Scientists have identified two newfound species of howler monkey in the Amazon rainforest. The discoveries could redraw branches of these primates' evolutionary tree, a new study shows.

The new species were named Alouatta iroi and Alouatta matogrossensis. The adorable creatures have bushy beards, winsome expressions and bright red fur. Their identification raises the number of known howler monkey species to 16, researchers said in a statement.

"Our study shows that the Amazon still holds remarkable biological secrets, even among well-known animals such as howler monkeys," study first author Romina Batista, a biodiversity scientist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the University of Salford in the U.K., said in the statement.

One of the newfound species, A. matogrossensis, is probably on the brink of extinction. The other newfound species faces threats from a planned dam on the Rio Branco River, according to the study.

In addition to identifying the new species, the study, published Oct. 30 in the journal Communications Biology, used genetic evidence to understand when howler monkeys spread out and diversified. The researchers analyzed the genomes of 11 howler monkey species living in South and Central America, combining existing DNA datasets with new genomic information from specimens in Brazilian zoological collections.

Overall, the genetic data confirmed that howler monkeys diverged from close relatives between 19 million and 13.5 million years ago. But the analysis changed the picture of more recent evolution.

For instance, the team argued that the Tapajós red-handed howler (A. tapajozensis) and the Amazonian black howler (A. nigerrima) are not as closely related as scientists previously thought. The researchers also said that the Trinidad howler (A. insulanus), whose status has been unclear, should be confirmed as a separate species.

"This discovery comes at a critical time, as increasing deforestation, climate change and habitat loss threaten many Amazonian species before they are fully understood or even discovered by science," study co-author Jean Boubli, a professor and chair of primate ecology and evolution at the University of Salford in the U.K., said in the statement.

The scientists found that natural barriers such as the Amazon River, the Xingu River and the Branco River drove many howler monkeys to develop separately. Researchers believe that howler monkeys can swim across small waterways, but big rivers block groups from mixing, which led to different traits and species evolving over time. Natural barriers are a common reason why species emerge in the Amazon, the researchers noted in the study.

Primates Quiz: Go ape and test your knowledge on our closest relatives

The great and "godless" English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose remains have been on display at a U.K. university for over 150 years, suffered from severe dental problems, according to X-ray scans of his skull.

The scans were conducted with CT (computed tomography) scanning equipment to create a digital 3D model of his head and highlight Bentham's lengthy "presence" at University College London (UCL) as it celebrates its 200th anniversary.

The scans revealed that Bentham was missing many teeth and had advanced arthritis in his lower jaw when he died of natural causes at the age of 84. During the scanning process, project leader Tannis Davidson, curator of UCL's Grant Museum of Zoology, saw how thin the jawbone had become. "He must have been in excruciating pain," she told Live Science.

Bentham's utilitarian philosophy inspired UCL's founders; it was only the third university in England, after Oxford and Cambridge, which was founded as London University in 1826 and opened to students in 1828.

As a young man, Bentham had declared that he would donate his body to science after his death. This was a radical idea at the time; in the U.K., dissection after death was looked down upon, even if it was for scientific purposes, and it was reserved for the worst criminals. After Bentham died in 1832, his remains were fashioned into an auto-icon — a supposed replica of himself — to memorialize him in the way a tombstone might, Davidson said.

Except for brief visits across Europe and to the Met Breuer in New York City, this auto-icon has been in a display case at UCL since the 1850s, where it can be seen by students as they pass by.

Brainless auto-icon

To make the auto-icon (which is not a mummy), Bentham's body was dissected and studied. Then, his skeleton was dressed in his clothes, which were padded with straw. His severed head was badly disfigured during an attempt to preserve it with sulfuric acid, so a wax reconstruction based on paintings and death masks was attached to the body.

Bentham's real head was displayed at the feet of the clothed skeleton that had a lifelike wax head; the real head's eyes were replaced with highly detailed glass eyes, which can be seen in the scans. According to UCL lore, the real head was stolen in 1975 and held ransom for a few days by rivals from King's College London, after which it was locked away.

Davidson explained that Bentham had coined the term "auto-icon" to mean "self-representation" and was setting an example for others. "He imagined a future where people were making auto-icons to keep their dead relatives around," she said.

The CT scans of the real head show that Bentham had dental damage and jaw arthritis, and that his brain had been removed before it was preserved—although some of his dura mater, a layer of connective tissue that covers the brain and spinal cord, was preserved. Davidson said the brain extraction was done to keep with Bentham's instructions that his head be mummified in the same way as Māori heads, which had their brains removed. The scanning process is shown in a short film called "Bentham Revealed."

"Godless" philosopher

Bentham wrote about his dental problems several times, Davidson said, but it is not clear if he understood that he also had severe arthritis in his lower jaw, which must have made the problems with his teeth much more painful. In addition, modern ideas about cleaning teeth had not been established by Bentham's time. "Dentistry 200 years ago was a very different kettle of fish than it is today," Davidson said.

Bentham was a polymath who hoped to improve the lives of ordinary people through social reform. He wrote extensively about subjects as varied as law, economics, education and animal rights, and he believed that society could be engineered to produce better outcomes through legislation and the objective measurement of "utility."

His most famous idea was the panopticon in 1791, a ring-shaped prison with one warden to watch all of the prisoners, which he proposed as a humane alternative to Australia's penal colonies. Today, however, it is a symbol of state control and surveillance. Bentham also invented a "felicific calculus" to numerically assess the benefits and drawbacks of any given action, based on variables like its intensity, duration, certainty, purity and extent.

Bentham's philosophy put him at odds with the established Church of England; he called himself an "unbeliever," while critics called him "godless."

This rift with the church may have played a part in Bentham's wishes for his remains. Davidson suggested that the auto-icon may have been a means for Bentham to avoid being buried with traditional Anglican rites. "Maybe this was a way he could 'stick it to them' a little bit," she said.

All that remains of a larger-than-life statue of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius once erected in Scotland is a lower right leg. Experts have now reconstructed what the entire sculpture looked like but are still unsure why it was carefully dismantled over 1,800 years ago.

The gold-covered bronze foot and calf, also known as the Milsington leg, was discovered in a bog in 1820, according to a Nov. 12 statement from National Museums Scotland. It is the only example of a monumental Roman emperor statue ever found in Scotland and was likely made around A.D. 140.

Initially, experts thought the bronze statue had been looted from York, England, which was founded by the Romans in A.D. 71 as the town of Eboracum. But as research into the Roman frontier advanced over the years, it became clear that equestrian statues were often set up in forts along the border of the Roman Empire.

This lower leg, experts now believe, originally came from an equestrian statue of Emperor Antoninus Pius that was similar to the famous statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome.

Antoninus Pius was Roman emperor from A.D. 138 to 161, succeeding Hadrian, who had built an enormous wall to defend the northernmost limit of the Roman Empire. To add to Rome's territory, Antoninus Pius directed the imperial governor of Roman Britain to move north, invade southern Scotland and build a second wall, called the Antonine Wall. But that wall was left undefended after Antoninus Pius died, and the Romans retreated from Scotland.

During that retreat, the Romans may have dismantled any valuable statues that they had set up, according to the statement. An examination of the Milsington leg ahead of a new exhibition showed that the bronze had no cut marks, suggesting it was removed carefully and not "brutally hacked off."

"This contrasts with examples of statues being deliberately destroyed after a battle, when an emperor's memory was condemned, or when they were chopped up for scrap," according to National Museums Scotland.

With the Scottish provenance firmly established, National Museums Scotland curators were able to learn more about Antoninus Pius and his approach to imperial expansion.

"This really turns on its head our understanding of Rome's second attempt at conquering Scotland," Fraser Hunter, principal curator of prehistoric art and Roman archaeology at National Museums Scotland, said in the statement. "This was a big deal for the Emperor, something which was worth celebrating."

But while the boot-clad bronze leg provides a glimpse into the monuments that may have graced southern Scotland nearly two millennia ago, it raises an important question for Hunter: Where is the rest of the statue?

The Milsington leg, the Inveresk Mithras altars and other Roman-period finds are on display beginning Nov. 14 in the exhibit "Roman Scotland: Life on the Edge of Empire" at the National Museum of Scotland.

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

Earth and its moon will have company this holiday season. In April, our planet picked up a passing "minimoon," pulling the space rock into a temporary orbit, astronomers have confirmed.

The object, dubbed 2026 QQ8, was first observed by Hungarian researcher Krisztián Sárneczky in August. It was officially reported by the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) Minor Planet Center — the body that logs and confirms new solar system objects — on Oct. 29. This extraterrestrial traveler is expected to stick around until January 2027, extending its stay through the holidays before breaking free of our planet's influence.

2026 QQ8 is tiny — only about 6 feet (2 meters) across, according to the IAU. If it got too close to Earth, it would likely burn up in our planet's atmosphere. However, researchers don't think there is much chance of that happening, since 2026 QQ8 is currently orbiting at around 1.5 times the average distance of the moon.

2026 QQ8 takes 359 days — almost a full Earth year — to orbit the sun. It comes close to our planet every 10 years or so. This minimoon is classified as an Aten asteroid; this population of space rocks occasionally cross into Earth's orbit and have semimajor axes smaller than Earth's, meaning they typically orbit closer to the sun than our planet does. Large Aten asteroids are considered the most dangerous type of asteroid, as they can easily get lost in the sun's glare before speeding toward Earth — but, again, our new mini companion is far too small to pose a threat.

2026 QQ8 is not the first minimoon discovered circling Earth. That distinction belongs to 1991 VG, which was around 30 feet (10 meters) in diameter when it was detected in November 1991. Astronomers now think Earth grabs minimoons pretty frequently; we are likely to have at least one at any given time. Most of the space rocks stay around for less than a year, although a handful may remain in Earth's gravitational pull for decades.

New telescopes ‪are expected to help researchers spot more minimoons as they enter and leave Earth's orbit. These include the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which began operation earlier this year. The Rubin observatory, which takes a full scan of the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every few days, has already spotted what may be a new dwarf planet lurking in the outer solar system, as well as a new satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Over its planned 10-year mission, the observatory is expected to detect millions of previously unknown moving objects in space.

An artificial intelligence (AI) tool can use brain scans to recreate the images people looked at with eerie accuracy.

The system, called Brain-IT, uses data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure activity in the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual input. A computer model then predicts both the broad layout of an image and high-level information about its content. It then passes those predictions to an AI image generator, researchers explained in a study uploaded to the preprint database arXiv. The research was presented at the ICLR 2026 conference, held April 23-25, and publicized by its authors in September.

Brain-IT builds on an approach called the Universal Brain Encoder. That model begins with an image and then predicts the fMRI response that would be expected in individual "voxels" ‪—‬ small 3D units ‪—‬ in a brain scan.

"The key idea is that every voxel, a tiny cube of brain tissue, gets its own learned vector that captures what it cares about in images," said study first author Roman Beliy, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Some voxels may be tuned to relatively simple elements of an image, such as edges, textures or locations. Others might be responding to higher-level abstract categories, like faces, bodies or scenes.

Peering inside your mind

Traditional image-to-fMRI systems have generally been custom trained for each participant and dataset. The Universal Brain Encoder is more flexible. It learns from data from multiple people and can transfer information across participants, datasets or different MRI systems with varying magnetic-field strengths, according to the study.

A voxel can determine which parts of an image are relevant to it based on its learned profile, essentially saying, "I recognize edges. Which parts of this image are edges?"

The Universal Brain Encoder starts with an image and predicts brain activity; Brain-IT starts with measured brain activity and reconstructs the image the person saw. In other words,it asks "based on this brain activity, what was the subject looking at?". It sorts thousands of tiny brain-scan measurements from the visual cortex into 128 groups based on the kinds of visual information they tend to carry.

The system then lets those groups share clues with one another, allowing it to combine, for example, information about a scene's shape, color and possible objects, to build a more complete picture of the image, Beliy explained.

The decoder produces two types of visual predictions. One captures semantic information ‪—‬ the features associated with what is likely in a scene; for an image of a dog standing in grass, for instance, this would include things like the features of a dog and an outdoor, grassy setting. The other captures structural information, like the broad visual layout or how forms are arranged.

In the above example, this would be aspects like the outline of the dog or where it was positioned in the frame. The structural prediction gives the generator a starting point for the image, rather than beginning from pure noise, while the semantic info guides an image generator that removes the remaining static until the image emerges.

Although the new tool can recreate what people see, it can't reproduce memories or imagined scenes.

"We're not reading people's thoughts," study co-author Michal Irani, a computer scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, told Live Science. "The images we do manage to recover from fMRI require people's cooperation and full intended collaboration."

How scientists tested the model

Brain-IT's synthetic images were compared with the images that participants saw. Brain-IT surpassed prior leading methods on standard objective reconstruction metrics and produced more faithful results, the study authors wrote. The system shined when limited fMRI data from a new participant was available, with just one hour of data from a new participant producing results as accurately as earlier approaches that had been trained on 40 hours of recordings.

A high-scoring or realistic-looking output should not be mistaken for a perfect copy of what someone saw, however.

In the final stage of processing, the system uses an off-the-shelf diffusion generator trained on massive numbers of images. Models like this generate plausible images and can smooth textures, sharpen facial features or fill in missing details.

Beliy said this "beautification" can make reconstructions more polished and convincing and introduce details that don't necessarily come from the brain data itself. In other words, the scan constrains the generated picture, but the AI model supplies some of its realism from learned patterns in photographs.

Why this is not memory decoding

While the new system produces impressive results for seen images, it can't be used to reconstruct an imagined or remembered image.

"Brain-IT relies on how the brain processes a seen image," Irani said. "Information flows from the eyes to the primary visual cortex and onward through a series of visual areas that recognize objects and scenes."

In a controlled experiment, researchers also know precisely which image was shown, giving the model a target during training and evaluation. In contrast, memories and imagined images do not offer the same clean reference. They can be vague and shaped by brain networks involved in memory and thought, with only partial and weaker reactivation of visual regions, Irani said. One limitation that would prevent this technology from being widely deployed is that the only way to get reliable results is from fMRI scanning, which is cumbersome and expensive. The team is currently experimenting with using easier-to-collect electroencephalogram (EEG) data, which is obtained via electrodes on the head, but that work is in the very preliminary stages, according to Irani.

The new system could help brain researchers better understand which visual information is represented in different brain regions, how those regions interact and how individuals’ patterns differ. Such tools could eventually reveal differences in visual processing that could help clinicians spot neurological, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions.

"There are numerous useful medical applications which we are currently striving toward," Irani said. "These include using our brain encoder/decoder to detect and analyze brain disorders such as MS, PTSD, autism and psychiatric disorders."

Lucid dreaming describes when you realize you're in a dream as it's unfolding. Sometimes, people can control the content of their dreams from this state of awareness.

Recently, researchers claimed that they found a way to "train" people to lucid dream by having them meditate and complete virtual-reality-augmented exercises while they were awake. Following the release of that study, Live Science asked its readers whether they would learn to lucid dream if they could.

Over 300 readers weighed in, with 77% saying "Yes, I'd want to try to control my dreams." Additionally, 17% of respondents said "No, I already lucid dream enough without training," 3% said "No, I don't see the point," and the final 3% said they weren't sure.

In the comments, one reader shared that they'd once experimented with hypnagogic napping, a technique famously used by Thomas Edison and Salvador Dalí in which the famous luminaries would wake themselves up just as they were drifting to sleep. Edison claimed that this helped him access a creative sweet spot at the edge of sleep and wakefulness.

"When I was experimenting with the hypnagogic state (using the Edison method) I started having spontaneous lucid dreams," the reader wrote. "I can confidently say, that there were some of the most profound experiences of my life, so the answer is definitely yes."

Another reader reported having lucid dreams "about once or twice a year," adding that they typically wake up shortly after realizing it's a dream. "My most recent one was of my recently deceased wife. I became very sad when I realized she wasn't supposed to be there," the reader wrote. "I hugged her and told her I don't want to be without her. She replied that I could live a long life if I took care of myself (This was a very typical response from her...lol). I feel very blessed to have had that dream."

Other readers chimed in on Facebook. "Already have it [lucid dreaming], but if I didn't I would certainly practice to do so," one wrote. "Hell yes," another said, in response to the idea of training themselves to lucid dream.

Other readers noted that they already lucid dream quite often or that they can consistently control their dreams, with one even saying that all of their dreams are lucid. Another said, "Some nights I interrupt it [my dream] like Monty Python — 'Too silly!' and start over."

But while one person compared lucid dreaming to "writing and directing your own movie," another noted that "lucid dreams can be boring, repetitive, annoying." So while many people would practice lucid dreaming if they could, not everyone sees the appeal.

Scientists have cooled atoms to the coldest temperature ever recorded, using a laser trap aboard China's Tiangong space station.

Tiangong included an experiment in which atoms were cooled to 10 picokelvins, which is barely above absolute zero, the coldest theoretical temperature possible in physics. Absolute zero is minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) and the threshold at which all particles in an object are believed to stop moving.

Scientists hit the mark using "optical tweezers," known more formally as an optical-dipole trap (ODT), which hold atoms in a laser beam," the scientists reported Nov. 5 in the journal Science.

The team placed 20,000 rubidium atoms in the trap in order to restrict their motion. This reduced motion, along with the weightlessness induced by the low-gravity environment aboard the space station, caused the cloud of atoms to cool to much lower temperatures than are possible on Earth.

The experiment's results could help improve future space-based research, the team said.

"This record-low temperature could stimulate a new generation of ODT-based experiments in quantum simulation and precision measurements in space," the researchers wrote in the paper.

How low can you go?

Despite this achievement, it's doubtful that scientists could ever hit absolute zero. One interpretation of the third law of thermodynamics, which looks at how systems behave when they approach absolute zero, is that the particles would always have a bit of entropy (disorder) associated with them, making absolute zero unachievable.

"One version of the third law states that it would require an infinite number of steps to reach absolute zero, which means you will never get there," Saibal Mitra, a professor of physics at Missouri State University, told Live Science in a 2024 interview.

The second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy always increases, would also be violated if scientists could reach absolute zero, he added. "If you had a heat sink at absolute zero, then you could build a machine that was 100% efficient," Mitra said.

That said, space makes it easier to get close to absolute zero because microgravity allows atoms to "float" and become more efficient at cooling, Science News reported. The researchers took their weightless collection of atoms and created a quantum state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, in which very cold atoms clump and create a "fifth state" of matter as they behave akin to a single atom.

Tiangong's very cold clump follows similar experiments on the International Space Station that reached 52 picokelvins and from a weightless fall induced by a drop from a tall tower, in which atoms hit 38 picokelvins, Science News added.

Taking doxycycline, a commonly prescribed antibiotic, during the first trimester of pregnancy may increase the risk of pregnancy loss, a new study suggests.

The antibiotic is broad-spectrum, meaning it targets a wide range of bacteria. It's often used to treat acne, respiratory infections and sexually transmitted infections, such as chlamydia and syphilis. Doctors generally avoid prescribing the drug during the second and third trimesters because it belongs to a class of antibiotics that can bind to calcium in developing bones. Animal studies suggest that this may disrupt fetal bone development.

However, evidence on doxycycline's safety during early pregnancy has been mixed and limited. The new study, published Tuesday (Nov. 10) in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, provides clearer evidence of a link between doxycycline use in the first trimester and pregnancy loss.

"I would advise physicians to carefully consider the benefit-risk balance when prescribing doxycycline to women who are pregnant or planning a pregnancy," study first author Almut Winterstein, a pharmacist and drug-safety researcher at the University of Florida, told Live Science in an email.

A higher risk than other antibiotics

Using information from two U.S. insurance databases, the researchers analyzed 224,870 pregnancies in people ages 12 to 55. More than 218,230 of these patients were treated for respiratory tract infections, and over 6,630 were treated for acne, between conception and the end of the first trimester. About 4,385 of the women filled a prescription for doxycycline during that time frame, while the others received an alternative antibiotic.

Among women with respiratory infections, those prescribed doxycycline had a 40% to 54% higher risk of pregnancy loss, compared with those prescribed amoxicillin, another broad-spectrum antibiotic in a different class. The exact level of risk varied between the two databases.

The researchers also compared the doxycycline users against women prescribed macrolides, the class of antibiotics that includes azithromycin (or "Z-Pak"). Again, the doxycycline users saw a higher risk — 39% and 36% higher, respectively.

Among the patients treated for acne, doxycycline users had a 49% higher risk of pregnancy loss in one database than those given the antibiotic clindamycin. In the second database, though, the difference wasn't statistically significant. Winterstein said that may be because there were fewer patients included in that analysis.

Overall, doxycycline was associated with seven to 11 additional pregnancy losses per 100 pregnancies, compared with the other antibiotic options assessed, the researchers reported.

What drives the risk?

It is not yet clear how the drug might contribute to pregnancy loss. Because the study was observational, it cannot prove that the antibiotic itself caused those losses, which included miscarriages and stillbirths. (Miscarriage is pregnancy loss before 20 weeks of pregnancy, whereas stillbirth refers to pregnancy loss after the 20th week.)

Animal studies hint that doxycycline could interfere with early placental development, potentially making it harder for the placenta to support a growing pregnancy, Luke Grzeskowiak, an associate professor and clinical pharmacist at Flinders University in Australia who was not involved in the study, said in an email.

The study authors also noted in their report that the drug may have direct effects on the developing embryo. But these explanations remain hypothetical; the researchers have not established that either mechanism occurs in humans.

"Pregnancy loss affects around one in four pregnancies and can happen for many reasons," Grzeskowiak noted. Although doxycycline exposure may add to that risk, taking the antibiotic does not necessarily mean pregnancy loss will occur. The available data suggests that it is just one risk factor among many.

Because doxycycline may be prescribed before a pregnancy is recognized, doctors should consider the possibility of pregnancy when prescribing this drug to women of reproductive age, particularly those who are sexually active, Grzeskowiak suggested. That does not mean doctors should avoid prescribing the antibiotic to these women, he emphasized; rather, clinicians should consider pregnancy plans and medical history when choosing a treatment.

In some cases, doxycycline may still be the best option for a severe infection, Winterstein told Live Science, and that infection could itself put a pregnancy at risk. But for less-serious infections, safer alternatives may be available, she said.

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

Archaeologists have found what may be the world's oldest poisoned weapons at a 125,000-year-old site on an ancient lakeshore in Saudi Arabia. The stone tools, which were likely used to hunt large animals, had traces of residue from a poisonous tree historically used for its toxins.

"At 125,000 years old, these would be substantially older than the poisoned arrowheads recently identified in South Africa, which date to around 60,000 years ago," study co-author Chris Clarkson, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany and Griffith University in Australia, told Live Science in an email. "But we haven't demonstrated exactly how the poison was prepared or whether it was effective. So I'd describe these as potentially the oldest evidence for poisoned hunting weapons, rather than an unequivocally established first."

In the new study, published Thursday (Nov. 12) in the journal Science, researchers investigated a 125,000-year-old site in southern Saudi Arabia known as 'Uruq Aljelibah, which means "sand dunes of a watering hole," study co-author Frans van Buchem, a geologist at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, told Live Science.

Today, the area is "hot, extremely dry, with extensive sand dunes," Clarkson said, located as it is within the Empty Quarter — one of the hottest, driest deserts on Earth. But the scientists found the site was once home to a freshwater lake measuring about 130 square miles (340 square kilometers) and up to 95 feet (29 meters) deep. Fossils there suggest it once supported a rich diversity of flora and fauna, including hippopotamuses, buffalo, ostriches, camels, gazelles, oryx, palms, reeds, trees and shrubs, which early modern humans likely exploited for food and other resources.

"The idea of hippopotamuses and enormous buffalo living around a lake in what is now the Empty Quarter really brings home just how dramatically these landscapes, and global climates, have changed," Clarkson said.

Astonishing stone tools

The archaeologists discovered more than 5,500 stone artifacts at the site, along with extraordinarily preserved traces of plant materials, such as fibers, resins and wood. Several of these artifacts were stone points that showed impact damage consistent with hunting large animals, and a microscopic analysis revealed traces of animal tissue near the point tips. The distribution of the stone tools closely matched clusters of animal bones, suggesting that the lakeshore was a focal point for hunting and processing game, according to the study.

"At most Paleolithic sites, we're lucky if we get the stone tools and perhaps a few animal bones," Clarkson said. "Here we can actually begin to reconstruct what those tools were doing and what other materials people were combining with them."

The researchers found that people may have hunted animals with poison-tipped tools. Several stone points had chemical residues linked with the arrow poison tree (Acokanthera schimperi), which is known historically for its toxins and is native to eastern and central Africa and southern Arabia. African hunters have coated spear tips and arrowheads with extracts from this plant to paralyze or kill game.

It remains unclear how hunters who poisoned their targets might have avoided poisoning themselves upon eating the game.

"The effects of a poison depend on the substance, the dose and how it enters the body," Clarkson said. "A poison introduced directly into a wound doesn't necessarily behave in the same way when swallowed." Hunters throughout history "are known to sometimes remove the meat around the wound before eating the rest of the animal," he added.

These findings emphasize how researchers have often underestimated the technological complexity of early human populations, because so much of what they made was organic and has simply disappeared," Clarkson said. "These weren't just people knocking stone flakes off cores," Clarkson noted. "They were combining stone with wood, plant fibers, resins and potentially toxic substances to make complex tools and weapons."

To have so much evidence for how people were making and using tools in a site like this "is remarkable," Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany who did not take part in this research, told Live Science in an email. "This goes from both the micro-scale, in finding traces of how people hafted spear tips, for instance, up to the bigger scale of the whole site and the very convincing spatial relationship between hunting-related tools and the bones of animals such as hippos."

Sites in Arabia that possess both stone tools and animal bones are rare, Jeffrey Rose, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Algarve in Portugal who did not participate in this study, told Live Science in an email. "This one has thousands of artifacts on an old lakeshore alongside hippo, buffalo and ostrich, and some of the flakes fit back together, so the tools were made on the spot," he said. "It's valuable new data."

Out of Africa

The Arabian Peninsula sits between Africa and the rest of Asia and was a major corridor for humans as they dispersed across the world. Recurring spans of increased rainfall could have made its otherwise hostile landscapes more habitable in the past. However, the hot desert that now covers much of Arabia has made it difficult for scientists to excavate many details about this vital bridge during this critical point in human history.

The researchers did not unearth any human remains. Still, they suspect the site most likely belonged to modern humans (our species, Homo sapiens), as opposed to a different human species.

"We know that H. sapiens had already expanded out of Africa and were present in Southwest Asia during this period," Clarkson said. "The age of the site fits with those early movements."

These findings add to growing evidence that wetter intervals in Arabia created migration corridors between Africa and Asia and supported productive habitats capable of sustaining repeated human occupation.

"What our site shows is that people weren't necessarily just passing through these environments," Clarkson said. "They were exploiting them in quite sophisticated ways, using a range of technologies and resources."

But Rose cautioned that all of the stone artifacts found in this study were collected from the surface. "Not one was excavated from the layers that were dated," he said. "The 125,000-year date belongs to the lake, not to the tools. For the tools, it is only a maximum age." Future research at the site should look for stone artifacts sealed in lake beds. "That's hard in Arabia, where wind has stripped most sites down to surface scatters, but it can be done," Rose said.

Clarkson agrees that further work is needed. "I'd really like to keep going back to this site to find more fossils, both animals as well as hopefully human fossils," Clarkson said. "I'd also really like to push the chemical and functional analyses further, particularly the evidence for toxic plant compounds. It would be fascinating to determine exactly which substances were being used, how they might have been prepared and whether they were deliberately applied to hunting weapons."

Future research focusing on the ancient lake margins may reveal more information. "There must be other places where people were living and carrying out activities, and some may preserve better stratified archaeological deposits," Clarkson said.

But the combination of discoveries at this site is amazing, the researchers said.

"I've spent much of my career studying stone tools, and one of the great frustrations is that we're usually only looking at the small fraction of ancient technology that survives," Clarkson said. "Here we have a chance to see much more of the complete technological system."

A newborn baby's heart is roughly the size of a walnut — which makes open-heart surgery challenging.

Each year, about 10,000 babies in the United States are born with critical heart defects that may require surgery to fix, often fairly soon after birth. In these infants, the two major arteries of the heart could have swapped positions or the left side of the heart may be far too small to pump properly.

Even if their surgeries go well, these babies face perilous recoveries. A complication can arise when blood flows back into the repaired heart, triggering what's known as an ischemia-reperfusion injury. This can stun the organ, triggering extensive damage that requires doctors to place the baby on a life-support machine that pumps and infuses oxygen into blood to sub in for the hampered heart and lungs. Only about 40% of newborns make it off the machine, because often, their tiny hearts don't recover.

Doctors and scientists at Boston Children's Hospital have been working to improve those odds using a creative idea: replacing the fuel source in damaged heart cells to help them bounce back from injury. That fuel source is mitochondria, the "batteries" found in most cells in the body. In this case, the mitochondria are isolated from an abdominal muscle and then injected directly into the heart.

As of April, 17 babies have undergone this procedure, and 80% made it off ECMO. It's too soon to say if the treatment improves overall survival rates, but the early data hints that it might. A clinical trial is currently underway.

"The first one or two for me were pretty nerve-wracking," said James McCully, a research associate at Boston Children's Hospital and associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School whose pioneering work paved the way for these procedures. His team isolates and purifies the mitochondria that a surgical team then transplants into patients.

"But you know, the heart comes back — you can actually almost see it coming back" in real time, he told Live Science. A heart deprived of energy looks pallid, while a freshly rejuvenated heart blushes a healthy pink.

Baby heart infusions are just one example of the promise of "mitochondrial transplantation." Following McCully's lead, other scientists have started investigating whether infusions of mitochondria could revitalize donated organs destined for transplantation, help stroke patients recover, and treat kids with devastating diseases. This work is still highly experimental, and its route to regulatory approval remains unclear.

But at its core is a straightforward idea: When a battery dies, you replace it.

Relic of our evolutionary past

The human body contains tens of trillions of cells, most of which contain hundreds to thousands of mitochondria. Following some back-of-the-envelope math, that means the total potential energy in each person "is the equivalent of a lightning bolt," Douglas Wallace, director of the Center for Mitochondrial and Epigenomic Medicine at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told attendees last year at a symposium on mitochondrial medicine.

Mitochondria, in a word, are powerful. They produce most of the chemical energy used by complex cells by churning out a molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The idea of transferring these fuel factories from one cell to another as a medical treatment emerged less than two decades ago — but cells have been doing such swaps on their own for eons.

Dr. Jon Brestoff, an associate professor of pathology and immunology and director of the Immunometabolism Initiative at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, describes this ability to move from cell to cell as a relic of mitochondria's bacterial past. "It is hypothesized that mitochondria transfer has likely been retained throughout evolution of eukaryotic life," the huge domain of life that includes all plants, fungi, protists and animals, Brestoff told Live Science.

Mitochondria are the powerhouses of nearly all complex cells on Earth, and there are a few theories as to how they adopted that ubiquitous role. A leading idea posits that, some 1.5 billion to 2 billion years ago, one simple cell engulfed another. The bacterial cell that got swallowed carried a circular loop of DNA inside its membrane, and that captured cell later became what we now know as the mitochondrion. The new organelle enabled cells to take advantage of the abundance of oxygen on our planet by converting it into usable fuel.

Mitochondria retained bacteria-like features, such as having their own DNA and membranes. But in 2006, researchers reported that mitochondria can also exit their "host" and survive the journey into a totally different cell — a phenomenon known as mitochondrial transfer.

"That was a complete revolution in thinking," said Dr. Lance Becker, professor and Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Northwell Health and the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. "With that notion that mitochondria might be mobile, that they might cross boundaries, that they might go from one cell to another cell, came the possibility that maybe that was something we could use to help people."

The 2006 study showed that cells that had been depleted of their own mitochondrial DNA could obtain healthy mitochondria from neighboring cells. After receiving other cells' powerhouses, the once-depleted cells were able to conduct energetically costly processes, such as cell division.

This research provided the first evidence that one cell can "donate" metabolic properties to its neighbor by sending over a fresh batch of mitochondria. Scientists once thought cells had to make all of their own mitochondria, but now, "I think cells have the ability to 'put their hand up' when they need mitochondria," Becker told Live Science.

Because those first experiments were done in lab dishes, initially, "it was unclear whether or not it was really biologically meaningful or relevant," Brestoff said. But within the past five to six years, improved tools and techniques have enabled scientists to watch mitochondrial transfer unfold within living organisms, he noted. It's been shown that cells of the same type can exchange mitochondria, as can cells of different types.

As scientists' fundamental understanding of mitochondrial transfer grew, the notion of doing the same thing therapeutically gained more traction.

"That procedure," Brestoff said, "is rooted in the biology of mitochondria transfer."

"The heart came back"

Just two years after the landmark 2006 paper, McCully's research group released data that hinted at the medicinal potential of mitochondrial transplantation.

Since then, these complementary lines of research — the foundational biology and the preclinical investigation — have continued in parallel. McCully's preclinical work helped to inspire other labs to explore the use of mitochondrial transplantation for a range of medical applications, including organ transplants and treatments for stroke and genetic disease.

McCully is "the pioneer — the guru of the field," said Dr. Giuseppe Orlando, a professor of surgery and regenerative medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine who is exploring mitochondrial transplantation as a way to maintain the integrity of transplant organs.

McCully's road to mitochondrial transplantation started in the 1980s. As a molecular biologist, he wanted to uncover mechanisms that protect the heart from damage, particularly when the organ's oxygen supply is compromised — such as during ischemia, or low blood flow. With an eye on older adults, he wanted to spare patients' heart tissue from the damage and cell death that can occur before and during heart surgery.

McCully and his collaborators initially "didn't care about the mitochondria one iota," he said. They were more focused on the nucleus, the control center that houses most of a cell's DNA, and its influence on cellular pathways that might boost the heart's resilience to ischemia. But "what we found was that everything we did started coming back to the mitochondria," he said.

They found that ischemia triggers damage and dysfunction in mitochondria that persists even after the heart's oxygen supply is restored; this dysfunction ultimately kills cells. The damaged mitochondria swell up, leak their innards, and set off a chain reaction that causes a cell to self-destruct.

McCully and colleagues observed that biological pathways that seemed to reduce this cell death often centered on the mitochondria. "We were looking around at either pathways upstream of the mitochondria or downstream of the mitochondria," he said.

So, logically, they started looking directly at mitochondria, studying what the organelle looks like before, during and after ischemia. One day, while isolating mitochondria from a laboratory pig, the animal developed fibrillation, meaning its heart began beating very quickly, with an uncoordinated and rapid rhythm. The team tried to reset the heart's rhythm with electric shocks and medications, to no avail. But McCully had an idea.

"At that point in time, the heart's kind of [got a] gray pallor, and it looks dead," he said. "And I said, 'Go upstairs; grab some of those mitochondria that we've isolated from the non-ischemic type. Just bring them down.'" They'd previously gathered some healthy mitochondria from the same pig, in hopes of generating a "before-and-after" picture of ischemia. Instead, McCully suspended those healthy mitochondria in a solution and then injected them directly into the pig's fibrillating heart.

"And the heart came back — started beating normally. It changed color, went back to a pink hue, and just kept on going," he said.

That serendipitous experiment led to a formal test of the technique in rabbit hearts, the results of which were published in 2008. In the study, they introduced healthy mitochondria to the rabbits' hearts during ischemia, just before reperfusion — when blood is reintroduced into the oxygen-starved tissue. They found that the mitochondria improved the organs' recovery and reduced tissue death. Further research in animals suggested that mitochondria that originated from one type of tissue, like liver tissue or skeletal muscle, could be introduced to other tissue types, such as cardiac muscle.

After seeing McCully's results in various animal experiments, including more with pigs, Dr. Pedro del Nido, chair of cardiac surgery at Boston Children's and a professor of child surgery at Harvard Medical School, approached him about testing the technique in human patients — namely, in babies on a life-support machine known as ECMO.

"He saw it in the animals; he saw what was going on," McCully said. "And he deemed it as being a possible intervention to save these kids."

They sought permission from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test the procedure and cleared the required regulatory hurdles. The process was made slightly easier because the mitochondria were coming from the patients' own bodies, not from a donor, McCully noted. Once given the go-ahead, they set forth with the help of Dr. Sitaram Emani, a heart surgeon at Boston Children's. The first procedure took place in 2014.

During each procedure, Emani and the surgical team collect a small sample of skeletal muscle from the patient, and McCully then isolates whole mitochondria from the tissue and prepares them in a syringe. He refined the isolation technique so the time from collecting the muscle sample to injecting mitochondria is only 30 minutes. Lately, the team has been developing a technique they can perform in the operating room, rather than in a lab, which could cut the time to 20 minutes. Emani uses various tests, including echocardiography, to see which areas of the heart tissue move the least, and injects mitochondria straight into those areas.

"It's great to be able to see something you've done and worked on for so many years actually provide a benefit," McCully said.

Transplants for transplant organs

While McCully is trying to protect infant hearts, other scientists want to do the same for other organs — including those destined for transplant surgeries.

To Orlando, mitochondria represent a potential way to make donated kidneys work better. "In transplant medicine, one of the major issues is making sure that the organs that are procured are well stored and kept viable until implantation," said Orlando, who is also president of the Cell Transplant and Regenerative Medicine Society.

Maintaining an organ's viability means preserving mitochondrial function as much as possible, but the transplantation process is tough on the organelles. "That energy plant is damaged. So it's pretty obvious that you should start thinking about a way to replace the damaged mitochondria," Orlando said.

Donated organs suffer some damage when they're unplugged from the donors' bloodstream, in part because this cuts off mitochondria's crucial oxygen supply. And then, paradoxically, the donor organs also get damaged when they're plugged into the recipient's bloodstream. That's because the fast flow of blood triggers the production of free radicals — unstable molecules that damage tissues.

While healthy organs normally produce some free radicals, reperfusion unleashes a flood. "It's more than the organ can bear and sustain," Orlando explained. This damage contributes to a phenomenon called delayed graft function, in which a transplanted kidney doesn't work right away so the patient ends up needing dialysis in the first week after surgery.

"You want to make sure that the kidney wakes up faster," Orlando said. That's where mitochondria come in.

Orlando was introduced to the idea of mitochondrial transplantation around 2019 through a collaboration with Dr. Benedetta Bussolati, a nephrologist and full professor of laboratory medicine at the University of Turin in Italy. Her lab had been studying mitochondrial transplantation in isolated kidney cells in lab experiments, and they reached out to Orlando about extending that work to lab animals.

In pigs, the researchers ran experiments in which the animals' kidneys were collected and stored in the same way human kidneys commonly would be prior to being transplanted. One set of kidneys received a placebo treatment, while another got an infusion of mitochondria from the donor pigs' muscle tissue. Upon being reperfused, the treated kidneys produced fewer free radicals and accrued less damage than the untreated kidneys did, the team reported in 2023.

They backed up this finding by analyzing RNA, a molecule that reflects which genes are active in cells. Compared with the untreated kidneys, the treated kidneys showed greater activity in genes involved in mitochondrial metabolism and lower activity in genes involved in repairing injuries.

Some groups are exploring mitochondrial transplantation in other donor organs, like the lungs — specifically, lungs treated with "ex vivo perfusion" (EVP), an emerging approach that helps retain the viability of transplant organs. Rather than placing a donor organ in a cooler of ice, as is generally standard, EVP flushes an organ with nutrient- and oxygen-rich fluid, helping to maintain its function until the transplant surgery. In lab experiments with pig and human lungs, scientists found that introducing fresh mitochondria during EVP further improved the organs' function while reducing inflammation and free radicals.

Across different organ transplants, Orlando sees mitochondria as a potential means to improve patient outcomes and expand the pool of available organs. There are scenarios in which would-be organ donors die unexpectedly of cardiac arrest and their organs are damaged in the process; mitochondrial transplants may help make such organs fit for patients, Orlando has said.

In the near term, Orlando and his colleagues are continuing to study the basic science of mitochondrial transplantation for this clinical purpose; they've also been cleared to run a clinical trial with donor kidneys but need more funds to proceed.

Looking to the more distant future, he and other experts in the field envision a world where transplant organs can be bioengineered and stored in banks, ready and waiting for the patients who need them, Orlando said. If that vision materializes, he suggested, mitochondrial transplants might be useful for preparing banked organs for transplantation "by giving them kind of an energy boost."

Reaching the brain

If infusions of fresh mitochondria could help the heart, kidney and lungs, what about the brain? That's the question Dr. Melanie Walker and colleagues at the University of Washington School of Medicine (UW Medicine) want to answer.

Walker, a clinical professor of neurological surgery, treats patients who have had ischemic strokes, which are caused by blood clots blocking blood flow to the brain. The immediate aim of post-stroke treatment is to clear out the blocked "pipe" and restore circulation to the brain as quickly as possible, she said. But no matter how quickly this is done, some brain cells are damaged. And once the blood clot is removed, the brain may then suffer a reperfusion injury.

Standard treatments can dissolve the clot but don't protect the brain, Walker said. "What about all those cells that are maybe not quite dead — they're on the verge of maybe dying? What can we do to support those guys?" she asked.

The UW Medicine team had heard about McCully's work in Boston and wondered if something similar could be applied in stroke patients. But while heart surgery exposes the tissue in need of new mitochondria, accessing the brain is trickier. "You don't do a craniotomy to give an IV medicine," Walker told Live Science.

But Walker realized that a harmful downstream effect of stroke might provide an opportunity for treatment. Immediately after a stroke, the brain's protective shield — known as the blood-brain barrier — becomes more permeable than usual, allowing more substances to pass from the bloodstream into brain tissue. That might open a door for mitochondrial transplantation.

A 2023 mouse study spearheaded by University of Virginia researchers and co-authored by Walker backed this idea, finding that mitochondria entered the brain after stroke and integrated into brain cells. These mitochondria had been gathered from muscle tissue, as in McCully's studies, and introduced to the brain via an artery. The treatment increased ATP production while reducing cell death caused by the stroke, compared with untreated mice's brains.

This work paved the way to the first trial using mitochondrial transplant in the human brain. The small safety trial included adult patients who'd had ischemic strokes and underwent thrombectomies ‪—‬ surgeries to remove the clots from their blood vessels. Four received mitochondrial transplants during their procedures and 12 did not. Mitochondria were injected near the site of each patient's stroke, into the closest branch of one of the brain's major arteries.

No negative side effects were tied to the transplants, hinting that the procedure is safe in humans. "But the next question is, how do we understand if it helps? And those are harder trials to design," Walker said. That's partly because the transplants are tacked onto the clot-removal procedure, so it's difficult to separate their effects from those of the clot removal itself, she noted.

Future trials will also need to explore exactly where the transplanted mitochondria end up in the human brain, how well they function once inside brain cells, and how the dose and timing of the transplant affect patients' outcomes, the trial runners wrote in their report. For the moment, Walker said her team is focused on exploring the safety aspects of the approach and have no further trials planned at this time.

Mitochondrial diseases — and what's next

Beyond heart defects, transplant organs and stroke, researchers are looking to mitochondrial transplantation as a solution for genetic conditions that harm mitochondria directly. Brestoff and colleagues are investigating the therapy's potential for treating Leigh syndrome, a rare neurological condition caused by genetic mutations that disrupt the fuel-producing machinery in mitochondria.

"Those kids have a terrible prognosis," Brestoff said. Most children with the most common form of the syndrome, whose symptoms show up by age 2, die by age 3. There is no cure for the syndrome, and treatments to relieve its symptoms are limited. So if it works, mitochondrial transplantation could fill a big gap.

So far, the approach shows promise in lab mice with a severe form of Leigh syndrome, improving the rodents' function and extending their median lifespan by 19% to 24%, the researchers demonstrated in 2024. They're now studying the approach in cells derived from patients with the disease.

Some companies, such as Israel-headquartered Minovia Therapeutics, are already running clinical trials with patients with other types of mitochondrial disease. Minovia is running one with children with Pearson syndrome, in which missing mitochondrial DNA hinders the function of bone marrow, which normally makes blood and immune cells.

While patients with a heart or brain problem may be able to pluck mitochondria from healthy muscles, people with mitochondrial disease don't necessarily have healthy mitochondria to spare. Especially for these patients, getting mitochondria from other people ‪—‬ known as heterologous transplantation ‪—‬ likely makes the most sense. What's more, for transplantation to be used widely for any purpose, there would need to be an "off-the-shelf" mitochondrial product available, Brestoff said.

Such a product could eliminate the step in Boston Children's heart procedure where mitochondria have to be isolated from a patient while they're waiting, open on an operating table. "Getting them from the recipient can sometimes be problematic, because the recipients are sick. All the organs, all the tissue is quite distressed," McCully noted. A standardized and safety-tested mitochondrial product would therefore be a boon for the field.

Brestoff is on the scientific advisory board of LUCA Science, a company developing mitochondria as therapeutic agents, and a consultant for Cellergy Therapeutics, which is making mitochondrial products to combat conditions from muscle degeneration and aging. These companies exemplify the effort to come up with ready-made products that could someday bring the therapy to more patients.

A shift to heterologous transplantation does raise concerns about immune reactions. "You have some variations in the proteins that are present in your mitochondria that I don't have," Brestoff noted. "So it is possible that our immune systems recognize heterologous mitochondria as non-self."

But McCully doesn't expect immune reactions to be a big problem, based on his research in animals. "I can get the mitochondria from you and put them into me, me into you — doesn't really matter," he said. Early trial results from Minovia and others suggest heterologous transplantations come with minimal side effects, at least at doses tested so far.

Another roadblock is that the FDA has not approved any organelles as therapies yet, so the standards and regulatory framework for the field are still being established, Brestoff said.

Despite that hurdle, the field has advanced significantly since its start as a niche, theoretical interest and then a highly experimental procedure for the sickest newborns. Scientists are now exploring the treatment as a solution to many common conditions, from rheumatoid arthritis to chronic pain.

Becker compared the state of the field to the early days of organ transplantation.

"It just turned out that it was revolutionary, when all of a sudden you could just give a person a kidney transplant," he said. "I think it's going to be kind of similar with mitochondria."

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

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A telescope tasked with creating the largest-ever 3D map of the universe is making good on its promise.

On Thursday (Nov. 12), the European Space Agency (ESA) shared the first major data release from its Euclid space telescope, including observations of more than 900 million galaxies and 60 million black-hole-powered light sources in the early universe.

"These are far more than beautiful pictures; today marks a scientific milestone in our study of the cosmos," Carole Mundell, ESA's director of science, said in a statement. "This major Euclid data release represents the largest space-based survey of its kind, laying the foundation of future discovery."

Captured over 13 months, this cornucopia of data covers a slice of sky about 9,500 bigger than the full moon — about 14% of the total sky area that Euclid will survey on its planned six-year mission. Each object in the survey is like a "puzzle piece," with its specific light signature, or spectrum), offering clues about its composition and distance from Earth, according to ESA.

Scientists can now start using the 1.7 million gigabytes of Euclid data to slot those objects into a 3D model of the universe and begin to map out the vast cosmic web that underlies all galaxies. But the data release also includes some stunning space images, which you can enjoy immediately. Here are some of the highlights.

A record haul of "Einstein rings"

Gravitational lenses are nature's biggest magnifying glasses. These "Einstein rings" ‪—‬ named after Albert Einstein, who predicted their existence — occur when exceptionally massive objects, like large galaxies, bend the fabric of space-time. This cosmic curvature causes the light emitted by objects behind them to appear magnified, distorted and sometimes duplicated.

In its first data release, Euclid has discovered more than 15,000 strong gravitational lensing candidates. These cosmic lenses enable astronomers to get much clearer views of the deep universe than any telescope could possibly see on its own.

"Over 10 years ago, we forecast that Euclid would revolutionise the field of strong lens discovery," Natalie Lines, a Euclid Consortium member working at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, said in the statement. "That day is finally here."

Grand design

The Messier 81 galaxy (seen on the right) is one of the brightest in the sky. With fully developed spiral arms stretching to its bright core, M81 is known as a "grand design spiral" galaxy.

While M81 is relatively close to Earth and can be seen with a good pair of binoculars, Euclid's field of view captures it alongside the elliptical galaxy NGC 3077 (bottom left) and crisp clouds of interstellar dust.

Golden Eye

Among the nearly 1 billion galaxies charted by Euclid is NGC 1291, also called the Golden Eye galaxy. The galaxy is located 33 million light-years from Earth, and Euclid shows a close-up view of it here at the telescope's highest resolution, according to ESA.

Ring galaxies like this contain a central bulge disconnected from a surrounding ring of stars; astronomers think these galaxies form when a smaller galaxy plunges through the middle of a larger one.

Filling the map

This image shows the entire sector of the Euclid Wide Survey, the telescope's mission to map vast swatches of the northern sky. The Wide Survey is accompanied by the Euclid Deep Survey, which will spend about 10% of the telescope's observing time taking repeated observations of three relatively small spots of sky, according to ESA.

With about 85% of its survey left to go, Euclid is on track to collect one of the most comprehensive datasets of the universe ever. Now, it'll be up to the scientific community to make good use of those observations and find something extraordinary.

For more stunning space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week.

Maritime archaeologists investigating a 17th-century shipwreck off the coast of Sweden have discovered a fancy shoe and two metal rings used as currency in the transatlantic slave trade. The items were lost during a mutiny on a slave ship in 1683, during which the governor of the Danish West Indies was thrown overboard.

The Danish frigate Havmanden (which translates to "Merman") was en route to St. Thomas, a Caribbean island that is now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, with convicts and indentured servants aboard destined for work on the island with the Danish West India Company. The plan for the Havmanden, after dropping off the new colonists, was to sail to West Africa to buy enslaved Africans. But due to a shortage of food and water, several crewmembers and convicts aboard seized control of the ship near the Azores in the North Atlantic and began sailing it back to Copenhagen.

The mutineers shot the ship's captain and threw other officers ‪—‬ including Jørgen Iversen Dyppel, the first governor of the Danish West Indies ‪—‬ overboard in the English Channel. After the ship ran aground, the mutineers were tried for their crimes in Copenhagen and sentenced to death.

The story of the Havmanden is one of the most violent mutinies in Denmark's history, according to a Nov. 11 translated statement from the National Museum of Denmark. But now, underwater archaeologists are learning more about the fateful voyage from the wreck, which lies on the seabed just east of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Archaeological divers discovered the rear half of a man's "unusually fine" shoe in the wreckage, according to the statement.

"I see a great many shoes from shipwrecks, but I have never before seen a shoe of such high quality," Vivi Lena Andersen, director of the Rudersdal Museums in Denmark, said in the statement.

The sole has a high level of craftsmanship, Andersen said, which can be seen in the minuscule holes perforating the edge of the shoe. The regularity of the holes would have required tools and expertise that only the most skilled shoemakers had at the time. It was "undoubtedly an expensive and exclusive shoe that only the elite could afford to buy," Andersen said.

Because the shoe was likely owned by an upper-class individual, experts think it could have belonged to Iversen, the Danish West Indies governor who was thrown overboard.

"The shoe testifies not only to Jørgen Iversen Dyppel's life and dramatic death, but also provides a personal point of entry into the larger story of the establishment of the Danish colonies in the West Indies and the widespread slave trade Denmark was a part of," Andreas Kallmeyer Bloch, a maritime archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark's Center for Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage, said in the statement.

Additional clues to the Danish slave trade on board the Havmanden included two manillas, ring-shaped pieces of metal that were used as currency in West Africa. European merchants cast manillas from copper, brass or iron and traded them for enslaved people in West Africa, particularly along the coast of modern-day Nigeria. But manillas are rarely found in Scandinavia, according to the statement.

"The manillas add another layer to Havmanden's story and underscore the connection to the slave trade, which was a central part of Denmark's colonial activities in both the West Indies and on the west coast of Africa," Kallmeyer Bloch said.

Denmark continued to engage in the transatlantic slave trade for more than a century after the Havmanden sank. Although King Christian VII of Denmark-Norway banned the trade in 1792, slavery continued in the Danish West Indies until 1848, when hundreds of enslaved people revolted and were finally granted their freedom.

Archaeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered a unique gold bear figurine in a 2,200-year-old burial mound that looters had hit but failed to empty completely.

The sculpted bear stands on its hind limbs and holds a pot-like container between its front paws. The artifact would have been worn as part of a headdress, and holes at its base indicate that it could have been sewn onto the garment, according to a translated statement from the Kazakhstan government.

The gold bear was unearthed at an Early Iron Age burial mound at the Karagaily burial ground in the southern city of Almaty, along with a surprisingly high number of human bones for a single burial mound.

Although other gold-crafted animals have been found in the region, the newly unearthed bear is the first of its kind.

"The sculpted bear figurine is unique to Kazakhstan. No similar finds have been discovered previously," Lyazzat Sagyndykova, director of the Almaty Museums Association, which conducted the excavation, said in the statement. "This discovery allows us to trace cultural parallels across the whole of Eurasia, from the Black Sea region to Altai."

The figurine dates to the Saka period, named for a nomadic horseback-riding people from Iran who lived on the Eurasian Steppe and Tarim Basin of what is now western China. Archaeologists have found comparable gold objects at other excavations in Kazakhstan, according to the statement. For example, a headdress element shaped like a small leopard previously came to light at the Almaty Kok-Kainar burial ground, which dates to the fourth century B.C. Also, the headdress of Kazakhstan's famous "Golden Man," a young Iron Age warrior buried in an extraordinarily lavish grave, also has a gold, sheep-shaped decorative element.

It's unclear which bear species the figurine depicts, but today Kazakhstan is home to two subspecies of brown bear: the Tien Shan or Himalayan brown bear (Ursus arctos isabellinus), which lives in the Tien Shan Mountains in the southeast, and the East Siberian brown bear (Ursus arctos collaris) in the Altai Mountains in the east, according to a study published earlier this year.

Preliminary analyses date the recently excavated site to the fourth to third centuries B.C., according to the statement. Based on the number of bones they excavated, experts suspect that the mound, which is around 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall and roughly 85 feet (26 m) wide, may have been the final resting place for four adults and three children.

"Of particular interest is the unusually large number of human remains in a single burial mound, as such burials are atypical for Kazakhstan," Marat Mugalovich Nurpeisov, a senior research fellow at the Almaty Museums Association, said in the statement. "As a rule, burial mounds of a comparable size were intended for the burial of one or two people."

Archaeologists also found pieces of Saka pottery, most of which had been strewn about after the burial had been looted in ancient times, according to the statement. The thieves left behind a 10-foot (3 m) looting pit.

"Research into the Karagaily burial ground is ongoing," Nurpeisov said in the statement. "To clarify the circumstances of the burial and determine the exact number of individuals interred, further analyses are planned, including the involvement of anthropologists."

After all of the investigations are finished, some of the artifacts will be put on display at the Almaty Museum, according to the statement.

More than a billion years of geological history is missing from the walls of the Grand Canyon, and now, scientists may know why.

In the canyon's sides, ancient metamorphic and igneous rocks that formed 1.7 billion years ago sit directly under younger sedimentary rocks laid down 500 million years ago. The 1.2 billion-year chunk of history in between wasn't preserved — leaving a geological gap known as the Great Unconformity.

This missing period was a very important time in Earth's history, because it was just before and during the Cambrian explosion, which saw a huge diversification of life on Earth. The Great Unconformity is not only at the Grand Canyon; there are big gaps in the rock layers of that time across North America, the Baltic region of Europe and in northern China. Researchers have long debated why this unconformity exists.

Now, a new model of the movement of Earth's middle layer, the mantle, has revealed an explanation: The slow, heat-driven circulation of the mantle pushed these three regions upward during the time when the Great Unconformity was formed, according to new research published Nov. 4 in the journal Nature.

This uplift would have helped facilitate erosion, meaning sediments formed at that time sloughed off the continents and landed in the ocean. Importantly, the model also shows that in the past 540 million years, these same areas started sinking instead of rising, creating areas for sediments to get caught and then keep piling up in neat layers on the continents — marking the point where the Great Unconformity ends. This matches what geologists can see in North America, the Baltics and northern China.

"We looked at, where are the best places that the mantle would help create a Great Unconformity?" study co-author Nicolas Flament, a geoscientist at the University of Wollongong in Australia, told Live Science. "And these three places turned out to be three places where it's known to be quite extensive."

The cause of the Great Unconformity is hotly debated, with some arguing that a global deep freeze known as Snowball Earth could have shoveled sediment off the continents in this period. Glaciation probably played a major role in erosion, Flament said, but the new study suggests that the key driver was deep within the planet. Without the mantle pushing the continents upward, glaciers and other erosive forces would have had no slope to push sediments down, he said.

Constant flux

Earth is in a constant state of recycling crust through plate tectonics, said Shanan Peters, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study. Oceanic crust sinks back into the mantle through the process of subduction ‪—‬ when one tectonic plate dives beneath another. The chemicals it carries down with it get released back into the atmosphere via volcanic eruptions, linking the mantle with the atmosphere.

And tectonics aren't steady. As continents break up and join back together over eons, different materials get pushed into the crust. For example, the ancient Paleo-Tethys ocean, which lapped off the shores of the supercontinent Pangaea until it closed about 200 million years ago, was rich in carbon-bearing sediments that eroded from the continents, Peters said. When the ocean floor was subducted back into the mantle, this carbon was pushed into the depths of the planet.

Today, in contrast, most of Earth's subduction is around the Pacific Rim, and much of the Pacific seafloor is remote from continents, so the seafloor is relatively starved of carbon. What's getting pushed into the mantle now is therefore a different chemical composition than what existed 200 million years ago.

In that sense, referring to the Great Unconformity as "missing information" isn't accurate, Peters told Live Science. Instead, the absence of a rock record in those places at that time reveals something about the processes going on back then — and hints at how geology might have been affecting the atmosphere, and thus life's evolution.

The geological processes occurring during the time of the Great Unconformity may have set the stage for the Cambrian explosion, Peters said. For example, the crystalline rocks exposed on the surface at that time may have released elements like potassium, iron, manganese and carbon into the seas at an increased rate, prompting marine life to invent biomineralization — shells — in response and possibly shifting the composition of Earth's atmosphere to be more oxygen-rich, Peters said.

Flament agreed that the geological changes had significant knock-on effects for life. "It contributes to the environment in which complex life evolved," Flament said.

What's particularly interesting about the Great Unconformity is how it reveals not just a period of erosion but also a switch back to the deposition of sediments. The new paper provides an explanation for both, Peters said, and changes in the mantle are just the planetary-scale process to explain this big-picture phenomenon.

"This seems to me to be the only reasonable way to go back and forth between this state over time," he said.

There are still questions about what else the continents were doing in this time period. Peters leads an effort called Macrostrat that is pulling together observations of rock layers around the world, and Flament said he hopes that database will help ground-truth the new models' findings.

"So far in Africa and Russia, we don’t have as comprehensive a database," he said. "Once that is done, we can go and check whether the idea works."

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 10:30 p.m. E.D.T. to note that James Price, not Tia Ghose, edited this story.

Scientists have proposed a new tabletop device to detect the subtle way Earth's daily spin on its axis twists the space-time around it ‪—‬ an effect predicted by Einstein's general relativity.

If built, the sensor could measure the quantum effect known as frame dragging with the same precision as the best satellite experiments, but in minutes instead of years, the researchers proposed in a new study.

The research, published Sept. 17 in the journal Physical Review Letters, aimed to address a classic mismatch in physics. Picture a ring of clocks bolted to a spinning merry-go-round. You synchronize each clock with its neighbor around the ring. Then, you compare the last clock with the first. They don't match.

"It is impossible to synchronize that collection of clocks when you're in a rotating frame," Kai-Isaak Ellers, a physics graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and first author of the study, told Live Science.

Gravity's a drag

Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a massive, spinning object drags the fabric of space-time along with it, just like a spoon twirling in honey. The effect is clearly visible around supermassive objects, like the Milky Way's central black hole. But around Earth, the effect is very faint.

So far, scientists have measured Earth's frame dragging only from orbit. They tracked how the twisting of space-time slowly shifts spinning gyroscopes or the paths of satellites. In 2011, NASA's Gravity Probe B satellite, which carried four gyroscopes, confirmed Einstein's prediction with a margin of error of about 18%. Satellites tracked with lasers have since done even better. In July, researchers reported in the journal Nature that the LARES-2 satellite had shrunk that margin of error to just 0.2%.

However, that took about three years of laser tracking. Researchers also had to account for the fact that Earth bulges at the equator and its mass is spread unevenly, which gives the planet’s gravity small irregularities that tug on satellites far more strongly than frame dragging does. To subtract those tugs, the team relied on detailed maps of Earth's gravity made by other satellites.

Measuring frame dragging more precisely is a way to stress-test general relativity. Several alternative theories of gravity predict a slightly different amount of twisting, and a lab-based measurement would also be free of the modeling assumptions that satellite experiments depend on, Ellers said.

A quantum loop

The new device is a loop of superfluid helium-4 — helium chilled until it flows without friction and behaves like a single, giant quantum object. The loop is interrupted by a thin barrier riddled with tiny holes, called a Josephson junction. Superfluid helium can slip through the holes, but ordinary liquid helium cannot.

"That's where the quantum behavior comes from," said K. Birgitta Whaley, a quantum physicist at UC Berkeley and a co-author of the study.

As Earth spins and drags space-time, it nudges the quantum state of the helium flowing through the junction. That nudge shifts the frequency at which the helium sloshes back and forth in the loop, which the researchers could detect.

Superfluid devices, many of them built at UC Berkeley, have detected Earth's rotation since the late 1990s. But the helium-4 versions built around a Josephson junction, like the new design, have worked within about a hundredth of a degree of 2.17 K (minus 455.76 Fahrenheit, or minus 270.98 Celsius), the temperature at which helium-4 becomes a superfluid. At that temperature, a lingering fraction of "normal" helium mixed in with the superfluid adds noise.

Instead, the team calculated how the device would behave at a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Below 0.7 K, the noise changed character, and the team found it drops sharply as the helium gets colder. One key finding in the new paper is the result of the team's thermal noise analysis, which showed how sensitive these devices could be at millikelvin temperatures, Elles said.

The catch is the barrier. Earlier helium-4 devices used holes about 90 nanometers wide. Working at these frigid temperatures demands much smaller holes, about 1 nanometer across ‪—‬ roughly the size of a helium atom. Keith Schwab, a physicist at Caltech and co-author of the study, and his collaborators are developing such materials, but they haven't been built into a working sensor yet.

If they can be, the researchers calculate that the device could measure frame dragging to 0.2% precision in about 35 minutes. If its vibrating membrane were made from the lowest-loss crystals, such as quartz or sapphire, that could drop to about one second, they said.

"This seems to be a very serendipitous discovery that at millikelvin, we can get this high sensitivity," Whaley told Live Science.

The signal corresponds to a time difference of about 10^-35 seconds between helium flowing one way around the loop and the other — the same mismatch as the clocks on the metaphorical merry-go-round.

"The interesting thing about it is just how small it is," Whaley said. "It's not so far off from the Planck time," about 10-⁴⁴ seconds, the shortest slice of time before the known laws of physics are expected to break down. This experiment is still a billion times too large to reach that limit, Whaley said. But future helium experiments could help explore whether time flows smoothly, like a ramp, or ticks forward in tiny, indivisible jumps, like the frames of a movie.

A tiny brown mushroom found in Florida's swamps is the first known fungus to contain both psilocybin, the chemical compound in psychedelic mushrooms; and amatoxin, the poisonous substance in the world's deadliest mushrooms.

The species, Galerina indica, has been nicknamed the "dark magic mushroom" and was characterized in a study published Wednesday (Nov. 11) in the journal Current Biology.

"There is no species of mushroom anywhere, in any group, that has been known to produce both at the same time," study first author Andrew Kunik, a fungal biology researcher at the University of Florida, told Live Science. "So it's quite remarkable."

Exactly why the dark magic mushroom has evolved to contain these two compounds is unclear, but the authors told Live Science that they may give the fungus a powerful defense against being eaten.

Common evolutionary trick, rare combination

The ability to produce either psychedelic or toxic chemicals has evolved multiple times across fungal lineages. A process called horizontal gene transfer, which is widespread among fungi, has played a part in that process.

In horizontal gene transfer an organism passes new genetic material to another, as opposed to vertical gene transfer, in which a parent passes genetic material to offspring. It can lead to unexpected genetic combinations and, in bacteria, plays a key role in the development of antibiotic resistance.

Some of the world's deadliest mushrooms, from the Amanita genus, stop cells from producing proteins and can cause death through liver failure. Past work has shown these mushrooms shared the ability to produce their poisonous amatoxins via horizontal gene transfer with mushrooms from the unrelated genera Galerina and Lepiota. Some mushrooms have acquired the ability to produce psilocybin via horizontal gene transfer as well.

But Kunik and colleagues weren't looking for specific chemicals when they began hunting for Galerina mushrooms in the swamps of Florida; they just wanted to learn more about the mushrooms' chemical makeup, as not all Florida Galerina mushrooms had been characterized before.

They collected five specimens from Galerina, a genus that contains over 300 species worldwide, many of which are poisonous. Among the samples they collected were small G. indica specimens that grew on moss-covered palm trunks. The largest mushrooms were only about 0.2 inches (0.5 centimeters) tall, with caps up to about 0.1 inches (0.25 cm) wide.

Chemical analyses revealed that the dark magic mushroom contained both psilocybin and amatoxins, including one amatoxin that had never been documented in mushrooms. The new amatoxin wasn't wholly unexpected, given that other species of Galerina produce closely related amatoxins, Kunik said.

The production of psilocybin alongside the amatoxins was more of a surprise for the research team.

"To find them both together in one mushroom, I never expected to find that," study co-author Matthew E. Smith, a plant pathologist at the University of Florida, told Live Science. "We were shocked."

To understand how the tiny, deadly mushroom acquired its mind-altering, liver-poisoning abilities, the team compared the genes of G. indica with those of other psilocybin-producing mushrooms, finding the genes shared a common evolutionary origin — even though the mushrooms themselves are distantly related.

The researchers also found G. indica’s psilocybin-producing genes are arranged in a different order than in other psilocybin-producing fungi, which suggests the gene cluster was rearranged during its evolutionary history, a clue that horizontal gene transfer happened.

Gene jumping and swapping

G. indica seems to have acquired the ability to produce psilocybin via horizontal gene transfer from unrelated fungi about 15.5 million years ago, based on reconstructions of Galerina’s evolutionary history from DNA analysis, Smith said. However, it’s possible that psilocybin-producing genes entered the lineage through two separate horizontal gene transfer events, possibly as recently as 6 million years ago, Kunik noted. Collecting and sequencing more Galerina specimens could help untangle their evolutionary history.

The findings are surprising, said Hannah Reynolds, a fungal ecologist at Western Connecticut State University who was not involved with the new research. "What was exciting about this paper was seeing both of these [compounds] present, seeing that this gene cluster jumped in, got rearranged, maybe came in twice — it's very cool," Reynolds told Live Science.

The ability to produce two types of incapacitating chemicals could form a powerful defense against being eaten, because organisms that would normally eat them would have difficulty evolving defenses against both, Kunik speculated.

But the idea that this duo of compounds prevents the mushroom from being eaten is just a hypothesis. To buttress that idea, further research might tweak the genes of the dark magic mushroom to observe how removing one compound affects the species' role in the food web, Kunik suggested.

Tropical and subtropical mushrooms are historically understudied, so there is likely much more incredible fungal diversity right under our feet, Smith said.

Obesity is linked to a range of health problems ‪—‬ including heart disease, diabetes and early death ‪—‬ but it can be hard to know who is most at risk for these outcomes. Doctors and researchers often use body mass index (BMI) as a convenient tool to assess patients, but this metric does not account for individual differences in body composition, scientists have long argued.

"BMI misses a lot of information," Dr. Francesco Rubino, a professor of bariatric and metabolic surgery at King's College London, told Live Science.

Rubino recently chaired a team of 56 experts that was assembled to better define obesity and develop new diagnostic criteria for the condition. First proposed in January 2025, their new framework includes more body measurements beyond BMI and distinguishes between "preclinical" and "clinical" obesity.

Now, a new study published Wednesday (Nov. 11) in the journal Nature confirms that these new criteria could detect obesity with greater precision than BMI alone. In other words, with the new approach, more people would be accurately diagnosed with obesity and fewer people would be misdiagnosed than are with BMI alone.

Live Science spoke with Rubino and other experts to break down the new findings and learn what they mean for patients.

What are the limitations of BMI?

At the simplest level, obesity is excess body fat. There are special scans and exams that send weak electrical signals through the body to measure a person's body fat percentage directly, but criteria based on body measurements are more accessible across clinical settings.

BMI is the most common of these measurements, as it simply involves dividing a person's weight by their height squared. However, it does not account for individual differences in lean muscle mass or bone density.

Additionally, the different BMI categories — such as "overweight" and "obese" — don't carry the same risks for all patients. Certain racial and ethnic groups tend to experience health consequences, such as higher mortality rates, at different BMI levels than others do.

What metrics does the new obesity definition use?

For a given patient being assessed for obesity, the proposed guidelines would suggest using at least one additional body measurement alongside BMI and having their doctor review their medical history for other signs of bodily or organ dysfunction.

The proposed body measurements are less influenced by a person's muscle mass or bone structure than BMI is. They include waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio and waist-to-height ratio. Notably, because different ethnicities are associated with different fat distribution patterns in the body, the latest Nature study incorporated different waist circumference cutoffs based that varied by ethnicity.

In addition to these body measurements, the proposed criteria look at 18 conditions and signs of bodily or organ dysfunction that are related to obesity, such as cardiovascular diseases, joint pain and sleep apnea. (All 18 factors can be found detailed in this chart.)

What is the difference between preclinical and clinical obesity?

Rubino and his colleagues — which together made up what's known as a Lancet Commission — defined "clinical obesity" as a disease state involving at least one of 18 forms of bodily dysfunction caused by excess fat tissue. Preclinical obesity, by contrast, is when a person is at risk of this disease state and may need interventions to avoid obesity-related dysfunction.

That means that two people with the same BMI, waist circumference and waist-to-height ratio may be classified differently, depending on whether they have other conditions. In the new study, between 77% and 91% of individuals with preclinical obesity did not progress to clinical obesity within 10 years, depending on the cohort analyzed.

This distinction can be complicated, though, as the diagnostic metrics for each form of dysfunction contain their own ambiguities.

"There needs to be more consensus on what's actually defining clinical obesity," said Dr. Aayush Visaria, an internal medicine instructor at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. Visaira was not involved in writing the new criteria but authored an analysis of the proposed measures.

The Lancet Commission argues that the categories of preclinical and clinical obesity could help doctors identify the people with the greatest need for treatment. The researchers tracked health outcomes using electronic health records from China, the United Kingdom, the United States and Spain, and they determined that their clinical obesity classification was better at flagging people's risk of death than BMI alone.

They found no clear association between BMI and mortality risk, but clinical obesity was linked to a 69% greater risk of all-cause mortality, compared to no obesity.

Would the new criteria affect the overall prevalence of obesity?

The Lancet Commission's approach could drive a small net uptick in individuals diagnosed with obesity, according to the new study.

Under the current framework, "we are definitely missing some people who actually need obesity treatment but just did not meet the BMI criteria," said Dr. Jennifer Hwang, an instructor of medicine at the University of Chicago who has published her own analysis of the new criteria.

With the BMI-only approach, people with BMIs of 30 or higher are categorized as obese. With the new definition, some people with BMIs under 30 would be newly categorized as clinically obese, while a smaller group of people with high BMIs would suddenly not count as clinically obese, the Nature study predicted.

For instance, the former group might include people who have "overweight" BMIs but also have obesity-related dysfunction, while the latter group might include people with "obese" BMIs but without any dysfunction.

Overall, the new criteria would increase obesity prevalence by about 3.3% to 7.4%, the team predicted. The percentage varied depending on the group analyzed.

What would it take to implement this new definition?

More research is needed to prove that the Lancet Commission's criteria would improve patient care and be practical to use in a clinical setting, Hwang said. She noted potential challenges in implementing both new aspects of the new framework. While the body measurements sound simple enough to use, clinicians would need training to perform them accurately.

Providers also may struggle with the new distinction between preclinical and clinical obesity. A 2025 analysis of the Lancet Commission framework noted that some patients who qualify for obesity medications under the Food and Drug Administration's guidelines may be recharacterized as having preclinical obesity and no longer receive a prescription.

Rubino and the rest of the Lancet Commission plan to continue validating their framework to see how it could best support personalized obesity treatment. For instance, they want to determine which forms of organ dysfunction are of greatest concern and develop a way of scoring each patient's level of risk.

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

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NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is nearing its final destination more than 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, where it will soon scour the universe for a host of cosmological treasures, including an estimated 100,000 new alien worlds.

But even before its mission truly begins, recent developments suggest the state-of-the-art spacecraft could take better images than — and remain operational for more than twice as long as — initially expected, further delighting already-excited astronomers.

"It is fantastic to learn that Roman is not just reaching its design goals but exceeding them," Eamonn Kerins, an astronomer at the University of Manchester in the U.K. who will help lead one of Roman's major surveys, told Live Science.

Roman is NASA's latest flagship space telescope, following in the footsteps of iconic observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The $4 billion machine ‪—‬ which is over 42 feet (12.7 meters) long and weighs around the same as a fully grown Tyrannosaurus rex ‪—‬ successfully launched into space on Aug. 30, more than a decade after scientists started building it.

The telescope is now en route to Lagrange point 2 (L2), a fixed point relative to our planet where Earth's gravity and the sun's gravity cancel each other out. There, Roman will join several other important spacecraft, including JWST and the European Space Agency's Euclid telescope.

During Roman's journey to L2, which is currently around 85% complete, mission scientists have remotely switched on the telescope's various instruments to test whether they function as expected. So far, this "commissioning process" has gone off without a hitch, and by the time Roman arrives in less than two weeks, it should be ready to snap its first in-depth images of the cosmos.

Researchers were already pumped to see what Roman will be able to do once it is in place and fully switched on. However, that excitement has further intensified in recent weeks, thanks to two postlaunch developments.

First, a series of near-perfect rocket burns, executed during and shortly after launch, saved more than a decade's worth of fuel that can now be used to extend Roman's mission. Second, after remotely adjusting the telescope's mirror, researchers discovered it should be capable of snapping images with around 30% greater detail than engineers predicted.

The team that designed, launched and remotely commissioned the orbital observatory has "done an amazing job" and "their work has ensured that Roman is more than up to the task," Kerins said.

Extended lifespan

Shortly after Roman arrived in space on board a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket that lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, mission scientists conducted two major burns, or engine firings, which gave the spacecraft enough momentum to escape Earth's orbit and make the journey to L2.

Thanks to a combination of "exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team" and "brilliant execution by the operations team," these burns were so precise that each one saved up to four years' worth of fuel, Jamie Dunn, director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a Sept. 14 statement.

On top of this, Roman ended up being much lighter than initially planned, which allowed engineers to pack another four years' worth of fuel into the spacecraft before launch. "Since Roman's [weight] was lower than we budgeted for, we were able to fill the propellant tanks to their capacity rather than only filling them as much as we needed," Alison Rao, the Roman propulsion lead at NASA Goddard, said in the statement.

In total, these savings could give Roman an additional 12 years of fuel, which could more than double the mission's planned 10-year lifespan. That means Roman could still be capturing images of the cosmos in 2048.

Given that Roman can collect data up to 1,000 times faster than Hubble, this extended lifespan will greatly enhance the amount of data the new space telescope will be able to capture. "With a 20-year Roman lifetime, we could, in theory, do over 20,000 years of Hubble survey work," Kerins said. "That's a lot of science!"

This prolonged lifespan will let astronomers compare images of specific objects decades apart — such as expanding nebulas or colliding galaxies — allowing them to detect changes they otherwise might have missed.

It may also let them study objects or phenomena that we haven't even discovered yet, which is particularly exciting, Kerins noted. "The real show-stopper results will be new things we just aren't even thinking about right now," he said. "The possibilities are truly breathtaking."

There is also the chance that Roman's mission could be extended even further, because engineers often find clever ways of making active spacecraft last longer. For example, Hubble is more than two decades past its initial mission parameters, and the recently deceased Swift Observatory lasted 10 times longer than initially predicted before falling back to Earth last week.

Improved image quality

Roman's secret weapon is arguably its Wide Field Instrument (WFI), made up of a 288-megapixel camera attached to a 7.9-foot (2.4 m) mirror, which will capture ultra-detailed images with a field of view roughly 100 times larger than Hubble's.

We have already seen the first WFI images — a series of blurry, green dots captured during a test of the instrument's 18 different light detectors ( see below). However, those photos were nothing like what WFI will capture in the future; those images will be so detailed that you would need dozens of high-definition TVs to properly display a single snap in full resolution, Kerins said.

After Roman completes the initial WFI commissioning phase, those images will be around 30% sharper than designers predicted. "All of the images from Roman's cosmic surveys will be even sharper than we expected," Alden Jurling, a senior optical engineer who works on Roman at NASA Goddard, said in an Oct. 14 statement. "It's a great outcome."

The improvements were first noticed after the WFI's car-sized mirror was realigned by just one-sixteenth the diameter of a human hair, demonstrating just how intricate the commissioning process has been. "Calibrating an instrument is like tuning a piano or guitar before a concert," Maxime Rizzo, a WFI systems engineer at NASA Goddard, said in the statement. "You adjust everything until it's just how you want it and then leave the settings alone so it performs consistently while you use it."

The improved image quality could really come to the fore during Roman's hunt for potentially habitable exoplanets, which is what Live Science's readers are most excited about for this mission.

Kerins, who is leading the Exoplanet Demographics Working Group for the Transits in the Roman Exoplanets Survey, is particularly excited about this development, but he said it does not necessarily guarantee that Roman will find more exoplanets than initially predicted.

"A remarkable achievement"

The rest of Roman's commissioning phase is also proceeding as planned.

Roman's coronagraph instrument, which will block out the light from distant stars to allow WFI to spot alien worlds, has passed its main commissioning phase and is working as intended, according to a NASA blog post.

Meanwhile, a global network of ground stations, which will receive up to 1.4 terabytes of data from Roman every day, has established contact with the spacecraft and is receiving signals as expected, another blog post revealed.

All of these early wins raise hopes that Roman can have a long and successful career, and are a testament to the years of work that went into designing the spacecraft and planning the mission.

"What we're seeing now with the actual optical performance and estimated lifetime of Roman is just how good that design process has been," Kerins said. "It's a remarkable achievement. I can't wait to see what Roman is going to give us."

The patient: A 45-year-old man in Italy

The symptoms: The man went to the emergency room because he had a sharp pain in his lower-right abdomen.

What happened next: When doctors examined the man, the type of pain and the location of his discomfort suggested that he might have appendicitis, or inflammation of the appendix.

Appendicitis can be dangerous because it can cause the appendix to burst and release bacteria from the bowels into the abdominal cavity, thereby infecting the cavity's lining. This infection, called peritonitis, can spread to the bloodstream and cause the life-threatening condition sepsis, which kicks the immune system into overdrive.

Even though the patient had acute pain in his lower-right abdomen, he did not show signs of peritonitis, such as fever, nausea, symptoms of dehydration and an elevated heart rate, according to a report of his case. His doctors then performed abdominal ultrasound scans and found that the man's abdominal organs, including the appendix, appeared normal, with no signs of inflammation.

The report's authors did not include details about the man's treatment after this examination. But eight months later, he was still in pain and returned to the hospital for further evaluation, they noted.

The diagnosis: This time, when medical personnel questioned the man, he recalled that approximately 15 years earlier, he had accidentally swallowed a piece of a long bone containing edible marrow. The report does not mention if the man sought treatment immediately after swallowing this bone.

At this second visit, doctors performed an abdominal X-ray and found a round object near the upper right of the man's pelvis. It measured about an inch (2.5 centimeters) long and a little over an inch (3 cm) wide.

According to a subsequent CT scan, the object contained bone tissue and was near the appendix. When the doctors looked inside the patient's abdomen with a laparoscope — a long, flexible tool with a camera at one end — they saw that the appendix was enlarged.

The treatment: Surgeons performed a laparoscopic appendectomy, which uses small incisions in the abdomen to insert instruments for removing the appendix. Inside the appendix was a hardened mass of fecal matter, called a fecaloma, which surrounded a long bone.

The organ's muscular walls had been stretched out by the mass, but there were no signs of inflammation. No complications developed after the surgery, and the patient was discharged two days later. The report does not describe any follow-up visits or treatments.

What makes the case unique: It's relatively uncommon for people to accidentally swallow something indigestible and then require a medical visit for it. In the United States annually, about 120,000 people — roughly 90% of whom are children — are treated for ingesting foreign objects, and most of the objects are swallowed accidentally. Most commonly, the adults requiring treatment have ingested jewelry, while children are more likely to swallow coins, toys and batteries.

Typically, small, swallowed items pass harmlessly through the intestines within 48 hours; less than 1% require surgical intervention. Some objects, however, need immediate attention. For example, sharp items can tear the esophagus or puncture digestive organs. Batteries are hazardous if swallowed, as they contain corrosive acid that can leak into the gut. And small magnets are a big risk, especially if two or more are involved, since they may stick together through intestinal walls, which can tear holes in tissues or cause blockages and contortions in the intestines.

Swallowed foreign bodies rarely affect the appendix. Whether they enter the organ depends on the size of the opening into the appendix where it connects to the colon (which can vary between individuals), the dimensions of the ingested object, and the appendix's position in the body at the time. These objects cause approximately 0.005% cases of appendicitis, according to the man's case report. Such items recovered by surgeons through appendectomies include pieces of coal, nails, bits of enamel and glass, shells, dental crowns and bullets.

When a foreign body migrates to the appendix, it typically generates appendicitis within a few months, at most. However, this is not always the case. One report described a man who had eaten pigeons as a child and discovered more than 30 years later that he had 27 lead shot pellets in his appendix. Despite containing these pellets from the birds' flesh, his appendix was not inflamed.

"It is therefore possible, although rare, that a foreign body in the appendix even after many years (in our case, 15 years) does not lead to an authentic appendicitis either histologically or clinically," the authors of the marrowbone case report wrote.

They added that their patient was the first record in the scientific literature of a sizable bone lingering inside an appendix for more than a decade without causing significant inflammation. His pain was likely caused by physical shifting of the hard mass. His experience presented "a unique clinical picture," the doctors wrote.

"This case could offer a possible diagnostic and therapeutic option for appropriately treating patients with foreign bodies within the appendix," they said.

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!

In the 1950s, American geochemist Clair Patterson presented findings that showed Earth is around 4.55 billion years old. His evidence was based on lead isotopic analysis that he used to calculate the age of the Canyon Diablo meteorite, which was discovered in Arizona in 1891. That result is now widely accepted as the age of our planet, but the buildup to this discovery was a long time coming.

Earth's true age was a subject of much debate among scientists in the 19th century. And rather than geologists taking the helm, it was physicists who realized that this giant ball of rock we live on must be far older than the thousands of years that had been assumed in prior centuries. Their main reasoning was heat.

In this excerpt from "This Is Life: A Journey from Inside Your Body to Beyond Earth" (University of Chicago Press/Picador, 2026), author and physicist Christophe Galfard looks at the progression among scientists who were coming to realize that thermodynamics was an essential piece of this long-standing puzzle.

Some two and a half centuries ago, the foremost experts on scientific matters knew a thing or two about heat. They knew, for instance, how heat could be transferred from one place to another. A new science was about to emerge out of this knowledge, a science called thermodynamics, which means "movements of heat" in Greek.

Thermodynamics isn't a force. It is more like a guidebook, a set of rules that apply to large

numbers of particles when they come together. It gives us, humans, a way to understand how particles behave when there is a lot of them without needing to refer to each one of them individually. It shows us how properties that don't exist on their own arise when many particles are together. It deals with these things we call emergent phenomena, such as heat and pressure, and which [Philip] Anderson's "More Is Different" tried to make sense of.

Understanding the dynamics of heat meant a lot to nineteenth-century scientists — so much so that many saw in it the roots of a philosophy so universal and powerful that they thought it should guide us through all our lives. Some even went as far as believing that heat was the source of eternal life. A prominent scientist became so convinced that this was the case that he locked himself up in his house and overheated it, thus shielding himself from all mortal diseases (ageing and death included). The experience was a true torture for the occasional guests who came to visit him, not to mention his wife, who had to endure it day and night.

The scientist held fast to his belief, though, piling on layer after layer of clothing to keep himself ever warmer. Unfortunately, the bulk made it difficult to move, and he eventually missed a step on his own staircase and died from the fall.

As a scientific discipline, thermodynamics was born with a book written in 1824 by a 27-year-old French physicist named Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, who, as he explained how heat could produce work, told everyone how the steam engine worked.

With Carnot's vision, the way hot objects cool down began to be understood, raising hopes that the resolution of one particular problem might be imminent: the determination of the Earth's age. Were we to somehow guess how hot our planet was at birth, thermodynamics could then be used to tell us how much time had gone by for it to have cooled to its present temperature. Many scientists tried it, keen to be the first one to nail the true age of our world.

Considering our planet in all its complexity to be far too difficult, simplifications were in order, and British physicist William Thomson shot first by picturing our world as a ball. A very simple, rock-solid ball made of pretty much the same stuff throughout, from surface to core. No ocean, no mountain, just a smooth ball the size of the Earth. He then calculated how long it would take it to cool down from being red hot to its present temperature, and declared that the Earth was something between 40 and 400 million years old.

Refining his calculations, he then announced that the world was 100 million years old, before settling for 40 million again.

Thomson's result does not correspond to the true age of the Earth, but it was a start. It was the result of a model, an attempt at figuring out something about our world using still-to-be-refined laws, and mathematical sense. What was more problematic was that no one dared question his results. Even as it shifted from one paper to another, the age of the Earth given by Thomson was always greeted as the right one. A reason for this is that at the end of the nineteenth century Thomson had become Lord Kelvin.

The same Kelvin after whom the Kelvin unit of absolute temperature is named. A scientific superstar who had the power to undo, in a snap of fingers, the career of anyone who disagreed with him.

Lord Kelvin was a physicist, not a geologist, so geologists could have questioned his work, but they didn't. In fact, they weren't bothered. Many of them back then believed that being a geologist was all about intuition and proper English, a language they deemed far more efficient than mathematical gibberish.

That being said, and however wrong the results, Kelvin's calculations were beautiful, giving whoever wanted to think about the problem of the age of the Earth a way forward, which is exactly what one of his former students, Northern Irishman John Perry, did. He thought that Kelvin had overlooked something. As a man of science talking to his former mentor (and job provider), Perry explained his vision to Kelvin but was ignored.

Still, he published his thoughts in Nature. But again, the article was ignored. Not just by Kelvin, but by the scientific community at large, including geologists.

It would have saved us all quite a bit of time had this not been the case, because Perry not only found a much more correct way to picture the Earth and estimate its age than Kelvin had, but he also found the source of the power that makes our planet's continents drift.

In his model, Perry didn't picture the Earth to be uniformly the same from surface to core as Kelvin had. Instead, he modelled the Earth's interior as being divided into three regions: a metallic core at its centre, a solid crust at its surface, and a mantle that lay in between the two. Rather unexpectedly, Perry didn't envision the mantle as everyone else would have; he believed that it didn't behave like the solid rock it was, but as a liquid.

No wonder his former master didn't take him seriously. However, he pictured the mantle behaving like a liquid only when considered over long periods of time. Sandwiched between a hot core and a colder crust that very much looked like a lid, he believed the mantle had no choice but to behave just like water does in a heated pan, with the hottest parts at the bottom rising and cooling before diving back down and rising up again, in repeated loops, albeit in extremely slow motion. This type of movement is called convection, and it happens in solids, too.

If he was right, there would be two immediate consequences. The first one was that the time it would take for our planet's surface to cool down from red hot to its current temperature could now be far longer than Kelvin had estimated. The lid and the convection patterns prevented our planet from quickly radiating away all its energy into space, so we were now inhabiting an Earth that could be as old as 2 or 3 billion years. Maybe even more. Such timescales were unheard of in the scientific community. Back then, no one knew that the universe itself was 13.8 billion years old. They knew next to nothing.

The second consequence of Perry's model was that the mantle's circular movements underneath the crust could drag the crust itself via friction. The solid surface of our world would then move, and split into pieces that would drift, and collide, and plunge underneath — or slide above — one another. Where they collided, mountain ranges would rise, like the Alps, the Himalayas, the Rockies . . . Where they split apart, rifts would appear, probably in the middle of oceans, along ridges . . . just like [Marie] Tharp had found.

Nowadays, these broken pieces of our planet's surface have all been mapped. They are our world's plates and their movements through time are called plate tectonics. Today, most of us have heard about plate tectonics. Back then, however, no one had, and if very few people remember Perry today, it is because another scientific breakthrough made the estimation of the age of the Earth much easier and precise, showing us that our world isn't 2 or 3 billion years old, as Perry suggested, but precisely 4.567 billion, give or take a few million.

Reprinted with permission from This Is Life: A Journey from Inside Your Body to Beyond Earth by Christophe Galfard, published by the University of Chicago Press in North America and Picador in the UK. © 2026. All rights reserved.

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Engineers in China have built a new computer architecture they say can one day make up to a million artificial intelligence (AI) chips work as one. For comparison, Elon Musk's AI company, SpaceXAI (soon to be SpaceXSI), describes its Colossus cluster as the world's most powerful AI training system, comprising 200,000 interconnected chips.

Traditionally, the AI chips used to train foundation models are housed in separate servers and communicate over a network to share data and divide workloads. But the new architecture, Peerium, uses a high-speed interconnect system designed to maintain efficient communication between chips across multiple racks, even as the number of chips scales into the hundreds of thousands.

Huawei unveiled the new architecture Sept. 17 at the company's annual CONNECT conference.

Representatives from Huawei said in a statement that computers powered by Peerium could train models with up to 40 trillion parameters. For comparison, competing hardware, like GB200 NVL72 from NVIDIA and CS-3 from Cerebras, have reported training at the trillion-parameter scale, rather than the tens-of-trillions.

"Over the next two years, there will be roughly 6 or 7 frontier AI labs in China, and all will aim at training foundation language models of sizes ranging from 10 to 40 trillion parameters," Liao Heng, chief scientist for Huawei's chip design arm HiSilicon, told the Associated Press. "So you need such a scale of infrastructure to train these models."

The technology powering Peerium

Peerium's performance relies on three elements: nested parallelism, unified memory addressing, and peer-to-peer interconnects, Huawei representatives said in the statement.

Nested parallelism allows workloads to be broken into smaller tasks and organized across hierarchical groups of chips that work in parallel. It's similar to how a company breaks down work into departments and then smaller teams, all of which coordinate their efforts toward a common goal. Unified memory addressing allows processors to access memory across other servers, as opposed to only that attached to the processor's own server. Peer-to-peer interconnects allow components to communicate more directly with one another, rather than relying on an intermediary.

All three principles are designed to make more efficient use of computing resources so that a single system can coordinate larger numbers of chips to handle demanding AI workloads.

According to Huawei, existing interconnect technologies — which link processors and servers to enable them to communicate — cannot support the Peerium architecture at the scale it envisages. For instance, NVIDIA uses NVLink for communication within racks and InfiniBand for communication between racks. The inter-rack communication bandwidth in this setup is 200GB per second, Eric Xu, Huawei's rotating chairman, told the AP.

"With such a low inter-rack communications bandwidth, there is no way you can make one million processors work as one computer," he said.

Huawei instead developed its own interconnect technology, UnifiedBus, which the company says delivers inter-rack communications bandwidth of up to 800GB per second.

"When one million processors work as one computer, this lays the foundation for better and more efficient AI training and inference," Xu added. "Therefore, I see UnifiedBus as the path for the future AI era. I believe, in the years to come, other players would certainly follow suit."

Stitching together a computing network

Alongside Peerium, Huawei also announced the Atlas 950 SuperPoD, a computing system built on Peerium and powered by more than 8,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT AI accelerator chips.

Xu said testing for AI training is underway on these SuperPoDs and that results show that they use their available computing power for AI training more efficiently than AI computing clusters that aren’t based on Peerium and UnifiedBus.

Huawei expects to begin supplying the SuperPoDs by early next year, at the latest, before its SuperClusters, which link multiple SuperPoDs to form a larger AI computing system, based on Peerium, eventually come online. Representatives said that one SuperCluster with 256,000 computing cards — hardware modules that add processing capacity — is currently being deployed and tested.

Models with large numbers of parameters demand greater computing resources and infrastructure, which isn't always desirable as it increases costs. In the summer, researchers used an IBM quantum computer to reduce the perplexity of Meta's Llama 3.1 8B language model — a measure of how well it predicts the next word or token — while keeping the number of parameters almost unchanged.

Magnetic reconnection — the process behind the sun's most violent outbursts — may have a counterpart in gravity.

According to a new theoretical study, sheet-like structures in the gravitational field can break apart and reconnect in new arrangements, much like the magnetic field lines that unleash solar flares.

Built entirely on Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, the study spells out when this "gravitational reconnection" can happen. It also offers a way to measure how fast the theoretical reconnection proceeds, and suggests a change to how gravity and matter trade energy. The process could even play a role in black hole collisions, the researchers suggest.

From solar flares to space-time

Magnetic field lines are normally "frozen" into plasma — the hot, electrically charged gas that makes up stars — and carried along wherever it flows. The lines can be stretched and twisted, but not cut. Where this rule breaks down, they can snap and rejoin in a process called magnetic reconnection, releasing pent-up energy in explosive bursts such as solar flares.

"In plasma physics, reconnection has become an essential part of our understanding of how magnetic fields reorganize and exchange energy with matter," Luca Comisso, an astrophysicist at Columbia University and first author of the study, told Live Science via email. "Could something similar be true for gravity?"

"Gravity and magnetism describe very different aspects of nature, so there's no obvious reason to expect them to behave alike," Comisso said. "But when we express Einstein's equations in a particular mathematical form, some of the same principles that govern magnetic fields also emerge in gravity. We wanted to understand whether those similarities extended to reconnection itself."

Comisso and study co-author Felipe Asenjo, a physicist at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile, used a mathematical framework known as the tetrad formulation. "Einstein's theory describes gravity through the geometry of space-time," Comisso explained. But in the tetrad formulation, "certain aspects of gravity can be expressed through quantities resembling electric and magnetic fields."

In a prior study published in the journal Physical Review Letters earlier this year, the researchers applied this framework to gravity. That study suggested that gravitational fields can form two-dimensional structures called gravitational field sheets. Of the sheets' two dimensions, one stretches through space and the other through time — so each sheet is the trail a line leaves as time passes. A snapshot at any instant therefore catches each sheet as a line, akin to the field lines drawn around a magnet. And, like magnetic field lines frozen into a plasma, "under certain conditions, these sheets evolve without breaking or changing how they are connected," Comisso said.

Rewiring gravity

In the new study, published Oct. 28 in the journal Physical Review D, the researchers found that this is not always the case. "Gravitational field sheets can break and reconnect in a different arrangement, much like magnetic field lines do in plasmas," Comisso said.

The researchers showed that breaking the frozen-in rule doesn't, by itself, guarantee reconnection. Sometimes, the sheets merely slip relative to the flow that carries them, staying intact because they remain frozen into a different flow. Genuine reconnection happens only when no such alternative flow exists.

"We also derived equations describing how quickly this reconnection can occur and how it can affect the transfer of energy and momentum," Comisso said. In general relativity, gravity and matter can trade energy and momentum, with only their combined total conserved. The study shows that reconnection changes the local rate of that exchange.

Reconnection also alters gravitational helicity, the gravitational counterpart of a quantity that measures how twisted and interlinked magnetic field lines are. Frozen-in sheets keep their helicity fixed, but reconnection can create or destroy it.

The findings don't require new physics. "Everything follows from Einstein's general relativity," Comisso said.

"Einstein developed his theory more than a century ago, and it has passed an extraordinary number of experimental tests," he added. "Yet even after more than a century, there are still new insights to be gained from those same equations."

Clues from colliding black holes

What could trigger gravitational reconnection in nature remains an open question. Among the candidates the researchers suggested are the singularities thought to lurk at the hearts of black holes and the combined effect of gravitational ripples that are too small to track individually. Quantum effects linked to Hawking radiation ‪—‬ the faint glow that black holes are predicted to emit ‪—‬ could also play a part.

"We're still at the beginning, but one of the most interesting possibilities is that gravitational reconnection could play a role in extreme events, such as the merger of two black holes or the collision of neutron stars," Comisso said. "These are environments where gravity is extremely strong and the geometry of spacetime changes dramatically."

Such collisions send out ripples in space-time called gravitational waves, which detectors such as LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) have been recording since 2015. "We'd like to understand whether gravitational reconnection could contribute to transferring energy, and whether it might leave a recognizable signature in gravitational waves," Comisso added. "We don't know the answers yet, but these are questions that we can now begin to investigate."

ZWO has just released the newest member of its smart telescope range: the Seestar S30 Plus. This all-in-one smart telescope is designed for beginners and hobbyists who want an affordable way into astrophotography that won't leave you scratching your head, and lets you capture, process and share your images in one simple workflow. It sits between the Seestar S30 and S30 Pro, and is priced at $499 for its release.

With 2K image quality, a light pollution filter and a user-friendly interface, it's a smart telescope that anyone can enjoy, regardless of your experience level, and regardless of whether you're shooting from your city balcony or a dark sky site. Like the other models, it uses dual cameras to capture a wide range of subjects, including deep-sky objects with the telephoto camera, and constellations, star trails and the Milky Way with the wide-angle camera. It's lightweight and easy to travel with, and it even comes with a separate solar filter for solar imaging and eclipse time-lapses.

We got our hands on an advance copy to test ahead of its release, so we put it through its paces on several different celestial subjects.

Design & Setup

• Quick and easy set-up
• Comes with carry case, tripod and solar filter
• Lightweight and easy to transport

The Seestar S30 Plus is one of the smallest, most compact smart telescopes on the market, weighing just 3.63 pounds (1.65 kg) and measuring 8.3 x 5.5 x 3.2 inches (210 x 140 x 80 mm). Its sleek, matte white design looks identical to the other Seestar models (we compared it to our S30 Pro), except for the branding on the unit itself.

It comes in a padded soft carry case and includes a small tripod (although we always prefer to use our own), a solar filter, a 40-inch (1 meter) USB-A to USB-C charging cable, a removable shoulder strap for the carry case, and a quick-start guide. With its accessories and case, the whole setup weighs 4.89 pounds (2.22 kg).

On the unit itself, you'll find just one button, which powers it on, plus the USB-C port on the side. Super simple, although we'd have liked the USB-C port to be covered to prevent moisture or dust from getting in.

The set-up process couldn't be easier. When you turn the telescope on, you'll hear a double beep and see the power button light up alongside the red dots on the black screen to indicate the battery level. Four dots mean the battery is full. The telescope will tell you when it's ready to connect, at which point you can sync it up to the app on your smartphone or tablet. To turn it off, you just select "Shutdown" in the app, which closes the arm and turns the unit off.

It also features an anti-dew heater, which we've found works quite well in mild to moderate humidity. On a couple of our shoots, we noticed a tiny bit of condensation forming on the unit when the humidity was higher, so we wouldn't feel confident leaving it unsupervised for long periods on a particularly dewy evening. (We used the Clear Outside app to monitor the humidity levels.)

The Seestar App

• User-friendly and easy to navigate
• A good amount of image editing controls, but we'd like a few more
• Educational and shows what's in the sky for your time and location

The Seestar App is user-friendly and easy to navigate, with just the right amount of controls: you have plenty of options to choose from but it doesn’t become overwhelming. The main Seestar page is where you'll likely spend most of your time, as this is where you can search for celestial objects to shoot, access your album, plan a shoot and read up on what objects Seestar recommends based on your time and location.

The Stargazing section is where you can select or search for the subject you want to shoot. You can use the search function to find a specific target or browse Tonight's Best, and you can also search through different types of subjects like galaxies, nebulas, clusters and more. From here, you can also select planets, track comets and photograph constellations using the wide camera.

Click on a subject and the app will display information about it, including its current altitude and coordinates, which help determine what time is best to shoot that particular object. It automatically applies the appropriate filters and settings, but you can override these if you want to.

There's very little to complain about when it comes to using the app. It has lots of information for beginners, so you don't need a ton of knowledge about the night sky, and everything is fairly self-explanatory. There were a couple of occasions when it failed to calibrate itself (for example, when we tried to locate the Pleiades, which had just risen above a tree), and other times when we chose a new target and it slewed the long way round instead of only having to move slightly. But otherwise, the app worked well.

The AI Enhance section has some good editing tools to bring out the best from your photos. You can reduce the stars, adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation and RGB curves, apply denoise and eliminate any satellite trails — although we'd love a dehaze slider to bring out some of the fainter nebulosity of certain objects. The sliders could do with being a little more responsive, especially the RGB curves, but overall, it does a pretty good job of editing your pictures to get a pleasing result.

Astrophotography

• 160mm focal length perfectly suits larger apparent subjects
• Built-in filters to bring out colors
• Modest image resolution, but still pretty good

We had about 10 days to test our review unit before its release, so we could only capture as much as the weather permitted in that time. We'll add more images to this review over the coming weeks. All our tests were conducted from our backyard in a Bortle 4 region, and captured before moonrise to eliminate as much light pollution as possible. Due to these time constraints, we aimed to capture our images for a total of 60 minutes each, although we'd have ideally aimed for longer in some cases.

Now for the fun part — the images. The Seestar S30 Plus has a focal length of 160mm, which is advantageous for capturing large subjects like the Andromeda Galaxy, the North America Nebula and the Pleiades. Large emission nebulas are where it really shines; however, the focal length is too short to capture smaller apparent objects.

For this review, we aimed to capture as many different types of objects as possible. All our images were edited in the Seestar app with, in some cases, a few minor tweaks in Lightroom. You also have the option to download the individual files to your computer to process them yourself in dedicated astrophotography software, which is advantageous if you're a more experienced user.

Star clusters

Everyone's favorite star cluster, the Pleiades, was one of the first targets we wanted to capture. We could see the faint blue nebulosity after as little as 15 minutes of integration time, and it only improved over time. After 60 minutes, we had a really nice image and could easily bring out the blue haze via the editing tools in the app. However, we got a much more impressive result after tweaking our image a little further in Lightroom, bringing out even more haze and reflective dust.

Galaxies

The Andromeda Galaxy is a perfect target for the Seestar S30 Plus. It takes up a large portion of the frame, and with long integration times, it can reveal beautiful details in the faint outer arms. We shot for around an hour in our tests due to weather and time constraints, but we still got an impressive image. As we approached 60 minutes, there was a lot of cloud cover, and we noticed it struggling to stack images toward the end of the session, so we stopped the integration at 57 minutes.

Andromeda is certainly going to be the most impressive galaxy for the Seestar visually, as most others will appear smaller in the frame and will need longer integration, so make sure you have a clear, dark night for it.

Large emission nebula

Large emission nebulas are where the Seestar S30 Plus thrives, and the North America Nebula is a great target. It covers the whole field of view, and the red hydrogen gas easily comes to the forefront of the image.

The Eastern Veil Nebula is another lovely target where you can bring out the beautiful red and turquoise hues in as little as 15 minutes, but longer integration times will yield brighter, more colorful results.

Planetary nebula

Planetary nebulas are where you will see the limitations of the Seestar's 160mm focal length. Most planetary nebulas have a very small apparent size — we've previously captured the Dumbbell Nebula and Cocoon Nebula with our S30 Pro, and they were a tiny dot in the middle of the screen. We tried the Helix Nebula, and even though it's one of the largest apparent planetary nebulas, it's still fairly small on the Seestar S30 Plus. You can still get a decent image of it, but if you want to focus on imaging planetary nebulas, you'll need a bigger scope. Because it was very low in the sky and there was some interfering cloud, we stopped integration at 27 minutes.

Should you buy the Seestar S30 Plus?

The Seestar S30 Plus is an affordable entry point into deep-sky astrophotography without the confusing settings and expensive setup. It's ideal for beginners, although more experienced users will likely want to upgrade to the superior image quality and extra features of the S30 Pro.

Still, for under $500, we can't complain. Not only is the Seestar S30 Plus easy to navigate and use, but it teaches you about space in a fun and interactive way, and you don't need to spend hours stacking individual frames on your computer to process — although you still can do that if you want more control over your editing.

If the Seestar S30 Plus isn't for you

Bird calls are far more than pleasant sounds in nature. They are complex forms of communication that can reveal how birds think, learn, cooperate and respond to their surroundings. From intricate songs used to attract mates to alarm calls that warn others of danger, vocalizations offer valuable clues about avian intelligence and social organization.

Julie Elie is an animal behavior researcher and associate project scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She recently won the 2026 Coller Dolittle Challenge for Two-Way Interspecies Communication for her work in studying and deciphering zebra finch communication.

For more than a decade, Elie observed the social behavior of birds, recording thousands of sounds and using machine learning combined with behavioral experiments to decode specific calls.

In this interview, Elie discusses how zebra finches learn and use vocalizations, what their calls reveal about intelligence and social relationships and how artificial intelligence (AI) contributed to decoding birdsong.

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry: What made you study birds and birdsong?

Julie Elie: The beginning of my work with birds dates from my Ph.D. I've always been super interested in animal behavior in general. But I think as a young person, I was more attracted by animals that we relate more easily to, which are mammals, right? Dogs, cats, horses.

I wanted to do a Ph.D. on animal behavior and, more specifically, on relationships between animals. I was interested in how animals interact with each other and what kind of social organization they establish.

[Someone suggested I] work on the zebra finch, and I said, "OK, I've never taken the time to really observe birds very well; might as well start now."

I realized that it's difficult to observe birds because they're not close to you. They can fly wherever they want. When you are out and about in town, in the countryside, and you see birds, they're here, and then they're gone. You don't get to see a lot of their vocal interactions or a lot of their social interactions.

So here I was, studying the zebra finch in cages where they were fully interacting with each other. And the question was, what kind of social organization do they have?

I realized quickly that they were not doing a dominance hierarchy [which was previously thought to be the case], but instead, the most important thing in their life was their partner. They were doing pair bonds, and that's the core of their social organization, [with] males and females pairing for life.

KHC: Why is it important to study birdsong, and what can it teach us about intelligence and behavior?

JE: A level of complexity we were trying to understand was, what are the neural mechanisms that enable those birds to do this process of listening to something and copying it, and reproducing it, and doing a comparison between what they're producing and what they're hearing?

The zebra finch is a just-right middle ground level of cognitive ability that is interesting, where you see this pattern of copying vocalization and producing it. But you can look through the avian kingdom, and some species show more complex behaviors.

We know that there are some species that are able to not only imitate their own vocalizations from their own species, their dad, but they're able to copy other species. So, here in California, for instance, a mockingbird is a bird that is really known to be able to reproduce a bunch of different sounds and is actually incorporating this in their vocalizations.

Parrots are also well known for that because we have them as pets, and they're able to reproduce our own vocalizations as humans. This is kind of crazy, when you think about it, because they don't have the same vocal tract as we do. It's smaller, and they have a different system. I think a high cognitive level is when an animal is able to reproduce a sound that is not in their "native language," let's say, and use it for a goal. We do see this in parrots ‪—‬ they're able to ask you for something or even ask the dog to shut up sometimes, which is interesting. They're able to really use those vocalizations, such as "This is not mine, but I communicate with another species this way."

It shows you how smart they can be, and by studying vocal communication in animals, we are getting a window of what cognitive abilities they have and how the usage reveals their level of smartness.

KHC: Could you walk me through how you ended up decoding bird vocalizations?

JE: I spent countless hours observing zebra finches, and I realized that I could progressively do a match between the social context and the acoustic characteristics of the sound produced. I could recognize these sounds and understand what they "mean."

It's like at home with your cat or dog: Within a couple of months, you figure out every time the cat is doing this kind of sound —‬ "meow" — ‬it means he wants to get out or he's hungry, or he wants to cuddle. Same thing with the dog. It's the same process, but instead of doing this with cats or dogs, I did this with birds and constituted the first acoustic dictionary of zebra finch calls.

However, how do you know you are correct? That you correctly identified the sounds that correspond to the "words" in that species?

I thought that the best confirmation of whether I was right or not could only come from the zebra finches themselves. Up to now, nobody had found a way to systematically go through the vocal repertoire of an animal and confirm if each identified call type was indeed perceived as a word in that species' language.

To achieve this somewhat impossible discussion with a bird, we designed an operant conditioning experiment where the bird is asked to classify vocalizations that were previously recorded from other zebra finches. The game is simple and relies on two rules. The first one is that every day, only the recordings corresponding to one call type are rewarded by seeds, while the recordings from the other call types in the repertoire are not rewarded. The second rule is that the bird can interrupt recordings and skip to the next one whenever they want, like how you skip through songs on your favorite music app.

The bird is placed in a cage that has a button or a little infrared sensor that it can activate with its beak. Each time it does so, the recording of a vocalization randomly drawn from the library of call types is played. Four out of five times, birds trigger the playback of a call type that will not give them access to seeds. Because they are slightly food deprived, they only really want to listen to the rewarded playback, so they interrupt the nonrewarded calls and only listen for the calls that are going to be rewarded.

Every day, the bird has to find out which call type or "word" is rewarded. They usually figure it out pretty rapidly and then start interrupting the playback of all the other call types. Using this task, we could test a different call type every dayIf they had not been able to do it, it would tell us that the call type we had identified was in fact not existing in their language. If they were able to do it ‪—‬ and spoiler alert, they were! ‪—‬ it meant that we had correctly identified that call type.

The birds told us yes, basically —‬ the organization that you're proposing is correct.

But then we made a surprising discovery. We noticed that birds were making some rare and systematic mistakes. We wondered if these mistakes were coming from the acoustic similarity of the call types — how you might mistake, for instance, the word "glove" for "love" or "hurt" for "heart." Or if they were coming from the semantic similarity of the call types — you could maybe mistake "love" for "heart" if you are remembering about the general meaning of the rewarded word today, which is "love.".

In that last case, it would mean that birds truly have an understanding of their call types' meaning. We found out that birds' errors could be better explained by the meaning [the semantic similarity] of the call types. That is a big discovery in the field of animal communication.

KHC: Do you think we are headed toward actually being able to communicate with birds, or do you think it's more that we're still testing the waters and we still need to learn the rest of the language before we get there?

JE: When we say "talking with birds," I think we need to understand that it's not going to be a language. Right now, I am studying the zebra finch; it doesn't mean that I would be able to communicate with a crow once I have a repertoire. So there's this component of when we talk about birds, there are many different species.

I think there's more traction in this particular part of the animal kingdom than in other parts, just because birds are really talkative. Birds use a lot of their vocalizations to communicate with each other. So because of that, I'm thinking that the first species we might be able to communicate with, interact with vocally, might be a bird, just because they are very talkative.

For now, I found all those words. But we need to understand how those words are [strung] together. So it's not necessarily the case that we need to understand the rules of the dynamic exchanges between individuals or how fast you're responding, but how you are responding and whether that makes sense or not.

They [also] have [body] postures. They have specific displays at the same time they're producing the vocalizations. And if we really want to achieve full communication with another species, we need to get to that level.

It's not tomorrow for sure, it's probably not next year, but I think in the range of 10 years we should get there. Especially with how fast the domains of AI and robotics are. I have some hope that we should be able to get to that point.

KHC: Is there one takeaway you would want our readers to know about your work?

JE: Just one. The most important thing for readers that are not specifically scientists is to realize that, by studying animal behavior more generally, researchers are discovering the intelligence of animals. This is opening our eyes to other species and realizing that we're not the only species that is intelligent on this planet.

This is a lesson to us as another species on this planet, that we are not the only ones that are smart and we need to take this into account in how we are evolving.

We need to realize how we're affecting them and realize that they also have their own internal lives, and maybe we should start to respect them a little bit more.

Editor's note: Some of this interview was conducted via email as part of a follow-up conversation. The interview has been edited lightly for clarity and length.

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This eye-catching astronaut photo shows a towering, highly active Russian volcano poking its head above a thick bank of swirling clouds over the Kuril Islands.

The lofty peak is located on Atlasov Island, the northernmost of the Kuril Islands — a chain of roughly 50 largely uninhabited volcanic landmasses stretching along a fault line that runs between Russia and Japan in the Sea of Okhotsk. Altasov lies 40 miles (65 kilometers) off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, which is also renowned for its volcanic activity.

The island consists mainly of a single, massive volcano, called Alaid, which is known for its near-perfect cone shape. Alaid reaches up to 7,497 feet (2,285 meters) above sea level, making it the tallest peak in the Kuril Islands.

Alaid has erupted at least nine times in the past 50 years, including a major outburst in April 1981 that ejected a 1,250-mile-long (2,000 km) plume of thick smoke and ash into the atmosphere, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

Its most recent eruption occurred between September and November 2022, when a river of lava flowed down its flank (see below). During this outburst, the volcano also spit out smoke and ash that was spotted from space alongside another eruption plume coming from the nearby island Paramushir.

In the astronaut's photo, roughly half of Atlasov Island rises above a deep, low-lying bank of swirling clouds. The summit of Alaid, crowned by a roughly mile-wide (1.6 km) caldera, is also obscured by clouds. (The volcano was not erupting when the photo was taken.)

Farther down the volcano's flanks are a series of snow-filled gullies carved out by lava flows from previous eruptions. Eagle-eyed viewers may also be able to spot some parasitic cones — small openings where lava burst through in the past — around the edge of the cloud layer, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The area surrounding a cluster of parasitic cones on the volcano's northwest flank (top right in the photo) is devoid of vegetation ‪—‬ a result of another major eruption in 1972, which scoured the surrounding landscape with hot ash. A 2009 study revealed fresh signs of recovery in the affected area, but noted that it could take hundreds of years for vegetation to return to pre-eruption levels.

The clouds are not the only thing the island rises above. Alaid is essentially the summit of a much larger underwater volcano that lies beneath the Sea of Okhotsk. The rest of the island has grown around the exposed cone as lava flows have reached sea level and solidified. Millions of years ago, this larger volcano was likely connected to the Kamchatka Peninsula via a land bridge that has since been submerged.

Astronauts and satellites have snapped several other stunning shots of intriguing landmasses nearby, including a quartet of end-to-end volcanoes on Simushir Island and a set of volcanic "nesting dolls" on Onekotan Island.

And in 2022, the Landsat 8 satellite also spotted the iconic summit of Mount Vesuvius peeking through a gap in the clouds over Italy, just like Alaid.

See more Earth from space

The world's carbon emissions from oil, gas and coal are projected to decrease by 0.4% this year, driven partly by the expansion of solar and wind power capacity and the price increases caused by the Iran conflict, according to a new report.

The 2026 Global Carbon Budget report was published in the journal Earth System Science Data Nov. 10 and is due to be presented at the U.N. Climate Change Conference's COP31 meeting in Antalya, Turkey, this week.

It is the first time annual carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from fossil fuels have fallen since the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. But the overall emissions picture suggests the world is still likely to miss key climate goals.

"It is an encouraging sign that the growth of emissions is slowing and decarbonisation efforts are starting to make a difference," said Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London who wasn't involved in the research. "However, at 0.4%, the projected decline is very small," Rogelj told Live Science in an email.

The report projects 38.2 billion metric tons (42.1 billion U.S. tons) of emissions of the climate-warming greenhouse gas CO₂ from fossil fuel sources this year. Greenhouse gases trap heat by absorbing the sun's radiation, and as their concentrations in the atmosphere increase, so do global average temperatures, leading to altered weather patterns and higher sea levels, as well as other major impacts.

Part of the 0.4% reduction in CO₂ emissions is attributable to 40 countries that have cut emissions over the past decade while growing their economies. These include the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Japan and about 30 countries in the European Union, the researchers reported.

When it comes to some of the biggest emitters, annual CO₂ emissions are projected to decrease by 0.9% in China, 1.3% in the U.S., 1.5% in the European Union and 1% in Japan, but India's annual CO₂ emissions are projected to grow by 4.4%.

Fossil-fuel-linked CO₂ emissions from the rest of the world are projected to decrease by 0.7%, driven mainly by a 1.9% drop in oil emissions. Some of the report authors suggested in an accompanying paper in Nature Climate Change that this is a short-term response to the global supply constraints and increased prices triggered by the Iran conflict.

"The war with Iran has resulted in restricted fuel availability and high prices, with a corresponding reduction in demand," Rogelj said.

While fossil fuel emissions and demand for oil are declining globally, overall demand for energy is actually increasing.

"Based only on the demand for energy, which has grown, we would have expected an increase in fossil CO₂ emissions by about 0.8 gigatonnes," said study co-author Judith Hauck, a biogeoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany.

About two-thirds of that increase in demand is being met by solar and wind power and electric vehicles, showing that clean technologies are making a real difference in reducing global emissions, Hauck said. However, the hike in energy prices that resulted from the Iran conflict also decreased demand by 0.4%, she said.

"So only together with the energy crisis did we bring the change in emissions down to negative," Hauck told Live Science, adding that she expects CO₂ emissions to rebound if the conflict ends, as they did after the temporary emissions drop caused by the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nearing the peak?

The exceptional circumstances that energy markets experienced this year make it clear that the small projected emissions decline is no reason to declare that emissions are now reducing, but there are hopeful signs, Rogelj said.

"Despite my muted enthusiasm about whether these lower emissions for 2026 represent the start of a long-term decline, the analysis shows encouraging signs of deeper long-term structural changes," he said. "But this shift must accelerate to ensure it is not outpaced by energy demand growth."

The report found that clean energy growth isn't yet fast enough to drive a steady decline in global CO₂ emissions attributable to fossil fuels. The study authors expect that to happen in the next few years, Hauck said, as long as there is a continued push to deploy solar and wind power, batteries and electric vehicles.

CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels are just part of the picture, though. Because of increases in human-caused peat fires, deforestation and forest fires linked to dry El Niño conditions, total global CO₂ emissions from all sources this year are projected to increase slightly from 42.8 billion metric tons (47.2 billion U.S. tons) last year to reach a record 43.3 billion metric tons (47.7 billion U.S. tons) this year, according to the report.

This means that the total budget of CO₂ that can be emitted before global warming reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels is now just 150 billion metric tons (165 billion U.S. tons) ‪—‬ equivalent to less than four years of emissions at the current rate.

Hauck, like many climate scientists, thinks we have already missed our chance to hit the 1.5 C target and could only get back to that level through extensive removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere.

"I'm still hopeful for something between 1.5 and 2 C [3.6 F]," Hauck said. "But for 1.5 degrees, we would need to see such a drastic strong drop in emissions. Based on what we've seen in the past years, even with this strong increase in avoided emissions, I don't think we can make that."

To halt global warming from increasing ever further, the world needs to be more ambitious in its planned emissions cuts, said Rogeli. We need to bring annual emissions down to zero to protect future generations from a double whammy of “having to try to transform economies so that they produce less climate pollution, while dealing with the impacts and damages of an increasingly adverse climate system," he said.

Editor's Note: This article was updated on Wednesday, Nov. 11 at 8:45 a.m. E.D.T. to note that the conclusions about the effect of the Iran conflict on fossil fuel emissions came from a Nature Climate Change paper written by some of the report authors.

Archaeologists in Peru have discovered the skeleton of an infant with a rare birth defect that left only one central eye socket in the child's skull. DNA analysis of the remains confirmed a chromosomal abnormality caused the deadly condition in the infant over 1,600 years ago, according to a new study.

"We cannot really say how long this individual survived," study co-author Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Live Science in an email. But "the burial of this infant suggests that the Nasca treated this individual in death like most other infants."

The skeleton of this female infant was discovered alongside a second one inside a ceramic urn at the archaeological site of Jauranga in Peru's Palpa Valley, where numerous geoglyphs known as the Nazca Lines have been found. Archaeologists uncovered several dozen other burials dated to the Middle Nazca (also spelled Nasca) period (A.D. 325 to 440) at the site, but one of the co-buried infants had an extremely rare condition, researchers wrote in a study published Monday (Nov. 9) in the journal PNAS.

The infant had a very small skull and a single eye socket in the middle of her face, along with other developmental issues of the cranial bones. These traits match modern clinical descriptions of cyclopia, a lethal condition that occurs when the front part of a fetus's brain fails to divide into left and right hemispheres.

This condition can also cause alterations in the nasal structures, resulting in a missing nose or a tube-like nose above the single eye.

"The cause of the malformation was present at fertilization, but manifestation occurs around the fourth to fifth week in utero [in the womb], when the frontal lobe of the brain has to divide," study first author Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, told Live Science in an email.

Cyclopia is a rare condition, occurring in about 1 out of every 100,000 births. To learn more about the infant's short life, the researchers sequenced her genome. (DNA suggested the infant carried two X chromosomes, typical of a female.)

The team detected an extra copy of chromosome 13, meaning the infant had a genetic condition called trisomy 13, or Patau syndrome. It's known to be a major chromosomal cause of cyclopia; that said, only a small percentage of trisomy 13 cases involve cyclopia.

While trisomy 13 is associated with advanced maternal age, it is not clear whether that was the case for this infant, Fehren-Schmitz said.

"This condition has been documented in historic and modern anatomical collections, but to my knowledge this is the first archaeological example of this developmental abnormality," Siân Halcrow, a bioarchaeologist at Durham University in the U.K. who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

The researchers' estimate of the infant's age at death suggests she may have survived for several weeks or months after birth, Halcrow pointed out. "This raises important questions about how infants with profound congenital differences were cared for and treated in past societies," she said.

The infant was buried in a ceramic urn, the researchers noted in the study, which was a common burial method in the Nazca period, along with a second female infant who had no skeletal abnormalities. "The baby with cyclopia was at the bottom of the jar, while the other baby was on top. Nevertheless, it appears that they were interred in a single event," Tomasto-Cagigao said. The genetic analysis showed that the two infants did not have the same mother.

A burial of two infants in one urn is unusual for this culture, the researchers said, but there is not enough archaeological evidence to conclude that the infant with cyclopia was given a different type of burial.

"The fact that the individual was buried with a 'healthy' individual in a regular cemetery, without any special grave goods, suggests that, to some extent, the individual was not treated differently in death, even though it had such a rare condition," Fehren-Schmitz said. "It was neither 'excluded' because of it nor treated in a 'special' way."

In ancient Andean societies, some people with disabilities took on special societal roles, such as ones associated with religious practices. "If that reflects Nasca society as a whole, we can't say based on one case," Fehren-Schmitz said, "but it does reflect the community this infant was part of, even if only briefly."

Despite engaging in human sacrifice, the people who lived in the Lambayeque Valley of northern Peru had low levels of violence, a new study of their remains finds.

Human sacrifice occurred in the valley over the millennia. It's thought that at least some of these mass sacrifices were attempts to appease the gods in the wake of El Niño, a periodic weather phenomenon that can lead to intense rains and flooding in Peru and droughts in other parts of South and Central America.

"We have one example at the site of Sicán where around [A.D.] 1050/1100, around 200 individuals were killed and ritualistically buried during an intense El Niño event," study co-author Haagen Klaus, an anthropology professor at George Mason University in Virginia, told Live Science in an email.

Other human sacrifice findings include more than 200 children found near the modern-day town of Huanchaco who were sacrificed sometime between 600 and 800 years ago, possibly during an El Niño.

However, despite the occurrence of human sacrifice, levels of violence unrelated to sacrifice were actually quite low in the Lambayeque Valley. In the study, scientists analyzed the skeletal remains of 1,519 people from the Lambayeque Valley who lived between roughly 1500 B.C. and A.D. 1800, and whose remains were preserved enough to detect signs of violent trauma, including interpersonal violence.

Of these skeletons, "only 25 (1.6%) exhibited traumatic lesions consistent with interpersonal conflict, and 77 exhibited post-cranial traumatic lesions consistent with accidental trauma (5.1%)," Klaus and co-author Thomas Snyder, a bioarchaeologist at New York University, wrote in the paper, which was published Nov. 8 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

The team didn't find any link between a person's sex and violence, they noted. The findings mean that despite the presence of human sacrifice, the amount of violence unrelated to sacrifice was low. This leaves a question: Why?

"Ritual violence may have alleviated non-ritual violence by creating spaces where social tensions could get worked out in a few different ways," Klaus said.

It's important to remember that other areas of Peru also practiced human sacrifice but didn't have the same low levels of interpersonal violence. Klaus noted that areas in the Peruvian highlands sometimes had higher rates of interpersonal violence. In their paper, Klaus and Snyder noted that societies that originated in the highlands, such as the Tiwanaku, Wari and Inca had to grapple with poorer soils and cold temperatures, and these challenges may have been a factor in increasing the levels of interpersonal violence.

The "evidence of sub-lethal and lethal violence forceful enough to break bone is significantly higher in some areas of Peru's highlands," Klaus said. He and Snyder noted in their paper that the inhabitants of the Lambayeque Valley may have had better access to marine and water resources, such as seafood and rivers that could be used for agricultural irrigation, than those who lived in highland areas. Access to these resources may have helped alleviate interpersonal violence in the valley by providing more food resources, they wrote.

Scholars react

Aside from practicing human sacrifice, people in the valley may have engaged in other practices that helped lower levels of interpersonal violence, researchers who were not involved in the new study told Live Science.

Environmental conditions may have helped reduce conflict or there could be "really unusual cultural practices in this region of avoiding or mediating conflict — both between and within groups," Elizabeth Arkush, an anthropology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said in an email.

Constanza Ceruti, an anthropologist and explorer with the National Geographic Society, said in an email that she's glad that researchers are studying human sacrifices "after decades of being ignored as a taboo topic in academic discussion." She praised the study’s large sample size and noted that human sacrifice is a "phenomenon primarily associated [with] the manipulation and concentration of power by elites."

Jordi Rivera Prince, an anthropology professor at Tulane University, said that the findings dovetail with her excavations in the region, where she has "found little evidence of violent trauma during the Salinar (400-200 BCE), a period of great social change in the Andes."

Weston McCool, an archaeology professor at Cal Poly, said in an email that the newly published paper "is an interesting study that provides additional evidence for a sharp break in patterns of violence between the Andean coast and highlands." He noted that it "supports the hypothesis that coastal populations were buffered from terrestrial environmental downturns in ways that highland populations were not. The nature of that resilience, however, remains an important question for future research."

This small terra-cotta vase, which is shaped like a cockerel or young male chicken with human feet, was discovered in central Italy and was made by the ancient Etruscans. The potter inscribed the Etruscan alphabet on the body of the chicken, giving modern researchers clues to a language that has never been fully deciphered.

The vase stands just over 4 inches (10 centimeters) tall and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The dark-black ceramic, known as bucchero, was made through a unique firing method that prevented the kiln from getting enough oxygen, which caused the clay to absorb carbon. Bucchero is considered the trademark Etruscan ceramic, and it was produced from the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C. by this pre-Roman society. It is unclear where the cockerel vase was originally found, but it may have been discovered in a grave in one of the many cemeteries that surround Viterbo, which was originally an Etruscan town about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of modern-day Rome.

According to The Met, the vase may have been a portable inkwell used by an ancient Etruscan who was learning how to write. The cockerel's head was the stopper, and it was loosely attached to the body by a cord through a set of loops. The inscription on the body of the vase is known as an abecedarium ‪—‬ the sequential list of letters in an alphabet.

The Etruscan alphabet is well known, since it was adopted from a regional version of the Greek alphabet in the early eighth century B.C. There were 26 letters in the Etruscan alphabet, but one of them in this abecedarium is incorrect. A close look at the end of the alphabet shows that someone inscribed an S twice; the second one should look more like an X, according to The Met.

The terracotta cockerel vase was one of several ancient Etruscan artifacts that helped experts partially decode the mysterious ancient language, as it preserved the order of the letters in the early alphabet, archaeologist Gisela Richter wrote in a 1930 catalog of The Met's classical artifacts.

Thanks to the adoption of the Greek alphabet, it's possible to fully sound out the Etruscan language. But although more than 10,000 Etruscan inscriptions have been found, the language is still only partially understood because those inscriptions are short and any lengthy Etruscan literature that once existed has been lost.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

During dreams, bizarre scenes you encounter can seem as tangible as reality; you feel as though you're really flying through the sky or being chased through a jungle of bright-purple trees. But in special cases, people realize they're in the midst of a dream as it's unfolding.

Called lucid dreaming, this phenomenon occurs when we suddenly regain our capacity for metacognition, or thinking about our own thoughts, in the middle of a dream. Lucid dreamers can sometimes even control the content or trajectory of their dreams. Now, researchers claim that they've found a way to "train" people to lucid dream by having them meditate and complete virtual-reality-augmented exercises while they're awake.

In a study involving a few dozen participants, the scientists found that repeating this training twice a week for a month significantly increased how often participants experienced lucid dreaming. They say the approach could have practical applications as an intervention for people with nightmares, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder — but those applications are theoretical, for now.

If you could learn how to lucid dream, would you? Let us know in the poll below, and add your thoughts in the comments.

Archaeologists excavating in northeastern France have unearthed a small fifth-century cemetery containing the graves of two Germanic chieftains and two warhorses. The burial ground is providing new information about the transitional period after the fall of the Roman Empire.

The burial complex was discovered near the city of Colmar, just a few miles from the Rhine River, which forms the border between France and Germany. This area had a Gallo-Roman village from the first to the third centuries, and archaeologists found several ancient houses, hearths, wells and craft areas, according to a Nov. 6 translated statement from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap).

Archaeologists also uncovered a rare fifth-century cemetery at the site, which was used from about A.D. 450 to 500, a critical time period in Western Europe because of the collapse of the Roman Empire. While scholars have debated for centuries about why the empire fell, one key issue was the repeated occupation of Rome in the fifth century by Germanic tribes known as the Goths and the Vandals.

Archaeologists discovered 11 adult graves, three graves of children and two horse burials at the site, according to the statement. In two of the female burials, archaeologists found silver bird-shaped brooches, glass bead necklaces and a bone comb, suggesting that these may have been high-status women.

But two of the male burials, in particular, stood out because of their high-quality grave goods, including a sword with a partially preserved wooden scabbard, a shield, a javelin and a scramasax, a type of Germanic short sword, which was decorated with a gold-and-garnet accessory. The weapons are characteristic of the burials of Germanic chieftains or mercenaries, according to the archaeologists, and two horses were buried nearby with their harnesses.

In addition to the weapons and warhorses, archaeologists noticed evidence on the men's bones that hinted that the individuals were likely warriors. Two people suffered stab wounds that showed no signs of healing, which suggests they died quickly and violently, according to the statement. And another man's right knee bones had completely fused together, which would have prevented him from bending it. This condition, called ankylosis, commonly results from an improperly healed injury.

The archaeologists believe the warrior's grave goods weren't just for show, but further study of the skeletons is planned to confirm whether the injuries seen during the excavation could have been sustained in a conflict.

Few Germanic settlements and cemeteries from the fifth century have been found, so the newly excavated site should provide important information about the upheavals linked to the fall of the Western Roman Empire and how that political collapse affected communities on the edge of the empire.

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

Early Wednesday (Nov. 4), NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory fell out of space, burning up in the sky over Sumatra. It was a fitting, fiery end for a telescope that spent 22 years studying the most powerful explosions in the universe — and, even with Swift gone, its observations will continue to feed scientific curiosity for years to come.

Swift's most important contributions to astronomy are not exactly eye candy. Designed to swivel toward deep-space explosions at a moment's notice, Swift excelled at capturing bright, fleeting and faraway specks of light. The multiwavelength observatory was equipped with optical, ultraviolet (UV) and X-ray instruments, allowing it to catch cosmic bursts of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, zeroing in on flares of light that other telescopes might miss.

One of its most significant detections was a gamma-ray burst — an incredibly bright blast, likely emitted by a giant star as it exploded in a supernova before collapsing into a black hole. Swift's famous image of GRB 221009A, or the BOAT ‪—‬ short for "brightest of all time" ‪—‬ looks like a speckled orange bull's-eye, caused by waves from the explosion rippling across space.

But Swift also took millions of observations of the nearby universe, including galaxies in our backyard. One of its most jaw-dropping images is this 24-hour exposure of the Andromeda galaxy (M31), located about 2.5 million light-years from Earth.

Andromeda is the closest major galaxy to ours, and it may be destined for a shared fate. Scientists suspect that Andromeda and the Milky Way are drawing closer together and might eventually collide. The merger would add Andromeda's roughly 1 trillion stars to our sky, though there probably wouldn't be any life left on Earth to appreciate it.

In Swift's view of our encroaching neighbor, captured with the observatory's ultraviolet instrument, tens of thousands of Andromeda's stars shine like sapphires set in a sparkling ring.

According to NASA, the observatory detected some 20,000 ultraviolet light sources in this image, captured over two months from May to July 2008. These sources include thousands of dense, hot star clusters scattered across Andromeda's 150,000-light-year-wide ring, as well as the distant galaxy M32 (seen as a bright orb of light to the bottom right of Andromeda's center).

In visible-light images of Andromeda taken with ground-based telescopes, the galaxy's bright center bleaches out many of the fiery young stars that emerge in Swift's view. While Swift likely won't be remembered best for shimmering starscapes like this one, it's a powerful reminder that looking at familiar structures in a new light can change everything.

The Vikings were explorers, farmers, merchants and, most famously, warriors who launched raids across large parts of Europe.

Stereotypes of Vikings usually conjure up images of muscular men. But over the past few decades, researchers have turned their attention to women of the Viking Age (roughly A.D. 793 to 1066) and the roles they held. For instance, there are stories of "shield maidens" who fought alongside men, and some of these texts mention Viking women who fought in battle. The archaeological record also holds evidence, including graves of Viking Age women who were buried with war-grade weapons and shields.

It's still a matter of debate whether women who lived during the Viking Age could be warriors, but this discussion raises another question: It's one thing to have texts describing female fighters and archaeological records of women buried with weapons, but what can the evidence tell us about how frequently Viking women fought in battle?

The answer, experts told Live Science, largely depends on our interpretation of texts, artifacts, and burials of Viking Age women, which often face higher scrutiny than burials of men who were buried with similar (or even fewer) weapons.

"They put toughness before allure"

The Vikings used a runic system of writing, but they left precious few texts behind. Instead, much of what we know about the Vikings was written about them by people from other cultures or by their Norse descendants.

One of the most evocative texts was written in the 12th century by the Danish historian and theologian Saxo Grammaticus. In "Gesta Danorum" (Latin for "History of the Danes" and translated by Jenny Jochens), he wrote that "there were once women in Denmark who dressed themselves to look like men and spent almost every minute cultivating [combat] skills." As "if they were forgetful of their true selves they put toughness before allure, aimed at conflicts instead of kisses, tasted blood, not lips, sought the clash of arms rather than the arm's embrace, fitted to weapons hands what should have been weaving, desired not the couch but the kill, and those they could have appeased with looks they attacked with lances."

Another text about the Vikings, the medieval Irish "Cogadh Gaedhelre Gallaibh" ("War of the Irish with the Foreigners"), refers to a woman known as the "Red Lady" leading a Viking fleet in a raid on Belfast in the 10th century.

There's a lot of uncertainty, said Neil Price, an archaeology professor at Uppsala University in Sweden who has written extensively about the Vikings. The text in the "Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh" that refers to the Red Lady is of debatable accuracy, Price told Live Science in an email.

He suspects that Viking women fought in battle but not frequently. In addition, "female warriors were probably a very small minority," Price said.

The account written by Saxo Grammaticus is also contentious. Thomas Kristian Heebøll-Holm, a history professor at the University of Southern Denmark, said Saxo Grammaticus is not a reliable source.

"Saxo Grammaticus does write about female warriors, but only in the parts of his work concerned [with] the legendary past of Denmark," Heebøll-Holm told Live Science in an email. "Furthermore, these writings are not accurate, but moral and fictitious," Heebøll-Holm said, noting that, in some instances, Saxo Grammaticus seemed to be drawing on the stories of the Amazons, a group of legendary female warriors whom the ancient Greeks believed in with stories about them dating back more than 2,500 years.

Turning to archaeology

Archaeological evidence can also be challenging to interpret. Archaeologists know of about 30 Viking Age female burials containing weapons, including three with swords in Scandinavia. Even more Viking Age women's graves have items that could have been used as weapons ‪—‬ including spears, axes and knives ‪—‬ although these tools also could have been used for hunting or tending to farms. Either way, we can't be sure if these women fought in battle.

"The first concern is that the weapons were really used by the deceased and were not merely included as signs of special status or social rank acquired through inheritance," Deborah Shepherd, an independent researcher who holds a doctorate in archaeology and has studied the Vikings extensively, told Live Science in an email. She noted that graves are often not well preserved, making it difficult to gather information.

There were likely "some few female warriors, but they were probably only found in the highest ranking families, and their warrior career was probably short-lived," Shepherd said. "They wouldn't have fought in the great armies of later centuries but possibly did fight in pre-Christian skirmishes." (The Vikings began gradually converting to Christianity between the ninth and 12th centuries.)

There is at least one known case of a Viking woman found with what may be combat-related injuries. A Viking woman found in Solør, Norway, had a head injury consistent with a sword strike. She was 18 or 19 at the time she died, was buried with weapons and lived around 900.

Ole Kastholm, a curator and senior researcher at the Roskilde Museum in Denmark, said there is a lot of uncertainty regarding how frequently Viking Age women fought in battle.

Weapons "do occur as a grave good in a handful of graves with female human remains," Kastholm told Live Science in an email. "Often it is just a single weapon [such] as a spear or [a] battle axe. But we know of at least one example of a female grave with a full set of weapons as well as riding equipment," which is located in Birka, Sweden.

"If this was a man's grave, researchers would have no doubt that it was a warrior grave, and this explanation must necessarily also apply when the interred is a woman," Kastholm said.

That said, there were female warriors in other cultures. "One can also note in passing that female warriors were an almost common feature of central Asian societies for at least a millennium before the Viking Age," Price wrote in his book, "The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age" (Basic Books, 2026).

For instance the Scythians are a people who flourished in eastern Europe and Asia and Scythian women have been found buried with horses and weapons. In some cases, the Scythian women suffered combat wounds such as arrowheads and it's been speculated that they may have been an inspiration for stories of the Amazons.

See how much you know about ancient norsemen with our Viking quiz!

The Maya used so much red paint that they accidentally poisoned their lakes and waterways with mercury, a new study finds.

The problem was cinnabar, a vivid-red mercury-sulfide mineral that can be used as the pigment vermilion in red paint. The run-off from the paint can enter waterways, where anaerobic bacteria then transform cinnabar into highly toxic methylmercury in the sediments of lakes. Over time, the methylmercury accumulates to higher levels in the food chain.

The ancient Maya, a people who lived in what is now southern Mexico and Central America and whose descendants are still around today, painted almost everything red. Archaeologists have found countless artifacts that the Maya reddened, including sculptures, monuments, walls, plazas, pottery and the dead for ceremonial funerals. Cinnabar was a common pigment in the paint they made, along with red ocher, which gets its color from a nontoxic iron mineral called hematite.

But the Maya passion for the color red — which to them represented the sun, blood and life — caused an environmental disaster when the nearby waters were poisoned by the cinnabar runoff, said study first author Matthew Waters, a paleolimnologist (a scientist who studies ancient waterways) at Auburn University in Alabama.

"They would have seen a strange color change in the water … and a drop in its productivity, such as fish for protein," he told Live Science. The Maya depended heavily on freshwater fisheries, including for freshwater shellfish.

Previous studies had already found evidence for high levels of mercury in the Maya's southern highlands and south-central lowlands, but no one had fully examined levels of the toxic mineral in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

To investigate, Waters and his colleagues studied mercury levels in Maya-era mud in the Yucatán, and found overwhelming signs of mercury poisoning, probably from cinnabar paint, they reported in their study, published Nov. 4 in the journal Science Advances.

"We did not suspect [the Maya] used it in the quantities that we were seeing," he said.

Troubled waters

The study found extreme levels of mercury in sediment cores from two Maya-era sites: Cobá Lake, a shallow lake beside the Maya city of that name, and Cenote Xcach (also spelled X-Canché), a flooded sinkhole beside a ruined city in the jungle that few have excavated.

The sediment cores chronicle the composition of earth and water over more than 2,000 years, and the times of mercury poisoning coincide with several periods during the Preclassic and Classic periods of the Maya civilization from about A.D. 40 to 820.

Waters explained that the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. has determined it is unsafe to drink water with mercury levels above 2 parts per billion, while the official limit for the level of mercury in fish, where it builds up over time, is 1 part per million — any number above that means the fish can be seized by authorities.

Severe poisoning occurs when the mercury levels in human blood exceed about 100 parts per billion, from drinking contaminated water or eating contaminated marine animals, such as fish. In humans, mercury poisoning can cause severe symptoms, including permanent lung damage, brain damage and death.

The most polluted parts of the Yucatan cores had a mercury level of 2.3 parts per million, the team discovered. "They experienced this for decades and, in one case, for centuries," Waters said.

The researchers then examined the sediment cores for signs of environmental damage caused by the mercury poisoning. They found that the cores lacked tiny fossils of freshwater shellfish, indicating that the high mercury levels were killing marine life. The team also noticed that the sediment cores had hardly any traces of algal blooms, which should have happened frequently, Waters said. That's likely because algae could not survive in the poisoned water nutrients.

Maya collapse

Scholars debate why the Maya civilization collapsed in the eighth and ninth centuries, but a leading suspect is the disruption of food supplies caused by drought.

But although mercury levels were high during the Preclassic and Classic periods, the environmental damage caused by mercury levels had been falling in many places for hundreds of years by the time of the Maya collapse, Waters said, although it may have been a contributing factor.

Cinnabar does not occur naturally in the Yucatán, so it must have been imported there, probably from what's now Honduras, the researchers said. It seems these cinnabar imports eventually stopped at Cobá Lake, and the poisoning there fell to a background level of about 20 parts per billion by A.D. 520. However, the sediment cores showed that the mercury poisoning continued at Cenote Xcach until the collapse, they said.

What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica? Find out with our ancient Maya quiz.

A geological reorganization near Japan may have led to the formation of one of North America's most recognizable features.

The birth of the Gulf of California, which rifted from Mexico and created the Baja Peninsula 6 million to 8 million years ago, was accelerated by the formation of a double subduction zone more than 6,000 miles (9,600 kilometers) away, near Japan. This reorganization led to a transfer of tectonic force across the Pacific tectonic plate, which, in turn, opened the Gulf of California and ultimately led to the Grand Canyon's formation, according to new research published Oct. 29 in the journal Science.

The findings will help researchers understand more about plate boundaries, which is where most of the strongest earthquakes on the planet originate.

"It's more than a regional curiosity," study co-author Thorsten Becker, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), told Live Science. "It's a reminder of the global connectedness of mantle convection and plate tectonics."

The Gulf of California is an example of a rift zone, a place where continental crust pulls apart and creates a spot so low that it can be filled by ocean water. There are many rift zones around the world; a currently active one is the Red Sea. But rifting can slow down, speed up or peter out entirely. In the Gulf of California, rifting not only persisted, but sped up. Rifting took about 6 million to 13 million years ‪—‬ much quicker than the typical speed of 30 million to 80 million years.

Study co-author Guido Gianni, a geophysicist at the Czech Academy of Sciences, wondered why that was. No previous research fully explained the rapid rifting, which changed the face of North America in many ways. Not only did the rifting transfer Baja California to the Pacific Plate, but it provided an outlet for the developing Colorado River, which subsequently carved the Grand Canyon on its way to sea level.

Gianni and Becker's doctoral student at UT Austin, Xiang He, used a global model of plate tectonics, run on supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center on campus, to find out if far-flung forces might provide an explanation. Around the same time the Gulf of California was pulling apart, Japan was undergoing its own geological changes. Off the coast of Japan, the Pacific Plate subducts, or pushes under, the Eurasian Plate. About 10 million to 12 million years ago, a single subduction zone near Japan transitioned into two separate subduction zones.

This transition at the western end of the Pacific Plate influenced the tectonic forces on the other side of the plate, He, Gianni, Becker and their colleagues found.

"It turned out — ta-da! — [with] the change in this pulling stress, Baja California was one of the few places outside the Japan region that were affected," Becker said. It was "unexpected and sort of a little bit too good to be true."

The researchers tweaked their model to see if the result held with different assumptions about stresses and mantle properties, and it did.

The Gulf of California was already rifting regardless of the situation across the Pacific. The initial rift was caused by the subduction of a tectonic plate called the Farallon Plate, located under the West Coast of North America. The Farallon slab stretched and thinned the continental crust of the North American plate as it moved. But such rifting might have ended with nothing more than the formation of a little valley or low spot if Japan's influence had not kicked in to give the rifting some extra oomph.

The findings have a direct effect on scientists' understanding of how plate boundaries form, Becker said. And this isn't just academic. The findings could have implications for understanding earthquake-generating faults such as the San Andreas in California and the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest, Becker said. Cascadia is what's known as a "megathrust" boundary, capable of triggering quakes of more than magnitude 9.

"If I'm asking what is the mantle doing underneath Cascadia so I get our megathrust correct," Becker said, "I need to include these effects."

It's a common observation that women often prefer warmer temperatures and feel cold more easily than men do, and the same trend appears among females of other species. Now, a study offers new clues as to what drives this preference — and testosterone may play a part.

Skin carries sensors to detect heat and cold that influence each organism's decision to stay in or move out of an environment. The new study, published Oct. 28 in the Journal of Physiology, found that these sensors activate at higher temperatures in female mice, which appears to shift their preferred temperature roughly 7 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) higher than that of male mice. Testosterone seems to influence this difference in activation.

"You could say it's just a cute observation of no particular importance," said study co-author Peter McNaughton, a pharmacologist at King's College London who studies pain, thermal sensation and thermoregulation. "[But] it's got practical ramifications," in that it might be important in designing buildings and spaces that accommodate people, he told Live Science.

A distinct temperature preference

Proteins in the skin's nerve endings activate in response to warmth or cold. "You can look at them like little electrical generators in the nerve endings," said Dr. Michael Caterina, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the research.

When activated, these proteins allow charged ions to enter sensory nerve cells, which, in turn, transmit electrical signals to the brain. The circuits a given nerve cell connects to determines our perception of heat or cold, Caterina told Live Science.

Beyond humans, it is known that many female animals, including mice and birds, prefer slightly warmer temperatures than their male counterparts do. So the researchers set up an experiment to investigate these differences.

They put 30 male and 27 female mice on two adjacent plates of different temperatures — one at 91.4 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) and another that varied between lower and higher temperatures. A camera tracked the mice's movements and calculated how much time they spent on each plate.

Both male and female mice spent more time at the 91.4 F plate when the second plate was cooler. However, when put next to a plate measuring 100.4 F (38 C), female mice spent significantly more time on the warmer plate than male mice did. The average preferred surface temperature was approximately 89.6 F (32 C) for male mice and 96.8 F (36 C) for female mice.

"Since the top of the cage was completely open, there was no question of the air temperature affecting the mice," McNaughton said, so the preference was driven solely by the sensors in their skin. The researchers also measured the internal and skin temperatures of the mice and confirmed that there were no significant differences between the sexes on those fronts.

The role of testosterone

The scientists explored what would happen if they genetically deleted the warmth-detector protein. In male mice, this reduced their avoidance of the warmer plate, suggesting this protein normally sends a signal that discourages them from staying on warmer surfaces. The mice's preferred temperature also rose to about 95 F (35 C), closer to that of females.

In female mice, deleting or blocking the protein did not have any significant effect.

The team then tried eliminating or blocking the coolness-detecting protein, finding that males and females didn't avoid the cool plates as strongly as they did before. Female mice also spent less time on the warmer plates, but males' preference for the warmer plates didn't change.

"Females are a little bit more responsive to activation of the cold receptor," Caterina said, "and a little bit less responsive to activation of the warmer receptor." That's despite the temperature-sensing neurons in both sets of mice working identically, the team found.

The researchers suspected that sex hormones might help to explain this difference.

They gave a group of male mice a drug that blocks the production of testosterone. Weeks after the treatment, these mice spent more time on the 38 C plate than males with normal testosterone. Meanwhile, female mice given testosterone lost their preference for warmer temperatures.

Interestingly, giving male mice female hormones, including forms of estrogen and progesterone, did not affect their temperature preferences. And blocking the hormones in female mice also had no effect. These hormones are known to influence other aspects of temperature regulation in the body, though, such as heat dissipation through the skin; but in this case, they didn't seem to affect animals' perception of temperature.

"So it really seems as though testosterone is the most important determinant," McNaughton said. But these changes were only partial; testosterone did not completely reverse the differences between the sexes. "So there is something else going on that we weren't able to identify," he added.

The exact mechanism for how testosterone impacts the sensor proteins is not clear. Because the effect happened over weeks, researchers suggested that it did not directly affect the temperature-sensing proteins. It might instead act indirectly by influencing the activity of genes, but further studies would be needed to confirm this idea.

Although the researchers did not conduct any tests in humans, McNaughton noted that the same sensor proteins are present in people and that studies with humans suggest that they behave in a similar way.

This research provides "valuable information" for understanding how the proteins responsible for sensing temperature work, Caterina said. Understanding these mechanisms could be useful for studying conditions like neuropathic pain, in which people's sensitivity to heat and cold is enhanced.

"What kinds of signals create our daily experiences around temperature is by itself very important," he told Live Science. "It's a big part of understanding ourselves as living beings."

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

In February 2011, Madi Allen, a healthy 12-year-old in Central Illinois, who loved playing sports, almost died from the flu. The influenza B virus resulted in her developing necrotizing pneumonia, where the infection triggers inflammation that destroys the tissue of the lungs, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and her kidneys shut down. She was put on life support and dialysis, and was intubated for five weeks. She spent another two months in hospital and a decade recovering from the damage caused.

Allen, now 28, shared her experience with Live Science.

I was 12 years old when it all started. I was just a normal seventh grader, I played soccer and basketball. I didn't really have any health issues beforehand — just sports-induced asthma.

That weekend, I started to feel a little sick, but nothing too bad. My mom kept giving me over-the-counter medicine and it would work for a bit, then once it wore off, it would get really bad. I'd planned to go to one of my friend's birthday parties then spend the night with my best friend. I went to the party, but I texted my mom saying I should come home because I really wasn't feeling well, which was not usual for me at all. That night I asked my mom to sleep with me because I just felt terrible.

That was Saturday. By Sunday night, the only position that I could get comfortable in was my mom holding me like a baby. My mom just held me all weekend. My whole body just hurt and I started feeling like I couldn't breathe properly. That got way worse Monday morning.

We were waiting for my pediatrician to open up and my mom suggested taking a shower, saying, "Maybe that will help you feel a bit better before we go to the doctor." She had to help me take a shower because I was so weak, I couldn't stand by myself. She stepped away for a second just to grab a towel and said that when she came back, my lips were turning gray and my eyes were starting to look sunken in. She knew that something was not right so she called my dad, who was at the grocery store, and told him to just leave everything, that we need to get to the hospital.

Our local hospital is just a small rural hospital — everybody gets transferred out. They diagnosed me with double pneumonia and then sent me to a different hospital 30 minutes away that specialized more in kids.

My dad rode with me in the ambulance while my mom went home and grabbed a few things — she thought we'd just be there for a few days. By the time we got to the second hospital, I was in respiratory distress. They wanted to intubate me straight away but were waiting until my mom got there so she could talk to me — my dad did the best he could, but my dad didn't know how to calm me down.

I don't think the doctors even told me that they were putting me to sleep. My mom had to be the one to tell me. I remember being very scared. They put this mask on my face for the BiPAP [bilevel positive airway pressure machine, which delivers pressurized air to a patient] and I felt like that was suffocating me. It didn't feel like it was helping at all, which, I guess, at that point, it wasn't. They were just trying everything they could. I was begging them to take it off of me, crying and just saying, "one minute, just take it off for one minute."

Finally my mom tried to calm me down and she's like, "They're gonna have to put you to sleep now." I remember her telling me, "You're just gonna go to sleep for like a couple of hours and then you're gonna wake up and you're gonna feel a lot better."

My mom had to leave the room while they were doing that. As she was walking out the door, the last thing I said was "Mom" and then I put my hands in a heart shape. That was the last thing I did and the last time my mom heard my voice for five weeks.

After I was intubated, things got worse. I had to be put on life support so needed to be moved to a bigger hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. The flight team came to evaluate me and they later told me they didn't think they were ever going to get me to Saint Louis. They thought I wasn't going to make the trip. But they said my mom was begging them to help me, everyone in my family was begging them, so they did everything they could to get me on the helicopter. They worked on me for several hours — every time they tried to move me something would go wrong — but eventually they got me there.

The doctors had to call my parents to get permission to do surgery and put me on life support. My mom said that every time she heard my dad's phone ring, she thought they were calling to tell them that I didn't make it. They were told twice that it was more than likely I was going to pass than make it. They were trying to prepare my parents that I wasn't going to make it.

I woke up five weeks later, and it was very confusing. Everybody was told if I asked what day it was, just to tell me the day of the week. When someone accidentally told me the date, I started crying because my aunt was supposed to be getting married a few weeks later and I was worried about being at her wedding. My mom wasn't there, so my dad had to calm me down and then he told me the wedding had been pushed to October so I could be there.

The second thing I was worried about was that I was supposed to take a test on the Constitution and that I'd missed it. I ended up taking it in the hospital. I was there for 93 days. I got out the very last week of school, so I got to go in on the last day of school and surprise my classmates and my teachers.

That summer, I didn't really do anything besides go to doctor's appointments. I was doing physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy — literally all my time was spent at the hospital in therapy. I'd missed three months of school, but I got to start eighth grade with all my friends, and I ended up playing basketball again. But the next several years was a lot of hard work of trying to get back to my normal.

It probably took the rest of junior high and high school to get back to how I would have been before. It was a very long process and during that time I got sick a lot, so I ended up back in the hospital several times. And it was hard going through that as a teenager — I felt like everybody else is living their normal life, and I felt like I missed out on a lot. Looking back now, I still feel like I did miss out a lot. But I think we made the best of the circumstances.

During COVID, when I was 22, I kept getting sick, and the doctors finally told me that part of my lung was so damaged from the flu it was causing infections, so they gave me an option of getting part of my lung removed. It was a major surgery, but I did it and that was probably the best decision I ever made, because it's been five years and I have not been in the hospital once.

I moved to Florida about three years ago, and I started working as a medical assistant in a pulmonary clinic. This semester I got accepted into respiratory therapy school, so for the next two years, I'm going to be in school for respiratory therapy. It's kind of a full circle moment, to come back into the medical field, because there was a point in my life where everybody was asking me, "Oh, do you want to be a doctor? Do you want to be a nurse?" And I'm like, "Absolutely not." I was still so sick that I was there all the time. I never wanted to be there.

I went to college and I got a degree in criminal justice, but I never really knew what I wanted to do. I ended up getting a job at our local hospital — that first hospital that I went to. Every time they put me in the ER I just loved being there. That job made me realize that this is what I wanted to do.

When people hear my story, they don't realize that if I don't tell the end — after the hospital until now — they don't realize that my life didn't go back to normal after. It's taken 10 years. And it's hard. Some of the other family members that we've gotten to know through Families Fighting Flu, it's difficult listening to their stories. Sometimes I feel like I have this survivor's guilt. Their stories sound exactly like mine — but their kids didn't make it.

Before I got sick I got the flu shot every year, but that year we just got busy and it got put on the back burner. Since getting sick I have always made it a priority to get the flu shot every year. I know it is not a guarantee that I will never get the flu again — but hopefully it will reduce the chances of it ever getting that bad again.

With thanks to Families Fighting Flu, a non-profit organization that promotes flu vaccination and raises awareness of the severity of the infectious disease through families that have been affected.

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.

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Dogs typically love belly rubs and will roll on their backs to get more. With cats, it's a different story: Most are visibly uncomfortable when someone touches their belly, and the same applies to their feet and tail.

When a cat is petted in these areas, its body language often changes. "They might do a quick head turn, looking at your hand, or they might start moving away from you or wiggling around a lot, basically trying to get away from the petting," Mikel Delgado, a cat behaviorist and senior research scientist at Purdue University, told Live Science in an email. "If these early warning signs are ignored, they might escalate to biting, hissing or scratching."

But why do cats dislike it so much when humans touch these specific areas?

Although there has been little formal research into this question, animal behavior experts proposed a few ideas for why cats don't like to be touched in certain areas.

Off-limits petting zones

"Cats are prey animals as well as predators and so they can be very protective of areas that are particularly vulnerable to injury during attack, such as the belly area," Sarah Ellis, head of cat mental well-being and behavior at the cat welfare charity International Cat Care, told Live Science in an email.

A cat's belly houses vital organs ‪—‬ such as the liver, stomach and intestines ‪—‬ without the protective bony cage that the ribs provide for the heart and lungs. Although cats have evolved a special feature called the "primordial pouch" —‬ basically a flap of loose skin and fat on their belly —‬ which provides a little extra padding to protect vital organs during fights, most cats still feel threatened when humans touch or rub their belly.

Dogs have a similar anatomy to cats, but they have to worry less about falling prey to larger animals. Cats, meanwhile, can be hunted by dogs, urban coyotes, and even birds such as hawks and owls, making it natural for them to be protective of their bellies.

The tail is also a vulnerable area for cats. "When a cat is chased by another animal, including other cats, the tail is often the part of the cat's body that is closest to touch," Ellis said, "and the risk of being bitten at the base of the tail is high." Therefore, cats may be skittish about having their tail stroked.

When it comes to foot rubs, there are two possible explanations for why most cats hate them. First, a cat's paws are essential in threatening situations. Running away from danger is a cat's preferred survival strategy, and they rely on their paws as a means of escape, Ellis explained. If they can't run away, "a cat may resort to repelling any threats through swiping and scratching and it needs its paws free to do so," she said. "It is therefore predisposed to not enjoy having its paws restricted in any way."

Another reason could be that cats' paws are very sensitive. They have wrist whiskers (also known as "carpal vibrissae") and toe pads that are sensitive to various types of stimuli, like pressure and heat, Delgado said, "so it's not surprising that many cats are sensitive about having their feet touched."

Petting rules and exceptions

If you're interacting with a cat, it's generally a good idea to stick to the areas where most cats like to be petted: the base of their ears, around their cheeks and under their chin. These areas are rich in scent glands, and cats tend to rub them against other cats they are friends with, Delgado explained. So essentially, cats like being petted in those areas because "they treat us as they do other cats," Delgado said.

But some cats go against the grain. "I've had a few who enjoyed belly rubs," Delgado said. Others enjoy having their tail stroked briefly and show their pleasure "by pushing their rump into the hand of the petter and holding their tail up in the air," Ellis said. (This behavior is sometimes called "elevator butt.")

As puzzling as it may be to humans, these varied preferences are a reminder that "each cat is an individual," Delgado said. Positive responses to petting of the belly, feet or tail can also signal close bonding to a human, Ellis said.

She advises people to "always take the cat's lead, learn what each individual cat likes and dislikes and respect these preferences."

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

For centuries, Mars has been seen as a potential place for future human settlements. But long-duration space travel comes with serious risks to astronauts' health, including those resulting from cosmic radiation and the effects of microgravity.

A new study found that rats that were exposed to radiation similar to what astronauts might encounter during a Mars mission developed more scar tissue around their hearts' small blood vessels compared with a control group. Although the findings haven't been validated in humans, the results contribute to growing concerns about the potential effects of long-haul space missions on astronauts' health.

Given these new findings, Live Science asked its readers whether they'd travel to the Red Planet, despite these potential health risks. Over 240 readers weighed in, with 65% picking "No, I don't think the risks are worth it."

Interestingly enough, the comments reflect a slightly different trend. One reader wrote, "Any pioneers who travel to Mars will be facing the prospect of death and never coming back. Even if they make it back, there are any number of health issues that could come up. These risks have not stopped people from exploring throughout human history. The bigger question is who to send?"

Other commenters echoed this sentiment, with another reader posting, "Explorers in the past have always been exposed to unusual risks; without the risk takers we would still believe the world is flat."

Beyond the feelings that Mars will be explored anyway, despite the health risks, other commenters highlighted the cost of these missions, with one reader stating, "Sending flesh water balloons to Mars is ridiculous. For the cost of one human on Mars, we could literally probe the entire solar system and map/sample/rove every planet and every major Moon."

Others highlighted the mental and emotional cost of a trip to Mars. "As a devoted sci-fi fan for decades, I always wished I could go into space," another reader noted. "Now that I am 77 years old, I realize I would miss the outdoors. The wind and trees, the birdsong and sweet grass under my feet would be a devastating loss. Let the brave explorers go instead. Life is too brief to leave this planet for the uncertainty and dangers of space travel."

Do you agree with these readers? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Symptoms of long COVID ease in half of patients within three years of the infection that kicked off their illness.

That's the primary conclusion of a new study that tracked over 1,000 patients with long COVID, a chronic condition that can emerge after an infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Among the patients, the chance of improvement varied sharply depending on how the condition affected their bodily systems.

In the study, published Tuesday (Nov. 3) in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, roughly 60% of patients whose predominant symptoms were changes to their ability to taste or smell had significantly improved three years after their first positive test. But less than 20% of those with a multisystem presentation had improved in that time frame.

This latter group had symptoms that affected their cardiac, nervous and gastrointestinal systems, among others. An expert told Live Science that the condition resembled myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which often arises after an infection and similarly impacts a wide range of bodily systems.

The new study's findings could help direct the structure of future clinical trials of treatments for long COVID, experts said.

One disease, many symptoms

The patients in the study were enrolled in the long-term RECOVER Adult Study. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the project has recruited thousands of adults across the United States who previously tested positive for COVID-19.

Researchers scored patients based on how they were affected by a range of symptoms, including fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath and heart palpitations. The study included patients who scored more than 10 points on a 30-point scale — called the 2024 LC Research Index (LCRI) — which attempted to capture these different symptom combinations.

Nearly 1,020 patients met this requirement and were tracked over time; they had in-person appointments and filled out symptom surveys every three months. Scientists marked patients as "improved" once they recorded LCRI scores of 10 or less at two consecutive visits. They found that 36% of the participants had improved two years after their inciting COVID-19 infection, and that figure rose to 50% after three years.

LCRIs hit zero for 26% of the participants after three years, meaning all of their symptoms were gone at the time of the survey.

Reeder said he was careful to avoid describing the participants as "recovered." This decision was influenced by input from the long COVID community to the RECOVER Adult Study, he said. They highlighted that their symptoms can wax and wane, whereas "recovery" implies a permanent resolution. The new study didn't capture, for example, whether individual patients who recorded meaningful improvement later relapsed.

Some patients' journeys were far less straightforward than the top-line data might suggest. Although men and women improved at similar rates, adults under 46 were more likely to improve than older participants were. Patients affected by the Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2, which emerged in 2021 and quickly became the dominant strain of the virus, were more likely to improve than those infected with earlier strains.

ME/CFS and long COVID

Some of the starkest differences in improvement rates were seen between patients with different symptoms.

In a previous study, RECOVER researchers had grouped participants into five subtypes, using an algorithm to connect patients with similar predominant symptoms:

• Loss of smell or taste
• Chronic cough
• Brain fog
• Heart palpitations
• Symptoms affecting multiple bodily systems

In the new study, patients in the last three groups were less likely to get better within three years. The final group's rate was particularly low, at just 19%.

Dr. Carmen Scheibenbogen, an immunologist at Charité University Medicine Berlin, said these patients' progress resembles that of people with ME/CFS.

"It looks as if at least a major subgroup is suffering from ME-CFS," Scheibenbogen said, noting that COVID-19 may have triggered their condition. "This is a disease which is triggered by different infections, but in the end, the disease [itself] is very similar," she said.

Like long COVID, ME/CFS can affect a wide array of bodily systems, and it remains poorly understood despite recent advances in research.

The team's new findings highlight the need for clinical trials to test possible treatments for long COVID. Both Scheibenbogen and study co-author Harrison Reeder, a biostatistician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said these subtypes would be important to consider in the design of these potential trials.

The multisystem subgroup, Reeder said, "might be a group where an effective intervention can make a bigger difference than people who stand to potentially have a higher chance of improvement regardless."

Future work would need to further scientists' understanding of people affected by long COVID at the level of their genes and proteins, both scientists said.

"There's a lot of work to do in RECOVER and in the world of long COVID research," Harrison said. "There's a lot of opportunity."

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

A fledgling owl that lived 47 million years ago in what is now Germany offers tantalizing new clues about when most of these birds became nocturnal, a new study shows. The discovery brings researchers one step closer to finally solving the biggest mystery about these birds.

The young owl is a newly described species named Masillastrix blattophaga. Researchers unearthed the almost perfectly preserved bird in 2025 in the Messel Pit, an ancient lake surrounded by a forest that is now the richest fossil site in the world for understanding life in the Eocene epoch (56 million to 34 million years ago). The skull is missing, but the rest of the fossil was so well preserved that researchers found the owl's last meal in its stomach: a greenish-blue, iridescent cockroach.

The cockroach is one of several pieces of evidence suggesting that this tiny owl was diurnal, or active primarily during the day. Iridescence is associated with a diurnal lifestyle, so it appears that the owl, which measured less than 5 inches (12 centimeters) long, was hunting in the daytime, researchers said in the new study.

This indicates that owls were not nocturnal 47 million years ago and so must have switched to the night-owl lifestyle more recently, said study first author Gerald Mayr, a paleontologist and head of ornithology at the Senckenberg Research Institute and the Natural History Museum Frankfurt in Germany.

"There exists a consensus that owls must have evolved from a diurnal ancestor," Mayr told Live Science in an email. That's because some early owl fossils have head-rotation structures similar to those of diurnal raptors and bony ridges above the eye sockets that could have shaded the owls' eyes from the sun.

Therefore, it is plausible that the Messel owl was fully diurnal, rather than active during the daytime and nighttime as some owls are today, because that would imply that some of its ancestors had already evolved nocturnal traits, Mayr said.

Researchers also found a cockroach identical to the one in the Messel owl's stomach in sediments just a few feet away from the new fossil. This well-preserved cockroach helped the team to identify the insect inside the owl, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Nov. 2 in the journal Current Biology.

It's possible that the owl ate the cockroach at dawn or at dusk, which might cast doubt on whether the bird was diurnal. But there are other clues hinting that the owl was diurnal, including the appearance of some of the owl's feathers and the stoutness of its upper wing bones.

Mayr said he and his colleagues believe the shape of the upper wing bones, or humeri, is an indicator of when owls are active. The Messel owl's stocky humeri hint that the species flew during the day, when silent movement doesn't confer a significant advantage because there is enough light to see predators. Conversely, modern nocturnal owls have slim humeri and fly almost soundlessly, he said.

Assuming this hypothesis is correct, the earliest known nocturnal owl species are from about 35 million years ago, in the Late Eocene, Mayr said. Owl fossils from this period and more recently look a lot like modern owls and have elongated humeri, he noted. The oldest known owl in the fossil record, Ogygoptynx wetmorei, dates to around 60 million years ago.

This means that owls likely became nocturnal between 47 million and 35 million years ago. This is the best current estimate, because the owl fossil record is very sparse and species are often described from only a few isolated bones, according to the study.

"We still know so little about the early evolution of modern birds," Mayr said, adding that every fossil discovery has the power to change even well-established ideas in the field.

The big question that remains is why owls became nocturnal. Previous theories suggested that owls evolved this behavior to avoid competition with diurnal birds of prey or to benefit from a proliferation of nocturnal mammals. But studies show that both of these groups exploded much later than 35 million years ago — around 20 million to 25 million years ago — suggesting there wasn't a clear advantage driving owls to switch to nocturnal lifestyles at that time.

The new results have deepened the uncertainty of why owls turned nocturnal. But "by narrowing down the time frame when owls became nocturnal, our study may eventually contribute to solving this mystery," Mayr said.

When it comes to spotting planets orbiting distant stars, the biggest hurdle is often separating the signal from the noise — specifically, trying to distinguish a planet from the stellar glare around it. That's true even for the most sophisticated telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Now, astronomers have developed a new way to spot planets that were formerly drowned out in a sea of light. Using a combination of modeling and machine learning techniques, they picked out a previously hidden giant exoplanet in data from JWST. The results were published Nov. 4 in the journal Nature.

"Planets are a million times fainter than their stars," study first author Rodrigo Ferrer-Chavez, an astronomer at Northwestern University, said in a statement. "So, to image exoplanets, we need to remove that glare."

Telescopes like JWST use instruments called coronagraphs to block out some of this excess light, similar to the way the moon and a pinhole camera operate during a total solar eclipse. But even the best coronagraphs have limitations — for example, they can't block all the glare, and the telescopes themselves move.

Even the most stable telescopes vibrate almost imperceptibly as they collect light, so the images a telescope produces contain ever-so-slight mismatches compared with what the instrument actually sees. These slight shifts can be enough to obscure even very large exoplanets.

To address this, Ferrer-Chavez and his team developed a "digital twin" of JWST that virtually recreates how light travels through the telescope's detectors, minus any movement-based imperfections. To fine-tune this digital replica, the researchers used computational models based in real-world physics alongside machine learning techniques similar to those used to train AI. But the authors stressed that this is not an AI model.

"Because we already know the physics, we don't need AI to understand what's happening," study co-author Jason Wang, also an astrophysicist at Northwestern, said in a statement.

The researchers named their approach Physics-based Learning for Imaging Planets, or FLIP.

Using FLIP, the team analyzed data from three stars, including 51 Eridani, which is located around 97 light-years from Earth and was already suspected to have a giant exoplanet orbiting it. Although the planet, called 51 Eridani b, had been detected by ground-based telescopes, it was drowned out by light in previous JWST observations. With FLIP, however, 51 Eridani b popped out from the dataset.

The scientists hope this approach will help astronomers pick out even more hard-to-spot exoplanets, especially ones that look like the planets in our own backyard. In the nearly 35-year history of exoplanet hunting, the vast majority of planets we've found have been radically different from those in our own solar system, partially because larger and more reflective worlds are easier to spot with current telescopes.

"It's not that [solar-system-like planets] don't exist," Ferrer-Chavez said. "It's that we can't see them."

Mars' supersize Valles Marineris — the largest known canyon in the solar system — is still tectonically active even though the Red Planet is geologically "dead," new research on a previously record-breaking marsquake reveals.

On Aug. 25, 2021, NASA's InSight lander, which touched down on the Red Planet in 2018, detected a powerful marsquake, designated S0976a. The Martian equivalent of an earthquake reached magnitude 4.2, which, at the time, was the most powerful quake that InSight or any other Mars lander had ever seen. (Since then, a 4.7 magnitude marsquake in May 2022 knocked it off the top spot, but S0976a remains second on this list.)

Unlike most marsquakes, which have been minor tremors triggered by meteorite impacts near InSight, S0976a was a deep rumble that originated from the opposite side of Mars as the robotic seismologist, in the western half of Valles Marineris.

In the new study, published Oct. 15 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers reanalyzed the seismic wave data of S0976a and found that the quake originated from within a fault line running below the enormous canyon. The most likely explanation, they argue, is that there was tectonic movement in this hidden crustal crack.

"Valles Marineris is one of the most spectacular geological structures anywhere in the solar system, but until now we didn't know for certain that its faults are still active," study first author Jung-Hun Song, a researcher in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, said in a statement. "What we see is that this is not just a 'dead' fossil landscape, as faults deep beneath the canyon can still slip and generate marsquakes, long after the geological processes that originally formed them have ceased."

A geologically "dead" world

Valles Marineris is an enormous set of interconnected gullies and ravines stretching up to 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) in length, or roughly 10 times longer than the Grand Canyon. It is also up to 20 times wider and five times deeper, meaning that if you found yourself stranded at the bottom, it could take you a couple of months to climb out again.

The enormous chasm — named after the Mariner 9 spacecraft, which helped discover it in 1971 — is clearly visible from space, like a giant scar carved into the Red Planet's face. From orbit, you would also see the nearby Tharsis region, which is home to Mars' giant volcanoes, including Olympus Mons, which is at least three times taller than Mount Everest.

These imposing structures are proof that Mars was once geologically active, perhaps even more so than Earth. However, scientists think the Red Planet's surface has remained relatively unchanged for nearly 3 billion years, according to the European Space Agency.

The reason for this is twofold. First, Mars is smaller than Earth, so its core and mantle have cooled much faster than our planet's and are, therefore, less dynamic. Second, Mars has no tectonic plates. Instead of giant patches of crust butting against each other, the Red Planet's outermost layer is almost completely intact and acts like a giant lid over its cooling molten innards. (Research published earlier this week throws the "dead" theory into question, hinting that magma may still lurk below dormant Martian volcanoes).

Despite this, Mars still has fault lines. But rather than being a boundary between tectonic plates, these lines are more like giant cracks in its crust, some of which are visible at the surface.

Signs of tectonic life

In the new study, researchers discovered proof of what they call a slip-strike marsquake, where "blocks of crust move horizontally past one another along a steep, deeply rooted fault," the team said. They believe this occurred somewhere between 12 and 25 miles (20 to 40 km) below Valles Marineris.

The researchers also simulated several other potential causes of the marsquake, including a major asteroid strike or a landslide within the canyon, but nothing else could explain the patterns they saw.

"What makes the result compelling is that several completely different types of evidence point in the same direction," Song said.

The finding also raises hopes that similar tectonic activity could one day be detected on other worlds across the solar system.

"Our study opens up exciting possibilities for discovering ongoing seismic activity on other planetary bodies that we might otherwise consider geologically inactive," Song said.

Mapping Martian vibrations

The discovery highlights the importance of detecting and studying marsquakes, which were only officially discovered in 2019, thanks to InSight. (Scientists have since uncovered older marsquakes, using data collected by the Viking landers in the late 1970s.)

"S0976a has turned out to be an extraordinary event," study co-author Doyeon Kim, head of Imperial College London's Terrestrial and Planetary Seismology Lab, said in the statement. "Its waves traveled through the core and helped us investigate the deepest part of Mars, and now they are telling us what happened at the source itself. From a single marsquake, we can learn both about the center of the planet and about an active fault beneath one of its most remarkable landscapes."

Scientists have similarly used marsquake vibrations from InSight to map out Mars' interior, leading to several intriguing subsurface discoveries, including dozens of blobs left over from ancient protoplanets, the hidden cause of the planet's uneven hemispheres, a potentially active "mantle plume" and a gigantic underground water reservoir containing enough liquid to cover Mars with a mile-deep (1.6 km) ocean.

Unfortunately, in December 2022, InSight quite literally bit the dust: A thick covering of Martian powder blocked its solar panels, preventing the lander from returning signals to Earth and thus ending its mission.

This means we currently have no way of detecting new marsquakes. However, the new study proves that the lander's archived data can still lead to exciting discoveries.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest evidence of cannabis use from a 2,800-year-old monumental tomb in Siberia. The presence of plant seeds in the grave and chemical traces of the drug in mummy hair suggest people practiced a funeral ritual that may have involved a grim practice: calming human sacrifice victims with cannabis.

In a study published Thursday (Nov. 5) in the journal Science, researchers investigated the contents of a "royal mound" burial at the Tunnug archaeological site in the Uyuk valley of southern Siberia. Archaeologists discovered four wooden structures containing several log coffins in the middle of the mound. On top of the wooden burial structures were the skeletons of horses that once formed a "spectral cavalcade," a Scythian funeral tradition that involved sacrificing horses and humans. And inside the burial structures, the archaeologists discovered piles of tiny seeds from the plant Cannabis ruderalis, a wild type of cannabis or marijuana.

Cannabis likely originated in Asia and was cultivated thousands of years ago for various purposes, including for ropes and textiles, and 6,000 years ago as an oilseed crop, according to the study. But it's unclear when people learned about the psychoactive properties of the plant. In the fifth century B.C., the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Scythian nomads inhaled the fumes from burning hemp seeds. And evidence of cannabis use was previously discovered in a cemetery in China dated to about 500 B.C. The new study, however, pushes back this date by three centuries.

Researchers discovered more than 1,000 whole cannabis seeds and around 500 partial seeds in the Tunnug burial mound, and they carbon-dated them to between 800 and 760 B.C. They also recovered several human hair samples from the grave. An analysis of the hair revealed signals matching cannabinol and THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), psychoactive chemical compounds found in cannabis. The tests could not determine how much of the drug people consumed, however.

"The molecular traces in the hair and the cannabis seeds come from the same grave and suggest that cannabis was used for its intoxicating properties," study first author Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, said in a statement.

But given the burial context of the discovery, the use of cannabis may have had a darker purpose.

"In this princely tomb, the burials were accompanied by extensive horse sacrifices and, most likely, human sacrifices as well," Caspari said. The tradition of human sacrifice, in particular, "would have potentially made the plant a useful agent to calm individuals who were to be included in the rituals," the researchers wrote in the study.

The new study confirms the ancient use of cannabis in funerals in Central Asia and extends the date back to 2,800 years ago, the researchers noted. Future work is planned but will focus on other aspects of ancient cannabis.

"We have already begun sequencing some of the plant samples," Caspari said. "This will help us learn more about the history of the domestication and spread of the crop soon."

An Elizabethan padlock has been opened for the first time in more than 400 years after researchers used X-ray imaging techniques to crack its four-letter combination.

The brass lock was part of the Ann Francis treasure hoard, named after the British merchant ship that wrecked during a storm off the coast of Wales in 1583. Researchers believe the lock once secured a chest aboard the ship, before becoming separated from whatever riches it was protecting.

Some of the Ann Francis' cargo was recovered at the time of the wreck, while the rest was claimed by the sea. In recent decades, dredging and storms on Margam beach in South Wales have exposed some of the ship's lost treasure.

Between 1996 and 2017, metal detectorist Peter Hughes found the lock and much of the hoard, which included gold and silver coins. The lock was subsequently acquired by Amgueddfa Cymru — National Museum Wales, which worked with researchers at Cardiff University in Wales to decipher its combination.

To study the lock's internal mechanisms, the team used micro-CT scans, which make thousands of X-rays that can then be configured into a 3D digital image. By matching internal notches to external letters in the digital 3D image, the researchers were able to decipher the correct four-letter code — "ANCE" — and open the lock.

"We normally use this technology to study bones and other biological structures, so investigating a 400-year-old padlock was certainly a first for us," David Williams, a research associate at the Musculoskeletal Biomechanics Research Facility at Cardiff University, said in a statement. "It's not every day you get to solve a 400-year-old mystery!"

Smugglers' ship

The Ann Francis was owned by Francis Shaxton, a merchant and notorious smuggler. Francis claimed the ship was sailing along the eastern English coast from King’s Lynn to Hartlepool, when it was actually traveling in the opposite direction, heading to Spain to deliver a cargo of wheat. Spain was dependent on grain shipments at the time and paid for such shipments in gold and silver from colonial conquests in Central and South America, according to Amgueddfa Cymru.

The ship was traveling back from Spain to England when, on the evening of Dec. 28, 1583, it was caught in a violent storm. After heading off course, the ship ended its journey in ruin off Margam beach.

A parish register noted the loss of 14 sailors during the same month as the wreckage, which could have been The Ann Francis's crew, according to Amgueddfa Cymru. The deaths were blamed on the nefarious work of a supposed witch.

Locals were quick to loot the Ann Francis wreck before a legal dispute ensued over who had the right to its goods. One Welsh lord claiming the wreck made an inventory list of items he impounded, which included cannons, guns, a piece of mast, Spanish silver and three chests with their locks broken. The newly cracked lock could have originally secured one of these chests, according to Amgueddfa Cymru.

Centuries after the ship was wrecked, Hughes found the lock near a previously undiscovered stash of Spanish silver coins and coin weights while metal detecting on the beach.

"When I found the lock I was immediately astonished by the incredible workmanship and its astonishing condition," Hughes said. "When I moved the ring dials of the combination they turned with ease after over 400 years beneath the sands and I was left in disbelief."

Hughes said he attempted to open the lock himself over many years but could never find the right combination. After Amgueddfa Cymru acquired the lock, staff were concerned that they could hear grit moving around inside the dials, and with more than 1,000 possible combinations, they didn't want to cause any damage.

The micro-CT scans offered a nondestructive view inside the lock, and an opportunity to finally identify the correct four-letter combination.

"Elizabethan combination locks are known in Britain, but this one is in exceptionally good condition and is associated with a dated wreck, making it a unique find and the code a tantalising mystery to solve," Alastair Willis, the senior curator for numismatics and the Welsh economy at Amgueddfa Cymru, said in the statement. "Of course, now we've solved it, we are left wondering if the code meant something to its owner."

Archaeologists investigating the genomes of a dozen people buried in an abandoned Roman-era settlement in northwestern Germany have discovered a surprising organism lurking in one man's remains: a rare strain of Mycobacterium leprae, which causes leprosy.

This strain of leprosy has never been seen in this part of Europe before, which hints that the individual had traveled and interacted with people from across the Roman world. The man was buried in a wooden boat surrounded by unusual objects, indicating he was a high-status person, according to a research study.

"The results were particularly striking in the case of one individual," study co-author Ben Krause-Kyora, an archaeologist at the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology (IKMB) at Kiel University in Germany, said in a Nov. 3 statement. "He could, for example, have been a mercenary in the Roman army who later settled between the Elbe and the Weser [rivers]."

In the study, published online Oct. 15 in the journal iScience, Krause-Kyora and colleagues analyzed the genomes of people buried at the coastal settlement of Fallward. The settlement originated in the first century B.C. but gradually declined and became a cemetery by the fifth century A.D. Among the 200 cremation burials and 60 inhumation burials originally excavated in the 1990s was a distinctive grave made from a wooden boat.

The oak boat was over 13 feet (4 meters) long and sealed with a roof-like structure, the researchers said. It held the skeleton of a man who was about 50 years old when he died some time between A.D. 425 and 450. His grave goods included a small box shaped like a water bird, an ornate chair or throne carved out of alder wood, a bronze basin and a maple stool with a hunting scene and a runic inscription. The maritime artifacts coupled with the man's well-developed upper arm bones suggest he may have worked as a fisherman or boatman just before he died, the researchers wrote.

"The grave goods placed in the tomb aroused particular scientific interest," study co-author Hauke Jöns, an archaeologist at the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research, said in the statement. "The man possessed a late Roman military belt, which suggested that the deceased had had connections across great distances."

A rare form of leprosy

To learn more about this unusual burial and to determine where the man was from, researchers analyzed his DNA.

"Genetic analyses confirm that a man buried at Fallward originated from the Danube region," study first author Daniel Myburgh, an ancient DNA researcher at IKMB, said in the statement. "He was also infected with a very rare leprosy pathogen."

The researchers found the DNA of the bacterium M. leprae in one of the man's teeth and in a foot bone. Because the leprosy DNA was so well preserved, the researchers were able to narrow down the strain that had infected him. This strain of leprosy may have evolved in Egypt around the fourth to second centuries B.C. and had never before been found in Central or Northern Europe, according to the statement.

But the man showed no signs of leprosy lesions in his skeleton, the researchers said. Leprosy first attacks the nerves and skin, but it can eventually eat away at the bones of the skeleton, particularly affecting the nose, jaw, hands and feet.

"Leprosy is a chronic disease," study co-author Almut Nebel, a biologist at IKMB, said in the statement. "Either he was affected by an asymptomatic form of the disease, or the disease had so far only affected soft tissues. He may have travelled long distances whilst carrying the disease."

While the researchers don't know exactly what happened in this man's life, they suggested he might have been a mercenary who served in the Roman army and later retired to northwest Germany, becoming a high-status member of the community who was honored with an alder-wood "throne" in his burial. But he also may have acquired the Roman belt through trade, inheritance or as a war trophy, the researchers wrote.

Either way, the man's skeleton and his grave goods suggest that northwest Germany had long-distance connections in Europe even after the fall of the Roman Empire, according to the statement.

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

Across 53 challenging days between fall 2020 and spring 2021, a 360-pound (160 kilograms) young male grizzly bear nicknamed "Lingenpolter" tried to cross Interstate 90 in western Montana 46 times. High-resolution GPS tracking showed him moving parallel to four lanes of roaring traffic, bouncing off the highway like a furry pinball as he searched for a gap.

Eventually, Lingenpolter beat the odds, probably by slipping under a river bridge. But his hero's journey shows what a formidable barrier a busy highway can be for wildlife, Cecily Costello, a research wildlife biologist at Montana's Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, told Live Science. "It is easy to imagine the difficulty this grizzly bear experienced trying to reach the other side," Costello said.

This past May, another grizzly wasn't so lucky. Braving a crossing near one of Lingenpolter's attempts, the 27-year-old male bear was struck and killed by a truck, triggering a multicar rollover.

It's crucial for grizzly bears (Ursus arctos), also known as brown bears, to have room to roam. When they can't move between populations to mate, small groups get genetically isolated. And what's true for bears can also be true for other wildlife. "It's really challenging to be a small, fragmented population," said Michael Proctor, a wildlife biologist at Birchdale Ecological Ltd., a Canada-based environmental consulting firm. Such fragmentation is "one of the mechanisms by which we lose entire communities, and sometimes whole species," he told Live Science.

Nowhere is this challenge more urgent than in the 2,100 mile long (3,400 kilometers) region stretching along the spine of the Rocky Mountains between Yellowstone in Wyoming and the Yukon in northern Canada. The area, which spans five U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and more than 75 Indigenous territories "represents the most intact, connected, wild, large mountain region in the world," Jordan Reeves, program director of landscape connectivity at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y), which aims to secure connectivity throughout the region told Live Science.

But as highways, rail lines, and human development fragment its valleys, maintaining connected pathways for grizzly bears across this landscape has become a challenge.

Grizzlies range across vast, diverse terrain, spanning high-elevation alpine habitats, mid-mountain slopes, and low valley bottoms, which means safeguarding their movement can also protect passageways for coexisting species, including wolverines, mountain goats, elk and bighorn sheep, Proctor said. That's why researchers are trying to understand why, where and when grizzlies move. And what stops them in their tracks.

"We're looking at how a bear sees the world," Andrew Derocher, a bear biologist at the University of Alberta who has used GPS collars on grizzly bears to trace their movements, told Live Science.

Nature versus nurture

When Sarah Sells started her graduate studies in animal behavior, her supervisor told her to "try to crawl into their fur brains and understand how they think," Sells told Live Science. Although we can't recreate exactly what's going on between a grizzly's ears, GPS collars that track animal movement hourly can tell scientists a lot about how animals behave, said Sells, who is currently the assistant unit leader of the U.S. Geological Survey's Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit.

That tracking data is starting to produce an incredibly detailed picture not just of where bears go but also how and why they're making those choices.

"Bears are food finding machines," Chris Servheen, a bear biologist with the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Bear Specialist Group, told Live Science. "So remembering where they found food is critical to their success in life."

Using a combination of telemetry data (information collected by tracking devices) and movement modeling, Derocher and colleagues have investigated how well grizzlies remember where food is and when it is best to visit a foraging patch. Derocher's research showed that about two-thirds of the bears have a great memory for where and in what season they previously found food. His tracking data also revealed that wild bears generally avoid humans. But bears have only a few months to fatten up for winter. If food is scarce, many bears go into human environments and sometimes get killed, Proctor said.

The data is also offering insight into different bear "personalities." Bears are ultimately individuals, with their own traits and quirks, Servheen said.

Tracking data suggests that a lot of bear behavior is transmitted culturally via a mother's influence. Sometimes, the wrong behavior can get passed down to the next generation, Servheen said. For example, an infamous female grizzly known as 399 jaywalked potentially hundreds of times in the Jackson Hole valley in Wyoming while managing to keep her distance from humans. Her 20-odd cubs learned to follow her example, but they lacked her strategic caution. Several were killed by vehicles or management euthanizations.

"It's a risky thing to teach your kids to do stuff like that," Servheen said. "And her offspring weren't as smart as she was."

A cracked windshield

Further north along the region between Yellowstone and the Yukon, Proctor's first DNA survey across 1,500 square miles (4,000 square kilometers) of southern British Columbia in the late 1990s shattered his illusion that the bears, along with bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) and other species in this province, were free to roam. Instead, he found a "cracked windshield" landscape, where roads and human sprawl had fractured the wilderness into isolated genetic islands. In the 2000s, the genetic diversity of the South Selkirk grizzly bears — a detatched subpopulation inhabiting southeastern British Columbia, northern Idaho, and northeastern Washington — was so low, for example, that biologists feared the bears wouldn't survive.

But Proctor and his colleagues went on to use bear movement data to model pathways through human-settled valleys. Proctor was so convinced about the viability of one potential corridor that he paid 10,000 Canadian dollars ($7,000) of his own money to buy a key piece of land right in the middle of it. "That was the first canoe over the waterfall of purchasing connectivity land," Proctor said

Proctor’s land secured a segment of a crucial connectivity corridor and, in the following years, he and other scientists partnered with trusts to purchase other land parcels, build fences, and establish safe corridors for grizzlies in the Creston Valley in southeastern British Columbia. These actions helped bears move north and south (sometimes across the border) and between the South Selkirk Mountains and Purcell Mountains. The researchers then watched bears like "Captain Hook," who'd been shot in the leg, hobble into the South Selkirks and breed with eight females. By 2021, nine immigrant bears had produced 27 new offspring within the population.

"This is gene flow; this is connectivity," Proctor said. "We took a completely isolated population and pretty much recovered it."

Despite efforts to safeguard corridors through human occupied landscape, roads continue to stop bears in their tracks. When Servheen tracked bears near Highway 2 in northwest Montana, he found that many of the grizzlies avoided the highway altogether and those that crossed did so at night. But he also found that the bears' crossings clustered in specific sections of the road. Finding the crossing zones has helped researchers identify good locations for constructing overpasses and underpasses on many busy highways, but a crossing structure on its own is not enough, Servheen cautioned.

A bear's memory for where to find food is exemplary, but there's no special reward in a bear's brain for crossing a road safely — only a fatal penalty when they don't, Servheen said. So conservationists can't rely on bears to remember where crossings are. Instead, they must build fencing along the highway to funnel wildlife into the underpasses or overpasses. Then, the immediate land on each side needs to allow animals safe passage. "Otherwise, you have a bridge to nowhere," Servheen said.

Now researchers such as Sells are trying to use data about bears' likeliest routes to determine potential corridors in locations where they have little tracking data or where few bears live yet.

To do this, Sells is developing a virtual "Sims for Bears" that recreates the Continental Divide Ecosystem in Montana. In the life-simulation video game "The Sims," players give virtual humans personality traits, preferences and needs, and then drop them into a virtual environment to see how they behave.

Sells built the model using the GPS collaring data from 65 grizzly bears navigating individual paths through greenery, riparian areas and around forests and roads. Then, she "parachutes" an individual digital bear into a detailed computer simulation of real-world terrain and has them take thousands of virtual steps. By running these multiple simulated bears through thousands of iterations across the digital terrain, the researchers can watch where the virtual bears repeatedly choose to walk, effectively creating a map of predicted movement corridors.

Sells has used the model to predict how grizzly bears might recolonize the Bitterroot ecosystem of Idaho and Montana, which Lingenpolter was heading toward when attempting to cross Interstate 90.

To get to the Bitterroot Mountains, bears must pass through a valley filled with people, roads, garbage and fruit trees. "So knowing where they are more likely to end up is helpful to address things that could be difficult for humans or bears," Sells told Live Science.

The people problem

The data is also confirming that the greatest barrier bears face comes from human contact or transportation infrastructure across the entire Yellowstone-to-Yukon region. Studies from across west-central North America report that humans directly or indirectly caused between 77% and 90% of grizzly bear deaths from 1989 to 2015. Hunting, managed kills in urban areas and road and rail collisions all take a toll.

Bears in the wild usually avoid people, but some bears seek out human-dominated areas because they know these places are a source of food. People move to the Elk Valley in southeastern British Columbia because they love nature, but then they plant apple trees in their backyard, which attract bears, said Clayton Lamb, a wildlife scientist at the nonprofit Biodiversity Pathways.

Quickly, a bear eating backyard apples gets labeled a "problem bear," "when really it is a 'people problem,'" Lamb told Live Science.

Even human recreation takes a toll on bears' health and ability to move freely. Lamb's research has shown that grizzly bears try to avoid areas next to busy cycling and hiking trails.

To minimize human-bear conflict, Michelle McLellan, a wildlife ecologist at Biodiversity Pathways, has tracked trail use by both people and grizzlies in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. McLellan documented people's habits using trail cameras and apps such as Strava Metro. Her research shows that the bears use the trails to move quickly between foraging spots but have learned not to use the trails that are most popular with humans. Consequently, the Nelson Cycling Club decided to close certain trails in the spring and cautioned riders about when and how to use the open trails. "Ride aware, make noise, slow down when needed," the club cautioned in its May newsletter.

Working with information from McLellan, the club has cut back overgrown vegetation along sight lines to prevent mountain bikers from startling bears at close range. They've also constructed wooden platforms on sections of trails that clatter and rumble as bikes pass over them, giving bears early notice of approaching riders. "The key is to not surprise them by making a lot of noise." McLellan told Live Science, noting that grizzlies are more likely to attack if they are surprised.

One advantage of having human mountain biking and hiking trails concentrated close to towns is that it focuses recreation into specific areas, Lamb said. Keeping trails condensed supplies multiple accessible paths and reduces humans encroaching on true wilderness — prime bear habitat. "The goal would be to ensure that there's sufficient recreation opportunities for people to stay healthy and connected to their local landscape while ensuring that wildlife can still move around and access their habitats," Lamb said

Learning to share

As humans increasingly live, work and play in bear territory, it's important to recognize the impact on the animals, Servheen said. "The bears never get a day off," he said. "Every day, they're trying to stay away from people and make a living in a place with multiple people on the landscape."

Bears expend a lot of much-needed energy trying to avoid people, and they won't be able to do that forever, Servheen said. As humans increase the development of private lands and recreation in bear territory, the squeeze is on. "There's going to be more conflicts with bears, and more dead bears," Servheen said.

The bears have done their part, Lamb said. His research has shown that bears living near humans are adapting by becoming mostly nocturnal, which reduces their odds of clashing with humans. "So, we need to meet them where they are at and see what we can do to share the space," Lamb said.

On the human side, people need to make it less tempting for bears to be in human dominated areas, McLellan said. That means keeping garbage stowed and making sure there is no ripe fruit available. "If you live rurally, you want them to be able to pass through your property but not linger near your home or in your front yard," McLellan said.

Bears have proved to be adaptable and persistent; Lingenpolter tried to cross the highway dozens of times before finding a way under. However, Servheen warned that we are putting them in a tough spot. To keep bear populations stable, scientists need data on bear behavior to help inform land management policies that create safe pathways for grizzlies to move through human dominated areas and regulate recreation with bears in mind, Servheen said.

"If we want to have bears in the future, we need to think about the needs bears have for some level of space on the landscape," Servheen said.

Securing that space across the vast Yellowstone to Yukon landscape requires more than just land acquisitions and highway overpasses — it requires increasing public awareness and counteracting the perception that bears are inherently aggressive and irrational, Proctor said. If people understand bear behavior, they can learn to act in ways that neither attract bears nor threaten them. And understanding the totality of bears’ strong drive to survive, and protect each other, can elicit empathy and motivation to protect this iconic species.

Early in his career, Proctor captured, immobilized and radio-collared a mother grizzly with her two yearlings, or newly adolescent bears. While the research team worked, the young bears circled quietly at a distance. When the scientists finally stepped back and the mother began to stir, the yearlings approached cautiously. As the mother's groggy head rested on a log, the yearlings' long-clawed front paws delicately explored the radio collar. Then, each one rested its head directly on hers, to form a quiet pile of three bear heads.

"They just wanted to touch mom after this ordeal," Proctor said. "Yes, grizzlies can be rough and dangerous but they can also be gentle at times," Proctor said.

Reporting and travel for this story was supported by the Sitka Foundation and the Science Media Centre of Canada.

Editor's Note: This article was updated on Sat. Nov. 7 at 10:00 a.m. E.D.T. to correct the credit information for two of the photos.

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Every year, the Royal Meteorological Society's Weather Photographer of the Year competition offers a reminder that some of the world's most compelling images emerge from the unpredictable forces of nature. The 2026 short list includes 30 photographs selected from more than 5,500 entries submitted by photographers around the world. Each offers a different perspective into the relationship among weather, landscapes and the people who experience these natural phenomena.

The short-listed images span a range of settings and subjects, from lightning strikes, to cloud swirls, to rainbows. You can explore the full short list and vote for your favorite photo before the competition ends on Thursday (Nov. 5).

Live Science rounded up seven images that stood out for their composition, atmosphere and ability to tell a story. If you're hoping to be a weather photographer yourself, we have resources on the best cameras, best beginner cameras, and best wide angle lenses to capture your perfect shot. Which one is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!

"Mount ShastaTop Hatat Sunset"

Photographer Lisa K. Kuhn captured a lenticular cloud above Mount Shasta in California.

"Triple strike NYC"

Watching from Bayonne, New Jersey, photographer Dan Martland captured this triple lightning strike above New York City.

"A Supercell in the Sandhills of Nebraska"

"Mother Nature was kind enough to give us a supercell and lightning at night," said photographer Laura Hedien about seeing this storm in Nebraska.

"Lakeland Rainbow"

During a walk in England's Lake District, photographer Mat Robinson waited in the pouring rain and eventually took this image of a beautiful rainbow.

"Ice Hearts"