Swarms of artificial intelligence (AI) agents could soon invade social media platforms en masse to spread false narratives, harass users and undermine democracy, researchers warn.

These "AI swarms" will form part of a new frontier in information warfare, capable of mimicking human behavior to avoid detection while creating the illusion of an authentic online movement, based on a commentary published Jan. 22 in the journal Science.

Imagine finding that the views of your favourite online community are hardening around a position that was previously up for debate. Human instinct is often to follow the "wisdom" of the herd. But in this case, the herd could be secretly shepherded by an AI swarm operating on behalf of an unknown individual, group, political party, company or state actor.

"Humans, generally speaking, are conformist," commentary co-author Jonas Kunst, a professor of communication at the BI Norwegian Business School in Norway, told Live Science. "We often don't want to agree with that, and people vary to a certain extent, but all things being equal, we do have a tendency to believe what most people do has certain value. That's something that can relatively easily be hijacked by these swarms."

And if you don't get swept up with the herd, the swarm could also be a harassment tool to discourage arguments that undermine the AI's narrative, the researchers argued. For example, the swarm could emulate an angry mob to target an individual with dissenting views and drive them off the platform.

The researchers don't give a timeline for the invasion of AI swarms, so it's unclear when the first agents will arrive on our feeds. However, they noted that swarms would be difficult to detect, and thus the extent to which they might have already been deployed is unknown. For many, signs of the growing influence of bots on social media are already evident, while the dead internet conspiracy theory — that bots are responsible for the majority of online activity and content creation — has been gaining traction over the last few years.

Shepherding the flock

The researchers warn that the emerging AI swarm risk is compounded by long-standing vulnerabilities in our digital ecosystems, already weakened by what they described as the "erosion of rational-critical discourse and a lack of shared reality among citizens."

Anyone who uses social media will know that it's become a very divisive place. The online ecosystem is also already littered with automated bots — non-human accounts following the commands of computer software that comprise more than half of all web traffic. Conventional bots are typically only capable of performing simple tasks over and over again, like posting the same incendiary message. They can still cause harm, spreading false information and inflating false narratives, but they're usually pretty easy to detect and rely on humans to be coordinated at scale.

The next-generation AI swarms, on the other hand, are coordinated by large language models (LLMs) — the AI systems behind popular chatbots. With an LLM at the helm, a swarm will be sophisticated enough to adapt to the online communities it infiltrates, installing collections of different personas that retain memory and identity, according to the commentary.

"We talk about it as a kind of organism that is self-sufficient, that can coordinate itself, can learn, can adapt over time and, by that, specialize in exploiting human vulnerabilities," Kunst said.

This mass manipulation is far from hypothetical. Last year, Reddit threatened legal action against researchers who used AI chatbots in an experiment to manipulate the opinions of four million users in its popular forum r/changemyview. According to the researchers' preliminary findings, their chatbots' responses were between three to six times more persuasive than those made by human users.

A swarm could contain hundreds, thousands — or even a million — AI agents. Kunst noted that the number scales with computing power and would also be limited by restrictions that social media companies may introduce to combat the swarms.

But it's not all about the number of agents. Swarms could target local community groups that would be suspicious of a sudden influx of new users. In this scenario, only a few agents would be deployed. The researchers also noted that because the swarms are more sophisticated than traditional bots, they can have more influence with fewer numbers.

"I think the more sophisticated these bots are, the less you actually need," commentary lead author Daniel Schroeder, a researcher at the technology research organization SINTEF in Norway, told Live Science.

Guarding against next-gen bots

Agents boast an edge in debates with real users because they can post 24 hours a day, every day, for however long it takes for their narrative to take hold. The researchers added that in "cognitive warfare," AI's relentlessness and persistence can be weaponized against limited human efforts.

Social media companies want real users on their platforms, not AI agents, so the researchers envisage that companies will respond to AI swarms with improved account authentication — forcing users to prove they are real people. But the researchers also flagged some issues with this approach, arguing that it could discourage political dissent in countries where people rely on anonymity to speak out against governments. Authentic accounts can also be hijacked or acquired, which complicates things further. Still, the researchers noted that strengthening authentication would make it more difficult and costly for those wishing to deploy AI swarms.

The researchers also proposed other swarm defenses, like scanning live traffic for statistically anomalous patterns that could represent AI swarms and the establishment of an "AI Influence Observatory" ecosystem, in which academic groups, NGOs and other institutions can study, raise awareness and respond to the AI swarm threat. In essence, the researchers want to get ahead of the issue before it can disrupt elections and other large events.

"We are with a reasonable certainty warning about a future development that really might have disproportionate consequences for democracy, and we need to start preparing for that," Kunst said. "We need to be proactive instead of waiting for the first type of larger events being negatively influenced by AI swarms."

China is set to deploy the largest drone carrier in the world by the end of June. Nicknamed the "drone mothership," the aircraft promises to provide China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with more capability to deploy swarms of drones for combat, surveillance, emergency rescue missions, and other purposes.

The Jiu Tian drone carrier, an 11-ton (10 tonnes) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), can carry up to 100 smaller UAVs weighing an additional 6.6 tons (6 tonnes) up to 4,350 miles (7,000 km), according to a report published in the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

The aircraft was introduced in November at the international Zhuhai Air Show, China’s biggest aerospace trade show, and has the potential to launch kamikaze drones (also called loitering munitions) — UAVs that are designed to wait until their target is found, then intercept and crash into them, often while armed with explosives.

Kamikaze drones are becoming more common in warfare — Russia has used them extensively in its invasion of Ukraine to target power stations, population centers, and military equipment. Ukraine has combated their use by shooting down the drones before they can strike, setting up advanced air defense systems from allies, and building makeshift cages from chain link fencing and tree branches around likely targets.

Unlike kamikaze drones already in use, China’s drone "mothership" is designed to launch entire swarms of coordinating drones that might be able to overwhelm some existing air defense systems, according to the South China Morning Post.

"The big thing that really keeps me up at night is swarms," Col. Andrew Konicki, the head of the US Marine Corps Systems Command’s ground-based air defense said at a military exposition for US Marines on April 30.

Individual drones are often viewed as expendable, but when working together, they can accomplish a lot — especially when coordinated using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to navigate obstacles and respond to some attempts to interfere with their operations. Also, drone swarms are often cheaper to build and maintain than the defence systems used to shoot them down, depending on the level of technology and size of the swarm.

However, questions remain over how practical the Jiu Tian would be in some scenarios, and there isn’t a lot of information about the carrier’s technical specifications.

"China's display of advanced weapons systems can generate hype in ways that can align with deterrent and propaganda objectives, even when the actual capabilities remain unconfirmed," Elsa Kania, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Live Science in an email. Her research centers on China’s military strategy, defense innovation, and emerging technologies.

"For instance, given its size, there are reasons to question the survivability of the Jiutian in highly contested environments, even equipped with electronic warfare capabilities.The Chinese defense industry is also a leading exporter of unmanned systems, which has accelerated the global diffusion of these capabilities. The displaying of and deliberate disclosures about advanced unmanned systems can also serve advertising purposes sometimes in that regard."

Jiu Tian's drone swarms also have many applications beyond combat, including resource monitoring, disaster relief, and emergency response operations thanks to its modular payload design. Swarms could make it a lot easier to assess damage from natural disasters, look for survivors, and help rescuers navigate dangerous terrain.

The aircraft's first mission is expected to begin before the end of June and will consist of operational tests before it joins the rest of the PLA's UAV fleet.

Dozens of skeletons buried in a 3,700-year-old cemetery in China show evidence of extreme trauma, suggesting that assailants felt a need to "overkill" their victims in bloodthirsty raids during the Bronze Age.

"One individual had 18 separate stab wounds to the cranial vault, which is obviously more than is needed to incapacitate or kill a person," Elizabeth Berger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California, Riverside, said in a presentation April 24 at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Berger and colleagues presented new results — which are not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal — from their analysis of a cemetery called Mogou in Gansu Province, China. Part of the Bronze Age Qijia culture, Mogou was used for burials between 1750 and 1100 B.C. The large cemetery contains more than 1,600 graves with more than 5,000 people buried in them. These people lived a mostly agricultural lifestyle and exchanged metal and ceramic goods with other groups in the region.

In 2019, the researchers published a preliminary study of some of the Mogou skeletons, discovering a shockingly high frequency of trauma on adult skulls. Their new work, which focused on 348 skulls from adults and adolescents, also revealed a lot of trauma: 11.1% of the heads had evidence of unhealed injuries, such as stab wounds, blunt trauma and projectile damage.

What surprised the researchers, though, was their discovery that the majority of the adults with trauma had suffered multiple injuries rather than just one fatal blow; 55% of the adults had three or more cranial wounds.

"None of the other sites in the region has violence like this — it is unique," Berger told Live Science.

Related: 2,200-year-old grave in China contains 'Red Princess of the Silk Road' whose teeth were painted with a toxic substance

Males were more likely than females to have multiple-injuries on their crania, Berger said in the presentation, and several males had defensive injuries such as violent fractures of their hand bones. The researchers also found injuries to different parts of the skulls — such as the front and rear — that suggest the possibility of multiple attackers.

The results of intense violent interactions can be seen on numerous male skulls, including one with a large slash through his face showing sharp trauma, and one who had chop marks on his lower leg in addition to 18 separate stab wounds on his skull.

Why "overkill"?

The extreme nature of the violence inflicted on the skeletons, Berger said in the talk, suggests the idea of "overkill," a term used by forensic specialists to describe homicides in which a murderer does significantly more damage than necessary to kill their victim.

"I think it is a useful term," Berger said in the talk, "because there seemed to have been an emotional or psychological or performative aspect to the violence."

The researchers are still unsure of the reason for the Bronze Age violence. Warfare and raiding are two potential interpretations, particularly because the Qijia culture was situated at a kind of ancient crossroads between different groups of people.

But Berger believes the explanation might lie in an ancient blood feud, in which there was both a lethal intent but also a need "to destroy the social identity of the people who were being killed and cause psychological damage to the people who were not killed," she said in the talk.

"Violence is a cultural component of society," co-author Jenna Dittmar, a biological anthropologist at Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine in Louisiana, told Live Science. "It's important that we go back and revisit previously published collections of skeletons," particularly to look for evidence of trauma, she said.

Additional research is ongoing at Mogou, the researchers said, including the study of animal bones, parasites and ancient DNA, with a goal of understanding what life was like during a key transition to a drier and cooler climate.

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

Around 2,500 years ago, an elite Celtic warrior was gravely injured by an arrowhead, but his wound partly healed thanks to meticulous medical treatment, a new study reports.

"Healing took at least several weeks," study first author Michael Francken, an osteologist at the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in the Stuttgart Regional Council, told Live Science in an email. "Most men of this period were familiar with combat, but the elites were probably more focused on it."

In the new study, published online Feb. 23 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, researchers analyzed a skeleton found in an Iron Age burial mound after noticing severe trauma to the pelvis. The man, who lived until he was between 30 and 50 years old, appeared to have been shot with a projectile.

The skeleton was discovered decades ago as the central burial beneath a large mound at the prehistoric hillfort site of Heuneburg in southern Germany. The mound was about 140 feet (43 meters) in diameter and nearly 10 feet (3 m) high. A limited number of artifacts were found in the burial due to grave robbers raiding the site in antiquity, but archaeologists identified fragments of a chariot, metal belt and jewelry that helped them date the burial to 530 to 520 B.C.

The researchers determined that the wound was located on the man's left ischial bone — part of the pelvis sometimes referred to as the "sitz" bone — close to his hip socket. Based on the wound track's direction through the bone, the researchers concluded that the man was struck in the pelvis from his front left, likely when he was running, sitting or riding.

Related: Were the Celts matriarchal? Ancient DNA reveals men married into local, powerful female lineages

Although no weapon was found embedded in the bone or in the grave, the researchers figured out what it was based on 3D CT scanning, which let them make a negative imprint of the wound.

The overall shape and size of the imprint suggested a small arrowhead caused the trauma to the man's pelvis. Based on archaeologically known weapons of the time, it was most likely a long arrowhead with a diamond-shaped tip used in combat.

Because the ischial bone was not fully perforated, the arrow must have been pulled out, the researchers wrote. "The healing of the injury implies that the arrowhead was expertly removed and the wound received proper medical treatment," they said.

No written records of medical treatment in the early Iron Age survive. However, based on evidence that the wound channel in the man's pelvis had to be enlarged to remove the arrow, the researchers suspect that medical practitioners of the time had specialized implements to help treat injuries.

After the arrow was removed, the man likely needed several weeks to convalesce, the researchers said. "This suggests the injured person probably belonged to a social class exempt from daily physical labor for sustenance," they wrote.

The smooth edges of the wound indicate that the injury occurred at least several months prior to the man's death, Francken said, but "unfortunately, I can't say whether there is a connection between the individual's death and the injury."

The exact nature of the battle this man was injured in is also unknown, as these Iron Age people did not keep written records of combat. But given this man's access to medical care, the researchers think he was part of the elite social class, honored at death with a "princely burial" in a massive mound.

Declassified spy images of Iraq have helped archaeologists find a historic Islamic battlefield.

Upon analyzing the images, which were taken in 1973 by a U.S. satellite system named KH-9 (Hexagon), the team found remnants of a 1,400-year-old settlement. This helped them match the site to the lost location of the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, the researchers reported in a study published Nov. 12 in the journal Antiquity.

The Battle of al-Qadisiyyah took place in A.D. 636 or 637 between the Arab Muslim army and the Sasanian Empire, which ruled the area that is now Iran between A.D. 224 and 651. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the battle was a consequential victory for the Muslim army and the beginning of the eventual Muslim conquest of Persia.

But William Deadman, an archaeologist at Durham University in the U.K. and the lead author of the study, and colleagues had not originally set out to find the lost battle site. Using the 1973 satellite imagery, they were examining the Hajj pilgrimage route of Darb Zubaydah as part of its consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to UNESCO, Darb Zubaydah connected the city of Kufa, Iraq, to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and was the most important Hajj route between A.D. 750 and 850, during the Abbasid Caliphate, a golden age of Muslim civilization.

Related: Cold War satellite images reveal nearly 400 Roman forts in the Middle East

As the researchers looked over the newly declassified images, they realized they might have the chance to find the lost battlefield of al-Qadisiyyah, according to a Durham University statement. Records of the battle had given clues to its location. For example, they mentioned there was a 6-mile-long (10 kilometers) wall that connected al-Qadisiyyah to a neighboring town and that the town was "south of a body of water, between [a] moat and a bridged stream," the paper noted. Using these clues, Deadman located a modern-day agricultural field that matched the description.

An on-the-ground survey confirmed the find. Researchers identified the 6-mile-long wall and the moat north of the town mentioned in historical texts.

"This discovery provides a geographical location and context for a battle that is one of the founding stories of the expansion of Islam into modern day Iraq, Iran and beyond," Deadman said in the statement.

Vikings are often depicted as brutish, bloodthirsty warriors with battle axes and horned helmets. In popular culture, Vikings are shown raiding, pillaging and murdering anyone in their path and performing grisly executions, like the infamous "blood eagle."

But is the Vikings' ruthless reputation warranted?

"The question isn't, 'Were Vikings violent?'" said Daniel Melleno, an associate professor of medieval and pre-modern history at the University of Denver. "They were absolutely violent. It's just a question of, are they doing something that is out of the norm?"

The Viking Age lasted from about A.D. 793 to 1066, coinciding with Europe's Middle Ages — an already-violent time, Melleno said. In this era, wars, slavery and raids were commonplace, and the Vikings were no exception. With fast and mobile longships, the Vikings were experts at launching surprise attacks from the sea.

Related: Why didn't the Vikings colonize North America?

One of the Vikings' first raids was on a wealthy monastery in the British island of Lindisfarne in A.D. 793. The Vikings frequently attacked monasteries, which were poorly guarded and filled with riches. Because the Vikings were initially pagan and their victims were Christian, their attacks were described as particularly abhorrent and ungodly.

"These are Christians writing, and they talk about these 'heathens' or 'pagans' attacking," Caitlin Ellis, an associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oslo, told Live Science. "Sometimes they even say it's a punishment from God that their own people have sinned or not been good enough."

Unlike their southern neighbors, the Vikings were largely preliterate; they left only a few runes of their activities. Some of the only written evidence of their actions comes directly from their victims or from sagas written hundreds of years later by the Vikings' descendants. Although the Vikings were also merchants, farmers and fishers, their victims were, justifiably, more focused on the violence committed against them, Melleno said. Over the years, stories of Viking brutality were also likely embellished.

"Some of the sources that are most negative in the way they describe the Vikings as being particularly ferocious or barbaric are actually from a bit later," Ellis said, "from the 12th century, so a few hundred years after the raiding had begun. So maybe there's a bit more exaggeration with time that plays into the image that we still have today."

In addition, discrepancies in some sources' writings cast doubt on their legitimacy, Melleno said. For example, an account from the chronicler Prudentius in A.D. 834 describes the Vikings destroying everything in the town of Dorestad, in what is now the Netherlands. But the next year, the village was still standing for the Vikings to "lay waste" to it, Prudentius wrote. The Vikings returned in 836 to destroy the town again, and then again in 837, he reported.

"If we look at the archaeological record, one of the things we don't often see is mass graves or burn layers — the signs of that destruction that we would expect to see if we read the sources and took them at face value," Melleno told Live Science.

The Vikings were not the only group raiding and conquering towns in medieval Europe. Muslim raiders called "Saracens" frequently attacked parts of what are now France, Switzerland and Italy. The Magyars, a group from Hungary, attacked what's now Bavaria. And Charlemagne, king of the Franks, waged a decades-long war against the Saxons that resulted in mass killings, hostage taking and pillaging in what's now Germany.

"What's the difference between Viking raiding and Frankish wars of conquest? Really, not that much," Melleno said, adding that it comes down to state violence versus stateless people committing acts of violence. It's likely that because the Vikings weren't part of a formal kingdom, their victims saw them as more unpredictable and barbaric.

"The Vikings come off as bad because they're not a state waging war," he explained. "The Vikings don't have a country, and they barely have a king … so it's just a bunch of pirates."

Underwater archaeologists in Sweden have determined that a chest in the wreck of a 15th-century warship held tools to make lead shots for early handguns. The finding hints at key changes in naval battles at the time.

The chest is in the wreck of the Gribshunden ("Griffin hound"), a Danish royal "floating castle" that sank in 1495 at an anchorage in southern Sweden after a fire attributed to the mishandling of gunpowder.

The discovery could shed new light on the fate of the vessel, according to Rolf Warming, a maritime archaeologist and doctoral student at Stockholm University. Warming co-authored a new report on the weapons chest and other new finds from the Gribshunden wreck with Johan Rönnby, a maritime archaeologist and professor at Södertörn University in Sweden. The wreck was discovered by recreational divers in the 1970s, and Rönnby has studied it since 2013.

The discovery also hints at an early development in naval warfare from ramming and engaging in hand-to-hand combat — the tactics used since ancient times — to attacking enemy ships at a distance with gunfire, Warming said. But he stressed that it took more than a century for the development to become widespread.

"This is very much at the beginning of what we call the 'military revolution at sea,'" Warming told Live Science. "The tactics and technology for that were only fulfilled in the second half of the 17th century."

Related: 30 incredible sunken wrecks from WWI and WWII

Weapons chest

Warming and Rönnby used photogrammetry, a technique that involves digitally stitching together photos, to create a precise, virtual 3D model of the weapons chest. The chest is still underwater at the wreck site in coastal islands near the Swedish town of Ronneby, but Warming hopes it will be recovered soon. Conserving its contents will be a lengthy process, he said.

Based on what can be seen in the top layer of the chest, it contained several differently sized molds for the ball-shaped lead shots used in early handguns, plates of lead to be melted down for the molds, and cylinders that appear to have been canisters for gunpowder.

The researchers identified the chest as a "zeuglade," a type of tool chest that was used to make ammunition and which contemporary illustrations show on battlefields of the time.

They think the chest belonged to a company of German-speaking mercenaries on the ship when it sank; and a shirt of chain-mail armor, made of brass in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg in the early 1400s, was found elsewhere on the wreck, Warming said.

The cylinders in the zeuglade are similar to those known to have stored gunpowder, he said. But it wasn't clear if any powder they held was also used in the ship's many swivel guns, nor whether their mishandling led to the fire and explosion on the vessel — a possibility that was later suggested.

Diplomatic mission

The Gribshunden was the flagship of the Danish king Hans (or John), who was going to the Swedish town of Kalmar when the vessel sank. Hans and his retinue were not on board at the time.

Kalmar had been the site of a 14th-century agreement to unite Denmark, Norway and Sweden under a single monarch, known as the Kalmar Union. But it had fallen into abeyance, and in 1495, Hans had been trying to persuade Sweden to rejoin the union, with Hans as its ruler.

Learning more about the fire that sank the Gribshunden might help resolve lingering questions about it, Warming said. He noted that the ship's diplomatic mission meant there were probably fewer soldiers on board than its full complement in times of war.

Warming and Rönnby also found evidence of "elevated combat platforms" built above the bow and stern of the Gribshunden. The soldiers would have used these platforms during naval battles, perhaps to bombard their enemies with crossbows and firearms.

Such platforms were the origin of the shipboard term "fo'csle," meaning "forecastle," Warming said; and the Gribshunden one of the earliest ships where these platforms had been built into the hull, rather than being added after the ship's construction.

Editor's note: Updated at 9:40 a.m. EDT on April 24 to note that Danish king Hans was going to the town of Kalmar when the vessel sank, not returning from it as was previously stated. Also, that the Gribshunden was one of the earliest ships with a forecastle, not the earliest. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for decades, but this year was a breakout for the spooky technology, with OpenAI's ChatGPT creating accessible, practical AI for the masses. AI, however, has a checkered history, and today's technology was preceded by a short track record of failed experiments. 

For the most part, innovations in AI seem poised to improve things like medical diagnostics and scientific discovery. One AI model can, for example, detect whether you're at high risk of developing lung cancer by analyzing an X-ray scan. During COVID-19, scientists also built an algorithm that could diagnose the virus by listening to subtle differences in the sound of people's coughs. AI has also been used to design quantum physics experiments beyond what humans have conceived.

But not all the innovations are so benign. From killer drones to AI that threatens humanity's future, here are some of the scariest AI breakthroughs likely to come in 2024.

Q* — the age of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)? 

We don't know why exactly OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was dismissed and reinstated in late 2023. But amid corporate chaos at OpenAI, rumors swirled of an advanced technology that could threaten the future of humanity. That OpenAI system, called Q* (pronounced Q-star) may embody the potentially groundbreaking realization of artificial general intelligence (AGI), Reuters reported. Little is known about this mysterious system, but should reports be true, it could kick AI's capabilities up several notches.

Related: AI is transforming every aspect of science. Here's how.

AGI is a hypothetical tipping point, also known as the "Singularity," in which AI becomes smarter than humans. Current generations of AI still lag in areas in which humans excel, such as context-based reasoning and genuine creativity. Most, if not all, AI-generated content is just regurgitating, in some way, the data used to train it. 

But AGI could potentially perform particular jobs better than most people, scientists have said. It could also be weaponized and used, for example, to create enhanced pathogens, launch massive cyber attacks, or orchestrate mass manipulation.

The idea of AGI has long been confined to science fiction, and many scientists believe we'll never reach this point. For OpenAI to have reached this tipping point already would certainly be a shock — but not beyond the realm of possibility. We know, for example, that Sam Altman was already laying the groundwork for AGI in February 2023, outlining OpenAI's approach to AGI in a blog post. We also know experts are beginning to predict an imminent breakthrough, including Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, who said in November that AGI is in reach within the next five years, Barrons reported. Could 2024 be the breakout year for AGI? Only time will tell. 

Election-rigging hyperrealistic deepfakes 

One of the most pressing cyber threats is that of deepfakes — entirely fabricated images or videos of people that might misrepresent them, incriminate them or bully them. AI deepfake technology hasn't yet been good enough to be a significant threat, but that might be about to change. 

AI can now generate real-time deepfakes — live video feeds, in other words — and it is now becoming so good at generating human faces that people can no longer tell the difference between what's real or fake. Another study, published in the journal Psychological Science on Nov. 13, unearthed the phenomenon of "hyperrealism," in which AI-generated content is more likely to be perceived as "real" than actually real content. 

This would make it practically impossible for people to distinguish fact from fiction with the naked eye. Although tools could help people detect deepfakes, these aren't in the mainstream yet. Intel, for example, has built a real-time deepfake detector that works by using AI to analyze blood flow. But FakeCatcher, as it's known, has produced mixed results, according to the BBC.

As generative AI matures, one scary possibility is that people could deploy deepfakes to attempt to swing elections. The Financial Times (FT) reported, for example, that Bangladesh is bracing itself for an election in January that will be disrupted by deepfakes. As the U.S. gears up for a presidential election in November 2024, there's a possibility that AI and deepfakes could shift the outcome of this critical vote. UC Berkeley is monitoring AI usage in campaigning, for example, and NBC News also reported that many states lack the laws or tools to handle any surge in AI-generated disinformation. 

Mainstream AI-powered killer robots 

Governments around the world are increasingly incorporating AI into tools for warfare. The U.S. government announced on Nov. 22 that 47 states had endorsed a declaration on the responsible use of AI in the military — first launched at The Hague in February. Why was such a declaration needed? Because "irresponsible" use is a real and terrifying prospect. We've seen, for example, AI drones allegedly hunting down soldiers in Libya with no human input. 

AI can recognize patterns, self-learn, make predictions or generate recommendations in military contexts, and an AI arms race is already underway. In 2024, it's likely we'll not only see AI used in weapons systems but also in logistics and decision support systems, as well as research and development. In 2022, for instance, AI generated 40,000 novel, hypothetical chemical weapons. Various branches of the U.S. military have ordered drones that can perform target recognition and battle tracking better than humans. Israel, too, used AI to rapidly identify targets at least 50 times faster than humans can in the latest Israel-Hamas war, according to NPR. 

But one of the most feared development areas is that of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) — or killer robots. Several leading scientists and technologists have warned against killer robots, including Stephen Hawking in 2015 and Elon Musk in 2017, but the technology hasn't yet materialized on a mass scale. 

That said, some worrying developments suggest this year might be a breakout for killer robots. For instance, in Ukraine, Russia allegedly deployed the Zala KYB-UAV drone, which could recognize and attack targets without human intervention, according to a report from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Australia, too, has developed Ghost Shark — an autonomous submarine system that is set to be produced "at scale", according to Australian Financial Review.  The amount countries around the world are spending on AI is also an indicator — with China raising AI expenditure from a combined $11.6 million in 2010 to $141 million by 2019, according to Datenna, Reuters reported. This is because, the publication added, China is locked in a race with the U.S. to deploy LAWS. Combined, these developments suggest we're entering a new dawn of AI warfare. 

A wooden frame saddle with iron stirrups that was stunningly preserved in an ancient tomb in Mongolia may be the oldest of its kind. The innovative saddle could give archaeologists clues to the origins of medieval mounted warfare.

In a study published today (Dec. 8) in the journal Antiquity, an international team of archaeologists described the painted saddle, which was previously looted from a cave burial. Radiocarbon dating of the human remains in the tomb and a sample of the horsehide saddle indicate it dates to around 420 A.D., making it the oldest known frame saddle in the world.

"Our study raises the possibility that the Eastern Steppe played a key role in the early development and spread of the frame saddle and stirrup," the researchers wrote in their paper.

Modern horses were first domesticated around 2000 B.C. in Western and Central Asia, and nomadic riders quickly used them to support their mobile lifestyle. Early equestrianism was essentially bareback, as riders armed with bows and arrows gripped the horse with their legs while holding onto the horse’s mane, the researchers noted. Within a few centuries, people roaming the northern steppes invented the bridle and bit, and they shifted to mounted riding on a soft pad around 1000 B.C.

But rigid saddles complete with stirrups —  an important part of cavalry equipment —  are a much more recent invention.  Direct evidence for when they originated has eluded archaeologists because organic material does not always preserve well in the harsh climate of the steppe.

In 2015, police notified archaeologists at the National Museum of Mongolia that a cave burial at Urd Ulaan Uneet, near the province of Khovd in the western part of the country, had been looted. The police confiscated several artifacts, including a birch saddle painted black and red with leather straps on either side, an iron bit, wooden archery equipment and mummified horse remains. They also took possession of the bones of a man who was buried wearing sheep- and badger-hide clothing. The tomb quickly became known as the "cave of the equestrian."

In the new study, the researchers discovered through DNA testing that the human remains were those of a man and that the animal was a male domestic horse. Radiocarbon dating of the human remains and the leather stirrup strap from the saddle placed the burial and the saddle around 420 A.D.

"Our study raises the possibility that the Eastern Steppe played a key role in the early development and spread of the frame saddle and stirrup," the researchers wrote in their paper. Study author William Taylor, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Live Science in an email that "developing a rigid frame that could support a suspended stirrup was a watershed moment, really unlocking a whole host of other things people could do while mounted." For example, a rider could use them for stability and standing up, freeing up the rider's upper body for delivering blows while on the horse and giving them a major advantage in mounted warfare.

The new information the researchers found in their study shows that horse cultures of the Eurasian steppe were early adopters of frame saddles and stirrups, further suggesting that "Mongolian steppe cultures were closely tied to key innovations in equestrianism, an advance that had a major impact on the conduct of medieval warfare."

But domestication was hard on the horses. The horse found in the Urd Ulaan Uneet burial had bit-related damage to his teeth and changes to his nasal bones, similar to injuries found in other horse burials in Central and Eastern Asia. Additionally, the Urd Ulaan Uneet horse had "healed nock marks to the ears that might have been used to show who the horse belonged to during its life," Taylor said.

Although the "cave of the equestrian" housed a man, horse riding wasn't just for men, Taylor said. "There's every reason to think that both men and women were regularly riding horses since the earliest appearance of horses in the Eastern Steppe," he said.

Future work is needed, particularly in areas of East Asia with exceptional organic preservation, to help clarify whether wooden frame saddles were invented in the Eastern Steppes, the researchers said.

Chimps use an ancient military tactic to make decisions and avoid potentially fatal clashes with rival groups, scientists have discovered.

Researchers observed two western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) communities in Africa take to the hills to carry out surveillance on each other — much like reconnaissance missions used by militaries. They then used that intel to decide when to enter contested territory.

Plenty of animals look out for danger in their environment, but this is the first time scientists have documented a non-human species making elaborate use of elevated terrain to assess risk in a territorial conflict, according to the new study, published Nov. 2 in the journal PLOS Biology.

Related: Primates have been masturbating for at least 40 million years

"It really shows this metacognition ability, so the ability to reflect on your own knowledge and to act on what you don't know to get more information," lead author Sylvain Lemoine, an assistant professor of biological anthropology at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science.

The use of elevated terrain is one of the oldest military tactics in human warfare, according to a statement released by the University of Cambridge.

Chimps live in communities that compete for space and resources, and their normal behavior involves coordinated aggression — including occasional killings.

The border between chimp communities isn't set in stone, and their daily presence in an area is what matters, Lemoine said, adding it is like living in a "constant, low intensity and small-scale state of warfare."

The new study looked at two neighboring chimp communities monitored by the Taï Chimpanzee Project, a research and conservation project based in the Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). The team, along with students and local assistants — unnamed in the study — followed the chimps for 8 to 12 hours per day between 2013 and 2016, collecting GPS and behavioral data.

The data showed that chimps were more likely to climb hills when traveling to the borders of their territory than to the center. While on these hills, they quietly rested rather than engaging in activities that would impede their ability to listen, according to the study.

Chimps in the study were more likely to advance from high ground into contested territory when their rivals were far away, suggesting they used the hills to avoid conflict. However, they may also use them to find an opportunity to attack. Lemoine noted that when members of two communities meet, the balance of power — numbers on each side — is an important factor in whether one side escalates violence. The chimps seem able to weigh the cost and benefit of engagement, and the hills help them do that.

"They use the high spots to find the right conditions where they can take the risk — or not — of attacking," Lemoine said.

The new study only looked at chimps in Taï National Park, but Lemoine told Live Science that he assumes other chimps also use this tactic, depending on the terrain. 

In the statement, Lemonie said complex cognitive abilities that help chimps expand their territory would have been favored by natural selection, potentially suggesting these warfare tactics are rooted in evolution. "We are perhaps seeing traces of the small scale proto-warfare that probably existed in prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations," he said.

Over 5,000 years ago, men, women and children with head trauma and arrow wounds were buried in a mass grave in Spain. Now, archaeologists have teased apart this tangled web of skeletons, revealing new evidence of ancient warfare, a new study finds.

The San Juan ante Portam Latinam (SJAPL) rock shelter, located in the town of Laguardia in northern Spain, was first excavated in 1991. More than 300 skeletons, radiocarbon-dated to 3380 to 3000 B.C., were found in one mass burial, many of them interwoven and in odd positions. Excavators also discovered dozens of flint arrowheads and blades, along with stone axes and personal ornaments.

Researchers initially concluded that they'd found evidence of a Neolithic massacre. But a new analysis of the SJAPL skeletons has revealed that these people were most likely killed in separate raids or battles over a period of several months or years.

Related: Why were dozens of people butchered 6,200 years ago and buried in a Neolithic death pit?

In a study published Thursday (Nov. 2) in the journal Scientific Reports, first author Teresa Fernández-Crespo, an archaeologist at the University of Valladolid in Spain, and her team describe the healed and unhealed injuries on the SJAPL skeletons. They found a total of 107 cranial injuries, most of which were located on the top of the skull and likely correspond to blunt-force trauma, such as blows from stone maces or wooden clubs. Nearly five times as many males as females suffered cranial trauma, the researchers found.

Injuries on the rest of the skeletons were also examined. The team discovered 22 instances of trauma — mostly spiral or V-shaped fractures — affecting the limbs, as well as 25 injuries to other parts of the body. Like the skull injuries, these seem to have disproportionately affected men, who were nearly four times as likely as women to have evidence of bodily trauma. Arrowhead injuries were also strongly linked to male skeletons, suggesting men were more often exposed to long-range violence than women were.

All told, adolescent and adult males buried at SJAPL accounted for 97.6% of unhealed trauma and 81.7% of healed trauma recorded in skeletons whose biological sex could be estimated. This suggests, according to the study authors, that the mass grave represents "one or more 'war layers' resulting from battles and/or raids where the involvement of males was dominant."

"We think we are seeing the result of a regional inter-group conflict" at SJAPL, Fernández-Crespo told Live Science in an email. "Resource competition and social complexity could have been a source of tension, potentially escalating into lethal violence" between communities, she said.

These Late Neolithic communities — each of which consisted of a few hundred people — comprised mostly farmers, who cultivated wheat and barley and tended to domesticated herds of sheep, cattle and pigs. But additional evidence of illness and stress that the team found on the Neolithic skeletons suggests that food scarcity may have affected the people and potentially been a consequence of the violence.

"This research presents a convincing case for interregional conflict where male combatants died in battle," Ryan Harrod, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "The fact there were more nonlethal compared to lethal injuries on the 338 individuals," Harrod said, shows that many people healed from their injuries, "which might indicate that the regional clashes were not epic battles or warfare."

The combination of evidence from SJAPL, including traumatic injuries from arrows and skeletal indicators of poor health, coupled with high population pressure and the presence of different cultural groups, may have created a metaphorical powder keg that erupted 5,000 years ago, resulting in what the researchers have characterized as "a more sophisticated and formalized way of warfare than previously appreciated in the European Neolithic record."

Editor's note: Updated at 2:19 p.m. EDT to note that food scarcity may have been a consequence of the violence, not a trigger for it as was previously stated. 

Humans have waged war on each other for thousands of years, shaping civilizations and defining ways of life. And despite being the source of suffering for so many, it has also been a catalyst for some of the most significant scientific and medical advances in human history. 

From significant moments in history, such as the Cold War and the Pacific War, to the technologies that transformed warfare today, Live Science’s expert writers and editors have you covered with the latest news, articles and features on how war impacts science.  

Aerial drones equipped with lasers have revealed the secrets of the Battle of the Bulge, the largest and bloodiest battle fought by the U.S. in World War II. 

The drones revealed 941 traces of the battle, including dugouts and bomb craters, according to a study published Tuesday (Aug. 15) in the journal Antiquity. 

Officially known as the Ardennes Counteroffensive, the Battle of the Bulge took place between December 1944 and January 1945 in eastern Belgium and Luxembourg, according to the Imperial War Museum in London. Despite being such a huge WWII battle, dense forests in the region shrouded much of the archaeological evidence left behind.

"Although this is a 'high-profile' battlefield, studied intensively by military historians and the subject of significant attention in museums and the popular media, little has been published on its material remains," study lead author Birger Stichelbaut, an archaeologist at Ghent University in Belgium, said in a statement.

Related: World War II 'horror bunker' run by infamous Unit 731 discovered in China

To uncover remnants from the battle, scientists outfitted drones with a remote sensing technology called lidar (light detection and ranging), which uses pulsed lasers to form digital maps of the landscape. They surveyed between the city of St. Vith and the village of Schönberg — an area that was once the central zone of the Battle of the Bulge — and discovered various traces of the war, including artillery platforms, trenches and foxholes (small forts to protect soldiers from enemy fire).

"This [lidar technique] allowed for traces of the battle to be observed on a scale not known until now," Stichelbaut said.

After discovering these features on the virtual map, researchers visited the sites, which helped them identify three distinct phases of the Battle of the Bulge. During the first phase, before the offensive, the Allies maintained a steady front line using U.S. field artillery battalions positioned a few miles west of the area. The researchers surveying this area found artillery fuses, artillery platforms and field fortifications that they believe can likely be attributed to this pre-offensive phase.

During the second phase, at the start of the German offensive, more than 200,000 German troops and nearly 1,000 tanks launched an attack on Allied soldiers. This mayhem left behind field fortifications and German objects at American artillery banks, which likely means that German forces used abandoned American fortifications during the battle, the study's authors wrote.

The final phase was the turning point of this battle, marked by "numerous extant bomb craters," which "indicate that the Allied air forces were able to establish tactical dominance once the weather improved," they wrote. However, the researchers added that some of these craters may have been from earlier points in the battle.

"This paper highlights the wide range of new technology, including LiDAR and drones, that is now being employed by [conflict] archaeologists," James Symonds, a professor of historical archaeology at the University of Amsterdam who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. He added that this research shows how contemporary archaeology can shed new light on "well-known historical events from the recent past."

Moving forward, this technique could be applied to other forested areas of Europe, thereby growing our understanding of different battlefields, the study's authors said. It could also help protect valuable heritage sites, according to Symonds.

"It is significant as it highlights the need to devise cultural heritage strategies to safeguard future heritage, while at the same time demonstrating the difficulties of recovering traces of mechanised and highly mobile modern warfare," he said.

The Aztec Empire flourished in central Mexico during the Postclassic period of Mesoamerican history, from approximately A.D. 1325 to 1521. It is considered one of the great civilizations of the Americas — known for amazing feats of urban planning, engineering, military conquest and unique artistic innovations — and the last great Mesoamerican civilization before the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century. 

The Aztecs, also known as the Mexica, ruled by a combination of fear, skillful political manipulation, alliances and military force. At the same time, the Aztecs were renowned artisans, engineers, builders, traders and agriculturalists. They created colorful and intricate art, vast cities with towering pyramids and great aqueducts, a highly productive agricultural system and a writing system that made use of logograms and syllabic signs. 

Today, the influence of the Aztecs on modern Mexican society and culture is profound and far-reaching and can be seen in cuisine, architecture, art, literature and more.

The origin and growth of the Aztec Empire

According to legend, the Aztecs migrated into the Valley of Mexico from Aztlán, reputed to be somewhere in the North. (The word "aztlán” is from the Nahuatl language and is typically translated as "white land," or "land of white herons," according to Britannica.) These migrants were likely hunter-gatherers from northwest Mexico who were organized into a loose confederation of nomadic tribes, according to Britannica; they were skilled hunters and warriors who were openly hostile to the settled inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico. 

As depicted in several Aztec codices, the famous Indigenous manuscripts written on bark paper and folded like an accordion, the Aztecs were led to the Valley of Mexico by their chief god, Huitzilopochtli, according to New World Encyclopedia. Much of the valley was already inhabited, including the good agricultural land, so the Aztecs settled on an island at the western end of Lake Texcoco. They built their capital city, Tenochtitlán (modern-day Mexico City), on the spot where they observed an eagle — a potent symbol in Aztec ideology — perched atop a nopal cactus and clutching a snake in its talons (an image depicted on the modern Mexican flag).

Modern archaeology, however, paints a different picture of Aztec origins. The people who would later be known as the Aztecs were one of many Nahuatl-speaking groups occupying the Valley of Mexico. During the 12th century A.D., many of these peoples began to organize themselves into independent communities. "The basic political form of these groups was the city-state," Michael Smith, a professor of archaeology at Arizona State University (ASU) and the director of the Teotihuacan Research Laboratory at ASU, told Live Science. 

In Nahuatl, "city-state" is translated as "altepetl," and much like the city-states of ancient Greece, for example, the city-states in the Valley of Mexico were independent political entities with their own standing armies, Indigenous identities, and political and religious structures. Like Athens, the Aztec city-state of Tenochtitlán grew from obscurity to military and political prominence through a gradual program of alliance and military dominance, Smith said.

At first, as legend has it, the Aztecs eked out a precarious existence on their island, practicing agriculture and building a small settlement that gradually expanded. Fierce warriors, they often battled with the other peoples of the region. Other times, they hired themselves out as mercenaries in the many wars in which the inhabitants of the valley were engaged. Either by force of arms, alliance or skillful politicking — or a combination of all three — the Aztecs gradually came to dominate the surrounding tribes and city-states in the region, according to World History Encyclopedia. It is possible that the Aztecs contributed to the downfall of the Toltecs, who were the dominant political and cultural force in the Valley of Mexico before the rise of the Aztecs, according to World History Encyclopedia. 

In 1427, the Tepanec War — a conflict that pitted the Aztecs against the Tepanecs of the city of Azcapotzalco — broke out. It was precipitated by a civil war that flared up between two Tepanec rulers who vied for power after the death of the Tepanec king, Tezozomoc, according to Omni Atlas. The Aztecs sided with one of the claimants, a man named Tayahuah, who opposed Tezozomoc's son, Maxtla. Initially, the war went poorly for the Aztecs; the Aztec ruler, a man named Chimalpopoca, was killed in the conflict. But, with the ascension of the new Aztec ruler, Itzcóatl (who ruled from 1428 to 1440), the war took a dramatic turn. Itzcóatl, in a coalition with several city-states, marched on Azcapotzalco, overthrew Maxtla and captured the city.

Soon thereafter, in 1428, Itzcóatl formed an alliance with the neighboring states of Texcoco and Tlacopan, two of the more powerful city-states in the region, according to World History Encyclopedia. This came to be known as the Triple Alliance and is viewed by some scholars and archaeologists as the beginning of the Aztec Empire (other scholars argue that the empire began much earlier in 1325, which is the date of the founding of Tenochtitlán). At first, the three cities ruled the valley relatively equally. But gradually, the Aztecs gained sole political power and hegemony of the region.

"The Aztecs ruled by a policy known as 'indirect control,'" said Smith, which is a form of political control, as opposed to 'direct control,' that does not intervene directly in the political, cultural or religious institutions of the conquered group. As long as the province or territory paid the necessary taxes it owed the Aztec Empire in full and on time, the Aztecs left the local leaders alone, Smith explained.

During the reign of Moctezuma I, from 1440 to 1469, the Aztecs extended their borders southward to the Valley of Oaxaca, westward to the Pacific, and eastward to the Gulf of Mexico. Moctezuma also carried out a successful war with the Mixtec peoples of southern Mexico. With these new regions added to the empire, trade goods, tribute and taxes began to flow into the city of Tenochtitlán. These goods included shells from both coasts, jade, parrot feathers and feline pelts from the tropical forests of the south, as well as precious stones and metals, such as gold and silver, from all over the empire. 

"The Aztec Empire grew little by little as each ruler enlarged Aztec territory through time by conquest and alliance," said Laura Filloy Nadal, associate curator for the arts of the ancient Americas at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. "The goal of this conquest was not only to gain territory but also to gain access to materials and goods from around Mesoamerica." 

Ahuitzotl, who ruled from 1486 to 1502, was the grandson of Moctezuma I and a hugely successful military leader. He launched the most ambitious military campaigns of any of his predecessors, adding large swathes of land to the empire, including land as far south as what is now the southern border of Mexico and Guatemala. He carried out successful military campaigns against several Mesoamerican peoples, including the Huastecs and Zapotecs. He was also an ambitious builder who added buildings, temples and palaces to Tenochtitlán; refurbished the massive Templo Mayor; and developed a far-flung network of roads that connected the empire from coast to coast and from north to south.

Ahuitzotl is also famous for promoting the Aztec practice of ritual sacrifice. Human sacrifice had existed as an integral part of Aztec culture for a long time, but Ahuitzotl raised the practice to unimagined heights, often sacrificing captives captured in war in the temple of Huitzilopochtli. According to Britannica, Ahuitzotl sacrificed some 20,000 captives during the festivities surrounding the dedication of a new temple in Tenochtitlán in 1487. 

The Aztecs sustained and consolidated their empire through an extensive system of taxation. This was not simply tribute, or a one-time payment, Smith said. "The Aztecs had a regular, sophisticated system of taxation that was comparable to what the Romans and Greeks were doing," he said. Cocoa beans and cotton textiles, which were the Mesoamerican forms of currency, were the primary forms of taxes that subordinate people paid to their Aztec overlords, Smith added. Cocoa beans were used for small monetary transactions, while cotton textiles were used for larger transactions. 

The Aztecs maintained their empire — and fended off rival societies — through a highly effective, well-trained military. All Aztec boys were trained from an early age for war in special military compounds, according to World History Encyclopedia. The ones that showed particular promise were inducted into the military, where they at first assisted the other warriors by carrying weapons and supplies and occasionally acting as skirmish troops. It was only later that these young warriors were allowed to fight in hand-to-hand combat. One of the main goals of Aztec warfare was the capture of sacrificial victims; in fact, an Aztec fighter was deemed successful and acquired status by the number of warriors he could capture in battle, and whole wars — known as the Flower Wars — were fought with neighboring groups for the sole purpose of capturing enemy warriors. A warrior who captured 20 captives was allowed to join the elite fighting units of the Aztec army, such as the jaguar and eagle units. 

By the early 16th century, the Aztec Empire was at the height of its power. The Aztec state was well organized, with a complex bureaucratic system that included governors, soldiers, law courts, tax collectors, and civil and religious officials. At the top of this hierarchical pyramid was the monarch, called the "tlatoani" in Nahuatl. The monarch ruled over some 5 million to 6 million people spread over 80,000 square miles (207,200 square kilometers), according to Britannica. This vast area contained about 400 to 500 city-states.

Tenochtitlán, capital of the Aztecs

Today, Tenochtitlán is buried under modern-day Mexico City. Some 500 years ago, however, the Aztec capital was a thriving metropolis of approximately 400,000 inhabitants, which made it larger than most major European cities of the same time period. Laid out with razor-straight avenues and broad causeways that connected the city with the lakeshore, Tenochtitlán was a city with pyramids, temples, palaces, artificial reservoirs for fresh water, and gardens. There was even a great aqueduct that carried water from the distant Sierra Madre mountains directly to the city. The Aztecs fed the inhabitants of the city via a sophisticated agricultural system made up of "chinampas," or "floating gardens," which were artificial islands made by adding successive layers of mud, sticks and vegetation until a small island was formed. These chinampas were highly productive and sustainable, according to 2020 research in the journal HortTechnology. 

In the center of the city was an area known as the Sacred Precinct, which contained the gods' temples and a monumental ball court, according to World History Encyclopedia. The most prominent temple in the Sacred Precinct was Templo Mayor, or the "Great Temple." This towering pyramid, which dominated the city's skyline, was crowned by two temples: one dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and the other to the rain god Tlaloc. Two parallel staircases, each flanked by large snake heads carved in basalt, led up the pyramid from ground level.

According to Nadal, Templo Mayor measured 256 feet (78 meters) at its base from north to south and 274.3 feet (83.6 m) from east to west. Its height was 148 feet (45 m), a length comparable to the Pyramid of the Moon, the second largest pyramid in Mesoamerica, which is located in the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan, located just east of modern-day Mexico City. The materials used in the construction of Templo Mayor included igneous stone, earth, limestone, sand and wood, Nadal said. 

Although Templo Mayor was discovered in 1914, it wasn't extensively excavated until 1978, when Mexican archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and his colleagues completely uncovered the pyramid from the rubble that had covered it for centuries, Nadal said. They discovered that, although the initial construction of the structure began in 1325, the temple was renovated at least six times over the centuries, reaching its final form just before Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519.

Aztec religion

The Aztecs were polytheists — that is, they propitiated a panoply of gods, each with different powers, temperaments and symbols. By some estimates, no fewer than 200 gods constituted the Aztec pantheon, according to ThoughtCo. There were four major gods and a multitude of minor gods. The chief god of the Aztec pantheon was Huitzilopochtli, a war god whose name is translated as either "left-handed hummingbird" or "hummingbird of the south," according to Britannica. He is associated with the sun and fire, and often depicted as a warrior decked out in colorful hummingbird feathers and carrying a shield in one hand and a snake in the other. The lower part of his face is typically blue, while the upper part is black. 

An equally important Aztec deity was Quetzalcoatl, whose name means "feathered serpent." He was the god of light, wisdom and the arts, and was associated with the wind and the planet Venus. In Aztec culture, he gave several gifts to humankind — including books (codices), the calendar and maize (corn) — and, in some depictions, was opposed to the practice of human sacrifice. Some of the earliest mentions of Quetzalcoatl come from the pre-Hispanic site of Teotihuacan, where feathered serpent motifs are prevalent in the art of the city. He was also worshipped by the Maya of the Yucatán, who knew him as Kukulcan (also spelled Kukulkan).

Tezcatlipoca, which means "smoking mirror," is the Aztec god of judgment, the Earth, divination, sorcery and the night. Although he is portrayed as the "invisible god," he is frequently depicted in Aztec art with black and yellow stripes painted across his face, heron feathers on his head, seashells on his wrists and ankles, and a colorful shield. He also carries an obsidian mirror that he uses to divine the future and see into humans' thoughts. He was also worshipped by other Mesoamerican societies, such as the Toltecs and the Maya. 

The Aztecs also worshipped the rain god Tlaloc, whose name means "he who makes things sprout." He is often depicted in Mesoamerican art wearing a mask with protruding fangs, similar to a jaguar's. In addition to rain, Tlaloc is associated with agriculture, fertility and storms. He is one of the most ancient Mesoamerican gods, according to ThoughtCo., with depictions of Tlaloc appearing as early as the Olmec culture, which flourished in the modern Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco from 1200 B.C. to 400 B.C.

The fall of the Aztec Empire

"By the time of Moctezuma II, in the early 16th century, the Aztec Empire was at its largest extent," Nadal said. "The Empire was divided into at least 61 provinces that covered what is today most of the central part of Mexico." In 1519, however, Cortés invaded the Aztec Empire. With 500 Spanish soldiers, he landed in Veracruz and proceeded to march inland, allying himself with several Indigenous groups that were at odds with Aztec rule, especially the Tlaxcalans, a Nahuatl-speaking people from Tlaxcala who fiercely resisted Aztec rule and whom the Aztecs had never succeeded in conquering. 

When Cortés reached Tenochtitlán, he was in command of thousands of warriors, all intent on toppling the Aztec Empire and looting the city. The Aztecs, under their new ruler, Cuauhtémoc, at first put up a stiff resistance. But the superior iron weapons, arquebuses (matchlock rifles), cannons and cavalry of the Spanish as well as the hostile Tlaxcalans ultimately proved too much for the Aztecs. In 1521, Cortés and his allies succeeded in capturing the city. 

But force of arms was not the only factor leading to the Aztecs' demise.

"European diseases, especially smallpox, played a decisive role in Cortés' victory," Smith said. "The Indigenous people simply had no immunity, and the disease ravaged the region — killing thousands." 

According to Suzanne Alchon, a historian and author of the book "A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective" (University of New Mexico Press, 2003), between one-quarter and one-half of the inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico, including the Aztecs and other Indigenous peoples, died of the disease. 

Today, whether rightly or wrongly, the Aztecs are known in the popular imagination primarily as fierce warriors who engaged in blood-curdling human sacrifice. But they were so much more, Smith said: They created perhaps the most sophisticated civilization in Mesoamerica and engaged in massive engineering and building projects that rivaled and, in some instances, surpassed those being conducted in Europe at the same time. Aztec artisans created some of the most distinctive artwork in the Americas, and their wondrous stone, feather and ceramic pieces are now on display in museums around the world.

Additional resources

• To learn more about the Aztecs, watch the History Channel documentary "Engineering an Empire: The Aztecs."
• Or, read about the Aztec gods at History Crunch.
• And don't forget to learn about the great city of Tenochtitlán at ThoughtCo.

Originally published on Live Science.

"Scythian" is a term used to denote a diverse but culturally related group of nomads who occupied a large swathe of grassland, or steppes, that stretched from north of the Black Sea all the way to China. Sometimes also known as Saka or Scyths, the name "Scythian" was coined by the ancient Greeks.

"Scythian culture flourished on the steppes from about 800 B.C. to about A.D. 300," Adrienne Mayor, a folklorist and historian at Stanford University and the author of "The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World" (Princeton University Press, 2014), told Live Science. 

The Scythians were known to many ancient civilizations, she said, including the ancient Greeks, Persians, Romans and Chinese, and they perfected the art of archery on horseback — even without the use of stirrups or saddles. They had a reputation for ferocity in battle and were masters of hit-and-run battle tactics.  

The origins of the Scythians and their empire

There is much debate about the origins of the Scythians. According to the fifth-century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus, the Scythians originally inhabited Asia but were pushed west by a hostile tribe. They eventually reached the Black Sea region and the eastern outskirts of Europe, where they, in turn, pushed out the existing inhabitants. By contrast, the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century B.C., claimed that the Scythians moved north into the steppe region from the south, possibly from the modern area of Armenia or even farther south along the western border with India. 

In a different and far more fanciful origin story, Herodotus tells how the Scythians were the descendants of the mighty hero Heracles and a creature who was half woman and half snake. In this story, Heracles encountered the creature while traveling in the lands east of Greece. After stealing Heracles' horses, the creature demanded that if he wanted them back, he would have to stay and mate with her. The union produced three sons, one of whom was named Scythes, who became the ancestor of the Scythian nobility. 

Modern historians, however, have used archaeological and genetic evidence to reconstruct the Scythians' origins. 

"It appears that what we call Scythian culture emerged more than 2,500 years ago, as a combination of Siberian, East Asian, and Yamnaya Eurasian groups," Mayor told Live Science. "Just as the region of ancient Scythia had many different languages, great ethnic diversity is also found in Scythian ancestry, especially in the maternal line. All the studies so far confirm that Scythians were not a single homogeneous group." 

Although genetic studies are revealing a great deal about the makeup of the diverse peoples of the lands once known as Scythia, the full story is not yet known and still debated, Mayor noted.

Social organization and burials

The open grassland of the steppes — an environment of vast plains and low, rolling hills — was beneficial to pastoralism, and for millennia human populations in this landscape tended large herds of livestock. The Scythians were no exception. They tended herds of cattle and horses, according to Herodotus, and most people roamed the steppes rather than settling down in permanent habitations. According to World History Encyclopedia, the Scythians moved about the landscape in wagons driven by oxen. Some of these wagons were large and elaborate, with multiple rooms. When multiple wagons traveled together, the conglomeration resembled a city or large settlement. 

The Scythians were organized into tribes that were not united politically but shared a common language, culture, style of dress and art style. During certain periods, such as times of war or the celebration of ritual undertakings, different tribes came together to form larger political units or confederations. It is unclear whether Scythian society had sharp social divisions, such as hereditary elites, but in many respects they appear to have been relatively egalitarian, Mayor said — especially with regard to gender roles.

The historical and archaeological record indicates that Scythian women enjoyed considerable autonomy and privilege that would not be rivaled until modern times, according to World History Encyclopedia. For example, many Scythian women served alongside men as mounted horse archers (more on this below) and could hold leadership roles in Scythian society. Moreover, numerous Scythian burials show that women were often interred with as much elaborate offerings as men. In 2019, for instance, a burial containing four women was found that contained offerings typically reserved for men, including weapons and gold, the Smithsonian Magazine reported.

Herodotus mentioned the existence of Scythian "kings," using the term "Royal Scythians" to designate this group. He indicated that they were a separate tribe and lived in what is now the southern part of Ukraine, immediately north of the ancient Greek towns that clustered around the Black Sea. Herodotus indicated that they wielded considerable political and military power, and that they were a hereditary elite, but it is unclear what their relation was to the other Scythian tribes. 

When a Royal Scythian died, a large grave consisting of a "great four-cornered pit in the ground" was prepared, and the individual's body was placed inside, according to Herodotus. The individual was buried with his "concubines, his cupbearer, his cook, his groom, his squire, and his messenger, besides horses, and first-fruits of all else, and golden cups," Herodotus wrote (translated from ancient Greek.) The king's retainers then covered the grave with dirt and erected a mound, vying "zealously with one another to make this as great as may be." 

Archaeologists have excavated some of these high-status tombs, which are called kurgans. One of these, found in southern Siberia, dates from 2,800 years ago and was wider than the length of a football field, Live Science previously reported. It contained the burial of a man and woman and was filled with gold jewelry, weapons, richly decorated cups (some with traces of drugs like opium) and other grave goods.

Scythian clothes, tattoos and artwork

Several classical writers mention the Scythians' distinctive dress, describing the men as wearing peaked caps, colorful tunics and, most characteristically, long trousers that reached down to the ankles. The Scythians were fond of elaborate designs, intricate embroidery and bold colors. Men and women wore boots that were, like the Scythian attire in general, colorful and emblazoned with many designs and patterns. One of these, a woman's boot, was found in the Altai Mountains in central Asia and dates to around 2,300 years ago, ZME Science reported. 

The Scythians were famous for their practice of tattooing. Designs of real and mythical animals, many rendered in highly stylized patterns, were especially prominent on arms and legs. According to The Siberian Times, the mummy of a young woman, dubbed the Ukok Princess, was found in 1993; she displayed a series of elaborate tattoos, including depictions of a deer, a panther and a griffon. Other tattooed mummies have been found throughout the ancient Scythian region.

Many ancient accounts mention the Scythians' love of gold artwork and jewelry. Numerous pieces of Scythian art — including pendants, clasps, brooches, necklaces, combs and choker-like necklaces known as gorgets — have been found in kurgans. Like Scythian tattooing, these pieces are distinctive for their intricate designs and stylized ornamentation. There is evidence that Greek merchants may have been responsible for creating some of these gold pieces and that a lively trade existed between the Greeks and Scythians, according to Realm of History, with several pieces imported from the Greek mainland. Like Scythian tattoos, these works of art often depict animals. 

Scythian religion

According to World History Encyclopedia, the Scythian religion was an amalgam between Greek religion, which the Scythians may have adopted as a result of contact with far-flung Greek colonists, and older shamanistic elements, such as animal worship. Scholars are still largely in the dark about the specifics of Scythian religion, though the little that is known comes primarily from Herodotus. He claimed that the Scythians, like many ancient peoples, were polytheistic — that is, they worshipped a plethora of deities. Herodotus mentioned eight gods as constituting the Scythian pantheon, all of whom had Greek counterparts. This included the two main gods, Tabitha, who was a goddess of fire and the hearth and most closely associated with the Greek deity Hestia, and Papaeus, the god of the sky who resembled the Greek god Zeus. The other Scythian deities included Goetosyrus (Apollo), Argimpasa (Aphrodite), Api (Mother-Earth), and three additional gods whom Herodotus does not name but associated, respectively, with Ares, Hercules and Poseidon. 

One of the most revered deities in the Scythian pantheon was Ares, the Greek god of war. "It is their practice to make images and altars and shrines for Ares, but for no other god," Herodotus wrote. The Scythians frequently sacrificed animals to the gods, such as sheep, goats and cattle, typically using a garrote (iron collar or cord) to strangle the beasts. To Ares, however, Scythians sacrificed both animals and humans. In Book IV, Herodotus described how prisoners of war were occasionally sacrificed to Ares; this occurred at a shrine that had a built-in sword, the symbol of Ares. During human sacrifices, prisoners were reportedly killed with this weapon. "They pour wine on the men's heads and cut their throats over a vessel; then they carry the blood up onto the pile of sticks and pour it on the [sword]," Herodotus wrote. 

The older elements of Scythian religion are demonstrated through the propitiation of animals and shamanism. Herodotus described a class of shamans among the Scythians, using the term "diviners." He described them as hereditary and having the power to tell the future — a gift given to them by their Aphrodite-like goddess, Argimpasa. However, if a prediction didn't come to fruition, the diviner could be put to death, usually by burning. These diviners also had the ability to effect cures using herbs and various medicinal plants.

Scythian warriors and weapons

Herodotus wrote of the Scythians' military prowess, describing this aspect of their lives in great detail and categorizing them as "invincible and unassailable." Scythian warriors could achieve high status through skill in battle. "[A Scythian warrior] carried to his king the heads of all whom he has slain in battle, for he receives his share of the booty if he brings a head, but not otherwise," Herodotus wrote  (translated from ancient Greek).

The Scythians were especially renowned for their skill as mounted archers. 

"Scythian male and female mounted archers were admired and feared by Greeks, Romans, Persians, and the Chinese, whose Great Wall was built to defend against them," Mayor said. 

The Scythians' primary weapon was the composite bow, which was made of wood, horn and sinew. It was a remarkably durable and accurate weapon. Scythian warriors also carried an array of other weapons, such as axes, swords, spears and maces. Their military skill was recognized by the many civilizations around them, and Scythian warriors frequently served as mercenaries in foreign armies, such as with the Persian empire and the forces of the Greco-Persian king Mithridates VI.

Scythian women and the myth of the Amazons

The Scythians have often been associated with the legend of the Amazons — fierce women warriors who figure prominently in ancient Greek mythology. Diodorus Siculus was one of the ancient writers who asserted the prominent martial role of Scythian women. "For among these peoples the women train for war just as do the men and in acts of manly valor are in no wise inferior to the men. Consequently, distinguished women have been the authors of many great deeds," he wrote (translated from ancient Greek).

Mayor has explored the connection between the myth and reality of these stalwart women warriors. 

"Greek writers such as Herodotus, Plato, Strabo and Pausanias all linked the Amazons of myth to the real, flesh-and-blood women among the warlike Scythian nomads of the steppes," she said. "Now, thanks to recent and spectacular archaeological discoveries of more than 300 ancient women, some with combat injuries, buried with their weapons and horses across ancient Scythia, we know that Greek literature and art about Amazons were strongly influenced by the lives of steppe nomad mounted archers."

The twilight of the Scythian world

Herodotus described a great war between the Scythians and the Persians, under Darius I of the Achaemenid dynasty. It began in 513 B.C. when Darius invaded Scythian lands, intent on subjugating the people living there and bringing them under the Persian yoke. But the campaign proved disastrous; harried by Scythian cavalry, tired by long marches and the unrelenting vastness of the lands they were trying to conquer, the Persian army ultimately turned back. This defeat enabled the Scythians to expand their influence by moving westward into northern Greece and Thrace. 

But the Scythians were not so lucky several centuries later. Their power ebbed as they suffered a series of military defeats, first at the hands of Philip II of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great) in 339 B.C. and then by the Sarmatians, a people culturally and linguistically related to the Scythians, in a prolonged conflict that lasted from the fourth century B.C. to the second century A.D., according to Britannica. They also suffered a major military defeat during the second century B.C., when Mithridates VI, the king of Pontus, in northern Anatolia, decisively defeated Scythian forces and incorporated Scythian warriors into his own army.

A severe blow to Scythian society and political hegemony came during the fourth century A.D., when the Scythians were devastated by the Huns, mounted nomadic warriors from Eurasia who, under their ruler Attila, invaded Europe in the fifth century A.D. According to World History Encyclopedia, the Scythians may have been assimilated by the Goths at this time. Some scholars believe that the Ossetians, who occupy parts of southern Russia and the Caucasus Mountain region, may derive their ancestry from the Scythians.

Mayor, however, cautioned that tales of a culture's ultimate demise can be misleading.

"Although the ancient Scythian culture as the ancient Greeks, Romans and Persians knew them faded with upheavals in the Middle Ages, extinction or integration with other tribes, and the rise of Islam — and despite the modern history of continual conquests, displacements, oppression, and other turbulent events — Scythian traditions never really disappeared," she said. "Scythian customs and expertise in mounted archery continued with the Parthians, the Mongols, and others, and Scythian riding and archery skills and egalitarian values persist in some nomadic and semi-nomadic groups living in Central Asia today."

Additional resources

• Watch a video about the Scythians by historian Barry Cunliffe, author of "The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe."
• Read Discover Magazine's article about the warrior women of ancient Scythia.
• Learn about the ancient Scythians at the British Museum.

Originally published on Feb. 10, 2022. Updated on March 18, 2022.

Bibliography

University of Chicago, "Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Book II:35-60." https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/diodorus_siculus/2b*.html 

One Earth, "Pontic Steppe." https://www.oneearth.org/ecoregions/pontic-steppe/ 

World History Encyclopedia, "Scythians." https://www.worldhistory.org/Scythians/ 

University of Chicago, "Herodotus, Chapter 4:46-82." https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Herodotus/4C*.html 

ZME Science, "Pristine 2,300-year-old Scythian woman's boot found in frozen Altai Mountains." https://www.zmescience.com/science/scythian-boots-0532/ 

The Siberian Times, "Siberian Princess Reveals her 2,500 year old tattoos." https://siberiantimes.com/culture/others/features/siberian-princess-reveals-her-2500-year-old-tattoos/ 

Realm of History, "Workmanship beyond warfare: The Scythian 'paradox' in gold-made artifacts." https://www.realmofhistory.com/2015/09/07/workmanship-beyond-warfare-the-scythian-paradox-in-gold-made-artifacts/ 

World History Encyclopedia, "Scythian Religion." https://www.worldhistory.org/Scythian_Religion/ 

History Hit, "Why was the Scythian bow so effective?" https://www.historyhit.com/why-was-the-scythian-bow-so-effective/ 

World History Encyclopedia, "Darius I." https://www.worldhistory.org/Darius_I/ 

Britannica, "Scythian: Ancient People." https://www.britannica.com/topic/Scythian 

World History Encyclopedia, "Mithridates VI." https://www.worldhistory.org/Mithridates_VI/ 

Britannica, "North Ossetia-Alania." https://www.britannica.com/place/North-Ossetia-Alania#ref95738 

A brutal attack on an Iron Age town in northern Spain during the mid-fourth or late third century B.C. left more than a dozen bodies — men, women and children — scattered and smoldering in the streets, as the town burned. 

Injuries inflicted upon the people who died were horrific. One person was decapitated, two had severed arms, and the remains of nearly half of the individuals showed signs of mutilation, archaeologists recently discovered.

New analysis of the victims' bones — the first detailed investigation of their injuries — suggests that they were murdered by a neighboring community during either a calculated power grab or an act of revenge. 

Related: 25 grisly archaeological discoveries

The site of the massacre was once a bustling, economically thriving town called La Hoya, located in northern Spain's Rioja Alavesa region. It was occupied from the 15th century B.C. to the third century B.C., and at its peak was home to about 1,500 people. Archaeologists uncovered the prehistoric settlement in 1935, and excavated it from 1973 until around 1990, uncovering about 15% of the site, the scientists reported in a study published today (Oct. 1) in the journal Antiquity. 

Though only a fraction of La Hoya was excavated, it was immediately clear that something terrible had happened there. Burned skeletons — at least 13 complete and partial remains — were found lying in the streets and inside buildings. One adult male had been decapitated, though the archaeologists did not find his skull. Damage to his right clavicle and shoulder bone revealed that his attacker struck more than once, according to the study.

Bone injuries of another male victim suggested he had been stabbed repeatedly from behind; a teenage girl suffered an amputated arm, which was found a short distance from her body, still wearing five copper-alloy bracelets, the researchers reported. They found no signs of weapons near the bodies. Nor were there any defensive injuries, and the damage appeared to have been inflicted at close range. All of these clues pointed to a surprise attack.

Scattered craft items, hobbled livestock and vessels filled with recently harvested cereal grain suggest the attackers invaded La Hoya during a market day in the summer or early autumn. By deliberately choosing a time when public spaces would be crowded, the attackers would have ensured a higher number of casualties, according to the study.

Yet despite the display of abundant goods in La Hoya at the time of the attack, the city was unplundered and its riches untouched, hinting that the motivation for the violence was political rather than for economic gain, the scientists said.

A violent legacy

The Roman occupation of Iberia, beginning in 218 B.C., was brutal, and has long been credited with sparking cycles of regional violence and upheaval. Two Roman massacres in Iberian towns — Cerro de la Cruz in 150 B.C. to 130 B.C. and La Almoina in 75 B.C. — are known from archaeological evidence. In Cerro de la Cruz, the Romans enslaved 10,000 people and beheaded 500 of them; in La Almoina, they shackled and executed 14 unarmed men. There, one man was beheaded, another was pierced by a javelin, and several had all of their limbs cut off, according to the study. 

However, the La Hoya carnage predates Roman conquest in northern Spain, so it's possible that political instability and deadly clashes between Iberian rivals were already well underway prior to the arrival of Roman forces, the scientists reported.

An attack on La Hoya, which was politically and economically important in the region, likely had dramatic repercussions on the balance of local power, "by either creating a power vacuum or by consolidating the position of a rival community," the study authors reported.

Because the bodies were left unburied, the village was probably abandoned after the slaughter. Some who have analyzed the La Hoya site previously suggested that the townfolk may have regrouped and continued to live in La Hoya for centuries after the massacre, according to the study. But the preserved aftermath of the attack and the condition of the remains make that scenario highly unlikely, "given the scale of death and destruction revealed by the excavations," the scientists wrote.

Originally published on Live Science.

Throughout humanity's long and often-bloody history, there have been battles in which one side gained ground and promptly lost it again. And victories have often been marred by the sobering reality of heavy casualties on both the winning and the losing sides.

Many military clashes seem like a waste in retrospect, but are there any battles that stand out for their sheer futility?

There are, sadly, many contenders. Some were poorly planned and executed, such as the botched Dieppe Raid of Aug. 19, 1942, in which undersupported Allied forces lost more than 3,000 soldiers while attempting to take a French port under German control during World War II.

Other battles flared over astoundingly trivial slights, such as the so-called "Pastry War" of 1838. This altercation between France, Mexico and the U.S. erupted when a Frenchman demanded restitution for his lost property in Mexico — a pastry shop that Mexican forces had destroyed and looted the previous year, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.     

However, a strong candidate for the most pointless battle of all time was a European skirmish that purportedly took place from Sept. 21 to Sept. 22 in 1788. In this altercation, there was no winner and no loser, as the victor and the defeated were one and the same — the Austrian army. [10 Epic Battles that Changed History]

It's a confusing scenario that was equally perplexing to the Austrians, who, at the time, were engaged in the Austro-Turkish War, waged from 1787 to 1791 against the Ottoman Turks, author Eric Durschmeid, a former war correspondent for the BBC, wrote in his book "The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History" (Arcade Publishing, 2016). 

Austrian soldiers launched a deadly response to what was perceived as a Turkish attack, and the battle was joined near the town of Karánsebes (also spelled Caransebeș) in what is now Romania (then Transylvania). But when the smoke cleared, the Austrian army discovered that they had been battling themselves all along, though accounts vary about the scale of the carnage, according to Durschmeid.

A drunken start

The "attack" unfurled on the night of Sept. 21 while the Austrians, under the leadership of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, were on a night march to engage with the Turkish army, historian Charles Kirke, a lecturer in military anthropology at Cranfield University in the U.K., wrote in the book "Fratricide in Battle: (Un)Friendly Fire" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

When the army stopped close to Karánsebes to rest, tired and thirsty cavalry officers bought liquor for themselves and started drinking. Soon after, a fight broke out between cavalry and infantrymen; shots were fired, and drunken, joking cries that the army was under attack by the Turks sparked panic that quickly spread among the ranks, Kirke reported.

"While it was obviously a prank in the eyes of the soldiers close by, the columns of soldiers behind heard shouts and firing in the darkness ahead, and assumed the worst," he wrote.

Skirmishes erupted as thousands of soldiers panicked and threw themselves into the fray, firing in the dark at anything that moved. When the sun rose over the bloody scene — perhaps as many as 10,000 Austrian soldiers were killed or wounded — it became clear that there were no Turkish soldiers in sight. But when the Turkish army did turn up two days later, they easily outmaneuvered the demoralized the Austrians, and captured the undefended Karánsebes, according to Kirke.

Spotty records

However, historical records about the incident are spotty, calling into question whether the battle occurred as popular lore suggests and hinting that the embarrassing story of the Austrian army's blunder may have become exaggerated over time, historian Matthew Mayer explained in his doctoral thesis about the 1788 campaign, written while Mayer was a graduate student at McGill University in Canada.

According to Mayer, Joseph II sent a letter to his brother Leopold on Sept. 26 of that year, describing the sudden outbreak of rifle fire on the night of Sept. 21 and the alarm and confusion that followed.

"The column in which I found myself was completely dispersed," Joseph wrote. "Cannons, wagons and all the tents were turned over, it was horrible; [my] soldiers shooting at each other! Eventually calm was restored, and we were lucky that the Turks were not on our trail otherwise the whole army would have been destroyed."

Joseph further expanded on the debacle in a dispatch that he sent to the chancellor of Austria, Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, according to Durschmied.

"This disaster which our army suffered due to the cowardice of some units is incalculable for the moment. The panic was everywhere, among the army, among the people of Karansebes, and all the way back to Temesvar [a city in western Romania], a good ten leagues from there," he wrote.

But there is no mention of heavy casualties — in Joseph's letters or in other historical records — and Joseph's letter to his brother includes only a brief description of damage to army stores, which included the loss of "all the pots and tents" and "three pieces of artillery."

It's possible that the more sensationalized version of the battle that appears in Kirke's book drew from the biography "Joseph II" (Twayne Publishers, 1968), in which historian Paul Bernard mentions the loss of 10,000 men but omits attribution for the number, Mayer pointed out.

"Since Bernard fails to give his source, Joseph's description must be seen as the more accurate of the two," Mayer concluded.

Original article on Live Science.

Introduction

Humans have enlisted animals to help fight their wars since prehistoric times, and some of the world’s earliest historical sources tell of battles between ancient warlords in horse-drawn chariots. Dogs and horses were probably the first animals used in war, and many are still used today in modern military and police tasks.

But, an even wider range of creatures have been used to fight human battles throughout history. Here we count down some of the unwitting animals that have been recruited to fight in both ancient and modern warfare.

Related: What Really Happens to Fighting Bulls After the Fight?

Pigeons

Pigeons have been used to carry messages since at least the 6th century B.C., when the Persian king Cyrus is said to have used pigeons to communicate with the distant parts of his empire. Like many species of birds, pigeons have an innate homing ability that is thought to be based on their sensitivity to the direction of the Earth's magnetic field. Some specially bred homing pigeons have found their way home from more than 1,800 miles (2,900 km) away.

Because of this ability, pigeons have been used to carry messages for conquerors and generals throughout much of human history. But, their homing superpower only works one way: usually the birds need to be transported to where they will be used, to fly back home with a message.

During the four-month Siege of Paris by Prussian forces in 1870 and 1871, Parisians trapped inside the city used messenger pigeons to communicate with their compatriots outside. The French military used hot air balloons to send hundreds of caged homing pigeons over the enemy lines, where they could be collected and used to send microfilm messages back into the city. The use of messenger pigeons reached its peak in World War I, just before the widespread adoption of radio, when more than 200,000 messenger pigeons were used by Allied forces alone.

One of the most famous wartime pigeons, named Cher Ami, earned the French "Croix de Guerre" for delivering 12 messages between forts in the Verdun region of northern France. The plucky bird made his last message delivery despite having suffered serious bullet injuries, and is credited with saving the "Lost Battalion" of the U.S. 77th Infantry Division, which had become cut off by German forces.

Another group of 32 pigeons earned the British Dickin medal for animal valor during the D-Day invasion of World War II, when Allied soldiers kept radio silence and relied on the pigeons to relay messages.

Bears

Bears appear a few times in the history of warfare, but one bear in particular became famous for his exploits against the Germans during World War II.

Voytek was a Syrian brown bear cub adopted by troops from a Polish supply company who purchased him while they were stationed in Iran. The bear grew up drinking condensed milk from a vodka bottle and drinking beer. When the Polish troops were moved around as the war progressed, Voytek went too: to battle zones in Iraq, Palestine, Egypt and then Italy.

Soon, Voytek had grown to weigh more than 880 pounds (400 kg) and stood more than 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall. In time, he was enlisted as a private soldier in the supply company, with his own paybook, rank and serial number, and eventually rose to the rank of corporal in the Polish Army. In 1944, Voytek was sent with his unit to Monte Casino in Italy, during one of bloodiest series of battles of World War II, where he helped carry crates of ammunition.

In his later years, Voytek lived at the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, where he’d been stationed with his adopted supply company at the end of the war. He became a popular public figure in the United Kingdom, and often appeared on children’s television shows until his death in 1963.

Elephants

Elephants, the largest land mammals on Earth, made their mark in ancient warfare as creatures capable of devastating packed formations of enemy troops. Elephants could trample enemy soldiers, gore them with their tusks and even throw them with their trunks. They were often armored against enemy weapons, or had their tusks tipped with iron spikes. Some even carried a raised fighting platform on their backs for archers and javelin throwers.

Elephants were first used in war in India around the 4th century B.C., many centuries after wild Asian elephants first began to be tamed there around 4500 B.C. Elephants breed slowly and the captive herds were small, so wild males were usually caught and trained to be war elephants. In 331 B.C., the invading armies of Alexander the Great encountered the war elephants of the Persian Empire for the first time at the Battle of Gaugamela. The elephants terrified Alexander’s soldiers, but that didn’t stop them from winning the battle, and soon Alexander added all of Persia's war elephants to his own forces.

In 280 B.C., the king Pyrrhus of Epirus borrowed more than 20 African war elephants from the Egyptian king Ptolemy II, to attack the armies of the Roman Republic at the Battle of Heraclea in southern Italy. The elephants helped to rout the Romans, but by the time of the battle of Asculum the next year, the Romans had developed anti-elephant wagons covered in iron spikes and troopers were specially trained to attack the elephants with javelins. Pyrrhus also won that battle against Rome, but with huge losses among his troops, giving rise to the term "a Phyrric victory." The Romans also faced elephants in the Punic wars against Carthage, and in the Second Punic War (201-218 B.C.), the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca led war elephants over the Alps to attack Italy from the north. Many animals died during the crossing.

Later, the Romans used war elephants themselves in their conquests in Spain and Gaul, where they were known for their terrifying psychological effect on undisciplined "barbarians." War elephants were also used in the Roman invasion of Britain under the Emperor Claudius in 43 A.D. Ultimately, elephants proved unsuited to war — they were too vulnerable to massed weapons, and too likely to panic: the terrified giant beasts often caused as much damage to their own forces as they did to the enemy.

Elephants continued to be used as war animals in Asia and India until recent centuries, and some animals continue today in ceremonial military roles, but the emerging use of cannons eventually ended their role in combat.

Camels

Camels still serve as military patrol mounts in the deserts, mountains and wastelands of several regions of the world. Although a camel cannot charge as fast as a horse, they are valued for their ability to endure long marches in harsh and sometimes almost waterless conditions.

Archaeologists think camels were first tamed as pack animals and as herd animals for milk and meat in North Africa and the Middle East around 3,000 years ago. The first recorded use of camels in war is in 853 B.C., when the Arab king Gindibu fielded 1,000 camels in an allied army united against the Assyrians at the Battle of Qarqar, in modern-day Syria. In later centuries, the Parthian and Sassanid Persians sometimes armored their camels entirely, like cataphract heavy horse cavalry.

From the 7th century A.D., Arab, Berber and Moorish camel troops were an important part of the Muslim armies that conquered the Middle East, North Africa, and southern Spain. Foreign camel troops were often employed in the European colonial armies of the 18th and 19th centuries, in the Middle East, Africa and India. Several countries still maintain units of camel cavalry descended from those colonial forces.

In World War I, both the Ottoman and Allied forces in the Middle East included camel cavalry among their forces. Camels were also used in the Arab rebellion against Ottoman rule in the Hejaz region of the Arabian Peninsula, with the aid of the British Army officer T.E. Lawrence, known as "Lawrence of Arabia."

Dogs

Dogs may be man's best friends, but they can also be fearsome opponents. The first dogs of war were probably hunting dogs that joined their masters in raids on hostile human communities. Since then, large dog breeds have served on battlefields, as scouts and as defensive sentries for everyone from the ancient Egyptians to Native American peoples.

One of the earliest accounts of dogs fighting in battle comes from the early kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor around 600 B.C., where a pack of Lydian war dogs routed and killed a number of invaders.

The Roman legions bred their own war dogs from an ancient mastiff-like breed known as the Molloser. They were mainly used as watchdogs or for scouting, but some were equipped with spiked collars and armor, and were trained to fight in formation.

Today's dogs of war are mainly limited to the battlefield roles of messengers, trackers, scouts, and sentries alongside human handlers. They are also used in military policing tasks, such as the U.S. military’s bomb-sniffing dogs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Horses

No other animal has played so great a role in the history of warfare as the horse. Archaeologists have found evidence of the use of horses by raiding nomads as early as 5,000 years ago on the steppes of central Asia and eastern Europe, where it is thought horses were first domesticated.

Several "kurgan" burial mounds across an area from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, some dated to as early as 3000 B.C., hold the remains of horses that were sacrificed at the death of their nomad rider and buried alongside him, along with bridles, saddles, and weapons. Later burial mounds from the same region, dated to around 2000 B.C., hold the earliest horse-drawn chariots.

The use of horses in war is also documented in ancient historical documents, including the War Panel of the Standard of Ur, from the Mesopotamian city of Sumer in around 2500 B.C., which shows horses or donkeys pulling a four-wheeled wagon. From around 1600 B.C., the powerful Hittite civilization in Anatolia were famed for their use of horse-drawn war chariots as a stable platform for fighting with bows and spears. And in the centuries that followed, chariots were in use from ancient Egypt to ancient China.

One of the world’s earliest war stories, Homer’s "Iliad," from around 800 B.C., describes the heroes of the Trojan War driving to battle in horse-drawn chariots, before dismounting to fight on foot. Troy itself, Homer said, was famed for King Priam's magnificent herds of horses — and the trick of the Trojan Horse sealed the fate of the city.

The invention of an effective saddle and stirrup, along with larger breeds of horses that could carry a rider in heavy armor, gave mounted warriors a decisive edge. Simple stirrups were used in India and China from around 500 B.C., and the use of heavily armored mounted warriors, known as cataphracts, developed in the Median and Persian kingdoms of ancient Iran at about the same time.

Horses and mounted cavalry have played a major part in almost every major war ever since — from the nearly nonstop wars of the post-Roman world, to the Hun and Mongol invasions, to the Muslim conquests and the Crusades; in the New World, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Crimean War, where the Light Brigade made its famous charge; and in the many colonial and territorial wars waged around the globe in recent centuries.

The extensive use of horses in combat did not end until the era of modern warfare, when, trucks, tanks and machine guns began to make the creatures obsolete. Several horse charges were carried out during World War I, but only a few were used in World War II. One of the last instances of horses in warfare was a successful charge by the Savoia Cavalleria, an Italian horse regiment, against Russian infantry at Isbushenskij, on the Eastern Front, in 1942.

Dolphins

The U.S. Navy has been training bottlenose dolphins to carry out marine patrols since the 1960s, after they were identified for their intelligence and military aptitude in a program of tests of 19 different types of animals, including birds and sharks.

A dolphin’s main military asset is its precise echolocation sense, which lets it identify objects underwater that would be invisible to human divers. Dolphins also use their eyes underwater, but by emitting a series of high-pitched squeaks and listening for the echoes that bounce back, they can make a mental image of objects they can’t see.

U.S. Navy dolphins are deployed with teams of human handlers on patrols of Navy harbors and other shipping areas to look for threats such as marine mines, or "limpet bombs" attached to the hulls of warships. The dolphins are trained to spot strange objects and report back to their human handlers with a type of "yes" and "no" response. The handler can follow up on a "yes" response by sending the dolphin to mark the object's location with a buoy line.

These mine-marking abilities came in handy during the Persian Gulf War and in the Iraq War, when Navy dolphins helped clear mines from the port of Umm Qasr in southern Iraq. U.S. Navy dolphins are also trained to help people having difficulty in the water, and to locate enemy divers or swimmers. But, the Navy denies rumors it has trained dolphins to attack, or to use underwater weapons.

Bees

The ancient Greeks and Romans are among many ancient peoples known to have used bees as tiny weapons of war. Attackers would sometimes catapult beehives over the walls of besieged cities, and the defenders of Themiscyra, a Greek town famous for its production of honey, defeated the attacking Romans in 72 B.C. by sending swarms of bees through the mines that had been dug beneath their walls.

The Romans seem to have an especially bad history with bees. In 69 B.C., the Heptakometes of the Trebizond region in Turkey tricked invading soldiers under the command of the Roman general Pompey by leaving hives filled with poisoned honey along the route of their march. Chemists now think the poison was a grayanotoxin that can form in honey, which is rarely lethal to humans but makes them very sick, and the Heptakometes were able to easily defeat the vomiting, intoxicated Romans.

At the Battle of Tanga, in German East Africa (now Kenya) during World War I, both the invading British forces and the defending Germans were attacked on the battlefield by swarms of angry bees, which caused the British attack to fail when a swarm drove off one of their infantry regiments. British propaganda from the time portrayed the bee attack as a fiendish German plot that used trip wires to aggravate the hives of the insects.

During the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, Viet Cong guerillas were said to have carefully relocated wild hives of the Asian giant honeybee, Apis dorsata, along the trails used by enemy patrols. One fighter would wait nearby until a patrol approached, before setting off a firework near the hive to aggravate the bees and attack the enemy soldiers.

Cattle

Stampeding cattle are one of nature's irresistable forces. They have been used many times in the history of warfare in attempts to crush opposing forces — but often with mixed results.

At the Battle of Tondibi in West Africa in 1591, the defending army of the Songhai Empire opened the engagement with a charge of 1,000 stampeding cattle against the lines of Moroccan infantry — a tactic that had worked in the past against enemies who had no guns. But the Moroccans did have guns, which spooked the cattle. The creatures stampeded back into the Songhai army, who lost the battle and eventually lost control of their empire as a result.

In 1671, the Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan (later Sir Henry, and the British governor of Jamaica), led an army of 1,000 pirates and freebooters to attack the Spanish colony of Panama City. The Panamanians had only 1,200 troops to defend the city, but they also deployed a herd of 2,400 wild cattle, which they planned to stampede into the pirate army.

But, the pirates stationed themselves behind a patch of swampland, which made the Panamanian cavalry and cattle charges impossible. The wild bulls were finally released late in the battle, but the pirates managed to divert the stampede by waving rags at the charging bulls, and eventually shot down all the poor beasts with muskets.

Morgan and the pirate army went on to capture and sack Panama City, which burned down a few days later, after several mysterious fires broke out. It was rumored that Morgan himself ordered the city to be burned so his drunken pirate army would be forced to move on elsewhere.

Mosquitos

Late in World War II, the German military forces in control of Italy ordered the flooding of the Pontine Marshes south of Rome, in an effort to create a malaria-filled swamp that would slow the Allied advance. The marshes had been drained in a major development project in the 1920s and 1930s. But after Italy changed sides in 1943, and German forces took control of the country, they ordered the pumps that kept the marshes under control to be stopped.

Soon the marshes started to fill with brackish water, which pro-Nazi scientists had foretold would encourage the return of the malarial mosquito species Anopheles labranchiae to the marshes, as well as causing long-term damage to the agriculture of the region.

Over the months that followed, the Allies and Germans fought several "Battles of the Swamps" in the Pontine Marshes, as the water and mud got deeper and amid worsening outbreaks of mosquito-borne malaria that badly affected soldiers on both sides.

But in the end, the mosquitos and malaria were not enough to stop the Allied advance. After the war the Pontine Marshes were drained once more, and the region has been free of malaria since the 1950s.

Scorpions

The Romans armies faced an enemy even worse than bees when they besieged the Atrenians at the city of Hatra, near Mosul in modern-day Iraq, in 198 B.C. According to ancient accounts, the Atrenians seem to have perfected a method of handling scorpions without endangering themselves, which allowed them to fill clay pots with dozens of the stinging creatures and hurl them down on the attacking Romans.

"The insects fell into the Romans' eyes and on all the unprotected parts of their bodies," wrote Herodian of Syria early in the 3rd century A.D.: "digging in before they were noticed, they bit and stung the soldiers."

The hot climate and disease among the attackers did the rest, and the Romans eventually had to give up the siege of Hatra.

Historian Adrienne Mayor of Stanford University, who has published a book about ancient special tactics like scorpion bombs, thinks the Atrenians handled the scorpions by spitting on their tails, which allegedly puts them out of action and allows people to pick them up. Modern researchers who have recreated the scorpion bomb found a better way was to put the creatures in a fridge for a few minutes instead.

Animal astronauts

The first earthlings in space were not human astronauts, but many animals that took part in the Cold War "space race" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, from the late 1940s to the 1970s. In the very first animal flight, in 1947, a flask filled with fruit flies reached an altitude of 68 miles (108 km) on a U.S. test flight of a captured German V2 rocket. The flask of flies descended by parachute and they were recovered, still alive.

Mice, frogs, guinea pigs, dogs and monkeys also earned their astronaut wings in the years that followed. A rhesus monkey named Albert became the first primate in space in 1948, also aboard an American V2 rocket. And in 1957, the Soviet space dog Laika became the first animal in orbit on Sputnik 3. Neither Albert nor Laika survived their space journeys, a common fate for many test flight animals.

America's most famous animal astronaut was Ham, the "first Hominid in space," who flew in a prototype Mercury capsule on a Redstone rocket on Jan. 31, 1961. Ham was selected for the flight from more than 40 prospective astrochimps by US Air Force scientists. He had been trained to pull on levers in response to flashing lights, receiving either banana pellet treats or mild electric shocks. The training experiments were repeated in flight — without the shocks — to see how his performance was affected.

Ham flew for almost 17 minutes in a suborbital flight before his Mercury capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The chimp suffered only a bruised nose during the journey, and carried out all his lever-pulling tasks only a fraction of a second slower than on Earth, showing that humans too would be able to endure the stresses of spaceflight. Ham's historic journey paved the way to space for the first human astronauts.

Mules

Mules have played an unsung but crucial role throughout the history of warfare by carrying or hauling much of the food, water, tents, weapons, ammunition and other supplies needed by armies.

Born from a male donkey and a female horse, mules became preferred over horses for carrying loads because of their greater endurance and milder natures. They are also quite intelligent, as Charles Darwin noted, which has contributed to their stubborn reputation.

Roman legionaries were allotted one mule for every group of eight soldiers who shared a tent together, to carry their belongings and supplies. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar began his rebellion against Rome by crossing the river Rubicon in a carriage drawn by a team of mules, which had been borrowed from a nearby bakery so that Caesar could travel without raising suspicions.

Sure-footed mules were also preferred to skittish horses in difficult country or crossing mountains: Napoleon Bonaparte rode a mule across the Alps as he led the French armies into Italy in 1800. During World War I, the U.S. Army used about 571,000 horses and mules in Europe during World War I, and lost about 68,000 that were killed in action.

Mules continue to be used in military tasks today, including with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, where they help keep open supply lines to remote mountain outposts. Mules used by the Pakistan Army are trained to carry a load of up to 160 pounds (70 kilograms) and to walk up to more than 14 miles (20 kilometers) before resting.

Bats

The bat bomb was a bizarre experimental weapon developed by the U.S. military during World War II, designed to start thousands of fires in cities across Japan in retribution for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The bat bomb plan called for 1,000 live bats per bomb, with a tiny incendiary device fitted to each bat. All 1,000 bats would then be housed inside a casing that could be dropped from a U.S. warplane over Japan. The idea was that the bats and their attached incendiaries would then seek wooden Japanese homes and buildings to roost in, where they would kindle fires for the war effort.

The bat bomb plans seems to have been taken seriously, mainly because it was thought up by a friend of U.S. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The plan received approval from President Roosevelt in 1942, and the U.S. military went on to spend more than $2 million dollars trying to get it to work. More than 6,000 bats were used in the bat bomb tests: most of them plunged straight to the ground or just flew away. But, they did manage to set fire to a simulated Japanese village, a U.S. Army hangar and a general's car before the program was abandoned.

Sea Lions

The same U.S. Navy program that identified bottlenose dolphins as potential military assets also highlighted the abilities of California sea lions. These marine mammals have excellent low-light vision and underwater hearing, and can swim 25 mph (40 km/h), and do repeated dives to depths of up to 1,000 feet (305 m).

As with its dolphins, the U.S. Navy continues to train sea lions to locate and mark the locations of marine mines and other threats — including enemy divers and swimmers. They are trained to attach a special leg cuff to human divers or saboteurs, which allows their handlers to haul the suspects to the surface.

A special sea lion harness also carries cameras that can provide live underwater video footage. Just one sea lion, two human handlers, and a rubber boat can replace a full-sized naval vessel, its crew and a group of human divers to search for objects on the ocean floor.

Congress took formal steps on Thursday toward requiring the US military to establish a dedicated "Space Corps," as concern mounts over the vulnerability of American space assets and their central role in modern war-fighting.

The move came with a stinging rebuke to the US Department of Defense from key members of the House Armed Services Committee, who asserted that Pentagon leadership doesn't appear to grasp how delays and cost-overruns stemming from a "crippling" organizational structure are threatening America's military readiness in space.

"We are convinced that the Department of Defense is unable to take the measures necessary to address these challenges effectively and decisively, or even recognize the nature and scale of its problems," said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), who chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee for Strategic Forces, and Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), the subcommittee's ranking member, in a joint statement. "Thus, Congress has to step in."

On Thursday, the subcommittee formally introduced a proposal to add language to the National Defense Authorization Act that would require the creation of a separate military service by January 1, 2019 to be directly responsible for space programs — a role that is currently occupied primarily by the Air Force.

The new Space Corps would be led by its own chief of staff, joining the existing joint chiefs of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force.

RELATED: 'Space Aggressors' Are Training US Forces for Extraterrestrial Conflict

Yet the Space Corps chief would answer to the civilian secretary of the Air Force and technically remain within the Air Force as a distinct service branch — similar to the way the Marine Corps technically functions within the Navy. Some senior Air Force officials have spoken out against the arrangement.

Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson said on Wednesday that she opposes the creation of a Space Corps.

"The Pentagon is complicated enough. We're trying to simplify. This will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart and cost more money," she said during a visit to Capitol Hill. "If I had more money, I would put it into lethality, not bureaucracy."

Yet backers say the creation of a Space Corps would elevate the priority of space as a war-fighting environment, as countries like China and Russia develop weapons that could neutralize the advantage America now enjoys from its vast network of communications, targeting and navigation satellites.

That network includes the Global Positioning System, or GPS, which is currently operated by the Air Force.

Rogers said on Thursday that he was "outraged" by the pushback on the proposal from Air Force leadership.

"I've been shocked by the response from the Air Force leadership. Did they miss where the Chinese and the Russians have already reorganized space operations? The Chinese literally have a space force today," he remarked. "If she can't implement this proposal without creating six new deputy chiefs of staff, that's on her. Maybe we need a Space Corps secretary instead of an Air Force secretary leading space."

RELATED: Ted Cruz: US Satellites Are Vulnerable to 'Truly Chilling' Enemy Attack

Rogers and Cooper called the creation of a Space Corps "a first, but critical step towards fixing the National Security Space enterprise."

"There is bipartisan acknowledgement that the strategic advantages we derive from our national security space systems are eroding," Rogers and Cooper said in their statement. "The adversary will continue to build capabilities to hold our space assets at risk. For that reason, we must act now to fix national security space and put in place a foundation for defending space as a critical element of national security."

In May, Gen. David Goldfein, the chief of staff of the Air Force, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that creating a separate and distinct Space Corps within the Air Force would mostly cause confusion.

"I don't support it at this time," the general said, in comments reported by SpaceNews. "Right now, to get focused on a large organizational change would actually slow us down…. Whether there's a time in our future where we want to take a look at this again, I would say that we keep that dialog open, but right now I think it would actually move us backwards."

The measure still has to be approved by the full committee, then passed by both houses of Congress and signed by President Donald Trump before it is implemented.

Original article on Seeker. 

(Inside Science) -- Everyone knew it was coming. The day before it came they even knew when. What the U.S. couldn't figure out was where.

No one expected an attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. Even after the U.S. decrypted the Japanese diplomatic cipher, the Japanese still managed to nearly destroy America's Pacific fleet and guarantee the U.S.'s entry into World War II.

The story of the U.S. code breakers at the dawn of America's involvement in WWII is one of brilliant technology, ingenuity and intuition hampered by incompetence, miscommunication, and lethal assumptions.

Ever since that day, Dec. 7, 1941, which President Franklin Roosevelt described as "a date which will live in infamy," conspiracy theorists have been busy, mostly blaming Roosevelt and the military for either not paying attention to intelligence that would have predicted the attack, or knowing the attack was coming but choosing for political purposes to ignore it. Neither is true.

Robert Hanyok, retired historian at the National Security Agency, said that even in hindsight, there was no way the code breakers could have predicted an attack on Hawaii from what they uncovered.

The British were luckier in breaking the German cipher. The Germans used a cipher machine called Enigma to send secret messages, but the cipher for Enigma had been broken by three Polish mathematicians in the early 1930s. The Poles gave a replica of Enigma to the British, who reproduced them and used them throughout the war. Even then, the British, led by the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, had to invent a single-purpose computer to decode the messages. Eventually, the British knew which cities would be bombed before the raids and where the U-boats were.

Breaking the Japanese cipher was a splendid example of American ingenuity even if it resulted in failure, according to journalist Steve Twomey in his new book Countdown to Pearl Harbor, the Twelve Days to the Attack. American cipher breakers did it the hard way.

Unlike the British, American code breakers had no model of the Japanese cipher machine to work with. Instead, they had to recreate one by intuition.

"They did not use a stolen Japanese machine," said Twomey. “They did not have photographs of one. They did not have blueprints of one. They simply imagined how it must work and they turned out to be right." Essentially, they tried to imagine what an encryption machine would look like if Japanese engineers built one and they intuited correctly.

Their machine was called Purple and the decrypted messages were called Magic. Twomey wrote that the offices of only ten people knew about Purple and could read Magic, and one was President Roosevelt's. It was a more closely guarded secret than the atomic bomb. Those ten offices did not include Congress, diplomats, or the military command in Hawaii.

Both Purple and Enigma were cipher machines, said Hanyok. A cipher is not the same as a code. And breaking code or a cipher does not mean you can read what it says, only that you know how the code was constructed. The Americans broke the Japanese cipher in early 1939 but did not get translations until the fall of 1941 Hanyok said.

In a simple code, one letter, a group of letters, numbers or other symbols are substituted for something else. For instance, the name of a ship, say the Lexington, could appear in a code as zkeigfer every time. The machine at the other end would know what zkeifger means.

"That is the main vulnerability," Hanyok said. It is possible to see patterns. Analyzing the patterns can reveal clues about the content of the message, and eventually, the meaning.

Cipher, on the other hand, doesn't make consistent substitutions. It transposes letters or numbers according to a key and the key is changed regularly. Lexington may be zkeigfer the first time it is used in a message but might not the second time and certainly wouldn't be after the key is changed. Both sending and receiving machines would be working off the same key.

The Japanese changed the diplomatic keys daily. The Americans even guessed what keys the Japanese would use, based on knowledge of past Japanese methods and encryption tendencies, Twomey wrote.

The fatal disadvantage, Twomey wrote, was that the U.S. could read only some of the diplomatic ciphers, and none of the military communications. The Japanese military had their own encryption system, which was not broken until well into the war.

Americans reading the decrypted messages assumed they were getting a fuller picture of Japanese intentions than they in fact were, he wrote.

The team intercepting the messages was on Bainbridge Island, Washington State, which relayed them in their original form — sometimes by Western Union — to Washington, D.C. for decrypting. Bainbridge couldn't read the messages but could read what we now call the metadata —who was signaling whom, when, how often, and the identity of all the stations.

Navy intelligence knew where much of the Japanese fleet was on Dec. 6, but some of the heavy carriers had dropped off the map weeks earlier and were presumed to be safely in port in Japan.

While negotiations to end the tensions between the two countries continued fruitlessly in Washington, on Nov. 26, a large task-force pulled anchor from a naval base in northernmost Japan: two battleships, three cruisers, nine destroyers, three submarines, seven tankers and six aircraft carriers carrying 353 planes, including bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters to protect the squadrons.

Twomey wrote they sailed across the north Pacific in total radio silence. Purple heard nothing.

On Nov. 27, the War Department had sent a message to Pacific commands that began: "This dispatch is to be considered a war warning." Washington then assumed the proper precautions would be taken across the Pacific. They were not, Twomey wrote. No one asked if the commanders complied.

No one ordered air patrols of the sea surrounding Hawaii, even to the North where an attack was most likely. No one ordered the American fleet out of the trap that was Pearl Harbor except for some American carriers that had sailed west earlier. They were easy targets for the Japanese planes.

In Washington on Dec. 6, Purple reported messages that Tokyo ordered the embassy in Washington and the consulate in Honolulu to get ready to burn documents and destroy one of its two code machines and then, finally, the second one, a sure sign war was about to begin. In Bainbridge it was noted that the radio call signs, usually changed once a month, were suddenly altered out of sequence. The amount of radio traffic exploded. Clearly something was about to happen, but where?

All the betting was on the southwestern Pacific, Twomey wrote, with the Philippines (an American colony), Singapore (British), Indonesia (Dutch), Indochina (French) being the most likely targets. No one thought of Hawaii because, they believed, the Japanese were not capable of such a feat, lacking the audacity, the technology, Twomey wrote. Also, no one thought they could keep that big a secret.

Even when the huge squadrons appeared on army radar on Oahu, the operators were told by their officers "don't worry about it," saying they were probably American bombers being ferried to Hawaii. The operators were told to go home.

Two thousand, four hundred and two Americans died in the attack. The battleship USS Arizona remains at the bottom of Pearl Harbor with the bodies of many of the 1,177 sailors and marines still entrapped.

The National Cryptologic Museum in Annapolis Junction, Maryland has a Purple on display.

This article is provided by Inside Science News Service, which is supported by the American Institute of Physics.

Thousands of small, sharp, spearlike objects scattered throughout Easter Island have long been presumed to be evidence of massive warfare that led to the demise of its ancient civilization. But new evidence from archaeological investigations suggests that these objects, called mata'a, were not used as weapons at all.

Easter Island is a tiny landmass located about 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) off the coast of Chile. The remote volcanic island, also known as Rapa Nui, has been at the center of fierce debates in both academia and popular culture.

Polynesians first arrived on the island in the 13th century, and Rapa Nui's early inhabitants were famous for the enormous stone statues (called moai) that they built and placed on the coastline. More than 900 of these majestic statues were found on the island — so many that scholars have argued that there must have been tens of thousands of residents on Easter Island at one point — but so far, scientists and historians have not been able to agree on what caused the collapse of its society. [Image Gallery: The Walking Statues of Easter Island]

Popular belief held that massive internal warfare led to the population's catastrophic collapse. This grim outcome became a cautionary tale of the overuse of limited resources and eventual self-destruction. But, in the past decade or so, this understanding has been challenged by archaeologists whose research points to a different story — in which disease and slavery introduced by Europeans were the more likely cause of the Polynesian society's decline.

By carefully examining more than 400 mata'a, collecting photographs and analyzing their shape using a technique known as morphometric analysis, researchers have added new evidence to this line of thinking.

"The mata'a have lots of different shapes," said lead study author Carl Lipo, an anthropologist at Binghamton University in New York. "Some of them are roundish, some of them are square and some are kind of triangular."

The mata'a would not have made good weapons, Lipo said. For one, they are not sharp, and not all of the mata'a are pointed. They are also too thick and asymmetrical for piercing lethal wounds, and the wear patterns on these objects suggest that they were used to scrape and cut things, rather than puncture vital organs, he said.

Moreover, other evidence of systemic warfare on the island is mysteriously absent, according to the researchers. For instance, archaeological digs on Easter Island have not uncovered traces of lethal skull trauma, severed limbs or mass graves, Lipo said. Nor did scientists find defensive fortlike structures common on other islands in the Pacific with a history of warfare, such as Fiji and New Zealand.   

"There's no question that there's going to be competition on the island," Lipo told Live Science. "It is an island with finite resources. But the interesting thing is that it doesn't appear to have led to lethal violence."

All of this evidence suggests that the small population of 3,000 that was living on the island when Europeans first arrived in 1722 wasn't a relic of a much greater civilization. In fact, the Rapa Nui society probably flourished until well after initial European contact, according to Mara Mulrooney, an anthropologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, who also studies the Rapa Nui civilization but was not involved with the new research.

The researchers' "morphometric analysis of mata'a lends further empirical support to the notion that Rapa Nui is an example of success rather than 'collapse,'" Mulrooney told Live Science in an email.

The Rapa Nui mata'a were probably general-purpose tools used for agricultural practices such as lithic mulching, ritual sacrifice and tattooing, Lipo said. These peaceful activities actually make more sense in an archaeological context because on such a small, isolated island, people would have had to learn to deal with their problems and mitigate group-level competition, he added.

"You can't afford to escalate to killing because there's no way to escape the cost of killing," Lipo said. "Warfare would have killed everybody."

If the Rapa Nui civilization was successful on the remote island, the next question archaeologists need to answer is how these people created a sustainable community, Lipo said. "The mystery is actually more interesting now," he said, "because now, we have something to learn."

The new study was published online Feb. 17 in the journal Antiquity.

Follow Knvul Sheikh on Twitter @KnvulS. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A community in the southern United States reclaimed an important part of its history Tuesday (Sept. 29), when three Civil War-era cannons were pulled up from the Pee Dee River in Florence, South Carolina.

The now-rusty relics once adorned the deck of a Confederate warship, the CSS Pedee, which was built in a shipyard just east of Florence, South Carolina. The cannons, as well as the remains of the ill-fated ship, have been at the bottom of the river for 150 years.

Heavy machinery was needed to lift the huge cast-iron cannons out of the water, according to WMBF News, which reported that the heaviest of the weapons weighed a whopping 15,000 lbs. (6,800 kilograms). Divers attached the cannons to the arm of a giant front-end loader with ropes, and it took about 30 minutes to pluck each one from the river, WMBF News reported. [Busted: 6 Civil War Myths]

Aside from being coated in mud and muck, the recovered cannons were in surprisingly good condition and are more or less "ready to rock and roll," said Jonathan Leader, South Carolina's state archaeologist, who helped lead efforts to locate the remains of the sunken CSS Pedee. Receding waters left the third cannon (a 7-inch Brooke rifle) exposed, and the gun is a bit corroded as a result, he said.

The recovery of the cannons marks a milestone for Leader and his colleagues at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. Between 2009 and 2012, the state archaeologist worked with several institutions, nonprofits and local volunteer organizations to find parts of the ship, including the cannons, and figure out how to get them out of the water. The task of plucking the guns from the river was facilitated by a grant from the Drs. Bruce and Lee Foundation in Florence.

Archaeologists also located the site of the Mars Bluff Navy Yard, where Confederate troops and local volunteers built the CSS Pedee and several smaller boats during the Civil War. But the discovery of the CSS Pedee's cannons is particularly special, Leader told Live Science.

Typically, victors scour the battlefield after a fight, and anything useful is hauled off and used again in future battles, Leader said. After the Civil War, cannons and other weapons were gathered and moved to various federal depots. Piled together and taken from their original context, objects like cannons became anonymous, Leader said, losing what he called their "important connections to battlefields, military actions and communities."

But that is not the case for the CSS Pedee's cannons. Thanks to historical records and oral histories from locals, a lot is known about how and where these cannons were used and who operated them, Leader said. The last time the Confederate warship's cannons were fired, they were pointed at Union Gen. William T. Sherman and his troops, who were advancing into North Carolina, he said.

Fearing the ship would fall into enemy hands, Confederate soldiers threw the cannons overboard before they "scuttled," or deliberately sank the CSS Pedee. The dredged-up weapons serve as a direct link to that moment in history, Leader said, noting that reclaiming the cannons felt like a "handshake over the ages."

But the rusty old weapons aren't just important to archaeologists like Leader; they're also meaningful to the people of South Carolina, many of whom had ancestors that fought in the Civil War and who may have helped construct the USS Pedee at the Mars Bluff Navy Yard.

"This was an early version of a modern dreadnaught," Leader said. "It had the most advanced guns of the day mounted on its decks ... It was a serious threat. And it was built by the locals."

It's only fitting, then, that locals played such an important part in hauling the ship's cannons from the riverbed. Without help from local groups, those cannons would still be lost in the Pee Dee River, Leader said. Now, the community of Florence, South Carolina, can use the objects to make sense of both the past and present. The cannons aren't just old guns, Leader said — they're the "the quilt, the fabric and the thread" that hold people together.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

If some worst-case scenarios are to be believed, then terrorist groups could use the recent outbreak of Ebola in Africa to their advantage. By using the Ebola virus as a biological weapon, the story goes, these groups could wreak havoc around the globe.

But the idea that Ebola could be used as a biological weapon should be viewed with heavy skepticism, according to bioterrorism experts. Although deadly, Ebola is notoriously unstable when removed from a human or animal host, making weaponization of the virus unlikely, two experts told Live Science.

That's not the view posited by Peter Walsh, a biological anthropologist at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. The world should be taking the threat of an Ebola bomb very seriously, Walsh said in a recent interview with the British tabloid The Sun. [7 Technologies That Transformed Warfare]

Walsh warned that terrorists could "harness the virus as a powder," load it into a bomb, and then explode the bomb in a highly populated area, CBS Atlanta reports.

"It could cause a large number of horrific deaths," Walsh told The Sun.  

But the idea of Ebola being harvested for use in a "dirty bomb" sounds more like science fiction than a real possibility to bioterrorism experts.

Dr. Robert Leggiadro, a physician in New York with a background in infectious disease and bioterrorism, told Live Science that although Ebola is listed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a possible bioterrorism agent, that doesn’t necessarily mean the virus could be used in a bomb.

"The thing about Ebola is that it's not easy to work with," Leggiadro said. "It would be difficult to weaponize."

And Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, COO of SecureBio, a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear security firm in the United Kingdom, said that claims like Walsh's are an example of fear-mongering.

"The chance of the Zaire strain of Ebola being made into a biological weapon is less than nil," de Bretton-Gordon said, referring to the strain of Ebola that is causing the current outbreak in West Africa. "It's just not going to happen."

These experts pointed to three main reasons why Ebola isn't likely to be used as a bioterrorism agent anytime in the near future.

Weaponization woes  

In order to make Ebola into a biological weapon, a terrorist organization would need to first obtain a live host infected with the virus, either a human or an animal. Only a few animals serve as Ebola hosts, including primates, bats and forest antelope, and none of these are particularly easy to detain.

Once a live host was captured, it would need to be transported to what de Bretton-Gordon called a "suitably equipped" laboratory, in order to extract the virus. Such laboratories, known as Category 4 or Biosafety level 4 Labs, are not easy to come by, he said.

In fact, there are less than two dozen Category 4 laboratories in the world, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Failure to work inside one of these labs when handling the Ebola virus would likely result in the death of whoever is doing the weaponizing, de Bretton-Gordon said.

If a terrorist organization were able to obtain a host, gain access to a Category 4 Lab and isolate the virus, they still would have a lot of work to do before they could use Ebola as a biological weapon.

"The process to weaponize a biological agent is complex and multi-staged, involving enrichment, refining, toughening, milling and preparation," de Bretton-Gordon said.

Ebola is not well suited to any of these processes, which are designed to ensure that the biological agent survives the traumatic experience of being fired from a rocket, dropped from an aircraft and submitted to harsh climatic conditions.

Hardly hardy

There's a reason you haven't heard about Ebola being used as a biological weapon in the past: it hasn't been. And that's because Ebola, unlike other disease-causing agents, is not very hardy, de Bretton-Gordon said.

"The reason anthrax has been the biological weapon of choice is not for its mortality rate — when properly weaponized it is similar to Ebola— but for the fact that it is exceptionally hardy," de Bretton-Gordon said. "Anthrax can and will survive for centuries in the ground, enduring frosts, extremes of temperature, wind, drought and rain before re-emerging."

In contrast to the hardiness of anthrax bacteria, the Ebola virus is sensitive to climactic conditions, like exposure to sunlight and extreme temperatures, de Bretton-Gordon said. Once the virus is removed from its host, it requires a very particular environment in which to survive, including relatively high temperatures and humidity, he said.  

"Assuming a terrorist organization manages to capture a suitable Ebola host, extract the virus, weaponize the virus, transport the virus to a populated city and deliver the virus, it is entirely likely that the sub-optimal climatic conditions of a Western city will kill it off relatively quickly," de Bretton-Gordon said.

Slow transmission

Many of the deadliest viruses and toxins that the CDC categorizes as possible bioterrorism agents can spread from person-to-person through the air. These airborne toxins, such as anthrax or plague, could be released into the environment, through a dirty bomb or some other means, and could infect many people very quickly. [7 Devastating Infectious Diseases]

But as de Bretton-Gordon explained, that's not how Ebola works.

"Contrary to popular myth — probably from the film "Outbreak" — Ebola is not airborne, and relies on transmission through the consumption of contaminated meat and direct contact with infected bodily fluid," de Bretton-Gordon said.

It's method of transmission makes Ebola less contagious than airborne viruses, and therefore easier to contain, provided that strict protocols for containment are followed, de Bretton-Gordon said. When the proper protocol is followed, Ebola is considerably less contagious than common viruses, such as measles or the flu, he said.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

The bones of a soldier with leprosy who may have died in battle have been found in a medieval Italian cemetery, along with skeletons of men who survived blows to the head with battle-axes and maces.

Studying ancient leprosy, which is caused by a bacterial infection, may help scientists figure out how the infectious disease evolved.

The find also reveals the warlike ways of the semi-nomadic people who lived in the area between the sixth and eighth centuries, said study researcher Mauro Rubini, an anthropologist at Foggia University in Italy. The war wounds, which showed evidence of surgical intervention, provide a peek into the medical capabilities of medieval inhabitants of Italy.

"They knew well the art of war and also the art of treating war wounds," Rubini told LiveScience.

Buried horses and bashed-in skulls

The cemetery of Campochiaro is near the central Italian town of Campobasso. Between the years 500 and 700, when the cemetery was in use, Rubini said, the area was under the control of the Lombards, a Germanic people who allied with the Avars, an ethnically diverse group of Mongols, Bulgars and Turks. No signs of a stable settlement have been found near Campochiaro, Rubini said, so the cemetery was likely used by a military outpost of Lombards and Avars, guarding against invasion from the Byzantine people to the south.

So far, Rubini said, 234 graves have been excavated, many containing both human and horse remains. Burying a man with his horse is a tradition that hails from Siberia, Mongolia and some Central Asian regions, Rubini said, suggesting that the Avars brought their death rituals with them to Italy.

Rubini and his colleague Paola Zaio detailed three of these bodies in an article to be published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The first man was about 55 when he died, the researchers found. They aren't sure what killed him, but they do know what he managed to survive: a blow to the head that tore a 2 inch (6 centimeter) hole in his skull. The pattern of the wound and the size of the hole suggest a Byzantine mace as the weapon, Rubini said.

Almost as alarming, the man probably went through the medieval equivalent of brain surgery. The margins of the wound are smooth and free of fragments, Rubini said.

"Probably the margins were polished with an abrasive instrument," he said.

Whatever happened, the man survived his wound. The bone had begun to heal and grow before the man died, Rubini said.

A leper warrior?

Body No. 2, another man of 50 or 55, painted a similar forensic picture. Judging by the shape of the wedge-shaped dent in the man's skull, Rubini said, he probably got in the way of a Byzantinian battle-ax. Like his comrade with the hole in the head, this man survived for a long time after he was wounded.

The third soldier wasn't so fortunate, the researchers suspect. First of all, his bones show the telltale wasting and mutilation of leprosy, now known as Hansen's disease. In ancient times, leprosy sufferers were often banished from society. Apparently the Lombards and Avars took a more tolerant approach, Rubini said, because this man, who died around age 50, was buried in the cemetery along with the other dead. [Read: Earliest Known Case of Leprosy Unearthed]

The leprosy sufferer's skull bears the mark of what Rubini and Zaio indentify as a sword slash. It may not have killed him, but the wound shows no signs of healing, suggesting the man died within hours of sustaining it.

"The Avar society was very inflexible militarily, and in particular situations all are called to contribute to the cause of survival, healthy and sick," Rubini said. "Probably this individual was really a leper warrior who died in combat to defend his people against the Byzantinian soldiers."

Whoever he was, the mysterious leper may help researchers understand how the disease evolved over time. Rubini and other researchers are working to extract the DNA of the bacteria that causes leprosy from bones found in the cemetery. The goal is to compare the medieval version of the disease to the bacteria alive today, Rubini said: "We study the past to know the present."

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas.

The recent targeting of an Iranian nuclear power plant by a dangerous computer worm hints at how "cyber weapons" could change the face of future warfare, according to one security expert.

On Sept. 26, the Associated Press reported that the Stuxnet worm -- a piece of malware that targets computers running Siemens software used in industrial control systems -- hit the personal computers of the staff at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power facility.

The report follows a Sept. 25 article by the Tehran-based, State-run Mehr News Agency (MNA), which confirmed the attack. In the MNA story, Mahmoud Liaii, Director of the Information Technology Council of the Industries and Mines Ministry, explained that the Stuxnet worm was detected in the IP addresses of 30,000 industrial computer systems. (No specific systems were named).

“An electronic war has been launched in Iran,” Liaii said.

Though both the AP and MNA reported that the Stuxnet worm caused no serious damage to the Bushehr plant or its computer systems, the presence of such a virus and its ability to infect and takeover industrial systems raises a serious concern what role malware will play in the theatre of war.

Roel Schouwenberg is a Senior Malware Researcher with Security software company Kaspersky. Schouwenberg called Stuxnet a "cyber weapon," and agrees with the assertion made by Ralph Langener, a German security researcher who argued in a Sept. 16 blog that because of Stuxnet’s complexity, it was most likely manufactured not by a single hacker but by a highly sophisticated group, perhaps aided by a government.

“There’s no reason to believe governments wouldn’t be capable of writing malware,” Schouwenberg told TechNewsDaily. “With Stuxnet we’re seeing something which is likely written or supported by a nation-state. We’ve not seen any other cases where we suspect this to be the case.”

To construct and disseminate a worm such as Stuxnet, “requires a malware author with a lot of knowledge about these systems,” he said. “That definitely isn’t mainstream knowledge.”

Schouwenberg is confident malware will play an important part of large-scale future conflicts.

“I’m positive that in any future physical war we’ll also see a cyber-war going on at the same time, including the use of malware," he said.

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The U.S. Army will equip a group of Special Forces troops deploying to the war zone this summer with the new high-tech XM25 airburst grenade launcher that Afghanistan veterans who have fired it predict will be a game-changing weapon. If this test is successful, the Army may purchase 12,500 of the weapons.

The full name of the XM25 is “XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System.” “Defilade” means a position hidden from enemy fire by a natural or artificial obstacle. That has a special resonance in Afghanistan, where a favored Taliban tactic is to take cover in buildings with thick walls, behind trees or in underground trenches, often at distances of 300 meters or more.

These kinds of targets present a challenge even for skilled marksmen with conventional small arms, since a shot is only lethal if it hits the head or vital organs. Calling in artillery or airstrikes can take anywhere from minutes to hours; by the time heavier fire power is available the enemy has often slipped away.

The XM25 will enable U.S. soldiers to target and kill these targets in just seconds by going around or over such obstacles, according to Army officials.  Its 25 mm exploding “smart” rounds with embedded microchips are accurate up to 500 meters, approximately the length of five football fields. The shells have a lethal blast radius similar to a hand grenade, which eliminates the need for sniper-like accuracy. The explosion distance is set by the soldier before firing.

Early in May the Army demonstrated the XM at Aberdeen Test Center in Maryland by shooting its high-explosive rounds through the window of a simulated building.

Its “point-and-shoot” simplicity makes it easy for soldiers to learn how to use the XM25 effectively. But it’s hardly a simple weapon. Its fire control system uses an array of precision sensors, lasers and optics to measure the distance to the target.  “This is the first time we’re putting a smart weapon in the hands of our soldiers at the infantry squad level,” Col Doug Tamilio said at the Aberdeen demonstration. Tamilio is project manager for soldier weapons with the Army’s Program Executive Office Soldier.

When the soldier pulls the trigger, the target data is wirelessly transmitted to the shell’s micro-chip and sets it to detonate above or behind the enemy. A switch on the trigger guard lets the soldier add or subtract one or two meters to the distance, to ensure the shell explodes inside a building or beyond a wall, for example, spreading shrapnel in a 360 degree radius. “The round knows exactly where to burst over the target,” Tamilio said.

“It brings, right now … the capability to defeat targets that we’re seeing every day in Afghanistan — targets that we can’t currently hit,” he added. “It will save soldiers’ lives because now they can take out those targets.”

This is not fighting the enemy on the cheap. Each production XM25 will cost $25,000 and shells are $25 apiece.  The weapon carries four rounds in its magazine and weighs 14 pounds. For comparison, the standard issue M4 carbine weighs 7.5 pounds loaded.

The final decision to purchase 12,500 weapons, which are made by Heckler and Koch, is pending program review by senior Army officials. Field reports and soldier comments will be incorporated in a final production version, Tamilio said.

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The U.S. Navy yesterday test fired an incredibly powerful new big gun designed to replace conventional weaponry aboard ships. Sci-fi fans will recognize its awesome power and futuristic technology.

The big gun uses electromagnetic energy instead of explosive chemical propellants to fire a projectile farther and faster. The railgun, as it is called, will ultimately fire a projectile more than 230 miles (370 kilometers) with a muzzle velocity seven times the speed of sound (Mach 7) and a velocity of Mach 5 at impact.

The test-firing, captured on video, took place Jan. 31 in Dahlgren, Va., and Navy officials called it the "world's most powerful electromagnetic railgun."

The Navy's current MK 45 five-inch gun, by contrast, has a range of less than 23 miles (37 kilometers).

The railgun has been a featured weapon in many science fiction universes, such as the new "Battlestar Galactica" series. It has also achieved newfound popularity among the 20-something-and-under generation for its devastating ability to instantaneously shoot a "slug" through walls and through multiple enemies in video games such as the "Quake" series of first person shooters.

The Navy's motivation? Simple destruction.

The railgun's high-velocity projectile will destroy targets with sheer kinetic energy rather than with conventional explosives.

"I never ever want to see a Sailor or Marine in a fair fight. I always want them to have the advantage," said Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gary Roughead. "We should never lose sight of always looking for the next big thing, always looking to make our capability better, more effective than what anyone else can put on the battlefield."

The railgun's lack of explosives means ships would be safer, said Elizabeth D'Andrea, Electromagnetic Railgun Program Manager.

The Navy's goal is to demonstrate a full-capability prototype by 2018.

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Food and water shortages fueled in the future by global warming could spur conflicts and even wars over these essential resources, the authors of a new study warn.

History suggests the controversial idea might be on track.

Changes in climate, such as temperature and rainfall, can significantly alter the availability of crops, livestock and drinking water. Resource shortages could, in turn, prompt people to turn to war to get what they need to survive, several experts have warned.

A new study, detailed in the August 2007 issue of the journal Human Ecology, suggests this was the case in the past. The authors reviewed 899 wars fought in China between 1000 and 1911 and found a correlation between the frequency of warfare and records of temperature changes.

“It was the oscillations of agricultural production brought by long-term climate change that drove China’s historical war-peace cycles,” wrote lead author David Zhang of the University of Hong Kong.

Similarly, several top retired American military leaders released a report in April warning of the national security threat posed by global warming, predicting wars over water, refugees displaced by rising sea levels and higher rates of famine and disease.

Climate change could possibly improve growing conditions in some areas (particularly higher latitudes), while hurting them in others (especially the tropics), explained William Easterling of Pennsylvania State University.

“What that sets up is a sort of winners and losers situation,” said Easterling, who was not affiliated with the new study.

Easterling, a co-author of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the potential impacts of climate change, told LiveScience that all-out war is unlikely unless international institutions and global markets completely fail, but the change in distribution of resources could cause “international tensions [to] intensify.”

As an example of these tensions, Easterling cited Israel’s control over regional water resources and its use of that monopoly in the conflict with the Palestinians.

“It became a huge political tool,” Easterling said.

Easterling also said that the correlation cited by the authors of the new study did not necessarily prove that temperature changes caused increased warfare, but that there could certainly be a relationship between the two.

Separately, other scientists have argued that a looming peak in oil production could potentially generate conflict on a global scale as industrialized nations fight over dwindling petroleum supplies in an era of soaring demand.

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A recently unearthed human skull [image] believed to have been used as a ceremonial trophy by the people of an ancient Peruvian empire gives new insights into the nature of warfare in the society, archaeologists say.

The Wari Empire, a society that predated the Incas, ruled over parts of Peru 1,500 to 1,000 years ago.

While exploring a Wari cemetery last summer in Peru’s Huaro Valley, archaeologists discovered what they consider to be an elite section of the graveyard when they came across llama bones arranged in a special pattern, often a marker of something special when it comes to Wari remains.

Beneath the bones, the team found a skull with several unusual holes and marks that seem to indicate it was revered. Circular holes cut at the skull’s base [image] and back suggest it was held on poles or worn as a large pendant during special ceremonies.

A line cut across the front of the skull indicated that the scalp may have been removed either for cleaning or as a ceremonial vessel, and was later reattached with gold-alloy pins.

The archaeologists think the skull belonged to a warrior because of healed-over scars and abrasions on it. They estimate the warrior was about 30 years old when he died.

For his skull to be displayed in ceremonies, the man must have been a well-respected warrior.

“The trophy skull adds a new dimension to our understanding of the role of warriors and warfare in Wari culture,” said team leader Mary Glowacki of the Earthwatch Institute. The expedition  was funded by volunteers who join Earthwatch scientists on field missions.

The site of the cemetery, Cotocotuyoc, which sits high above the floor of the valley, was believed to be a last stronghold of the Wari as their empire collapsed.

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