950 B.C. and flood-destroyed dikes from 500 B.C. Additionally, archaeological sites in the Chengdu Plain decreased in number and became geographically concentrated in relatively elevated areas, suggesting that people were relocating to higher ground.

The researchers' paleoclimate modeling showed that northward typhoons and related weather events intensified between 1850 and 1350 B.C., affecting the Shang in the Central Plains, and that westward typhoon activities intensified between 850 and 500 B.C., affecting the Shu in the Chengdu Plain.

"What stood out here was intensified typhoon activities," the researchers wrote, which may have caused widespread inland flooding and resulted in population decline and social changes in the Central Plains and Chengdu Plain. "Intensified typhoon activities exerted unexpected disastrous influences in inland China during the Bronze Age," they wrote.

The climate conditions in this area were extremely variable, however, and the researchers noted that other climate-related hazards may have contributed to cultural instability in Bronze Age China. In particular, droughts caused by El Niño-like conditions could have hit the Central Plains around 1350 B.C. and disrupted the culture, similar to how protracted droughts ushered in the collapse of many cities within the Maya civilization.

Although the researchers are not certain exactly how the ancient climate affected inland Chinese civilizations, they suggested that typhoon-induced extreme weather events were as much of a concern in the past as they are today. But by integrating archaeological evidence, oracle bone scripts and paleoclimate proxies, the researchers wrote, the study is the first to reveal links between coastal typhoon activity, inland extreme rainfall, flooding and social changes around 1050 B.C.

Live Science reached out to the study's authors for comment, but they did not respond by the time of publication.

Chinese astronauts have described what happened when they were nearly stranded in space last year after a suspected piece of space junk struck their return capsule.

Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie, the crew of the ill-fated Shenzhou-20 mission, were preparing to leave China's Tiangong space station and return to Earth on Nov. 5, 2025. During a routine check, the astronauts spotted something unusual, beginning what has since been described as China's first spaceflight emergency.

Commander Chen Dong was carrying out final checks on the return capsule when he noticed a triangular mark in the spacecraft's viewpoint window, according to a detailed interview with the crew by Chinese state media, reported by Live Science's sister site Space.com.

"My first thought was whether a small leaf had somehow stuck to the outside of the window," Chen said in the interview, aired by China Central Television (CCTV). "But then I quickly realized that couldn't happen because we were in space. How could there possibly be a fallen leaf there?"

Chen determined that the leaf-shaped mark was the result of cracks to the window, some of which he said "had penetrated through." His crew then worked with the Shenzhou-21 relief crew and ground teams on Earth to check and confirm the condition of the window. The taikonauts (Chinese astronauts) have previously described taking a methodical approach to what could have been a perilous event.

"When we learned of the situation, we had discussions and reached a common understanding," astronaut Chen Zhongrui told CCTV in a press briefing on Jan.17. "At the same time, the ground teams communicated with us promptly, and we soon calmed down."

The taikonauts arrived at the Tiangong (Mandarin for "heavenly palace") space station on April 24, 2025. Their original departure date of Nov. 5 was pushed back after the crack was discovered, but they were able to travel home 9 days later in the Shenzhou-21 spacecraft that had delivered their relief crew.

The three taikonauts safely touched down in northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on Nov. 14. The crew spent 204 days in orbit, which was a record for a taikonaut crew, though far from the record for longest time humans have spent in space (437 days).

The quantity of space junk in Earth's orbit is increasing. This junk, which includes things like rocket boosters and other discarded space travel objects, has the potential to collide with uncrewed and crewed spacecraft and thus puts astronauts at risk. Various methods have been proposed to deal with the growing space debris problem — including the development of sci-fi-inspired tractor beams and junk-capturing spacecraft. But so far, no potential solutions are ready to be deployed at scale.

This striking satellite photo shows a recently uncovered meteor crater in China that is likely the youngest impact structure on Earth and the largest in its wider age bracket. The horseshoe-shaped depression is also only the second impact crater ever discovered in the country.

The Yilan crater is an incomplete, nearly circular impact crater located in the Lesser Xing'an (also spelled Khingan) mountain range of China's Heilongjiang province, around 12.5 miles (20 kilometers) northwest of the town of Yilan. It is approximately 1.15 miles (1.85 km) across at its widest point, and its ringed walls reach up to 500 feet (150 meters) above the crater floor.

Chinese researchers discovered that the incomplete ring was an impact crater in mid-2021, around three months before this photo was taken. Until then, it had largely gone unnoticed because it is surrounded by thick forests. Although locals knew about the structure, they called it Quanshan, meaning "circular mountain ridge," which suggests they had no idea of its extraterrestrial origins.

However, when the research team dug up to 1,440 feet (440 m) beneath the crater's floor, they found "shocked quartz, melted granite, glass containing holes formed by gas bubbles, and tear-drop-shaped glass fragments" — all clear signs that a sizable space rock had slammed down there, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Carbon dating revealed that the crater formed sometime between 46,000 and 53,000 years ago, meaning it could be the youngest of the roughly 200 major impact craters on Earth.

Until this discovery, the most widely accepted "youngest major crater" on Earth was Barringer Crater (also known as Meteor Crater) in Arizona, which dates back 50,000 years, according to the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Given the uncertainty around the Yilan crater's age, researchers cannot be sure that it is younger than Barringer Crater, although it is thought likely.

The Yilan crater is also the largest of any impact crater under 100,000 years old, so it beats another record previously held by Barringer Crater, which is around 0.75 mile (1.2 km) across.

As you can see in the satellite photo, the southern third of the crater's rim is missing. Researchers are unsure exactly when or how this section of the crater's rim disappeared. However, sediment found on the crater's floor hints that there was formerly a lake within the crater, which strongly suggests that the structure was once fully intact, according to the Earth Observatory.

Chinese craters

The Yilan crater is the first impact crater to be discovered in China since the 1.1-mile-wide (1.8 km) Xiuyan crater in Liaoning province, which dates back to between 330,000 and 1.1 million years ago, was confirmed in 2009.

Given how large China is — around the same size as the U.S. by land area — it has long been a mystery as to why more impact craters haven't been found there. However, others have been uncovered following the discovery of the Yilan crater.

In September 2023, scientists discovered a third Chinese crater, around the same size as the Yilan crater. Carved into the summit of a mountain near the North Korean border, the crater dates back at least 150 million years.

Then, in October 2025, scientists confirmed a fourth impact structure, dubbed the Jinlin crater, on a mountain near Zhaoqing in China's Guangdong province. This crater is only around 3,000 feet (900 m) wide and may date to as recently as the current epoch, known as the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago, according to Sci News, although its age is unconfirmed.

See more Earth from space

More than 1,000 years ago in dynastic China, many young girls had their toes tightly bound in gauze strips to create the illusion of dainty feet. The oldest preserved example of their petite footwear, called "lotus shoes," dates to the 13th century, but the practice of foot-binding — known as "chanzu" in Chinese — lasted until the mid-20th century.

Foot-binding was a type of body modification practiced mainly by the Han Chinese on young girls. Between the ages of about 4 and 8, a young girl would have her feet wrapped in bandages or gauze by her mother. The goal was to create extremely tiny-looking feet by bending all four little toes under the sole of the foot and bringing the front and back of the foot as close together as possible by breaking the bones of the arch of the foot. The practice, which is reported to have been severely painful, was at various times a marker of high status, a representation of feminine beauty and a way to restrict women's physical movement.

"The bandages that women used for footbinding were about 10 feet long, so it was difficult for them to wash their feet," Chinese writer Yang Yang, whose mother had bound feet, told NPR. "They only washed once every two weeks, so it was very, very stinky."

The earliest known archaeological examples of lotus shoes come from the Song dynasty (960 to 1279) in China. According to experts at the Textile Research Centre (TRC) in Leiden, Netherlands, six pairs of shoes were found in the tomb of Lady Huang Sheng, who lived from 1227 to 1243, and they averaged just 5 inches (13 centimeters) long. Several other tombs dated to the 13th century also revealed evidence of foot-binding, suggesting it was an upper-class practice and a prerequisite for a woman's "proper" marriage.

There are surviving examples of numerous types of lotus shoes, including daytime boots, wedding shoes and sleeping socks. Lotus shoes were commonly made from cotton, wool or silk and were often intricately embroidered with flowers and birds. The smallest example of a lotus shoe in the TRC Leiden exhibit measures just 2.4 inches (6 cm) long.

By the late 19th century, the practice of foot-binding was falling out of favor in China due to fights for women's rights, as the binding significantly deformed women's feet and caused pain. But foot-binding was practiced in some areas until 1949, meaning that a few elderly women with bound feet can still be found today. The last factory that made lotus shoes closed in 1999, although some smaller shops continued even after that.

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

A Chinese energy firm has successfully tested an experimental blimp-like wind turbine capable of generating energy in the skies above cities and inland communities.

Developed by Beijing Linyi Yunchuan Energy Technology, the S2000 airborne wind energy system (AWES) is a large, helium-filled airship containing 12 wind turbines.

The craft ascends thousands of feet into the air to harness the stable wind speeds at higher altitudes, which spin the turbines and generate electricity. This is then sent down the tethering cable to the ground below, where it can enter the grid.

In its test flight, the manufacturers flew the S2000 at an altitude of 6,560 feet (2,000 meters) above Sichuan Province, generating 385 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

This is enough to power the average U.S. household for approximately 13.3 days, per usage figures provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

In total, the S2000 clocks in at 197 feet (60 m) long, 131 feet (40 m) high and 131 feet (40 m) wide, as reported by Global Times. The system is rated at 3 megawatts total power capacity.

The new technology has a couple of potential uses, the developers suggest. "One is for off-grid settings like border outposts, where it can serve as a relatively stable conventional energy source,” explained Weng Hanke, CTO at Linyi Yunchuan Energy Technology, as reported by Tide News — an affiliate of the state-owned Zhejiang Daily Press Group — via Global Times.

"The other is to complement traditional ground-based wind power systems, creating a three-dimensional approach to energy supply."

If realized at scale, the approach could have transformational potential for countries with constrained space for onshore wind generation, such as many in mainland Europe, as well as those without the shallow seabeds necessary for offshore wind power generation, such as Japan.

However, the reliability of the tethered cable for delivering stable power to the grid will require further testing.

In all but the most remote rural communities, the 1.25-mile (2,000 m) cable could present a dangerous obstacle to aircraft. In the U.K., the Civil Aviation Authority requires those wishing to fly tethered balloons above 200 feet (60 m) to apply for special permission to avoid risk to aircraft sharing airspace with the balloon.

Beyond its safety concerns, the S2000 will also need to undergo rigorous testing to ensure its viability for reliable commercial operations. Standard wind turbines require regular maintenance and the craft could prove difficult and more costly to service as it will have to return to the ground for every repair.

Wind power density

Wind turbines can generate more power where the wind power density — the measure of wind energy that can be harnessed at a given altitude — is higher. Offshore wind turbines, for example, can capture the higher, more consistent wind speeds over open water.

These offshore turbines can also be significantly larger than their onshore counterparts, with the hub of Chinese manufacturer Dongfang Electric’s DEW-26 MW-310 offshore turbine standing at 606.9 feet (185 m). Floating wind turbines can be similarly gigantic, with the tower for the recently-revealed, record breaking floating wind turbine from China Huaneng Group reaching 489 feet (152 m).

For example, the average offshore wind speed deemed suitable for wind farms at 295 feet (90 m) elevation within U.S. waters is 7 meters per second, per the Marine Cadastre National Viewer, a web-based data viewer produced by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office for Coastal Management.

It’s hard to state the exact wind speed at various altitudes, as this varies by location and weather.

The aerospace group Omnidea estimates that at altitudes between 328 and 8,200 feet (100 and 2,500 m), wind power density increases by approximately a factor of six, with an average wind speed of 33.5 mph (15 m/s) at 8,200 feet

This highlights the potential efficiencies to be unlocked with greater exploitation of higher-altitude wind speeds with tethered, flying wind turbines such as the S2000.

Three Homo erectus skulls previously unearthed in China are almost 1.8 million years old, around 600,000 years older than originally thought, a new study finds.

This revelation has made the Yunxian skulls from Hubei province the oldest evidence of our early human relatives, known as hominins, in East Asia, according to research published Wednesday (Feb. 18) in the journal Science Advances.

Study co-author Christopher Bae, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Live Science in an email that he felt "absolute surprise" when he first saw the results of the analysis. This more ancient age may force experts to rethink the date that H. erectus first emerged, which is believed to have occurred around 2 million years ago in Africa.

"What this means is that we need to consider pushing the origin of Homo erectus back" to around 2.6 million years ago, Bae said in an email.

H. erectus has long been considered the first human relative to leave Africa, with 1.78 million to 1.85 million-year-old fossils found at the Dmanisi site in Georgia being the earliest evidence of humans in Asia. But stone tools discovered at two sites in China dated to 2.1 million and 2.43 million years ago have complicated that picture, since they predate experts' theory of when H. erectus originated.

The exact date of the three Yunxian skulls, which were found between 1989 and 2022, has long been debated, but they were previously considered to be around 1 million years old based on the age of animal teeth found close by, although one study dated them to around 1.1 million years ago using electron spin resonance and uranium-series dating. So when the opportunity arose to try a new dating technique at the site, Bae and his colleagues thought it was a good chance to revisit the debate.

Their team used a technique called cosmogenic nuclide burial dating to determine the age of the quartz found in the sediment layers where the skulls were found. This dating technique measures the half-life of two chemical variants — Aluminum-26 and Beryllium-10 — to determine how much time has passed since the quartz was exposed to cosmic rays.

This dating method revealed the hominin fossils were approximately 1.77 million years old, which is about 600,000 years older than the oldest age proposed for the site previously, Bae said.

Because the new date is younger than the stone tools discovered elsewhere in China, there is still a large time gap of around 600,000 years between the earliest fossil evidence and the earliest tool evidence, he added.

But since this date is close in time to the Dmanisi fossils in Georgia, the results suggest that H. erectus moved across Asia relatively quickly, Bae said. The size and shape of the Yunxian skulls, however, shows that these hominins had larger brains than those found in Dmanisi, despite being a relatively similar age. "This points to important variation in the early hominins outside of Africa," Karen Baab, a professor of anatomy at Midwestern University in Arizona who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email.

Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the National History Museum in London who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email that "it would indeed be remarkable" if the Yunxian skulls were nearly 1.8 million years old, but "placing Yunxian at such a great age would put it completely out of sync with the rest of the fossil record."

According to previous work by Stringer and his colleagues, the Yunxian fossils may belong to a group that gave rise to the Denisovans, which their model suggests emerged around 1.2 million years ago.

The new date for the Yunxian fossils, if correct, may also require experts to reconsider the origin of the ancestor to our own species, Homo sapiens, Stringer said. "I would suggest that further work on the dating of the site is certainly needed!"

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Humanoid robots have taken part in the world's first fully autonomous martial arts performance to mark the Lunar New Year. In new footage from the 2026 Spring Festival Gala in Beijing, Unitree Robotics’ G1 and H2 machines can be seen performing complex acrobatics and wielding weapons.

The machines performed several world firsts, Unitree representatives said in a statement, including the first continuous freestyle table-vaulting parkour, the first launched aerial flip with a maximum height approaching approximately 10 feet (3 meters), and a two-step wall-assisted backflip.

The two robot models were also equipped with new dextrous hands to support the rapid switching between different body positions and transitions between tricks, as well as to grapple surfaces and handle martial arts props.

The robots’ performance is a marked improvement on demonstrations at the same festival in 2025, where the machines looked stiff and clumsy, with clunky transitions between different routines.

Company representatives said the improvements result from artificial intelligence (AI) improvements alongside new lidar (light detection and ranging) processing, alongside mechanical upgrades to the robots themselves. They represent an advancement in the field of embodied AI, in which scientists attempt to give robots tools to better understand and navigate the physical world.

The year of the fire horse

"The performance draws its inspiration from a tribute to traditional Chinese martial arts," Unitree representatives said in a technical blog post. "The concept centers on fusing the martial arts spirit with modern technology, using robotic performances to present the power and beauty of Wushu [the Chinese term for martial arts] while conveying the message of cultural inheritance and innovation. It aims to showcase Chinese Kung Fu culture alongside technological progress to the world."

Company engineers had been preparing for the performance since November 2025. Scientists pretrained a stunt-motion model using extensive training data from an array of stunts, which subsequently improved the standard of fine-tuning to get the robots up to speed.

They also upgraded the cluster control platform — a system for coordinating dozens of robots at once that involves network communication, different operating systems, embedded devices and software engineering elements. This allowed for end-to-end automation, from AI-planned choreography planning to the real-time multirobot coordination, with millisecond-level synchronization.

In terms of robotic motion, the engineers ensured that the robots could navigate their environment, which involved a lidar-based localization algorithm that could improve how accurately they positioned themselves. Another pretrained high-speed-movement model then ensured they could track their target positions stably and quickly and complete the desired movement with human-like gaits.

The machines' design also played a role in the improvements. The engineers upgraded the motors to boost maximum performance and then configured them to adapt to the new movements. Examples of specific improvements include higher power density for core joint motors, optimized limb robustness, and more dextrous hands.

Although the martial arts display was designed primarily for entertainment, company representatives said the movements and actions demonstrate real-world utility. For example, the cluster control platform could be a key step in enabling several robots to coordinate within a variety of environments without human intervention.

China's Yangtze River is showing signs of recovery following the introduction of a 10-year ban on commercial fishing in 2021. The number of large fish has increased, and there has been recovery among endangered animals, including the Yangtze sturgeon (Sinosturia dabryanus) and the Yangtze finless porpoise (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis), new research finds.

"These results show that strong political decisions are required to restore biodiversity," Sébastien Brosse, an ecologist at the University of Toulouse in France and co-author of the new study, told Live Science via email. "This is an encouraging message because biodiversity loss is often seen as irreversible." The Yangtze is the longest and largest river in China. About 30% of the country's population lives within its drainage basin, and the 11 provinces and municipalities that make up the Yangtze River Economic Belt generate about 47% of China's total gross domestic product.

But rapid urban development since the 1950s, dam building, decades of overfishing, pollution and habitat degradation had all led to a decline in water quality and a biodiversity crisis. The Yangtze River dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) and the Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius) went extinct, and 135 fish species found in historical surveys disappeared.

This decline continued despite the establishment of a network of protected areas and an investment of more than $300 billion in water-quality management and improvement. In response, China took drastic measures: The country instituted a 10-year fishing ban across the entire Yangtze basin in 2021, used river police to enforce strict penalties, and continued broad environmental management.

To assess the effects of the fishing ban, Yushun Chen, a hydrobiologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, China, and his colleagues used data from between 2018 and 2023 to evaluate the health of fish communities in the Yangtze before and after the ban went into effect.

They found that overall, the total mass of fish collected in samples more than doubled between those dates, and there was a 13% boost in the number of species in the samples.

The overall number of fish stayed about the same, but larger-bodied species that are higher up in the food web, including the economically valuable black Amur bream (Megalobrama terminalis) and the white Amur bream (Parabramis pekinensis), grew, and they contributed a larger amount of the biomass. However, the total mass of smaller species sampled decreased by 18%.

The team's findings, published on Thursday (Feb. 12) in the journal Science, also included positive signs for migratory and endangered species. For example, populations of slender tongue sole (Cynoglossus gracilis) increased after the ban, and its freshwater migration extended farther upstream. Endangered fish species — such as the Yangtze sturgeon, Chinese sucker (Myxocyprinus asiaticus) and tube fish (Ochetobius elongatus) — also showed signs of recovery.

Another notable positive was the boost in numbers of the only freshwater mammal remaining in the Yangtze River, the Yangtze finless porpoise (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis), whose population rose by a third from 445 in 2017 to 595 in 2022. This gain may have resulted from a greater availability of bigger fish to eat; fewer deaths related to vessel strikes or fishing bycatch; and a reduction in other stressors, such as underwater noise from vessel propellers, the researchers suggested.

"In an era of unprecedented biodiversity losses and declines, especially in freshwater systems, this study offers a glimpse of hope regarding the future of biodiversity," said Lise Comte, a conservation ecologist at California-based Conservation Science Partners who wasn't involved in the research.

"It demonstrates that bold protection and restoration strategies can be efficient in slowing down and even reverting human impacts on ecological communities," she told Live Science via email.

Chen and his colleagues are still monitoring Yangtze River biodiversity, and they said the recovery is continuing. But they warned that the progress could easily be reversed if commercial fishing were to restart and that lasting biodiversity recovery will depend on sustained management that addresses all human pressures on river systems.

They also suggested that similar conservation measures might be useful on rivers such as the Mekong and the Amazon.

However, the Yangtze fishing ban had huge human and financial costs, as it involved the recall of 111,000 fishing boats, the resettlement of 231,000 fishers, and an investment of more than $2.74 billion in the Yangtze River Economic Belt.

"The promising findings demonstrate the resilience of these systems but are also a case study of an approach that I hope we don't have to emulate elsewhere," co-author Steven Cooke, a professor of biology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, told Live Science via email. "Closing all fisheries in a river basin has significant socio-economic consequences. Fishers, and those in related industries, often move on, forever changing those communities. Managing fisheries in ways that do not require such a 'nuclear' option is always preferred."

A better approach would involve the ongoing assessment of fish populations; science-based fisheries management; and the study of watersheds as integrated systems that connect people, water and fish, he added.

Carbon dioxide emissions from China have flatlined or fallen for 21 months, meaning the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter may have reached a global turning point sooner than expected.

China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions dropped by 1% in the last quarter of 2025 and likely by 0.3% over the whole year, keeping them just beneath the record highs reached in May 2024, according to a new analysis by the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief. The nearly two-year flatline or fall is the longest on record not driven by an economic slowdown in the country, which emits over a third of global CO2.

If the trend holds, China's emissions could reach an all-time peak before 2030 — the country's official target date — or even sooner, marking a key win in the global effort to curb fossil fuel use and slow global warming. Yet whether the drop is sustained or demand will drive a rebound in emissions before the officially targeted peak remains an open question.

"CO2 emissions fell year-on-year in almost all major sectors in 2025, including transport (3%), power (1.5%) and building materials (7%)," Lauri Myllyvirta, lead author of the analysis and co-founder of CREA, wrote on Bluesky. "The key exception was the chemicals industry, where emissions grew 12%."

"The numbers imply that China's carbon intensity — its fossil-fuel emissions per unit of GDP — fell by only 12% during 2020-25, short of the 18% target," Myllyvirta added. "China now needs to cut carbon intensity by around 23% over the next five years in order to meet its Paris [Agreement] commitments."

Driving the trend are China's development of renewable energy technologies and electrified transport, alongside dropping demand for cement and steel. China is the world's largest producer of both commodities, accounting for around 48% and 54% of the global production of cement and steel, respectively, with each contributing roughly 15% to the country's total greenhouse gas emissions.

The plateau also occurred despite a growth in China's power consumption by 520 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2025, according to the CREA analysis. That's because clean energy production grew to match power consumption, with solar power output increasing by 43%, wind by 14% and nuclear 8% year over year, offering roughly 530 TWh of new power. Energy storage capacity also grew by a record 75 gigawatts (GW), outpacing the 55 GW growth in demand.

But whether this plateau holds, temporarily rebounds or dips into permanent decline will hinge on decisions made by the Chinese government in its next five-year plan in March.

CREA's analysis notes some ambiguity in the CCP's planning. An explainer for the upcoming plan refers to a "plateau" in coal consumption from 2027, suggesting that absolute reductions in emissions may have to wait until after 2030.

"Moreover, allowing coal consumption in the power sector to grow beyond the peak of overall coal use and emissions implies slowing down China's clean-energy boom," the CREA report says. So far, the boom has continued to exceed official targets by a wide margin." Clean energy technologies drove more than a third of China's economic growth in 2025.

China is complementing its clean energy investments with ecological engineering projects that include planting trees around the Taklamakan Desert, which has turned one of the world's largest and driest deserts into a carbon sink.

Meanwhile, today (Feb. 12), the Trump administration is set to revoke the 2009 "endangerment finding," which established a legal mechanism to regulate U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. And on Wednesday (Feb. 11), Washington Coal Club gave Trump the "Undisputed Champion of Coal" award a day after he issued executive orders for the U.S. Department of Defense to buy coal-generated electricity.

Mass tree planting in China is turning one of the world's largest and driest deserts into a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits, new research reveals.

The Taklamakan Desert (also spelled Taklimakan or Takla Makan) is slightly larger than Montana, stretching across about 130,000 square miles (337,000 square kilometers). It is encircled by high mountains, which block moist air from reaching the desert for most of the year, creating extremely arid conditions that are too harsh for most plants.

However, over the past few decades, China has sowed a forest around the Taklamakan's edges, and a new study suggests this approach is beginning to bear fruit.

"We found, for the first time, that human-led intervention can effectively enhance carbon sequestration in even the most extreme arid landscapes, demonstrating the potential to transform a desert into a carbon sink and halt desertification," study co-author Yuk Yung, a professor of planetary science at Caltech and a senior research scientist in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Live Science in an email.

Over 95% of the Taklamakan Desert is covered in shifting sand, meaning it has long been considered a "biological void," according to the study. The desert has been growing since the 1950s, when China underwent massive urbanization and farmland expansion. This conversion of natural land created the conditions for more sandstorms, which, in general, blow away soil and deposit sand instead, causing land degradation and desertification.

In 1978, China implemented the Three-North Shelterbelt Program, a huge ecological engineering project intended to slow desertification. Also called the "Great Green Wall," the project aimed to plant billions of trees around the margins of the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts by 2050. More than 66 billion trees have been planted in northern China to date, but experts debate whether the Great Green Wall has significantly reduced the frequency of sandstorms.

China finished encircling the Taklamakan Desert with vegetation in 2024, and researchers say the effort has stabilized sand dunes and grown forest cover in the country from 10% of its area in 1949 to more than 25% today.

Now, scientists have found that sprawling vegetation in the Taklamakan Desert's periphery is absorbing more carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere than the desert is releasing, meaning the Taklamakan may be transforming into a stable carbon sink.

The researchers analyzed ground observations of different vegetation-cover types, as well as satellite data showing precipitation, vegetation cover, photosynthesis and CO₂ fluxes in the Taklamakan Desert over the past 25 years. They also used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Carbon Tracker, which models CO₂ sources and sinks globally, to bolster their findings.

The results, published Jan. 19 in the journal PNAS, show a long-term trend of expanding vegetation and rising CO₂ uptake along the desert's edges that coincides both in time and space with the Great Green Wall.

Over the study period, precipitation during the Taklamakan Desert's wet season from July to September was 2.5 times higher than it was in the dry season, averaging about 0.6 inches (16 millimeters) per month. Precipitation enhanced vegetation cover, greenness and photosynthesis along the desert's margins, thereby lowering CO₂ levels over the desert from 416 parts per million in the dry season to 413 ppm in the wet season.

Previous research indicated that the Taklamakan Desert may be a carbon sink, but those studies focused on CO₂ that is absorbed by the desert's sand. They also suggested that sand is not a stable carbon sink under climate change, because rising temperatures can cause air in the sand to expand, which releases extra CO₂.

"Based on the results of this study, the Taklamakan Desert, although only around its rim, represents the first successful model demonstrating the possibility of transforming a desert into a carbon sink," Yung said.

The Great Green Wall's potential to slow desertification remains unclear, but its role as a carbon sink "may serve as a valuable model for other desert regions," he added.

The spotted lanternfly has spread across the United States with unrelenting speed — and now we have a clue as to why: living in cities seems to have helped these invasive insects evolve to be more resistant to stresses.

"Cities may act as evolutionary incubators that help an invasive species to better deal with pressures like heat and pesticides, which then helps them to better adapt to new environments," lead author Fallon (Fang) Meng, a biologist at New York University, told Live Science.

The spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) is a planthopper that uses its long mouthparts to suck sap from plants. The insect is native to China, but has spread through South Korea, Japan and to the U.S., where it was first detected in Pennsylvania in 2014, but is now seen in 19 states in the eastern U.S.

Its preferred host plant is the tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), which is also an invasive species — but it is able to sup on a wide range of plants, including economically valuable ones like grapevines, hops, maples, fruit trees and hardwood trees.

Spotted lanternflies can weaken plants, and as they feed, they also excrete a sticky, sugary fluid that promotes the growth of sooty mold. What's more, when bees decide to forage on this sugary waste rather than visiting flowers it gives the honey they produce a smoky aroma and a lingering aftertaste, although this honey is still safe to eat.

All this adds up to a potentially huge financial impact. For example, a 2019 study estimated that in Pennsylvania alone, if uncontrolled, the insect's effects could cost $324 million annually.

Lanternfly genetics

To get a better handle on how the lanternflies have adapted so well to life in the United States, researchers sequenced the genomes of lanternflies from urban and rural areas in Shanghai, China, and from New York City, Connecticut and New Jersey. The study was published Wednesday (Feb. 4) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

In the lanternfly populations in China, they found clear genetic differences between those in the urban and rural areas. "Even though they're just 30 kilometers [19 miles] away, they have very strong population differentiation," Meng said.

This is probably because although lanternflies can fly, they need to feed continuously, so they stick close to the host trees on which they depend. This means it is easy for populations to stay separate, Meng added.

This separation means the urban lanternflies in Shanghai evolved genetic tolerance to stresses that the rural ones didn't, adapting them to the hotter conditions of cities, and boosting their ability to detoxify and metabolize toxins and pesticides.

In the U.S., however, the lanternflies were genetically similar across all locations, even though some were sourced from locations 124 miles (200 kilometers) apart. The same genes that evolved for city living were further adapted in U.S. populations, according to the study.

Using demographic modeling on the genomic data to reconstruct the recent history of the lanternflies, researchers revealed three genetic bottlenecks, when populations were established from a limited pool of insects. One was more than 170 years ago, when Shanghai underwent rapid urbanization. The second aligned with when lanternflies moved from China to South Korea in 2004, and the third was in 2014 when the insects arrived in Pennsylvania — probably hitchhiking on goods shipped from overseas.

Adapting to China's cities may have primed the lanternfly to tolerate other hot, polluted environments, Meng said. "We should study invasive species and urbanization as interconnected parts of a whole. Those two major aspects are too often studied in isolation, but their effects actually can compound in synergistic and surprising ways."

The ability to handle a wider range of toxins might be helping spotted lanternflies spread in the U.S., said Zach Ladin, an ecologist at the University of Delaware, who wasn't involved in the study.

The relatively high densities of tree of heaven give spotted lanternflies a foothold in many cities, he told Live Science, "but some of those genes that they found that are related to overcoming toxic chemical exposure could really help them switch hosts and take advantage of other plants."

Ladin added that the new genetic information could help people slow or contain the spread of spotted lanternflies. "From a chemical control perspective, now we have some genes to target which could be important in making sure we're not just driving resistance to certain chemicals," he said.

Archaeologists have found that early humans in what is now China were using sophisticated stone tools as far back as 160,000 years ago.

"This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period," the research team wrote in a statement about the discovery.

At the site of Xigou, discovered in 2017 in Henan province in central China, the archaeological team found the remains of more than 2,600 stone tools and determined that some of them were "hafted," or attached to a piece of wood or other form of stick.

"The identification of the hafted tools provides the earliest evidence for composite tools in Eastern Asia, to our knowledge," the team wrote in a study published Tuesday (Jan. 27) in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers already knew of extremely early tool use in East Asia, with the oldest known wooden tools there dating to 300,000 years ago. However, the new findings, which were excavated between 2019 and 2021, are the earliest known tools consisting of two materials, as is evidenced by the hafted artifacts.

Hafting "is a new technological innovation whereby the stone tool is inserted or bound to a handle or a shaft," Michael Petraglia, director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University and a co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. "This improved tool performance by allowing the user to increase leverage and providing more force for actions such as boring."

It appears that the tools were used to process plant materials. "Microscopic analysis on the edges of the stone tools indicate boring actions, used against plant material, likely wood or reeds," Petraglia said.

Their toolmaking techniques "appear to be well established and involve several intermediate steps, showing evidence of planning and foresight," the team said in a statement.

Ben Marwick, an archaeology professor at the University of Washington and a co-author of the paper, said it is not clear which early human species made the tools.

"The exact identity of the makers of these tools is not clear, because during this time there were probably multiple hominin species living in the region," Marwick told Live Science in an email. "So it could be, for example, the Denisovans, H. longi, H. juluensis or H. sapiens that made these tools. Hopefully future work will recover fossil remains or DNA that will shed more light onto this interesting question."

It is noteworthy that many of the artifacts are small — less than 2 inches (50 millimeters) — but were made with complex techniques, Marwick noted. "These come from a period when previous archaeological research has mostly found large artefacts produced using simple flaking methods," he said. "So our finds suggest that complex tool production strategies appear earlier than previously understood."

The newly discovered tools date to between 160,000 and 72,000 years ago. At this time, people in the region lived as hunter-gatherers, but the details of their lifestyles are unclear.

"While the lack of mammal bones and other evidence makes it difficult to deduce how they lived, at least, their stone tools indicate a high degree of behavioral flexibility and successful adaptation to the local climate and resources," Shi-Xia Yang, a paleoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who is a co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email.

Stone tools in East Asia

The discovery of the sophisticated stone tools from this region and time period dispute a long-held assumption about early toolmaking, the study authors noted.

"The broader relevance of the finds are that they challenge the entrenched bias that East Asian hominins only produced 'conservative' tools," Marwick said. "The bias was deeply entrenched, dominating archaeology for over half a century through the concept of the Movius Line.

"Proposed in the 1940s, this 'line' suggested a geographical divide between the 'advanced' Acheulean handaxe cultures of Africa and Western Eurasia and the 'conservative' chopper-chopping tool cultures of East Asia," he continued. "This created a narrative of East Asia as a cultural backwater, where hominins were thought to be evolutionarily stagnant."

John Shea, an anthropology professor at Stony Brook University who was not involved with the research, praised the paper but noted that the idea that East Asia was a cultural backwater was never accurate. He noted that, in his own stone tool experiments, the small, complex and sharp stone tools that were being constructed more often in Europe could be dangerous to work with. "Trust me on this, for I have the scars to back it up," he said.

Any "hominins with a lick of common sense almost certainly minimized the amount of time they spent pounding out razor-sharp flakes," Shea said. "In this respect, [Southeast] Asian hominins were doing what one would expect them to do. … The "idea that 'simple tools equals simple minds' is archaeological mythology."

Anne Ford, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, praised the research.

"This is really an excellent discovery and highlights our need to move away from older descriptions of Asian technologies as simple core-flake industries," Ford told Live Science in an email. She noted that hafting is an "important technological step and has implications for assessing the cognitive ability of hominins in China during this time period."

China's "Great Green Wall" is a huge ecological engineering project to slow the expansion of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts in the country's north.

Since 1978, China has planted more than 66 billion trees along its borders with Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan — and Chinese authorities plan to plant 34 billion more over the next 25 years. If they succeed, the Great Green Wall will increase Earth's forest cover by 10% since the late 1970s.

The Great Green Wall, formally known as the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, is designed to slow soil erosion and sand deposition that has been increasing since the 1950s due to huge urbanization and farmland expansion. These changes exacerbated the region's already dry conditions, which in turn created the conditions for more sandstorms. Sandstorms blow away the top layer of soil and deposit sand, degrading the land and increasing particulate matter pollution in cities.

Northern China was dry before the urbanization boom of the 1950s, because the Himalayas create a rain shadow over the country's border with Mongolia that limits precipitation in the region. This is why the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts are so enormous; combined, they cover 618,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometers), which is slightly smaller than Alaska, according to the Royal Geographical Society.

Despite China's efforts over the past five decades, the Gobi and Taklamakan are still expanding. The Gobi Desert, for instance, swallows around 1,400 square miles (3,600 square km) of China's grassland every year. Desertification is ruining ecosystems and agricultural land, but it's also making pollution in cities like Beijing worse, according to the Royal Geographical Society.

Last year, government representatives announced China had finished encircling the Taklamakan with vegetation, which has helped stabilize sand dunes and grow forest cover from about 10% of China's area in 1949 to more than 25% today. Tree planting will continue around the Taklamakan to maintain and enlarge the forest, the representatives said.

If everything goes to plan, the Great Green Wall will be 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) long by 2050. The "wall" is the world's largest seeded forest — but it's still unclear just how effective it is at slowing desertification.

While some studies suggest the Great Green Wall has reduced the frequency of sandstorms, others argue this decrease is mostly due to climatic factors.

Critics say the survival rate of planted trees and shrubs is too low to show robust results, possibly because huge swathes of the wall encompass only one or two tree species — mostly poplar and willow, according to the Royal Geographical Society — making the wall susceptible to disease. For example, in 2000, 1 billion poplar trees were lost to a single pathogen in the Ningxia province.

Tree mortality is also high because China is planting trees in places that don't have enough water to grow them. Without constant human intervention, many of the trees don't survive.

"People crowded into the natural sand dunes and the Gobi to plant trees, which have caused a rapid decrease in soil moisture and the groundwater table," Xian Xue, a leading expert on erosion-driven desertification at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told National Geographic in 2017. "Actually, it will cause desertification [in some regions]."

Because it is a monoculture, the Great Green Wall also doesn't promote biodiversity in the same way that a more diverse mix of indigenous plants would. Nevertheless, the program inspired Africa's Great Green Wall, which will be a 5,000-mile-long (8,000 km) tree belt across the continent to slow land degradation and desertification.

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Just outside the gate of a 4,000-year-old city in China, archaeologists found a pit full of 80 skulls from human sacrifice victims. Now, a new study has revealed a surprising fact about the victims: Nine out of 10 were men.

In the study, published Nov. 26 in the journal Nature, researchers analyzed DNA collected from skeletons found in the ancient city of Shimao and its satellite towns to figure out the social and kinship structure of this Neolithic society.

The ancient stone-walled city of Shimao was first discovered in Shaanxi province in 2018. Occupied between about 2300 and 1800 B.C., Shimao was roughly 1.5 square miles (4 square kilometers). The city featured a large step pyramid, craft specialization areas and two cemeteries.

Archaeologists also found two different forms of human sacrifice: one involving the heads of decapitated individuals, buried in "skull pits" near the city gate; and another involving the entombing of a lower-status individual — usually a female — as a sacrifice in a higher-status person's burial.

In the new study, the researchers used DNA analysis to figure out the biological sex of the skulls in the pit discovered beneath the foundation of Shimao's Dongmen (East Gate).

"In contrast to previous archaeological reports that identified these sacrifices as female-based," the researchers wrote in the study, the new DNA results "showed no evidence of female bias, with 9 out of 10 victims being men."

This finding surprised archaeologists, because the sacrifices associated with the elite burials at Shimao and its satellite towns were predominantly female.

"These patterns of mostly female sacrifices starkly contrast with Dongmen, in which decapitation and mass burial involved mostly sampled men," the researchers wrote. "This suggests Shimao's sacrificial practices were highly structured, with gender-specific roles tied to distinct ritual purposes and locations," according to a statement from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Additionally, when the researchers looked at the sacrificed men's DNA, they found no differences in their ancestry compared to the ancestry of the elite tomb occupants, meaning the sacrificial victims were not "outsiders."

Although the reason for the sex-specific sacrifice customs is still unclear, researchers have offered some possible explanations.

The cemetery-based sacrifices "may represent ancestor veneration, in which women were sacrificed to honour elite nobles or rulers," according to the researchers, while the sacrificed skulls in the pit "were probably connected to a construction ritual of the walls or gate."

Terracotta Army quiz: What do you know about the 'warriors' in the 2,200-year-old tomb of China's 1st emperor?

For millennia, an ethnic group in what's now southwest China placed their dead in "hanging coffins" on cliffsides, but their identity has long eluded researchers. Now, a new genetic study reveals that this ancient funeral tradition was carried out by ancestors of people who still live in the region today.

The researchers also found genetic links between the ancient people who practiced "hanging coffin" tradition — in which ancient wooden coffins were pegged onto exposed cliffs — and Neolithic ("New Stone Age") people who lived on the coasts of southern China and Southeast Asia.

The findings "provide valuable insights into the genetic, cultural, and historical roots of this burial custom," the researchers wrote in their study, which was published Nov. 20 in the journal Nature Communications.

Over the past 30 years, researchers have documented hundreds of hanging coffins throughout China and Southeast Asia, the researchers wrote in the study. Historical texts and oral traditions note that a small ethnic group known as the Bo people were behind the practice, but for the new study, researchers turned to genetics to solve the mystery once and for all.

In their investigation, the researchers analyzed the genetics of 11 individuals, some of whom lived more than 2,000 years ago, at four "hanging coffin" sites in China.

They supplemented their study by examining the remains of four individuals contained within ancient "log coffins" discovered in a cave in northwestern Thailand, the oldest of which dates to 2,300 years ago, and with 30 genomes from living people of Bo descent.

The results indicate that the "hanging coffin" people — and, therefore, the modern Bo people — had genetic links to groups who lived between 4,000 and 4,500 years ago, during the Neolithic period in this region from about 10,000 B.C. until about 2000 B.C.

"The genetic traces left behind provide compelling evidence of a shared origin and cultural continuity that transcends modern national boundaries," the researchers wrote in the study.

Hanging coffins

Dozens of "hanging coffin" sites are found throughout southern China and in Taiwan, where it was once a popular funerary style. However, funerals of this type stopped hundreds of years ago, during China's Ming dynasty between 1368 and 1644.

The researchers noted an early reference dates to the Yuan dynasty, from about 1279 to 1368. "Coffins set high are considered auspicious," a chronicler wrote."The higher they are, the more propitious they are for the dead. Furthermore, those whose coffins fell to the ground were considered more fortunate."

A few thousand people of Bo descent now live in China's southern Yunnan province, where they are categorized as part of the official Yi ethnic group, although their language and traditions are unique, according to the study.

But their ancestral culture was once much more widespread, encompassing regions that are now parts of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Taiwan, the researchers wrote. It seems the tradition of "hanging coffins" originated at least 3,400 years ago in the Wuyi Mountains of China's southeastern Fujian province.

Shared ancestry

The remains from the ancient "log coffins" in northwest Thailand also showed remarkable genetic similarities to the people interred in the "hanging coffins," the researchers found, indicating these peoples had shared ancestries.

In Thailand, the coffins were made by splitting the log of a tree in two lengthways and hollowing out one side while using the other side as a coffin lid. The coffins were then interred within a cave, often on wooden supports or on high rock ledges.

Those findings, as well as evidence from other archaeological sites throughout Asia, suggest the "hanging coffin" people were a branch of the ancient Tai-Kadai-speaking peoples who occupied much of southern China before the dominance of the Han ethnicity from about the first century B.C., the researchers reported.

According to Thailand's Chulalongkorn University, the ancient speakers of the Tai-Kadai languages (also known as the Kra-Dai languages) have given the name to the modern nation of Thailand and are the ancestors of millions of non-Han Chinese people, especially in the south of that country.

But the key finding of the study is the ancient identity of the "hanging coffin" people, the researchers wrote. Regional folklore referred to the Bo people "with names such as 'Subjugators of the Sky' and 'Sons of the Cliffs,' and even described [them] as being capable of flight," the team wrote in the study. Now, genetics firmly connects the Bo people to those buried in the hanging coffins.

"Approximately 600 years after the custom vanished from historical records, we found that the Bo people are the direct descendants of the Hanging Coffin custom's practitioners," the researchers wrote.

China's efforts to slow land degradation and climate change by planting trees and restoring grasslands have shifted water around the country in huge, unforeseen ways, new research shows.

Between 2001 and 2020, changes in vegetation cover reduced the amount of fresh water available for humans and ecosystems in the eastern monsoon region and northwestern arid region, which together make up 74% of China's land area, according to a study published Oct. 4 in the journal Earth's Future. Over the same period, water availability increased in China's Tibetan Plateau region, which makes up the remaining land area, scientists found.

"We find that land cover changes redistribute water," study co-author Arie Staal, an assistant professor of ecosystem resilience at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Live Science in an email. "China has done massive-scale regreening over the past decades. They have actively restored thriving ecosystems, specifically in the Loess Plateau. This has also reactivated the water cycle."

Three main processes move water between Earth's continents and the atmosphere: evaporation and transpiration carry water up, while precipitation drops it back down. Evaporation removes water from surfaces and soils, and transpiration removes water that plants have absorbed from the soil. Together, these processes are called evapotranspiration, and this fluctuates with plant cover, water availability and the amount of solar energy that reaches the land, Staal said.

"Both grassland and forests generally tend to increase evapotranspiration," he said. "This is especially strong in forests, as trees can have deep roots that access water in dry moments."

China's biggest tree-planting effort is the Great Green Wall in the country's arid and semi-arid north. Started in 1978, the Great Green Wall was created to slow the expansion of deserts. Over the last five decades, it has helped grow forest cover from about 10% of China's area in 1949 to more than 25% today — an area equivalent to the size of Algeria. Last year, government representatives announced the country had finished encircling its biggest desert with vegetation, but that it will continue planting trees to keep desertification in check.

Other large regreening projects in China include the Grain for Green Program and the Natural Forest Protection Program, which both started in 1999. The Grain for Green Program incentivizes farmers to convert farmland into forest and grassland, while the Natural Forest Protection Program bans logging in primary forests and promotes afforestation.

Collectively, China's ecosystem restoration initiatives account for 25% of the global net increase in leaf area between 2000 and 2017.

But regreening has dramatically changed China's water cycle, boosting both evapotranspiration and precipitation. To investigate these impacts, the researchers used high-resolution evapotranspiration, precipitation and land-use change data from various sources, as well as an atmospheric moisture tracking model.

The results showed that evapotranspiration increased more overall than precipitation did, meaning some water was lost to the atmosphere, Staal said. However, the trend wasn't consistent across China, because winds can transport water up to 4,350 miles (7,000 kilometers) away from its source — meaning evapotranspiration in one place often affects precipitation in another.

The researchers found that forest expansion in China's eastern monsoon region and grassland restoration in the rest of the country increased evapotranspiration, but precipitation only increased in the Tibetan Plateau region, so the other regions experienced a decline in water availability.

"Even though the water cycle is more active, at local scales more water is lost than before," Staal said.

This has important implications for water management, because China's water is already unevenly distributed. The north has about 20% of the country's water but is home to 46% of the population and 60% of the arable land, according to the study. The Chinese government is trying to address this; however, the measures will likely fail if water redistribution due to regreening isn't taken into account, Staal and his colleagues argued.

Ecosystem restoration and afforestation in other countries could be affecting water cycles there, too. "From a water resources point of view, we need to see case-by-case whether certain land cover changes are beneficial or not," Staal said. "It depends among other things on how much and where the water that goes into the atmosphere comes down again as precipitation."

Three Chinese astronauts who were marooned in space for more than a week now have a safe way of returning to Earth after an unmanned "lifeboat" spacecraft was sent to meet them in orbit aboard the Tiangong space station. However, the trio will not be coming home until spring 2026, when their original mission is scheduled to end.

The rescue mission concludes a nearly month-long saga that began when a piece of suspected space junk hit and damaged another return capsule hours before its passengers were due to depart from the space station — sparking a chain reaction of orbital strandings.

The fiasco has revealed a potential flaw in China's astronaut protocols, which could have ended in disaster, and further highlights the need for a more streamlined global "space rescue service," some experts warn.

On Monday (Nov. 24), the unmanned Shenzhou-22 spacecraft was successfully launched into low Earth orbit (LEO) on board a Long March 2F rocket, which took off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at around 11:11 p.m. EST, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. The empty return capsule, which has since docked with the Tiangong station, will eventually ferry home the Shenzhou-21 crew — Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang — who arrived on Oct. 31.

The astronaut trio was sent to replace the Shenzhou-20 crew — Wang Jie, Chen Zhongrui and Chen Dong — who were originally scheduled to return home on Nov. 5, after completing a six-month stay in space. However, after a successful handover with the Shenzhou-21 crew, the return mission was called off at the last minute when the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) discovered a large crack in the viewing port of their return capsule.

The Shenzhou-20 crew has since returned to Earth on board the Shenzhou-21 spacecraft, touching down in the Gobi Desert on Nov. 14. However, this meant that the Shenzhou-21 crew was left on Tiangong without a safe ride home. The damaged Shenzhou-20 capsule has remained docked to the space station throughout the ordeal and may have been used as a last resort. But this was never confirmed. (The damaged spacecraft will now likely be detached from the station and deorbited in the coming days or weeks.)

"I'm very glad that they [Shenzhou-20 crew] got home, but it is a bit disconcerting that the replacement crew apparently does not have a vehicle to come back to Earth," Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the Colorado-based nonprofit Secure World Foundation, previously told Scientific American.

The saga played out exactly as CMSA protocols dictated. But what remains unclear is why these protocols allow for a crew to be stranded in space without a viable return capsule, or why it took over a week to launch Shenzhou-22 into space, especially as the spare return capsule and its launch rocket have been on standby since before the entire saga began, according to Space News.

If an emergency scenario, such as a fire or another space junk impact, had played out on Tiangong, the marooned trio may not have been safely evacuated. Luckily, this did not happen. But it was still a risk.

The situation is reminiscent of another recent "stranded astronaut saga," involving NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. This pair arrived on the International Space Station (ISS) in June 2024 for a roughly week-long mission. However, they ended up staying for around nine months after their Boeing Starliner capsule suffered multiple mechanical failures and eventually returned to Earth in March.

Before that, in 2023, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio inadvertently set the record for longest single spaceflight by an American (371 days), after his return capsule was hit by a meteoroid while docked to the ISS, delaying his departure.

However, in both these previous cases, the stranded astronauts could have safely returned to Earth at any time on board the remaining return capsules that were already docked at the ISS.

In addition to highlighting the urgent need to clear up space junk in LEO, some researchers believe the latest saga is also proof that we need some form of global space rescue service that can return stranded astronauts in emergency situations, according to Space.com. One expert described it as a "massive wake-up call."

However, it appears that the CMSA is not worried about a repeat incident in the near future.

"This emergency launch is a first for China, but I hope it will be the last in humanity's journey through space," CMSA official He Yuanjun told state media after the Shenzhou-22 launch, as reported by Reuters.

Three more Chinese astronauts, or taikonauts, are now marooned in space following the successful return of their previously stranded comrades. The latest development highlights a potential flaw in China's space protocols, experts say, which could put astronauts needlessly at risk.

The latest stranded trio — Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang — are the crew of the Shenzhou-21 mission. They have been living onboard China's Tiangong space station since Oct. 31, shortly after they were launched into space by a Long March 2F rocket. Their mission was to take over from the station's incumbent Shenzhou-20 crew, made up of taikonauts Wang Jie, Chen Zhongrui and Chen Dong, who were originally due to return to Earth on Nov. 5.

However, after a successful handover period, the Shenzhou-20 crew's return trip was called off at the last minute when a piece of suspected space junk hit their return capsule. After tests revealed a crack in the viewing port of the struck spacecraft, the Shenzhou-20 crew boarded the return capsule designated for the Shenzhou-21 crew and successfully returned to Earth on Friday (Nov. 14).

But while many were quick to celebrate the return of the Shenzhou-20 crew, who completed the longest single spaceflight by any taikonauts (204 days), this now means that the Shenzhou-21 crew has no way of returning to Earth themselves, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

Recent unconfirmed reports of activity by the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) hint that an empty replacement return capsule, dubbed Shenzhou-22, could be launched to Taingong as early as Nov. 24, according to Space News. However, if something potentially dangerous happens to the Shenzhou-21 crew before then, such as another space junk impact on the main station, they may not be able to safely return to Earth.

"I'm very glad that they (Shenzhou-20 crew) got home, but it is a bit disconcerting that the replacement crew apparently does not have a vehicle to come back to Earth," Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the Colorado-based nonprofit Secure World Foundation, recently told Scientific American.

Once the new return capsule eventually arrives at Tiangong, the damaged Shenzhou-20 capsule will likely be detached from the station and deorbited into the Pacific Ocean, according to Reuters. The Shenzhou-21 crew is widely expected to complete their six-month mission, as originally planned.

It is currently unclear why CMSA decided to return the Shenzhou-20 crew before a new capsule was sent into space. It could be that Tiangong, which is only one-fifth the size of the International Space Station (ISS), could not safely support all six taikonauts at once, although the CMSA had previously stated that this was not an issue.

It may also be possible that the stranded crew could return home on the damaged Shenzhou-20 capsule in an emergency scenario. These spacecraft are separated into three detachable sections — a power and propulsion module, crew living quarters, and a parachute-assisted return module, according to Ars Technica. And as long as the cracked windshield is not part of the main return module, it may be able to deliver the stranded crew to Earth if push comes to shove.

Unfortunately, due to the limited information that China reveals about its missions and spacecraft designs, we may never know the full explanation.

The respective predicaments of the Shenzhou-20 and Shenzhou-21 crews are reminiscent of similar "strandings" onboard the ISS. The most notable of these incidents was the recent saga of NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who returned to Earth in March after being stuck in space for around nine months, as well as the record-breaking story of Frank Rubio, who inadvertently stayed in space for over a year.

But in both of these previous situations, the stranded astronauts could have safely returned to Earth at any time on board the remaining return capsules, which were already docked at the ISS.

China is preparing to rescue three astronauts stranded inside the Tiangong space station, officials announced Tuesday (Nov. 11).

The astronauts Wang Jie, Chen Zhongrui and Chen Don, were forced to extend their stay aboard the space station after what's thought to be space junk struck their return capsule last week.

Now, representatives of the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) say the astronauts are well and working normally while engineers perform tests on the backup capsule that will be used to ferry them back to Earth, according to an agency statement.

The agency has not announced a date for the Shenzhou-20 teams' return, but the crew is already carrying out tests and drills, according to the CSMA.

The replacement craft, which was crewed by the Shenzhou-21 team, docked with the Tiangong station on Nov. 1.

The work is progressing steadily and "according to plan," agency officials wrote in a translated statement. "The Shenzhou-20 astronaut crew is working and living normally and is conducting in-orbit scientific experiments together with the Shenzhou-21 astronaut crew."

China's Tiangong, or "heavenly palace" space station is 180 feet (55 meters) long and consists of three modules, making it around half the length and one-fifth the size of the 358-foot-long (109 m) International Space Station and its 16 modules.

The space station usually holds a crew of three astronauts rotated across six-month stays. With the Shenzhou-21 crew also now aboard, the astronauts in the station will be more cramped than usual. But they won't necessarily be uncomfortable — the station is designed to hold two crews.

The unexpected extension of the Shenzou-20 crew's stay does have one upside. Commander Chen Dong, who has 416 nonconsecutive days in space and counting, already holds the record for most cumulative days in space by a Chinese astronaut. The unexpectedly long stay will increase his record.

The astronauts' ordeal is reminiscent of an earlier stranding of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. The duo splashed down into the Gulf of Mexico with 286 space days on the clock after their week-long mission stretched out into nine months after their Boeing Starliner capsule malfunctioned.

The two closely-spaced stranding events were described by one expert as a "wake up call" for space rescue, according to Space.com. That's because, as an ever-increasing number of spacecraft and satellites populate Earth's skies, the space junk orbiting our planet does too — making events like this one ever more likely.

Three Chinese astronauts, or taikonauts, have been temporarily stranded in space after their return capsule was struck by a piece of suspected "space junk" hours before it was due to depart. Officials are investigating exactly what happened, but so far, there is no indication of how much damage the craft sustained or when the crew will return to Earth.

The taikonaut trio — Wang Jie, Chen Zhongrui and Chen Dong, collectively known as the Shenzhou-20 crew — has been living on China's Tiangong space station since April 24. They were due to return to Earth Wednesday (Nov. 5) following a successful handover period with the Shenzhou-21 crew, who arrived on the station on Halloween (Oct. 31). However, earlier on Wednesday, at around 10:30 a.m. local time, representatives from the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced that the astronauts' return had been postponed, via a statement posted on the Chinese social media site Weibo.

The stated reason for the delay was that the crew's return capsule "is suspected of being impacted by small space debris," CMSA representatives wrote in the translated statement. The agency added that an "impact analysis and risk assessment are underway" to ensure the health and safety of all six taikonauts currently on board the space station. However, no other details have yet been released.

The potentially damaged spacecraft is likely still docked to the Tiangong space station, where it has remained since delivering the Shenzhou-20 crew to the station in April. It is made up of three detachable sections — a power and propulsion module, crew living quarters, and a parachute-assisted return module, according to Ars Technica.

If any of these sections are deemed unsafe, the spacecraft will likely be ejected and returned to Earth without the astronauts. In this case, CNSA guidelines suggest that the Shenzhou-20 crew will return to Earth on board the Shenzhou-21 return module, which will, in turn, be replaced by another spacecraft that CMSA keeps on standby, according to Reuters.

During the ongoing mission, Shenzhou-20's commander Chen Dong broke the record for the most cumulative days in space by a Chinese astronaut, having now spent more than 400 days orbiting our planet. This record will now be further extended by this delay. (The current record for most nonconsecutive days spent in space is held by Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, who has accumulated 1,111 days in space.)

Dong's situation is reminiscent of that of NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who inadvertently broke the record for longest spaceflight by an American (371 days) in September 2023, after his return module was irreparably damaged by a meteoroid impact, while docked with the International Space Station (ISS).

In March, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams also made headlines when they returned to Earth nine months after their initial week-long mission began. The pair's extended stay onboard the ISS was the result of multiple technical issues with their Boeing Starliner capsule.

This is not the first time that China's space station has been impacted by space junk: One of the station's solar panels was struck by debris in 2023, which triggered a partial power outage, according to Ars Technica. As a result, additional shielding has been added to parts of the station's exterior during recent spacewalks.

The ISS is also susceptible to space junk and has to be constantly repositioned to dodge large pieces of debris. Parts of the space station, such as the Canadarm2 robotic arm, have sustained damage from smaller debris collisions over the years.

The amount of space junk orbiting Earth is rising fast, in tandem with the increasing number of spacecraft around our planet. Some experts are concerned that, if this continues, we could reach a point of no return where a chain reaction of collisions will render low Earth orbit unuseable. This theoretical scenario is known as the "Kessler Syndrome."

In the meantime, national space agencies and private companies are testing various space debris mitigation strategies.

Scientists in China have developed a new chip, with a twist: it's analog, meaning it performs calculations on its own physical circuits rather than via the binary 1s and 0s of standard digital processors.

What’s more, its creators say the new chip is capable of outperforming top-end graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia and AMD by as much as 1,000 times.

In a new study published Oct. 13 in the journal Nature Electronics, researchers from Peking University said their device tackled two key bottlenecks: the energy and data constraints digital chips face in emerging fields like artificial intelligence (AI) and 6G, and the "century-old problem" of poor precision and impracticality that has limited analog computing.

When put to work on complex communications problems — including matrix inversion problems used in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems (a wireless technological system) — the chip matched the accuracy of standard digital processors while using about 100 times less energy.

By making adjustments, the researchers said the device then trounced the performance of top-end GPUs like the Nvidia H100 and AMD Vega 20 by as much as 1,000 times. Both chips are major players in AI model training; Nvidia's H100, for instance, is the newer version of the A100 graphics cards, which OpenAI used to train ChatGPT.

The new device is built from arrays of resistive random-access memory (RRAM) cells that store and process data by adjusting how easily electricity flows through each cell.

Unlike digital processors that compute in binary 1s and 0s, the analog design processes information as continuous electrical currents across its network of RRAM cells. By processing data directly within its own hardware, the chip avoids the energy-intensive task of shuttling information between itself and an external memory source.

"With the rise of applications using vast amounts of data, this creates a challenge for digital computers, particularly as traditional device scaling becomes increasingly challenging," the researchers said in the study. "Benchmarking shows that our analogue computing approach could offer a 1,000 times higher throughput and 100 times better energy efficiency than state-of-the-art digital processors for the same precision."

Old tech, new tricks

Analog computing isn't new — quite the opposite, in fact. The Antikythera mechanism, discovered off the coast of Greece in 1901, is estimated to have been built more than 2,000 years ago. It used interlocking gears to perform calculations.

For most of modern computing history, however, analog technology has been written off as an impractical alternative to digital processors. This is because analog systems rely on continuous physical signals to process information — for example, a voltage or electric current. These are much more difficult to control precisely than the two stable states (1 and 0) that digital computers have to work with.

Where analog systems excel is in speed and efficiency. Because they don't need to break calculations down into long strings of binary code — instead representing them as physical operations on the chip's circuitry — analog chips can handle large volumes of information simultaneously while using far less energy.

This becomes particularly significant in data- and energy-intensive applications like AI, where digital processors face limitations in how much information they can process sequentially, as well as in future 6G communications — where networks will have to process huge volumes of overlapping wireless signals in real time.

The researchers said that recent advances in memory hardware could make analog computing viable once again. The team configured the chip's RRAM cells into two circuits: one that provided a fast but approximate calculation, and a second that refined and fine-tuned the result over subsequent iterations until it landed on a more precise number.

Configuring the chip in this way meant that the team was able to combine the speed of analog computation with the accuracy normally associated with digital processing. Crucially, the chip was manufactured using a commercial production process, meaning it could potentially be mass-produced.

Future improvements to the chip's circuitry could boost its performance even more, the researchers said. Their next goal is to build larger, fully integrated chips capable of handling more complex problems at faster speeds.

A hefty chunk of blackened material recently found smoldering in the Australian outback is likely part of a secretive Chinese rocket, experts claim. The charred debris likely crash-landed shortly after failing to completely burn up upon reentry to Earth's atmosphere.

Local miners discovered the smoking wreckage, which measures around 5 feet (1.5 meters) across, at around 2 p.m. local time on Saturday (Oct. 18), roughly 18.5 miles (30 kilometers) from the town of Newman in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, ABC News originally reported.

Local police quickly identified the object as potential space debris after ruling out the possibility that it had fallen from an aircraft. The Australian Space Agency was then called to recover the wreckage for further testing, but was unable to identify the debris immediately.

Marco Langbroek, an aerospace engineering analyst at the Delft Technical University in the Netherlands who tracks the trajectories of orbiting spacecraft, was the first to identify the likely origin of the debris as the upper stage of one of China's Jielong 3 rockets, which deorbited shortly before the discovery, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

This theory was later backed up by other experts, including Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking space debris reentries for more than 35 years. It is currently unclear when this rocket was initially launched into space.

Experts are unsure exactly which part of the 102-foot-tall (31 m) rocket was found near Newman, due to its extensive damage and uncertainty around the spacecraft's design, which results from the high secrecy surrounding China's entire space program, including their rocket designs, space plane, moon missions and satellite constellations.

However, it appears to be largely composed of carbon fiber, according to Space.com. The most likely scenarios, therefore, are that it is either a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV), which contains high-pressure gases and liquids inside rockets, or the mangled remains of the entire upper stage.

Based on its size and landing spot, Langbroek also estimates that the surviving chunk of the rocket weighs a hefty 660 pounds (300 kilograms). This could be further proof that the rocket is powered by an experimental solid-fuel source, as solid fuel is heavier than traditional liquid rocket fuel, he added.

But one of the biggest surprises about this incident is that the wreckage was still partially burning when it was found, which is highly unusual. This is likely the sign of a "very recent impact," Langbroek wrote in a blog post.

What goes up must come down

Every object that ends up in low Earth orbit, whether it be a satellite, rocket stage or larger spacecraft like the International Space Station (ISS), is doomed to eventually fall back to Earth once its operational lifespans comes to an end, according to NASA.

Normally, these objects fully burn up upon reentry, such as China's Shenzhou-15 spacecraft, which created a spectacular "fireball" when it burned up over California in April 2024. If spacecraft are too large to disintegrate completely, they are often strategically deorbited so that they end up landing in a remote part of the ocean.

But sometimes, an object that is expected to burn up doesn't end up fully disintegrating, or a hefty spacecraft makes an uncontrolled reentry — such as the dead Soviet spacecraft Kosmos 482, which made headlines as it fell to Earth in May. When this happens, large chunks of debris can rain down on Earth's surface, with potentially devastating consequences.

China has previously been criticized for the high number of its rocket boosters that have fallen to Earth over the last several years. This happens because they are much larger than most other boosters and because they are left to reenter on their own, without any guidance from operators on the ground.

While nobody has been injured or killed by falling space debris so far, there have been some near-misses. For example, in January, an 8-foot-wide (2.5 m) metal ring landed in the middle of a village in Kenya, and in April 2024, the remains of a battery pallet dumped by the ISS crashed into a house in Florida.

A 2022 study predicted that there was a 10% chance of a space junk-related casualty within the coming decade, with a higher chance of mortality for people living in the Southern Hemisphere.

Many space agencies and private companies are investigating new space junk removal methods, but the rate at which new objects are being deployed in orbit far outpaces any progress being made in removal technologies.

Skull cups and skeleton masks have been discovered among a pile of 5,000-year-old discarded human bones in China, according to a new study.

The sculpted skulls were found jumbled up with pottery and animal remains, but the purpose of the macabre items has so far eluded experts.

These bones come from the Liangzhu culture, which included the earliest city in East Asia, according to the study, which was published Aug. 26 in the journal Scientific Reports. The collection of bones was carbon-dated to between 3000 and 2500 B.C., during China's Neolithic period.

Several Liangzhu cemeteries have been discovered in the past, but none of them had sculpted bones. Archaeologists recovered more than 50 individual human bones from canals and moats at five sites that show signs of being "worked" — split, perforated, polished or ground down with tools.

"The fact that many of the worked human bones were unfinished and discarded in canals suggests a lack of reverence toward the dead," study lead author Junmei Sawada, a biological anthropologist at Niigata University of Health and Welfare in Japan, told Live Science in an email.

There were no traces of the bones coming from people who died violent deaths, or signs that the skeletons had been pulled apart. That means the bones were likely processed after corpses decomposed, Sawada said.

The researchers discovered that the most common worked bone was the human skull. They found four adult skulls that had been cut or split horizontally to create "skull cups," and another four skulls that were split top-to-bottom to create a skeleton mask-like object.

Human skull cups have been previously recovered from high-status Liangzhu culture burials, the researchers wrote in the study, which suggests that they may have been made for religious or ritualistic purposes.

The mask-like facial skulls, however, have no parallel. And other types of discarded worked bone, including a skull with perforations on the back and a lower jaw that had been purposefully flattened, are also unique.

"We suspect that the emergence of urban society — and the resulting encounters with social 'others' beyond traditional communities — may hold the key to understanding this phenomenon," Sawada said.

Because many of the worked bones are unfinished, this suggests that human bones were not particularly rare or significantly valued, according to the study, which highlights a transformation in the perception of the dead during the swiftly urbanizing Liangzhu culture. When people no longer know all their neighbors or count them as kin, it may be easier to separate bones from the people they belonged to, the study authors suggested.

"The most interesting and unique thing about the findings is the fact that these worked human bones were essentially trash," Elizabeth Berger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science. Berger agreed with the researchers that the atypical treatment of the bones might be related to the increasing anonymity of an urban society.

The Liangzhu culture's practice of working human bones appeared suddenly, lasted for at least 200 years based on radiocarbon dates, and then disappeared, the researchers wrote.

"The people of Liangzhu came to see some human bodies as inert raw material," Berger said, "but what caused that to happen and why did it only last for a few centuries?"

Sawada said that future studies may help address these questions, particularly by helping reveal when and how people sourced the bones. These additional analyses could help the researchers tease out the meanings behind the practice and its relationship to changing social ties and kinship in Neolithic China.

Stone Age quiz: What do you know about the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic?

This striking satellite photo shows a particularly convoluted section of a record-breaking "braided river" in China, which drastically changes shape every year and could become more unstable over the coming decades due to climate change.

The Yarlung Zangbo River is a roughly 1,250-mile-long (2,000 kilometers) waterway that stretches from its origin at a glacier in the eastern Tibetan Plateau all the way into India. It is the longest river in Tibet, as well as the fifth longest in China, and holds the record for being the highest major river on Earth, flowing at an average elevation of 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) above sea level, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The photographed section of the river is located in Zhanang County, just before it passes through the world's deepest land-based canyon and its namesake, the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, which is more than 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) deep — or three times deeper than Arizona's Grand Canyon.

Yarlung Zangbo is a classic example of a braided river — a waterway with "multi-threaded channels that branch and merge to create the characteristic braided pattern," with mid-channel sandbars that are "formed, consumed, and re-formed continuously," according to the National Park Service.

This section is where the most braiding occurs anywhere along the river, with up to 20 channels across at certain points in the image.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

Yarlang Zangbo's extreme braiding is caused by heavy sediment deposits from the steep slopes of the adjacent Himalayas, which are washed into the river and help carve new channels into the ground, Zoltán Sylvester, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Earth Observatory. The river changes shape so often that no vegetation can fully grow on the sandbars that sporadically appear between the river's braids, he added.

You can see how quickly the river changes shape for yourself in a 37-year timelapse animation, which shows annual satellite images of this spot taken between 1988 to 2025 by Landsat 5, Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 (see below).

Eagle-eyed viewers may also be able to spot a narrow bridge, which was constructed over the shapeshifting waterway in 2014. (It's visible as a thin line near the far right-hand side of the animation).

The river starts at the Angsi Glacier, emerging from a stream of meltwater that flows from the ice mass. However, this was only officially confirmed in 2011, according to Chinese state media. Before this, there was confusion among scientists about whether the river actually originated from a meltwater stream coming from the nearby Chemayungdung Glacier.

Like many other Himalayan ice masses, the Angsi Glacier has lost a significant amount of water in recent decades due to human-caused climate change. The resulting meltwater has caused more sediment to be deposited into the river, which can increase erosion and make it more likely for its banks to collapse. According to a 2024 study that analyzed satellite photos of the 13 major rivers in the Tibetan Plateau, this poses a risk to local ecosystems, infrastructure and landscape stability.

When the river eventually reaches India, it becomes part of the Brahmaputra River and continues for another 1,800 miles (2,900 km) until it reaches the Ganges River Delta, where it drains into the Indian Ocean, according to the Earth Observatory.

In a video statement to the United Nations (UN) in September, China's President Xi Jinping announced the country's first-ever plan defining set targets to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

The country aims to reduce its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035, per the new plan. As the world's largest emitter, China has the potential to shape the global fight against climate change.

The pledge is remarkable as it is the first time China has set out specific emission-reduction targets. Research indicates that the goals set out are achievable. Proponents argue that China will not fall short — and may even overdeliver — on its commitments.

Some have expressed concerns, however, labeling China's nationally determined contribution (NDC) — a country's climate action plan — as insufficient to meet the target of limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels under the Paris Agreement. Still, many see it as a significant moment in global climate policy.

"China's new climate target is both underwhelming and transformative," Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns at 350.org, an international environmental NGO, said in a statement. "Reducing emissions by 7-10% by 2035 from peak levels falls short of what the world needs, yet it anchors the world's largest emitter on a path where clean-tech defines economic leadership."

China, the United States and India were the top emitters in 2024, according to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. In 2024, China was responsible for about 29% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, the U.S. contributed 11.1%, while India contributed 8.2%.

At the same time, China is surging ahead in renewable energy, having installed a record of 1,200 GW of wind and solar capacity by the end of 2024 — surpassing the 2030 target set by its National Energy Administration six years early. While coal still dominates China's power generation, these developments suggest the country may be poised to fulfil its new climate goals.

So what do you think? Has China's new target positioned it as a true global leader in climate action — or is this promise too little, too late? Answer our poll and let us know what you think in the comments below.

A few years ago, one of us (Myles Allen) asked a Chinese delegate at a climate conference why Beijing had gone for "carbon neutrality" for its 2060 target rather than "climate neutrality" or "net zero", both of which were more fashionable terms at the time.

Her response: "Because we know what it means."

It was a revealing answer: China, unlike many other countries, tends not to make climate commitments that it doesn't understand or intend to keep. And that's why its latest pledge — cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035, as part of its commitments under the Paris agreement — matters more than the underwhelmed response might suggest.

To be fair on those other countries, lofty goals have played a role in driving the climate conversation about what is possible: there is always the argument that it is better to aim for the moon and miss than aim for the gutter and hit it.

But the climate crisis needs more than aspirations. It needs concrete, plausible plans.

That's what makes China's pledge so significant: Beijing has form in only promising what it plans to deliver. Having promised to peak emissions this decade, barely 50 years after it began to industrialize in earnest, it looks set to achieve that. And in the process, become a world leader in wind power, solar energy and electric vehicles.

Meanwhile, in the scientific literature…

A paper appeared in the journal Nature Communications at the end of August that provides some context for China's announcement and ought to have received much more attention.

In it, climate scientists Junting Zhong and co-authors describe what they call a "reality-aligned scenario". This means a pathway for emissions over the coming century that is consistent with emissions to date and countries' near-term commitments.

The paper is provocatively titled "Plausible global emissions scenario for 2°C aligned with China's net-zero pathway" (provocative because of the implication that some other scenarios out there are, well, less plausible).

In their scenario, global carbon dioxide emissions peak this decade and reach net zero around 2070, accompanied by immediate, sustained but not particularly dramatic reductions in emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases. In response, global warming is expected to peak at just over 2°C towards the end of this century before declining below 2°C early in the next.

Crucially, Zhong and his colleagues break out China's contribution. In their scenario, the country's carbon dioxide emissions would peak in the next few years before a steady decline brings them close to zero by 2060. Methane emissions would begin to decline immediately.

There is much to discuss in the relationship between this scenario and China's latest emission pledge. How much of that 7% to 10% reduction in all greenhouse gases by 2035 will be delivered by (very welcome) cuts in methane emissions? Breaking out separate contributions of long-lived (CO₂) and short-lived (like methane) greenhouse gases would be helpful to understand the implications of China's pledges for global temperature.

Zhong and colleagues see land use changes (such as reforestation) playing only a minimal role in China's long-term climate plan. So why does Beijing's new pledge put so much emphasis on planting trees? Is this just a stopgap, or the start of a bigger reliance on land-based carbon dioxide removal?

And while renewables are central to China's strategy, the country will also need to store captured carbon (from power plants or factories) on a massive scale. The real question may be around how China is going to deliver all this.

That's why the phrase "while striving to do better" in President Xi's announcement is so important. The world has a keen interest in China over-delivering.

Why the silence?

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of all this is how little discussion there has been of the work by Zhong and his colleagues. It was clearly relevant: it came out just as China was preparing its pledge, it was published in one of the world's top scientific journals, and one co-author has a prominent role in the IPCC. Yet despite all that, it received almost no online attention.

Perhaps most climate commentators were too preoccupied with responding to a very different document: a "critical review" commissioned by the US Department of Energy of greenhouse gas impacts on the U.S. climate.

Whether or not you agreed with their conclusions, Zhong and his team's paper was rigorous, transparent and peer-reviewed. The U.S. review was none of those things, and already widely criticized as flawed. Yet it dominated headlines and commentary for weeks.

While the world's second-largest emitter was debating a dodgy dossier, a carefully presented and comprehensive scenario, directly relevant to the climate policies of the world's largest emitter, passed largely unnoticed.

That's a missed opportunity. China's targets aren't just slogans or aspirations — they are statements of intent, grounded in what the country believes it can deliver. And where China goes, others will follow. Paying attention to analyses like the one from Zhong and his colleagues help us understand both China's role and the world's chances of keeping warming below 2°C.

That's why President Xi's call to "do better" applies not just to countries, but to scientists, commentators and climate policy-watchers too. Don't be distracted by the usual suspects flooding the zone.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What if the first Martian rock samples ever deliberately hauled back to Earth landed not in Houston, but in Beijing?

That scenario, once far-fetched, is edging closer to reality. The U.S.-led Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission — long flagged as a top priority in planetary science and designed as the capstone to the Perseverance rover's carefully-curated cache of geological samples scooped from Mars' Jezero Crater — has stalled.

Initially targeted for the early 2030s, the program has become over-complicated, over-budget and increasingly vulnerable to political headwinds. Meanwhile, at least 30 sealed sample tubes, which may contain the first hard evidence of extraterrestrial life, lie stranded in the Martian dust.

At the same time, China's Tianwen-3 mission, designed as a leaner effort aiming to collect fewer, less carefully chosen samples, is on track for launch in 2028 with a planned return to Earth in 2031. If successful, Beijing would secure one of the most coveted prizes in planetary science years, if not decades, ahead of NASA. With China's launch window fast approaching, experts say NASA may have already lost its chance to pull ahead.

"I don't think it's a competition anyway, because we already know enough about MSR's problems and their budget issues," Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona who is not directly involved with either country's sample return program, told Live Science. NASA's mission is already far enough along, with samples cached on Mars and major hardware designed or built, that a pivot now to a nimbler, cheaper alternative that still meets the original mission timeframe is "simply not possible," he said. "They're stuck with the plan they have."

The scientific payoff is immense. Returning Martian samples would allow laboratories on Earth to conduct analyses that are impossible with rover-based instruments, such as probing rocks at atomic and molecular scales, searching for organic compounds, and even scanning for fossilized microbes.

Such work could finally prove whether Mars once hosted life — or confirm that it has always been barren. Either result would revolutionize planetary science. But as with so many firsts in space, science is only part of the story.

"There is undoubtedly a certain degree of geopolitical value in being first, and the value in that regard comes from the public perception of being first or not," Gerard van Belle, the director of science at Lowell Observatory in Arizona who is not directly involved in either country’s sample return mission, told Live Science. "The idea that maybe one mission will be better in terms of its results will probably get lost in the mix — and that's a pity."

Can NASA catch up?

Since 2020, NASA's Perseverance rover has been drilling and caching dozens of samples in Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed where it recently uncovered what the agency has called the "clearest sign of life we've ever found on Mars." Such carefully curated rocks, scientists argue, represent humanity's best chance yet to determine whether the Red Planet was ever home to life.

But getting them home is proving elusive. The U.S.-led MSR, a joint project with the European Space Agency, was conceived as a high-stakes chain of complex handoffs: Perseverance's cache would be fetched by a lander, transferred by robotic arm into a Mars Ascent Vehicle, and then launched into orbit for capture by a return spacecraft.

Even after plans for a "fetch rover" were later dropped in favor of a pair of miniature helicopters, the choreography remained astronomically expensive. With costs swelling past $11 billion and timelines sliding toward 2040, NASA declared the plan untenable in 2024.

"Maybe if the U.S. had to rethink it, they might have cast a slightly different path, where they might have gone with a simpler mission first — maybe," said van Belle.

Earlier this year, NASA outlined two scaled-back alternatives. Either would require an immediate $300 million commitment from Congress to stay on track, with a launch around 2030 and the return of about 30 Martian samples between 2035 and 2039.

Even so, Impey doubts NASA can regain lost ground. "I don't think they can accelerate the timeline, even if they got the money they are asking for currently," he said.

China's Tianwen-3, by contrast, is betting on a self-contained mission whose playbook was proven effective by its recent moon missions, which returned lunar samples with Chang'e-5 in 2020 and Chang'e-6 in 2024 — the latter gathering the first samples ever scooped from the moon's unexplored far side.

Tianwen-3 calls for two launches: one carrying a lander equipped with a drill, robotic arm and helicopter scout, and the other carrying an orbiter-returner spacecraft. Using a "grab-and-go" approach, the lander would collect samples and load them directly into its ascent vehicle. After about two months on the surface, that rocket-powered stage would launch to meet the orbiter-returner in Mars orbit, which would then ferry about 1 pound (500 grams) of material back to Earth.

The Chinese mission plans to target a flatter, less geologically diverse landing site than Jezero, chosen for safety rather than scientific promise. That means the samples may be less revealing than Perseverance's cache. Still, Tianwen-3 is more likely to stay on schedule, as it is embedded in China's long-term space strategy — one that is healthily funded and has already returned lunar samples, built a space station, and set goals for a permanent moon base by 2035 and crewed missions to Mars by 2050.

"[China's] timelines are a few decades, but the timelines for NASA are almost dissolving as we watch," Impey said. "So, if there is a space race, China's already winning it, and could win it dramatically in the next few decades."

A new Sputnik moment?

NASA's obstacles are not purely technical. The White House has proposed steep cuts — nearly halving NASA's science budget and slashing its overall funding by 24%, from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. If enacted, it would mark the steepest single-year cut in NASA’s history, even deeper than the reductions after the Apollo program wound down in the 1970s.

The coming fiscal year will be decisive, Impey said. If the cuts are enacted, they will not only jeopardize MSR but also trigger broader reductions across active observatories and planetary probes.

"That would be devastating," said Impey. "That's a cliff that they could fall off — and if they fall off that cliff, then the U.S.-led MSR effort is certainly not going to happen for decades."

If China returns Mars samples first, the symbolism would potentially echo a new Sputnik moment. In 1957, the Soviet Union’s launch of the first artificial satellite stunned the U.S., spurred the creation of NASA, drove massive investment in science and engineering education, and ultimately accelerated the space race that culminated in the Apollo moon landings a decade later.

Planetary scientists eager to know about Mars' past habitability emphasize that they want to see the U.S.-led Mars Sample Return mission succeed, even if it has to be delayed, rather than see the plug pulled entirely.

"What's important is, can you answer the question of whether there was or is life on Mars?" said Impey.

But no single mission is guaranteed to settle that question, he cautioned. Each will return only a small cache of rocks from a single region of a vast, complex planet. That makes it all the more critical that both NASA and China succeed in their sample return plans, since together their efforts could offer complementary pieces of the puzzle.

"If you brought back the perfect rock, yes, you could get lucky," Impey added. "There is still a chance that a single shot sample return from one location just won't answer the question."

Researchers have virtually reconstructed a crushed and distorted 1 million-year-old human skull discovered in China. The newly restored cranium may have belonged to a relative of the mysterious Denisovans and provides clues to the rapid evolution of Homo sapiens in Asia.

In a study published Thursday (Sept. 25) in the journal Science, researchers presented their reconstruction of the Yunxian 2 skull, which was excavated in 1990 from an archaeological site in Hubei province in central China.

Although experts thought for decades that the Yunxian skull was from the human ancestor Homo erectus, the new analysis revealed the skull is more closely related to "Dragon Man," an extinct species first described after the discovery of a different skull in northeastern China in 2021, and to Denisovans, a mysterious group of humans that went extinct around 30,000 years ago.

After digitally reconstructing the Yunxian 2 skull using computed tomography (CT) scans, researchers noticed that it showed a distinctive combination of traits, including a large cranial capacity, a long and low frontal skull bone, and a narrow space between the eye sockets. This set of characteristics is found in what the researchers call the Homo longi clade, a lineage or group of individuals and their descendants that have the same ancestor.

"The Homo longi clade, containing the Denisovans, lasted for over a million years," study co-author Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, told Live Science in an email. "But so did the Neanderthal and sapiens lineages."

Based on statistical data from 57 fossil skulls, the researchers estimated that the Neanderthal clade diverged from a common human ancestor first, around 1.38 million years ago. Then, the H. longi clade diverged around 1.2 million years ago, followed by H. sapiens around 1.02 million years ago. (The earliest clear fossil evidence of H. sapiens, however, comes from 300,000-year-old bones from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.) This short timeframe suggests that rapid diversification took place in all three human groups.

But the researchers are unsure what may have caused these ancient human groups to develop such diverse appearances so quickly. "They lived in small, relatively isolated populations and adapted to diverse paleoenvironments," study co-author Xijun Ni, a paleoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email.

Pushing back the origin of these ancient human groups, however, means experts can look even earlier in time for factors that may have triggered human evolution.

"For example, there were two severe cold events at about 1.1 million and 900,000 years ago," Stringer said, "and that may have catalysed evolutionary and behavioural changes," including extinctions.

Given the 1 million-year-old date of the Yunxian 2 skull and its blend of ancient and modern physical traits, the researchers concluded in their study that it likely represents an early form of the group that includes the Denisovans.

Human evolution quiz: What do you know about Homo sapiens?

A new report warns that China's rapid and unrelenting growth within the space sector will see the country overtake the U.S. in the "new space race" to become the world's leading space-faring nation in as little as "five or 10 years," experts say.

The stark warning comes less than two weeks after a Senate Commerce Committee hearing discussed the increasing likelihood of China beating the U.S. in a race to return humans to the moon. During these talks, former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told senators that "it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China's projected timeline," unless the recent record-breaking cuts to NASA's budget are reversed.

The new report, titled "Redshift," was published on Tuesday (Sept. 16) by the Commercial Space Federation — an advocacy group that supports investment in the U.S. commercial space industry. It details how China's space infrastructure and capability of exploring the solar system has rapidly grown over the last decade, and its improvements show no signs of slowing down.

The 112-page document contains the most up-to-date information on China's various space assets and missions, including the country's new space station, its growing satellite megaconstellations and its plans to visit and colonize the moon.

"China is not only racing to catch up — it is setting pace, deregulating, and, at times, redefining what leadership looks like on and above Earth," researchers wrote in the report. "China's space ascendancy — propelled by disciplined policy, strategic investment, and sweeping technological gains — has fundamentally redrawn the domain in which global power is contested."

Related: China is building a constellation of AI supercomputers in space — and just launched the first pieces

One of the most worrying issues raised by the new report for the U.S. is the possibility that China will be the first nation to return humans to the moon, for the first time since 1972. While NASA's Artemis missions have been repeatedly delayed, partly due to recent issues with SpaceX's temperamental Starship rocket, China has continued to hit "major milestones" on its plan to land astronauts by 2030. These include mapping the lunar surface in record detail, returning historic lunar samples to Earth and building their own supersized rockets. (NASA is currently aiming to land astronauts on the moon by 2027.)

China is also planning to build a fully operational moon base, equipped with an autonomous nuclear reactor, by as early as 2035. This could help the nation stake its claim on valuable lunar mining materials and give them the edge in the race to eventually send humans to Mars, Live Science's sister site Space.com recently reported.

Another area where China is likely to dominate is in low-Earth orbit, thanks to its recently completed Tiangong space station, which will become the only major state-run space station in operation once the International Space Station (ISS) is decommissioned at the end of this decade. (NASA has no plans to replace the ISS directly, although a number of commercial ventures are pursuing plans for their own stations.)

China is also starting to build out its own satellite megaconstellations to rival SpaceX's rapidly expanding "Starlink" network. It's also planning to build an orbital solar power array and its own version of the James Webb Space Telescope in the near future.

On the ground, China now has six different operational spaceports, which will allow the country to rapidly increase the number of rockets it can launch in the coming years.

But perhaps the most alarming point for the U.S. is that the country is completing all these impressive tasks simultaneously. In other words, "China is living its Apollo, ISS, and commercial space eras all at once," the report authors wrote.

Related: Chinese astronauts make rocket fuel and oxygen in space using 1st-of-its-kind 'artificial photosynthesis'

The secret to China's recent success is (unsurprisingly) increased funding, especially for commercial companies, which have been given special support from the government to aid the China National Space Administration (CNSA). For example, the country invested $2.86 billion in its commercial space ventures last year — more than 17 times the $164 million it spent in 2016, according to the report.

Another important factor has been China's willingness to work with other nations to achieve its goals, including Russia, India and Japan. This approach, dubbed the "Space Silk Road" initiative, has seen China set up over 80 projects with international partners so far, "eroding U.S. influence," the researchers wrote.

The report's co-author Jonathan Roll, a space policy analyst at Arizona State University, was particularly surprised by how quickly China's space capabilities have progressed since he first properly studied the topic in the early 2020s: "I thought I had a pretty good read on this when I was finishing grad school," Roll told Ars Technica. "[But the fact] that almost everything needed to be updated, or had changed three years later, was pretty scary."

Meanwhile, America's space ambitions have been hamstrung by the Trump administration, which has proposed cutting NASA's budget almost in half, putting multiple long-term missions in jeopardy and creating knock-on impacts in the commercial space industry.

"The United States is still ahead today in a lot of areas in space," Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, told Ars Technica. "But the Chinese are advancing very quickly and poised to overtake us in the next five to 10 years if we don't do something."