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

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

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

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

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

A Peptide by Many Names

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

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

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

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

A Surge in Popularity

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

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

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

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

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

Stacking Up

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

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

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

Use at Your Own Risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discover more planet Earth news

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

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

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

Life's Little Mysteries

Are CAPTCHAs obsolete in the age of AI?

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

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

Medici murder mystery solved

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

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

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

Discover more archaeology news

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

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

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

Also in science news this week

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

—The hantavirus outbreak is over, WHO declares

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

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

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

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

Science Spotlight

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

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

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

Something for the weekend

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

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

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

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

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

Science photo of the week

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

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

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

Follow Live Science on social media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mysterious "Golden Man"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BS: Which feed will you be watching most closely?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A molecular mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archaeological anomalies

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

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

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

Previous excavations have already revealed that several of the other stone circles at Machrie Moor were originally built as timber circles before the wooden posts were replaced with stones around 2000 B.C. Human cremations and bodily burials were later placed within some of the circles, suggesting the monuments' functions changed over time.

"It is likely that the newly-discovered circle dates from a similar period as the other circles still standing," representatives of Historic Environment Scotland said in the statement.

See how much you know about Stonehenge with our Stonehenge quiz!

An 11-year-old boy in Ontario, Canada, has died after being bitten by a rabid bat that was resting on his face as he slept. The boy had no obvious bite or scratch marks and didn't show symptoms for the first 19 days after the incident, his doctors report.

While on vacation with his parents at a cottage in northern Ontario in 2024, the boy was woken up in the night by a bat on his nose and mouth, according to a report published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on June 29. His father caught the bat in a cooking pot and released it outside, and because the child had no visible injuries and the bat did not seem to be particularly aggressive, his parents decided not to seek a medical assessment, the report noted.

A few weeks later, the child began to experience tingling, numbness and swelling on the right side of his face. When he was examined at his local hospital his vital signs appeared to be normal, aside from an elevated heart rate and white blood cell count.

The next day, the boy's symptoms worsened: he lost feeling in the right side of his face and his speech was beginning to slur. While waiting in hospital, he developed a fever, confusion, hallucinations and difficulty swallowing, followed by excessive production of saliva.

After four days in intensive care at McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, the child tested positive for rabies, and after five days his brain stem reflexes were absent, indicating a total loss of brain stem function. Seventeen days after admission, following a consultation between his family and medical experts, he was taken off life support and died.

Rabies is a viral disease that primarily affects the central nervous system, according to the CDC. It is mainly spread through bites and scratches from infected animals, with bats accounting for the majority of cases in North America, according to the boy's doctors.

"Bats pose a particular risk because bites or scratches may be small and are easily overlooked, and patients may not recollect or recognize a bat exposure," the medical team wrote in their report.

According to a report in the Journal of Virology in 2013, silver-haired bats (Lasionycteris noctivagans), are responsible for the majority of rabies cases in Canada. Skunks, foxes and raccoons also often carry the disease.

The rabies virus must travel to the brain before symptoms can occur, but once a patient develops symptoms the infection is almost 100% fatal, with most deaths occurring within one to two weeks of symptom development. However, prompt treatment after exposure — including wound cleaning, antibody administration and a series of vaccines — is nearly always effective at preventing the disease, according to the CDC.

Rabies in humans is very rare in North America, with fewer than 10 deaths reported in the U.S. every year, according to the CDC. In Canada, only 28 human fatalities have been reported since 1924, according to the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association. Even so, the boy's doctors have emphasized the importance of prompt medical attention following exposure to bats and other animals that could carry the disease.

"Early recognition of exposure and timely PEP [postexposure prophylaxis] remain the only effective means of rabies prevention," they wrote. "Any direct human contact with a bat, even in the absence of a visible bite or scratch, is an indication for PEP."

They added that rabid bats do not always display the classic symptoms commonly associated with rabies, such as aggressive behavior and frothing at the mouth. "Any direct human contact with [a] bat is considered high risk," they added.

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

Editor's note: This article was updated at 06:53 EDT on July 3 with news that the mission has launched and reached orbit.

A rescue spacecraft set to speed toward a NASA telescope to prevent it from falling into Earth's atmosphere has launched into orbit.

The first-of-its-kind mission reached orbit after launching at 4:36 a.m. EDT (0836 GMT) Friday (July 3) from the Marshall Islands, carrying a robot-arm spacecraft named Link into the sky aboard a modified Lockheed Martin L-1011 airliner. In midair, a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket fired Link into orbit, where it will now rendezvous with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray telescope that has been slowly falling toward Earth and headed for an untimely demise.

The launch follows two consecutive scrubs that caused delays to the mission on July 2 and 3, the first due to weather conditions and the second a software fault. Now that Link has reached orbit, mission engineers are working to acquire a signal from the craft to confirm that its solar panels have deployed and its power systems are working, NASA wrote in an update.

Link was developed by private company Katalyst Space for $30 million. Katalyst's goal is to meet up with the falling Swift Observatory, which launched in 2004, and pull it to a higher orbit, using Link's robotic arms and thrusters. Swift is still scientifically useful but is rapidly losing altitude due to the natural drag of Earth's atmosphere. Without help, Swift will likely meet its demise later this year, scientists say.

"This is a high-risk, high-reward mission," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, said in a statement. "We have much to gain by attempting this boost, which is more affordable than trying to replace Swift's capabilities, and allows NASA to advance the nation's satellite servicing industry, for the benefit of all."

Swift cost $250 million in 2004, which is roughly $450 million today when accounting for inflation — a relatively cheap observatory compared with the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope. The Swift mission was originally designed to study gamma-ray bursts ‪—‬ cosmic explosions that occur when a massive, dying star collapses into a black hole. Swift has made many observations of these bursts in the past 20-plus years while also watching for other signs of stellar activity, like X-ray flares or supernova explosions, as well as transient objects, like comets and asteroids.

In sum, Swift helps us see how the universe is changing over short periods.

"Swift is NASA's multitool when it comes to studying the cosmos," S. Bradley Cenko, Swift's principal investigator and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. "It observes the sky using a wide range of light, and rapidly points at short-lived outbursts, alerting other facilities in space and on the ground to help coordinate follow-up observations."

High-risk rescue mission

The rescue mission comes with several challenges. Swift was not designed to be serviced when it launched, making the logistics of the mission something of a puzzle. Moreover, NASA only gave the contract to Katalyst in September, after high solar activity in recent years ballooned Earth's atmosphere and unexpectedly accelerated the spacecraft's fall due to increased drag. This meant the mission had to be ready for space in less than a year after the usual punishing requirements of design, build and testing.

Katalyst accepted the challenge because the company hopes to do this kind of work more often. "If we're going to build an enduring presence beyond Earth, we need the capability to manipulate our environment in space," Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said in the statement. "That means deploying robotic spacecraft that can reposition, repair, refuel, and refit satellites after launch."

Unless Swift altered its operations plan, however, the spacecraft would have been irrecoverable in July. So, to give Link as much time as possible to rescue Swift, the operations team at Penn State's Eberly College of Science made some changes.

For example, Swift's science was minimized so that the spacecraft looks at targets only if the telescope is put in a "streamlined position" to minimize drag, NASA explained. Power consumption has also been slashed to let Swift's solar panels fly "in a more aerodynamic orientation," which also reduces the drag that is making the spacecraft fall into the atmosphere.

These changes will allow Swift to stay above the minimum rescue altitude of 185 miles (298 kilometers) until autumn, agency models suggest. Katalyst will use that time to do the usual spacecraft "commissioning" on Link to make sure all systems are well. It will take Link about a month to rendezvous with Swift, according to NASA.

Following those steps, Link will approach Swift for evaluation, and Katalyst will use Link's robotic arms to latch onto the NASA observatory. Link will then use its propulsion system to gradually bring Swift's orbit to about 370 miles (595 km) ‪—‬ well above the pathway of the International Space Station, which orbits roughly 250 miles (400 km) over Earth.

NASA did not say how much longer Swift would be able to keep observing, should it reach its new altitude safely. However, figures from the European Space Agency suggest that spacecraft at an altitude of 310 miles (500 km) reenter the atmosphere within about 25 years. This would suggest that as long as Swift's instruments hold out, scientists would have many years of observations to look forward to.

Two brothers from the wealthy and powerful Medici family died of malaria and were not poisoned as a rumor had suggested, archaeologists have confirmed based on a DNA analysis of the brothers' skeletons. The analysis also revealed a unique, mutated strain of malaria that may hold the key to understanding the evolution of the disease in Europe.

The Medici family rose to power in the 15th century by creating the largest bank in Europe. The family used their extraordinary wealth to fund Renaissance artists and to start a political dynasty that eventually included numerous dukes, four popes and two queens of France.

In the 16th century, Cosimo I took over all of Tuscany as grand duke. But within a span of 25 years, at least five of his family members died from high fevers. This gave rise to a rumor that some of them had been poisoned with arsenic by another family member, although most people believed they died of malaria.

To get to the bottom of the 500-year-old Medici cold case, an international group of researchers tested the bones of two of Cosimo I's sons: Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici and Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici, for the DNA of Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the deadliest form of malaria and that is transmitted by mosquitoes.

The researchers extracted ancient DNA from the bones of Cardinal Giovanni, who died in 1562 at age 19 in the same month as his mother and younger brother Garzia, and from Grand Duke Francesco I, who died at age 46 in 1587 along with his wife. The team's study was published online June 17 in the journal iScience.

Because of the almost simultaneous deaths of Grand Duke Francesco I and his wife, a rumor circulated that another brother had poisoned them over a long-standing feud. But the Medicis were known to have frequented their family villas in marshy and swampy areas of Tuscany, where malaria was prevalent well into the 20th century.

Researchers found evidence of P. falciparum in the bones of both Medici brothers, confirming reports from court physicians at the time that described the brothers as sick with "tertian fever," a type of high fever that returns every three days and is a hallmark of malaria. The medical reports also revealed the brothers were treated with bloodletting.

"Now we can say with scientific certainty that malaria, not poisoning, killed Grand Duke Francesco de Medici," study co-author Valentina Giuffra, a medical historian at the University of Pisa, said in a statement.

But the ancient-DNA study held two additional surprises.

The Grand Duke's bones were positive not only for P. falciparum but also for Plasmodium malariae, a different parasite species that also causes malaria in humans, suggesting that both species contributed to the severe illness that killed him and his wife.

Cardinal Giovanni, on the other hand, had only P. falciparum, but the specific strain that infected him was previously unknown. The strain is similar to those found in ancient and early modern Europe, but with two mutations the researchers had never seen before, they wrote in the study.

"The study of ancient DNA offers us an opportunity not only to diagnose malaria in the remains of individuals from the past, but it also offers us a window for understanding the evolution of malaria species, Plasmodium falciparum in this case, which can help scientists better understand how the pathogen adapts over time," study first author Alexander Ochoa, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, said in the statement.

Further analysis of the brothers' bones is needed to determine the evolutionary relationship between the strains of malaria they carried, the researchers wrote in the study.

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

The first dinosaur found in Antarctica belonged to a group that included the largest animals ever to walk the planet, a new study finds.

A backbone from the 82 million-year-old giant was discovered more than 40 years ago, but at the time, researchers assumed it came from an ancient marine reptile. Now a new study, published June 29 in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, has revealed that it was actually a titanosaur — the group of long-necked sauropods that included the largest land animals on record.

"At first glance this appears to be an unremarkable fossil, but it holds an important place in the history of Antarctic exploration as the first dinosaur fossil found on the continent," study first author Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, said in a statement.

While this fossil now holds the record for the first dinosaur fossil found in Antarctica, other dinosaur fossils were identified on the continent after its discovery, so it's not the only known Antarctic dinosaur. In fact, researchers have identified a variety of dinosaurs on Antarctica, with another sauropod fossil identified as a titanosaur in 2011.

The newly identified dinosaur was around 20 to 23 feet (6 to 7 meters) long. That's very small compared with the largest-known titanosaurs, which could grow up to 123 feet (37.5 m) long. However, as the fossil is just a fragment of a vertebra, researchers are unable to narrow down which species the Antarctic titanosaur belonged to, and it's possible that the individual was only a juvenile when it died.

Mike Thomson, a British Antarctic Survey geologist, found the fossil during an expedition to James Ross Island in 1985. The island, which has been the site of multiple dinosaur discoveries, is located off the northeastern Antarctic Peninsula, south of the 600-mile-wide (965 kilometers) Drake Passage that separates South America from Antarctica.

Antarctica is well known for its icy landscapes, but when titanosaurs roamed Earth, the continent was still attached to South America and full of temperate forests. Antarctica's dinosaurs were so far south that they would have lived in constant twilight during the winter months, according to a news article published by the Natural History Museum.

The authors of the new study identified the dinosaur using high-resolution CT scans, which enabled them to look inside the fossil. Dating back to the Cretaceous period (143 million to 66 million years ago), the titanosaur lived in the last age of the non-avian dinosaurs, before an enormous asteroid hit what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago and wiped them out.

The Antarctic titanosaur helps researchers better understand how dinosaurs spread across Earth's southern continents, which at the time were combined into a supercontinent called Gondwana. The presence of titanosaurs on Antarctica suggests that they may have used Antarctica to travel from what is now South America to New Zealand.

Other dinosaurs identified on Antarctica include small herbivores, armored ankylosaurs and bipedal predators like Imperobator, which would have shared the forests with the newly identified titanosaur. While researchers are beginning to piece together Antarctica's ancient ecosystems, they still have a lot to learn about the dinosaurs that lived there.

"There are likely many more dinosaurs to be discovered on the continent," Barrett said. "As climate change causes ice to retreat we may indeed find further evidence of this past biodiversity."

Researchers have proposed creating a novel satellite constellation, dubbed StormWall, that could shield Earth from the worst effects of solar "superstorms" that we are otherwise unable to mitigate. The innovative idea, which would essentially create a giant airbag in front of our planet, could prevent trillions of dollars in potential damage and is "quite feasible," experts say.

Over the past few years, we have been bombarded by dozens of solar storms as the sun reached the most active phase of its roughly 11-year solar cycle, called solar maximum. These events are often triggered by large clouds of incoming plasma, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which often follow powerful explosions on the sun's surface known as solar flares. Such storms frequently paint vibrant auroras across our skies, but their effects are not always benign.

Every century or so, the sun spits out a supercharged storm, such as the Carrington Event of 1859, that is several orders of magnitude stronger than a typical CME. If such a storm were to hit us today, it could wipe out every satellite orbiting Earth, dose astronauts with lethal levels of radiation, damage power grids and even knock out the internet.

Currently, the only way we can prepare for the next superstorm is to get better at forecasting them and design our spacecraft and ground-based infrastructure to deal with their arrival as best as possible. However, a new study published June 2 in the journal Space Weather presents a more proactive approach.

In the new paper, researchers propose launching six bus-sized satellites into a geosynchronous orbit, around 22,500 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth. At this altitude — far above the International Space Station and most other satellites — the mini spacecraft swarm would sit and wait for the next "big one." If and when such a storm were spotted, the satellites would empty giant canisters of gas around the edge of Earth's invisible magnetic shield, or magnetosphere, creating a giant wall of plasma that would cushion and divert an incoming CME.

The team’s simulations show that this plasma wall could cut the intensity of a superstorm down by more than half. This would not completely shield us, but it could help avoid any worst-case scenarios, similar to having an airbag during a car crash, study co-author Daniel Welling, a space physicist at the University of Michigan, told Science magazine. "It's as if you could install an airbag in the magnetosphere," he said.

Because we currently have no way to defend ourselves against these storms, the researchers argue that such a system is vital and should be constructed as soon as possible.

"It's like people in a village who see a river flooding — maybe they can predict when that will happen, but probably what's even better is if they could build a storm wall. That's what we're proposing here," study first author Brian Walsh, a plasma physicist and space weather expert at Boston University, said in a statement. The only difference is that "it would help all people on the planet," he added.

Protecting the planet

StormWall was inspired by Earth's natural response to a solar storm. When CMEs impact our planet, they temporarily weaken the magnetosphere — known as a geomagnetic disturbance — allowing solar radiation to flood the upper atmosphere and trigger auroras. But this also causes oxygen ions to rise into the magnetosphere, where they accumulate on the sun-facing side of our planet, creating a bubble that helps shield us from incoming radiation while the magnetosphere is compromised.

The idea of StormWall is to create this protective barrier before the storm arrives so that the geomagnetic disturbance is not as strong as it otherwise would be. To do this, the proposed satellites would dump around a dozen oil trucks' worth of a reactive gas — such as barium, lithium, sodium or calcium — into the magnetosphere. This gas would accumulate on the sun-facing edge of the magnetosphere and quickly become ionized by the sun, creating a massive plasma barrier that would not only push back against an incoming CME but also help divert it around our planet.

To demonstrate StormWall's potential effectiveness, the team simulated how the satellites would have impacted the May 2024 solar storm (also known as the Mother's Day storm), which occurred when a series of CMEs struck our planet in quick succession, triggering the most powerful geomagnetic disturbance since 2003. They found that the satellites could have reduced the intensity of the resulting geomagnetic disturbance by as much as 84%.

"When you apply some really serious physics to it, it does work," Walsh said. "And the amount of mass we need, the launch capacities — it's all within our capabilities."

One of the most surprising aspects of the new proposal is the amount of gas being released by the satellites: It equates to only around one-millionth the weight of a typical CME, yet this can cut a solar storm's power in half — so the "scheme punches far above its weight," according to Spaceweather.com.

"I definitely would want this"

Some concerns need to be addressed before StormWall could become a reality. For example, similar geoengineering projects — most of which have been proposed to tackle the effects of human-caused climate change — have been criticized for the inadvertent impacts they may have on our planet.

However, while follow-up studies will be needed to make sure it is safe, the researchers are confident that the ionized gas would not affect Earth's magnetosphere or upper atmosphere in any way. Once deployed, the plasma wall would quickly dissipate and be blown clear of our planet by solar wind.

There is also the issue of money. The StormWall satellites, with their massive gas canisters, would be among the heaviest spacecraft ever launched and would likely require massive rockets, such as SpaceX's Starship, to put them into geosynchronous orbit. While a proper cost analysis has yet to be completed, this would likely cost billions of dollars.

However, considering the potential damages from solar storms, the researchers argue that StormWall would be well worth the money. The May 2024 solar storm, for example, cost U.S. farmers around $500 million due to malfunctions with GPS equipment. And that's just a drop in the bucket compared with what a Carrington-level storm would cost; the study researchers estimate that such a superstorm could cause up to $3.4 trillion in damage.

Another issue is that StormWall is a one-and-done solution. Once the gas canisters are empty, they need to be refilled or completely replaced, which would create a substantial additional cost. But again, if the benefits significantly outweigh the cost, this would be a no-brainer.

Even when taking all of these challenges into account, several experts believe StormWall is not only a good idea but also achievable on a relatively short timescale.

The proposal is "highly innovative and appears to be quite feasible in the near term," Allison Jaynes, a space physicist at the University of Iowa who was not involved in the study, told Science magazine.

And given that there are currently no viable alternatives, it would help put people at ease about the next superstorm.

"If I knew that a 100-year disturbance was coming and it would knock out power grids, I definitely would want this," David Sibeck, chief of heliophysics at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Science magazine.

Life on Earth could continue for another 1.8 billion years, according to new research. This figure, which is based on complex climate models, is far longer than many previous studies indicated.

As the sun evolves, it is getting brighter. Our star is currently producing about a third more energy than it did at the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. And it will continue to get hotter until it eventually dies in about 5 billion years.

Scientists have wondered for decades how long life on Earth will manage to cling to existence as the sun brightens. In 1982, James Lovelock and colleagues estimated that Earth's photosynthetic biosphere — which includes all plants and forms the basis for most of the planet’s biology — would end about 100 million years from now. Successive studies have pushed back the deadline for the death of all life on Earth.

In the new study, published May 28 in the journal JGR Atmospheres, researchers suggest that plant life could continue about 1.8 billion years into the future. That nears the time when Earth would lose its oceans to space, either through radiation splitting water atoms or runaway evaporation, in about 2 billion years.

"We were trying to show that life on Earth — complex vegetation — could survive longer into the future than previous studies had shown," study co-author Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist at space exploration charity Blue Marble Space, told Live Science.

The boundaries of life

Life on Earth relies on photosynthesis, the process used by plants, algae and some bacteria to turn sunlight into energy. The mechanism chemically converts carbon dioxide and water into sugars and oxygen. It requires both CO₂ and sunlight.

But at certain temperatures, plants' photosynthetic machinery shuts down. Eventually, the sun will warm Earth to the point that plants are no longer able to photosynthesize, which would in turn cause entire food webs to collapse and all life to perish.

Another issue is that as the sun dies and it gets brighter, there will be less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, effectively starving plants.

"The Earth has stayed pretty hospitable in terms of surface temperature for most of the last 4 billion years because it has a built-in thermostat" by storing CO₂ in rocks and releasing it during volcanic eruptions, Robert Graham, a planetary science researcher at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the research, told Live science.

When it is hotter, the planet pulls more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it in rocks underground, Graham said. This offsets the warming to keep the temperature stable but means that the carbon dioxide isn't accessible to plants.

Climate models and extreme plants

In the new study, Haqq-Misra and colleague Eric Wolf, a research scientist at Blue Marble Space, used 29 climate models to estimate what would happen to Earth's vegetative biosphere under different scenarios. They used the two extreme cases as limits — when Earth is too hot for life but the CO₂ was stable; and when there is not enough CO_2, but the temperature was stable. They then looked at the range of CO₂ and sunlight conditions in between those extremes. This enabled them to include situations in which Earth was very efficient at pulling carbon from the atmosphere when temperatures started rising.

They also included information about a variety of plants. Some plants can survive on a much lower ratio of atmospheric CO₂ than others. The study included plants that have a special photosynthetic process (known as crassulacean acid metabolism), such as succulents and orchids. These plants can sustain themselves on relatively tiny amounts of CO₂. The same is true of some marine plants, which can dissolve and access carbon in the ocean system.

Other experts were impressed by the findings.

"Haqq-Misra and Wolf have used a sophisticated 3D climate model to show that Earth's climate may remain hospitable to plant life significantly longer into the future than predicted" by simpler models, said Graham, who authored one of those earlier studies. "It's an advance over previous work and suggests that complex biospheres like that of Earth are more resilient to environmental change from stellar brightening than previously suggested."

Looking to the future

Andrew Rushby, an astrobiologist at Birkbeck University of London who was not involved in the research, told Live Science that the paper updated the concept of the lifetime of the biosphere. However, he cautioned that the results remained "broad estimates."

"It is not possible for us to predict or know the possible evolutionary adaptations that the photosynthetic biosphere may undergo in response to increasing solar output and lower [atmospheric CO₂], especially over billions of years," he said.

In their paper, the authors wrote that "limits posed by thermal stress or starvation may only reflect our observations of the biosphere today rather than hard limits on how the biosphere may evolve." There is also no way of knowing how life might adapt to new circumstances.

Haqq-Misra said that he found the results comforting. "Earth's system is resilient, and we are part of something that could have a much, much longer future," he said.

The results could also help scientists figure out what the thresholds could be on other planets. "Part of the challenge is starting with these Earth-based models, and then generalizing the physics as much as possible to be able to simulate a wider range of atmospheres," he said.

How much do you know about our blue planet? Test your terran knowledge with our Earth quiz!

Network latency in bitcoin mining is driving massive energy waste ‪—‬ the annual equivalent of the total generation capacity of Switzerland's entire hydroelectric power system, scientists say. This wasted energy results from inefficiencies in the mining process and increasing competition among bitcoin miners.

In a new study published May 26 in the journal PNAS Nexus, the researchers aimed to provide a theoretical model to measure patterns within the networks powering bitcoin's distributed ledger system.

But they also calculated that in 2025, around 16,000 megawatts was wasted by fruitless bitcoin mining attempts, where competing mining efforts exert massive computational power to obtain the same units of bitcoin. This is roughly equivalent to the total generation capacity of Switzerland's 701 hydropower plants, according to statistics from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy.

It's important to note that this figure differs from the total energy consumed by bitcoin mining activity, estimated by researchers to stand at an annual level of 138 terawatt-hours, as of June 2024. This is higher than the annual energy consumption of several developed countries including Norway and the Netherlands.

Energy-guzzling crypto

Concerns around the environmental impact of bitcoin and other proof-of-work blockchain technologies have abounded in recent years.

In 2021, for example, bitcoin mining's water usage, primarily for liquid-cooled computer equipment, equated to more than the domestic water use of 300 million people in rural sub-Saharan Africa, according to a 2023 U.N. report.

Bitcoin is underpinned by a distributed ledger system, called a blockchain, which operates on a "proof-of-work" model. For a new unit of the digital currency to be generated, computing power must be used to solve a digital puzzle. In theory, the first entity to successfully "solve" the problem adds a new "block" of transactions to the ongoing chain and is granted a set quantity of bitcoin in return.

However, due to the explosion of interest in bitcoin as a financial trading asset, the competition for who can be the first to complete a block and claim the rewards has become incredibly fierce. A solution to the puzzle is based on computational power, with specialized hardware providing a greater advantage in speed. It has driven commercial entities to invest in building specialized data centers dedicated to such mining operations.

Because the race to be the first to mine a block is so competitive, the difference between first and second place can be just tiny fractions of a second. This often results in "accidental forks" — where two competing blocks are registered at almost exactly the same time.

In this scenario, the block with the longest chain of subsequent blocks built on top of it will eventually become a verified and legitimate part of the blockchain — earning its miners the bitcoin reward — while the competing block will be seen as invalid and worth nothing.

The energy needed to solve the proof of work and generate these "orphaned blocks" in the first place — as well as any subsequent blocks built on top of them before the winner is decided — is ultimately wasted.

"Despite their indication of a distributed network, accidental forks are an inefficiency of the Bitcoin protocol that leads to wasted computational resources (and thus energy), increasing the cost of network operations and its environmental impact to maintain a given level of security," the researchers wrote in the study.

According to the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI), a cryptocurrency analysis firm, bitcoin is the most dominant cryptocurrency by far, with a market capitalisation of more than $1.1 trillion — more than 80% larger than the next most popular currency, Ethereum. However, instead of proof-of-work, Ethereum uses a different form of consensus mechanism to establish block authorship, called "proof-of-stake," which is significantly less computationally intensive.

While other cryptocurrencies apart from bitcoin also use proof-of-work methods, bitcoin is around twice as large as its next nearest rival in this category, making it orders of magnitude more power-hungry.

Who rules the pool

Whereas previous models for analyzing fork rates treated all miners in the network as equal, this study considered elements such as network latency and geographic distribution, aiming to provide a "null model" — a baseline which can be used as a starting point to inform future analysis.

The model also allowed the researchers to quantify other notable trends, such as the distribution of "mining pools" — consortiums in which mining operators pool their efforts to maximize their potential success. They identified a decline in the dominance of Chinese mining pools from 2022 following the country's ban on bitcoin mining while also discovering high levels of consolidation at the upper level of the bitcoin mining industry.

The report found that just three mining pools produce over 50% of new bitcoin blocks. This is a problem because it risks a "51% attack," whereby unscrupulous miners enter fraudulent information into the blockchain by ensuring that they always produce the longest chain and, therefore, become validated.

This level of consolidation distorts the market for processing fees that bitcoin users pay to have their transactions included in the next block, the researchers added, and could thus allow miners to arbitrarily delay the inclusion of specific transactions.

The patient: A man in his 20s in Edinburgh, U.K.

The symptoms: The man visited an eye clinic after noticing floaters — small, dark shapes drifting across his field of vision — along with brief flashes of light in his right eye for six days. He was otherwise healthy and had no history of eye disease, physical trauma to the eye, or drug use. He had mild nearsightedness, for which he wore glasses.

What happened next: Doctors performed a thorough eye exam while the patient wore glasses, finding that his corrected vision measured 6/6 in both eyes, the metric equivalent of 20/20. His eye pressure was also normal.

However, a closer examination of the patient's retinas, the light-sensitive layer lining the back of the eye, revealed significant damage in both eyes, according to a report of the case.

In the right eye, doctors found multiple retinal tears and bruising, as well as a retinal dialysis, a rare type of tear in which the retina begins to separate from its outer edge where it connects to other tissues of the eye. Without treatment, retinal dialysis can progress to full retinal detachment and cause permanent vision loss. The left eye also had bruising and six small, horseshoe-shaped retinal tears: three at the top and three on the side of the retinal tissue.

Since these injuries are typically caused by sudden trauma to the eye ‪—‬ from a punch or sports injury, for instance ‪—‬ doctors revisited the patient's history and asked whether anything unusual had happened involving his eyes.

The patient, described in the case report as a "hesitant historian," later disclosed that he had been using a percussive massage gun directly on and around his eyes for the past three months. He had bought the device himself and used it weekly for several minutes at a time without medical guidance, in an effort to relieve a "feeling of tiredness" in his eyes.

The diagnosis: Doctors concluded that the patient's retinal injuries were most likely caused by this improper use of the massage gun, according to the case report. These devices deliver rapid, high-frequency pulses of pressure that are intended to relieve muscle tension. However, they can cause severe damage to delicate tissues like those found in the eyes.

The eye is filled with a gel-like fluid that helps it maintain its shape. The case report authors suggested that, each time the device put the eye under pressure, it may have briefly distorted the eye's shape. Over time, this repeated stress may have placed strain on the retina, eventually leading to the small tears.

This pattern of injury was also different from what's seen in typical retinal dialysis cases, they noted. The condition most often occurs in the lower, outer part of the retina, along its bottom edge. In this patient, however, the injury was found in the retina's upper region, which his doctors said may reflect repeated forward pressure from the device rather than a conventional lateral impact, such as blow to the head.

The treatment: Around 8% to 15% of retinal dialysis cases can progress to retinal detachment, which can lead to vision loss. In this case, however, the patient's vision was preserved.

The retinal tears in both eyes were treated with laser therapy; targeted laser burns create scar tissue that helps seal the retina in place and thus prevent fluid from seeping underneath. The right eye's retinal dialysis was treated with "barrier laser therapy," which similarly creates a protective scar around the affected area to reduce the risk of progression.

At a follow-up six months later, the patient's condition remained stable, with no further damage or cataract formation (clouding of the eye's lens). Doctors reported that the positive outcome was "likely due to the patient's prompt presentation soon after noticing symptoms and the immediate initiation of treatment."

What makes the case unique: Eye injuries linked to massage guns are rarely reported. The small number of cases that appear in the medical literature suggest they can sometimes cause serious or permanent damage.

In one such case, a 69-year-old man developed severe eye complications, including lens dislocation and glaucoma (a sudden rise in eye pressure) after using a massage gun near his eye for several weeks. In another case, a 38-year-old woman developed a dense traumatic cataract — a type of cataract that forms due to physical injury — and severe vision loss after using a similar device over her temple and eye region.

The Edinburgh man's case is the first to report retinal dialysis and multiple retinal tears linked to massage gun use. Such injuries are usually associated with high-energy trauma, such as road traffic accidents, sports injuries or a direct blow to the eye, or they occur in people with underlying risk factors, including severe nearsightedness or age-related eye changes, the case report authors noted.

In this case, the young man had none of these known risk factors. The extent of the damage in the absence of these risk factors raises concerns about the effects of improper use of massage guns near the eyes, his doctors concluded.

Massage guns are widely sold for at-home use, but there are currently no standardized safety guidelines for using them on or near sensitive areas, such as the eyes. The authors of the case report said the man's case highlights the need for clearer manufacturer warnings and greater awareness of the potential risks of improper massage gun use.

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

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

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

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful atom smasher, has entered a planned four-year shutdown that will upgrade it to its most capable form yet.

The particle accelerator was switched off Monday (June 29) and is scheduled to come back online in 2030 as the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HiLumi LHC), with improvements that will allow it to smash together roughly 10 times more particles than its original design. That data could help spark new discoveries in fundamental physics and shed light on the nature of dark matter, antimatter and the early universe.

"This is a very important moment," HiLumi LHC project chief Markus Zerlauth told Agence France-Presse. "From Monday, we will be entering a new phase."

Since its first successful proton collision in 2009, the LHC has allowed physicists to test theories about particle physics and the Standard Model of the subatomic world. It was essential to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, which helped explain how tiny fundamental particles acquire mass. The collider covers a 17-mile (27 kilometers) loop at the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva.

The current shutdown is the third long-term, planned pause in the collider's operations. The first, a two-year shutdown beginning in 2013, consolidated connections between superconducting magnets and boosted the energy of the colliding proton beams. A second pause, from 2018 to 2022, involved a series of upgrades, replacements and preventive maintenance.

In the current period of dormancy, dubbed Long Shutdown 3 (LS3), specialists will install upgrades to boost the collider's luminosity by a factor of 10. That will increase the number of particle collisions, roughly tripling the number of times particles will smack into each other compared with the existing setup. Once the final version of the particle accelerator is online, it will run until the end of its operational lifespan in the 2040s and will be earmarked for replacement by a new, higher-energy particle accelerator in the years that follow.

"It really is an opportunity to explore the universe in a way we haven't done before," Mark Thomson, director general of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), where the LHC is housed, told New Scientist.

That jump means that experiments will produce much more data, which will allow scientists to study known phenomena, such as the Higgs boson, in more detail and increase the odds of observing rare events. For example, the HiLumi LHC is expected to produce about 380 million Higgs bosons over its lifetime of a decade or so, compared with the 55 million it's made to date. The data could help scientists solve problems with the Standard Model, which currently doesn't incorporate dark matter or dark energy, the primary forms of mass and energy in the universe.

"The LS3 represents a huge and complex logistical and engineering undertaking," Jean-Philippe Tock, head of the LS3 coordination team, said in a statement. "In the LHC alone, 1.2 km [0.75 miles] of magnets and components will be removed and replaced with new equipment, and across the whole complex, dozens of projects are planned, involving thousands of engineers, physicists, technicians and support personnel."

While the LHC won't be smashing any particles together during the shutdown period, researchers will continue to analyze data already collected during experiments during the prior operational window.

Though the LHC's primary purpose is fundamental physics research, technologies used to upgrade the collider could find their way into everyday life. For example, some instruments and techniques originally developed at CERN are now being used in medical imaging, sensors and art restoration.

Two lumps of potato discovered in a roughly 500-year-old Inca storage room in Peru are a rare find: freeze-dried potatoes predating the Spanish invasion, a new study finds.

These freeze-dried potatoes, known as chuño, were once a backbone of the Inca Empire's food supply and a product so fragile that they almost never turn up at archaeological sites.

The new discovery, made along Peru's arid south coast, is only the second time chuño has been recovered from an Inca site, researchers reported in the new study. It is concrete evidence that the empire directed one of its most important food sources hundreds of miles from the Andes, down to the Pacific Ocean.

Chuño is made by repeatedly exposing potatoes to nighttime frost and daytime sun until nearly all their moisture has evaporated, leaving a lightweight, long-lasting vegetable that can be stored for decades. This technique works only at high elevations where hard frost occurs regularly, so chuño had to be produced in the mountains and then transported using llama caravans, often hundreds of kilometers, to feed people living elsewhere in the empire.

The Inca used the same drying method to preserve meat, producing a product called "charki" — the source of the English word "jerky," study principal investigator Lidio Valdez, an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, told Live Science in an email.

In the new study, published May 1 in the Journal of Field Archaeology, Valdez and study co-author Katrina Bettcher, an independent archaeologist, reported that the chuño was found alongside an Inca pottery fragment and a broken spindle whorl, a tool used to spin fibers, such as raw wool, into yarn or thread.

The discovery happened during the 2024 field season at Tambo Viejo, an Inca provincial center in the Acarí Valley, where an archaeological team had worked for several years. Inside a small storage room, the team uncovered a clay pot sunk into the dirt floor, its top half long gone. As researchers scooped soil out of the broken pot, they reached its bottom.

"Almost at the base of the vessel, the two samples of freeze-dried potatoes were found," Valdez said. "They showed me without knowing what they were, and right away I said: chuño!"

Potatoes are roughly 80% water, and they typically rot within a week at lower, warmer elevations — making them a poor food choice for long-distance storage. Valdez said freeze-drying was likely discovered long before the Inca rose to power in the 15th century, perhaps when potatoes that were accidentally exposed to frost at a high elevation became dried out and people realized the result was still edible.

Because chuño can be made only above roughly 11,800 feet (3,600 meters), the samples at Tambo Viejo must have traveled down from the highlands, most likely via a llama caravan along the Inca road network, Valdez said.

"Chuño being a light product probably also made its transportation easier," he added.

The two freeze-dried potatoes survived thanks to the Acarí Valley's extremely dry conditions, which help preserve organic remains that would otherwise decay — the same conditions that have previously yielded naturally mummified guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) in Valdez’s previous work at the site.

Beyond its archaeological importance, the ancient preservation method has lessons for today. "We still have so much to learn from the people of the past," Valdez said. "Food security is a main concern, even in our times; yet we waste food, perhaps more than at any time in human history."

Relatively few Inca sites along Peru's coast have been systematically excavated, and Valdez expects more evidence of chuño — and the long supply lines that carried it — to surface as archaeologists keep digging.

Do you know where pumpkins and blueberries come from? Find out with our fruits and vegetables quiz!

Trees in China that were planted as part of huge reforestation projects appear to grow faster than those in natural forests, a new study finds. This is possibly because the reforestation trees are responding more strongly to the rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, scientists say.

China is quickly turning green. The country has planted 66 billion trees since 1978, with plans for 34 billion more by the middle of this century, as part of its "Great Green Wall" to slow the spread of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts.

These new forests absorb large amounts of CO₂, but it is unclear exactly how they differ from natural ones, study first author Yuhang Luo, a landscape ecologist at Peking University in Shenzhen, China, told Live Science.

Luo and his colleagues set out to study how differences between natural and planted forests, including species diversity, tree density and age, might affect how the forests respond to rising CO₂ and climate change.

"Planted forests are widely used in climate mitigation strategies, but most global ecosystem models do not distinguish between forest types or represent age-related dynamics adequately," Luo said. "So we felt it was important to clarify how these factors interact — not just for scientific understanding, but also for improving the models and assumptions that underpin real-world forest policy and carbon accounting."

Planted forests are those purposefully created by humans, such as those in the Great Green Wall. Natural forests, on the other hand, grow without human intervention.

The researchers used satellite data to track leaf area index, a measure of canopy density and a key driver of carbon uptake, to determine how fast the different forest types grew, and found a striking difference: Planted forests increased their leaf area 66% faster than natural ones.

Most of that difference was due to planted forests being, on average, much younger than the natural ones — and young trees grow faster than old ones. But even when comparing forests of similar age and growing conditions, the planted ones still grew 4.6% faster, and the difference was even more pronounced in mixed and evergreen forests.

This is largely due to how planted forests are managed. They tend to feature fast-growing species like eucalyptus and poplar and are often actively managed, with people removing competing vegetation and even fertilizing them. These interventions reduce competition for light, water, and nutrients, amplifying the fertilization effect of rising atmospheric CO₂.

This discrepancy peaks in planted forests when trees are around 30 to 40 years old and then declines noticeably after age 40. In contrast, natural forests grow more slowly but steadily, so have an advantage over the long term.

"Planted forests can be a powerful short-term tool for carbon uptake, but this advantage is temporary," Luo said. "For long-term carbon storage and resilience, natural forests remain irreplaceable."

Kevin Dsouza, who worked on reforestation models during his postdoctoral research at the University of Waterloo and was not involved in the new study, said the results make intuitive sense, as the sprawling leaves of young, fast-growing trees could lead to increased carbon take-up. But he is not sure that leaf area is the best measurement for tracking growth and carbon sequestration.

"It's not a bad proxy, but it doesn't give you the full picture," he said. "The canopy is just the top of the tree and the carbon is stored in all sorts of different places like wood, bark, roots and soil."

Another study of Chinese forests found that natural forests actually accumulate more carbon above ground than planted ones in their early years, Dsouza pointed out, so these results should be considered carefully alongside other factors.

Luo said the findings show that most global climate models are missing something when it comes to understanding how various forest types play a role in carbon sequestration and climate change.

"Land use management works in more subtle and specific ways than we had assumed," he said. "It is not just about planting more trees. It is also about when you plant them, what species you choose, and how you manage them over time."

Luo hopes these findings will help guide reforestation efforts, to ensure we get the most benefit from planting new forests to help mitigate the effects of climate change.

"Our work offers a more practical guide for forest-based climate action: when to plant, what to plant, how long the benefits last, and what current models are getting wrong. We hope that helps people make better decisions," he said.

Editor's note: A picture caption in this article was corrected at 5:16 ET on July 1 to say 66 billion trees had been planted.

A breakthrough in photonic chips could make large, costly, ultrafast lasers dramatically smaller, leading to portable and affordable imaging, diagnostic and information-processing devices, researchers say.

By using a decades-old overlooked laser architecture, scientists managed to fit an ultrafast laser onto a tiny photonic chip — a chip that uses light, rather than electricity, for computing operations.

In a new study published June 3 in the journal Nature, the team demonstrated that a tiny laser on the photonic chip could deliver 1.05 nanojoules of energy in 147-femtosecond (147 quadrillionths of a second) bursts — thereby competing with the output of laboratory-class ultrafast lasers.

Ultrafast lasers are used in a variety of applications, from precision manufacturing and eye surgery to biological imaging and atomic clocks, but the systems needed to power them tend to take up whole tabletops in labs or factories. Yet the powerful output of these laser pulses made them difficult to miniaturise onto photonic chips.

"For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics," Tobias Kippenberg, a photonics professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology(EPFL), said in a statement.

"Our result shows that it is not only possible, but that it can be achieved with a surprisingly elegant architecture that the integrated-photonics community had overlooked."

Forward-thinking breakthrough comes from looking back

Photonic chips manipulate light by using microscopic structures called waveguides — usually in the form of optical fibers or etched cavities — to carry information. They aren't particularly novel, and can be found in fiber-optic communications, medical sensors and lidar systems.

But photonic chips have previously struggled when handling high-powered, ultrafast lasers. That's because they need to contain light to extremely small waveguides, leading the light to interact strongly with itself and destabilizing the laser pulses.

To tackle this problem, the researchers looked at a laser architecture called the Mamyshev oscillator, created in 1998 by Pavel V. Mamyshev, a physicist and engineer at Bell Labs.

This oscillator, which has received little attention in the world of photonic chips, works by placing a nonlinear waveguide between two optical filters. This causes a high-intensity laser pulse to expand into a broader range of colors that can then pass through both filters while weaker light, which can cause laser destabilization, is blocked out. This technique essentially means that a high-intensity laser pulse can be maintained.

Because the Mamyshev oscillator doesn't require extra components to manufacture on a chip, it presents an attractive design for use on photonic chips. And although the laser cavity needed to direct an ultrafast laser is 16.5 inches (42 centimeters) long, it can be folded to occupy around the same area as a match head. This can't be done with conventional fiber-optic-based lasers, often used in photonic chips.

That takes care of the size, but the cost of ultrafast laser systems is another challenge. But because photonic chips can be fabricated using silicon wafers in the same fashion as computer chips, more than 1,000 laser cavities could potentially be produced in a single batch, the researchers said. As such, photonic chips with ultrafast laser capabilities could be produced at scale, in turn reducing manufacturing costs and even expanding their use.

Photonic chips capable of handling ultrafast lasers could, in the future, lead to portable tools for tasks like detecting pollutants or performing advanced medical diagnostics in the field, the researchers noted in the study. The technology also opens the door to smaller atomic clocks that can benefit navigation and future communications.

This eye-catching satellite snap shows off a sprawling mass of petrified lava surrounding the jet-black slopes of a potentially dangerous volcano in the heart of the Sahara. A smaller volcanic "skull" lurks near the shadowy peak's base.

Toussidé (also known as Tarso Toussidé) is a "potentially active" stratovolcano located within the Tibesti Mountains, which cover around 40,000 square miles (100,000 square kilometers) of northern Chad and southern Libya. The dark peak stands 10,712 feet (3,265 meters) above sea level, making it the second-tallest mountain in the Tibesti region.

The name Toussidé roughly translates to "which killed the local people with fire" in the language of the nearby Indigenous people, hinting at a destructive and deadly history. However, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program, there is no evidence that the volcano has erupted during the Holocene — the current geological epoch, which began around 12,000 years ago. It is unclear if it has actually killed anyone.

The dark blob surrounding the volcano is known as a massif. It is made up of layers of overlapping magmatic rock left by multiple ancient lava flows that effusively erupted, or slowly poured from, the volcano's summit.

The shadowy structure, which is up to 20 miles (32 kilometers) across at its widest point, stands out against the surrounding sand-covered plateau, which has been carved into a network of crisscrossing canyons by eons of wind blasting, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Just southeast of the massif (in the upper right of the photo), there is a small, white circle containing several dark patches. This is Trou au Natron — a roughly 3,300-foot-deep (1,000 m) volcanic crater, or caldera, which looks eerily like a giant skull when viewed directly from above.

The cranium-like caldera likely formed during an explosive eruption more than 120,000 years ago. It was once filled with a giant salt lake that was home to ancient algae and other microorganisms. When the lake dried out, around the start of the Holocene, the receding water left behind a thick layer of white salt surrounding a pair of eyelike volcanic cones.

Toussidé is one of the youngest mountains in the Tibesti range, which formed by similar effusive eruptions long before the stratovolcano was born. The entire region likely once matched the massif's dark hue before being relentlessly bombarded by sand and wind. In another 100,000 years or so, the massif may blend in with the surrounding plateau, according to the Earth Observatory.

While the shadowy volcano has remained dormant for several millennia, it occasionally puffs out steam from small vents, or fumaroles, near its summit, suggesting that it is still technically active, according to the European Space Agency. However, geologists have not properly assessed its eruptive potential.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius buried a vast collection of scrolls in ash and scorched them into solid black lumps. Now, without unrolling them, researchers have virtually read two of them —‬ and uncovered what may be a work by a well-known Stoic philosopher.

The breakthrough comes from the Vesuvius Challenge, an international research effort to digitally read the scrolls that were preserved when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by ash and pumice in A.D. 79. Papyrologists, who study and preserve the ancient manuscripts, announced June 25 that they had digitally unwrapped the surviving portion of one scroll, known as PHerc. 1667, revealing roughly 5 feet (1.5 meters) of continuous Greek text across 20 columns. Researchers also recovered more than 70 columns of text from a second scroll, PHerc. 172.

"For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible," Brent Seales, Vesuvius Challenge co-founder and a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, said in a statement. "Today ‪—‬ after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence, academic research and an innovation contest ‪—‬ we are finally able to read them."

Over the past few years, Seales and his team have used a synchrotron to essentially X-ray inside the scrolls and detect the ink ancient Romans used to write. The letters are then studied by papyrologists, who translate the text.

Part of PHerc. 1667 was physically opened in the 1980s, but overlapping layers obscured the writing so badly that the scroll was given a readability score of zero, Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, said in the statement.

The handwriting and text of PHerc. 1667 suggest the scroll dates to the second or third century B.C., making it one of the oldest scrolls in the Herculaneum collection. This early date means it could not have been authored by Philodemus of Gadara, the first-century-B.C. Epicurean philosopher whose writings dominated the Herculaneum library.

Experts think the text reads more like a Stoic treatise on ethics and human behavior, and it specifically mentions Aristocreon, the nephew and pupil of the influential Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. Very little of Chrysippus' own writing has survived, so if the attribution holds up, it would be a significant addition to the historical record of early Stoic thought.

In a separate discovery, researchers identified a new book title within scroll PHerc. 139. The end of the scroll references Philodemus' eighth book of "On Gods." While this treatise had previously been known to exist, the new discovery reveals the work extended across at least eight volumes. Experts plan to reexamine other texts in the Herculaneum collection for additional volumes that may belong to the same series.

More than 600 Herculaneum scrolls remain unopened. It's thought that the villa was once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

How much do you know about the Roman town destroyed by Mount Vesuvius? Find out by taking our Pompeii quiz!

About a decade ago, the Japanese government spotted a worrying pattern: Pediatricians were doling out a ton of antibiotics, well beyond what should be needed to treat the bacterial infections coming through their doors.

Antibiotics treat bacterial infections, not those caused by viruses, fungi or parasites. Yet doctors were often sending young patients home with antibiotics for illnesses unlikely to be bacterial. Treating nonbacterial infections with antibiotics can fuel antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and the rise of superbugs by unnecessarily exposing bacteria to the drugs, pressuring those bacteria to evolve strategies to survive. Resistant bacteria can then spread their adaptations to others, thereby compounding the problem.

In the long run, resistance could make common infections impossible to treat with existing drugs, raising the risk of serious illness and death across the population.

When pediatricians in Japan did treat bacterial infections, they were overusing the antibiotics that are likely to fuel resistance — "broad-spectrum" drugs that target many bacteria at once. When compared against 35 other high-income countries in 2015, Japan ranked dead last in the appropriateness of antibiotic choices for kids under 5.

One way to slow the development of AMR is to get antibiotic prescriptions under control. So Japan focused on one of its biggest sources of problematic antibiotic use: pediatric outpatient clinics.

"The clinics are a particular problem," said Dr. Yusuke Okubo, chief of clinical epidemiology and health services research at the National Center for Child Health and Development, a research center and hospital in Tokyo. Looking at Japan's overall antibiotic use, "90% of prescriptions are [from] outpatient clinics, not hospitals," Okubo told me. (Outpatient practices account for a similar proportion of antibiotic prescriptions in the U.S.)

A large proportion of problematic prescriptions were being written for children under 3 years old, especially those with upper respiratory tract infections, which nine times out of 10 are caused by viruses, Okubo said. The stomach bug gastroenteritis was another biggie for overprescription, despite most often being caused by a virus.

Government officials hatched an idea: What if each time a pediatrician chose not to prescribe an antibiotic in these cases, they earned a small financial reward — a tip for making a better choice? Each tip would be small, amounting to about $5 per claim at today's exchange rate, but could translate to thousands of extra dollars of annual income for individual clinics. That's no small matter for Japanese pediatricians, who Okubo estimates earn roughly $90,000 to $100,000 a year.

This incentive program, rolled out in 2018, has proved a success, so much so that it's since been expanded to cover more patients, more clinics and a wider variety of diseases. But what made the program work? I went to Japan to find out what systemic and cultural factors contributed to the program's success. Ultimately, I wanted to see whether other countries, like the U.S., could learn from this nationwide experiment.

The quietly rising threat of resistance

With bacteria, as with animals, it's survival of the fittest. When exposed to antibiotics, a percentage of bacteria die, while others survive. That surviving population has traits that help them withstand the drug's effects, which are encoded in "resistance genes." Bacteria can transfer those genes to the next generation by multiplying, as well as physically pass those genes to nearby bacteria. Plus, they can pick up new resistance genes through random DNA mutations.

All antibiotics come with the risk of pressuring bacteria to evolve resistance — it's an inherent feature of the drugs. However, broad-spectrum drugs carry the greatest risk, because they place pressure on a wider variety of bacteria than narrow-spectrum drugs do. The 2015 cross-country comparison found that Japanese doctors prescribed antibiotics with the lowest risk of resistance only 35% of the time, meaning most antibiotic prescriptions were for broader-spectrum drugs.

It's sometimes necessary to use broad-spectrum drugs — such as when an infection is resistant to narrow-spectrum options — but using broad-spectrum antibiotics when they're not needed hastens the development of AMR. So does using antibiotics for nonbacterial infections. In both scenarios, you're introducing evolutionary pressure that could have otherwise been avoided.

Globally, resistance is rising among common disease-causing bacteria; it's far outpacing the development of alternatives to antibiotics. In 2021, resistant bacterial infections directly caused 1.14 million deaths worldwide and contributed to another 3.57 million deaths. Those numbers could climb dramatically by 2050 if swift action isn't taken now.

Common pathogens already show high rates of resistance in Japan, and resistant germs contribute to thousands of deaths each year, with most occurring among older adults. People over 65 make up about 30% of Japan's population. As that percentage grows in the coming years, AMR-related illness may also increase, health officials worry.

Japan's youngest residents are also at risk, though, as resistant bacteria can sometimes pass from mothers to newborns at birth and can cause serious complications, like sepsis. Resistance has also been detected among respiratory bugs that frequently infect kids, such as Mycoplasma pneumoniae, said Dr. Takemi Murai, deputy head of the Infectious Diseases Division at Nagano Children's Hospital in Azumino. "There have been outbreaks of Mycoplasma that are resistant to antibiotics," he said.

Yet not long ago, the unrestrained use of antibiotics was a mainstay of Japanese medicine. (I'll dig into the myriad reasons why in later installments of this series.)

National insurance data sampled from 2005 showed that 60% of patients in Japan with nonbacterial upper respiratory tract infections were prescribed antibiotics, mostly broad-spectrum ones like third-generation cephalosporins, macrolides and quinolones. Most of those prescriptions came from clinics.

Something had to shift.

Tips for appropriate treatment

In 2016, Japan got serious about reducing its antibiotic misuse, releasing its first National Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance. It aligned with a global plan from the World Health Organization, which aimed to raise awareness of AMR and optimize the use of antimicrobials, including antibiotics, among its member states.

Two of Japan's big goals were to slash overall antibiotic use by 33% and broad-spectrum antibiotic use by 50% by 2020. The country came very close to hitting those ambitious targets by the deadline, and doing so was no small feat. The tipping program was just one of a slew of initiatives introduced to improve AMR awareness and antibiotic use.

Prior to the incentive's introduction, Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) — whose role is somewhat analogous to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — rolled out educational campaigns for doctors and patients and wrote a manual for antibiotic use, with the first edition directed primarily at outpatient doctors. It emphasized that most acute respiratory tract infections and acute diarrheal diseases don't require antibiotics.

Among kids, children under 5 saw the highest antibiotic prescription rates, often receiving the drugs for respiratory infections. Data showed this overprescription problem was the worst in children under 3 being assessed for upper respiratory infections or acute gastroenteritis. The government's solution? Pay doctors extra to withhold antibiotics when faced with cases that don't warrant them.

"If the clinicians provide more appropriate medical services, we add additional payment," said Dr. Takuma Kato, a counselor at the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations who previously worked on the incentive program for MHLW. In this case, they pay "a little bit more" when doctors don't give patients antibiotics for illnesses that are likely viral, he said.

A "little bit more" is accurate. Each tip is 800 yen, equivalent to about $7.20 when the program launched in April 2018 and about $5 at today's exchange rate.

Here's how it works: A caregiver brings in their sick infant or toddler for an initial visit, and the pediatrician determines the child likely has an acute upper respiratory tract infection or gastroenteritis. These illnesses are typically caused by viruses, so the doctor decides not to provide an antibiotic. The doctor explains this rationale to the caregiver and provides guidance for home care. If the appointment checks those boxes, the clinic can claim an extra 800 yen when they seek reimbursement.

Because mild viral infections typically resolve on their own in a few days, a strategy called "watchful waiting" can help clarify if a bacterium is actually at fault. So if a doctor does prescribe an antibiotic at the first visit, they'll often encourage the caregiver to bring the child back if their condition remains the same or worsens within a few days. The incentive and this "waiting" strategy go hand in hand.

There are a few technicalities. For example, the children being assessed must have no underlying conditions that might complicate their case, such as a weakened immune system. If children test positive on a formal diagnostic test for influenza or COVID-19, the incentive cannot be claimed. To qualify for the incentive, clinics must specialize in pediatrics and use a "comprehensive" payment system, meaning patients pay a standardized amount for the whole appointment rather than the itemized "fee for service" that is ubiquitous in the U.S.

Despite this fine print, the perk is pretty appealing for the clinics that claim it. "I think pediatric doctor associations are really happy," Okubo said.

Doctors say "small incentives add up"

The Japanese government generally incentivizes doctors to adjust their behaviors, rather than penalizing them for poor practices, Okubo said.

"It's a constructive message from the government: 'You changed your behavior, so we'll pay something,'" Okubo said. "This constructive approach motivates physicians, especially pediatricians, to apply their common sense to their actual practice."

This system is readily accepted by Japanese doctors, who have historically held a lot of political power, Kato noted. Just like in the U.S., their professional groups, such as the Japan Medical Association, lobby the government and typically push against policy proposals that they view as potential threats to their bottom line.

By contrast, an incentivizing approach is "very, very welcome, especially by the doctors' associations," said Dr. Norio Ohmagari, director of disease control and prevention at the National Center for Global Health and Medicine, part of the Japan Institute for Health Security (JIHS) in Tokyo. Ohmagari also leads the AMR Clinical Reference Center, which collaborates with the WHO on AMR countermeasures.

Doctors I asked confirmed that they like the incentive, namely because it boosts their profits.

"I apply for the pediatric antibiotic appropriate use support premium each time" it's applicable, said Dr. Yusuke Shibata, who runs the Shibata Pediatric Clinic in Asakusa, a historic district in Tokyo's Taito ward. "I appreciate the premium, as pediatric clinics already have low profits" compared with clinics that care for adults, Shibata told me in an email after I visited his clinic.

For first visits with kids under 6, clinics are paid a base rate of 6,040 to 7,210 yen, or about $38 to $45 at current exchange rates. An extra 800 yen (about $5) increases that fee by more than 10% — "a huge amount," Okubo emphasized.

Shibata estimates that his clinic sees about 30 to 40 patients with an acute respiratory infection or diarrhea each week, depending on the season. He can potentially claim the incentive for the first visit with each of these patients, assuming they don't have any conditions that would disqualify the claim.

On the high end, Shibata estimates that he might claim the incentive 180 times in a single busy month, which would total 144,000 yen, or about $900.

Dr. Atsushi Miyahara, who runs the Karugamo Clinic in the Setagaya-ku ward in Tokyo, said he was already conservative about using antibiotics so the incentive rewards him for sticking with his status quo.

Fifteen years ago, when Miyahara opened his clinic, he noticed that other physicians prescribed a lot of antibiotics, and he questioned the practice due to the potential to fuel resistance. He provides his patients with informational flyers that explain the risks of resistance and how avoiding unnecessary prescriptions can reduce that risk. When antibiotics are needed, he predominantly uses narrow-spectrum drugs that pose a relatively low risk of resistance.

Miyahara said the local government and medical associations announced the antibiotic incentive when it was launched, and he felt its introduction has been very positive. It's increased his revenue and encouraged him to continue his stewardship practices. He estimates that for every 50 of his first visits with patients, he claims the incentive 10 to 15 times, so it applies to at least 20% of those visits.

The incentive's impact

Because some pediatric clinics qualified and others didn't — due to fee-for-service clinics being excluded — Okubo and his colleagues could directly measure whether the policy worked.

To assess the incentive's effects in its first year, the researchers looked at insurance claims from over 10,000 medical facilities from just before and after the policy's introduction. About 3,000 of the facilities qualified and claimed the incentive 316,770 times, totaling 253 million yen ($2.29 million at the time). These eligible clinics saw a 17.8% reduction in their total antibiotic use over a year without any negative effects for patients, such as higher hospitalization rates.

To see if those effects lasted, the team drew years of data from over 165,000 young children who went to either eligible or ineligible clinics. Within the first month of the policy's implementation, the former group of children saw a nearly 45% reduction in total antibiotic prescriptions, compared with the other kids. Cumulatively over the next four years, their overall antibiotic use and broad-spectrum-antibiotic use was 20% and 24% lower, respectively.

The decrease in antibiotic prescriptions did not come with an uptick in hospitalizations or healthcare costs, although there was a slight increase in the total number of doctor's visits. But that's what you'd expect as doctors track an infection over time, Okubo explained, meaning they likely employed the watchful-waiting strategy and had parents bring their kids back in if they didn't improve quickly.

Okubo's team has continued to track pediatricians' antibiotic use, and he noted that they're seeing "spillover effects" among age groups not covered by the incentive. In the under-20 age group, outpatient antibiotic prescriptions fell by 50% between 2011 and 2022. He thinks the incentive is a key driver of this trend, directly reducing prescriptions for the youngest kids while also triggering ripple effects in older groups. (This research will soon be published in a peer-reviewed journal.)

That said, there's room to improve doctors' selection of antibiotics when they are used, as the ratio of broad- to narrow-spectrum drugs is still too high. "Total antibiotic use was reduced, but its quality should be improved further," Okubo said.

The incentive's evolution

While the 800-yen tip has proved significant to clinicians, the incentive represents a very small slice of overall government healthcare spending, which totaled 468 billion yen ($3.1 billion) in 2022.

"This program is not large compared to the whole budget," Dr. Kosuke Sasaki, who works in the MHLW's health insurance bureau, told me. The program's budget has no upper limit, so if the number of claims from clinics increased, there isn't a cap on how many could be paid out. "The number of doctors using this program has increased while the number of antibiotic prescriptions has decreased since the start," Sasaki's colleague Dr. Tomonori Aoki added, noting that the government isn't concerned about how to pay that rising bill.

The program's measurable impact and low price tag may explain its growth over the years.

Every two years, Japan's Ministry of Finance hands the MHLW its slice of the government budget, and MHLW then revises the pricing for drugs, medical devices and healthcare services. The antibiotic incentive falls under this revision process and has been expanded several times.

During its first revision in 2020, the incentive was extended to children under 6. In 2022, ear, nose and throat specialists (ENTs) newly qualified for the incentive; like pediatricians, they treat many acute infections in kids and tend to overuse antibiotics, insurance data suggested. That same year, doctors could start claiming the fee for ear infections and sinus infections.

"I see a tendency for pediatric clinics to avoid prescribing antibiotics, but I do see some ENT clinics prescribing antibiotics carelessly," Shibata, the clinic owner in Asakusa, Tokyo, told me. So ENTs seem to be a logical next target.

In 2024, a separate, facility-level incentive was introduced as a complement to the 800-yen incentive. It encourages clinics to submit data to a government database that tracks antibiotic use. If first-line, narrow-spectrum antibiotics make up a certain percentage of the clinic's overall prescriptions, that clinic earns extra money, Okubo explained.

Ultimately, the 800-yen incentive helped put AMR on the radar of doctors who didn't take it as seriously as experts like Kato, who told me "AMR is kind of my life's work." Kato and researchers like Okubo see the program as a success, although they pointed to room for improvement in antibiotic selection. Ministry officials like Sasaki and Aoki said the program is easy to implement and makes a difference. Clinic doctors like Shibata and Miyahara appreciate the incentive and use it consistently. All in all, at just $5 a claim, the incentive has been remarkably effective.

In speaking with experts in Japan and the U.S., I've learned that U.S. doctors have historically faced the same pressures and showed similar lapses in antibiotic use that Japanese doctors have. However, the U.S. does not have an incentive program like Japan's. Should it launch one?

In the next installment of this series, I'll explore a central feature of this problem: the motivations behind pediatricians' antibiotic misuse. What are they, and do those motivations differ between doctors in the U.S. and Japan? Answers to those questions will help determine whether a similar incentive might have the same impact in both places.

A Chinese system has become the world’s most powerful supercomputer, surpassing American machines for the first time since 2021.

LineShine, installed at China’s National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, clinched the top spot in the 67^th TOP500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The new system has already been used in a range of fields, giving developers another route to achieve supercomputing power.

The machine, which came online in the first half of 2026, can reach speeds of 2.198 exaFLOPS — where 1 exaFLOP is 1 quintillion (10¹⁸) floating-point operations, or mathematical calculations, per second (FLOPs) — making it the only supercomputer on the planet to exceed 2 exaFLOPS per second. It's also the first time China has hosted the world's fastest supercomputer since 2017.

A FLOP is a type of calculation used to benchmark computing performance. Exascale supercomputers can perform more than 1 quintillion of these operations every second. In comparison, home computers can perform roughly 5 trillion FLOPS.

According to TOP500, LineShine can achieve speeds about 22% faster than El Capitan, a supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California that had previously held the top spot since November 2024.

The system’s computing power is the result of "a comprehensive breakthrough in a series of core technological barriers," according to a translated statement from China's National Supercomputing Center.

Unlike many other supercomputers, LineShine uses only central processing units (CPUs) to perform calculations. Other systems rely on both CPUs and graphics processing units(GPUs), which run many jobs simultaneously by dividing tasks among smaller, specialized cores.

Since 2018, the U.S. government has restricted exports of semiconductor chips to China, including GPUs. However, startups such as DeepSeek have wrangled other technological advancements to train artificial intelligence (AI) models with fewer and less powerful GPUs than comparable systems such as ChatGPT.

LineShine "represents a historic leap forward for China's supercomputing field, breaking through foreign technological blockades and building an independent and controllable software and hardware system," the statement read.

The system has already been used on projects in multiple research areas, including atmospheric science, drug discovery and AI, according to the National Supercomputing Center. In general, supercomputers perform extremely complex calculations at speeds much faster than traditional computers can handle, allowing them to solve problems that would otherwise take too long or cost too much to address.

The fastest supercomputers utilize a range of different designs and processors, showing that high-performance computing doesn’t rely on any one single method.

"The list demonstrates that there is no single dominant technology path to leadership-class computing; instead, vendors are pursuing a variety of CPU, GPU, APU, and custom-accelerator approaches coupled with different interconnect and system designs," TOP500 representatives said in a statement.

Following LineShine and El Capitan, two supercomputers at U.S. national laboratories and one in Germany claimed spots three through five on the TOP500 list. Machines in Italy, Switzerland, Japan and the U.S. round out the top 10.

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

Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" have inspired countless books, movies and works of art in the nearly three millennia since the epic tales were first written. This small, bronze sculpture, once attached to an ancient box, shows how the Greek epics influenced the aesthetics of the enigmatic Etruscans.

The Sleep and Death cista handle, which is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, features a set of bronze figurines welded to form a decorative handle for a cista ‪—‬ a small, cylindrical, lidded box used for a variety of purposes in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Etruria, an ancient region in central Italy.

The handle is roughly 7.3 inches long and 7.2 inches tall (18.5 by 18.3 centimeters). The figurines represent Hypnos (the Greek god of sleep) and Thanatos (the Greek god of nonviolent death) bending to lift the body of Sarpedon, one of Zeus' sons who fought in the legendary Trojan War.

Sarpedon fought on the side of Troy, leading his men into battle against the formidable Greeks, according to Book XVI of the "Iliad." The Greek hero Patroclus entered the fray wearing Achilles' armor to trick the Trojans into thinking the greatest Greek warrior had joined the fight and scare off the Trojans. Sarpedon met Patroclus on the battlefield, and even though Zeus wanted to save his son, Sarpedon was mortally wounded. The Greeks stripped Sarpedon's body of his armor, but Zeus commanded Apollo to retrieve the corpse and deliver it to twin brothers Hypnos and Thanatos, "who bear men swiftly away" (translation by A. S. Kline).

The ancient sculptor of this piece "succeeded brilliantly in capturing the pathos and emotion in a scene from Homer's 'Iliad,'" Michael Bennett, former curator of Greek and Roman art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, said in a video. And on a technical level, the piece is much more detailed than a typical Etruscan handle; this one appears to be almost ergonomically designed, as Sarpedon's limply falling hair can be used as a finger grip, according to Bennett.

But the reason the Etruscans adapted the visual aesthetic of Homeric epic to many of their artworks, such as sculptures and wall paintings, is still unclear.

Because the Etruscan language is only partly understood, most information about this civilization, which arose around 900 B.C., comes from outside sources, such as the Greek historian Herodotus, who was writing several centuries later. Herodotus believed the Etruscans came from Lydia in Asia Minor, not too far south of Troy. Coupled with the later legend that Aeneas, a Trojan hero, wandered to Italy after the war and helped found Rome, some experts, such as linguist Robert Beekes, believe the Etruscans may derive from the Trojans or groups that fought on the Trojan side. However, a 2021 genetic study found the Etruscans may have been local.

The Etruscans may have used scenes from the Trojan War to decorate their vases and bronze boxes because they felt kinship with the antagonists in the "Iliad." But they also might have adopted the aesthetics because the Trojan War was a popular theme in Greek art at the time, and vases and other works decorated in this style reached the Etruscans through extensive trade networks. The Etruscans then put their own spin on the stories of the Trojan War, focusing in particular on scenes of death and brutality, classical archaeologist Larissa Bonfante argued in "Etruscan Myths" (2006, British Museum Press).

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

June's full moon, the Strawberry Moon, will rise Monday (June 29) as seen from North America and Europe. As it does, it will be the lowest-hanging and one of the smallest full moons of the year.

The moon will officially become full at 7:56 p.m. EDT on June 29. It will appear nearly full and brightly illuminated Sunday (June 28) and Tuesday (June 30) as well, but the best time to catch it is when it appears on the southeastern horizon at dusk on Monday. At that time, it will be visible on the horizon and remain unusually low in the sky for viewers in the Northern Hemisphere.

Full moons that occur close to the summer solstice, which happened on June 21 this year, follow a lower path across the southern horizon. That's because the solstice places the sun at its northernmost point on the ecliptic (the path of the sun through the daytime sky), so the full moon near that time appears low in the southern sky. Because a full moon, by definition, sits opposite the sun in Earth's sky, it mirrors the sun's path from approximately six months earlier.

Observers in the Southern Hemisphere will experience the opposite effect, with the Strawberry Moon climbing high overhead and becoming the year's highest-rising full moon.

Anyone can see the full moon without specialist equipment. But a decent backyard telescope or pair of binocualrs can help you zoom in on lunar landmarks, like craters and mountains. If you've got a good camera, here's how to take the best photos of the moon.

A low-hanging 'micromoon'

June's full moon will be the second-smallest full moon of 2026, occurring when the moon is 252,442 miles (406,267 kilometers) from Earth — just 63 miles (102 km) closer than the year's most distant full moon, the Blue Moon of May 31, at 252,505 miles (406,369 km). According to Time and date.com, that makes it a micromoon, minimoon or apogee moon.

The Strawberry Moon's name comes from Native American traditions associated with the seasonal harvesting of strawberries and other ripening fruits. According to Almanac, several tribes used other names linked to summer harvests, including the Berries Ripen Moon, Blooming Moon, Green Corn Moon, Hoer Moon, Birth Moon, Egg Laying Moon and Hatching Moon. European names include the Honey Moon and Mead Moon.

As the Strawberry Moon rises into summer skies, look out for a yellowish, bright star to its upper right. That's Antares, a red supergiant star and the brightest in the constellation Scorpius.

Following the Strawberry Moon, the next full moon — known as the Buck Moon — will rise on July 29, setting the stage for both a total solar eclipse and a partial lunar eclipse in August.

How much do you know about the moon? Test your lunar smarts with our moon quiz!

During several recent conversations, people have told me that they've stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.

This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report, 69% of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now.

Globally, 40% report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.

As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It's the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.

Wired for bad news

Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.

This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.

A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.

Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What's changed is the size of the world it's asked to scan for threats.

Scanning the whole world

For most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.

In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.

Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17% of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61% reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with 6% of those who didn't.

For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.

Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we're not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.

Looking away is not the fix

What's the solution to news fatigue? Well, it's not avoidance. A democracy depends on informed citizens.

Many adults already cite the spread of misleading information as a major source of stress. Withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem. We're wired to pay more attention to bad news, and that kind of content will find its way to us one way or another.

The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources.

Several approaches can help manage news fatigue and protect mental health. Containing news consumption to defined windows of time reduces the sense of being overwhelmed. Choosing depth over volume also matters: one carefully reported long-form article will inform you better than bursts of random, unreliable and emotionally loaded posts on Instagram.

There is also value in distinguishing between information and action — research on perceived control and stress consistently shows that the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Identifying what you can actually do about what you read in the news, however small, regulates that response.

Finally, be wary of "rage bait" — intentionally provocative messages or content designed to boost engagement on social media platforms by eliciting negative reactions. Recognizing that certain content creators want to provoke rather than reflect reality creates useful cognitive distance.

The news will not become less "heavy." But our relationship with it can become more deliberate. Our brains were not built for this scale of input. They were, however, built to learn to adapt.

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

Earth may survive the fiery death of the sun, even as our star engulfs the innermost planets, a new study using state-of-the-art models suggests.

The findings offer a potential alternative fate for our planet, which was thought to face certain death as the sun engulfs it in a thermonuclear inferno billions of years from now. As a yellow dwarf star, the sun is expected to have a relatively calm, 10 billion-year life. But in about 5 billion years, it will run out of hydrogen to fuse in its core and begin fusing hydrogen in its shell, causing it to expand enormously into a red giant star and then an even larger "AGB star," before it ultimately dies as a white dwarf.

Now, in a Letter to the Editor published June 19 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomers used stellar evolution models and observed a nearby dying star to reassess Earth's ultimate, potentially fiery fate.

Solar tug of war

When the sun enters its later life stages, Earth will be at the mercy of two competing forces — a fate shared by countless worlds throughout the unimaginably immense span of cosmic time.

As the sun expands to potentially hundreds of times its current size, the increased tidal forces will pull Earth toward our rapidly ballooning, sputtering star. Yet the surging sun will also lose its puffed-up outer layers into space through stellar wind. As it sheds much of its mass and becomes lighter, its gravitational grip will weaken, allowing our planet to escape outward into the depths of the solar system, the models show.

"The fate of Earth depends on a delicate balance between these two effects," Mats Esseldeurs, a doctoral candidate at KU Leuven's Institute of Astronomy in Belgium and first author of the study, said in a statement. "If tidal interactions dominate, Earth is engulfed. If mass loss dominates, Earth escapes to a wider orbit."

Previous research only muddies the issue. Studies have made different assumptions about solar mass loss, tidal forces and planetary interactions that may occur as the inner solar system evolves. As a result, it's uncertain if Earth will survive both of the sun's giant phases before our star shrivels into a tiny-but-dense stellar corpse called a white dwarf.

In a glimmer of hope, astronomers have discovered intact worlds around white dwarfs. On the other hand, some white dwarf systems are littered with the rocky remnants of their destroyed planetary children. So the researchers observed the formerly sunlike, dying giant star L2 Puppis, located 200 light-years away in the "poop deck" constellation Puppis, to glimpse our solar future. L2 Puppis may be losing up to one-millionth of a solar mass per year, according to previous estimates, expelling a dusty disk that's thought to harbor a planet 12 to 16 times the mass of Jupiter.

Additionally, the researchers performed state-of-the-art gravitational calculations "based on the internal structure and dynamics of evolved stars," modeling the orbital evolution of the inner solar system and the sun's lifespan from its infancy to its final phase as a "burned out" white dwarf.

So long, Mercury and Venus

Based on observations of L2 Puppis' mass loss, combined with the updated stellar evolution models, the researchers projected that Earth will survive as it shifts to just outside the expanding sun's radius.

"The largest uncertainty no longer comes from the tidal calculations, but from how much mass the future sun will lose," Esseldeurs said in the statement. "Observations of sun-like giant stars currently point towards Earth's survival, but we need better observations before we can be certain."

But even if Earth survives, our solar system siblings will not be spared; the simulations suggest Mercury and Venus will be engulfed by the hellish blaze of our dying star.

Additional stellar observations and improved models will help elucidate our planet's fate. For example, the European Space Agency's PLATO mission, a space telescope that aims to search for Earth-like planets around sunlike stars, will launch next year. It will likely detect planets around aging stars, thus providing a more accurate account of this potentially doomed population.

See how much you know about the sun with our sun quiz!

As I sip coffee in my Berlin apartment and fire a question at Google's AI chatbot Gemini, it's easy not to think about the energy it takes to generate a response. Once the signal reaches my router, it whizzes, I assume, through copper wires or fiber-optic cables to one of Google's data center hubs. Somewhere inside the data center's labyrinthine halls of stacked processors, my query gets converted into numbers and undergoes billions of computations to determine context and meaning. The answer, once assembled, races back, in the blink of an eye.

Data centers — the beating hearts of the internet, powering everything from email to web searches — have existed for decades, but with the growing popularity of AI to generate text, images and video, they're using more energy than ever. According to Google's own estimates, processing a median-length text prompt with its AI assistant Gemini consumes around 0.24 watt-hours.

These amounts, individually small — 0.24 watt-hours is equivalent to watching TV for about nine seconds — are adding up fast. In March 2026, OpenAI estimated that more than 900 million people use its AI chatbot, ChatGPT, every week, tallying billions of queries daily.

The exact amount of electricity consumed by data centers, globally or in the United States, which hosts more than any other nation, isn't publicly reported by all tech companies, says Eric Masanet of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who researches data center sustainability. But according to the most recent estimates by the International Energy Agency, US data centers guzzled some 224 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025 — more than 5 percent of the country's electricity use. That's a significant uptick from an estimated 1.9 percent consumed in 2018, well before the mainstream surge of generative AI.

This electricity use seems set to soar. In the race to secure market leadership for generative AI products, companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Oracle are investing tens to hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI-focused data centers. Compared to data centers of the pre-AI days that consume, say, 100 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 83,000 homes with average demand — the newcomers are often "hyperscale" and can use a gigawatt or more, or roughly a tenth of the electrical capacity of Los Angeles.

Masanet and other experts have been alarmed to see much of this demand met by plants powered by fossil fuels, such as gas, whose burning releases planet-warming carbon dioxide. A key reason is that data centers are often constructed in places without abundant renewable energy sources like hydropower, geothermal, solar or wind.

Tech companies often offset emissions by investing in renewable energy elsewhere. But unless those clean energy plants make more energy than the data centers use, this strategy — at best — keeps CO₂ emissions of centers in stasis rather than reducing them to a net of nothing, important for halting global warming. "For every megawatt for which we install fossil fuel power," Masanet says, "it sets us back on our progress."

And that's not considering the resources spent on manufacturing the hardware that fills new data centers, or the impacts on communities living near them, which often suffer from air and noise pollution from gas plants and possible strain on local water resources, which are used to cool the data centers.

Although forecasts for AI's energy impact remain devilishly tricky, especially since the size of payoffs from investments in AI are uncertain, it's clear to experts that energy-saving strategies are urgently needed. Without them, according to one 2025 estimate, US data centers could soon be releasing the equivalent of 24 to 44 megatons of CO₂ annually, the latter equivalent to the annual emissions of Norway.

And so computer scientists and engineers are rethinking some of the power-hungry hardware and software that fuel AI. They're working to develop energy-saving algorithms and processor designs, and carefully considering where, and how, data centers are constructed.

"AI's energy cost is not an accident: This is basically a product of how our systems are built," says Fengqi You, an expert in energy systems at Cornell University. But with the right mix of solutions, he says, "we could really reshape the trajectory."

The roots of AI's energy problem

To comprehend AI's energy cost, it helps to understand large language models (LLMs) — the lifeblood of AI text generation tools such as chatbots and AI assistants — specifically, ones based on a design described in 2017 by the machine-learning laboratory Google Brain. This design, transformer architecture, can process text at lightning speed by simultaneously taking each word and weighing its relationship to every other word it sees. It "learns" which words go together by computing how strongly each word relates to all other words in a text, examining each word in many contexts. (A similar design is used for AI image and video generators.)

On a computational level, this happens by converting words or word fragments into numbers and performing additions and multiplications between them. Key to the speed is being able to do these calculations in parallel, made possible by graphic processor units (GPUs) — mostly manufactured by the company NVIDIA — originally invented for rapid 3D rendering of imagery during gaming.

The initial training of an LLM, required to learn all these relationships, consumes vast amounts of energy. Because each word it trains on must be weighed against all others in a given chunk of text, the number of computations the model performs — hence the energy required — increases quadratically relative to the length of text (i.e., doubling the length of text quadruples the number of computations). That adds up quickly given that most LLMs are trained on massive swaths of publicly available internet text. Some estimates suggest that training GPT-4 — the iteration of ChatGPT that launched in 2023 — guzzled between 50 and 60 gigawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power San Francisco for three to four days.

But experts are more worried about the energy costs of using the models to generate data once they've been trained, a process called inference. "You train once, then you inference for a billion people in the world," says Mosharaf Chowdhury, an AI systems expert at the University of Michigan who has been measuring the electricity usage of a handful of large language models that have been made publicly available.

This process is surprisingly inefficient: Each time transformer models generate a word — by selecting the one with the highest probability of following the previous word, given context — they put the query and partially written answer through the model. In doing so, they apply all of the parameters they've calculated during training to understand language patterns — which number in the hundreds of billions or even trillions.

"The fact that you have to do a lot of calculations for a single word to be added — that’s a problematic thing," says Günter Klambauer, an AI expert at Johannes Kepler University in Austria.

Tweaking AI software to save energy

This recognition has triggered interest in smaller language models specialized to specific tasks. These are trained more narrowly, have fewer parameters — say, tens or hundreds of millions — and perform substantially less computation than larger models. In one 2025 paper published by UNESCO, computer scientist Ivana Drobnjak of University College London and colleagues compared energy consumption of Meta's language model Llama-3.1 with smaller AI models dedicated to particular tasks — ones called DistilBART and t5-small-xsum for summarization, and others for translation or answering questions. When used for their respective tasks, the smaller models consumed more than 90 percent less energy than Llama 3.1 on the same job.

And so computer scientists have been driven to build a similar kind of task specialization into LLMs themselves. In "mixture of expert" models, only particular parts of one big model are activated for certain tasks. These parts "learn to handle different patterns in language," Drobnjak says.

This is thought to be one reason why R1, an LLM developed by the Chinese company DeepSeek, reportedly consumed significantly less energy than other models (independent experts have raised doubts about those figures). Udit Gupta, an expert in electrical and computer engineering at Cornell Tech, says that LLMs like Gemini or ChatGPT are similarly routing queries to more specialized sub-models. "There's a lot of work being done on how to assess the complexity of the query or task that's coming from users and then find the right model," Gupta says. (While Google spokesperson Ralf Bremer notes that the 0.24 watt-hours currently spent on processing median-length Gemini prompts is already 33 times more efficient than it was back in 2024, some experts suspect that processing queries with an LLM still consumes more energy than an equivalent web search.)

Scientists are also exploring different kinds of LLMs, to break what Klambauer calls the "quadratic curse" of transformer models.

One alternative, called a long short-term memory (LSTM) model, gets around this alarming energy increase by temporarily storing a kind of summary of the prompt that was inputted by the user plus the text generated so far, akin to recalling important plot points instead of an entire movie. That way, it only has to process the summary, rather than all the words in the full text to date, every time it generates a new word. This prevents LSTM's energy costs from skyrocketing as it responds to a query — using about 50 percent less energy than transformer-type models to process texts of around 8,000 words in length, Klambauer says.

LSTM models were developed in the 1990s but were abandoned because transformers could be trained much faster. But Klambauer says that recent advances have improved the performance of LSTM, now called xLSTM. He's working with the Austrian startup NXAI to further develop and optimize xLSTM, "because we think it's worth it for energy efficiency," he says.

But major tech companies have invested so many years and resources into developing transformer-based models that switching to other models would be costly, says Wolfgang Maaß, an AI and business informatics researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. "We have to see whether this becomes as dominant, or whether it finds a niche in the whole market."

Computing with wafers and light

Though experts say the fastest energy savings will come from software tweaks, some are also taking aim at the energy-hungry processing chips that fuel AI computations. Engineers have made chips increasingly efficient over time by packing more computing capacity into individual processors — reducing the energy required to shuttle data between chips that are working together to perform AI computations. Engineers have done this by shrinking the size of transistors — microscopic electrical switches that process data — inside the chips.

But because engineers are reaching the physical limits of how small transistors can be, "we need to think of alternate ideas to improve the designs," says computer architect Ajay Joshi of the Boston University Photonics Center.

One strategy is to make the chips larger. Dinner-plate-sized "wafer-scale chips" can pack nearly 70 times as many transistors as a single, postage-stamp-sized GPU and consume 143 times less electricity for communication than comparable GPUs, says computer engineer Rakesh Kumar of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Commercially produced by the California company Cerebras, wafer-scale chips have drawbacks, including a greater risk of damage during manufacturing. But because of their energy-saving and other beneficial features, "they would be very attractive to many hyperscalers and AI companies," Kumar says.

Many tech companies have improved energy efficiency by fashioning their own processors that are tailor-made for AI computations — such as Amazon Web Service's Trainium2 chip or Google's Ironwood Tensor Processing Units — according to statements from those companies. As for NVIDIA, the company's head of sustainability Josh Parker says its AI-specialized GPUs have come a long way from the ones used for gaming and are now designed to run AI tasks as efficiently as possible; other innovations, such as making the interconnections between GPUs more efficient, have also helped. "Over the past eight years, NVIDIA GPUs have improved 45,000 [times] in energy efficiency for large language model workloads," he says.

Engineers are also exploring alternative computing methods. Conventional AI processors calculate by encoding numbers in a binary system of ones and zeros, which is achieved by turning transistors on and off (representing the number 5, for instance, requires four transistors to represent the code 0101). But transistors can do more than function as binary switches allowing electron flow or not; they can also work as analog dials and hold intermediate voltages representing different numbers. That requires fewer transistors, and less energy, for computations. "People have known for decades that doing certain things in analog … can be a lot more energy efficient," Kumar says.

For example, electrical engineer Paul Manea of the German research institute Forschungszentrum Jülich and colleagues are working to develop devices called "gain cells" that are full of transistors working this way. Importantly, gain cells can both store the data required to process a query, and compute the answer. That overcomes another big energy bottleneck of conventional computing systems, where memory storage and computation occur on separate pieces of hardware.

That's especially problematic for transformer-based LLMs, because each time they generate a word, they must shuttle the query and partially written answer from memory to a processor. Manea and colleagues estimate that gain cells in lieu of traditional GPUs can reduce the energy guzzled by one of the most energy-consuming parts of transformer-based LLMs by four orders of magnitude. But it will take more refining before they can be more widely used, Manea says.

The notion of devices that both store and compute information is a key idea of "neuromorphic" computing, an up-and-coming field of computer engineering inspired by the human brain, which consumes orders of magnitude less energy than computers. Another brain-inspired invention is chips that encode information not in continuous data streams but — like human nerve cells — in the timing of voltage "spikes" propagating through the system. Allowing components to rest until they're needed "could potentially translate to less energy," says Eleni Vasilaki, an expert in bioinspired machine learning at the University of Sheffield in England.

Maaß, for example, is part of a team that received roughly $5.8 million from the German government to test neuromorphic chips, among other strategies, to reduce the energy required for AI models. Some brain-inspired chips are already commercially available, but the technology is still far from being attractive for mainstream computing, says nanoelectronics expert Tony Kenyon of University College London, whose team recently received $17 million from the UK government to develop neuromorphic computing.

Other scientists are developing chips that process information not with electrons but through the interaction of photons — particles of light — with matter (fiber-optic cables, which encode and transmit data as light pulses, are used around the world). With photons, more information can be transmitted at the same time, and signals can be altered much faster, says Elena Goi, a photonic computing researcher at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany.

Several companies have developed chips that can perform some AI computations with optical methods, says Joshi; he recently estimated that manufacturing optical chips could consume up to an order of magnitude less energy than conventional ones of the same size. Joshi hopes that, "in 10 years, we would have a practical solution that can be deployed pervasively across the data centers."

Reshaping AI's energy trajectory

Even without reinventing how computers work, much can be done to reduce AI's impact not just on energy but also on water resources used for cooling data centers. Importantly, tech companies should reconsider where they build those centers, says energy systems expert You. Right now, existing US ones are concentrated in northern Virginia, which has limited water resources and renewable energy capacity compared with the Midwest, for instance. You recently estimated that better siting — along with energy-efficient hardware and software — could reduce future carbon and water footprints of US data centers by 73 percent and 86 percent, respectively.

Masanet adds that tech companies already with data centers across the country could at least train their models in strategic places. "Some companies like Google have been doing this: They shift their loads to follow renewables," he says. They also should address the electricity and resources spent on manufacturing processors for new data centers, as well as electronic waste as outdated tech is replaced every few years, he adds.

Minimizing e-waste by using hardware for longer periods and recovering old electronics is one of Amazon's sustainability strategies, according to a statement to Knowable Magazine; so is designing data centers in energy- and water-saving ways and investing in a slew of renewable and nuclear energy projects. "We'll continue to implement solutions that benefit our customers and the communities we operate in," says Brandon Oyer, Amazon Web Services' head of energy and water in the Americas.

Meanwhile, a press representative at Microsoft points to a number of sustainability initiatives the company has taken, including new cooling technologies, renewable energy investments and waste reduction. Google spokesperson Ralf Bremer emphasized the company's goal of reaching net-zero emissions across its operations by 2030 and replenishing 120 percent of the fresh water consumed by its offices and data centers by 2030. An OpenAI representative points to a press release outlining efforts to minimize water use and plans for solar energy generation at one of its campuses. Anthropic, Meta and Oracle did not respond to requests for comment by deadline.

Though tech companies are taking sustainability into consideration, their main objective is to rapidly build out data center capacity, says computer engineer Benjamin Lee of the University of Pennsylvania. He predicts that, eventually, they'll need to step up efforts to improve energy efficiency to reduce costs. Governments should help to accelerate this shift, Masanet says. So far, he and his team have counted nearly 220 policies introduced to address data center sustainability at the US state level, 18 at the federal level, and more from other countries, though not all were ultimately adopted.

"It's clear that governments around the world are beginning to take action," he says. However, he adds, "we also see some state and local governments with proposed policies that mostly aim to incentivize and accelerate data center builds."

AI's energy cost will ultimately be a balancing act: Will it save more resources through its problem-solving abilities deployed toward everything from finding cancer cures to improving logistics, than it demands? But though building a more frugal, energy-saving AI is important, so is carefully considering where AI is needed, Kenyon says. Is the world truly a better place, for example, with nonhuman "AI agents" providing customer support?

"I think it’s a common mistake, when a new technology comes in, to suddenly think, 'Well, everything has to adopt that new technology,'" he says. "That approach really isn't doing us any favors."

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine's newsletter.

Younger generations may be aging faster than their predecessors, and this may be linked to a rise in early-onset cancers, a new study suggests.

There have been recent increases in the rates of some cancers among adults under 50, including breast, colorectal, kidney and uterine cancers. One 2023 paper suggests that these early-onset cancer diagnoses rose by 25% globally between 1990 and 2019, and scientists are still investigating why.

"The trend of increased cancers at younger ages is very real, and it is not simply because of more efficient diagnosis, or diagnosis at earlier stages," said Dr. Jyoti Nangalia, a hematologist and cancer researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the U.K. who was not involved in the new study. "It is possible that we are being exposed to new cancer-causing risks or that [our] defences to them are somehow altered," she told Live Science in an email.

The new study, published June 22 in the journal Nature Medicine, suggests that younger generations may have a wider "gap" between their chronological ages and their biological ages — a measurement of how quickly the body's tissues and systems are aging — than older generations do. The greater gap among younger adults seems to be linked with a higher risk of developing cancer early in life.

The new study cannot prove that faster biological aging causes early-onset cancer, but it provides new clues for scientists trying to unpack what might be driving the worrying trend.

"This is really proof-of-concept," study co-author Yin Cao, a molecular and clinical epidemiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine and Siteman Cancer Center, told Live Science.

Concerning trends lurking in dense data

Chronological age is straightforward: It's the number of years that have passed since a person's birth. "Biological age," however, can vary wildly from one person to another. This catch-all term describes a range of metrics, including markers on DNA and in the bloodstream. These are often measured using "aging clocks," which aim to determine if the body is acting much older than its chronological age.

Scientists have increasingly used these summary measures in an attempt to understand why some people are more prone to age-related diseases than others. To check whether there could be a link between biological age and the rise in early cancers, the new study analyzed data from more than 150,000 adults in the UK Biobank, a long-running project that has been tracking the health of about half-a-million U.K. adults since the mid‑2000s.

The participants had provided blood samples, with many already measured for markers used to track biological aging. The study authors plugged these results into PhenoAge, a statistical model that estimates a person's "age gap" at a given chronological age. In essence, this model can compare snapshots of two 40-year-olds — one born in 1950 and the other in 1965 — and see if their blood markers suggest they're the same biological age.

"The traditional approach is really focusing on individual risk factors" for cancer, such as a history of obesity or a high intake of ultraprocessed foods, Cao said. "We are testing whether we can leverage these large biobanks and potentially find some biological imprint as a potential reflection of many exposures that can be linked with cancer risk," she said.

The analysis revealed a concerning pattern: UK Biobank participants born between 1965 and 1974 had a larger age gap than those born between 1950 and 1954 at the same chronological ages. Based on PhenoAge's metrics, the younger cohort had systemic aging levels about 0.23 standard deviations higher than the older cohort — a modest shift toward older-looking biology.

The researchers applied this same approach to about 10,000 participants in the U.S. National Institutes of Health's All of Us Research Program, another large biobank. There, they found a more pronounced pattern: People born between 1990 and 1999 had age gaps about 0.92 standard deviations higher than those born between 1965 and 1969.

Another blood-based aging clock, called the Klemera-Doubal method, showed broadly similar patterns to PhenoAge, albeit slightly weaker ones, the study found.

Real trend or data mirage?

In the UK Biobank cohort, the researchers found that participants with higher age gaps were more likely to develop early-onset solid cancers, meaning cancerous tumors that appear in tissues, rather than "liquid" cancers present in bodily fluids. This link was strongest for lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers. This finding was based on the patients' medical records.

When the participants were divided into three groups based on their biological ages, those in the highest group had a roughly 15% higher risk of early-onset solid cancer than those in the lowest group.

To probe deeper, the authors used a different model that estimates biological aging at the level of specific organs and systems, using patterns of proteins in the blood. In almost 20,000 UK Biobank participants, they found that markers suggesting an "older-than-expected" immune system were linked with a higher risk of early-onset lung cancer. Similarly, markers suggesting older-than-expected fat tissue were linked with a higher risk of early-onset colorectal cancer.

Does this mean younger generations are aging faster and that's causing the rise in cancers? Maybe, but maybe not — there are important caveats to the study's findings.

The patterns will need to be confirmed in other datasets and populations, Cao noted. Biological aging tests, including PhenoAge, are also relatively new, and their implications aren't fully understood. While they clearly capture something about health and risk at the population level, at the individual level, different biological age tests can give very different answers for the same person. That raises questions about what any single score really means for individual health.

It may be that the differences PhenoAge uncovered between younger and older people have to do with how the test was originally calibrated, Stephen Burgess, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. To know if that's the case, one would have to dig deeper into how PhenoAge scores are calculated and see if that might have skewed its assessment of the UK Biobank and All of Us cohorts, he said.

Cao added that, while PhenoAge scores have been tied to mortality risk across a range of adults, the test "requires further validations" when it comes to assessing cancer risk.

As with any observational study using large databases, it is hard to untangle cause and effect, Nangalia added.

"The main issue for this paper is one of correlation versus causality," she said. "Either way, it is useful — with the first, as a potential way of tracking population health and cancer risk, and with the second, as insights into cancer-causing mechanisms."

Cao hopes her team's approach will serve as another useful tool to figure out why more young people are getting cancer. " Hopefully this is just a starting point," Cao said.

The universe is full of structures that remind us of Earthly objects, such as the Cat's Eye Nebula, a "cosmic hamburger," and the famous Crab Nebula. Now, one more has been added to the list: a radio galaxy shaped like a bow and arrow.

The newly discovered galaxy, dubbed the RAD-Bow-And-Arrow Radio Galaxy (RAD-BAARG), sits roughly 2 billion light-years from Earth.

Radio galaxies are powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes that launch powerful jets of charged particles in opposite directions. As these high-speed jets crash into the surrounding medium, they form huge lobes of magnetized plasma that can stretch for thousands to millions of light-years. Inside both the jets and the lobes, electrons spiral around magnetic-field lines and emit radiation that is detected at radio wavelengths.

As a result, most radio galaxies look roughly symmetrical, like two matching balloon-like radio lobes inflated on each side of the central galaxy. RAD-BAARG, with its lopsided structure, appears to be an oddball.

RAD-BAARG was first spotted by citizen scientist Pranim Limbo while inspecting ultrasensitive radio images from the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey. Limbo made the discovery through India's RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory, a citizen-science research initiative in India, in collaboration with an international team of researchers.

The new image shows RAD-BAARG in stunning detail, with red tracing the radio emission captured by the LOFAR telescope, combined with an optical image from the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey.

Researchers think the strange shape may have been influenced by the galaxy's environment. RAD-BAARG appears to be falling toward a nearby cluster of galaxies, plunging through the intracluster medium, ‪the hot, thin gas that fills the space between galaxies, the researchers explained in a paper published June 22 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"The structure of this source is unlike that of any radio galaxy I have seen in the last 25 years," Ananda Hota, principal investigator of the RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory and first author of the paper, said in a statement.

When a galaxy moves through this gas faster than the speed of sound within it, it creates a shock front, similar to how a fighter jet generates a sonic boom. This compressed wall of gas piles up ahead of the galaxy as the gas falls inward.

One of RAD-BAARG's jets appears to be running straight into this shock front, causing it to bend and compress into the shape of a drawn bow. The enormous bow-like structure extends nearly 1.8 million light-years across. On the opposite side, the other jet doesn't face the same resistance. Instead, it twists into a distorted S shape before fading into a faint tail forming the "arrow."

According to the study, RAD-BAARG has a length of about 2.3 million light-years. That places it in the category of "Giant Radio Galaxies," which are some of the largest standalone single structures in the universe.

Astronomers have long predicted that infalling galaxies should generate bow shocks as they plunge through the hot gas of a galaxy cluster. But actually catching one has been extremely difficult, since the surrounding gas is too diffuse and faint to detect easily. Sitting in a complex, chaotic environment, RAD-BAARG is rare not only for its unique shape but also for providing a direct, detailed view of this elusive phenomenon. In other words: That’s a bullseye.

See more space photos of the week:

If you push two metal plates together on Earth, nothing happens. But if you take those same plates into the vacuum of space, they can fuse into a single piece of metal.

This phenomenon, called cold welding, has been a known hazard for spacecraft engineers for a long time. So what's actually happening at the atomic level, and why does space make it so much easier?

The answer comes down to a lack of oxygen in space, experts told Live Science.

Metals are made of lattices — structures where atoms are bonded to one another. But atoms near the surface of a metal aren't bonded to anything on the outward-facing side. If given the chance, they'll "reach out" and share electrons with the surface of another piece of metal.

But on Earth, nearly every metal surface is coated in an oxide layer. The layer is just a few atoms thick and forms when metal meets oxygen. "Once the oxide is formed, it's over," Julia Greer, a materials scientist at Caltech, told Live Science. "Then it can't cold weld anymore, because the oxygen basically passivates these bonds."

That thin oxide acts like an insulating wrapper. Without it, the free electrons at the surface of one metal piece stop recognizing which atom they belong to. "Those electrons don't know if it's in this piece or if it's in that piece, so they begin sharing the electrons, and essentially that cold welds things together," Sven Bilén, a professor of engineering design and aerospace engineering at Penn State, told Live Science.

In space, there's no oxygen to rebuild that layer once it's gone. The cold and the radiation make things worse. Bombardment from solar and ionic radiation in orbit can scour metal surfaces clean, Greer said, leaving freshly exposed atoms primed to bond. "Everything in space is conducive to cold welding," she said.

Metal surfaces are never perfectly smooth, either. At a microscopic level, they're jagged ‪—‬ more like tiny mountain ranges than flat plains, said Zachary Cordero, an aerospace engineer at MIT.

Pressing two surfaces together, especially with any sliding or vibration, can shear off the oxide layer that formed while the metal was on Earth and flatten those peaks into metal-to-metal contact. "You're breaking up the surface oxide, and you're forming metallurgical bonds," Cordero said.

Why cold welding worried early spacecraft engineers

Cold welding in space has long been a problem. "If there is cold welding, things can become stuck in place," Cordero told Live Science. "If you have a deployable structure and there's cold welding, you might freeze the mechanism, or a door might become locked, or something might become immobilized, which you don't want."

For example, say you were to add a metal screw to a metal door. After a while, you would not be able to unscrew it because it would have become part of the door.

Bilén pointed to NASA's Galileo probe, which launched in 1989: lubricant loss and launch vibrations during launch are thought to have stripped the oxide layer from parts of its furled high-gain antenna. When engineers attempted to deploy the antenna in 1991, it never fully opened.

Some metals are more troublesome than others. Gold and platinum don't form an oxide layer at all, even on Earth, which makes them notoriously prone to cold welding. "Gold definitely is a very notorious metal for cold welding," Greer said, adding that gold's softness lets it conform easily to whatever surface it touches and it bonds even more easily.

How to prevent cold welding in space

To prevent components from accidentally fusing in orbit, engineers rely on a few strategies. One is anodizing, a process that locks an artificial oxide layer onto a metal surface. Another method is to coat moving parts with dry lubricants, such as molybdenum disulfide, to physically keep surfaces from touching.

A third strategy is to pair dissimilar metals — for instance, gold next to a "body-centered" metal, like molybdenum — so their atomic structures don't mesh as neatly. "Their packing order is not quite perfectly aligned, and so there'll be a lot more energetic kind of barrier to overcome," Greer said.

Before launch, hardware also gets shaken on vibration tables and cycled through extreme hot-and-cold swings inside vacuum chambers, simulating the stresses of liftoff and orbit to catch problems on the ground.

Even with all of those precautions, cold welding can still happen. Bilén recalled bolts in his own lab's vacuum chamber fusing shut after a move across campus. They eventually had to be drilled out. "It happens even on Earth," he said.

See how much you know about human exploration into space with our spaceflight quiz!

Plants, insects, and larger animals, like the forest’s white-faced capuchin monkeys, are well adapted to these changes. But in 2015, during an abnormally severe drought influenced by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Perry, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, observed behaviors that once seemed impossible.

Under normal conditions "The [capuchin] mothers are quite devoted," she explained. "Now, I was seeing babies crying on the ground piteously. And the mothers just looking down like 'Too much trouble' and walking off, abandoning their infants."

"Even capuchins have their limits," Perry said. "And we need to start paying attention because all the weather predictions are saying that we're going to get more unpredictability and more climate extremes."

Monkeying around

Odd Jacobson, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, was a student at Lomas Barbudal in 2016, a year after this severe drought. His focus was on understanding how the study site's 12 different capuchin groups were moving through the forest. But now he's set out to investigate how else climate extremes may affect the behaviors and social structures of these monkeys.

In a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, Jacobson and his coauthors — including Perry — analyzed how climate variability correlated to the 33 years of geolocation data they had on the capuchins.

Their first step was understanding how the size of each group was affecting the relationships between monkeys within the same group. To do this, they observed variables such as daily fruit intake, the size of the group's home range, and the distance the group traveled each day to find food.

Finally, to understand how monkey groups interacted, they used a "hierarchical social relations model," which allowed the scientists to predict how two different monkey groups would move through the forest and where their territories would overlap.

The team repeated this process, two monkey groups at a time, until they analyzed the interactions between all 12 monkey groups at Lomas Barbudal. Then, they added the climate-over-time layer to predict how the home range overlap and encounter rates (meaning moments where capuchins from two different groups engaged, often violently) would change with the seasons.

Strength (and weakness) in numbers

Generally, large monkey groups have advantages and disadvantages in the forest. One key advantage is the ability to control resource-rich areas, such as land with fruiting trees known as food patches. A key disadvantage is increased intragroup competition for food, meaning the daily fruit intake of individual monkeys was lower.

The researchers found that during climatic extremes, such as extremely wet or dry seasons, this intragroup competition intensifies, making the group less efficient at foraging overall. Behavior between groups changed with the climate as well. For example, in a typical dry season, large groups often overpower smaller ones to take over areas with more available fruit, such as along rivers.

But the new research found that this long-understood idea doesn't always hold true: During extreme climate events, like a dry season made even drier by the effects of El Niño, capuchins didn't try to hoard the higher-quality areas.

"We don't really know exactly why," Jacobson said. "Maybe there's not as much heterogeneity in the landscape during these resource poor times, and so there's not much that larger groups can monopolize."

Climate extremes, the research suggests, may be upsetting the balance that determines the optimal size of monkey groups. And, as a warming atmosphere makes climate extremes like El Niño or La Niña more intense, it's growing increasingly important to understand how these changes will affect animal societies.

Filippo Aureli, an ethologist at the Universidad Veracruzana, in Mexico, was not involved with this study, but he has studied the effects of extreme weather events on spider monkeys in Mexico. He also registered the infant mortality rates of capuchin and spider monkeys in the Costa Rican dry tropical forest during that 2015 drought. Capuchin populations experienced high infant mortality during the extreme event, while spider monkey populations tended to stop reproducing.

"With climate change, [climate extremes] are going to be more frequent and intense," Aureli said. "And we don't know what's going to happen. For this period [so far], they've held on very well, the spider monkeys, but we don't know for how much longer."

Perry agreed, noting "the importance of having a baseline when you're trying to study rare events like El Niño droughts."

"We know what normal is," she explained. "If you just try to drop in right now in all the chaos that we're starting to feel around the planet, then you really can't study it."

This article was originally published on Eos.org. Read the original article.

A new episode of "Almost History," the alternate-history podcast from All About History, explores one of the biggest "what-ifs" of the ancient world: What if Carthage had defeated Rome during the Punic Wars?

The episode is hosted by Emily Staniforth, a staff writer at All About History, a sister publication of Live Science. It features historian and archaeologist Eve MacDonald, a senior lecturer in ancient history at Cardiff University in the U.K. and author of "Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire" (W. W. Norton & Co., 2026). Together, they examine how close Carthage came to changing the course of history and what the modern world might look like if one of Rome's greatest rivals had emerged victorious.

"Carthage ha[d] enormous resources, because to even be in the fight for as long as they were is extraordinary," MacDonald said in an interview. However, despite Carthage's capabilities, they were always fighting an uphill battle, she noted.

"I always think the Romans were probably never going to go away," MacDonald said.

Tactics and turning points

The Punic Wars, fought between the Roman Republic and Carthage from 264 to 146 B.C., transformed the ancient Mediterranean. Although Rome ultimately prevailed and went on to build one of history's largest empires, victory was far from guaranteed. During the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hannibal famously marched elephants across the Alps and inflicted devastating defeats on Roman armies, bringing the republic to the brink of collapse before Rome eventually recovered.

In the podcast, MacDonald discusses the political and military turning points that could have tipped the balance in Carthage's favor. The conversation also explores how a Carthaginian victory might have altered trade, culture and the distribution of power across Europe and the Mediterranean, offering listeners a glimpse of an alternate version of world history.

"I think that's one of the things that we would appreciate more now: As much as the Greco-Roman history of the Mediterranean is part of the Western world, so too is all of Carthage, Phoenicia and Numidia" in northern Africa, MacDonald said. "But we haven't got those tales anymore for us to understand."

The episode is part of "Almost History," a series inspired by All About History magazine's long-running "What If" feature. Each installment invites historians to examine pivotal moments from the past and consider how different outcomes might have reshaped history. Recent episodes have tackled questions such as What if D-Day had failed? and What if the Bolshevik Revolution had never succeeded?

You can listen to "What If Carthage Won the Punic Wars?" on Acast and other major podcast platforms.

Can you match these historical maps to the empires that ruled them? Test your geography skills with our ancient empires quiz!

This week, we've taken one tantalizing step closer to finding out if there really was life on Mars, after NASA's Perseverance rover uncovered the highest concentration of organic molecules on the Red Planet to date.

The data comes from mudstones in Jezero crater, which once hosted a deep lake. Last year, researchers described a piece of rock with patterns resembling those left by microorganisms on Earth as one of the clearest signs yet of past Martian microbes.

Now, scientists have confirmed the widespread presence of complex carbon-based molecules in this area of the crater, which they suggest indicate the presence of fossilized microbes.

Going even further back in history, new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed how early galaxies lived fast and died young, offering a possible preview of our own galaxy's death.

Elsewhere in space, JWST captured the formation of a distant star, 1,280 light-years away in the constellation Orion, while the Euclid space telescope snapped the most detailed photo of the Milky Way ever taken.

Weird human cousin gets even weirder

'A weird result from an already weird hominin': Archaeologists discover all Homo naledi skeletons found in South African cave are female

Homo naledi surprised scientists once again this week. Found in a South African cave in 2013, the small-brained, two-legged relative to modern humans is thought to have lived around 300,000 years ago. Since its initial discovery, the enigmatic hominin has shocked scientists with a string of baffling revelations. In 2023, researchers found evidence that H. naledi may have used fire in the cave. This early hominin may also have buried its dead. Now, archaeologists have analyzed genetic material in the enamel of nearly two dozen skeletons at the site and found that they are all female.

"The bottom line is this is a weird result from an already weird hominin," Elizabeth Sawchuk, curator of human evolution at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

Discover more archaeology news

—Hanging lamp in the form of a sandaled right foot: A 1,600-year-old bronze lamp with multilayered Christian symbolism

—Early Homo sapiens may have lived in rainforests, new clues suggest — and it could overturn our understanding of human evolution

—Some of the last surviving Neanderthals were remarkably diverse ‪—‬ suggesting inbreeding didn't doom them

Life's Little Mysteries

How did the Romans build such straight roads?

The Romans are known for their transport systems that enabled travel and trade across their enormous empire. Many of these centuries-old streets had a reputation for being extremely straight. Nowadays, building straight roads requires advanced surveying using GPS networks and lasers, as well as careful engineering to flatten the terrain. So how did the Romans do it about 2,000 years before these things were invented?

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

Water might be 2 liquids

Water might secretly be a mix of 2 different liquids, scientists say

Most of us discount water as the most basic of beverages, but if you look at it at a molecular level, water is actually rather exciting. Think about it: While most liquids are denser in their solid form, water ice floats. That's weird. Water also resists temperature changes better than similar liquids do, and its viscosity decreases under certain pressures.

Some scientists have hypothesized that these weird behaviors come about because water consists of not one, but two liquids ‪—‬ a dense one and a less-dense one that constantly switch places. Now, with the help of AI, we have proof of this weirdness.

Discover more weird news

—We've spent decades looking for the wrong type of alien radio signals, new paper claims — and there's an easy way to fix it

—'Weirdos of the sperm whale world' appear to be evolving 2 different dialects, audio recordings suggest

—China's Einstein Probe detected a mysterious cosmic explosion — and scientists have no idea what caused it

Also in science news this week

—The US just approved bemotrizinol, a sunscreen ingredient long used in Asia and Europe. Here's how it works.

—'You can't patch your way out of it': Cheap AI worm can spread between devices without human guidance — but how did scientists create it?

—Water shortages could prevent the US from mining more lithium, deepening reliance on foreign imports

—Diagnostic dilemma: After taking a medicine for years, a man suddenly had weird changes in his taste that made food disgusting

Science Spotlight

'If there's any country that will do it, it's China': Why is China diverting some of the world's mightiest rivers thousands of miles?

People in China's northern megacities have 74 times less fresh water availability than the average American. But China boasts some of the largest rivers in Asia that flow farther south, along with massive water reserves in glaciers in the west. To address this imbalance, the Chinese government has built the world's largest water diversion project, ferrying water from the Yangtze River in the country's center and south over thousands of miles through a complex system of canals, pipes, dams, reservoirs and pumps.

And yet, this is still not enough to satisfy the water needs of the country's thirsty North. Now, China is expanding these routes and planning a third, western route for the project, which will be the most dangerous and ambitious route yet.

Beyond diverting the country's rivers, China is also building the world's largest dam in an earthquake-prone region in Tibet and has invested heavily in creating a permanent "sky river" to help solve the country's water crisis.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here are some of the best news analyses, crosswords, interviews, opinion pieces and quizzes published this week.

—9 of the best technology conspiracy theories [Countdown]

— AI companies don't want to be legally responsible for their chatbots. US courts should make them. [Opinion]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #49: 'Short' tempered French emperor — 13 across [Crossword]

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

—60 million stars: Euclid space telescope snaps the most detailed photo of the Milky Way ever taken [Skywatching]

Science in pictures

NASA satellite captures wave of warm water hundreds of miles long that signals a devastatingly strong El Niño

New satellite imagery shows a wave of warm water stretching across the Pacific Ocean in a dramatic illustration of the newly declared El Niño. The image shows a red wave as it streaks across the equator and piles up around the west coast of South America.

Ocean patterns like this are known as Kelvin waves. They occur when winds in the Pacific Ocean near the equator temporarily reverse and blow from west to east. This enables warm water to gradually build up in the east,preventing cold waters from rising below.

The wave was spotted by NASA's Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, which measures ocean temperatures through radar scans of changes in sea surface height, caused by heat's expansionary effects upon water. The satellite has already observed several other Kelvin waves this year in anticipation of El Niño.

Follow Live Science on social media

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

A photograph of Earth glowing in deep space, the moon's cratered horizon stretching across its foreground, caught many people's eyes in April 2026. Astronauts captured the image while aboard NASA's Artemis II mission, and like the famous Apollo 8 "Earthrise" image, the picture felt instantly real and inspiring for many.

But when almost anyone can fabricate a visually similar image in seconds from a text prompt using artificial intelligence, how do people decide which image is real?

The proliferation of AI-generated science images in public spaces is not simply a misinformation problem. As a researcher who studies visual science communication and public trust, I believe it also contributes to a crisis of trust in science in the age of AI, and the tools scientists have long relied on to establish visual credibility are losing their grip.

AI-generated images infiltrate science

AI tools are already changing how scientific visuals are created, shared and publicized.

Researchers use them to generate illustrations, create synthetic data, edit lab images and produce materials for education and public outreach.

While AI can help scientists communicate complicated ideas more creatively and efficiently, these same tools blur the lines between illustration, enhancement and fabrication.

In 2024, two papers were retracted after publishing AI-generated figures posessing biologically impossible structures. In April 2026, the New England Journal of Medicine retracted a paper after discovering that a clinical image had been manipulated with AI. These are just cases that came to mass public attention and are likely just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers have warned that AI-generated visuals pose growing threats in fields that depend heavily on visual evidence, such as materials science.

Academic publishers are beginning to adopt AI-detection tools. However, systems designed to detect fake images will almost always lag behind systems designed to create them. Many detectors can identify only image patterns they were trained to recognize. As new AI models emerge, developers must constantly obtain new data and retrain detectors to catch up.

The biggest concern are realistic-looking visuals that subtly distort scientific details while remaining believable enough to pass initial review.

Trust in scientific images

For decades, scientific images carried authority partly because they were difficult to produce. Creating microscope images, climate graphs and space photographs required expensive equipment, institutional resources and specialized expertise. Most people assumed such images represented true observations because very few people could make them.

Research in science communication, including my own, suggests that people judge scientific visuals using a few mental shortcuts. Does the image look technically sophisticated? Does it come from a trusted institution? Does it match what I already believe? Generative AI is undermining all three of these heuristics, or mental shortcuts.

Today, anyone can create a polished, scientific-looking image from a text prompt. Images are also detached from their original source when circulating online. When visual quality and institutional attribution become unreliable cues for judging the credibility of science images, people tend to fall back on something else: their own prior beliefs.

As a result, authentic scientific images that challenge someone's existing beliefs can now be dismissed as AI-generated, whereas fabricated images that confirm them are easily accepted as evidence. AI, in this way, may amplify motivated reasoning — that is, people's tendency to accept what they already agree with and question what they do not.

This shift matters because visuals have long served as evidence for scientific claims. Nonexpert audiences rely on images not only to see what scientists have discovered but also to develop an emotional connection and perceive credibility in the science being presented.

If audiences stop trusting visual evidence altogether, science loses one of its most powerful tools for public communication.

Transparency, not restriction

AI tools offer real benefits for researchers communicating their work to diverse audiences. The challenge is using these tools without quietly transferring AI's credibility deficit onto the science the images are meant to convey.

One practical path forward is for researchers to treat image provenance — where an image came from and how it was created — with the same seriousness they already apply to data provenance.

Scientists routinely disclose funding resources, study methodologies and conflicts of interest. Similar standards may now be necessary for scientific images. Was AI used to generate or modify this image? Is it a direct observation, a simulation or an illustration? What exactly does the image represent, and how was it verified? Can it be replicated by other researchers?

My colleagues and I found that people's familiarity with AI significantly shapes how they judge the credibility of AI-generated visuals. Those familiar with AI tools were more likely to view AI disclosure as a sign of transparency, and some rated clearly labeled AI-generated content as more credible than unlabeled content.

Transparency gives audiences the necessary context to evaluate what they are seeing, but it may not resolve every dispute about how images are made. Responsible use of AI-generated scientific images will require honesty, adherence to professional norms and the collective development of evidence-based standards across fields.

Why authentic images remain powerful

The original Apollo 8 "Earthrise" photograph of 1968 carries significant emotional impact. So do the Artemis II images of 2026.

What makes them meaningful is not simply their beauty. It is their traceable connection to scientific reality. When people look at these photographs of planets, they also know there are astronauts, physical cameras, documented missions and verifiable observations behind the images. In this sense, authenticity is a documented relationship between an image and the world.

In the age of generative AI, scientific institutions can no longer assume audiences will automatically trust their visuals. Trust now depends on transparency, documentation and clear communication about how visual evidence is produced.

Without guidelines and standards, science risks entering a world where every image can be questioned and no image carries inherent credibility.

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

Ancient Roman transportation engineers built a vast network of roads that stretched across Europe, North Africa and parts of the Middle East. This complex road system was a key to travel and trade in the Roman Empire, and many of the centuries-old streets had a reputation for being extremely straight, although not all of them were.

For instance, Via Appia (Appian Way), which connected Rome to the port of Brundisium in southern Italy, was more than 300 miles (500 kilometers) long, and sizable parts of it were straight. Another Roman road, Stane Street in southern England, was built to connect London to Chichester. Much of the road, which stretches roughly 57 miles (92 km), is straight. The Middle East also had straight Roman roads, including a coastal avenue from Antioch, Turkey, to what is now Gaza.

A recent mapping project was able to map about 186,400 miles (300,000 km) of roads and more are probably undiscovered. But how did the Romans avoid unnecessary twists and turns to ensure straight streets? The answer may lie in three surveying instruments the Romans used.

Surveying roads

In some instances, the Romans built on top of older roads that existed before they conquered an area. Their "road network incorporated older roads from a broad range of different societies and polities," Marion Kruse, an associate professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati, told Live Science in an email.

But when the Romans built new roads, they used a few different tools to help plan them.

"Three instruments were used consistently by Roman road builders: the dioptra, the groma, and the chorobatus [or chorobates]," Adriana Panaite, a researcher at the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology in Romania who has studied Roman roads extensively, told Live Science in an email.

While the dioptra is known from ancient texts, no example of it has ever been found in an archaeological dig, according to M.J.T. Lewis, who was a historian at the University of Hull in the U.K. In his book "Surveying Instruments of Greece and Rome" (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Lewis noted that the design of the dioptra varied considerably. The different designs tended to include a stand and a disc-shaped base with a tube-shaped sighting instrument attached. An ancient surveyor could look through the tube and see a distant object without extraneous light interfering, allowing for a better view.

The chorobatus was used to measure horizontal planes. Around 20 feet (6 meters) long, the chorobatus was a beam of wood on legs and looked like a small table, Lewis wrote. It likely had small weights hanging from it to show that the beam was level. No ancient example of the chorobatus has survived, and the exact design and way it was used are unclear. Ancient texts indicate that it acted as a builder's level that could help set up level points and determine elevations.

But the most important tool Roman surveyors used was the groma, Joseph Lewis, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who has conducted extensive research on Roman roads, told Live Science in an email. The "groma was the principal tool of the mensor ‪—‬ the land surveyor ‪—‬ when planning long, straight alignments," he noted. "These alignments were then often used when constructing roads across gentle terrain."

The groma, also called a gruma or croma, consisted of a vertical pole with a horizontal X-shaped cross on top and four small weights hanging down from strings at the ends of the crossbeams, Lewis said. The groma was most useful for establishing right angles.

Multiple Roman surveyors could use the weights on their poles to ensure any road they were building was going in the right direction.

"A surveyor at one end will direct other surveyors to move their poles until they are in line with one another," Lewis explained. "Once the direction had been established, Roman surveyors observed the landscape and adjusted the course of a road to accommodate/avoid obstacles such as steep sections which would have posed difficulties for wheeled vehicles, locations to ford rivers, or to connect pre-existing settlements."

However, the techniques used to build roads throughout the Roman Empire probably varied somewhat, meaning experts "should be cautious about assuming that there was a single 'Roman' technique for road building," Kruse said. He noted that the Roman Empire covered a vast area and lasted for a long period of time.

"It seems safe to assume that practices varied across time and space," Kruse explained.

Not all roads were straight

One reason for the variation in Roman roads was likely the diversity of the laborers who built them. "In all likelihood, road-building work was done by a mix of soldiers, slaves ‪—‬ especially prisoners ‪—‬ and free locals called upon to help as part of a 'corvee' obligation imposed by their local community on Rome's instructions," Richard Talbert, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Live Science in an email. But paid laborers were probably used for some skilled tasks, such as building bridges, Talbert said.

While Roman roads have a reputation for being precisely laid out and straight, not all of them were.

"It is commonly mentioned that Roman roads were exceptionally straight. This is partially true: The Romans had engineers and a large labor force that in some cases managed to modify the landscape to enable straight roads," Tom Brughmans, a classical archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who is part of a team that helped create an updated map of the Roman road system, told Live Science in an email.

"We believe that the Romans preferred relatively straight roads in places where there was very little friction offered by the topography," such as flatland areas, Brughmans said. But in areas with more difficult terrain, such as mountainous regions, the roads would often not run straight.

Brughmans said he expects "future research will show that, in general, [Roman roads] are less straight than modern roads, given the need for motorized vehicles to avoid sharp turns when driving at speed."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BT: So what did you do next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BT: Do you at least have a few candidates?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CD: Yeah, hopefully others can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empires have shaped human history, often growing from a single city or cultural group into territories spanning continents.

Some empires rose through conquest, and others grew through trade or shrewd alliances. Their borders, captured in maps described by historians or revealed by long-forgotten burials and artifacts, show just how far their influences once reached.

Whether you’re a casual history fan or a devoted scholar of the ancient to modern world, this quiz offers a chance to test your knowledge of bygone empires and the lands they once ruled.

Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button!

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China's top-secret space plane just released another unknown object over Earth, raising concerns about exactly what the mysterious vehicle is up to. The clandestine spacecraft has now deployed at least nine payloads around our planet since 2022 — and we don't know what any of them really are.

The Shenlong, or "divine dragon," space plane is a reusable, robotic spacecraft that China has repeatedly launched into low Earth orbit (LEO) on board vertical rockets, before reentering the atmosphere for a horizontal runway landing — similar to the iconic spacecraft from NASA's now-defunct Space Shuttle program.

The space plane has never been photographed by outside nations, so we have no clear idea what it looks like or how large it is. Officials from China's space sector have yet to reveal any meaningful information about its design or purpose.

Shenlong first launched into space on a two-day mission in September 2020, before completing an eight-month stint in LEO between August 2022 and May 2023, and a nine-month spaceflight between December 2023 and September 2024. It released its first payload shortly after the launch of its second mission and deployed seven more objects during its third mission, six of which were ejected simultaneously.

The space plane's fourth and ongoing mission began on Feb. 7 when it launched atop a Long March 2F rocket that lifted off from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. And to date, there has been no news of its current activities.

But on June 22, the private space surveillance firm LeoLabs, which specializes in tracking spacecraft in LEO, detected "an unknown object in the vicinity [of the spaceplane]," according to a post on X. The mystery payload was initially picked up by one of the company's radars in New Zealand and did not match any other object in the company's catalog.

Later on the same day, LeoLabs representatives added in an update to the post that, following additional observations from across the company's radar network, they had "independently cataloged this object and assessed with high confidence that it was released from the Chinese space plane."

On June 23, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and satellite tracking expert at Durham University in the U.K. and previously with the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, confirmed in another X post that the new object originated from Shenlong and was being tracked by the U.S. Space Force.

McDowell also speculated that it could be a "cubesat" — a small, often box-like satellite frequently deployed as a secondary payload alongside larger spacecraft. However, as with the previously released objects, it is unclear what its purpose might be.

Space News previously reported that Shenlong's primary goal might be to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with other spacecraft and that its payloads may be targets for it to practise flyby maneuvers in orbit.

Others have speculated that the mystery objects could be covert surveillance satellites or possess anti-satellite weaponry, according to Gizmodo. However, to date, there have been no reports of any spacecraft being sabotaged by the space plane or its payloads.

Shenlong has now spent nearly 700 cumulative days in LEO. During that time, amateur photographers snapped some blurry shots of light reflecting off the mysterious space plane. The most intriguing image, captured in August 2024, revealed a bright appendage extending from the main spacecraft. This was most likely a solar array, experts speculated, which is unsurprising considering that most spacecraft are at least partially powered by sunlight.

China is not the only country with a secretive space plane. The U.S. also has its own version, the X-37B, whose two operational models have collectively spent more than 4,200 days in LEO since 2010. However, American officials have been much more forthcoming in revealing information about their space plane's design, mission parameters and research goals.

Who is responsible for AI's output? Artificial intelligence (AI) companies like OpenAI maintain that they are not. In fact, their terms and conditions in 2023 stated that responsibility lies solely with the user. A German court disagrees.

On June 9, a Munich court (subject to appeal) ruled that Google can be liable for false claims produced by its AI summaries, drawing a sharp line between ordinary search results and machine-generated assertions. In other words, AI companies must be held legally responsible for the output that is created by their systems and pushed to users.

The court's logic was simple but profound: Search results point outward to sources, while AI summaries speak in Google's own voice. That distinction matters because it goes to the heart of what kind of speech deserves protection — and what kind is subject to legal scrutiny. The U.S. should follow the German court's lead. In the absence of such provisions, the entire burden of discerning truth from falsehood falls on the reader.

In the U.S., the First Amendment is intended to protect the right to speak, argue, persuade and offend. But freedom of speech is not free of caveats. It does not allow people to incite others to commit crimes, to threaten or to defame, for example. And if speech causes material harm, speakers can be held liable for those harms. When a company chooses to put a synthetic answer engine between users and the web, it is no longer merely hosting speech; it is producing an amalgamation of complex mathematical expressions that, outputted as text, resemble human speech. AI companies want this text to enjoy the same protections user-generated text has, while simultaneously dodging all the responsibility associated with being a speaker.

The roots of this dilemma go back to the 1990s, when the advent of online forums and social media created a new problem. Unlike traditional publishers, forum hosts needed to provide a platform for their users' voices, without being liable for what their users were saying. This problem was addressed with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, enacted in 1996. Section 230 was a bipartisan amendment written to preserve the internet as a space where ordinary people could speak (or post) without the forum host becoming liable for every third-party post.

That broad immunity reflected a democratic judgment: If the law made platforms responsible for all user content, many would censor aggressively or stop hosting speech altogether. This would limit free speech. Section 230 was meant to protect the ecosystem of human expression. In this sense, hosts of online spaces can be seen as providing a public square where speech occurs.

The lawmakers who passed Section 230 three decades ago could not have foreseen a world populated by chatbot-generated text. As such text increasingly leads to real-world harms, lawsuits are proliferating and tech companies are deploying a number of often-contradictory legal strategies to avoid culpability. In some cases, they are arguing that AI-generated text is not speech, but rather simply a tool, and that companies are therefore protected as "carriers," not "publishers" by Section 230's protection of a public forum for free expression.

But the companies deploy this argument only when it suits them.

In other cases, they are increasingly reaching for free-speech language to defend AI-generated text because free-speech protections provide broad legal immunity. For example, in a Florida wrongful-death lawsuit against Open AI (maker of ChatGPT), a plaintiff has alleged that the company’s chatbot pushed a 14-year-old to take his own life. OpenAI argued that the chatbot was protected by the First Amendment, though the judge dismissed that defense and allowed the case to proceed.

Neither of these arguments is convincing. AI companies are not merely providers of a public forum, as the words produced by their AI summaries and chatbots are generated by the company's products.

Similarly dubious is the claim that bots should be seen as equal participants in a public square. This is a category error. Free speech is a human right — it protects people as speakers and listeners in a democratic public sphere. Bots do not vote, deliberate, dissent, worship or participate in civic life. They generate text, but they do not possess a moral and political standing. Bots have no skin in the game.

What, then, justifies constitutional protection in the first place? Extending the strongest speech protections to machines would not defend liberty; it would confuse "botput" with free expression. It would, in actuality, extend the strongest free-speech protection to companies. But that requires a separate line of argumentation that ought to be agreed upon by society.

The Munich court's limited and nuanced way of governing "botput" provides a clear way forward.

Given its history with Nazism, Germany does not enshrine free speech quite the way the U.S. does. But the German court's arguments still provide a useful template for a future U.S. ruling.

The Munich court held that if a system simply points users to sources, it resembles traditional search and should continue to enjoy broad protection afforded to aggregators. If it synthesizes claims, imitates the tone of authority, and offers a single authoritative answer generated by an AI, it should carry corresponding duties of care that entail liability for the company.

The need for such safeguards is only growing. AI-generated summaries can be copied instantly, scaled globally, and repeated across interfaces until a falsehood becomes regarded as "truth." That is not a hypothetical concern; it is already happening.

Moreover, it is important to remember that the original intention of Section 230 was to insulate platforms from liability for third-party posts, not their own text.

This is not an anti-innovation argument. AI can be helpful, efficient and genuinely transformative. The law should encourage useful tools while insisting that the companies deploying them remain responsible for the foreseeable harms of their products.

We need clearer rules that keep the internet free for people while preventing machines from laundering falsehood into authority. The German ruling points toward that future. The sooner U.S. law and policy follow, the better chance we have of preserving our shared reality and a healthy democracy.

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

With the aid of AI, scientists have identified a potential new antibiotic to treat gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted bacterial infection that's increasingly resistant to drugs. The newfound antibiotic has shown promise in lab experiments involving a "vagina on a chip," researchers report in a new study.

"There's an urgent need to address antibiotic resistance in gonorrhea, and discovering new antibiotics is one of the key strategies," Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a clinical professor at the University of Southern California who was not involved with the work, told Live Science. "It's exciting to see the application of AI in this area of public health."

Every year, over half a million people in the United States catch gonorrhea, which causes symptoms such as pain and fluid discharge. In severe cases, untreated gonorrhea can lead to infertility. If it's acquired during pregnancy, the infection can pose risks of miscarriage and early birth, and if it's passed to babies, it can potentially cause sepsis or newborn blindness if left untreated.

Gonorrhea bacteria, called Neisseria gonorrhoeae, often carry mutations that confer resistance to one or more antibiotics, limiting treatment options. The widely used antibiotic ceftriaxone remains the go-to drug, but resistance to this drug is soaring globally. For now, only 0.1% of cases in the U.S. are resistant, but rates are as high as 10% in some Chinese provinces and 27% in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Scientists are searching for novel antibiotics to tackle resistant bugs. To pinpoint new drugs, they typically screen large libraries of compounds to find ones that kill the bacteria. However, these experiments are slow and don't keep up with the pace at which new resistant strains are emerging.

So, in a study published June 17 in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers instead harnessed AI to expeditiously wade through a bevy of antibiotic candidates. They trained the AI models to spot potential antibiotics by studying patterns in the chemical properties of 1,755 clinically approved drugs that either do or don't treat drug-susceptible gonorrhea.

Next, they ran their trained models on a different set of approximately 6 million compounds, finding 213 possible hits. They whittled down that list by process of elimination, first by excluding compounds that were too similar to existing drugs in modeling experiments. Those drugs might not have worked against drug-resistant superbugs. Next, through lab experiments, they removed compounds that weren't potent enough against gonorrhea or were too toxic to human cells.

One of the most promising compounds that emerged was called MP20, which the researchers then put to the test.

Scientists often use laboratory mice to study new drugs, but it's difficult to establish a gonorrhea infection in mice. That's because the bacteria are so adapted to humans, study co-author Dr. Melis Anahtar, a physician scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Live Science. (She is listed as an co-inventor on a provisional patent for MP20.)

Additionally, "there is a large push, especially in the U.S. administration, to move away from animals and to use more human-organ-mimicking systems" to test new drugs, she added. (Many scientists are developing such laboratory models of the human body for drug testing, but those models aren't necessarily ready to replace animal testing yet.)

For this study, the researchers tested MP20 using a vagina-on-a-chip model. This small device contains a layer of cells that mimics the lining of the vagina and a layer of fibroblast cells, which are found deeper in the tissue. These layers are connected to a nutrient-filled flow channel that mimics the bloodstream.

The researchers added gonorrhea bacteria to the chip's first layer, mimicking how the bug is sexually transmitted. Then, they administered MP20 through the flow channel, mimicking body-wide administration of the drug, to see if the antibiotic could cross through these different tissues and reach the bacteria.

"It could actually get through all those epithelial barriers and accumulate at a concentration that was sufficient to kill the gonorrhea," Anahtar said. MP20 worked just as well as the existing drug ceftriaxone; no bacteria were detected at all after treatment with either drug.

More experiments are needed before MP20 could potentially reach the clinic and help patients. "You need to demonstrate these chemical compounds are safe and are not going to have any human liver toxicity, kidney toxicity or severe side effects," Klausner said.

He noted that an antibiotic's effectiveness depends on the anatomical site infected by the bug. So the researchers will need to assess how effectively their compounds, if delivered via the bloodstream, can reach the penis, rectum, throat and vagina to treat gonorrhea at any of those sites.

Anahtar thinks AI models will prove pivotal in the quest for new drugs, especially now that chemists can prepare a wider array of compounds than ever before. "In 2012, I think there were a million compounds that you could just buy from commercial vendors, and now it's more than 70 billion," she said. She aims to grow and improve her models to test even more compounds at once.

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

Nearly 70,000 years ago, modern humans created stunning rock art in an unexpected place: the tropical Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The finding, announced in January, made headlines for being the oldest known rock art in the world.

But the discovery's location also highlighted another surprising finding: that members of our species, Homo sapiens, were thriving in the tropics tens of thousands of years ago.

Researchers have long thought that early humans didn't live in tropical rainforests, as these places haven't yielded human fossils and are teeming with dangerous life, including venomous animals, poisonous plants and parasites that would deter early populations.

But that perspective has been changing over the past few decades. Sulawesi's ancient rock art is one of several clues that modern humans may have lived in tropical rainforests for hundreds of thousands of years. That would mean modern humans could have been living in these hot, wet regions since soon after the emergence of our species in Africa around 300,000 years ago.

Understanding how, when and where modern humans inhabited rainforests — and how that shaped our evolution — "may give us an insight into something about what it means to be uniquely human," Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and author of the book "Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped World History" (Penguin, 2022), told Live Science.

From one origin story to many

Conventional wisdom held that modern humans emerged from one parent population in an East African savanna and did not encounter rainforests until around 12,000 years ago, after agriculture emerged to support survival in these climes. The lack of H. sapiens fossils from Africa's tropics appeared to support this view.

Then, in 2017, scientists identified the oldest modern-human fossils — except they weren't in East Africa, but rather in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. The following year, Eleanor Scerri, an archaeological scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, and her colleagues reviewed archaeological evidence, including the Jebel Irhoud fossils, and integrated it with genetic data from present-day populations. The evidence pointed toward H. sapiens originating from many subdivided populations across Africa.

These populations periodically met and exchanged genes and ideas, but they also spent long periods apart, adapting to different ecosystems and evolving diverse traits. In this new understanding, the earliest members of our species may have evolved not just in the grassy savanna but in tropical rainforests, too.

"One of the implications of the model is, if it's not one place and it's many places, then maybe it's not one ecosystem," Scerri told Live Science. "Maybe it's many ecosystems."

Because rainforests come with their own set of environmental pressures, people who lived there may have evolved traits to handle those challenges. When different early human populations came together, tropical rainforest dwellers would have contributed different gene variants than populations from open savannas. The ability to adapt to a variety of environments, including rainforests, may have come in handy later, when H. sapiens spread out of Africa and into tropical Southeast Asia, including places like Sulawesi.

But establishing what these traits were would first require evidence that humans lived in rainforests close to the dawn of our species.

Rainforests are terrible for fossil hunters

Unfortunately, the highly acidic soil in rainforests degrades organic material like bones. This makes evidence of ancient humans, such as fossils, or human activities, like bone arrows or potential woven fiber baskets, exceptionally rare in rainforests.

Even in the few instances this evidence is found, the conditions make it hard to date and contextualize it. Archaeologists often date early human fossils by measuring radioactive isotopes (versions of elements), such as carbon-14, in distinct, undisturbed layers of sediments — broken-down rocks and minerals that form via erosion and weathering. The more sediment layers there are, the longer the period of history that can be traced. But weather conditions in West and Central Africa's rainforests have left few long sediment sequences.

The lack of long sediment sequences also significantly reduces the odds of finding fossils at all, said Antonio Rosas, a paleobiologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain who has been searching unsuccessfully for such fossils in Equatorial Guinean rainforests since 2014. "To be honest, I think I gave up the possibility of finding fossils properly," Rosas said.

Written in stone

As a result, many researchers studying early H. sapiens evolution have focused on a material that does preserve: stone.

In Africa, stone tools reveal humans were in coastal tropical forests in what is now Kenya roughly 78,000 years ago, the tropical rainforests of what is now Equatorial Guinea from around 45,000 years ago, and the rainforests of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo around 18,000 years ago.

Then, in 2025, researchers revealed that stone tools previously found in a tropical rainforest in the Ivory Coast in the 1980s were 150,000 years old. Because the area was also a tropical rainforest 150,000 years ago, this is evidence that our species inhabited rainforests "much earlier than previously thought," study first author Eslem Ben Arous, a geochronologist and archaeologist at the National Research Center on Human Evolution in Spain, told Live Science in an email.

The antiquity of these quartz tools — which were a mix of flakes and heavy-duty picks and choppers — show that early H. sapiens were capable of designing technology to survive in dense tropical forests. Dense forests weren't a barrier for early humans at that time, Ben Arous said.

Direct evidence

Although stone tools show ancient people were venturing into forests for food or living there part time, they don't prove humans lived there year-round. To do that, researchers still need fossils.

By analyzing the isotopes of elements found in human tooth enamel, researchers can reveal whether our distant relatives actually lived in rainforests. That's because closed, dense canopy rainforests have low levels of sunlight and high carbon dioxide, and the ratio of isotopes of elements in a person's teeth can reveal if they spent a lot of time in those conditions as a child.

Currently, zinc isotopes in two 46,000- to 63,000-year-old human teeth found in Tam Pà Ling cave in Laos are the oldest evidence of humans eating foods mainly from a tropical rainforest.

Similar evidence is currently lacking from African rainforests. But the ability to adapt to many different environments, including rainforests, and the capacity to develop highly specialized traits for such environments is "what's unique about our species," Roberts said.

Identifying adaptations

Early members of our species would have required certain adaptations to live in rainforests. So what were they?

Without preserved DNA or fossils, anthropologists guess by looking at contemporary populations living in the tropics. Many modern-day rainforest inhabitants are small, because it may help them cool off more easily, reduce their caloric needs, and make it easier to move in dense rainforests.

An analysis published in 2019 also found key differences in genes related to immunity and development in African rainforest hunter-gatherers compared with neighboring farmers. For example, the gene PITX1 — which codes for proteins crucial for limb development — is one of several genes that contributes to small stature and shows strong signs of positive selection in Gabonese hunger-gatherer populations.

There is evidence in multiple rainforest dwelling populations, including in those Gabon hunter-gatherers, of selection against specific pathogens.

Although early H. sapiens living in rainforests likely faced similar pressures, we don't have any evidence that similar adaptations evolved in these ancient members of our species.

Ancient DNA may be the key

But some scientists hope to someday find evidence of these adaptations in ancient DNA.

DNA preservation was historically considered impossible in hot and humid environments, but that assumption "turns out to be only partially true," Miklós Bálint, a functional environmental genomicist at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Germany, said in a statement.

Bálint and his colleagues recently reviewed ancient environmental DNA (aeDNA) recovered from tropical environments. They found 113 studies reported aeDNA in tropical and subtropical habitats between 1998 and 2025, including 1 million-year-old aeDNA extracted from a lake in Indonesia. This DNA came mainly from nearby plants, not from ancient humans. But because people leave "millions of DNA traces" in their environment during their lifetime, human DNA should also be present and retrievable, Bálint said in the statement.

"Obtaining DNA data will be a truly fundamental breakthrough in tropical forest research," Ben Arous said. For example, these genetic remnants peppered throughout the environment could reveal how humans changed the ecosystem, how they moved and interbred, and which diseases and parasites ancient people faced.

The new discoveries point to the need for more archaeological research in rainforest environments, Scerri said. Current efforts in Benin appear "really, really promising," Scerri said, and she and her team are also working on projects in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal, which are also yielding clues to ancient human habitation. "We're making some incredible finds," she said.

"There is enough evidence now to justify investigating areas that used to be well off the human origins map, considered to be very far from the main stage of human evolution," Scerri said.

The question now is how much further back in time people were living in rainforests and using their resources. "We consider ourselves to really be scratching the surface," Scerri said.

Human evolution quiz: What do you know about Homo sapiens?

The Socotra Archipelago is a cluster of four islands and two rocky islets belonging to Yemen. It is nicknamed the "Galápagos of the Indian Ocean" due to its staggering biodiversity, which includes hundreds of species that aren't found anywhere else in the world.

Located about 250 miles (400 kilometers) south of the Arabian Peninsula and 140 miles (220 km) east of the Horn of Africa, the Socotra Archipelago is home to around 60,000 people. As of 2023, visitors could reach it only via a weekly flight from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, that had to be booked through WhatsApp and was often canceled without reason.

The archipelago has one main island, Socotra, which makes up 95% of the landmass, along with three smaller islands and two islets. The main island hosts snow-white sand dunes, a central mountain range, and limestone plateaus peppered with drought-resistant cucumber trees (Dendrosicyos socotranus) and umbrella-shaped dragon's blood trees (Dracaena cinnabari) that do not exist elsewhere on Earth. The dragon's blood tree gets its name from its crimson resin, which is used for natural medicine and as a pigment.

Socotra was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008, thanks to its unique plants and animals, which have evolved in isolation for at least 15 million years. Socotra is a leftover fragment from when Arabia and Africa pulled apart around 30 million years ago. The split opened the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, which connects the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.

More than one-third of Socotra's plants, 90% of its reptiles and 95% of its land snail species are found exclusively in the archipelago, according to UNESCO. The marine life in Socotra is also incredibly diverse; it includes sea turtles, whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) and more than 250 species of reef-building corals.

The archipelago is tricky to get to, and pirates sometimes hijack vessels in the surrounding seas. Due to Yemen's ongoing civil war, many governments, including the U.S., advise against all travel to the country, including Socotra, citing threats of terrorism, unrest, crime, health risks, kidnapping and landmines.

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

Growing water scarcity could hamper the expansion of lithium mining in the U.S., deepening its reliance on foreign imports over the coming decades, a new study finds.

Lithium is used in electric-vehicle and energy-storage batteries due to its high energy density and low weight compared with other minerals, but mining it requires a huge amount of water. Currently, the U.S. has only one active lithium mine, in Nevada, and with demand for the metal projected to explode over the next few years, the government and private companies are planning to open at least 115 new mines across the country, according to the study.

However, most of the proposed mines that are in advanced stages of development overlap with water-stressed areas, specifically in the western U.S. In the new study, published May 28 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, scientists found that if lithium mines start operating in these regions, they will compete for water not only with households, agriculture and industry, but also with one another and with other proposed mineral mines.

"Future water availability under climate change may constrain whether new lithium mines will have sufficient water to operate," study senior author Jennifer Dunn, a professor of chemical and biological engineering and the director of the Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience at Northwestern University in Illinois, told Live Science in an email.

The U.S. imports more than 50% of its lithium, mostly from Chile and Argentina. Policymakers and corporations want to reduce this dependence, but even with the existing Nevada mine and the 22 proposed mines that are the closest to coming online, the U.S. won't have enough lithium to meet domestic demand, Dunn said.

"Every mine produces a different amount of lithium — depending on its deposit type, lithium grade, and final product — so we are unable to determine how many mines exactly would be needed," she said. "Our analysis estimated that if all 22 advanced [stage] proposed mines and the sole operating mine continued operation into 2050, 0.14 [to] 0.25 million metric tons [0.15 to 0.28 million tons] of lithium content in products could be produced per year."

This range falls short of the 0.83 million to 1.9 million tons (0.75 million to 1.7 million metric tons) of lithium per year that other researchers previously estimated the U.S. would need to cover its own demand.

However, the water demand to produce more lithium would be astronomical. That's because lithium is typically extracted from brines and rocks known as pegmatites, which require large-scale evaporation and aggressive processing with fresh water, respectively.

To find out if the U.S. would have enough water to support additional lithium mines under intensifying climate change, the researchers calculated the future water use of the 23 lithium mines most likely to be active in 2050, using data from mining companies. Then, they layered this projected water use on top of projected water uses from other sectors, such as agriculture and manufacturing, under four modeled socioeconomic-climate scenarios between 2040 and 2060.

The researchers found that the available water supply will, in most cases, be insufficient to support new lithium mines. The starkest example was Southern California's Salton Sea, which contains roughly 4.5 million tons (4.1 million metric tons) of lithium. The Salton Sea is fed by the Colorado River and showed the least water available to support lithium mining and other water demands, owing to the river's dwindling flow.

Lithium deposits in the U.S. are clustered in Nevada, Arizona and California. These are also some of the most arid and water-stressed states. Although the study found an increase in rainfall under a high emissions, "business as usual" climate scenario, these regions likely won't have enough water to support other activities, let alone additional lithium mining, Dunn said.

There were four exceptions in the study, including lithium-rich sites in North Carolina and Arkansas, which may have enough water to support future mines. However, there are other concerns related to lithium mining.

"Many of the lithium deposits in the United States reside near federally-recognized Indigenous and Tribal reservations, and the mines could violate Indigenous rights," Dunn said. "Lithium mining could also disturb sensitive ecosystems and biodiversity. And, like many other mineral mines, pollution, soil erosion, and water contamination are concerns."

Together, the findings highlight a catch-22 in the quest to source lithium: Lithium is essential to support a green energy transition and curb climate change, but shrinking water availability due to global warming is making it harder to extract lithium.

The study did not explore potential improvements to water-use efficiency that could reduce the pressure on some water resources and increase the availability for activities such as lithium mining. Nor did the researchers include water exchanges known as interbasin transfers (IBTs) in their analysis, due to the lack of studies about these transfers under climate change.

"IBTs could help supply water to arid or water-stressed regions," Dunn said.

Still, there is likely an upper limit on how much water can be allocated to lithium mining in a warming world, according to the study. This means the U.S. will probably continue to partially rely on foreign supply chains for lithium and other critical minerals.